baby killer
Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned.
This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.
(I leave aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism and non-DCT metaethics as interesting but very widely condemned by Christians.)
If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.
Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay.
I think that this is the better option for what you want to say. Even if all sins are equally sinful, you can still coherently argue that different societies have different propensities to sin vs. redemption. A hardline Christian DCT fan can still reason in a consequentialist way about maximising the probability of redemption and minimising the probability of sins.
newport
2mo ago
2/12 thread from roughly 2/12 6am EST to 2/13 5:30pm EST. Reference time (ie what the timestamps are relative to) is 5:30pm EST on 2/13. Seems each comment is separated by two blank bullet points. Nesting is obviously broken, and comments that were nested too deep to see without clicking "more comments" are unfortunately absent.
coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1hr ago new
“He Gets Us” doesn’t get it
The Christian advertising campaign “He Gets Us” aired two ads during the Super Bowl. The first ad asks “who is my neighbor?” interspersed with shots of mostly unsavory characters. The one you don’t value and welcome, the ad answers, to the drums of glitch-y hip hop. The second ad is titled “Foot Washing” and proved quite controversial. Among the scenes of foot washing depicted in the ad, the following have generated the most discussion: a Mexican police officer washing the feet of a black man wearing gold chains in an alley; a “preppy” normie-coded girl washing the feet of an alt girl; a cowboy washing the feet of aNative American; a woman washing the feet of a girl seeking an abortion (with pro-life activists sidelined, their signs upside down); an oil worker washing the feet of an environmental activist; a woman washing the feet of an illegal migrant; a Christian woman washing the feet of a Muslim; and a priest washing the feet of a sassy gay man. This last ad has tenfold the views on YouTube, in large part due to the negative response by Christians and conservatives, for example Matt Walsh and Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. Joel writes,
There’s a reason the “He Gets Us” commercial didn’t show a liberal washing the feet of someone in a MAGA hat, or a BLM protestor washing an officer’s feet. That would’ve been actually subversive. Because they were strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines.
I mostly agree with Joel. I think that this ad campaign is a failure.
The campaign fails to understand what brings people to a religion, or any social movement for that matter, or even any product, and as such it will not lead viewers to join their evangelical church or behave in the intended Christian manner. The audience of the Super Bowl is jointly comprised of people who care about what’s popular and cool, and people who care about remarkable feats of strength and dominance. These people are not going to be compelled to “love” their crack addict neighbor because you tell them to, because why would they listen to you? — there is no deeper motivation substantiated as for why they should do this.
In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t say “love your neighbor because it’s nice to do that and I am guilting you”, he says “love your neighbor so as to be a son of God whom created you, and obtain His reward, or else risk judgment from the eternal judge.” This is reward-driven and status-seeking behavior, the reward being administered by God and the status being administered by the church body. In its context, it requires a belief that the person saying it is the ultimate judge of both life and afterlife. (To behave Christlike, the required motivation is the totalizing significance of Christ... hence the name of the religion.) The starting point of the faith is the most dominant and powerful person telling you to care for the poor, not some cheeky “you should care about the poor because you should.”
Again, the Super Bowl viewer cares about what is popular and what is dominant. That’s normal, I’m not criticizing it. So could you not pull anything out of the religious tradition to depict the popularity and dominance of God? What, you feel bad playing off of FOMO to get people to your church? Jesus did just that on many occasions. 1, 2, 3, 4. Do you somehow feel guilty describing Jesus as glorious and powerful? What about the 72,000 angels he commands? You don’t want to tell the viewer that their prayers will be answered, when every 10 minutes there’s an ad for betting and gambling? Viva Las Vegas, non Vita Christi. So it has to be asked, what exactly is the purpose of the campaign? How is this getting people to your church, or even just getting people to behave better? “Jesus gets me” because… biker smoker and crack addict?
If the object of the ad is to instill a sense of pity to compel the viewer to behave morally, then there’s clearly better ads to be made. Why not the focal point of the religion, the “innocent beautiful sacrificial lamb slain for our freedom” motif? The religion already comes with a built-in way to empower pity. You could say, “he gets us because he dealt with all our pain and temptation”, and that would make much more sense, while incentivizing the intended result of the ad. As is, I get the idea that the ad campaigners are afraid of any depiction of the life of Christ. I don’t get the sense that these people believe he is an essential ingredient in the moral life. And it’s fine if they don’t, that’s their business, but then dont make multimillion dollars ads about it. If Christ is indeed essential, then your multimillion dollar ad campaign ought to be directed toward producing an image of Christ that is alluring, whether this be through scenes of pity or scenes of power. In an attempt to make Christianity subversive you should not be subverting Christianity.
Back to Joel’s critique of the ad: yes, the foot washing ad is problematic. Beside the fact that it is misinterpreted (explained below), it only works to further demean the image of Christianity to an irreligious America. “If I become a Christian, I’ll have to wash an old man’s feet?” The only viewers that will be compelled here are the foot fetish enthusiasts piqued by the alt girl. You are not going to convince anyone to join your social movement by promising them the opportunity to wash a man’s feet in an alley.
The foot washing ad elevates the status of people whose lifestyle do not conjure images of Christianity, and whose status is already elevated. During a Super Bowl, it’s not subversive to elevate the status of a vaguely athletic black man wearing gold chains. The half time show was Usher! Neither is it subversive to show an oil rig worker subservient to an environmental activist. In whose world is an environmental activist not more privileged than a dust-coated oil worker? And a wholesome girl washing an alt girl’s feet is not subversive in an event inaugurated by Post Malone’s national anthem. No, no; show me a wealthy and attractive CEO washing the feet of his fat ugly employee, if you must. But don’t just reinstitute the high/low status dynamic already in place by the world.
My last criticism I’ll try to keep short: the theological ground of these ads is spurious. There is indeed a scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, but the writer goes out of his way to clarify the meaning behind it. It begins by mentioning that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world”, namely his followers present and future. The students are shocked when their superior attempts to perform this subservient act, until it is explained to be necessary. “If your Lord washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you. I am not speaking of all of you [not Judas]; I know whom I have chosen.” So, rather than being an act that a Christian is compelled to do to anyone, we have an act that Christians do to one another, to cultivate humility and esteem for their brethren. They are told not to do it to merely self-labeled Christians, like Judas, let alone those of other faiths, as the ad suggests they do.
Foot washing was a culture-specific action that reflected the status hierarchy in a way that has no direct American parallel. An approximate American parallel would be for a boss to allow his employer to use his office, or for a boss to cook his employee’s family a dinner, or to clean his employee’s keyboard. The difficulty in understanding the event without careful study is the reason why it’s a mistake to depict it as a means of propagating your worldview. Nothing is accomplished. File this under “Christianity continues to die, but not before demeaning itself.”
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2rafa coffee_enjoyer 8m ago new
There are a lot of denials about this kind of thing, but in my adult PMC life I’ve actually known a moderately large number of very progressive liberal Christians who go to Hillsong or some other happy clappy multiracial Christian pop megachurch thing and basically believe in all of this stuff. I’m not saying it’s the majority but it seems to be less dead than some people here make it out to be.
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reactionary_peasant coffee_enjoyer 34m ago new
Great post. I was also bemused by the ad. C.S. Lewis had a passage (maybe from God in the Dock, can't find it) about how each age blows one virtue out of proportion and by doing so turns it into a vice, and in our present age this vicious virtue is clearly Charity. This example is yet another example of Christians extending the principal of charity to an absurd scope and at the expense of other virtues (see also immigration and some overseas poverty reduction).
The first question that popped into my head after watching was -- cui bono? To me, the ad reeked of this. So I tried to look up who was behind it. Apparently it's a nonprofit called [The Signatry](. Clicking through their site, I don't see any telltale signs of wokeness or progressivism. The entire board is old white dudes, every employee in the random sample I took was white and I only came across one woman. Skimming their site revealed that they created a mural of "Jesus and the children" in Oklahoma City and that they donate to what sound like bog-standard Christian charity causes. There are even negative articles about them about how they're anti-gay. One of their major public donors is Hobby Lobby CEO David Green of supreme court case fame. I'm not really sure what's going on here. A rogue department? Entryism? Or am I merely ignorant enough not to know that most Evangelicals look favorably upon washing the feet of Muslims and unrepentant gays?
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Gaashk coffee_enjoyer 40m ago new
This has the aesthetics of my aging neighborhood church. I tried going a couple of times, and they were singing about their friends in the 90s dying of AIDS, and almost the only conversation I had afterwards was a church musician mentioning his non-binary daughter. He seemed kind of sad about it, but like he thought he shouldn't be.
The steel man is probably that, despite massive amounts of propaganda lately, many people (most? It's hard to know) are being fake about accepting that, and do not actually like effeminate gays, illegal immigrants, underclass blacks, homeless druggies, (their father in law?), and so on. Perhaps a bit more propaganda, this time with a Christian flavor, will push them over into being sincere?
Which seems naive? If an attitude has been resistant to decades of extant propaganda, what is this short ad going to do? It's probably an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation for people with media representation skills.
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4doorsmorewhores coffee_enjoyer 44m ago new
The most prolific American example of footwashing that comes to mind being Mr Rogers washing the feet of some black police officer on Mr Rogers neighbourhood seems to go against a large part of your post re:
1. Hierarchies
2. Familiarity with the concept of foot washing
The Pope also does this sometimes and it's in the news. It seems sort of conceited and contemptuous to assume that normies who aren't as obviously well-versed in history as you will see foot-washing and think "Wtf? Christianity is about washing old people's feet? no thank you." What reason do you have to believe that a smaller portion of viewers would "get it" vs what the ad-makers expect?
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ymeskhout 5hr ago · Edited 55m ago How The Bailey Podcast Sausage Gets Made The Bailey is the podcast I started as the semi-official companion of the Motte, and it doesn't have the most consistent release schedule. I know. Stop reminding me. Go listen to the last episode though, it's really great, and Shakesneer should be again commended for participating. I want to peel back the curtain a bit and outline some practices I've adopted that I'm surprised to hear are not all that widespread. I've previously written about the immense benefits of real-time adversarial conversations that are not easily replicated within the written medium. I never claimed that it's superior by every metric however, and one major failure point for live debates is how they're much more susceptible to the Gish gallop maneuver. This is the tactic where someone drowns out a debate by offering so many low-quality arguments that they make up for their lack of quality through sheer quantity. This is a serious enough problem that Sam Harris has cited it as a major reason he avoids debating certain topics (namely the topic of vaccination). The solution is extremely simple: require advance notice for all citations. Before every episode of the Bailey, every participant is asked to share links and sources that they think are useful or are planning to rely upon. This helps everyone have the same foundation before we hit record and lets us skip a lot of unnecessary exposition, but it also mitigates against someone appearing to win an argument but only through the element of surprise. Sharing sources ahead of time also helps to avoid the commonly tedious "the studies I'm citing are better than your studies" epistemic impasse. Advance notice takes a page from the legal profession, where evidence cannot be introduced at trial unless the other side has been notified, and a strict podcasting implementation would impose similar prohibitions for every participant. When David Pakman interviewed Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon Shaman) one of the ways the discussion kept going off the rails is that Chansley would respond with a torrential rain of purportedly supporting allegations (what Pakman described as "setting small fires conundrum"). When asked about QAnon theories, Chansley said: ...if you look into Jeffrey Epstein and what he was doing. If you look into the Finders, if you look into the Franklin cover-up, if you look into the testimony of Ronald Bernard, if you look into the Barney Frank scandal, if you look into the Michael Aquino military-based scandals. If you look into the numerous scandals coming out now regarding all these people that debunked Pizzagate and now they're being arrested and charged with child porn charges and child abuse charges, then it's quite clear that there is some sort of an elite sex trafficking pedophilia ring in DC and Hollywood. And he went on like this. Unless you've already been marinating within this sphere and are already familiar with these claims, it's impossible to substantively respond to any of them in the moment. Each individual allegation will require significant radio dead air just to get your bearings about who is involved and what they're accused of, followed by several hours/days/weeks to properly investigate. The entire purpose of an advance notice rule has always been to avoid 'trial by ambush' and it's odd why this expectation is not more widely adopted. The second practice is paired along a trust expectation. I'm the one who ultimately edits and decides what the final cut will be, but I edit with a light touch primarily to get rid of ums, silences, or (rarely) dead-end discussions that don't go anywhere. There has been a long history of media outlets engaging in misleading editing with the intent of making an ideological opponent look bad (Katie Couric's Under the Gun documentary added an eight-second pause to make a gun-rights advocate appear as if he was speechless in response to a question), and the obvious way to guard against this is to always have your own recording when interacting with any journalist. I've adopted the same practice and have always provided every participant with full access to the raw audio files, and even ensured they have a chance to listen to the final cut before it's posted publicly. Sometimes we've re-recorded or added passages, and I allow some leeway if anyone wants to take back something they've inadvertently blurted out (generally falls under the umbrella of accidental doxing details). No one thus far has asked for this, but I wouldn't allow a revision that is meant to cover a weakness in one's argument. Thirdly, I try to engage in some fact-checking though I can't claim to be comprehensive. If someone makes a factual claim that I find dubious (either on the air or during editing) I ask for a citation, and I delete the segment if they can't provide one. An example of this process is from our An Unhinged Conversation on Policing episode where I tried to fact-check some assertions about national testosterone comparisons. Doing this in real-time is more challenging but still feasible, and if a jury-rigged zero-income enterprise like the Bailey can do this, runaway successes like The Joe Rogan Experience and their largesse can easily implement something more than just Jamie and his perfunctory Googling. If I had more resources and a steady roster of guests, I'd have one or two paid fact-checkers whose sole job is to interject when they sniff out some bullshit. I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it's particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more. And lastly, I've also accommodated requests to mask or modify voices. The easiest way is to pitch shift or fuck with the equalizer. The more elaborate and superior method is to hire a voice actor to redub the whole track, which we did for the Multi Ethnic Casting episode by replacing Ishmael with a thematically-appropriate Nigerian woman. That cost only $120 back then, and AI advances have already made this basically free. Admittedly, all this adds more work for me but I find it worthwhile to have some standards. I'm always open to having more civil conversations about contentious culture war topics, so don't hesitate to reach out ymeskhout[a]gmail.com if you have a topic in mind. • •
Glassnoser ymeskhout 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago new
Your email link doesn't work.
This is interesting information. I was confused about why it sometimes sounded like you were picking up from a previous discussion about the topic. Now, I know it's because of the shared references.
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ymeskhout Glassnoser 54m ago new
Thanks, Markdown drives me insane sometimes. And it's interesting hearing how the conversations sound from your perspective, having a shared foundation always seemed like a natural way to have a good discussion.
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Being ymeskhout 3hr ago I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it's particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more. I think this is the core of it and your claim is actually too narrow. Your podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions. Coming up with these precautions wasn't some groundbreaking discovery; it didn't take years, countless academics, or a multitude of thinktanks to develop. Which leaves the big question of if you can do it, why can't/doesn't anyone else? And this isn't just podcasts: radio can and should implement these rules as should journalism as should politicians (during senate hearings at least) as should public debates..... I can see only two options: 1. Either they are all grossly incompetent (unlikely). 2. Their goals are not your goals. They are optimizing their discussions for something other than intellectual discovery (less charitably: truth). The extent to which we judge a podcast or other forum for this shortcoming should depend on how they position themselves. Joe Rogan, for example, I don't think deserves much criticism (at least relative to others). He is a meathead who is clearly optimizing for topics he is interested in rather than the truth. If seeing him spend thousands of hours talking about the looniest conspiracy theories and admitting every time that he just thinks they are fun (and not necessarily true) doesn't convince a listener that his primary goal isn't truth, I don't know what would. Likewise, I think his lack of accuracy is less worth of disdain because I think he is less capable (I understand this is a dangerous argument, but I will make it nonetheless). This is a guy with basically no education whose team consists of only one other person: a regular joe whose only skill is being able to Google things and do basic audio "engineering". If anything I'm impressed he manages to have as much intellectual rigor as he does. When you are a major news station with entire teams capable of (and ostensibly dedicated to) researching yet you still manage to regularly underperform Joe Rogan in intellectual rigor, I think it's hard to overstate the level of failure. I suspect most Americans agree and this is why we see the trust in media approaching the lizardman constant (at least with certain demos).
