Civilizational Inadequacy of the Day: Keyboards still requiring a modifier key for both parenthesis and squiggle-brackets despite mainstream programming languages using one or both of those on every line for decades.
‘tis a plot by the physiotherapists against the programmers
programmer’s dvorak~
That layout is somehow simultaneously extremely sensemaking and extremely upfucked. It seem so attractive to try, and at the same time I’m slightly afraid of it.
If I have a screen with my work stuff on it, and a second, smaller screen on which I want to watch videos or play games sometimes, how could I make it so that I could have the second screen as a window inside my first screen (floating; using xmonad) so I can move it around/toss it in a different workspace, but also actually access the contents inside the first screen if I want, all the while the second screen faithfully renders the window precisely in place?
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
What are the murder rates for trans men? Does transitioning to male make you statistically less safe?
I counted an estimate of 4-6 trans men murdered in 2015 and 2016 (depending on whether one extrapolates for the rest of this year or not) for an annual death rate of 2-3. That’s 1/100,000 by the estimates at the top, and suggests a lot of trans men’s deaths are misreported as cis women’s deaths because I’m not believing that number for one second.
If we take ASAB as our prior it suggests that murdered trans men have 1:1 chances of being recorded as trans men. If we take gender as prior the chances are 1:6. I’m leaning more towards the latter because I find it highly unlikely that men who also have the complicating factor of transphobia would not be getting killed as often as other men, and I find it especially hard to believe that trans men would be just as low-risk as cis women.
This does creepy things to the murder rates of trans women. If we assume trans women are 5 times as visible as trans men, we would expect to be missing ~25 murders a year; if trans women are 10 times as visible as trans men, there would still be ~15 missing murders, pushing trans women’s murder rates up by 50-100%. Holy shit. Even a conservative estimate where being trans reduces a man’s murder risk by half, and trans women are 10 times more visible, the real murder rate would be 30% higher when accounting for the expected unrecorded cases.
If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
It seems a bit disingenuous to keep slicing and dicing the demographics until you come up with an obscure enough one where their rate is higher than average. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me look a bit askance.
How does the murder rate of TWoC compare to, say, illegal immigrant east Asian sex workers in the US? Or just US based sex workers in general? For a variety of reasons, trans women are more likely to be sex workers than cis women are. What happens if we control for that?
The point of intersectionality is to find out the factors that make people suffer. In this case slicing and dicing the demographics has shown that black people tend to suffer extremely high rates of violence, and I don’t think “black people” is a massively obscure demographic (unlike, say, the way the most vulnerable minority is always the individual; the demographic $murdered_trans_woman_X suffered a murder rate of 100,000/100,000 and that’s terrible), nor “black trans women” either. And I don’t think including class in it is a bad thing either, because “what do we do to the murder rate” is a vague question, but “what do we do to the murder rate of poor black people” is a more specific question that is easier to answer.
And such slicing and dicing also reveals new information; in this case I updated as I was expecting the murder rate of TWoC to be higher than it was compared to the murder rate of black men, and thus it seems that being black AMAB is the actual massive risk factor for violence. Intersectional analysis improves epistemic fidelity!
Also, sex workers suffer massive amounts of violence too and that’s not okay and the things that cause it need to be destroyed.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This is a pretty important heuristic.
no, actually…
This is a VERY IMPORTANT HEURISTIC.
However, anyone who sends me unsolicited dick pics will be at my mercy nonetheless. There Will Be Consequences, regardless of one’s position in the hierarchies, because I mostly* don’t want to receive unsolicited dick pics and anyone disregarding my explicit preference on the topic deserves the Consequences, and I believe that it’s more fair if I make these things explicit so a) benign but inept people would know it isn’t okay and b) malign people could not pose as benign but inept people.
(* It has been hypothesized that there might exist a category of people for whom the Consequences and “being at my mercy” would be net positive things, but I will not say explicitly which that category is, because I can’t give people foolproof definitions of when unsolicited dick pics could be okay and thus even ridiculously cute trans girls might end up misunderstanding the boundary and thus causing a net loss of utility when I would have to reject a ridiculously cute trans girl and that would be sad. So anyway even ridiculously cute trans girls please be careful about sending me dick pics and should probably ask first because asking first is a very good side to err on.)
(sometimes the parked cars / bikes are reversed on the few streets with Copenhagen-style bike lanes, but this is rare).
Needing separate lanes for trams, cars, and bikes makes the streets hella wide. But not having separate lanes is even worse, like Sydney Rd in Brunswick where trams can take half an hour to travel a couple of kilometres and cyclists are killed on a monthly basis by people opening car doors and knocking them into traffic.
Every time a tram stops it stops in the middle of the road: all the cars around it also need to stop (and most of the time they do, but not always) and then the people need to get from the centre of the road to the footpath safely.
To fix this the city has been installing large train-style super tram stops, but this takes up even more space and makes it even harder to fit in bike lanes on narrow streets. On Swanston St the bike path actually runs along the tram stop:
so people waiting for trams have to stand behind the yellow line or get taken out by a bike, and bikes have to stop when a tram is taking on passengers. You would think that would be a total clusterfuck but actually it more or less works, although at least once a week a car gets confused and drives down the platform and then falls off and gets wedged, blocking the tram line until it gets towed:
Plus the overhead wires the trams use are super ugly.
On the upside, tracks are more energy efficient and there are ways to do trams without overhead wires (such as in some European old towns) but it’s tricky.
When tracks are built separately from other traffic trams can achieve really high speeds, and the aesthetic footprint is lesser because instead of a fuck-ass wide stretch of asphalt the tram only needs two narrow strips of metal, and the thing between them can even be grass (as it sometimes is in European cities). And trams are more predictable in traffic, enabling the safety margins between them and others to be smaller; you can put a fence in exactly the position where a tram will not hit it, and the other side will be safe for pedestrians or cyclists, but you can’t have buses with only 50cm between them and fragile people, and you most certainly can’t drive a bus 80km/h if it has fences on both sides only 30cm away.
Furthermore, trams are more suitable for underground operation, such as in the Antwerp Premetro or SF Muni, allowing the tracks to be hidden away in the densest places at some cost in the ease-of-access department.
Trams have a significantly greater capacity, and it’s impossible to service important core lines with buses in any kind of a decent mass transportation system (eg. there’s one in Helsinki where they sometimes drive four buses behind each other to have room for all the passengers, and that’s pricey as fuck; little surprise they’re trying to turn it into a tram as fast as they can).
Electric buses are making the air quality part of the equation a bit more equal, so diesel pollution will not be a massive factor for long, but rubber transportation generates significant quantities of toxic dust from the tires and asphalt, whereas trams (metal emissions from the tracks and wheels) might possibly be less polluting.
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these
disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by
simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various
services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and
water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along,
you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you
have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural
consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go
around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends
and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
Reblogged so I can find this when I remember what this reminds me of. I swear there was some game where you went around learning phrases or something you could use later.
You might be thinking of The Secret Of Monkey Island, where you learn insults and rejoinders to use while swordfighting. (That mechanic is fairly common, though–I mean, in Skyrim you learn phrases you can use later!)
This also has a very nice opportunity for a ‘leveling’ mechanic I haven’t seen anywhere else. You start as a wandering arbiter, and each conflict you resolve increases your legitimacy, which would be tracked numerically, separately for each person. It goes up a lot for the winner of the dispute, regardless. The loser may either gain or lose legitimacy points, depending on the nature of the resolution and your solution to the dispute. ‘Just’ solutions in the eyes of the loser will gain a small amount of legitimacy (smaller than the winner), but strongarm tactics or deception will weaken your position. Then, everyone connected to the aggrieved parties on the social network will also gain or lose a portion of that legitimacy number. If the solution is mutually satisfactory, you gain legitimacy with everybody, but less than you would with a clear winner.
Aside from gatekeeping more difficult quests, legitimacy has the important role of allowing you to propose elements of a treaty/ system of laws- these are the rough equivalent of player perks. Each law requires a given amount of legitimacy with you to be active, and each is ranked- the more influence you have with a person, the more laws they will follow, in the priority order you set. They can do all sorts of things- regulate commerce, (dis)incentivize militarization, grant the player access to locked safes and terminals (alternative to a lock pick skill), even require people to be more polite.
