Warren. Second choice, whoever's under 65 and is the most electable.
On the premise that Biden is old and she might be called into the presidency?
"Any functioning adult 2020," as the bumper stickers say. But preferably a woman under the age of 70, and preferably a WOC. I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I like Kamala Harris for Biden's VP pick.
But really just ANYONE, male or female, black, brown, or white, who can help Biden win in November.
I wanna say Warren. But I think she'd be more effective in the Senate, and I don't trust that GrOPer Baker. Harris. Abrams. I hear there are excellent women governors, but don't know which I'd want. But Harris. Also, Harris.
3: And that VP has become an important job. The last 4 VPs have all had significant policy responsibilities.
I'd recommend Stacey Abrams for maximal Fuck You to the MAGA wankers, but I am aware of the counterargument that, rigged or not, a candidate ought to have won the election that is her claim to fame.
It's gotta be Assata Shakur. But I'm also okay with Jewel.
How about Julian Castro? Whitmer in Michigan is one of those lady governors being mentioned. She has only been in office two years but has done well with an intransigent legislature. I like Abrams, and she might drive some turnout. I'd vote for a trained monkey with a D next to its name, though, at this point. Maybe an untrained monkey.
Warren because she won't let Biden get away with his default Summers/Rubin/Dimon instincts.
Biden's already committed to picking a woman though, right? If he goes back on that it will hurt him more than just picking a man without having made the commitment.
I sorta feel like traditional notions of what will and what won't hurt a candidate don't really apply at this point--in part because Trump seems to have made a mockery of the notion of popular opinion, and in part because we're all going to vote for untrained monkeys if they're running against Trump. That said, I'd like Biden to pick a woman, because I think there's a decent chance he's not going to run again in four years, and I'd like a woman to be at the top of the Democratic ticket sooner rather than later.
Wasn't Klobuchar leaked as his choice a month or so ago? I like SP's point on Warren, but picking someone who couldn't move her numbers up when the was "the front-runner" is a bad omen, just as Abrams needs to actually win an election before she'd be plausible. But it really doesn't matter. The election is about Trump, so Anyone for VP. Biden himself is practically irrelevant; his slogan should be "I'm not Trump."
Stacey Abrams, then Warren. I wouldn't mind if Warren were given an anti-corruption commission with tons of power.
Abrams won plenty of elections. She was speaker of her state legislature.
She didn't appear out of nowhere to run for governor.
I think whoever finds the pee tape should get the job.
I will lose my goddamned mind if I have to vote for two men. Not positive of this, but it is possible that voting against Trump is the only thing that could get me to vote for two men. I've done some of the grinding low level campaign stuff in the last three years, and every single event I've been to, it is 90% or more women, most of them in their 60's. They have worked so hard (far more than me) and they are owed.
I think that's a pretty widespread feeling, and even more people understand that it exists. Biden already said he'd pick a woman; it'd be a serious mis-step if he didn't.
Because of the sexual assault allegations against him, Biden should drop out of the race.
As Bave tweeted today, "Democrats did the right thing pressuring Al Franken to resign. The same should be done for Biden as nominee." If we are interested in preventing Trump's reelection, that's what we should expend our energy on, not speculation about Biden's running mate.
As Bave tweeted today, "Democrats did the right thing pressuring Al Franken to resign. The same should be done for Biden as nominee."
I'm ambivalent on this question, so I'm curious to hear more of the arguments for and against. I do think pressuring Al Franken to resign was the right thing to do, but the situations don't seem exactly parallel in that (a) there were a significant number of accusations against Franken and that was a key reason why he was pressured to resign rather than going through an ethics committee process. (b) there was a clear process for replacing Franken, whereas replacing Biden at this point will be much messier.
I don't know that either of those considerations are dispositive, but they are both significant.
I guess I'd be a lot more charitable to the allegation if it had come, I don't know, in January, when it could have been factored into peoples votes during the actual election that was held.
Instead, it came out after the nominee had basically been picked, which smells a lot like ratfucking to me.
I like Abrams both on her merits and on the theory that she'd only take the offer if she assessed a reasonably good chance she'd win, and help the ticket with her presence.
I think Warren has the clout to stand up to the fat cat follies, which nowadays seems to require: access to the media, a national following, and experience with and allies within the executive bureaucracy.
Replacing Biden at this point would be madness. It's the very best thing that could happen for Trump.
