Whoa, I didn’t realize that it was so deliberate, I honestly thought it was unconscious
Scary, scary.
I remember one time, my mother got me a scarf and I told her I’d rather have had the money and she got so angry. Since nobody has ever gotten disappointed that their gift was rejected, I can conclude she was not offering me a gift but was merely planning to strangle me.
But srsly tho, giving non-money gifts is economically inefficient unless it’s one of the following situations:
You are able to provide something that money can’t normally buy
You are able to suggest something that better matches the person’s preferences than what they would have thought to buy themselves
You are able to obtain something for substantially less than the market price of equivalent value
Thus, I personally think there are essentially four valid gifts: company, crafts, cuddles, and currency.
It doesn’t seem to be that much about guns, but instead very much about culture. It’s likely that the gun culture in the US is especially dysfunctional, but that’s an argument for trying to change the culture, because nobody will ever be able to take those guns away (and I’d consider it an undesirable outcome anyway; my ideal society would have a strong positive culture that keeps things in check so that most people could basically be trusted with their choice to obtain firearms if they want). And when one takes that into account, focusing on skills and safety, responsible usage, and gun laws that are reasonable (permits not excessively hard to obtain, and focus on competence in safe handling instead of excessive barriers and fees) would probably be the best option forward.
I also get the impression that there is not really a “The” gun culture in America. It is a huge country with very varied firearms cultures even within the individual states.
Well yes. And a certain subset of those cultures are messed up in a way that isn’t seen in many other first-world countries, and causes those problems. I don’t expect the gunblr guys to be the ones driving up the bad statistics, and I apologize for any confusion my previous broad statement might’ve caused, if the intent wasn’t clear from the context.
The
group, which advocates for gay Americans to carry firearms, just won a
major victory on Tuesday: a federal judge in Washington halted
enforcement of a portion of the city’s strict gun law, ordering
Washington DC police to stop requiring residents to demonstrate they
have “a good reason to fear injury,” which he ruled places “an
unconstitutional burden” on citizens’ right to bear arms.
The Group, which nobody seems to spend five minutes looking for on google, is named the Pink Pistols. Remember the goddamn name.
Good, I don’t care who you sleep with or what color you are we all need to fight for and exercise our Constitutional rights. Let’s also put an end to the anti-gun crowds “only white guys” like guns myth.
I’ve heard a lot about Pink Pistols. They’re doing good stuff
Do lgbt people in the US who own guns even have a lower chance of being killed/injured by hate crimes when you adjust for wealth, age, location, gender, etc. though? I don’t think the people who are in the most danger (young teenagers who ran away from their home or were disowned by their parents, sex workers in violent areas, extremely poor people) would have as much access to weapons (or other kinds of safety/self defense tools and training, for that matter) as everyone else. So if a “guns make you safer” effect actually appears, it might just be cofounding.
I would research this myself if I weren’t too sick and tired to put mental effort into anything right now. Maybe, little followers, if you have been very good, you will get heated-up leftover effortposts and chocolate milk for breakfast!
#armthegaysiffitsactuallyhelpingthem
Nobody has a clue, all the data is confounded to hell, but it makes a staggering amount of sense. Even if one were to assume that increases in concealed carry increase gun crime in general, I’d be highly surprised if a drastic specific increase in concealed carry by vulnerable populations wouldn’t reduce the risk of hate crimes, effectively turning it into a PD/tragedy-of-the-commons type situation. (And there would be a predictable increase in gun suicides because being lgbtq tends to suck for many people, thus offsetting the effect a bit.)
Probably the best test of this would be to choose some cities in random, provide firearms, training and concealed carry permits to as many eligible lgbtq volunteers as possible (especially TWoC) and publicize the fuck out of it. Considering the opportunistic and non-gainful nature of bashing attacks, I don’t think the absolute number of gun carriers would need to be that great as long as prospective bashers had a reasonable doubt that their victims might be armed. (My prediction would be that such a program would have a statistically significant effect compared to controls, mostly from the PR side of trying to make as many haters as possible aware that some lgbtq people are packing and thus none are safe to mess with. Especially if the people who get guns were selected to be externally indistinguishable from the general lgbtq population but with significantly lower suicidality, impulsivity etc. to reduce the harms increased gun ownership would cause.)
Encouraging a population to carry guns for the purpose of shooting people is *really* *fucking* *dangerous*. I would hazard a guess it’s part of that cultural difference that makes the US’s gun violence four times Canada per gun ownership capita. (Hum, does that rhetoric exist in Canada, fact check?)