I do think that your description of the gish gallop is incomplete and your solution isn't a great solution as a result. I think a gish gallop is better understood as creating (deliberately or accidentally) an asymmetry of work: throwing a whole bunch of citations at someone takes MUCH less time than reading, evaluating, and developing a critique/counterargument for each of those citations. In the internet era it's never been easier to compile the gallop so we see them being trotted out more and more often. Having citations "pre registered" doesn't really address this asymmetry. A guest can still throw out four hundred citations and his opponent will be overwhelmed trying to dig into each of them even if he is given weeks to prepare. The reason the gish gallop works is because most listener's aren't equipped to understand it correctly - they aren't using the correct Bayesian reasoning. I think this is easiest to explain with an idealized (both debaters are reasonable and participating in good faith) example: • Galloper cites 100 claims. • CounterGalloper says "That's a lot, let's start from the top. Claim 1 is false because a, b, & c." • Let's assume that CounterGalloper is correct AND convincing: the audience agrees that claim 1 is false/irrelevant • Galloper typically responds, "I don't think you're correct in discarding it, BUT EVEN IF YOU ARE the remaining proof is overwhelming" • Most listeners end up very slightly discounting the Galloper, but still think is thinking something like "Sure, the galloper may not be right on every single detail, but most of the evidence (99% !) supports him.
If the listener were using proper Bayesian logic they should instead be thinking something like "Of the claims CounterGalloper addressed, so far 0% have been correct. Therefore, I'll adjust the probability that the remaining 99 claims are correct downwards."
If both debaters are competent the interaction continues: • The CounterGalloper points this out with something like: "If this one claim is false, the others probably are too." • The Galloper (likely correctly) says something like: "You just cherry picked the weakest claim. Even if one or two of my claims are weak, the majority are facts that you can't disprove." • The CounterGalloper may move onto the next claim in the gallop. The Galloper is free to make the same "CherryPicked" argument. We find ourselves trapped in this loop. • In real life, this about when both debaters and the audience become exhausted and the debate is no longer productive.
I hope this, perhaps contrived, example shows the problem and the solution: you need to shift the burden of narrowing down which claims should be evaluated from the CounterGalloper to the Galloper. If you leave that choice on the CounterGalloper, the Galloper will always be able to retreat to the "just cherry picked" defense. I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling. In reality, a galloper will likely still try to gallop if he finds his supposed best evidence collapsing. In this event, the host/moderator should remind the participants and audience that these claims were the ones the Galloper himself found most compelling. • •
OracleOutlook Fiat justitia ruat caelum Being 1hr ago new
The CounterGalloper should ask something like, "What do you think is your strongest claim?" and then target that.
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ymeskhout Being 1hr ago new
Your podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions.
Oh no offense at all taken, that was kind of my point. I wouldn't try to hold JRE to any standard if he didn't put up a thin veneer of verification with Jamie-pull-it-up. If I had to guess why more rigorous fact-checking isn't more prevalent overall, I'm guessing one under-appreciated component is that many within the media ecosystem are fixated on not jeopardizing the networking relationships they rely on. If you earn a reputation as a hardball interviewer, you'll end up with fewer people willing to do interviews with you (I don't know how Isaac Chotiner manages to convince people to talk to him). There used to be more of a division between 'paid' and 'earned' media coverage in the form of marketing vs PR, but it's near impossible to tell it apart nowadays. Journalism has long had to wrangle with the problems of "access journalism" where critical coverage can get you frozen out.
I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling.
Yes I agree with you completely, so the guidance I described is incomplete. It's just not practical to go over 100 different sources in any reasonable amount of time. I have suggested exactly this for an episode on 2020 election fraud allegations that never got recorded where I ask the other person to pick whatever they think are their three strongest claims, and then we can focus on just that instead of go on a neverending safari.
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ZeroPipeline Being 1hr ago new
This is handled in a legal context by barring the introduction of cumulative evidence so perhaps a similar solution can be applied here.
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cjet79 ymeskhout 3hr ago I am still interested in doing the Nationalism episode. This is helpful to read ahead of time. I'm not sure I plan on submitting anything as a citation. I have in person conversations occasionally, and generally feel like I have lost them when I have to start citing stuff. General knowledge of history and current news feels like it should be sufficient for most topics. • •
ymeskhout cjet79 1hr ago new
I don't want to give the wrong impression, almost every source we rely upon tends to be be mentioned in the show notes and you can see that it's usually a dozen at most. Most of the time it's background reading material that gets everyone up to speed. Advance notice of citations are generally only useful if someone is about to make a contentious factual claim.
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some ymeskhout 3hr ago The solution is extremely simple: require advance notice for all citations. Moving away from the allegedly superior oral-only debate towards one which requires the written word is a big admission of the harms of the position advocated in one of your previous top level posts. True rigour, substanstive argument requires background, works of others, which would be to slow to explain to another by speech. I could tell you to google the key words I hope will give you the page I am citing, but that is unreliable. I could tell the URL but that could take minutes, and is prone mistakes. But even if eliminate problems with giving cites by mouth, your demand (which I find justified, and support) that they be given before the actual debate, means that the principle of live debate is weakened. It is turned to one in which the can not just tune in and see the argument being demolished, she needs to also read the texts upon which the debaters will be relying. but it also mitigates against someone appearing to win an argument but only through the element of surprise. But that is one of purported benefits you touted in your past post. Sprining up an unexpected line of reasoning onto a person allows you to hang a person with their own words, but sometimes it is easier to make the argument, than to refute it. Bullshit Asymmetry Principle attests to this. And he went on like this. Unless you've already been marinating within this sphere and are already familiar with these claims, it's impossible to substantively respond to any of them in the moment. Which also a problem with the "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." rule. Both are subjective. Because you are exposed to arguments appearing to increase the likelyhood of "Trump did J6" being true, you wouldn't demand cites for them. Likewise the mods, if they are trapped in English speaking bubble, are more likely to be unfamiliar with claims which are common knowledge among people whose native language is another. Discourse is permitted with less effort, if one makes stays within the overton window of 21st century US. But if one steps outside it, a burden of citation is placed on them. Which wouldn't as a problem, if what determines the arguments and statements of fact with which the people are acquainted with, would be sufficiently diverse and not subject to partisan interference. But this isn't the case. • •
ymeskhout some 57m ago new
My cross-examination post frequently gets misunderstood as me saying that oral-only debate is superior to writing but I didn't claim that. My argument was how some elements of one medium are superior and cannot be easily replicated within the other medium, and that applies in both directions. When I decry the element of surprise here it isn't based on springing an unexpected line of reasoning (which I think is generally fair game) but rather unveiling evidence that would have otherwise fallen apart if there was enough time for scrutiny.
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gattsuru 16hr ago · Edited 2hr ago Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight. Me: I refused to turn on my AR glasses & see the barista as an anime fox otherkin spirit. Her glasses flagged that my filters were off. It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion. There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress. There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way. In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities. And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them. That's just not some fundamental part of technology. As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours. Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)]. But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it! Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here. Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available. There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use. From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there. Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony. Who cares? Block these sites in your uBlock Origin so you won't see that shit in your searches. If you want others to have a clean internet, feel free to share this post! I maintain four main blocklists for the Fediverse. A browser addon that highlights transphobic and trans-friendly social network pages and users with different colors. Thus, the Trump Filter is presented as part of the antidote for this toxic candidacy. This Chrome extension will identify parts of a web page likely to contain Donald Trump and erase them from the Internet. Download this extension to simplify your BDS commitments. PalestinePact automatically scans products on all major websites and blurs them if they are linked to the BDS list. and By refusing to exit the Russian market and continuing to pay their taxes there, some companies are implicitly supporting the war in Ukraine. This extension identifies their products while shopping online so you can boycott their products. And, perhaps worse: i love the new feature of phones where they figure out what you’re trying to take a photo of and then hallucinate it for you There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't? To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru. The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear. But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected. St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility. I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite. As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet. I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet. And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so. "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"—so asketh the last man and blinketh... "We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby. They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men! ... No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse. "Formerly all the world was insane,"—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby. They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoileth their stomachs. "We have discovered happiness,"—say the last men, and blinketh • •
drmanhattan16 gattsuru 6hr ago An interesting topic for sure, I think one of the myriad Chesterton quotes I've seen thrown around in this space says people from adversity/seeing something new, or something along those lines. Human history is rife with people talking about how new experiences can fundamentally alter how we see things, perhaps even sending us on wild adventures. Segregating oneself from those experiences as a cosmopolitan observer instead of a traveler in a new land can prevent learning and change. Have you see this old Tom Scott video? He goes into this same idea, about how we might one day live in a world where multiple societies could co-inhabit the same spaces but never interact because they literally can't see each other due to chips in the brain. It terrifies my mind for the reasons above, where people may never learn how to appropriately deal with the shock and anger that comes with realizing "immoral" people walk past you as if it's their land, not yours. At the same time, there's a TracingWoodgrains post about how valuable it can be to let a community define itself for those within it. He was talking about race, but it seems to be a universally valuable trait in that no one would like the idea that before they can even construct a defense against it, the world has already implanted an image of who they are in their own mind. • •
gattsuru drmanhattan16 2hr ago · Edited 2hr ago Human history is rife with people talking about how new experiences can fundamentally alter how we see things, perhaps even sending us on wild adventures. Segregating oneself from those experiences as a cosmopolitan observer instead of a traveler in a new land can prevent learning and change. Yeah, my objection here is definitely along these lines, rather than mere principle or aestheticism or even fear about this. There's reason I've got "They're paving over the wrinkles so you can't think!" on my draft list. Have you see this old Tom Scott video? I hadn't seen that, but it's definitely an interesting (and funny!) piece. It tunnel-visions a bit from being so comedy-focused on setting up its punchline, to an extent that I'd expect a lot of people reject it for the dependence on tech that doesn't exist and may never be accepted, but the punchline is pretty well-delivered. The other side that I think Scott's joke overlooks the breadth of possible problem space. He mentions friends sharing blocklists organically, and blocking, but in many ways there's a lot of pragmatic reasons that might not be what ends up mattering as much, especially in the next ten or twenty years. You can play a hundred hours with someone in FFXIV with Mare Synchronos, and not know their character's 'real' gender or race. We can share not just blocklists, but criteria for how things get blocked, and crowdsource and bulk ingest ways to fill them. We can list everyone's worst moments and dumbest mistakes, or their proudest successes, right by their heads; turn our opponents into ogres making the dumbest arguments in the most grating voices and our allies into halo'd elves. We can make things perfect. At the same time, there's a TracingWoodgrains post about how valuable it can be to let a community define itself for those within it. He was talking about race, but it seems to be a universally valuable trait in that no one would like the idea that before they can even construct a defense against it, the world has already implanted an image of who they are in their own mind. Perhaps, but I've got pretty badly mixed feelings. I've seen a lot of communities formed before social media tried to eat the world, and a lot of communities try to form afterward. There's reasons the modern day therian communities are the way they are, and maybe they are the end result of twenty years of the crucible going til the dross overflows. But it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free. • •
drmanhattan16 gattsuru 1hr ago new
But it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free.
There's certainly an extreme, ala Tom Scott, where we have sanitized the world to the point of making Paul Kingsnorth have an aneurysm. But there is also some value, I think, in letting people have their...I don't like the term safe space for this, so let's call it a "normalcy space". Where the dominant perception of you and your peers, your community, etc. is defined primarily by you and no one else. You can and arguably should be able to step into a world which doesn't cater to you or anyone in particular, but I don't see anything wrong with being able to sanitize at least some part of the ideological and cultural landscape to be fit for you.
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gattsuru drmanhattan16 just now new
There's an irony in having this conversation now.
I think wanting to sanitize part of the ideological and cultural landscape is understandable, and I wish there was nothing wrong to do so. And it's important for people from outside a community trying to talk in, who want to be taken credibly or honestly, to understand the sort of motivations that make subcultures curl in on themselves.
But it's very easy for a community that successfully cuts itself off from the outside world to go wonky.
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WhiningCoil drmanhattan16 6hr ago It terrifies my mind for the reasons above, where people may never learn how to appropriately deal with the shock and anger that comes with realizing "immoral" people walk past you as if it's their land, not yours. They'll learn when people start going missing Well, given the outcome of the scandal... maybe they won't after all. We don't even have AR yet and it's head in the sand all the way. • •
faceh drmanhattan16 6hr ago He goes into this same idea, about how we might one day live in a world where multiple societies could co-inhabit the same spaces but never interact because they literally can't see each other due to chips in the brain. A solution to the housing crisis that involved multiple people 'owning' the same house and being electronically manipulated so they never interfere with or even perceive the others, and all interior decorations being completely virtual so they can enjoy exactly the environment they individually prefer is kinda funny to think about. • •
drmanhattan16 faceh 6hr ago I don't know if you could get to that point. Atoms, after all, can't be tricked by AR, and even in his description, Tom never says you fundamentally couldn't notice another person (sorry, I made that point too strongly). You could bump into someone and you should probably be able to see them regardless of your filter at that point. I actually think I'm there, in a sense, because I don't interact with the Christian community around me despite there being a large church near my house. They might as well be dark matter to me, imperceptible in some way, a presence I acknowledge only intellectually. • •
faceh drmanhattan16 6hr ago · Edited 6hr ago I'm just saying if someone was fully plugged into AR goggles with noise-cancelling headphones and a little brain-stimulation tech to keep you from actually bumping into anyone, in theory you could have like three people occupy the same living space but not be truly 'aware' of each other. I say three people because if you managed it just right, each one could have a different 8 hour shift where only one of them is using the main bed for sleeping at any time and thus minimizing the risks of 'collisions'. A weaker version of this is where everyone only temporarily rents the space they're using for a brief time. You summon a car for transport on an as-needed basis, you rent out a particular bed/bedroom for the evening, you can't be sure if its the same one from the night before. The AR Goggles just impose a consistent view (the car always looks the same in-goggles, the bedroom looks the same, etc. etc.) so you don't notice that you are actually a transient with no permanent belongings. • •
TIRM faceh 3hr ago you are actually a transient with no permanent belongings Some might say you will own nothing and be happy. And if these chips make ground bugs taste like veal, then you'd presumably feel fine eating a tasty dinner in your sleeping pod. • •
faceh TIRM 1hr ago new
That phrase has been turning over in my head a lot. Would it really be SO BAD if we lived in a social order where personal ownership was a rare exception? Imagine if you could visit any given city on earth and rent a comfortable place to reside in for the duration of your stay. Where you can borrow a car on demand and not have to worry about icky maintenance expenses and fixing it if it breaks. Where you don't have to worry about upgrading your phone every year or so because you just turn it in at the end of your lease period and they issue you a new, state-of-the art upgrade. Where you don't have to move a huge collection of physical media with you because you can access your shows and movies where-ever you are using your streaming accounts. Where swapping jobs is as easy as selecting a geographic area and uploading your resume to find a suitable gig.
Being functionally rootless with no personal possessions or dedicated 'home' to return to means you have absolute freedom to move around to where-ever the market takes you. Not so bad a thought?
Bad. The entire concept is bad (to me).
But if you accept the underlying premise/logic, a world where AR makes you feel like you own things and gives you the psychological assurances that come with personal ownership whilst also having the convenience of having no real possessions other than a bank account associated with your name seems like a no-brainer.
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TIRM faceh 35m ago new
Some rootless young person might like it. But I am very much tied down with my family. I have my yard with my garden next to my house that I worked hard to renovate and my kid sleeps in their room, etc, etc.
On one hand this is all just stuff. On the other hand I really like my property and my stuff and I worked hard and paid a lot to set up things my way (or really the way my wife likes it, but close enough). No bug paste in a pod can replace what I have and value.
