I admit I'm a bit stunned that I can make a card that literally gives you +1$ for every 1$ you overpay (plus every other part of the card) and no one realizes that it's a joke. I guess the joke really didn't land
.I imagine bury & leprechaun could be a great combo. If you're lucky enough to open 3/4 you could buy double leprechaun and bury the first to reduce the chances of colliding and ensure at least one doesn't miss the shuffle. And with the two leprechauns you could probably rapidly rack up enough gold to buy a province a turn with 100% consistency, so long as you don't mind the hexes.
If you want to frame it as an issue of personal freedom, that's fine and a decent strategy, but then it's irrelevant what the studies say, and very important that you bring up personal freedom explicitly. The point of personal freedom is that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't infringe on other people's rights, you don't have to earn the right to do something in particular by first proving that it's good for you. Conservatives don't always agree with this, but it's not a hard concept for them to understand. (This strategy is also a lot more likely to work if you don't want to restrict personal freedoms that conservatives think are important, like gun rights.)
This is uh not a very flattering model of conservativesbut fair enough
@strategic point: well the outside view certainly suggests that you know this better than I do, but I still don't see the object level knockdown of my model
I disagree with your framing. Not so much with the literal claim but with the application. The point of my phrasing of the matter is to make the issue into one of personal freedom. I think saying that people suffer and this is the thing that helps, so shouldn't they be allowed to do that is an effective framing. I've rarely seen an outright rejection of this kind of thing based on the reference to studies. Maybe a personal example would be more effective (I'll even grant that this is the so in most cases), but the data isn't doing the emotional lifting there, the appeal to personal autonomy is.
I really don't think the conversation is unrealistic, at all. How do you think a conservative would respond?
I don't think it conflicts with your view at all, you seem pretty moderate on the topic. I posted it in response to faust asking for evidence. (Should have clarifies that it wasn't part of our current conversation.)
Evidence that the inclusive narrative hurts trans people: here's destiny reading 30 emails from viewers of his stream verbatim. There's also the gdoc where they're printed. Here's #11, for exampleQuote“Anyway, after this long ramble I just want to say one thing on the broad subject. The term "transgender" is overly broad to the point where it's losing value as a descriptor. If people who don't have dysphoria or don't want to medically transition want to call themselves transgender then whatever, I don't care about what anyone does or doesn't want to do with their bodies or their social presentation. But we are not the same, and to lump us all under the same umbrella term does people like me a disservice, because it dilutes the importance of having the proper medical care. It's like if we didn't have words for "gay" or "lesbian" or "bisexual" and just called everyone who wasn't straight "queer". I really don't like it when people who don't have these intense life ruining issues I've had come in and start muddying the waters surrounding those issues. If people want to push for placing less importance on gender roles in society then sure, fine, that's probably a worthy cause. But don't do it by hijacking the discussion around a very specific issue related to a very specific group of people like me. If people want transgender to be an inclusive umbrella term for anyone who doesn't rigidly conform to the most strict definition of traditional gender then so be it, but we need new narrower terms to describe specific things.”
Ofc it depends on how common this view is, but given that it's outside the overton window and exactly the opposite of what gets amplified, my honest guess is that there are numerous people who feel that way.
I do agree that trans issues aren't that high up on the list of what the typical conservative worries about. So yeah as far as magnitude goes, other things like the abortion debate play a way bigger role. But other than that, I'm not convinced. (And I also think the small role still far outweighs the benefits of having an inclusive trans label.) Here's a hypothetical discussion I see as plausible to have with a conservative:
Conservative: The whole trans thing is just weird and creepy to me, people are cutting off their genitals and [...]
Me: There's pretty solid evidence that gender dysphoria is a thing, people with dysphoria have crazy elevated depression and suicide rates, and there's zero evidence that trying to cure them out of it works. It's like gay conversion therapy, it's been tried and just doesn't work. But there is solid evidence that transitioning does help. And if that's the only thing that helps these people, shouldn't they be allowed to go through with it?
Conservative (unless they're very radical): Ok in those cases, that's fair enough. But what about {some more radical thing leftist people believe}?
Me: Yeah that's stupid, I don't agree with that either.
Conservative: Oh okay. (is now .1% blue-pilled)
So yeah I don't think that going to suicide rates is a bad idea, and I also haven't been talked about of my main point which is that representing a moderate PoV is generally helpful and representing a radical PoV generally harmful for your side. Not as a politician, but as a random person in the discourse.