I don't think anyone Biden chooses as a running mate is going to do much at all for turnout -- first because of untrained monkeys etc, and second because I don't think running mates do much at all. They can only do harm, though, whether Eagleton-style or Palin-style. None of names being batted around are Palin-like, so that's good. A lot of women were pretty excited about Ferraro, but I doubt many of those who were excited were not already going to vote for Mondale. Turned out her husband had some sort of business dealing that, in the Before Times, men who wanted to vote for the Big Phony could use as an additional excuse.
I don't feel like I know anywhere near enough about any of the contenders to have much of an opinion about any of them.
OK, I will say that a VP candidate might realistically help with local turnout, by adding their machine/contacts to those already on board for Biden. This makes Harris and Abrams less important, electorally, and makes Whitmer, Klobuchar, Baldwin better choices.
Replacing Biden at this point would be incredibly messy, and I really don't think it will happen (and am not sure that it should happen, even setting aside practical concerns).
The only way that it could work would be if Obama was actively involved in pushing Biden to resign and helping push people towards a consensus alternative -- both because he knows Biden better than almost anyone, and because he might have the credibility to keep the party from fracturing.
It's not going to happen.
But, I occasionally ask myself, let's say 5 or 6 other women had spoken out with similar allegations. In that case I think there would be a lot more pressure, and appropriately so.
Actually, Charley, Democrats who want to beat Trump should be relieved that there is now an excuse to get rid of Biden, since they're all terrified inside knowing what a weak candidate he is and secretly they wish he wasn't the nominee but feel stuck with him.
Spike, Reade's story is not recent. Her mom is on tape in 1993 talking about the incident on Larry King. And I'm sure you understand that sexual assault survivors often have great difficulty publicizing their experiences.
NickS, there are other Biden accusers, for example Lucy Flores.
And what would be so "incredibly messy" about Biden dropping out? Candidates who have suspended their campaigns can unsuspend them, and the race can continue.
Were these things known, and significant; were Democrats in truth so eager for the not-Biden; why then were they not surfaced, and decisive, in the primary campaign (or in 2008, or 2012, or in Biden's personal campaigns)?
MC, 27 answers your questions about timing, although the Larry King tape was only just discovered. And Biden is winning only because after South Carolina all his serious rivals except Bloomberg, some at Obama's behest, dropped out and endorsed him to achieve the higher purpose of defeating Sanders.
Candidates who have suspended their campaigns can unsuspend them, and the race can continue.
That's not what would happen, certainly not in the middle of a plague. What would actually happen is that the centrists would call a do-over at the convention in August and Andrew Cuomo would get the nod.
I worry that Warren as VP would essentially render her powerless and lacking in influence over any policy.
32: You know that how? The plague is relevant how, given that voting by mail exists? And even if you're right, how is that a reason Biden shouldn't drop out?
Warren has endorsed Biden, and is apparently on his VP short-list. I doubt she'll be his pick, though. Unfortunately, she's on the wrong side of 70 (because age is NOT "just a number," and if you don't believe ME, just ask the coronavirus...). I think she'd play an important role in his administration. But Biden needs to choose someone well under the age of 70... Or else, of course, an untrained monkey, any untrained monkey will do ...
How about that nice Mayonnaise Peter fellow?
He could make things maximally awkward by naming Buttigieg and then explaining "well, I thought there was a fifty percent chance he was the lady in the relationship."
I have no opinion and kind of don't care. The last three years show that nothing makes sense or matters or works.
I was hoping that he wouldn't get into the race, but it turned out that Biden's principal rivals, Sanders and Bloomberg, were weaker still.
Oh wait no I have a great idea. He should name the anonymous whistle blower and say you only get to find out who it is if I win. I have an incredibly idiotic theory I just made up that the reason races have gotten so close is that what people mostly want is suspense.
35. Age is a factor by itself in Covid-19 risk, but most of the risk is add-ons of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, smoking and others. Many elderly people have one or more of these? What are Warren's co-morbidities? She looks pretty healthy to me.
27-31: I'm agnostic about the truth of Reade's story, but to keep the conversation clear, there are no other accusations of sexual assault against Biden. There were multiple allegations, including from Reade, from women saying that Biden had touched them in ways that, although publicly acceptable, made them feel uncomfortable or maltreated. This is one of the many reasons I wouldn't have voted for him in the primary, but it's distinct from accusations of sexual assault like Reade's current story.
And the Larry King call that seems to be from Reade's mother also says nothing about sexual assault. This is not evidence that the assault Reade describes didn't happen, but it's also not evidence that it did.