How many gay people see cishets as the oppressors? As the Enemy? Who aren’t uncomfortable with throwing around notions of killing them. Not a lot, maybe. Those who do are going to be more afraid, more likely to want to defend themselves, and more likely to stop thinking of their oppressors as people and start seeing them as monsters. Then it’s simply a matter of getting over the fear of retribution and you have a gay shooting up a church or something. Introducing more weapons and training to kill into a world where people see categories of people as monsters is asking for trouble.
There are many countries in Europe where gun laws are as relaxed, or more, as in many states. In eg. the Czech Republic concealed carry for self-defense purposes is allowed for any gun owners, and a gun license is on “shall issue” basis, yet we don’t see a massive amount of gun violence (rate of gun homicides is 1/20th of that in the US). Similarly, there are countries with very strict gun laws, yet they don’t correspond to a comparable absence of lethal violence (Finland bans carrying by civilians and handgun permits are very hard to obtain nowadays, yet the gun homicide rate is twice that of the CR; the UK has higher rates of overall homicide than CR, and relatively close to that of Serbia or Bosnia despite the latter having very liberal gun laws and the UK having incredibly strict ones).
Or as the gun owners themselves say: “we carriers are some of the most well-behaved citizens because we know our permit will be taken away if we get drunk, act irresponsibly, get in brawls, etc.” and I basically trust them. Most gun owners are as reasonable and responsible people as anyone else, if not more (on average) because a properly functioning permit system will filter away the worst cases.
It doesn’t seem to be that much about guns, but instead very much about culture. It’s likely that the gun culture in the US is especially dysfunctional, but that’s an argument for trying to change the culture, because nobody will ever be able to take those guns away (and I’d consider it an undesirable outcome anyway; my ideal society would have a strong positive culture that keeps things in check so that most people could basically be trusted with their choice to obtain firearms if they want). And when one takes that into account, focusing on skills and safety, responsible usage, and gun laws that are reasonable (permits not excessively hard to obtain, and focus on competence in safe handling instead of excessive barriers and fees) would probably be the best option forward.
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.))
The
group, which advocates for gay Americans to carry firearms, just won a
major victory on Tuesday: a federal judge in Washington halted
enforcement of a portion of the city’s strict gun law, ordering
Washington DC police to stop requiring residents to demonstrate they
have “a good reason to fear injury,” which he ruled places “an
unconstitutional burden” on citizens’ right to bear arms.
The Group, which nobody seems to spend five minutes looking for on google, is named the Pink Pistols. Remember the goddamn name.
Good, I don’t care who you sleep with or what color you are we all need to fight for and exercise our Constitutional rights. Let’s also put an end to the anti-gun crowds “only white guys” like guns myth.
I’ve heard a lot about Pink Pistols. They’re doing good stuff
Do lgbt people in the US who own guns even have a lower chance of being killed/injured by hate crimes when you adjust for wealth, age, location, gender, etc. though? I don’t think the people who are in the most danger (young teenagers who ran away from their home or were disowned by their parents, sex workers in violent areas, extremely poor people) would have as much access to weapons (or other kinds of safety/self defense tools and training, for that matter) as everyone else. So if a “guns make you safer” effect actually appears, it might just be cofounding.
I would research this myself if I weren’t too sick and tired to put mental effort into anything right now. Maybe, little followers, if you have been very good, you will get heated-up leftover effortposts and chocolate milk for breakfast!
#armthegaysiffitsactuallyhelpingthem
Nobody has a clue, all the data is confounded to hell, but it makes a staggering amount of sense. Even if one were to assume that increases in concealed carry increase gun crime in general, I’d be highly surprised if a drastic specific increase in concealed carry by vulnerable populations wouldn’t reduce the risk of hate crimes, effectively turning it into a PD/tragedy-of-the-commons type situation. (And there would be a predictable increase in gun suicides because being lgbtq tends to suck for many people, thus offsetting the effect a bit.)
Probably the best test of this would be to choose some cities in random, provide firearms, training and concealed carry permits to as many eligible lgbtq volunteers as possible (especially TWoC) and publicize the fuck out of it. Considering the opportunistic and non-gainful nature of bashing attacks, I don’t think the absolute number of gun carriers would need to be that great as long as prospective bashers had a reasonable doubt that their victims might be armed. (My prediction would be that such a program would have a statistically significant effect compared to controls, mostly from the PR side of trying to make as many haters as possible aware that some lgbtq people are packing and thus none are safe to mess with. Especially if the people who get guns were selected to be externally indistinguishable from the general lgbtq population but with significantly lower suicidality, impulsivity etc. to reduce the harms increased gun ownership would cause.)