I notice that you just rejected my framing and used a different framing. I wasn't talking about moving the Overton window, I was talking about moving the median, i.e., moving people around within the Overton window. I was just thinking about winning elections, not about shaping the future of discourse.
That doesn't surprise me. I would guess that you also feel compassionate toward Elizabeth Hoover, if you've heard about her, which you probably did since you read the news. But the left almost universally rejects cases like hers, which to me looks like a mount Everest-sized hole in the entire ideology. The only reason I see to claim that trans people should be accepted but Elizabeth should be shunned for claiming to be Native American is that gender dysphoria is a thing and race dysphoria is not. If you take that away, then she has a way stronger case for being a Native American than just about any trans person has for being the opposite gender.
The argument against worries that men will claim to be trans to do weird shit has always been that no one would go through the process just for that, and that's true, but it stops being true if you remove all barriers for entry.
At the same time, you have this political fight where conservative people think this entire thing is crazy, and supposedly the argument is that there is a really awful thing happening here with depression and suicide rates through the roof, and this intervention is one of the only things that has a proven track record of helping at least some. Do you not see how softening the trans label and removing all barriers of entry makes the entire thing that much less credible? I think I brought up this type of argument before and didn't get any daylight at least with faust, but I continue to think that fighting the political extremes on your side is one of the most important things to do to win elections, and conversely, making the extremes more extreme is one of the most damaging things.
And it also just muddies the waters. You're lumping two completely different things under the same label; this is just bad instrumental rationality and bound to lead to problems like people following the wrong advice.
And for what? That's the thing I come back to. If it was important to do this, then maybe. But faust literally likened it to someone getting a haircut. If the positive stakes are that low, then yeah, it seems to me that allowing everyone into the fold is a huge net negative. I feel each one of these three reasons ougweighs the upside by itself.
(When I say don't open the fold I obviously(?) don't mean misgender people; I'm going to use the pronouns anyone tells me to use every time without question. But I don't think / don't yet have been presented with the positive case for why it would be a good idea to encourage people to identify as trans.)
Yet the left obviously has compassion for anyone claiming to be trans.I don't think the left has compassion for Blair White.
Only if other people think they're born black! It's not at all accepted for people to transition into another ethnicity or race, that's the point; do you disagree with this?
Ok I confess, the concept of trans without gender dysphoria doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Even if gender dysphoria is a spectrum (the paper is paywalled and scihub can't get around it) well then there is still a spectrum, so affected people at least feel some amount of dysphoria. If someone actually doesn't feel any dysphoria and decides to "transition" anyway, then yeah, I need someone to explain to me why the primary effect of this is not to cause more suffering for people with dysphoria/why it's important to respect this since by assumption those people don't suffer without transitioning.
Most gay people in the 50s would probably have pressed a button to make themselves not-gay, so was being gay a sickness in the 50s?
I don't see the difference in category. An ADHD diagnosis is awarded (simplifying here) if you score high enough on some standardized test. If you are just under that threshold and decide to self-medicate, are you using ADHD meds "recreationally"? If not, where is the cutoff?
Gender dysphoria is the same. What amount of wanting to change your body to better fit into gender norms is enough in order to be sick?
And also of course, there are trans people that do not transition medically at all, that have no wish to transition, what about them?
I mean, it's a perspective thing to some extent. But illness always carries this notion of "something is wrong here" and that it should be treated to go away. Even in a world where mental illness is not stigmatized I think it's still bad to say "being gay is being sick" or "neurodivergent people are diseased", and the same holds for trans people.
the assumption that being trans is the same as experiencing gender dyphoria, which seems dangerously close to labeling transness as a mental illness.
The unspoken thing here is that I feel like you're doing this purity test thing where you're taking someone who's arguably done a ton for trans rights but is in fact center left rather than radically left on the isssue, and then you're looking for the one thing in the video that sounds worst, and you're using it to villify him even though the interpretation isn't even plausible. Like I said I grant you that it's plausible on first listen, but really only on first listen.
On the top of your head, what's the Birds of Necama song, if any, that most closely fits these criteria?
Yeah, I mean they did say that they don't know anything about music and certainly never claimed that this is advanced or anything. But even if it's basic, I mean it's not like this happens in every song. Most music just has a lead melody and everything else playing backup, not several melodies.