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faceh gattsuru 8hr ago · Edited 6hr ago Hitting a slight tangent, I've considered that the "killer app" for augmented reality (if we assume a situation where almost everyone is wearing glasses all the time) is allowing attractive females to be extremely selective of who gets to pay them attention and enjoy their good looks. As in, a world where the hottest females will wear the equivalent of burquas everywhere they go, but have the option to select various bystanders who they find attractive and allow those bystanders to download an avatar of their real appearance and see what others are missing out on. Maybe they intentionally appear as a green, knobby-skinned orc creature to the plebs ("jokes on you I'm into that shit") but when a 6' chiseled chad walks by he gets the full view, and also access to her phone number/metaverse ID if he wants. Add a layer of dystopia and maybe other plebs can unlock the real view but only by paying the fee which is prominently displayed in their vision. Really go the extra mile and maybe big data allows the user to dynamically alter that fee depending on who is looking and their apparent ability to pay + their apparent willingness/desperation to look at hot women. In a sense this is a natural evolution of the current state of the web where every piece of content worth seeing is paywalled and microtransactions are everywhere and even basic human interactions becomes more transactional in nature (see for example livestreamers who will only read messages that users directly pay to send them). But I honestly don't think this is the particular version of the future that will come to pass, ONLY that there are probably a LOT of people who would willingly jump into this instantiation of the tech. It solves a particular class of problem for certain people (hot people who only want to interact with other hot people and avoid getting excess attention from plebs) even if it probably creates new problems we haven't even thought of. The advent of AR tech and the apparent aplomb with which some subset of the population are adopting it is my Squidward moment for realizing "holy cow the world really is going to fly off in a weird direction that I am unprepared to deal with." Whatever else it is worth, it really makes me desire to increase my connection with baseline reality rather than weaken those ties. Whether simulation hypothesis is true or not, it seems to me there IS something meaningful about living within the actual constraints of the physical world rather than trying to escape to a world you 'know' to be artificial. Edit: And I think that, perhaps ironically, AR can be used to increase ties to baseline reality when you use it to elicit more true and factual about your local environment. I.e. if you have a display giving you an accurate temperature reading of our immediate area and telling you the composition of the air you're breathing and displaying a live feed of your personal biometrics, you are in a sense becoming more entangled with the matter that composes your immediate surroundings, in much the same way you would be if you had directly augmented your sense of sight or hearing. So I'm not coming at this from a technophobic viewpoint, I think. • •
gattsuru faceh 4hr ago I've considered that the "killer app" for augmented reality (if we assume a situation where almost everyone is wearing glasses all the time) is allowing attractive females to be extremely selective of who gets to pay them attention and enjoy their good looks. I think access to the phone number/metaverse username will drive more than access to 'hotness', at least for women putting themselves out there. There's definitely already spaces in FFXIV that you can go and won't see what's really going on unless you pass some level of (usually text-focused) checks, (and/or, as with The Willow Street link above, put down some cash), but the same people put no small amount of effort into how they'd look for non-synced people -- Glamourer is nearly as critical as Mare Synchronous to this class of users, in many ways, since otherwise you end up wearing BurlapSackv3. Some people do use Discord in a kinda similar or overlapping role. I dunno if there's something similar in the het online dating world. Kinda surprising if there isn't, although I guess the median and mode purchaser on het dating websites isn't a woman, anyway. And I think that, perhaps ironically, AR can be used to increase ties to baseline reality when you use it to elicit more true and factual about your local environment. Yeah, there's a pretty wide variety of spaces there. I've got a few microdisplays I've long been futzing with to try to integrate everything from voice transcription to waypoint and map marking to live translation to sense augmentation on, and I've separately tried replicating this (no luck, but might just be me). This hit my interests for other reasons, but using mini-EEG, eye-tracking, and other sensors to put yourself into the world more completely has a lot of potential. Probably won't get anywhere productive, I'll admit, but it's been something that's driven my attention since at least the first time I saw Ghost in the Shell: SAC. And I'm not really opposed to virtual or 'fake' worlds, in no small part because I don't think the line is quite as clear as people want to draw. That said, while AR/VR/spatial whatever makes a great scifi twist feel, a lot of this filtering capability can happen well outside of it, and I think it is worth recognizing it. Even smart phones fell out of popularity, I don't think we could put the genie back in the bottle now. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 7hr ago Whatever else it is worth, it really makes me desire to increase my connection with baseline reality rather than weaken those ties. Whether simulation hypothesis is true or not, it seems to me there IS something meaningful about living within the actual constraints of the physical world rather than trying to escape to a world you 'know' to be artificial. A part of me wants to believe AR won't ever take off beyond a few Glassholes or whatever the Apple misnomer is going to be. The notion of it going full Black Mirror, where nearly everyone has it implanted directly into their eye with the government having ultimate control of what people are even allowed to see, seems beyond the pale. Then again, it wouldn't be the first Black Mirror episode that came true. All this inspires in me feelings not unlike the fundamentalist Christians who believe having a drivers license or a social security number is the mark of the devil. Probably been 30 years since I last saw a headline about someone like that. Maybe in 30 more years I'll make headlines for ranting and raving about how having a "Z-Eye" is the mark of the devil, and I'm no longer allowed in most businesses or government buildings because of it. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 7hr ago where nearly everyone has it implanted directly into their eye with the government having ultimate control of what people are even allowed to see, seems beyond the pale. We'd be seeing something like that in some of the more aggressive dictatorships around the world before we saw it in the West, I think. Not that it's too much solace. And implementing such a regime would create such intense demand for jailbreaking I doubt it would be sustainable. The Black Mirror episode that seems closest to coming true right now is Nosedive. Combining the concept of an ongoing universal rating system and augmented reality would create some interesting outcomes when people can define how they appear to others based on those others' relative scores. Zoomers seem to be willing to adopt something like this, notice how the prevalence of cheating in online games is leading to increasingly intrusive countermeasures, and then add on behavior/toxicity scores. That is, they're willing to accept a panopticon-esque policing systems if it means avoiding unwelcome interactions in the games. So these sorts of systems could just hop straight over to the real world with AR. And on the one hand, a 'gentle' type of behavior regulation is quite possibly a positive development for reigning in antisociality (but who defines that?). But as you say, if the punishment is something like having your eyeballs shut off or being made literally invisible to all other people, and having to desperately cowtow and beg for positive ratings to regain status, well, I don't want to be part of this future. • •
TIRM faceh 2hr ago antisociality It would be things like denying that transwomen are women that would get you in trouble. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 7hr ago We'd be seeing something like that in some of the more aggressive dictatorships around the world before we saw it in the West, I think. Not that it's too much solace. I wish I could believe this. But frankly our social media overlords have instituted speech regulation regimes just as bad, and virtually indistinguishable in effect, from the most aggressive dictatorships. To say nothing of all we've learned from the Twitter files and whistleblowers at Facebook and Google about their own constitution violating relationships with Federal government agencies. IMHO, the allure of gooning 24/7 with AR will be all it takes to convince a significant portion of the population to submit to a reality censorship regime. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 7hr ago Yes, I think there's a distressingly high number of people who would willingly plug into the 'matrix' and never unplug. For the older people, there's the promise of not having to be stuck with their own failing health and decrepitude. For the young, the ability to live up to all that potential they thought they had, and to pretend to achieve milestones that they are missing in real life. And porn, of course. I can't say that I'm NOT tempted by the allure of infinite AI-generated sex partners who are willing to cater to literally any whim you might have, rendered in high enough definition that your brain doesn't really care that it knows it is fake. But again, increasing ties to the real world. Sexual intimacy with a committed partner and all the mess, neurotransmitters, and weird physical sensations it can entail is probably going to continue to be more 'authentic' than any virtual experience until they can manage direct neural stimulation. And getting another human pregnant and producing offspring is still, in my view, the ULTIMATE entanglement with reality most humans are capable of. Literally enmeshing your genetic code, thousands upon thousands of genes, with another person to produce something new and unique that will then go forth to have further influence on reality. We're a long ways from simulating THAT in high fidelity, I think. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast faceh 6hr ago And porn, of course. I can't say that I'm NOT tempted by the allure of infinite AI-generated sex partners who are willing to cater to literally any whim you might have, rendered in high enough definition that your brain doesn't really care that it knows it is fake. Any whim you might have that doesn't offend the sensibilities of the majority too much anyway. • •
TIRM thrownaway24e89172 2hr ago They sell child sex dolls. Someone will make a child version of future VR super-porn. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast TIRM 2hr ago new
I don't think child sex dolls, which I'll note do have legal restrictions in a number of places (eg, at least 5 US states, Canada, and the UK), are the best comparison here. I think such VR is more likely to be treated like pornography and thus more strictly regulated than sex toys through existing obscenity laws.
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faceh thrownaway24e89172 6hr ago True, but the current trend of nearly every sort of kink and sexual proclivity finding at least some mainstream cachet might be extrapolated forward to say that in the future NO sexual behavior is off-limits so long as it is purely digital in nature. Not a prediction, just a note. • •
ThisIsSin A psychosexual analysis of the worlds and words of George Orwell faceh 4hr ago nearly every sort of kink and sexual proclivity With the small exception of wanting it with attractive young women, sure; you can have all the sex you want as long as the participants are sufficiently ugly (the symptoms of this being things like PornHub recommending you drag queens and other nastiness when you type "teen" in the search bar; there was a thread earlier this year discussing this but I don't remember which week). Orwell didn't call it the "Junior Anti-Sex League" or point out that the availability of the bog-standard kink pornography for proles was maximized within the first couple chapters of his book for no reason: the kink porn is the distraction, making things ugly forever except for those in power is the end goal of power. in the future NO sexual behavior is off-limits so long as it is purely digital in nature. Liberals and progressives are different; the latter continues to wage holy war on loli (and seeks to expand its definition, #fightfor25) while exempting everything else for this reason. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast faceh 5hr ago From my perspective the trend is the opposite, with the things I'm interested in becoming more and more off-limits--a change largely driven by the same people pushing for the wider acceptability of other kinks and sexual proclivities. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 6hr ago And getting another human pregnant and producing offspring is still, in my view, the ULTIMATE entanglement with reality most humans are capable of. Literally enmeshing your genetic code, thousands upon thousands of genes, with another person to produce something new and unique that will then go forth to have further influence on reality. Well, the western worlds plummeting fertility rates don't bode well for this being a sufficient motivating factor. I can totally imagine AR hooking people young, before they are of an age when they are even considering kids. And then it's just over for them. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 6hr ago There's an open question of whether this will just mean that the most pro-natal/fertile groups will end up picking up the slack over a few generations. People with the propensity to check out of society so easily are probably not going to be genetically represented as much in the future. Ultimately, SOMEBODY has to live outside the simulation to keep things running. (I'm intentionally eliding any reference to human-level and above AGI, because that changes the game in several irretrievable ways) • •
WhiningCoil faceh 6hr ago There's an open question of whether this will just mean that the most pro-natal/fertile groups will end up picking up the slack over a few generations. Maybe. But how damaging of a filter would it be if public schools hooked every kid on heroin in middle school and then we waited to see which ones were "strong enough" to get over the addiction and live productive, happy lives as adults and start happy, well adjusted families? I don't view the proliferation of AR much differently. Sure, some version of humanity might emerge from the other side the stronger for it. But it doesn't seem worth the cost if we can avoid it. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ 1d ago · Edited 1d ago Freddie deBoer has a new blog post out, in which he argues about that there is an unjustified double standard between lefties being quite willing to accept environmental impacts on outcomes including in particular intelligence, such as lead exposure, actively hostile to genetic impacts, as the circumstance that its baseline value is most likely highly heritable. He also leads the article with the observation that they are simply avoidant about the intermediate case of premature birth, which has a documented high adverse impact on intelligence, but while being non-heritable is as arbitrary an seemingly beyond our current capacity for intervention as the genetic ones are. However, this point does quickly take a back seat to the environment/genetics disparity, and I think his core thrust is in the following paragraph. I have often wondered why environmental influences on academic performance appear somehow more “polite” than genetic, to many people. I think it has something to do with the assumption that they cannot be changed, which again leads to fears of leaving children behind. As committed critics of behavioral genetics often point out, just because a condition is influenced by genetics does not mean that the condition necessarily cannot be changed. But then, the obverse is also true - just because an influence is environmental does not mean it can be changed. I have seen this question come up in "hereditarian left" (h/t to Scott) discussions repeatedly, and I'm surprised at the surprisal, because it seems to me that there is an obvious answer. Even though it has slightly fallen out of fashion in the atomic age, the idea that ambitions failed and injustices suffered by one generation can be vicariously made up for in the next is well-rooted in our culture. People on the left and right alike have some version of these stories that they enjoy, such as those involving Latin American immigrants braving jungles/cartels/CBP to pick pomegranates in the California sun until they die from skin cancer at age 50 but at least they get to send their Dreamer kids to a good state school and thence into the American white-collar life, or the middling academic/craftsman/artist/feudal lord/tiger mom giving up on their childhood dreams and instead going all in on raising their offspring to have more of a head-start at the family calling than they did, or just any historical concentration of misery that was on the causal path to our present prosperity (slavery, war, the industrial revolution). If intelligence is the sine qua non of worth and attainment, someone who is cognitively lacking because of lead poisoning or FAS, was born prematurely, raised by wolves or dropped on their head too much still can have smart children; like in these stories, their personal failure may be tragic, but the their tale may yet end in some form of redemption (you could in fact even think that cosmic justice will balance the scales, as the children will be able to turn their experience of hardship into an advantage - be it in the form of grit and experience or good material for the admissions essay). But if intelligence is heritable, then many of the people who must suffer in this world will also never find succour in the genetic afterlife: not only are they themselves stupid losers, but so will be all their descendants in direct proportion to the degree to which these descendants are of their own flesh and blood and positive weight in the value function. (Sorry for the stilted prose. I'm too sleep-deprived to be writing, but I figured that my attention span for this topic wouldn't last long enough that I'd still bother to post post-sleep.) • •
Felagund 4bpp 1d ago I think many people are more okay with saying that some individuals are smarter than others, due to genetics, who are not okay with saying that some racial groups are smarter than others. (And probably, though it amounts to nearly the same thing, people are more willing to say that groups are above average, but not that groups are below average—it's probably a lot less culturally fraught to say that Asians or Jews tend to be smart, than to argue that other groups are low-IQ.) So I'm not sure how that affects this. Because it's concern about classes of people, if undergoing some environmental problem doesn't cause one to think of a class as inherently less smart (on average), possibly due to the temporary nature of the effect, or because the class of people who experienced the harm are not along the lines that peope might tend to identify along, then that make people more comfortable with the environmental factors. • •