Has somebody solved Warren's Charlie Baker problem? If she's the VP (which, SWOON) the new senator from Massachusetts will be Scott Brown.
I get confused by this sort of thing immediately, but I think the appointment is only for five months and then there's a special election. So if she resigned to run for VP in July, there'd be a senatorial election in December: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vacancies-in-the-united-states-senate.aspx
Five months, I could live with. Also, I just discovered in googling Scott Brown that he's our current ambassador to New Zealand.
There's also talk that the legislature could pass a law that requires the appointment to be from the same political party. The advantage of that being Warren wouldn't have to resign until the election result is known so that if god forbid they lose she could keep her seat.
Also an advantage is the MA state party wouldn't fall back on their great track record of nominating people in special elections who think things like, "Why should I bother shaking voters' hands?" It turns out Coakley was just way ahead of her time for social distancing!
24: I don't know much about Whitmer other than that she seems appropriately to be focused on saving lives due to COVID. I really don't think Klobuchar is effective. I dislike her policies, but she also rambles. A LOT.
Do Biden and Warren agree enough for him to want her on the ticket? Abrams might be good.
42 and 45: I think Scott Brown is a NH resident now. He has a house there and ran for the Senate from NH.
Yes, the joke was next he'd move to Maine to run for Collins' seat so he could try to set the record for losing Senate races in the greatest number of different states.
47.1; She's a self-described progressive Dem, strong on abortion and LGBT rights, pretty good on environmental protections, and has been trying to get budget to spend on crumbling infrastructure. Her campaign tagline (a bit distasteful to me) was "Fix the damn roads." She seems very willing to use whatever powers are available to her to move her agenda forward. I think she's done well with pandemic response, and it's raising her profile, but she was a pretty solid governor in a (somehow) important state.
27-31: The recollection of sexual assault is difficult to evaluate by the standard of "always believe the victim," since the victim's statement in 2019 and her statement in 2020 are significantly different. The 2019 version, that Biden sometimes ran his fingers through her hair and made her feel uncomfortable, is consistent with statements of several other women who encountered Biden over the years. It was also publicly known before the primaries. The Larry King recording is consistent with either version, or with lots of other scenarios.
The most recent incident where a leading candidate withdrew after the primaries and before the convention was 1968, when RFK was assassinated during the victory party for the California primary. The 1968 convention did not go well, to say the least, and the Humphrey campaign never recovered. Of course the nomination rules are different now, partly because of that experience, but it's still something to be avoided.
51: Telling part of the story, and then all of the story is pretty standard. She hasn't veered between different versions of the story or said anything that's sounds adlibbed or odd. She certainly has sounded convincing to me in interviews.
The original allegation also sounds like something worse than what happened to Lucy Flores, it's just vague.
https://www.theunion.com/news/nevada-county-woman-says-joe-biden-inappropriately-touched-her-while-working-in-his-u-s-senate-office/
I feel like you would expect some more damning details after reading that. If she didn't seem traumatized at the time, the mother's, brother's and friend's reactions doesn't make sense to me.
I remain agnostic, but I think the 2019 and 2020 stories have to be counted as inconsistent. Going to the media with "Biden touched my neck in a way that made me uncomfortable" and a year later with "Biden digitally raped me," would mean that one or the other of the stories was deceptive even if technically true -- the strong implication of the first story is that there isn't a different much worse story to tell.
The explanation that sexual assault victims often tell a partial story while they're processing the events is certainly something to be taken into account, but you need that to explain the inconsistency -- I don't think you can say there's no inconsistency to explain.
I think that I am unwilling to upend the attempt to get rid of Trump over this allegation. That makes me super uncomfortable with myself - surely I'm an activist and not an incrementalist! - but nope. If Biden is guilty as alleged, then at this moment in time, I'm going for harm mitigation and getting the current Diarrhea Mouth out of office.
My fear would be that there would be ten more allegations that slowly emerge - uh, like there were for Trump - and it would make my position untenable. But for now, I'm going for it.
(On Franken, I came around to the idea that he needed to step down, but it wasn't my first instinct. So maybe I'm just not great on this issue in general.)
Sure is different coverage of Biden vs Kavanaugh. Guess everyone discovers their love of due process when it's one of their own.
And what would be so "incredibly messy" about Biden dropping out?
I feel like this question is disingenuous, and you don't actually want an answer, you're just staking out a rhetorical position. But, to attempt an answer.