“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
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.
I was the anon, sorry. I don’t know why I decided to be anon.
The main issue I have with it is: when most people are on basic income, where is the money coming from? Taxes? Taxes on what? Not income, since most people won’t be employed anymore.
Taxes on people who own stuff and collect rents from it, perhaps.
@in-all-conscience: Behind your question, there are some assumptions that are generally not shared among people who support a basic income.
You say “most people won’t be employed anymore” which yes/no, depending on what you mean when you say it.
To one meaning: “Yes they will.” To the other: “I know. That is the problem which we are solving with Basic Income.”
Yes they will This answer assumes you meant “People are generally lazy, and if they are given free money, they will stop working,” and the answer is “we’re not giving out that much free money.” The immediate goal is not that you can quit your job and live a solid middle-class lifestyle on the tax-payers dime, but rather that even if you have no job, you can still afford food, housing, medical care and other basic necessities.* For America, this is already the case - once you are sufficiently poor, you get food stamps, medicaid and welfare.
The problem with these programs is that they are all needs-tested, such that if you get a job and start earning money on your own, these benefits fall away, and they fall away so abruptly that getting a job has actually made you poorer. The short-term goal of Basic Income in the USA, then, is not to give more money to the poor but to give the same money to the poor in a way that actually makes sense and doesn’t keep them locked away from the job market. It also discourages crime - if you are on welfare, earning $8 an hour in walmart costs you money, earning $8 an hour in undeclared income from muggings will not cost you money.
But it’s not going to be so much money that working is discouraged - if you want that middle-class lifestyle, if you want to dress nice, if you want a car that isn’t a choking mess, if you want your friends to think you’re cool, if you want to impress beautiful people, you still need a job to pull in real money.
It will also cause some people to quit. There are people out there in really terrible jobs that they only do to survive. These are people who are too proud to accept welfare, or who do not know they can get it. People with mortgages they cannot afford to stop paying into. Basic Income is not a miracle cure for all of society’s ills.
So that’s the answer to assumption one: Some people will quit, others will stay because they want more money, others will get jobs because they can finally do so without losing money.
I know. That is the problem which we are solving with Basic Income This answer assumes you meant “Automation will push people out of jobs no matter whether Basic Income exists, and we cannot tax unemployed people to pay unemployed people.”
To which I say: Taxes are not actually levied on employment, they are levied on value created, which today often happens through employment.
Toy example: Scenario 1 without automation: A car factory pays a worker through his lifetime $1,000,000 to create $2,000,000 in value before he is pensioned, for a net profit of $1,000,000. The state taxes both worker and company at 50%, taking in $1,000,000 in revenue.
Scenario 2 with automation: A robot company pays a worker $250,000 through HALF his life to build $500,000 worth of robots, for a profit of $250,000. A car company buys the robots that create $2,000,000 in value before they break, for a net profit of $1,500,000. The state takes 50% of all profits, so 50%*(1,500,000+250,000+250,000)$ = $1,000,000.
Despite the worker working only half his life (and thus receiving half as much pay to be taxed to support basic income), the state receives the same income in taxes as before, and the parent company earns more money than before (because the robot is cheaper than the worker. If they didn’t earn more money they wouldn’t have bought the robot)
Now the worker has half his life left over to earn again, or build another set of robots. Or, if he owns all the companies involved, retire - he worked only half his life this time, and ended up with the same amount of money.
There are a lot of objections you can make against this toy example, but the important take-home lesson is that the car company only automates if that is cheaper than the worker. In any scenario where the income tax base falls due to automation, the corporate tax base rises due to efficiency. Altogether, the situation has improved: Previously one worker working his entire life created $2000000 value, now one worker creates that value by working only half his life. Whether the surplus value is captured by the robot company, the car company or the worker depends on the relative bargaining positions of each, but the actual taxable value did not fall and, if the worker finds other productive uses for his time during the second half of his life, the value you can tax will in fact be higher with automation than it was without.
But returning to your objection: It is true. Automation meant that for the same amount of cars sold, there was only available employment for half as many hours worth of worker. Despite creating more value, the worker is under-employed. Basic Income taxes some of the extra value the worker created with automation and gives it to the worker as a solution to this problem.
*The long-future goal, of course, is that you can quit your job and live in splendor unequaled even by the richest people today. That will take a lot of automation and possibly space travel and will not be the goal we are talking about for a near-future implementation of Basic Income.
EDIT: And of course I fucked the math. The worker is building robots through a quarter of his life, not half his life.
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.)