Goodguy 4bpp 1d ago You make an interesting point, but I think that in reality the vast majority of people who get the ick from intelligence hereditarianism do so because for them it is axiomatic that human races do not differ in intelligence and that anyone who questions the truth of that is almost certainly a racist who is motivated by a desire to hurt non-white people. To be fair, a large fraction of the people who question the truth of that really are motivated more by a political agenda rather than by a simple desire for truth, which muddies the waters. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Goodguy 1d ago I get the sense that I've seen the same resistance to intelligence hereditarianism in many societies where racial/ethnic averages were not much a topic in the public debate (ex. Germany around 2000), so it may not be appropriate to generalise from the Anglo-American societal experience. • •
netstack Texas is freedom land 4bpp 1d ago I’ll second what @guesswho said—at least in the US, the subject has been politicized for decades. It really was a weapon in the battle over public schooling and other forms of segregation. As with all such weapons, when someone new picks it up, opponents are going to draw the same conclusion. • •
Southkraut Rise, ramble, rest, repeat. 4bpp 1d ago There is no broad, social consensus on this topic in Germany. For many Germans, the heredity of intelligence is variously a plain fact of nature or either implicitly taboo or explicitly denied, and these positions do not map cleanly to political leanings even though leftist ideologues do obviously prefer a blank slate reading, but are also obviously motivated by moral concerns rather than any intention to state objective truth. But mostly it's just not a headline topic. • •
f3zinker Its A/B testing all the way down Southkraut 1d ago This got me thinking. Is there any society out there that just accepts HBD and moves on ? As in takes it as a matter of scientific fact. At the very least, doesn't taboo the idea of IQ? • •
tikimixologist f3zinker 21hr ago In India it's generally accepted - tambrams are smart, Punjabis proud, gujus good at money, etc. It's not a major topic, more just something of occasional intellectual interest. India also has open and honest affirmative action/quotas, and data on entrance exam scores of reservation admits vs general pool are easy to find. • •
2rafa tikimixologist 5hr ago That’s similar to cultural stereotypes about cheap Dutch, profligate Italians, lazy Spaniards, humorless Germans and so on, I don’t know that the average Indian believes that Brahmins are genetically more intelligent than other castes and in fact a lot of Indian media seems to be about people from humble backgrounds outwitting those from wealthier ones. It’s kind of like how Americans often buy into stereotypes about Asians being good at math, but if you actually ask them “are Asians more intelligent than white people because of their genetics” they’ll say no. • •
The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht 2rafa 5hr ago It’s kind of like how Americans often buy into stereotypes about Asians being good at math, but if you actually ask them “are Asians more intelligent than white people because of their genetics” they’ll say no. Those that understand the question know the acceptable answer, so that doesn't really tell you anything. • •
2rafa The_Nybbler 4hr ago I don’t believe any great fraction of American whites - including those who would pride themselves on an opposition to political correctness - believe in their heart of hearts that East Asians are hereditarily intellectually superior to Europeans on average. They may believe they’re better at math or more successful in life or even ‘smarter’ in the colloquial non-HBD sense where studying hard at school makes you smart. But they ascribe that to tiger moms and forcing kids into tutoring and pressure to perform and studying all day etc, not to anything ingrained. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! f3zinker 21hr ago Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, he had a bunch of speeches where he pointed out the statistics and explained this was why he wasn't going to demand equality of outcomes or introduce affirmative action. He was big on IQ too. “I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.” • •
2rafa RandomRanger 5hr ago · Edited 5hr ago I think LKY believed in HBD but the official policy in Singapore that he started and encouraged definitely doesn’t promote the idea that Chinese are smarter than Indians or Malays and in fact is very big on affirmative action, promoting the idea that someone from any background can do anything etc. LKY used ethnic quotas to rebalance numerous professions to replace the British (arguably HBD-aware) colonial system in which different groups found niches based on ability (eg merchants, soldiers, administrators). • •
IGI-111 f3zinker 23hr ago · Edited 23hr ago Lots of historical examples, most caste systems or organic society concepts are a way to make sure society explicitly caters to the interests of all strata and to maintain social cohesion in the face of the plain reality that some people are just better than others at most useful tasks. You can be a smart cookie and a great conqueror, but noblesse oblige. And even if you're the most backwards idiot peasant, you still have a role and a duty in the great machinery of your nation and the universe. I think the current hangup about this is actually fairly odd and specific to Liberalism and offshoots because it was explicitly founded on tabula rasa. Most people throughout history were very ostensibly aware that intelligence (and character in general) is heritable. • •
roche IGI-111 22hr ago Reminds me of that study which asserted social mobility has no major impact on who ends up where, as if there's a small-ish contingent of people who keep bumping up against the glass ceiling in low-mobility environments, but as a rule we're born into specific strata for a reason. There is some combination of intelligence, stability, drive, and health which is handed down genetically and which nearly all successful people share. • •
Goodguy roche 21hr ago Can't much of this wealth persistence be explained by people passing their wealth to their descendants rather than by intelligence, stability, drive, or health? • •
sodiummuffin Goodguy 20hr ago There's been some studies looking at historical cases like land lotteries indicating that randomly-obtained wealth doesn't tend to persist across generations. Off the top of my head this SSC post has some discussion of this. Similarly, the children and grandchildren of those who were sent to the gulag in the Soviet Union are today more likely to have a college education than the descendants of those who were not, and the areas where they were resettled to are now more prosperous. The gulag may have taken away everything else, but it disproportionately targeted groups like educated professionals, and those that survived still had their genes. Unfortunately it looks like they didn't have individual economic data from the survey, just education, it would be good to confirm that they're individually wealthier rather than having to go by area. • •
guesswho Goodguy 1d ago or them it is axiomatic that human races do not differ in intelligence and that anyone who questions the truth of that is almost certainly a racist who is motivated by a desire to hurt non-white people. The first half of that doesn't have to be true for the second half to be true. In my experience, most of the left agrees with the second half, and believes that there's not compelling evidence to reject the null hypothesis of no difference on the first half (with the caveat that the existing data is suspect for various reasons, largely having to do with the second half). But yeah, within the bailey this is mostly an arguments as soldiers thing. Most people don't know much of the science about this topic and have no reason to care about it except in as much as it affects the political landscape, so when it comes up they're not going to enthusiastically support their opponent's side of the question. • •
doglatine 4bpp 1d ago If your interpretation were correct, you’d surely expect everyone (but especially the left) to be very excited about polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, since it allows people to have children who are significantly smarter than themselves (and once you factor in CRISPR, the sky is the limit). In practice, though, the main people who get excited about polygenic embryo screening tend to be oddball techno-utopians, like many of us here. • •
hydroacetylene doglatine 20hr ago I think that- moral concerns aside- polygenic embryo screening will actually have a dysgenic effect, and crispr will probably make it worse over the medium to long term. ‘But hydro, it can select for higher IQ’- nonsense. In practice it selects for higher IQ people having fewer kids, because well educated upper class people are the natural target audience and it’s absurd to think it won’t suppress fertility among early adopters. And frankly I expect crispr selection for intelligence to be in vogue for about ten years before it switches over to selection for a ‘cute, obedient, phlegmatic temperament and probably athletic’ package. Yes, my bias is obvious. But factually high TFR groups today won’t use eugenics tech, because they’re either religious fanatics or underclass who don’t give a shit, and it won’t cause the people who do use it to have a rise in fertility because their low TFR is not caused by ‘but what if the kid turns out to have a 108 IQ instead of 112?’, it’s caused by not wanting to have to raise kids. I know there’s a motteizean technoutopian crowd which thinks artificial wombs with genetically engineered babies will bring about a rapidly growing 130+ IQ talented tenth. And it would be nice to have more 130+ IQ people around who want to behave in pro social ways, but someone still has to raise the baby for two decades. • •
doglatine hydroacetylene 11hr ago someone still has to raise the baby for two decades It’s not really two decades; more like 13 years or so. As Bryan Kaplan points out, by early teenage years parents are more interested in spending time with the kid than vice-versa. I also expect AI to play a progressively bigger role in parenting. Not so much the physical side (diaperbots may be further away than non-embodied ASI) but AI teachers and entertainers. “Hey Alexa, I have work on my presentation. Can you watch the kids for a couple of hours? Call me if there’s an emergency. Jonnie can watch TV until 6 and then you can help him with his homework.” • •
hydroacetylene doglatine 5hr ago This seems delusional, because AI has a long(some would say infinite) way to go before it has the capabilities of a mark I human teenager. It’s a meatspace task- whether the kid is 8 months or 8 years, if you want him to actually do his homework someone has to keep an eye on him. An AI can’t do it because it is a computer program, and if Alexa controls a shock collar on Johnny AI still has to be able to tell that he’s actually working on his homework and not, say, keeping the screen up while he plays on his game boy. Any 12 year old can do this. AI is a very long ways away. • •
ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad doglatine 11hr ago I also expect AI to play a progressively bigger role in parenting. Not so much the physical side (diaperbots may be further away than non-embodied ASI) but AI teachers and entertainers. “Hey Alexa, I have work on my presentation. Can you watch the kids for a couple of hours? Call me if there’s an emergency. Jonnie can watch TV until 6 and then you can help him with his homework.” Oh god, thank you for giving me one more reason to join the Butlerian Jihad. It wasn't quite enough that hostile teachers try to indoctrinate kids and turn them against their parents, or that Google curates my access to information, let's go ahead and combine the two, and hand the kids' indoctrination over to Google, because the current system is clearly not efficient enough. • •
SSCReader doglatine 1d ago If your interpretation were correct, you’d surely expect everyone (but especially the left) to be very excited about polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, Well that pattern matches to eugenics. Which has a negative rhetorical valence to many people (whether deserved or not). Remember facts matter less than feelings when it comes to the positions most people hold. If position A logically leads to position B, but position B is felt to be bad, then people can simply accept A and not accept B. We are excellent at that as a species. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ doglatine 1d ago Interesting counterpoint, but I think there are some arguments against it. I can't quite commit to a single line of argument, but think that in reality all of these might be a factor. • The objection to gene editing might exist for orthogonal reasons, such as the usual dystopian fiction priming. Compare to the widespread left-wing opposition to nuclear power (though this seems to have gone through a cycle of sanewashing into a hairier-to-refute "actually nuclear was never profitable to begin with"), or even more relatedly GMOs in nutrition: the idea that nutritional deprivation could be addressed with something like Golden Rice was received somewhere between coldly and with outright hostility, and I imagine you wouldn't want to argue that all these people don't actually want to solve vitamin A deficiency in the third world. I am actually not sure where typical right-wingers can be said to stand on GMOs, beyond a certain expectation of default support because left-wingers are against it and corporations stand to benefit. • Somewhat relatedly, the modern mainstream Left seems to be wary in general of proposed solutions that involve increased individual agency, particularly when exercising that agency correctly is difficult and depends on the confluence of a lot of complex enabling factors. Here I would draw a comparison to the widespread opposition to homeschooling and even school choice in general, even though you might think that if one considers education (as an environmental factor) important and some state schools are bad this would also be the natural response. Leftists surmise, perhaps correctly, that such agency tends to benefit those who are already winning and are better-prepared to make the right choice - indeed, an objection that I hear frequently to human genetic improvement is that rich first-worlders would be the most likely to give their children the best genetic enhancement, widening the gap further (and in particular breaking what little there is left of the karmic mechanism that rich kids squander their wealth but poor kids raise themselves up by their grit). If the person objecting gets drunk and edgy enough, they may even say the other half that if poor people do get access to genetic enhancement they may use it to make kids with Kim Kardashian's bum rather than Stephen Hawking's brain. • Separately, your argument presupposes that people actually, on some level, do accept that intelligence is heritable, and then doublethink it away: a process like "human differences in intelligence are due to genetic differences; such a reality would be far too horrible to accept; I shall therefore pretend to believe that it is not so", rather than "a reality in which human intelligence differences are inherited would be far too horrible to accept; I believe in a moral universe; therefore I earnestly conclude that it is not so". In the latter case, they may not think of gene editing as a candidate solution to the problem of human differences in intelligence at all; rather, it would be a frivolous undertaking that is still subject to the two objections from the previous bullet points - note that "current differences in human intelligence are not due to genes" is not incompatible with "gene editing could introduce inherited differences in human intelligence, such as a caste of superhuman rich white kids". I doubt that most people would constantly live with the cognitive dissonance of the former. • Finally, what do we know about the attitudes towards polygenic embryo screening of people that do actually accept that intelligence is heritable and gives rise to observed human diversity in intelligence? Are there major groups of people who fall in this class and don't belong to either of the three categories (1) apolitical, (2) oddball techno-utopians and (3) motivated racists? (1) will by definition defer their stance on gene editing to people somewhere on the convex hull in opinionatedness and prestige space, (2) is us, and (3) are surely not any more enthused about the prospect of creating new ethnic outgroups that are not intellectually inferior than they are about the existing ones. Also, last time heritability of intelligence was actually a mainstream prestige belief, we didn't have the knowledge base to propose DNA editing, but as far as I understand people were in fact very excited about eugenics. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 4bpp 21hr ago into a hairier-to-refute "actually nuclear was never profitable to begin with" It's true that they say this (and it is better than saying it's grossly unsafe when coal kills thousands of times more) but they're still lying outright. You can find articles online decrying US nuclear plants receiving subsidies when they're already profitable. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/586260-profitable-nuclear-plants-dont-need-subsidies-put-the-money-toward/ And then there are the graphs showing that even in America, a toxic regulatory environment, they're usually profitable year over year. Page 388 gives year by year profitability over a bunch of nuclear plants. https://www.monitoringanalytics.com/reports/PJM_State_of_the_Market/2021/2021q3-som-pjm-sec7.pdf • •
sodiummuffin RandomRanger 20hr ago Talking about the year-over-year profitability of something where the cost is overwhelmingly from initial construction is pointless unless you're specifically talking about whether to shut down existing plants. By that standard the business plan of "fill a tank with oil, then pump it out and sell it over the course of 10 years" is a profitable way to generate energy. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! sodiummuffin 19hr ago It includes capital cost, fuel cost, operating costs. In 2017, seven nuclear plants with a total capacity of 12,658 MW, in addition to Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island, did not recover all their fuel costs, operating costs, and capital expenditures. In 2018, one nuclear plant, with a total capacity of 894 MW, in addition to Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island, did not recover all its fuel costs, operating costs, and capital expenditures. • •
sodiummuffin RandomRanger 18hr ago It includes incremental capital expenditures during that year, in particular estimated maintenance costs. The analysis of nuclear plants includes annual avoidable costs and incremental capital expenditures from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) based on NEI’s calculations of average costs for all U.S. nuclear plants. Notice how in chart 7-20 the listed capital cost per MWh is identical for almost every plant, even though they would have cost different amounts to make, because it's based on estimated maintenance costs. Or how it can have a large difference between years for plants that are already constructed: NEI average incremental capital expenditures have decreased since their peak in 2012 (45.6 percent decrease from 2012 through 2019 for all plants including single and multiple unit plants). NEI’s incremental capital expenditures peaked in 2012 as a result of regulatory requirements following the 2011 accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/incrementalcost.asp Incremental cost is the total cost incurred due to an additional unit of product being produced. Incremental cost is calculated by analyzing the additional expenses involved in the production process, such as raw materials, for one additional unit of production. In this context, incremental capital cost would be how much more you have to spend on capital per MWh to keep the flow of additional units of electricity coming. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! sodiummuffin 17hr ago Ok, good point. I missed that part. Even so, many US reactors are paid off which indicates they must've repaid their capital costs, despite the ridiculous operating conditions (including the US's refusal to build a permanent waste dump despite spending billions on the matter). Nuclear energy in more competent countries like South Korea is cheap and reliable, despite political interference. Nuclear energy has been bailing out their expensive coal and gas imports. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/skoreas-nuclear-power-inflection-point-advocate-wins-presidency-2022-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N2X403F/ Here's a pro-renewable estimate, since it excludes costs of transmission or connecting to the grid (which will be worse for intermittent, geographically sparse renewables). Nuclear is competitive when compared to anything else, provided operation happens over the long-term (60 years), p46 https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/egc-2020_2020-12-09_18-26-46_781.pdf • •