So basically, the player is gradually building a social contract.
This has a few immediate consequences that I think are neat. First, the player has to decide whether to go ‘deep’ or ‘wide’ in legitimacy. That is, do you prioritize the interests of a small group of people, and be able to exert a lot of influence over the behavior of that tribe? Or do you keep a more even approach, working for a small number of more universal laws?
Second, it incentivizes corruption by the player. If an important person (a mayor, a merchant prince, or just someone with a lot of friends) calls for your services, an influence gain with that person could be incredibly important. You can get this bump by throwing the trial their way regardless of circumstances, but at the expense of a)perpetrating an injustice and b)lots of influence lost with others, especially if you’re obvious about it.
Yep!
I think something like the Icelandic system of law–where you have the godi / alderman / elder / whatever as a contractural representative of a congregation / group, and the country’s laws determined by all of them voting–makes sense, and is a thing the player should have access to and potentially participate in. If you want to settle down, you can be elected head of some group. Being the Lawspeaker, charged with memorizing all the laws as acting as, essentially, Supreme Court Justice, seems like a great brass ring to reach for.
How much of that should already exist when the player shows up seems uncertain. Probably any group of two or more people has a senior member, or it’s not really a “group.” But all of, say, post-apocalyptic California regularly meeting to decide on laws seems much too civilized for the start. More likely you have some existing leagues–maybe the NCR equivalent is make up of ~eight ‘congregations,’ each of which has a representative, and the league has a president (which is probably a rotating post among the representatives). But getting the NCR and the adjacent ghoul trading post to agree on laws and fines (which will dramatically cut down on the border skirmishes between them / increase trade) requires work on the part of the player, and until that happens the player will have to keep straight two different legal systems.
It’s unclear to me if it’s better to start the player off as a wandering arbiter, or have them have actual parents / a backstory / pre-existing relationships, which they have some ability to modify. Both approaches have their benefits.
It also seems like giving the player full access to the economic system opens up gameplay in a big way. If, say, there’s equipment necessary to purify water or a skill to doing right, the player can buy / craft that equipment or learn the skill. An easy way to be very popular is to be a doctor–which requires an immense amount of training to do well.
(This may open up gameplay too much, depending on how things are set up–if the main source of legal trouble is water conflicts, and the player invests all they money they can get their hands on into drilling more wells, then the water conflicts dry up. Presumably, population can expand until something else becomes the next pressure point, but that may be a bit too slow of a scale.)
Why is healthcare harmful? Do you mean actually treating diseases/injuries is harmful on average (or not worth it), or just the entire system around that?
Healthcare in the US is a massive waste of resources and spending tax money on it is thus harmful. Singapore is able to get better results for poor people and cover all of its population at a fraction of what the US spends on a fraction of its population (per capita, obviously; Singapore spends approximately 1/3 of US public healthcare spending on all healthcare, of which around half is tax money).
In fact, the situation is so bad that even western european countries that provide public healthcare for all their citizens a lot less efficiently than Singapore nonetheless end up paying less per capita than the US spends tax money on Medicare+Medicaid alone.
Thus, it’s totally possible to deliver far better outcomes while cutting the public healthcare spending to 200B a year, all it takes is the will to do it.
Unfortunately democracies tend to be really bad in the “will” department and thus I don’t really see a way to reform the current system. The only real way forward I could imagine is radical and sweeping cuts and privatizing the system into “private as in privacy”, extreme deregulation of healthcare (enough to make sure deregulatory capture doesn’t end up being a problem, and by that I mean “enough to make 90% of the population scared shitless”, because lesser deregulation is just immensely ripe for capture by politically favored special interests, as has been seen in many countries), and providing people enough free money so they can afford to buy their healthcare on the newly-freed markets. It would be painful, it would look terrible as many people would suffer through no fault of their own, but in the end it would render healthcare actually affordable even to poor people.
abolish ¾ length sleeves and capri pants imo, that is such a bad length for clothing to be
Stay away from my perfect sleeves.
¾ sleeves are best sleeves
¾ sleeves are worst sleeves. ¾ are a nightmare made flesh. ¾ sleeves are a curse upon the world, a darkness that will not subside, an abomination unto fashion. ¾ sleeves must be destroyed
We will fight at dawn.
no. dawn is a terrible time. dawn is desolate and freezing, no warmth nor sun to light the way. dawn is early, before the night has truly ended, before right-thinking people have arisen. dawn is suffering. one should not be awake at dawn. we will fight at high noon, when the sun is at its apex and its light has filled the sky. come alone, and bring no weapons. we shall settle this with our bare hands, and when i have won and you have been thoroughly defeated, you shall acknowledge the truth of what i say: ¾ sleeves are awful, and ought not to exist. so it has always been and so it shall always be. this is the truth of the world, this is the light and the way.
Dawn is when the dust clears and the air is clean. Dawn brings clarity and sharp edges, and purifies the few who stand beneath it. Dawn is its own weapon, its own defense, a barrier to weakness and fortification for the strong. I will come at noon, but I will bring the razor’s edge of dawn.
dawn is hell, if hell were cold. dawn is the bleak darkness of the void, the despair that consumes. dawn is the temporal equivalent of ¾ sleeves–and is therefore entirely appropriate for you, you heathen, you philistine, you lover of the worst that fashion has to offer.
we are agreed then; noon it is. i anticipate our meeting with great glee.
you hate the sunrise. how could you. sunrises are important. when else would we carry out our tr00 kvlt rites, if not at sunrise, the most tr00 und kvlt time of the day
A thing I have done:
Woken up at 3 in the night because then I’d have enough time to walk all the way to the coast and see the sun rise above the ocean.
I had blisters and my legs were fucking killing me.
Worth it.
Hello fellow sunrise aficionado. I tend to use my bike, and instead of blisters I once got a temporary phobia of deer, but otherwise that sounds precisely like something I’ve done.
If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
Some further clarification: because the government is evil, it could still possibly find a way to prevent MLK from getting guns even with a reasonable system.
But the point of the test is to determine whether it’s obvious that MLK would’ve been totally barred from having guns; if it requires a significantly non-trivial degree of creativity from the State to find out a way to bully people it doesn’t like one can consider the test passed at least in the “not needing to mass scorn people” sense, but simple and naive things like “no guns for people on the no-fly list” need to be discredited from the popular discourse.
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
Yes, I’m just making the implicit explicit so we can coordinate the mass scorning better when people are aware that it’s a thing we could and should do. I’m trying to make it actually catch on, and considering how many people in the audience are autistic or otherwise bad with implied messages, I don’t think making it clear would be harmful. At least as long as people don’t do like they did with the ‘Bechdel test’ and start crediting the idea to me instead of Ozy, as that would be terrible. I’m a pirate who’s all for expropriating information, but giving credit is sacrosanct (mostly because my brain expropriates ideas so constantly that I very seldom remember where I stole which piece from; nowadays I’m basically assuming that everything I say is derivative from something somewhere).
Now everyone please contact your local representative and tell them that surely they don’t wish to be the kind of people who would deny MLK his constitutional rights.
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
My pet peeve: Neo-Nazis who try to use “goyim” as an adjective.
It’s “goyishe”! We’re using feminism and multiculturalism to destroy goyishe culture! Get it right, you shliemels.
TBH I don’t think a basic comprehension of Yiddish is very high on the priorities of neo-nazis.
I mean, considering the apparent extent of their capabilities for basic comprehension they would be very rational to ration their usage and spend the scarcity on more pressing concerns than Yiddish grammar.
(Bvt as a ridicvlovs evropean polyglot I am bothered by how they don’t even realize that it’s a germanic strvctvre present in basically all the langvages they consider to be spoken by the right sorts of people. I mean, they speak engl-ish yet don’t realize this? They are being shitty germanics, that’s what they are. I know my germanics way better than they do, and I’m not even germanic. I’m a total mongoloid vntermensch from behind-slavs-land who hasn’t even screwed a germanic ever (now that I think of it I totally need to cvck their race; if I apply racism to a map of variovs attractednesses it prodvces a nice graph of kind-of-everything-bvt-germanics and that’s fvnny). No wonder the germanic white race is dying ovt when its heroes are of svch great scholarship and mvch intellectval formidability!)
Epistemic status: not a professional, but I was the sort of kid who asked for the DMS-IV on her fourteenth birthday.