1) What are you actually hoping will happen? Are you just hoping for letters to the editor and op-eds calling for Biden to drop out? Are you hoping that Biden will feel guilty and spontaneously drop out? Are you hoping that a coalition of power players within the party will lean on Biden and force him to drop out? In the case of Franken, there was a contingent of his peers who was organized and had enough power to put pressure on him. Biden's doesn't have a group of peers and colleagues in the same way, at the moment, and I'm not sure who would be in a position to force him out (unless, again, Obama publicly coordinated something, which isn't going to happen).
2) What role would you imagine Biden having in the general election campaign? Are you expecting that he would drop out and not be heard from again? Be a high-level campaign surrogate for the eventual nominee? Go on TV regularly but not do in-person events? It seems, again, like a very different circumstance than the one in which Al Franken was pressured to mostly drop out of public view. I don't think Biden would be willing to do that and, equally importantly, I don't think that would feel right to the public -- it would create a noticeable vacuum.
3) What happens with the 1300 delegates currently pledged to Biden. Presumably if he dropped out he would ask to vote for somebody, but almost anybody he could name would cause dissension. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama . . . I would be happy about some of those options and unhappy about others, but whoever he named would be frustrating to a significant number of those pledged delegates.
4) Those 1300 delegates are enough that you'd almost certainly be looking at a contested convention (unless Biden specifically instructed his delegates to support Sanders, which seems unlikely) which would likely end in a back-room deal of some sort which half the party would feel was illegitimate.
I think all of that counts as "incredibly messy"?
I wish I were more surprised by the impulse here to disbelieve a story of assault by a prominent Democratic politician.
Sure is different coverage of Biden vs Kavanaugh. Guess everyone discovers their love of due process when it's one of their own.
It's a little like states rights in that way.
But it's also very different: Trump is also guilty of many sexual assaults. So there is no path to getting someone unproblematic in office.
57: I'm not actually saying I don't believe her, although I do see the temptation. It reduces a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.
VP stuff: The VP should be picked as someone being groomed for a subsequent presidential run. In the last 40 years Dems have taken the Presidency twice, both times with relatively young dynamic candidates. Warren is a hard pass. She's too old and clearly has no idea how to win an election. She has great economic policies but then decided she was running for student body president at Oberlin, with predictable results. Harris likewise has latched onto the SJW thing. Pass. Biden should be looking at someone like Yang or Gabbard. He's already committed to a female VP so if not Gabbard then a charismatic female governor or congresswoman. And no not Abrams. Put the pipe down, she's not helping get votes in a national election at all.
Biden should be looking at someone like Yang or Gabbard.
Totally lost me here. I mean how about someone sane like Castro or Booker?
61: Sure, the point isn't any one specific person, it's someone young with broad appeal. But I also think Gabbard is underrrated around here.
And I would have preferred Biden not do that stupid commitment to a woman up front. Just say you're going to pick who you think is most qualified and then pick a woman. God forbid it look like merit instead of a diversity box being checked off.
61: But neither of the two people you mentioned as examples have broad appeal.
To merge the two elements of this thread, he should select Kristen Gillibrand as running mate.
64: They do, but are basically brand new on the national scene and don't have name recognition or the donor base yet.
Tulsi fucking Gabbard? geezwift. what are you smoking.
I know, God forbid we put up a young attractive articulate brown woman veteran from a liberal state.
I am inspired to muse that people, in general, should try to avoid thinking that candidates who appeal to their specific sense of grievance are broadly appealing, or that they have any insight into what gets votes, especially when, as is these hypothetical people's perennial habit, they make grandiose claims unsupported by any data. One might note that the last presidential elections that Democrats won were characterized by high black turnout. There is plenty of reason to believe that a black candidate *who is liked by black people* would help that on the margins. Actual polling data suggests Abrams does bring votes.
Tulsi Gabbard had the lowest favorability rating of any Democrat during the primaries. If Democrats dislike her, there is no indication she is a plausible future candidate for president; there is no sense in imagining that one should use the years of the vice presidency to rehabilitate someone your core constituency is already hostile to. Women in particular do not seem to like her. I can only imagine that given other topics in this thread, if you are going to nominate a woman VP, it would be helped to pick a woman who is liked and trusted by women, to compensate for some other problems you already have. Polls suggested that Gabbard would have had trouble retaining her House seat had she decided to seek reelection. It is unclear that she has any future in politics right now. The only function of offering her a VP slot would be to rehabilitate her.