netstack Texas is freedom land 4bpp 1d ago the usual dystopian fiction priming Now I’m a little curious about how much of an effect dystopian fiction has on actual decisions. There’s an obvious angle where policy gets influenced by the general mood on a technology or movement. But the reverse seems just as plausible. If we’re looking back on best-sellers or even cult classics, we’re getting a very curated sip from the firehose. For comparison, there’s a decent amount of mainstream entertainment dedicated to American race relations. It’s hip at the moment. By Sturgeon’s law, a small fraction of it will be good, and will be analyzed or referenced in the coming decades. No matter what happens socially or politically in the coming years, our grandkids are going to assume it was due to the vibes. • •
lagrangian 4bpp 1d ago Finally, what do we know about the attitudes towards polygenic embryo screening of people that do actually accept that intelligence is heritable and gives rise to observed human diversity in intelligence? Are there major groups of people who fall in this class and don't belong to either of the three categories [...] (3) motivated racists? [...] (3) are surely not any more enthused about the prospect of creating new ethnic outgroups that are not intellectually inferior than they are about the existing ones. As someone in all three categories, I think the conclusion here about 3 is sometimes (I'd say often) incorrect. My primary racist complaints would be solved by higher IQ, assuming it came with higher conscientiousness etc. "Those groups that annoy me" with high IQ start to quickly look a lot like "those groups that don't annoy me." So to whatever extent the new outgroups replace the existing low IQ ones, I say - great. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ lagrangian 10hr ago · Edited 10hr ago I don't know, it seems to me that not being annoyed by any other ethnic group is a rare position for card-carrying racists. Our very own forum went through a period of "soulless amoral bugmen" posting for East Asians, which as I gather is a pretty standard view for European and Caucasian-American (3) \setminus (2) as well; for other major high-IQ groups, a parallel poster already commented. I think it's quite likely that when you imagine other ethnic groups engineered to the average intelligence of yours, you actually also envision them engineered to have your aesthetic and value preferences, which are in reality largely orthogonal to intelligence; this would be hard to achieve in a genetic engineering campaign not only because you couldn't get the targets of the engineering on board, but also because you couldn't get the existing intelligent and successful ethnic groups to agree on what aesthetic to engineer in. (Imagine the heated debate in the International Congress of Racists about what level of Blind Filial Piety the New African Man ought to have.) (Also, I would think of (1) as mutually exclusive with the others...) • •
aqouta 4bpp 6hr ago Our very own forum went through a period of "soulless amoral bugmen" posting for East Asians Did we? • •
hydroacetylene aqouta 6hr ago Yes, the guy who posted about Chinese babies constantly. • •
hydroacetylene lagrangian 1d ago I dunno, the Twitter DR seems not to like Brahmins or Jews much. • •
Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast hydroacetylene 18hr ago The part about conscientiousness also being important is probably the piece of the puzzle you’re missing. DR complaints about Jews (outside of a few cranks like Neema Parvini doing a contrarian bit to make a point) do not actually deny the high IQ and considerable talents of Jews not Brahmins. Their complaint is that both groups are amoral, ethnonarcissicistic strivers who use their cognitive gifts to achieve selfish and/or malevolent ends. High IQ is only an unalloyed good when paired with a conscientious desire to do good and to play fairly. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Hoffmeister25 10hr ago · Edited 10hr ago What's an example of an ethnic group that's generally considered by racist members of another ethnic group to not be amoral and ethnonarcissistic (the "striver" part probably comes for free whenever there is conscientiousness, which would surely be introduced as part of any uplift genetic engineering)? (I suspect that this sentiment is more or less equivalent to "I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own".) • •
Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 4bpp 8hr ago What's an example of an ethnic group that's generally considered by racist members of another ethnic group to not be amoral and ethnonarcissistic Finns would be an obvious example. Unassuming, introverted, conformist, and, in the modern era, pathologically welcoming to other ethnic and racial groups. Sweden would be a very notable example of the latter tendency. Look at what the influx of Somalians and Syrians has done to their country. And it’s not just Swedes in Sweden; Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota are a full-on prey species at this point, with black and Somali gangs and political machines turning what was once one of the most well-functioning and high-QOL regions of the country into a basket case. Look, I’ve defended Jews in this space a number of times. But claiming that they’re just getting the exact same criticisms that every high-IQ ethnic groups gets is risible. Jews do in fact have very specific complaints which have been leveled at them consistently numerous times throughout their existence in Europe. Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". This is a total dodge, rather than a serious attempt to deal with the topic at hand. • •
Stefferi Chief Suomiposter Hoffmeister25 4hr ago Finns would be an obvious example. Unassuming, introverted, conformist, and, in the modern era, pathologically welcoming to other ethnic and racial groups. Well... • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Hoffmeister25 6hr ago Finns and Swedes Isn't the one making a judgement of them as not amoral and ethnonarcissistic here you, who would also not hesitate to consider Swedish-Americans and Finnish-Americans as belonging to your own ethnicity? I am not so sure that racists who outgroup them would actually agree with that assessment (and I am not willing to consider the mere clannishness of Somalians and Syrians to qualify as racism; that in my eyes requires believing in the inherent superiority of one's macroscopic genetic cluster rather than just "I stick up for my family because that's the Right Thing to Do"). Surely, racist Asians, Jews and African-Americans seem to push the line that all the Caucasian peoples around them are amoral and ethnonarcissistic. Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". Huh? What are standard racist complaints about Jews apart from (1) severe ingroup preference (i.e. they are competent and use that to their own benefit) and (2) a distinct style of wordceldom/"Jewish physics"/the differing aesthetics that are seen as particularly disagreeable to the speaker? • •
Jiro Hoffmeister25 6hr ago Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". Yes they can. People are normally racist against other ethnicities when those ethnicities are around. There are a limited number of other ectnicities that are around. • •
lagrangian hydroacetylene 19hr ago That tracks, I'm Jewish • •
TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra doglatine 1d ago Idk, I think if there were somehow a guarantee that embryo screening would be equally available for all then many lefties would be stoked for it. Unfortunately they have an extremely realistic concern that the rich will be the first to get genetic therapies, which will be expensive, and the intelligence differential will only continue to widen massively. • •
Skibboleth TheDag 1d ago · Edited 1d ago It depends. There are equity concerns, where the rich are going to get the earliest access which will lead to a literal genetic aristocracy (or, perhaps worse, genetic superiority will be used to justify elites' supremacy all out of proportion with the actual impact of such technology). Or that the rich are going to get the safe and effective options while the poor are going to be compelled to accept risky technologies to stay economically competitive. Or something to that effect. However, there's also something something diversity of human experience. On the more reasonable end, you have concerns that parents are going to hyperoptimize for a narrow conception of success over broader flourish, creating a monoculture of [your pejorative of choice for upper middle class professionals]. On the more extreme end, you have the "disabilities are a social construct" crowd, who will declare that you're trying to genocide deaf people by allowing parents to select embryos that don't have congenital deafness. On the other hand, I am reminded of a remark I saw like ten years ago about how transhumanism will never be a thing because when we finally get effective transhuman technologies it will be called "healthcare". I think effective embryo screening will probably win out if it ever becomes possible because the people who want their children to be smart, beautiful, and healthy will vastly outnumber the people who think we're losing some vital part of the human experience. • •
IGI-111 Skibboleth 23hr ago The most likely outcome is that we have a few idealistic people create notorious human disasters, label the disasters after them, say "never again" and proceed to keep doing the few things they did correctly forevermore. It is after all, exactly what happened to eugenics. • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist doglatine 1d ago That your kids will be better off if we can cut out the parts of their heritage that make them think like you and replace those parts with contributions from your (no longer only ostensible) betters seems like a cosmic cucking. • •
aardvark2 disposablehead 7hr ago If you have 2 children normally, you do not propagate, on average, about 25% mutations unique to you. If you want everything to continue from you, you need cloning or very difficult genome editing. • •
sun_the_second aardvark2 2hr ago Even that assumes your mutations are unique to you, when in fact it's that particular combination of them that is unique. • •
aardvark2 disposablehead 8hr ago East Asians are less smelly than Europeans (who are in turn less smelly than). I, European, would want my children to have genes in this regard, that's only 1 gene. • •
jkf aardvark2 4hr ago Considering the (supposed?) importance of odour to human attraction you are opening your gene line up bigly to some evil genie action with this request. • •
hydroacetylene jkf 2hr ago new
Is this the reason for low oriental fertility rates across nations and cultures?
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jkf hydroacetylene 22m ago new
Probably not -- IIRC it's more of an aid to assortative mating in that people tend to prefer partners who smell like their own family. Maybe it would make it easier for one's sons to pick up Asian girls?
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2rafa hydroacetylene 1hr ago new
They can’t be that low historically given how many Chinese there are, surely.
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The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht aardvark2 7hr ago Said by someone who has never been on a bus in Seoul. There's environmental factors, man. • •
aardvark2 The_Nybbler 7hr ago Low effort 'gotcha'. Educate yourself: non-functional variant of gene ABCC11 which has near 100% frequency in East Asia reduces earwax and armpit smell. I never said East Asians are completely odorless. Where were you in Seoul, did your compare everything-adjusted buses of Koreans, Europeans and Africans on how they smell? • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction aardvark2 1hr ago new
Actually the most important element is the bus. For some reason we have been engineering buses over the decades to make them nigh perfect mobile bo incubators. The first buses didn't stink at all actually - they were like covered wagons with rows of pews in the bed, open to the air and everything. But the bus travellers didn't smell enough, so we remade them with windows on the sides to trap in the odours. Then we perfected our technique - rearrange the seating so we can cram as many people in as possible. Take out the long skinny windows near the roof that let in air and replace them with giant full body windows that can't be opened, just let in the sun to cook everyone up and get them sweating. Put in air conditioning and then have it break down at least half the time. I assume the final step will involve sealing the bus and adding heated stones and jugs of water.
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sun_the_second disposablehead 1d ago Just because your genes tell you to reproduce them as perfectly as possible does not mean it's a good idea. You would prefer your child to remain weak where you are weak, no stronger than you where you are strong? All for the sake of "genetic heritage", a particular contribution of aminoacids that will dilute to 50% already as you merge your gamete with a partner's? This is an attempt to derive your goals from how your biology works that is as backwards as wireheading yourself. In reality, nearly all parents I observe do not want their child to think like them. They want them to think perhaps the same things, but better. • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist sun_the_second 1d ago A list of possible genetic modifications: 1. Fixing obviously broken genes; curing cystic fibrosis 2. Introducing novel genes not native in the human distribution; shark immortality, octopi neurons 3. Replacing all deleterious variants with beneficial variants sourced from across the human genome; fixing heart disease, dementia 4. Replacing all deleterious variants with genes from Chad Chaddicus, who is the perfect human specimen; maximizing population longevity, IQ 5. Replacing all genes from you and your partner with genes from Chad Chaddicus, the perfect human specimen; maximizing aesthetic beauty of the new human race 1 seems obviously good, 2 feels prometheian with large risks and benefits, 3 seems fiddly but cool if reality is kind enough to evenly distribute genetic health across all of humanity. 5 means you’re erased. Gnon has decided that the things that make you you are not worth holding on to, that the future belongs to a rival who through no particular personal effort ended up with the whole of the future, you get nothing, you loose, good day sir. 4 depends on your proximity to Chad. If Chad is your cousin(let’s call this 4+), sweet, you had most of those genes anyway, your kids just get a light tune-up. If Chad is from a rival population with whom you have beef(4-), then the future belongs to the [insert ethnic slur here]. Human destiny is your blood-enemy living in the skins of your grandchildren, forever. PvP is a default setting for human cognition. I don’t think you can get people to entertain the possibility of 4- in a serious way; see the static conversation on the Black-White IQ gap. When group A says “Huh, looks like this objective metric shows group A is just better than B,” group B hears, correctly, fighting words, even (especially) if A is correct. ‘Same thoughts but better’ is step 3 on a process that gets your thoughts and values thrown on the dungheap of history a few iterations later. • •
sun_the_second disposablehead 12hr ago · Edited 12hr ago Once 2 and 3 are achieved, it appears trivial to have "native" aesthetics and Chad Chaddicus hardware. The PvP instincts seem (thankfully), like all evolved whims of biological beings, to be mostly skin-deep, even if the differences aren't. I doubt anyone but the most intellectual racists (as opposed to instinctual racists) will care that their children's leg muscles originate from Kenya, social acumen from Ashkenazim and focus capability from Asia, so long as they look "like them, but with a tune-up" and inherit the same memes. Speaking of memes, you appear to be either not noticing or severely downplaying the effect that shared memes have on perceived kinship. And to expect your memes to be eradicated if you introduce another genepool into yours might be justified when you live in caveman times, where this means you've been invaded and your women were taken into another culture. In a society that has routine genemodding, the correlation of genes and memes ought to be recalculated. In any case, are you arguing that genemodding ought to be seen as cucking by you and me, or that it will be seen as such by most? • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist sun_the_second 4hr ago Memes and genes aren’t cleanly distinct; genes dictate what memes are palatable to a population, and memes dictate which genes are desirable enough to propagate. Joseph Heinrich has written good stuff on this. I’d also gesture towards the genetic similarities of friend groups, or the increased incidence of abuse with step-parents. I want GMO kids, but I think I’m close enough to our hypothetical Chad that they would still feel like my own children. If instead they turn out to be brilliant but agreeable bureaucrats then I’m not interested. • •
2rafa disposablehead 54m ago new
I think the point is that for most people it is about aesthetics. Indians and Malaysians and Japanese won’t want ‘white’ kids but their designer babies will look like biracial white-and-themselves versions of them. And that’s what most people would be content with.
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sun_the_second disposablehead 3hr ago It doesn't appear that the coupling of memes and genes is that tight. The material capabilities and capacities of civilizations (i. e. environment) affect both the meme palatability and the extent to which the memes are capable to affect sexual selection a great deal. Incidence of step-children abuse looks explainable enough by the plain issue that parenthood would often be only incidental for the non-genetic parent. They married the father/mother, the kid wouldn't be their first priority even if they're amicable. As for genetic similarities between friends - sure, I can see how there'd be a correlation, given that you'd need to share a language, often location, some interests, necessitating a shared non-aversion to those interests... Would have to read the study to know if it's pronounced enough to necessitate some special focus on "genetic correlation". What I'm getting at... if the kid popped out of you and you raised them, I doubt that the intellectual knowledge that their genes have been altered would affect the instinctual attachment much, unless you let yourself be convinced that not sharing genes is bad. A kid that I sired which was then modified doesn't appear harder to love than my own vanilla kid, to me. If they came from a sperm bank - sure, there'd be visceral aversion to raising the spawn of some actual, personified Chad. But otherwise, it feels more important to me to pass on my memes. Perhaps it caters to my pride more to think of myself as a collection of ideas that lived in a smart monkey body, rather than a smart monkey that had some ideas. Would you rather raise the child of your enemy to be your most ardent ally, or have your child be raised by your enemy to be their most ardent ally? • •
aardvark2 sun_the_second 8hr ago so long as they look "like them, but with a tune-up" and inherit the same memes. how we will know if 300 IQ engineered Russians would be still Russians? If they annex planets on first opportunity and say "cyka blyat", they are. • •
hydroacetylene aardvark2 2hr ago new
But they sold the rocket fuel…
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sun_the_second aardvark2 2hr ago new
If that's a joke, then sorry, this is the place where something like that might be argued completely sincerely so I failed to laugh.