This is a rant, I’m not grabbing sources at the moment, I’m just making some observations about things that are starting to bother me.
I really like the Less Wrong/Rationalist crowd, and I count myself in this group. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that there’s an unfortunate mix of contempt and fascination with the softer sciences. On the one hand, contempt for the academic system in general and for the value of soft sciences in general. As though once you see that a field has issues and generates a certain amount of bullshit, it will be trivial for a smart person to fix.
At the same time, subsets of this group seem to be in love with models like Kegan’s development levels, the MBTI, “amateur sociology,” and other things like that. To the point that I find myself in conversations where these things are taken as far more universal than I think is epistemically responsible to claim. Where, when I say something like “Kegan’s development levels might be locally useful, on an individual basis, but I think there’s risk of overfitting if you try to apply them everywhere,” I get the equivalent of “You haven’t done enough reading on this/this isn’t a problem if you’re applying it correctly.” The second response is nearly verbatim. It’s from a conversation where I tried to point out that Nonviolent Communication techniques could be the wrong tool to use in some situations.
I won’t pretend that I’m above this kind of navel-gazing. I like taking personality tests and getting the results, seeing if they match my experience. I like speculating on sociology, or wondering casually if certain fictional characters are sociopaths. I’m also not above reading an interesting thing in a pop psych article and trying it out, seeing if it has value for me. But I think that without large swaths of evidence (we’re supposed to be all about base rates and evidence, right?), value found in ad-hoc models written by random bloggers or psychologists from the 1980s should be locally applied. Attempts to apply them universally should be treated with skepticism.
More than that, I see a lot of people ignoring the potential for anchoring. It seems reasonable to me that if you are attached to certain model, you have an incentive to make all of the evidence fit. Or rationalize evidence away. Or ignore people who disagree with your pet theory’s claims. This seems to be a really dangerous habit for so-called “rationalists” to get into. A theory or a model is only as useful as its results. It’s only as empirical as its predictive value.
So long as we acknowledge the infallibility of sortinghatchats I agree with this.
Putting up barriers to entry based on skill and knowledge seems like a good way to reduce gun suicides (which probably reduces overall suicides) but not a good way to reduce gun homicides.
Well yes, and considering that gun suicides constitute the vast majority of gun deaths, I think that’s a reasonable goal to pursue while nonetheless not adversely impacting legitimate gun owners the way many other rules would.
I actually don’t know for sure if gun control will help
It seems to have helped in other places but perhaps the us is different
I honestly in humility must admit I do not know
But it seems to me that trying out incremental measures like background checks and like making it harder to get certain kinds of weapons and seeing whether they work is not by itself tyranny
Tyranny would be OK THATS IT NO GUNS FOR ANYONE EVER BOOM
incremental measures can be tried out and tweaked or reversed if they do not work
I mean I know people are terrified of a slippery slope but you know what? Even if we pass some laws we will still have an nra
they will still be loud
if shit goes south I guarantee you they will say something about it
Where the alternative is doing nothing out of fear of even trying something else at all
And doing nothing is getting us nowhere
The usual argument against incremental change is that anti-guns would push their advantage until guns are totally banned. So pro-guns prefer keeping the current situation as a Schelling fence.
I personally don’t know enough to form an opinion, but they might have a point.
That’s what I’m saying I disagree with.
Or at least think we should test the outer boundaries of to see if it looks likely to actually happen.
It is my understanding that the outer boundaries have, in fact, been tested. For example, the 10-year assault rifle ban. You can also look at other countries, such as the UK, or Australia, and what happened when they passed increased restrictions (including total bans) on guns. On the whole, increased gun control tends to reduce “gun violence” yet leave “total violence” unaffected; if violence was trending up (as it was in UK) it continues trending up in the same manner; if violence was trending down (as it was in Australia), it continues trending down. And I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.
The reason that gun advocates are so testy about gun control laws is because they are law abiding citizens, so they have to put up with the consequences. Not the anti-gun people, who don’t buy them, and not the criminals, who disobey the laws.
I’ll give you that the assault weapons ban was poorly designed. I’ll also give you that humans are pretty violent and that those who would use a gun often would just go for a knife instead. (Though I also see little blurby statistics now and again that suggest that as a whole, violence is actually generally trending down. But that doesn’t really affect this.)
What I won’t give you is this:
“I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.”
I’m pretty sure it is one, because if Omar Mateen had brought a couple knives to Pulse, I doubt anywhere near as many people would be dead.
I do understand that mass shootings are rare in the grand scheme of things. But compared to other countries they happen strikingly often here.
The US has a massively larger population than most countries, and in the developed world has a much larger homicide rate, both of which would result in a substantial increase in mass shootings. For example, The US has around 10 times the population of Canada (320 million to 35 million), and about 2.7 times the homicide rate (3.9 to 1.4). We could then naively expect the US to have 27 times as many mass shootings as Canada. And since the US has 10 times as many people as Canada, there would be 10 times as many people being informed that their country has 27 times as many mass shootings, even if gun laws had no impact on mass shootings.
There may be disproportionately more mass shootings in the US than in other countries, even accounting for things like the large population and higher homicide rate. But I have not seen good evidence that this is so, and non-trivial evidence against.
Is this a consistent finding? Because if so its pretty damning to the left’s claim to actually be informed about expert opinion.
That’s pretty astonishing and it seems actually valid. Checking the numbers for Finland, the death toll for mass shootings in the last 10 years is approximately 0.47/1M annually. Dropping just to the time period they examined gives the results they had. Taking a longer time period to compensate for the difference in population and the excessive variance it causes makes the numbers a bit more moderate: 0.16 for 30 years, approximately 0.1 for 70 years, and of course this is getting ridiculous but it shows that assuming their US numbers are correct then even controlling for rare and anomalous incidents, the US is actually safer nonetheless.
The numbers seem to have an interesting relation to overall homicide rates: (normalized for murders/100 000 population)
Russia 0.001 Italy 0.01 US 0.023 Canada 0.023 Germany 0.025 England 0.027 Belgium 0.071 Netherlands 0.073 Finland 0.083 Austria 0.136 Slovakia 0.168 Czech Rep 0.175 Switzerland 0.284 France 0.298 Norway 3.15
So actually the Anglosphere+Germany seems to have pretty constant rates of mass shootings vs. overall homicides, with a lot of Europe lagging behind. Only Italy is able to solidly beat the US in that area and Russia and Norway are total anomalies and probably not relevant for this. But the main point is: the mass shooting rate in the US is not that exceptional, and actually pretty low when the overall rate of violence is controlled for.
And in light of this the US is just freaking out absurdly and needs to calm the fuck down and stop issuing bulletproof blankets to schoolchildren.
Have discovered key advantage of judaism from @ilzolende - they hold their organised religion at a much more civilised time of dfay.
What time is that?
Allegedly 19:30 Fridays, although other sources have disputed this, or at least claimed it’s much more complicated.
19:30 Fridays at the local Temple Beth Reform Judaism.
It was “”“17:30 Fridays”“” (read: 17:50 Fridays) at the local Hillel when that was in session.
And apparently there are some magical synagogues that actually hold Saturday morning services at 10:00 or 10:30 every week.
Is that just the jewish IQ thing in effect or is judaism actually the Objectively Correct Religion because it has figured out the Objectively Correct Time to do religion at? I’m prepared to believe either…
Friends It Has Been Three Days Since Judaism Just Had A Religion Holiday That Was “Cheesecake-Fueled All-Nighter On A Saturday Night”*.
I Do Not Think This Is The Best Time To Be Talking About How Judaism Does Time Management Correctly.
(* Cheesecake depends on local custom. iirc almost all customs are something dairy-based.)
What do you mean “Cheesecake-Fueled All-Nighter On A Saturday Night” isn’t Correct Time Management? Because that totally sounds like Correct Time Management to me. (I mean, assuming the cheesecake is allowed to be vegan…)
Nothing is going to change. Americans love their guns more than they love people and after Sandy Hook we decided that killing over 20 children was acceptable and not outrageous enough to make reasonable restrictions on guns. This is America, a country that has been around for 200 years, a superpower, a 1st world nation, and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and we refuse to protect our own people. We respect guns more than we respect the lives of people.
What specific gun control measures would you propose and how would they directly and effectively make society safer?
Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
permit to learn
includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
If you live in a rural area where police (and people, for that matter) are few and far between, something akin to a deer hunting rifle should provide plenty of protection from predators and poachers, you still have to follow the aforementioned steps.
This doesn’t cover everything but I think it’s a good place to start.
Can you show me evidence that this would directly and effectively create a safer society?
I have never laughed so hard at a gun law post. Like seriously, the evidence is in fucking reality. The proposed restrictions are just fucking logic.
IIRC, gun control is useful for reducing suicides but not that useful for reducing murders?
Also, mass shootings aren’t a good basis for legislation, but if you’re focusing on them anyway, most of this probably wouldn’t help much. I feel like most terrorists could answer questions about how to use guns safely.
Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
Meaning “semiautomatic long guns” or “scary-looking guns”? The first is debatable, the latter is a terrible basis for laws. But if one wants to “absolutely get rid of”, that sounds like implying taking those guns away from their owners and…yeah, not going to happen in America. Even if it was a good idea (I don’t know whether it would be), it’s not an idea that would ever work.
Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
Making gun permits depend on being a well-behaved citizen is a good idea. I wouldn’t go as far to disqualify everyone with the slightest background of violence because people fuck up and get better (eg. having lesser crimes make one ineligible for a certain number of years would be satisfactory), but as a general rule yes, let responsible, peaceful, law-abiding (as far as victimful crimes go) people have guns (and make the permits easy to obtain if one is responsible, and easy to lose if one acts irresponsibly later) and just filter out the bad apples.
Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
permit to learn
includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
I’d replace the mandatory hours part with just a thorough examination without regard for how those skills were exactly obtained. Such courses tend to become fodder for rentseekers via regulatory capture when the licensed gun teachers start lobbying ever more onerous requirements. Show me that you know how to handle the gun responsibly in both theory and practice, and that you can pass the shooting test (and a health examination on eg. eyesight and some other issues that might pose a risk) and you’re good.
Assuming $20/h for the range and class, the costs would end up being $700 for the mandatory parts and the examination probably won’t be free either. That’s not only incredibly expensive, but also adversarial towards people who have learned their skills from eg. parents (”sure, you could pass the exams anyway, but we’ll make you sit through a whole workweekful of stuff regardless because fuck you that’s why, and oh yes you’ll be paying an arm and leg to politically connected cronies for it too”) and thus fails the basic requirement of “don’t antagonize the people you’re regulating”.
If you want to build regulations that have a sense of legitimacy and thus might not be immediately repealed the instant political winds change, don’t act like you’re putting up arbitrary barriers for the sake of barriers but instead figure out the least burdensome way of getting what you want while also giving the people you’re regulating as much of what they want as well. Treat it as positive-sum cooperation, not a zero-sum game of “let’s get rid of $unpopular_group”.
I know red-blue polarization that turns even ridiculously simple questions into Grand Matters of Principles and Destroying the Hated Outgroup is a time-honored american tradition, but it should seriously be dropped in favor of more productive approaches.
Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
That sounds expensive and would make poor people drop out of the legal gun system to the illegal gun system, an outcome everyone probably regards undesirable.
I think gun laws should start from the assumption that even a poor black guy in the ghetto, or a borderer out in the basically-third-world-appalachia, should be able to abide by the requirements to be a legal gun owner, because let’s face it, those people are going to have guns and having their guns be legal would be far better than having them be illegal.
No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
Concealed carry makes it impossible for attackers to reliably know who are packing and provides a slight degree of security through obscurity to anyone. Open carry creeps people out, shows which ones are safe to attack, and I don’t think criminals on their way to do crime would obey carrying restrictions anyway. A gun is like a penis: I don’t mind a person having one as long as they don’t use it to do violence to people because I know many people like having them and using them responsibly, but I’d prefer if people didn’t wave them around in public. So if anything, I’d say yes for concealed carry, but you may only take your gun out in serious circumstances or suitable locations.
Probably the best rule on this would be that local communities may choose whether they allow open carry or not, and then I could live in one where open carry isn’t allowed and others may have their own style.
If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
I don’t feel qualified to comment on this one.
If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
This means that the facilities become targets for violent criminals seeking to obtain weapons, especially if illegal gun trade has been reduced. If it’s in a densely populated area effectively supervised by neighbors it’s not that much of an issue, but it’s a lot harder to adequately defend a valuable location with a fuckload of guns out in the wilderness, or some industrial area without that much traffic (especially if it isn’t manned 24/7, and it probably isn’t), than to store the guns in a decentralized manner (ie. in people’s homes) so the mafia doesn’t have a single place to raid profitably and not even be discovered until some time after the fact. (I think some european country tried exactly this and found that it was a very very good way to discreetly distribute lots of weapons to organized crime)
“Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
“Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
“You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
“Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Tag yrself I’m a principled consequentialist.
This is… So silly. If the consequentialist position sounds wildly different from the “unprincipled capitalist” position then you really need to choose a completely different word than “theft” in all of the above, because you’re COMPLETELY failing to express what you’re trying to say by it.
There are important differences in the behavior of politicians who believe the one compared to politicians who believe the other.
One approach realizes that when you tax people, you hurt people. When you have the power to impose VAT on food items while children go hungry to bed, you have the power to hurt people. That is a grave responsibility, and should only be exercised when your taxation scheme helps people more than it hurts starving children.
The other approach, which I see too often, goes
Lol I want to signal that I am cultured, let’s fund the Royal Theatre by taxing important goods! Wait, there are starving kids in our country now how did that happen? Let’s tax luxury goods to help the kids. Poor alcoholics can no longer afford homes? Let’s tax cars exorbitantly. People die because they don’t replace old cars that don’t have the newest safety features? Let’s make those mandatory! Poor people can no longer afford to drive at all now? Well sucks to be poor I guess but cars aren’t a necessity.
What, you feel taxes are unjust? They’re the price you pay to live in civilization! Without them we wouldn’t have great things like the Royal Theatre but only the art that people like enough to pay money for without being forced to and that would be terrible.
I realize this isn’t primarily about mandatory art, but nonetheless mandatory art is the worst.
ugh that thing
that exact thing
one politician around here (from the Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party) has written an excellent piece on how “criminal law isn’t a list of facebook likes” and I just want to live somewhere where the government budget isn’t treated as a list of facebook likes either
Have discovered key advantage of judaism from @ilzolende - they hold their organised religion at a much more civilised time of dfay.
What time is that?
Allegedly 19:30 Fridays, although other sources have disputed this, or at least claimed it’s much more complicated.
19:30 Fridays at the local Temple Beth Reform Judaism.
It was “”“17:30 Fridays”“” (read: 17:50 Fridays) at the local Hillel when that was in session.
And apparently there are some magical synagogues that actually hold Saturday morning services at 10:00 or 10:30 every week.
Is that just the jewish IQ thing in effect or is judaism actually the Objectively Correct Religion because it has figured out the Objectively Correct Time to do religion at? I’m prepared to believe either…
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
@jbeshir said: I think they’re inclined to read the worst into such things, having had bad experiences that make it important to them that a repeat experience/the same experience happening to others is clearly and solidly rejected. I think you’re okay and still a pretty high status ingroup person yourself.
I mean…yes, I definitely do get where they’re coming from, and I would be lying if I claimed that a part of my reaction wasn’t about “ohfuckohfuckohfuck I’ve miscommunicated and triggered or at least severely upset someone who doesn’t deserve such things”. But there’s a certain irony in how this mirrors the way this stuff works “out there”; people don’t communicate optimally, others react to it, the reactions further cross yet another barrier of communication registers and sans active pumping against entropy shit escalates. And thus people can end up being effectively nasty even without active intent to be so.
If I wanted, I totally could spin this into something extremely destructive and evil, but instead I’m going to assume absence of adversarial activity and try to be constructive and effective instead; there’s a reason I’m a munchkin, not a warrior.
It’s a matter of morality (albeit not such a strong test of morality itself as I’m surrounded by people who would totally see through deliberate escalation and very justifiably scorn me very hard as a consequence; and there’s something awesome in knowing that the ingroup is capable of sustaining such norms to a reasonable degree which gives me faith in humanity in general) because I care more about doing right than about being perceived as being right.