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4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ sun_the_second 1d ago Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result. Gattaca evidently anticipated this concern, but still went on to build perhaps the most important relevant dystopian tropescape in our public culture with the "embryonic selection only" variant. • •
guesswho doglatine 1d ago When polygenic embryo screening is free to every citizen, maybe the left will get excited about it. Until then it's just GATTACCA, another way for the rich to give their offspring even more advantages over everyone else. • •
Hyperion guesswho 1d ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? GATTACCA is fiction, a fine movie, but it's fiction. You shouldn't generalize from fictional evidence! • •
sun_the_second Hyperion 8hr ago If you could make someone a physical God, would you do it with the same readiness whether: 1. it would be you 2. it might not be you 3. it is for sure not you, but someone you agree with 4. it might be someone you disagree with 5. it will for sure be someone you disagree with? Do you really have to be "such an egalitarian" to be apprehensive about giving a subset of people such an advantage over others? • •
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42 Hyperion 23hr ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? I for one don't need to be an egalitarian, just selfish and look at, me and my genetics and my bank account. Large-effect genetic technology that will be available to members of the millionaire class but not my family? If it becomes a thing, the price-point better come down soon or I will, dunno, despair. And no need to argue from fictional evidence. We have seen how highly unequal human societies have played out since the dawn of agriculture. There was a great deal of unpleasantness for the great majority of people. • •
guesswho Hyperion 1d ago First of all, when were we talking about me? Second, when did we jump from not being 'very excited' to, what,. wanting to ban it or something? • •
ulyssessword guesswho 18hr ago First of all, when were we talking about me? When you replied. That's usually how it works. Second, when did we jump from not being 'very excited' to, what,. wanting to ban it or something? As far as I can tell, in that sentence right there. • •
ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad Hyperion 1d ago · Edited 1d ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? Yup, I'd take one for the team. It's not even about equality, it's about turning humans into something to be deliberately engineered. Gatacca barely scratched the surface of where that leads to, though Darwin is of course wrong about when the left will get excited about it. They're already pushing it in some countries, and they're promoting a bunch of other human engineering technologies from euthanasia to surrogacy. • •
hydroacetylene 4bpp 1d ago I think you’re getting at a major difference between progressives and conservatives- progressives believe that utopia is doable and making progress towards utopia is the most important thing. Conservatives believe it isn’t and not making it worse is the most important thing. Pretty much everyone is upset with the status quo in America. But looking at the complaints- progressives complain ‘we haven’t improved on real wages since x date’, conservatives on the exact same thing complain ‘housing has gotten less affordable because of price growth compared to wages’. These are very similar statements but framed differently. It’s an occasional theme of my posts that western society is definitely post-Christian in a way that it isn’t post-Islamic or post-pagan. I think this is connected very well here; key to Christianity is the concept that we had perfection once, ruined it, and this world is fallen and can’t be restored by human action, we will attain perfection only in the next life. Conservatives being, well, conservative, still hold onto that Christian concept even when they sleep in on Sunday mornings. Progressives keep the concept of the fallen world and believe that we can attain perfection here- we can fix it. This is a very post-Christian dichotomy to hold to. • •
guesswho 4bpp 1d ago · Edited 1d ago I feel like this has to be performative ignorance from deBoer to at least some degree, right? Like... It's impolite to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because it's been a historic justification for all types of oppression and atrocity, from slavery and colonialism to restricting rights and excluding from professions to just generic racism and sexism. It's impolitic to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because we're in the middle of a culture war over equity vs equality, and one side wants to use 'genetic low intelligence' of various groups as their explanatory variable for why equality of opportunity doesn't produce equality of outcomes. It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' It's not rocket science! deBoer might think those are bad reasons to not talk about it, but they're really obvious and salient reasons that people talk about all the time! Freddie deBoer may be the type of high-decoupler who doesn't even think about all that context and consequence when discussing a topic that he considers scientific rather than political or social. But it's hard to imagine he's actually baffled about why other people care about those things, and how it affects their behavior. (also, you know, everyone cites heritability statistics taken within low-variance populations such as college freshmen, but heritability is inversely proportional to the environmental variance in your sample) • •
aardvark2 guesswho 7hr ago because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong Reality: Judicial predictions of reduction or elimination of the RAG through color - based decisions approached the l udicrous. In rendering the decisive vote on the High Court decision Grutter vs. Bolling (539 U.S. 2003) and endorsing a continuing legality of quotas, Justice Sandra Day O ’ Connor averred, “ ...the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences of social performance will no longer be necessary. ” In 2012 and having concurred with Justice O ’ Connor in the 2003 ruling, Justice Breyer acknowledged evidence of the unchanging RAG but noted only nine of the 25 years had passed. Puzzled by remarks of Justices O ’ Connor and Breyer, Otis Graham , writing in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal , recalled the 1976 statement of Constance Baker Motley, an African - American judge, at a Conference on Affirmative Action at the Center for Studies of Democratic Institutions: “ I despise the necessity of reverse discrimination but I swear to you we will end it in 25 years.” Twenty years had passed when Graham noted this in 1997, and it is now 16 years since then. • •
aardvark2 guesswho 8hr ago of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong what? what? what was 19th century Francis Galton and early eugenicists wrong about? Right now, your tribe restricts access to genetic databases. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! guesswho 21hr ago laughably and disastrously wrong The cost of affirmative action and interracial redistribution is vast. Trillions of dollars gone down the drain, destruction of urban centres, the toleration of gross institutional incompetence, a long-term drain on economic productivity and a source of political strife. • •
guesswho RandomRanger 18hr ago That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. Happy to examine any extraordinary evidence you have for it. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! guesswho 16hr ago It stands to reason that affirmative action reduces productivity, which is the primary source of economic growth. Everything from non-competitive government grants to minority businesses, corporations hiring diverse rather than competent workers and being unable to fire them, legal costs, huge diversity bureaucracies... Decade by decade, all around the West, that adds up. Plus there's been well over a trillion in aid sent off to Africa. If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to provide specific evidence. I'm rather interested by this statement: It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong I struggle to see how everyone who talked about the genetic component could be laughably wrong. Those of us who believe in evolution have little choice but to recognize genetic differences in intelligence, just as there are genetic differences in height, weight and every other factor. • •
Sloot RandomRanger 19hr ago In particular, subsidization of the survival and reproduction of negative fiscal, low human capital populations within and across countries. • •
2rafa RandomRanger 21hr ago That’s not redistribution, that’s social engineering. The latter can involve a form of the former, but it’s entirely possible to have redistribution, even reparations, without destroying the inner cities or political strife. The key is whether redistribution is designed to achieve some form of equality of whether it’s simply designed to improve the quality of life of the recipient population. I think social stability in the USA likely requires some measures by the majority that support the black minority, but it’s the nature and purpose of those measures that should be debated. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2rafa 18hr ago But the engineering is designed to redistribute. It involves the mobilization of resources which are produced by whites, whether that's goods or more intangible things like good neighbourhoods, companies or schools, university entrance placements... These resources are used to advantage blacks. Necessarily that will mean disadvantaging whites and Asians compared to if there was no such redistribution. White kids get bussed to black school districts and get beaten up while the legal and educational establishment look the other way when at all possible. There's nothing the state can do that doesn't have some kind of cost. Now the original plan was that it would be an investment, that after the investment was made the problems would disappear and you'd have all these great black scientists, engineers and so on. Social harmony would be greater than before. The investment hasn't paid off after 40-50 years! Such a business model should be scrapped, not revamped and relaunched time and time again. There's no investment case any more, just bribery and betrayal of civilized, meritocratic principles. De facto, US blacks have gotten trillions worth of reparations in welfare and affirmative action. They get their culture celebrated and lauded before the whole world. The death of a black drug addict with dubious morals is blown up into this huge global tragedy worthy of massive riots, the harms blacks cause are swept under the rug. There's no shortage of such stories - teachers strangled and raped by students, women inexplicably executed by black police. US blacks get wealth, they get status and preferential treatment from the authorities. What can more reparations possibly do, other than raise the bar for future demands? I'm considered pretty sympathetic to Russia on this forum but I'd draw the line well before offering Putin an open-ended subsidy to uphold the stability of Europe. That's actual appeasement and of a particularly abhorrent kind. • •
2rafa RandomRanger 17hr ago Even accepting your disagreements it still doesn’t follow that not intervening is preferable. Consider that for all your criticisms of programs that have disproportionately benefited African Americans, African American militancy is down significantly since the 1960s and 1970s. • •
aardvark2 2rafa 6hr ago African American militancy is down significantly since the 1960s and 1970s. It is true, albeit it is also true that African American militancy is up significantly since Jim Crow times. • •
2rafa aardvark2 4hr ago Jim Crow led in part to huge migration out of the South into those large northern cities, and as hydro said many of the nation’s most infamous race riots occurred during it. • •
hydroacetylene aardvark2 5hr ago Jim Crow featured regular race riots. • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction guesswho 23hr ago It's impolitic to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because we're in the middle of a culture war over equity vs equality, and one side wants to use 'genetic low intelligence' of various groups as their explanatory variable for why equality of opportunity doesn't produce equality of outcomes. Is that the explanatory variable you have seen? Because chance is the actual variable. Give two people two dice and the first one to roll snake eyes wins. Equal opportunity, unequal outcome, no discrimination necessary. • •
MartianNight Fruck 22hr ago Chance alone can't explain the differences in outcome between different groups, because the influence of chance on the individual level disappears on the group level. In your analogy: assume 1000 whites and 1000 blacks each roll a die. Now you take all the people who rolled a 6. There will be approximately equal number of whites and blacks in that group. But that's not what we see when it comes to income level, educational attainment, employment rate, life expectancy, crime participation, or a myriad of other metrics that people who care about equal outcomes care about. • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction MartianNight 20hr ago Groups are manufactured. And as you yourself note, individual levels and group levels follow completely different rules. In this setting the white people have an advantage as a group, because they started rolling the dice first, let's say a minute first, but only the people who roll snake eyes actually win. And if you change the rules, to say, give the black people a minute to catch up when the white people can't roll, once again only the people who roll snake eyes will win. Everyone else is a loser, but due to skin colouring you have decided some are winners. Winners who get none of the benefits of winning, but still winners somehow. Equity proponents aren't asking for equality of outcome, if they wanted that they'd focus exclusively on the people with all the money regardless of skin colour, because money is the only thing that will fix those metrics. In reality equity proponents are asking one group of people (poor whites) to suffer even more than usual for strangers because they share their skin colour with another group (rich white people). And spinning up racial tension. It's a repugnant and ridiculous philosophy. • •
TitaniumButterfly guesswho 1d ago · Edited 19hr ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong I don't think so. What are some examples? We're constantly told this but I don't think it's true at all. Our ancestors were pretty sharp and had a pretty solid understanding of racial differences. More likely the 'laughable and disastrous' examples (if any) are being cherry-picked or misrepresented. E.g., blacks really do have smaller skulls (and therefore brains) than whites. But mention this to most normies and they've been trained to roll their eyes at the notion. • •
FiveHourMarathon These hoes don't be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Meghan's Law guesswho 1d ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' Around the Lunar New Year a Chinese friend and I were chatting about it, and my hot-take was that Chinese Zodiac was the worst of all the Zodiacs because it was like some people are DRAGONS and some people are RATS and that's just stupid. Where the Western Zodiac is at least mostly decent things. You fucking KNOW that the guy who codified the Chinese Zodiac was born in a Dragon year. ((Why yes, my older sister was born in the year of the Dragon while I was born in a shitty animal year, total coincidence...)) I generally distrust any effort to sort people by "types" that is written to clearly elevate the speaker. Richard Florida is vastly guilty of this in all his work on Class in America: he's happy to accurately describe and hilariously send up the foibles of the upper class and the lower class, but then excuses himself from them with his creation of the CREATIVE CLASS who transcend all those hang-ups and are perfect and free of class problems. So often, these kinds of sorting systems are nothing but a method for the proponent to neatly place himself at the top of a "natural" hierarchy. I'm instantly suspicious of them for that reason. • •
Hyperion guesswho 1d ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' They weren't wrong though. Galton was right. Everything he said about intelligence and it's heritability was correct. His estimate of the White-Black IQ gap is nearly identical to the modern estimate. Galton and his heirs were right, it's just that leftists discredited them through propaganda, not by ever refuting the evidence. • •
Sloot Hyperion 20hr ago · Edited 19hr ago A more amusing and egregious example is Morton’s 19th century skull measurements, which found negro skulls had smaller brain sizes than Caucasian skulls. Gould infamously “ahktually”d this claim in a paper and his 1980s book Mismeasurement of Man, attributing any differences in measured brain size to Morton’s racism without putting in the physical work himself. Morton became another punching bag for Pale Stale Males and their evul scientific racism. A team of researchers later went back to remeasure the skulls (around 2011 or so), and found that Morton’s measurements were largely on point. Whoopsy! Yet, Gould was on the right side of history, and Morton and the 2011-ish wrong thinkers were not. The notion of blank slatism, and that human evolution is conveniently skin deep and stops at the neck, remains the dominant paradigm with no sign of being unseated in ${CurrentDay}. Gould remains a well-celebrated scientist and scientific communicator (where the communicator aspect is/was doing a hard-carry for the scientist aspect, like Neil deGrasse Tyson). It was Gould’s emotional truth and good intentions that count. Morton remains in the dustbin of wrong-thinkers. The researchers involved, instead of being celebrated for doing the unsexy but crucial work of replicating and verifying past research, gained a quasi-pariah status, their work at best being a begrudged, inconvenient footnote for what should had been a slam dunk for Gould upon the racists in anthropology textbooks published in the 201Xs and on. • •
Baila 1d ago · Edited 23hr ago A summary of The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich A free online version of the text can be found here. In The Socialist Phenomenon, Shafarevich examines socialism from antiquity to modern times. Throughout the book, he examines the invariant qualities of socialism and attempts to explain its origins, its driving forces and the goal to which it is driving. The book is split into a preface and three parts. In Part One: Chiliastic Socialism, Shafarevich examines socialism in antiquity, socialism of the heresies, and socialism of philosophers. Part Two: State Socialism examines socialism in South America and in the ancient orient. Finally, in Part Three: Analysis, Shafarevich discusses the contours of the phenomenon, surveys a variety of approaches to socialism, examines the embodiment of the socialist ideal, and the relationship between socialism and individuality before progressing to his ultimate analysis of the goal of socialism. This post will cover the preface and the Introduction to Part One.
Preface (p. 9-14) In the preface, Shafarevich introduces his topic and explains his overall approach. He notes that rigorous discussions of socialism are often derailed for a number of reasons, including the copious and contradictory writings of self-avowed socialists. The author’s solution is given by an analogy to religion. Shafarevich finds that while religion has many functions which greatly impact many domains of life, such as social function, and economic function, or a political role, the fact that religion impacts these domains “is possible only because there are people who believe in God and because there is a striving for a union with God which religion creates.” From this perspective, that Shafarevich seeks to uncover the “fundamental tendency” which enables socialism to impact various domains of life. Pursuing this approach immediately leads one to notice a set of apparent contradictions in socialist writings and thought. Proceeding from a critique of a given society, socialism cries out for justice and puts forth a program for a utopia. However, calls for freedom and utopia are nearly always immediately followed with equally strong calls for extreme violence and maximized, regimented coercion. A work entitled “The Law of Freedom” describes an ideal society where in each small commune there is a hangman and anyone who has been remiss or disobedient is flogged or turned into a slave. Being a mathematician by profession, Shafarevich explains that he seeks to find a description of socialism free from contradictions. That is, he seeks to understand socialism from the socialists’ point of view. While we may not be obliged to accept Marx assertion that man has no existence as an individual, only as a class, “why not accept that he is describing a view of the world inherent in certain people….it is quite possible that they are conveying a view of life in which the entire world evokes malevolence, loathing and nausea (as in Sartre’s first novel, Nausea).”
Part One: Chiliastic Socialism Introduction (p. 17-21) Shafarevich begins by stating that: The word “socialism” often implies two quite different phenomena:
- A doctrine and an appeal based on it, a program for changing life, and
- social Structure that exists in time
Rather than take the assertions of a particular socialist on faith, Shafarevich seeks to study both concepts of socialism independently and without any presuppositions. Beginning with the concept of socialism as an appeal, Shafarevich finds that all such doctrines:
are based on the complete rejection of the existing social structure. They call for its destruction and paint a picture of a more just and happy society in which the solution to all the fundamental problems of the times would be found. Furthermore, they propose concrete ways of achieving this goal.
Borrowing from religious literature, he characterizes this view as “chiliastic socialism.”
Shafarevich then proceeds to contrast two doctrines of chiliastic socialism separated distinctly in time in order to show their continuity. Turning first to Aristophanes comedy The Congresswoman, c. 293 B.C. In the comedy, the women of the city are disguised as men in the assembly and vote in a resolution to seize absolute power, after which they introduce a series of measures.
PRAXAGORA: Compulsory Universal Community Property is what I propose to propose; across-the-board Economic Equality, to fill those fissures that scar our society's face. No more the division between Rich and Poor...We'll wear the same clothes, and share the same food...My initial move will be to communalize land, and money, and all other property, personal and real.
BLEPYROS: But take the landless man who's invisibly wealthy... because he hides his silver and gold in his pockets. What about him?
PRAXAGORA: He'll deposit it all in the Fund....I'll knock out walls and remodel the City into one big happy household, where all can come and go as they choose....I'm pooling the women, creating a public hoard for the use of every man who wishes to take them to bed and make babies.
BLEPYROS: A system like this requires a pretty wise father to know his own children.
PRAXAGORA: But why does he need to? Age is the new criterion: Children will henceforth trace their descent from all men who might have begot them. ...
BLEPYROS: Who's going to work the land and produce the food?
PRAXAGORA: The slaves. This leaves you just one civic function: When the shades of night draw on, slip sleekly down to dinner. ... The State's not going to stint. Its hand is full and open, its heart is large, it'll stuff its menfolk free of charge, then issue them torches when dinner's done and send them out to hunt for fun.
Shafarevich then contrasts this with a direct comparison of quotes from the Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism. For the sake of brevity I will not provide all of the quotes here, but the author matches each claim made above by Praxagora with an exact match from Marx and Engels. Shafarevich notes that across more than a two thousand years, these sets of ideas have strikingly similar and durable features: (1) abolition of private property, (2) abolition of the family, (3) purely material, (4) freedom from the necessity of work. These key features of chiliastic socialism are then examined by the author in the remainder of Part One.
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stolen_brawnze I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song. Baila 1d ago Please can you cut it out with the humongous title text. I try to read these at work on my phone and don’t have an abundance of privacy (shared space no partitions). Every flick of my thumb risks exposing something ridiculous like “Are the JEWS hiding the TRANS truth about BLACK CRIME?” Yours is fine, but it’s a trend I’d be happy to kill anyway. • •
Rasgard 1d ago Have all my fellow Beyond The Dutiful Chuckle searchers (still left feeling dry by the false prophet of Babylon Bee) heard of FreedomToons? This is it for me, it exists, for sure. Indubitably, conclusively, forevermore, this is where I cease my wandering in the desert and build my house upon the sweet sweet spring of Right Wing Comedy That Is Actually Funny. I mean I've watched about ten videos but this is incredibly promising. Every video is ideologically pleasant, and there's great variety in what's going on in them. They're way more than a string of "left wing doctrine lived precisely goes into absurdist death spin" stylistic tributes to each other. And it goes back years! Hopefully he's always been this good. He seems to be a young guy, maybe young enough to be free of a certain sarky jaded bitterness in the spirit of his work that takes the air out of much right wing comedy, but old enough to look down on TicTocers with grizzled maturity. Highlights: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4_2BYLnii6s The CoronaVirus appears on Fallon Objectively funny! Objectively funny! Fauci brutally beating down the actorly yearings of Classically trained Covid to break free of the politicisation of his work is a concept that will prove eternally ticklish. Sadly, I missed the chance to get an early BTDC with a great gag about the Left Wing Dutiful Chuckle that I would have Right Wing Shouted A Laugh At for sure but I didn't get it smoothly enough. https://youtube.com/watch?v=5blyjF9whN4 TicTocers Try To Understand Relationships If you enjoy the faces and sound effects here see also Tucker Carlson watching the J6 footage. https://youtube.com/watch?v=COThKm3ftTo A Day In The Life Of Jordan Peterson I have probably loaded about 200 hours of JP content down the years and watched 2 cos of his voice, so this video was a classic from the moment of its writing and will be until the heat death of the universe. • •
Southkraut Rise, ramble, rest, repeat. Rasgard 7hr ago This is trash. I regret wasting two minutes on it based on the incorrect assumption that people on the Motte either have taste or the good sense to keep their guilty pleasures to themselves. • •
netstack Texas is freedom land Southkraut 6hr ago I'm afraid I still have to ask you to hold to our usual civility standards. Consider this the most gentle of warnings. • •
jkf netstack 4hr ago Perhaps a gentle note to the producers of lame-yet-lengthy toplevel posts (as is already done with ones that are considered too short) would be a way of improving content without the harsh words. I wanted to write something like this in response to "Big Headings Guy" last week, but couldn't think of a civil way to put it. You may have noticed that this thread is increasingly withering on the vine -- I submit that this may be due to the policy of punishing pithy-yet-interesting content with no equivalent system for the long-yet-boring. (Also overpolicing of civility making people reluctant to post their true opinions at all, but we already talked about that) • •
netstack Texas is freedom land jkf 3hr ago Which content do you have in mind as pithy-yet-interesting? I appreciate that you didn’t make an uncivil response to Big Headings Guy. In the end, someone politely requested smaller headings, and he complied. Is there a problem with this exchange? • •
jkf netstack 27m ago new
It wasn't the headings (well they were weird too), it was the lengthy repetitive uninteresting content. I much prefer posts of the form
[pithy description of culture war event/local happening] [potentially inflammatory (or not) take on said events] [call to discussion/sharing of alternate takes]
But people don't make this kind of post anymore, because they are liable to be scolded by the (recently enlarged) mod squad.