When I fuck up in communication, I want to fix it, not double down on it and conclude that others are evil and wrong and trying to censor ideas they don’t like and I’m a flawless saint of purity and justice and impartiality. PR and image are tools, not terminal values.
I suppose this kind of “treat the rest of the world as constant and yourself as the only variable” is uniquely slytherin secondary but it also makes a gigantic amount of sense and it explains why the bias method outputs slytherin secondary to me because I honestly can’t imagine how any other approach would be right. “Don’t whine at the uncaring void, figure out how the void works and hack it to output the results you want.”
And I suppose this illustrates one principle I consider really important. I don’t fault @slatestarscratchpad for reacting the way he did, because I know the reasons why (and even if I didn’t, I could try to guess that there probably is something behind it, which is my default assumption that I try to always maintain). And I don’t fault myself for being shaken at the reaction and reacting. And the instant I can collect myself I set out and fix what went wrong because that’s the right thing to do. And that’s the thing Bailey fucked up epically in.
If I continued things the way I see Bailey as having continued, doubling down on the thing that upsets people very badly, and writing a shitty book about it and portraying Scott and others in a very negative light and misrepresenting everything to push a terrible narrative, people would yell at me and be nasty to me and they would be totally right to do so. But instead I’m going to be a positive example, to show that there’s a better way of dealing with such things and that Bailey indeed screwed up horribly and failed at his duties. (I won’t lie and claim that the way I can spin this to “I’m like Bailey and you’re like James and I hope you sympathize with her position a bit more now, or at least understand why she did what she did” isn’t incredibly convenient and amusing.)
I find it really hard to believe Bailey didn’t have a situation where he could’ve noticed the effects of his claims and checked that maybe there is something substantial to people’s objections; if he really never noticed such a moment, perhaps he should’ve been studying ants instead of heavily marginalized humans who are hurt in many ways by the people around them, because the latter warrants a degree of sensitivity he and others of his kind seem constitutionally incapable of displaying.
And I guess that’s what my core argument is: Bailey didn’t treat people as people, and in doing so lost some of his own being-treated-as-person protections as well. And that’s the mistake I’m very much intending to avoid. And it has nothing to do with the scientific side of the ideas themselves, but instead everything to do with how they are handled.
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
Fucking huge extra disclaimer for those incredibly dense people who haven’t picked up on it yet:
I don’t harass people. Not even Bailey. In fact, I think the correct choice for people in such situations is to not harass people; even if some political tit-for-tatting were warranted (most of the time it even isn’t), other people are already doing enough of it (most likely way too much).
But I sometimes don’t condemn people who do, because actively condemning is a choice as well. Rationalists are the discourse equivalent of peacekeepers, and knowing when to intervene, how, and which side benefits from it, is relevant. I won’t waste time and effort rushing to the principled defense of Bailey (although I’d possibly rush to a principled defense of people whose actions are less over the line), as people are doing enough of it already.
@slatestarscratchpad reblogged a previous post of mine with the following commentary:
“Digusting pervert” is your term, not Bailey’s. Bailey said that a phenomenon *has a basis in sexuality*. If you think anybody who does something for sexual reasons is a disgusting pervert, that’s your problem and not his.
And when the public hears “has a basis in sexuality” they will think “disgusting perverts”. Partially because they already think trans women are disgusting perverts to begin with. I find this absurd coming from the person who literally wrote “The Virtue of Silence”. And from the person who wanted people to shut up about NrxaB for PR concerns.
Your idea that he is calling anybody a liar is equally unfounded. One of the most basic ideas of psychology and psychiatry is that people don’t necessarily know their own minds. Sometimes this can become very complicated. For example, some people have pseudoseizures - seizures which are not caused by epilepsy, which occur at moments when they need to get out of a situation quickly, and which are what most people would consider “fake” - but most neurologists believe this is not conscious dissembling but the subconscious mind responding to stress in the best way it knows how.
A lot of science involves attributing behavior to people who might not approve of those attributions. For example, many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. The evidence for this is currently mixed. I assume some homophobes are angry about this - should they be able to harass, doxx, and try to fire the scientists who think this? Some people use Implicit Association Tests to show that lots of people who don’t think they’re racist are actually racist; these tests have recently been found to be sketchy. Should all the scientists who supported them be killed? Or should we just turn their lives into a living hell? Why even have psychology at this point?
Bailey’s book is not virtuous science. It’s politics. It’s a deliberate attempt to push an idea to the mainstream, not via the usual procedures which have institutional restraints on them, but by specifically routing around those restraints.
I’ll just quote the book a bit:
Heterosexual men who want to be women are not naturally
feminine; there is no sense in which they have women’s souls. What
they do have is fascinating, but even they have rarely discussed it openly.
One cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexuals’
sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who
love men become women to attract them. Those who love women
become the women they love. Although transsexuals are cultural hot
commodities right now, writers have been either too shallow or too
squeamish to give transsexual sexuality the attention it deserves. No
longer.
Most people—even those who have never met a transsexual—
know the standard story of men who want to be women: “Since I can
remember, I have always felt as if I were a member of the other sex. I
have felt like a freak with this body and detest my penis. I must get sex
reassignment surgery (a “sex change operation”) in order to match my
external body with my internal mind.” But the truth is much more
interesting than the standard story
Two different types of men change
their sex. To anyone who examines them closely, they are quite dissimilar,
in their histories, their motivations, their degree of femininity,
their demographics, and even the way they look.
To anyone who has seen members of both types and who has
learned to ask the right kinds of questions, it is easy to tell them apart.
The most interesting reason why
most people do not realize that there are two types of transsexuals is
that members of one type sometimes misrepresent themselves as members
of the other. I will get more specific later, but for now, it is enough
to say that they are often silent about their true motivation and instead
tell stories about themselves that are misleading and, in important respects,
false.
The two types of transsexuals who begin life as males are called
homosexual and autogynephilic. Once understood, these names are appropriate.
Succinctly put, homosexual male-to-female transsexuals are
extremely feminine gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals are men
erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women.
Although some elements
of Cher’s story are very common to this kind of transsexual
(especially the erotic cross-dressing), others (such as the wearing of
fake vaginas) are unique to her. At least I have never met other transsexuals
who admitted to this. Nevertheless, I think that Cher is a wonderful
example of the second kind of transsexualism, less because she is
representative than because she openly and floridly exemplifies the
essential feature of this type, which is autogynephilia
In my experience, most laypeople are happy to accept the “I’m a
woman in a man’s body” narrative, and don’t really want to know
about autogynephilia—even though the preferred narrative is misleading
and it is impossible to understand nonhomosexual transsexualism
without autogynephilia. When I have tried to educate
journalists who have called me as an expert on transsexualism, they
have reacted uncomfortably. One said: “We just can’t put that into a
family newspaper.” Perhaps not, but then they can’t print the truth.
There is one more reason why many autogynephiles provide misleading
information about themselves that is different than outright
lying. It has to do with obsession. Something about autogynephilia
creates a need not only to enact a feminine self, but also to actually
believe in her
True acceptance of the transgendered requires that we truly understand
who they are.
According to this narrative,
transsexuals want to change their sex because their sense of self
disagrees with their bodies, not because they have any unusual sexual
preferences that depend on a sex change. While the first part of this
explanation sometimes may be true, the latter is not. It should be clear
by now that the “gender, not sex” part of the transsexual narrative is
false for autogynephiles
I have devised a set of rules that should work even for the novice
(though admittedly, I have not tested them). Start at zero. Ask each
question, and if the answer is “Yes,” add the number (+1 or -1) next to
the question. If the sum gets to +3, stop; the transsexual you’re talking
to is autogynephilic. If the sum gets to -3, she is homosexual.
This isn’t science. This is politics. This is condescending bullshit from someone who thinks he’s “helping” and, thanks to his high status in society, can get away with it without regard for the consequences he’s causing. And the scientific parts are bad and certainly do not warrant such a confident presentation in the form of a confused amateur ethnography. Even when accounting for the fact that this was written 10 years ago. For example, did nobody think to check cis women for autogynephilia too, to check on whether they’re actually picking up just regular common female sexuality instead of some “paraphilia”? Or maybe consider the fact that trans women exist outside gay bars and support groups, and that the ones found in those might not be representative of the whole population?
Even if I disregard all this “women are men” stuff and focus on the object-level claims instead of shibboleths, this has “bullshit alert” scrawled all over it. When you claim people are obsessed with something, that they are lying to themselves and everyone else, that they sort really neatly into two categories, etc. you better have some really solid evidence and most importantly you need to show that you understand the alternative claims and are actually able to rule them out with sufficient confidence. And when you sort neatly, it introduces another level of irresponsibility because this stuff seldom works that way so you need to overcome an extra amount of prior skepticism. TMWWBQ did not demonstrate any of this.
Those people are getting away with terrible science because of the differential positions of trans people vs. academicians. It’s brutal, cynical status psychology. (Of course, Bailey isn’t thinking that he’s consciously doing a hack job, he just doesn’t feel the need to test his theories properly because there was no pressure to be scrupulous when dealing with trans people because people got away with all kinds of unbelievable bullshit.)
Many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. And it’s one thing to do science and write something like “I observed a correlation with homophobic attitudes and signs of arousal from homoerotic material” and a completely different thing to write a book titled ‘The Man Who Hates His Sexuality: Why All People Who Dislike Homosexuals Are Secretly Gay’. Current evidence doesn’t warrant writing the latter, and if someone did it and it became really popular and widely accepted I’d consider it a big problem in the world and would express my disapproval in suitable contexts and be very understanding of why some people would react with nastiness. If you engage in outright memetic warfare, don’t complain if memetic warfare engages you.
I think Bailey’s theories are likely false, but science is full of false theories. The whole point of science is that we expect there to be dozens of false theories for every correct one, and the correct one will eventually win out. If everybody who proposes a false theory gets harassed, science can’t progress - and I’m sure that your harassers will be *super diligent* in making sure they only firebomb the homes of scientists whose theory is *genuinely false*.
And if you think anybody who attributes a phenomenon to something you don’t like deserves to be hurt and harassed, I think you’ve excluded yourself from the category of people who can discuss things maturely, and that any community that cares about epistemic integrity needs to exclude you for their own safety - not just the safety of their truth-orientation, but for the physical safety of their members. I think this is a super super super basic rule and I am surprised we cannot manage it.
I think there’s a significant confusion here. First of all, I’m not advocating firebombing anyone (Except the publishers of ‘The Nihilist’s Cookbook’ because when the entire human race is on the line I don’t give a shit. So people better not publish amateur-accessible guides to creating apocalyptic bioweapons.). And I’m not advocating that anyone should personally engage in this kind of activism on the margin, because what the world needs is less of it, not more. All I’m saying is that in a sufficiently shitty situation a thing that would otherwise be really shitty might be the least shitty option available, and that I cannot say with confidence that the world would’ve been a better place if Bailey hadn’t been reacted to with nastiness.
Obviously we’d all be better off in a world without nastiness.
And refraining from nastiness even when nastiness seems like a good idea is pragmatically a pretty good universal heuristic.
But in this utterly broken world there may be specific situations where some group engaging in nastiness would result in better outcomes than them abstaining from nastiness, even when accounting for the allure of the dark side. It would be highly suspicious that there would never ever be such a case, because nastiness is most closest analogous to violence and there are cases where violence is obviously the best answer.
And to continue the analogy, just because I recognize that violence is sometimes the least worst option doesn’t mean that in practice anyone would need to fear for their safety near me, because it’s effectively impossible that such a situation would actually arise in civil interaction between people who treat each other like people (self-defense being the most obvious candidate, which doesn’t have a clear equivalent on the nastiness side because nastiness is a lot more difficult to precisely define; but if you write a mean misrepresenting book about my ingroup, I’m going to write a mean misrepresenting book review about it).
But I can easily see ways by which nastiness could be used to improve the world. For example, if there was a sufficiently coordinated source of nastiness that could reliably retaliate against those who initiate nastiness without excessive bias in favor of specific sides, it might act to reduce the total nastiness. If doxxers got doxxed, if death-threaters got threatened, harassers harassed etc., we’d probably see less doxxing, threats and harassment. (In practice this is difficult because the smart ones always do it anon)
And when one looks at responses such as this one, the comparison to firebombing is even more baffling. Is James being nasty? Yes, absolutely. Is it an unwarranted level of nastiness? I can’t say so. It illuminates the way people experienced Bailey’s book, and some of the objections that didn’t get to academia because we don’t have access to academia. Such neat typologies are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Bailey’s sample was ridiculously biased. Blanchard’s institution is notorious for abusiveness. Garbage in, garbage out, and in a better world TMWWBQ would’ve been dismissed as the trivial hack job it was, based on shitty interpretation of shitty data, but we don’t live in that better world and the book is a representative of a wider incredibly shitty trend where cis academicians talk over trans people, erasing all the inconvenient ones in pursuit of their pet theories, and systematically get away with it. And we pay the price, sometimes with our lives.
There’s a massive institutional failure here, and I can’t say that flawless politeness would necessarily be the best option. It would be nice if it was, but there’s a certain suspicious convenience to that idea. I have seen way too much of the phenomenon where polite objections get dismissed and ignored, and only anger gets people to notice that maybe there’s a problem (people are clockwork, and respond to emotional appeals differently than to abstract arguments, news at eleven), to believe that complete politeness by everyone would always be the best way to achieve things. (And once the angry ones have stretched the overton window, the polite ones suddenly appear reasonable and make compromises and everyone credits the polite ones when in reality it’s the nature of the “good cop, bad cop” game which got stuff done. Yes, I’m cynical, but my background is that of a politician, not an academician, and I find it a mistake to assume that the rules of academical ingroup civility would automatically be the most effective ones everywhere. Just like it would be a mistake to assume the rules of effective politics would be conductive for effective truthseeking. But effective truthseeking doesn’t happen in the arena and style TMWWBQ was made for and in.)
Against that backdrop, I can’t consider a nasty article to be a massive sin.
(And to make it clear, writing nasty articles and trying to get someone discredited is the type of nastiness I’m talking about, not doxxing or threats, because there’s a chance that this might’ve been missed by the illusion of transparency. (This is going to be really embarrassing if it all ends up having been about that one.))
“It’s time to put the politics aside/stop shouting/grow up and get to the hard work of Solving Problems TM.”
Yeah, except the reason you can’t get to “solving” “problems” is that people can’t even agree on what values should underlie those solutions, what the problems even are, what means are acceptable as solutions, and so on. It’s like they pretend their solutions are obvious and their opponents agree but are being petty for no reason.
YES. This. It is so hard to have a conversation with someone about solving a problem when no one notices that they have drastically different ideas about how the world works.
*cough* minimum wage *cough cough*
#endorsed
this is why I always always try to get people to define their terms when it comes to values and consequences
Why do you support basic income? How do you reconcile this economically?
Various reasons. Many existing welfare programs are already basic income but encourage rule-breaking and discourage work, so that’s bad. Plus the ongoing automation of labour is going to put many people out of meaningful employment and that’s bad and inevitable. Ultimately it just seems like a sensible way to structure society, giving every person a democratic share of economic output for them to direct at their disposal. I think we’re going to end up with something like this whether we want it or not.
Submitted: (I’m defaulting submissions to anon unless you specifically ask me otherwise)
As an a.m.a.b. person with a lot of complicated gender feels who is cis but somewhat plausibly might not have been if I had been braver and read different books in a different order, I see the autogynephilia/erotic-location-target-error idea as a fundamentally plausible proposed mechanism that does an excellent job of explaining my experiences, and I’m really grateful that people like Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence have written about it as a thing that exists, even if the stronger two-type theory of MtF transsexualism in general is surely false. I understand that people with serious dysphoria rather than my vague, un-acted-upon wishes have very good reasons to not want to draw excess attention to my existence (and the existence of people like me but brave enough to do more about it) because the cis will abuse the knowledge to deny them their rights. But is the vitriol at someone writing a popular-level book that discusses the hypothesis really necessary? Can’t we agree to some sort of truce?—I’ll respect your right to speculate about the etiology of your self-identity, if you respect mine (and Anne Lawrence’s)?
I don’t have a beef with people who think AGP exists, my beef is with people who claim the two-type theory is anything other than thorough bullshit. The problem with BBL is the way they try to coerce millions of people into their own typologies. Anne Lawrence certainly knows herself better than I do, but Anne Lawrence has zero right to claim she knows me better than I do, unless she has some pretty damn bulletproof evidence (spoiler: she doesn’t).