So instead we get long boring contentless 'effortposts', and are not allowed to let the poster know how lame they are because of course they are apparently in line with the mission statement.
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reactionary_peasant Rasgard 9hr ago I used to watch some of his stuff. The smugness-to-humor ratio is way too high. Uncharitable in the extreme and subtle as a ton of bricks. Yet sadly probably one of the best conservative humor channels out there. • •
non_radical_centrist Rasgard 1d ago I'm generally centrist, leaning right fiscally and leaning left socially. The videos got a couple small chuckles from me but I didn't particularly find him funny and won't be watching anymore. I find Babylon Bee has a lot more jokes that land, although they have a lot that miss too. •
I propose, in line with your Greek theme:
The Ephorate Option
The Spartans were famously martial, but they were also famously reticent to go to war. They would frequently hem and haw well past the point where the Athenians or Thebans would have jumped into battle. This was largely tied to the martial nature of Sparta's slave society: Sparta always had a weak birthrate and Helot supermajorities and could not afford to spend Spartan blood profligately.
What's changed from the past is that the current leader of the Red Tribe is something of a putative dove, loudly declaring the wars of the past twenty years to be mistakes, and in a sotto voce stage whisper calling dead soldiers suckers and fools. The Trumpian takeover of the GOP has left us with three consecutive presidents who ran promising to pull us out of Afghanistan and arguing that the war in Iraq was a mistake, that there was public outcry when Biden ripped the band-aid off and that we still have troops in Iraq for some reason is a kind of deep-state zombie inertia. No one with any credibility is telling young American men that the wars they will enlist to fight are just. On the Left, they have always been baby-killers, but when Clinton or Carter were president there still existed credible conservative institutions encouraging young men to join up for patriotic red-blooded reasons. Trump, with his anti-war schtick, has supplanted those conservative institutions.
Young Americans are increasingly against America's continued fealty to Israel. As the majority of America's foreign adventures are at root about Israel, this leaves little reason to join up.
If America wants young men to join the military, it needs to rebuild the credibility of the defense establishment as caring about its soldiers. Both in the sense of "don't throw lives away for failed nation building missions," and in the sense of looking after their souls, doing their best to make sure the violence they are called on to practice is righteous. Speaking autobiographically, I should have joined the military, I had all the qualifications and interests they were looking for, and was recruited intensely. But, at the end of the day, I simply disagreed with the wars we were fighting on a moral basis. So when I hear "recruitment crisis" and I see Red Tribe figures like Donald Trump catching up to where my family was in 2003 on the advisability of invading Iraq, I can't help but think that a lot of people are thinking the same things I thought in 2010.
We need to revamp how we go to war, and rework our foreign policy. We need to build a credible system by which we show that we are making intelligent foreign policy decisions. The SecDef needs to be on the job. The President needs to be competent. The Congress needs to do its job and assert authority over the war powers of the executive. We need to have faith that the military is doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. That will make people more interested in serving: if they know that their pledge of their lives and their sacred honor won't be wasted.
On a more prosaic note...
The Malcolm Gladwell Option
There might be little mechanical and procedural tweaks that need to be twucked that can fix things right up. Marijuana usage, for example, is still a black mark on enlisting without a waiver, while alcohol usage is mostly tolerated. This may not reflect modern cultural choices. Moreso a question for career officers than for enlisted: the famous mobility of army careers, with soldiers being moved around assignments constantly even in peacetime, more or less requires that your partner subordinate her life to yours. In a world of two career households, it's a tough sell to any woman I would have considered marrying: you'll have to follow me around, your own career will have to come second, but your career will probably produce more money than mine. I thought about this while talking to a friend from Singapore about reading From Third World to First about how they tried to make careers in the military more appealing, how if I were Singaporean and an army officer even getting deployed to the other side of Singapore is a jokingly short distance from family/friends/spouse's career, while in the USA joining up meant I might end up anywhere at any time even outside deployment in a warzone. Is my young wife going to sacrifice her legal/medical/programming career to my military career?
Speaking of LKY and Singapore, they faced similar problems early on with racial composition of their armed forces:
We faced another security risk from the racial composition of our army and police. Independent Singapore could not continue the old British practice of having a city three-quarters Chinese policed and guarded by Malay police and soldiers. The British had recruited mostly Malays born in Malaya, who traditionally had come co Singapore co enlist. Malays liked soldiering whereas the Chinese shunned it, a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China. The question was whether the army and police would be as loyal to a government no longer British or Malay, but one the Malays perceived as Chinese. We had to find some way co induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect the population.
Ours was no easy task. We had to reorientate people's minds to accept the need for a people's army and overcome their traditional dislike for soldiering. Every Chinese parent knew the saying hao han bu dang bing, hao tie bu da ding (a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails). We set up national cadet corps and national police cadet corps in all secondary schools so that parents would identify the army and police with their sons and daughters. We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors-a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion. People must admire military valor. As Keng Swee said in sorrow, "The Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling." I had to get people to change their attitudes. We also had to improve the physical condition of our young by getting them to participate in sports and physical activity of all kinds, and to develop a taste for adventure and strenuous, thrilling activities that were not without danger to themselves. Persuasion alone was not enough. We needed institutions, well organized, well staffed, and well directed to follow up the exhortations and stirring speeches. The prime responsibility was that of the ministry of education. Only if we changed people's thinking and attitudes could we raise a large citizen army like Switzerland's or Israel's. We gave ourselves a decade to accomplish this.
Looking at a lot of the moves Singapore made, an emphasis on making military careers compatible with professional accomplishment made significant inroads. I'm also in favor of conscription, less in the model of the draft historically, and more in the mode of an expanded and revamped National Guard* which most men would be expected to join.
*Really what I'm in favor of is replacing the system of police in our country with a militia made up of anyone under the age of 50 who wants to take a few shifts a month of acting as a first responder for public order/protection calls. The militia would be funded by a flat income tax, say .5%, on anyone who doesn't serve in the militia.
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
They’re trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female, between men and women, altogether!
Who? Where?… No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman.
Terms like “birthing person” and “chestfeeding” are stupid and alienating to a lot of people!
Well… yeah… Again, though, plenty of trans people don’t use this language, and it’s mostly confined to the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments. I have been around LGBTQ people generally, and activists specifically, for most of my life. No one has ever scolded me for saying “ladies and gentlemen” or “breastfeeding” or “dad.” Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once!
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
You know what the “no one is saying” crowd do when you show them incontrovertible evidence that someone is saying it? They say “oh that person doesn’t matter,” and roll right along. “No one is saying” morphs easily into “no one important is saying.”
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
They’re gonna rape the girls in the bathrooms!
Please, help me understand this, because it’s never made an ounce of sense to me. The claim is that, if you allow transwomen into women’s bathrooms, they’ll rape the women in there, right? Here’s my question: do you think that a sign on a door is gonna keep a rapist from raping? Like, there’s a sexual predator who wants to commit a rape, and he’s about to follow a woman into the bathroom to do so, but then he sees that it’s a women’s bathroom and says “ah shucks, I guess no rape for me today”? I simply do not understand this. If physical proximity is by itself sufficient incitement to sexual assault, then we have much, much bigger problems on our hands. How does legally allowing a transwoman into a girl’s bathroom create any greater threat than a cisgender man’s practical ability to simply walk into that bathroom and assault someone?
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
[image in original post]
For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
[image in original post]
Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
Children are routinely getting permanently-disfiguring medical treatment!
To begin with, every indication is that the number of trans children receiving hormones remains low, and the number undergoing surgical interventions vanishingly rare. Can I see understand some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so. But what I can promise you is that I want medical decisions about children to remain between the children, their parents, and their doctors. That’s who should have a say - the children, the parents, and the doctors. If in fact there are risks or problems identified with the current manner of practicing trans-affirming medicine for children, then we will have to rely on the medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available. Will this result in perfect outcomes? Of course not. Does pediatric sports medicine or pediatric oncology result in perfect outcomes either? Of course not. What I am certain of is that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry.
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
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Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
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Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
- Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters”, and also that her “primary” persona is that of a trans boy named Alan (having given no indication that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder or any discomfort with her gender identity prior to installing TikTok on her phone). Alice/Alan demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects; and also to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
You might very well ask how it could possibly be the case that a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder would suddenly bloom into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves. How could that happen? The standard line on these things is that expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had. [emphasis mine]
And the core point here is that the people who are being hurt by this are these kids themselves. Sucking up scarce mental health resources with fictitious conditions is irresponsible, yes, and pretending to be sick for clout is untoward. But setting that aside, self-diagnosis is dangerous. Playacting a serious mental illness is harmful to your actual mental health. Fixating on the most broken part of yourself is contrary to best medical practices and to living a fulfilled life. Defining yourself by dysfunction is a great way to stay dysfunctional. And everything about mental illness that seems cool and deep and intense when you’re 18 becomes sad and pathetic and self-destructive and ugly by the time you’re 40. Take it from me. These kids are hurting themselves. I don’t want to ridicule them. I’m not even angry at them. I’m angry at their adult enablers. That includes the vast edifice of woowoo self-help bullshit Instagram self-actualization yoga winemom feel-good consumerist tell-me-I’m-special psychiatric medicine, and a media that loves the prurient thrills of multiple personalities and never saw a vulnerability that it couldn’t exploit.
Most of these young people will probably just move on as they get older, realizing that keeping up this pretense is exhausting and pointless, and go on to live (I hope) normal healthy lives. But some of them are no doubt using these popular and trendy diagnoses as a way to avoid what’s really wrong with them, far more prosaic and thus unsexy personal problems, whether mental illnesses or not. And all of this, the enabling and the humoring and the patronizing, will really hurt them in the long run. Adults who play into it should be ashamed. [emphasis mine]
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
For example, it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine.
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
Yes, detransitioners exist. (I was close with someone like that in grad school.) This is the human species; people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, including transitioning back to a gender identity that they once transitioned from. And I have no particular opinion on how many of those people there are. What I don’t understand is why the existence of detransitioners should undermine our respect for trans people. Why would the mere existence of people who transition back do anything to challenge our belief in the validity of the majority who transition and then maintain that gender identity permanently?
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
Here’s the problem: under current conditions, there’s no way I can talk about any of this in a way that liberals and leftists will listen to. They’ll see that I’m criticizing Zoomers on TikTok who are engaging under the broad umbrella of “identity” and they’ll declare me a reactionary. No matter how right I am. Ruy Texeira calls it the Fox News Fallacy: “if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.”
The specific way that lefties will dismiss this problem will be to say, hey, who cares, it’s just adolescents on TikTok. They won’t affirmatively say that it’s good that thousands of teenagers claim to have spontaneously developed an extremely rare and very punishing mental illness, because that’s stupid, so they’ll say it just doesn’t matter, and really it’s weird that you’re paying attention to this. I’ve already established why I care - I believe that this behavior, and the broader suite of 21st century progressive attitudes towards mental health, are doing immense damage to vulnerable young people. But also we’ve seen this movie before.
People pretend that this never happened, now, but in the early and mid-2010s, the stock lefty response to woke insanity at college was not to say that the kids were right and their politics were good. That was a rarely-encountered defense. No, the sneering and haughty response to complaints about, say, incredibly broad trigger warning policies that would effectively give students the option to skip any material they wanted to was, “hey, it’s just college! They’re crazy kids, who cares? Why are you paying so much attention?” Of course, first it was just elite liberal arts colleges, tiny little places, who cares about what happens there. And then it was just college. And then it was just college and Tumblr, and then college and Tumblr and Twitter, and then it was media and the arts, and then all the think tanks and nonprofits, and when it had reached a certain saturation point the defense changed: now it was good. Just like that, overnight, the “it doesn’t matter if that’s happening” sneering defense switched to the “yes that’s happening and it’s good that is’s [sic] happening” sneering defense. From an argument of irrelevancy to an argument of affirmation in no time at all, and absolutely no acknowledgment that what they were dismissing as meaningless the day before they were now defending on the merits.
And I’m fairly certain that’s what will happen with all of this “alters” shit and various other bits of identity madness. If you think we won’t have mainstream media liberals rabidly defending these self-diagnoses as “valid” and the “personal truth” of a generation of internet-addled kids, wait awhile. Wait. You’ll see. The cool types may not feel great about what’s happening, but they’re doggedly attached to never seeming to echo conservative complaints and are very invested in a self-conception of being above it all. So they won’t rock the boat and this ideology will bubble along in the background and eventually questioning it will result in instant excommunication. Meanwhile a lot of kids will get hurt.
I will inevitably be accused of a lack of sympathy for those with mental illnesses. But I have very deep sympathy for everyone who genuinely struggles with the human devastation of mental illness. What I have always demanded is that this sympathy be extended with an unsparing and viciously honest dedication to grasping their true, ugly, and profoundly unsexy reality. None of this stuff is honest, and none of it is healthy, and I think the cul de sac of rigidly-enforced identity politics is a ruinous development for psychiatric medicine. I am truly worried for online youth culture, and for that I’ll be called a reactionary.
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
- refuses to say it’s good that tens of thousands of teenagers are claiming to suffer from what was previously an extremely rare medical condition (gender dysphoria) and in many cases requesting drastic and irreversible medical and surgical interventions for same (because it would be stupid to say such a state of affairs is “good”)
- says it doesn’t matter that it’s happening (“To begin with, every indication is that the number of trans children receiving hormones remains low, and the number undergoing surgical interventions vanishingly rare.”)
- suggests that it’s weird that gender-critical people are paying attention to this at all (“I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”) and
- calls all gender-critical people reactionaries (“[Complaining about trans issues] would have made more sense under the old terms of straightforward appeals to public morality and Christian doctrine. The older school of conservative Christians would have simply denounced trans people as wicked, against God’s plan, where now those who agitate against trans rights have to jury-rig these bizarre justifications for restricting them. I would like to put it to those who insist that they don’t hate trans people but who spend endless hours agitating against them… maybe you do hate trans people? Or, at least, feel revulsion towards them, want never to have to encounter them in public?”).
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
__
1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
Can we merge Israel-Gaza related posts with the main thread now? The last one is 10 days old. At this point, +200 posts in the main thread should not crowd out other topics.
Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza has gotten a lot of attention lately. The brief siege already has a Wikipedia page longer than the First Battle of Fallujah's. It doesn't yet beat the Second Battle of Fallujah's page word count. Yet. There has been plenty of standard internet hemming and hawing, propaganda wars, and some genuine interest with the ethics civilians stuck in the middle of a war. In case you were worried, the premature babies are safe.
The IDF, which has made public claims that the hospital is used as a headquarters for Hamas operations, released a couple segments of footage since successfully occupying the hospital. One is a video with footage of a tunnel that leads to a blast door around, if not under, the hospital. The second video is allegedly from the hospital's security cameras footage on the 7th of October. One person in the footage is an amputee wheeled in on a gurney; the other hustles on his own two feet, herded by armed men although he could be injured still.
Israel is releasing this footage to try to show the hospital was an active part of Hamas operations. Critics retort well, duh, hospitals are where you take injured hostages people, you baby killers. Critics of those critics say, well how come come they didn't just drop off these hostages at one of the other 6 hospitals on the way back from the border, Mr. Smarty Pants Real Baby Killer? If we get something like the truth eventually, then the wrong baby killers will memory hole it, while the right baby killers will throw it in their face. The war wages on.