The sides in this war aren’t “AGP don’t real” vs. “AGP sometimes real”, the sides are “treating people as people” vs. “erasing inconvenient people”. BBL fall squarely in the latter one, (as do some shitty trans activists, such as truscum, HBS etc.) and I think the truce you’re talking of looks like exactly the very thing I’m trying to advocate: treat people as people, don’t erase their experiences with some simplistic typology.
And if one were to assume that such a truce was in force, TMWWBQ would be an act of aggression against its terms. It doesn’t say “this is a thing which sometimes exists”, it says “millions of people are lying when they say they aren’t this”. (And those who erase the experiences of AGPs are similarly in violation of the terms, and should also be scorned.)
Some further notes on the discourse about meanness and Bailey:
When your “scientific theory” ends up claiming that millions of unpopular low-status people are disgusting liars and filthy perverts, there’s a pretty damn good chance you’ve been biased in making it. Just saying.
Just because you wrap your words as “scientific theory” doesn’t make it value-neutral. I have a “scientific theory” that Bailey is a massive shitlord and can present quite a bit of evidence for it. It’s a scientific theory, don’t be mean to me just for presenting it. And I’m not actually doing science, I’m just popularizing the obvious and universally accepted theory that “Bailey is an Epic Shitlord”, and thus if my evidence is shoddy and ethics questionable it doesn’t matter anyway.
If you make sweeping generalizations of groups, don’t act surprised when the group reacts as if you had made the claim you sweepingly generalized, about every single individual of that group. Goes double with the above. If A = B and B = C then (A == C) = true, that’s just simple logic.
The obvious solution is to maybe not make sweeping generalizations about groups. Especially if said sweeping generalizations are things people would get really upset about if you said them face-to-face.
Especially if the sweeping generalization you’re making involves the claim that millions of people are lying about something pretty big.
Or if you do, you better have some goddamn bulletproof evidence for the sweeping generalization you’re making and an ironclad explanation of alternative hypotheses and why you’ve discarded them. A good rule of thumb would be to make sweeping generalizations only if you believe your evidence could stand a libel court case (even when there is no actual grounds to actually sue you for libel; just think how comfortable you would be defending your case in court).
Get the fucking hint: don’t make sweeping generalizations about specific groups if the generalization involves “everyone who says otherwise is just lying”, that’s just bad form. The truths you will miss that way are probably far less significant than the errors you will avoid.
This applies in all directions. If you say “all men are scum”, don’t act surprised when a lot of people are justifiably very upset and hurt by it and react accordingly.
As a general rule, maybe approximately don’t say things about groups that you wouldn’t say about individuals. Saying things about groups might be less personally targeting and thus less harmful, but it also inevitably targets people you aren’t thinking of (people who say “all men are scum” are usually thinking all men have the underlying state of psychological security which lets them shrug off such things, when a huge number of people actually don’t, at all) and is more fraught with risks.
I am confused by references to the "nasty activism and extremism" used against Michael Bailey, your suggestion that it may have been warranted under the circumstances, and your disclaimer that your argument does not justify "heaping abuse" against children for inconsequential offences. The specific "nasty activism and extremism" that you were saying "might be okay" was the heaping of abuse upon Michael Bailey's children (which was done because they were related to him).
James later fixed the part where she captioned Bailey’s children and replaced the pics with pictures of herself. The obviously correct thing would’ve been to use pictures of Bailey himself as a child. Alas, people are not always of sound judgment when their already weak position is attacked even further, in extremely disingenuous ways.
The “Bailey’s children can be categorized into two types: those that have been sodomized by Bailey, and those who haven’t” part was incredibly apropos for the context, and totally inappropriate too, and I don’t know if there would’ve been a way to do it without harming innocent people (it’s not the fault of Bailey’s children that they were born to such a PoS father).
But if there was a way to harm Bailey as much as those actions did, without harming the innocent children, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn it. However, the spillover effects James’ actions had on innocent people are condemnable.
TL;DR: In my opinion, what she did was shitty because it hurt people other than Bailey, not because it hurt Bailey. There are things that were done to Bailey himself which were shitty for being excessive even if they didn’t impact anyone else, but that one I wouldn’t consider one of them. It certainly wasn’t any worse than what Bailey himself had done.
You often hear that it’s irrational to worry about terrorism, let alone to legislate about it. Terrorism is spectacular and primed to offend our sense of group solidarity, so our monkey-brains attend to it out of all proportion to its severity. If you consulted the actuarial tables, you’d be much more worried about car crashes. No one’s that worried about car crashes, so we shouldn’t get too worked up about terrorism either.
But does this prove too much?
Suppose that terrorism is less of a problem than car crashes, which themselves are not a pressing national concern. Then it seems that we should be able to tolerate a roughly similar number of deaths from terrorism as from car crashes without getting bent out of shape about it. Car crashes kill about thirty thousand people a year in the US, so we should be able to take about ten 9/11′s a year without really minding all that much.
Can that be quite right?
Ten 9/11′s a year would present an annual per capita risk of about 10^-4. What does that mean in context? In the worst year of the Second Intifadah, civilian deaths in Israel stood slightly lower, at about 8 * 10^-5 per capita. During World War II, civilian deaths in Great Britain were somewhere around 2*10^-4. So ten 9/11′s a year would put us somewhere between the worst year on record for a country whose culture has, let’s say, come to be defined by a sense of national existential risk, and a country that had to be propagandized out of surrendering by its own government.
So if you begin from the premise that deaths from car crashes, pools and ladders are interchangeable with deaths from terrorism, then you can arrive at the conclusion that a 9/11 every month would be within normal operating parameters. But if that strikes you as a reductio, then perhaps we should revisit the assumption that deaths from terrorism are just like accident deaths in every relevant respect.
Isn’t it just the unfamiliarity? When car crash deaths began occurring they were taken extremely seriously
i actually do pretty firmly believe that the world (where it applies, the US at least) would be better off with much less cars (and much more trains, say). is this an uncommon opinion?
(it’s really convenient that aspirin became a poster child for “safe, commonly used medication” despite having such a crazy array of potential deadly side effects. It means that whenever you want to push a new drug, you can say it has “fewer side effects than aspirin” and be pretty sure that you’re right)
I’d consider it very preferable if terrorism was treated just like all other murders. Norway basically did it when they had their own per capita equivalent of 9/11 and simply arrested and sentenced the person responsible. If the US had concluded that the murder statistics of 2001 looked kind of bad and there were a bunch of extraordinarily serious criminals on the loose, but not freaked the fuck out, the world would be in a way better shape today.
And car crashes need to be taken way more seriously while airplane security is overblown, coal power gets away with being utterly irresponsible while the slightest whiff of radiation makes people freak out about nuclear plants etc.
What are you actually doing with your machine, by the way? Are you just messing with it for funsies?
I’m turning it into a proper software development platform on which I can code effectively. My workflow relies on vim with the right plugins, shell, and browser, so having those function Correctly is Extremely Important.
Thus, I need a tiling window manager (xmonad), a good terminal without the fucking scrollbar (st), vim (custom setup), zsh (custom setup), and a browser with tabs and vi-style keyboard commands which won’t be too insecure but can render normal people’s shitty webpages that rely on way too much irrelevant crap (firefox in firejail in grsec hardened kernel, with the vimperator plugin among others).
There are a lot of little details here that we could go back and forth on forever. I don’t really want to continue arguing over these details.
Your account of Dreger’s perspective, although internally coherent, feels like it’s reading a lot into the book I just read that wasn’t actually there. The line you’re drawing is (I take it) between scientists “doing their thing” with potentially harmful results down the line, and scientists using actively unethical methods. But I don’t remember Dreger ever drawing that distinction explicitly. This is not me being coy or “perversely charitable” or something; I just don’t remember that being the thrust of the book I read.
(It is also not something I would naturally read in, because it doesn’t fit the facts as I see them. Michael Bailey is in fact a scientific researcher, but the campaign to ruin his reputation was in response to a popular book he wrote which meant to illustrate a theory he didn’t himself develop – and the theory itself was developed by Ray Blanchard in a clinic [the Clarke Institute, or “Jurassic Clarke”] that has a reputation for clinical horror stories. So what Bailey actually did is sort of analogous to some colleague of Maria New writing a popular book in which they interview some cherry-picked children who received prenatal dex talking about how great the results are. Would the author of that book be “just a scientist doing their thing”?)
But in particular I want to reply to your concluding paragraph, because it seems to get at some core friction here:
(and if you do believe that - if you do think that someone writing an article in support of autogynephilia, for instance, is “causing indirect harm”, and thereby qualifies as “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, to quote @socialjusticemunchkin - then your repeated insistence on discussing the object level, the actual truth of autogynephilia and other such theories - remains that much mind-boggling to me).
I don’t understand this, so I apologize if I’m getting it wrong. What I think you are saying is “you and Promethea believe that mere discussions among scientists of whether certain theories are wrong or right can be inherently harmful and deserve public shaming and nastiness, in which case you must be willing to give up the whole endeavor of scientifically adjudicating the truth or falsehood of those theories.”
I certainly don’t believe that. I believe (like Dreger) that activism, and society in general, needs the free discussion of scientific ideas. But I also think that not every statement by someone with a scientific professorship counts as a defense-worthy part of this free discussion. At a certain point – as when someone writes a book for a general audience containing no new scientific content – they are acting simply as citizens, not as participants in the protected sphere of scientific discourse. No idea should be inherently anathema in the academy, but no one spends all their time in the academy.
If a chemistry professor (after work) tells someone (not a colleague) that they should mix bleach and ammonia when they get home to make a super-great cleaning product – “trust me, I’m a chemistry professor” – they are not advancing an unorthodox scientific hypothesis in some way we ought to protect and celebrate.
You’re drawing a distinction between science and everything else that I don’t subscribe to, and which I did not intentionally ascribe to you either (whether Dreger subscribes to it or not I’m not sure). Your write “Activism, and the society in general, needs the free discussion of [scientific] ideas” and “No idea should be inherently anathema [in the academy]”, but from where I stand, both these statements improve when the bracketed parts are removed. I don’t know how to make a principled defense of the bracketed parts but not the whole; any such attempt falls victim to the volatility of the boundary.
Look; my position as far as I can see is very simple; Yudkowsky’s “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never.” pretty much covers it. Someone who’s making a genuine attempt to understand the world and/or explain their ideas to others is covered. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing a peer-reviewed article or a blog post on a personal blog: they do not deserve to be doxed, fired, subjected to an angry activist mob, etc. Now it so happens that scientists are much more likely to be engaged in trying to understand the world than people in general; and it so happens that “bullets” applied to explicitly scientific discourse have the greater potential to fuck with gaining more and better knowledge. And I think since Dreger is especially worried about that (as am I), she focuses on activists hindering scientists. But it doesn’t mean that “argument gets bullet” is virtuous w.r.t. a blogger or a popular book writer. I don’t know what Dreger thinks on that, but I sure don’t think so.
(of course, this also means that the onus is on me to distinguish between Bailey, whose book is protected by this principle, and New, whose actions aren’t. But to me, the difference between them is clear, as I tried to explain in my previous post)
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
I’m not sure what *your* position is, but based on the above - and I’m sorry if I’m misinterpreting you - there’s a genuine difference; following @socialjusticemunchkin, you believe that “nasty extremism” is in fact justified in cases where someone argues for a position you believe to be “indirectly harmful” in a major way. Is that a correct summary of your view? Do you, in fact, agree with and justify the actions of Andrea James et al against Bailey described in Dreger’s book (given that Bailey was merely writing a popular book with no new science, which removes him from the “protected sphere” in your words)? In case you do, how much farther would you be willing to go, and in case you don’t, what kind of nasty, directly harmful activism *do* you support against people who express “indirectly harmful” ideas?
Okay, so I’ll step in to defend my own words. “Bad argument gets counterargument” works very well when discussing things in a relatively equal position, with adequate restraint on all sides. I don’t believe there is any single idea that should be verboten to express and discuss. Yes, this includes autogynephilia; jewish world domination; HBD; whether islam is inherently connected to terrorism, violence and anti-modernity; whether women are Just Worse than men, etc.
But the difference happens somewhere along the very vague and ill-defined boundary of academia and politics. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that some ideas need to be handled with more caution than others, because the discussion doesn’t happen in a vacuum and carelessly discussing those ideas may have dangerous spill-over effects. It’s one thing to investigate even controversial ideas, and completely another to write shitty books seeking to popularize them with bad evidence. (Just like people should study syntetic biology, but it would be very irresponsible to publicize a simple how-to guide on creating an undefeatable pandemic that would kill everyone, in a cave with just a box of scraps!) (This is actually the main point I’d like to push: would you consider it not okay to ever attack scientists who disseminate their knowledge in a harmful and irresponsible way? Because if you consider it okay to even nastily disincentivize publishing “The Nihilist’s Cookbook: 50 ways of wiping out the human race from your own garage”, then we already know what you are and are just haggling over the price.)
I’d compare the situation with Bailey to someone pushing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the popular discourse about antisemitism. Even if some parts of the claims were correct, it’s nonetheless complete politics, not honest truthseeking. (In fact, Bailey himself has defended his book on the basis that it’s politics, not science, and thus not subject to the institutional restraints of science.) And if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the writers of the Protocols got the Bailey treatment.
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
And I think there’s a big difference in this. Writing a blog post is one thing, writing a really popular book and being very influential is another.
Throughout the affair, Bailey had acted in a way which reflected the standard exploitative attitudes cis researchers have traditionally had towards trans people (and trans women in particular). Bailey wrote a book which got its popularity mostly from matching people’s biases rather than from being correct, and trans people are in a very bad position to defend ourselves from it. Some of its components were pure dark arts, such as “anyone who claims they aren’t an autogynephile is lying, and their claims can thus be disregarded” which very conveniently poisons the well so that people who want to ignore contrary evidence have a fully general counterargument ready.
I don’t know the exact specifics, but a lot of what the trans activists have done seems to be basically tit-for-tatting Bailey. I won’t claim there haven’t been genuine abusive overreaches but eg. the part where Andrea James juxtaposed pictures of Bailey’s children with sexually explicit captions taken from, or based on, his very own book is nothing worse than what Bailey himself had done. The only difference was that it was targeted personally instead of generally, and I find it ridiculous that it’d be somehow okay to express such attitudes towards groups but not individuals because groups are ultimately simply aggregations of individuals.
(The obvious solution is to be nice to everyone.)
And a big part of it is the relative positions of the participants. If trans women were not so thoroughly marginalized (especially back in the time the book was written), the danger of seeking to popularize such ideas would be much smaller. One of the basic ways marginalization operates is by treating people as members of groups, not as individuals, and thus when the group one is grouped into is attacked, it’s completely rational (in the “evolutionary tribal game theory” sense) to attack back to defend oneself. Even Yudkowsky has written about his frustration with journalists writing hack jobs and getting away with abusing their power like that, and when you add a bunch of biases and sociocultural status to it, shit gets really ugly really fast.
Or as I’ve said: I’d be a lot more tolerant about people expressing ideas if their ideas didn’t hurt me and my people, but since we don’t live in a libertarian utopia, when Bailey acts like a politician he shouldn’t be surprised if he gets treated like a politician. (And while it’s a totally irrelevant ad hominem, I find it ironically appropriate that Dreger is a bioethicist.)
Yes, I would love to have a society of niceness, community and civilization, but I don’t live there and I don’t blame people who reacted to Bailey with nastiness because I know where they are coming from and I know that the best cure for that nastiness is not to shun people who lash out from pain but to take away the pain. I used to be one of those nasty activists, and while I’ve updated my own methods to be more productive and effective and less likely to hurt innocents, I do consider myself a person who has some actual insight to why people act like that and what can actually be done about it. People are clockwork, if you want them to do/not do something you need to take the clockwork into account instead of whining impotently at the uncaring void.
And before you think I’m some kind of a PC spoilsport who doesn’t want to discuss uncomfortable ideas, let me express some of mine below the cut:
> me looking at router logs > what’s that, an unknown iphone in my wi-fi? > I don’t think so > macb& > now how the fuck did someone get to spook around in my network? > better switch to a better password and do some other security checking stuff > why is my tablet not connecting? > oh, right… > HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT I CUCK SOCKS
now the real mystery is why the tablet was labeled as an iphone to begin with…