Within this context, there's questions about the complicity of doctors and NGO's involved in Gaza. People like this guy and other former doctors have denied that there is any Hamas activity in the hospital. The vibe is that NGO's deny their proximity to Hamas in Gaza, and thus are complicit to some degree. This is just some guy but it's a common type of thread.
My question is more general: if you were a doctor in Gaza, and you knew Hamas operated within your hospital, what is the right thing to do? If you alert the Israelis to the presence of their enemy in your building, there is a good chance you are adding yourself, your hospital, and your patients to a target list somewhere. So, aren't you just putting everyone at risk by ratting out Hamas? Does the degree of the operation matter? Say, if Hamas only showed up once every couple of weeks to get medical attention, standard guard, and bring some hostages for treatment every few years, would you trust the IDF to take that into account when determining what kind of response was appropriate? You know Israel is mad, but they probably won't drop a JDAM onto a hospital and say oops, right? But, if you thought they might do that, and Hamas was operating deep in some tunnel system underground, shouldn't you let the IDF know that so they don't just drop a JDAM on the roof?
In this not-so-but-maybe hypothetical, I can't see a good reason why you'd ever talk to the IDF about Hamas being around you. In fact, you might even think it better to deny it and hope the fighters just evacuate before you and your patients get blown to bits. When the IDF shows up to siege you, you try to negotiate the evacuation of the premature babies, but otherwise you keep your mouth shut. When asked, you say you are there to provide medical attention to anyone that walks through the door, but are not responsible for whatever else goes on there. If you talk about Hamas after the fact, then you may get kicked out of the territory and that's just one less doctor around to provide medical treatment. Gun to head, if they find a Vietcong command center under your feet you stick to that story, so you can continue to provide medical treatment to people who need it, at a time when they need it most. This makes you complicit to a degree, but also seems ethical enough for me. What do you guys think?
Tenaz
6mo ago
Why is the pain necessary? Just put the baby on powerful enough painkillers to risk brain damage if necessary, then go for the long drawn out chance of life.
Hamas, specifically, I'd have to go back a year ago for something explicit, though the famous Tufts one is kinda telling on itself when the protestors start to insult the Palestinian peace advocate. More broadly, I can show anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine protests in March, anti-anti-anti-Semites in April, commencement speakers in May, so on.
Sometimes this got to equivalent extremes: SJP affiliates promoting literal spree-shooters was a January-this-year-thing.
That's also... notably not what I asked. Maybe there genuinely was a pro-Hamas protest named referencing a thousand-plus fatality attack on civilians, shortly after a separate pro-Hamas protest by the same group has some protestors turn violent in September I and the rest of the internet missed. I can't prove a negative, after all.
But it's a data point that hints and waggles its eyebrows, and I don't think it's the only one.
[citation needed] that what Israel government is doing is worse than what Hamas doing, and more deserving sanctions/invasion.
I'm not that person but as of writing:
Palestinian dead: 3,785
Israeli dead: 1,300
So by that objective measure Israel has killed more and is therefore "worse," if killing is a problem worth condemning. And that ratio is sure to get worse. Surely some of those Palestinian dead are children and attractive under 40 women, if that helps. To put it more provocative (honest) and bluntly, Israelis/Jews are the more prolific merciless baby killers. They just objectively are.
I personally always keep that stat in mind whenever I see someone try to pull the "omg atrocities" sympathy card by counting bodies. A bizarre play for Israeli siders because the Palestinians will always have the Israelis beat in an oppression and body count olympics. It only really makes sense for Jewish chauvinists that genuinely believe a Jewish life is more valuable than a goy, but most that pull said card aren't so it remains bizarre to me.
Tenaz
8mo ago
people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers
That sounded wrong to me, so I searched it. All mentions of the phrase were negative towards it, i.e. using the phrase the same way you did.
There have been plenty of comments claiming that abortionists is actual murder, but none ever just outright say "Hey did you hear what the baby killers were up to this week?" and use that as the group designation. Doing so, or calling pro-lifers "forced birthers", is an instant claim that none of your opponents have principles and all are acting in bad faith. Surely they are not actually pro-life; they disagree with me, are therefore evil, and therefore want to compel innocent young women to give birth against their wills. Surely they're not actually pro-choice, they just want to murder babies.
Using those terms is a terrible norm. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-life people are actually pro-life or just hate women. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-choice people are actually pro-choice or just hate babies.
DBDr
8mo ago
I mean, I only whipped out the phrase in question because people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers, so I thought some nice harmless hyperbole would be fun.
And you can really argue with it either. The woman in question wishes to abort the fetus; anti abortionists wish she would not. She is a baby killer, they want to force her to give birth. It is what it is.
"Compelled birth". Ah, the amount of new horror scare terms being dredged up by the baby-killers (you don't mind that term, do you? sauce for the goose and all that) in order to sow fear and terror is wonderfully creative, in a twisted way.
Yes, the horrible forced-birthers are lurking around, jumping out to kidnap women, tie them down to a surgical bed, do IVF on them without their consent, implant embryos in them and then wait around for nine months until they can then force their victims to deliver the baby without any anaethesia or pain relief at all.
It'd make a great B-movie.
(Because of course it's not that two people voluntarily have sex and sex makes babies and oops they were too careless in the moment and now the natural result is happening).
The Orwellian march of language is something else. Ending a human life is healthcare. Asking for normal pregnancy is forced birth/compelled birth/slavery.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
That reminds me of the book The End of the Spear, which is in large part about the conversion of the Waodoni indians in South America to Christianity. Prior to conversion they were infamous killers: nobody entered their territory because it was well known they would probably kill you. They famously killed the missionaries who came to convert them. What's interesting is that after the missionaries were killed, their wives continued the mission. As women they were not seen as a threat and were not killed, and they managed to fairly rapidly convert the entire tribe.
Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction. Steve Saint, son of the slain missionary Nate Saint, is recounting how he and members of the Waodoni took a group of students from the University of Washington on a trip into Waodani territory. After several days travel the students are resting at a Waodani village, among some of the Waodani people when one student asks where the famously violent tribe that killed the missionaries in 50s was. When told that the Waodani were that tribe the student was incredulous:
It was apparent she wasn’t going to accept my word for it, so I suggested she ask the Waodani themselves. “Just ask any of the adult Waodani here were their fathers are,” I suggested. I told her how to say “Bito maempo ayamonoi?” which means, “Your father--Where is he being?” She seemed to wonder what this had to do with her question, but she picked out one of the Waodani men who was enjoying our English gibberish and asked him. He answered simply “Doobae.” I explained to her that the word means “Already.” His father was already dead. I added “Did he get sick and die, or did he die old?”
The warrior snorted at my ridiculous question and clarified with dramatic gestures that his father had been killed with spears.
“Did he just say what I think he said?” the girl asked. “Was his father speared to death? Who would do such a terrible thing?” I informed her that the only people I knew of in Ecuador who had speared anyone in the twentieth century were Waodani…
One of the other students picked a Waodani woman and asked her the same question. Same answer. After one more try with similar results, two girls in the group asked me to ask Mincaye’s wife, Ompodae, the question. From the whispering I overheard, I gathered that they were sure someone as loving and sweet as Ompodae couldn’t have been traumatized by something as horrible as the vicious murder of her father. But Ompodae answered, “My father, my two brothers”--She counted them on her fingers--”my mother, and my baby sister…” There seemed to be more but she stopped there. “All of them were speared to death and hacked with machetes!” Then she pointed at the oldest warrior in camp, who was quietly sharing a stump with one of the male visitors. “Furious and hating us, Dabo killed us all.”...
My feisty tribal grandmother knew what the question was, so she decided to give an answer. She told how her family had been ambushed by another clan of Waodani. When the spearing was over, only she and another girl...were left alive in their clearing. When she finished her narrative, which I hardly needed to interpret because her pantomime was as clear to the students as her words were to me, she pointed to one of the warriors I was sitting with and stated matter-of-factly, “He killed my family and made me his wife!”
One of the girls in the group stammered, “How could she possibly live with the man who had killed her whole family?” I explained that the other girl who was kidnapped with Dawa was overheard complaining about her family being speared. One of the raiders ran a spear through her, and they left her on the trail to die an agonizing death alone, with no one to even bury her body. I explained, “It wasn’t like Dawa had much of a choice.”
Their society was pretty dang violent, but they took to Christianity in a big way. They were eager for it: a way of life where you weren't constantly in fear of getting killed. The anthropologist James Boster wrote a paper about how Christianity served as a way for the Waodoni to escape the perpetual cycle of revenge killing their society had gotten locked into.
We have a one month old right now.
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Consider a doula, if you find one you click with they can be a life saver
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For us, sleeping in shifts at night has worked better than trading off waking up. The baby sleeps in a separate room and whoever is on duty sleeps on a couch next to them so we each get some long, uninterrupted naps
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Killer gadget for us was a white noise machine, he sleeps a lot better and it blocks out any noise we make moving around the house
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If you want to breastfeed meet with a lactation consultant ahead of time, insurance covered ours 100% and also paid for a breast pump. It's been a big help.
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Buy a few brands of swaddle wraps now so you can try them out and see which you prefer once they're born, then you can buy more of that type. I prefer the velcro ones over zipper but ymmv
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
(continued from above)
This episode was enough to placate the sheep for a few days but eventually they started to desire to see Poot amongst them once again. Just like the last time they were not sure about how to do this but this desire only grew stronger until things came to a head. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key. Poot once again heard the sounds and the desire to go smash things up sprouted again, for by now he automatically associated the bleating of sheep with the release he got from breaking stuff. Once again he snuck into the barn and began to go on a rampage. This time he managed to cause even more damage before James discovered what was happening and delicately extracted his son from the situation. James decided to put Poot under constant babysitter supervision to prevent such a thing from happening again.
Poot wasn't the only one who had heard the sheep. Poot's mother, Alice, had always been sensitive to noises and the bleats had given her a bad headache. She wasn't particularly happy about the situation and she had never really liked sheep, if it had been up to her they'd be growing crops instead on their land. Alice took a bunch of painkillers to help, but they had never really worked for her and it took some time before she was back to her normal self.
Of course by this point even the sheep had noticed a trend. Whenever they all bleated together it was followed by Poot making an appearance. Thus the next time they desired to see Poot they knew exactly what to do. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key. Poot heard this sound and the desire to run amok swelled up in him again but under the watchful eye of the babysitter he was not able to sneak out to the barn.
The sheep though continued bleating, they were convinced at every moment that very soon Poot was about to make an entrance, just like all the previous times they had all bleated together. They continued to do this well into the small hours of the night until they were all exhausted and the next day Alice had a very bad headache indeed. The next day the sheep continued their long bleat as soon as they could muster up the energy to do so. From inside the house Poot heard them every second but his babysitter guard was ever vigilant and never gave Poot the opportunity to slip out unseen.
James was concerned that something was wrong with the sheep and naturally wanted to get it fixed as soon as possible. Before long V.E.T. made an appearance at the barn. He wore an expression of confusion and straight away got down to his pastime of manhandling the sheep. The sheep though recognised the intimidation tactic for what it was and continued with their mission. They had had enough of being maltreated, they wanted to see Poot and even the threat of sharp needles from V.E.T. wouldn’t make them stop.
True to form after a short discussion with James V.E.T. did indeed bring out the sharp needles and started poking the sheep with them. However these sharp needles were nothing like any they had ever seen before. This time very soon after a sheep had been poked it suddenly grew very tired until it no longer had any energy to continue with the bleating and fell asleep.
One by one the sheep were supressed by V.E.T. but as this was going on each and every single standing sheep redoubled their efforts, they were sure that if Poot just showed up he would take on and defeat V.E.T. and all things would be good again. At this moment Poot though couldn’t care less. His babysitter had taken him on a nature outing to see butterflys and Poot was too preoccupied with finding and squishing as many caterpillars as he could to have any concerns about the sheep.
After they had all been placated James went and searched the entire property to find the root cause behind the sheep hysteria. He had heard that sheep often cry out when there are predators nearby and wanted to make sure that they were completely safe. He was not able to find anything though, which caused much consternation as he could not think of anything else rational which would have caused the sheep to behave in the way they did.
Hoping that the problem would resolve itself when the sheep came back to he went out to fetch some more clean hay and water for them to make sure they were feeling better after a period in which they had clearly been in high stress. He then went to check on Alice who had recently been feeling very poorly given the incessant noise.
When the sheep woke up they were indeed more placated but eventually they remembered Poot and set about trying to make him show up again. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key.
Alice, who had been doing her best in the kitchen trying to work with a terrible headache heard the sheep again. Very soon her head started spinning and she collapsed onto the floor.
A week after the events above James and his wife were holding a party. All was quiet around the house and Alice’s headache had pretty much subsided completely. A seed trader, Jacob, and his wife Hilaria (contrary to her name, she was not very funny) were visiting the farm to discuss the economic benefits and pitfalls of growing cotton and some of their neighbours were interested in coming along too.
Poot was upstairs in his room with the babysitter, who had been tasked with making sure he didn’t disturb the guests in any shape or form, as well as making sure he didn’t soil himself (a bad habit Poot had picked up over the last few months as a way of getting back at others when he didn’t get his way). After spending time discussing the technicalities of growing cotton and letting people mingle around a bit it was time for dinner. At the table, mutton was being served.
Tanista
1yr ago
It might be a basic human need...but is it better to be alone, or to marry and have children...only to find that your wife tried to kill one of them? Or to be with an abusive alcoholic? All of these things suck: are relationships truly the least bad option here?
Obviously most people don't go into it and get that binary choice between a potential relationship and a baby killer. You might as well ask if it's worth driving if a semi might crumple your vehicle.
And, yes, our psychology is tilted such that we are broadly driven to downplaying those risks (some of which, like matricide, are relatively small here) and driven to be less satisfied with a parlous social network. Precisely because the benefits are manifold.'
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
Don’t forget the other murderers in this murder conspiracy: the mothers-to-not-be. Murderers who in most cases don’t consider themselves such. Women told by their society that ridding themselves of this clump of cells and ending the nine-month insane transformation early is their science-given right and is a good and noble thing they do. Do they deserve a bullet in their heads too? Oh wait, that would kill the baby. Keep her locked up and force-fed vitamins, then seize her child as soon as it’s born and execute her? What a nightmare! (But she deserves it, she was going to slaughter her child in cold blood…)
And what of the police? A hail of gunfire for the would-be rescuer would only be the beginning. Politicians anywhere to the right of Hillary Clinton will be subject to immediate, intense demands that they publicly denounce such vile, vicious acts of terrorism. Anyone who didn’t would be subject to more intense media demonization than even Donald Trump was.
The women in the clinic would be treated as the victims of something worse than rape: right-wing extremism. They would be flown at taxpayer expense to another abortion clinic in the lap of luxury, where their children would die anyway.
So it would take an intense nation-wide effort, organized by militias and timed to occur on a specific day and time. One whiff of such an operation, and the FBI would come down on them harder than Hunter S. Thompson going cold turkey. And if it was pulled off, the screaming and anguish of feminists would be unbearable.
And all of that might, might be worth it to save children being slaughtered at the rate of one 9/11 every two days. But the souls of the women and doctors and moderates would forever be lost, because by their modern liberal standards and the mutated hearsay cultural ideas of Christian doctrine, only a false religion kills in the name of its god, only a false religion has to kill. And the irony is they’d actually be right this time.
Ephesians 6:12 - For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Murdering the flesh and spilling the blood of the babykillers would only feed the rulers of the darkness of the world, and tighten their grip. That’s not Effective Heroism.
Instead, pregnancy crisis centers which don’t pull dirty tricks offer life to children and salvation to their mothers, according to their consciences and free wills. You can tell they’re effective because “Jane’s Revenge” is targeting them specifically for destruction, and the left’s best weapons for community change, the media, are castigating them for their existence.
I'm skeptical of this because I rarely see anyone extend such charity to an actual baby killer (ie a mother who smothers her newborn). No matter how vulnerable of a situation she was in.
It might not be intentional deception though. Someone else made a point that the abortion debate is complicated enough that most people simply can't grok the nuances enough to even have a well thought out position.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
This feels like it's just calling someone a baby killer with extra steps. I don't see how this would be more persuasive for people that already think abortion is baby killing than just straightforwardly saying that it's killing a baby. Likewise, it's obviously not going to persuade very many pro-choicers because they have already demonstrated that they're not buying the baby killing claim.
I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.
Sure he didn't provide a comprehensive list but he did on many occasions outright define a hierarchy of sins.
Matt. 22:36-40:
Matt. 23:23
I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.
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