Anyway, Yang or Castro should be the VP because unlike these other people *who were more successful in the last elections they ran in* they will bring in votes is just so unutterably stupid I shouldn't even be engaging with it.
68: ...who may be a useful idiot for the Russians, who can say, why bother worrying.
Fine. Let's just keep on with business as usual, which is losing elections.
71: Your gut feelings about how to win them are meaningless. You have no insight, and you are characterologically addicted to making bullshit claims that you do not support.
I like Elizabeth Warren, but I'm smart enough to understand that my sympathies are not the sympathies of America writ large. You're not.
71: yes, the fundamentals are the same in every way from 2016, there has been no meaningful coalition building or momentum for the democrats, and we should resign ourselves to hail marys.
72: Read your own links. The "data" on Abrams bringing votes is based off respondents reading short bios on each person. Why you think that's remotely a predictor to live politics is a mystery.
And that 538 article on Gabbard? The useful info in there isn't her ratings with women, it's her great numbers with conservatives and Democrat primary voters who voted for Trump. We need to flip swing states, not maximize our margins in NY and CA.
Under no circumstances can we have a literal cult member (Science of Identity Foundation), a hardcore Modi genocide supporter, who is likely a Russian asset heartbeat away from the presidency. Are you insane? Are you going to suggest Williamson next? It's been bad enough having one president who's a Russian asset, you want that to be bipartisan?
decided she was running for student body president at Oberlin
The fuck? Because she attacked Bloomberg about his own sexual assault accusation issues? She helped the party avoid a problem 10x worse that what Biden is facing.
Gabbard
Oh, ok, so you are just trolling.
To answer the OP, Biden's VP will surely have better than even odds of being the 2024 nominee and Tammy Baldwin is the only name occasionally being bandied about that would make me feel some optimism for the planet. Warren is very impressive in some ways, but she also let Joe Rospars drive her campaign into the ground, and just generally seems like a mediocre politician with very questionable judgment. Everyone else is a neoliberal or a hack or both.
Both of them would be surprising picks. Harris seems like the likeliest choice from what I can tell. She's awful in so many ways, her record, her judgment, her campaigning skills.
Gabbard is the only major Democrat who would make me consider voting for a republican opponent for president. Gabbard against someone like Romney, Baker, or Holcomb, I'd probably vote Republican.
75: Someone the core Democratic Party constituency hates is not a future viable candidate for the presidency. That is what is established by my links.
My link does not say that it was based on bios. You misunderstood it. The bit about bios was separate research. Here is the original memo. They conducted a poll, not a focus group. They based their analysis on the degree to which Abrams overperformed name recognition, and could drive enthusiasm. Your claim that Abrams does not bring votes is sill wholly unsupported, and is in fact contradicted. There are plenty of black voters, who Democrats need to turn out, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc.
Surely the explanation here is that Russian propaganda has largely taken over police social media? So Trump and Gabbard are the most liked candidates in gswift's circles?
56.3 -- What happens to the delegates for dropped out candidates depends on when the candidates dropped out, nd what kind of delegates they are. District delegates stay with the candidate, and so enter the convention as free agents. State-wide delegates are allocated to remaining candidates, if the candidate dropped out before the selection date for statewide delegates.
I know it's an article of faith in the Sanders movement that the pre-Super Tuesday drop out of moderate candidates who knew they couldn't win was aimed to prevent a Sanders victory. I think, though, that those candidates and the organized party in general viewed Bloomberg as the bigger danger. If Biden drops out, then do we get Bloomberg back? I think he's missed/revoked being on the ballot in a lot of places. Our ballots are already printed, I'm sure, and go out in 10 days or so.
38: You're conflating weakness in the primary with weakness in the general. On your implicit theory, Kerry, Romney, and Hillary had the best chance of anyone in their parties of winning their respective general elections. I'm quite sure that's false.
Kerry and Romney were strong candidates who did well! No one else would have won those elections. Popular incumbents win.
Clinton, I'll give you, O'Malley would have won.
I don't understand how I can have such weak opinions on the VP candidates, and yet have this thread quickly veer to things I have such strong opinions about (Gabbard bad! Kerry good!)
This thread is making me intensely interested in catching a bad case of Covid-19. Anyone know where I can score?
Yang or Castro
This should have read "Yang or Gabbard" but ftm the case for Castro on this score is pretty weak too.
86: "Kerry and Romney were strong candidates who did well! No one else would have won those elections. Popular incumbents win."
Agreed. I mean, incumbents generally win full stop. 27 US presidents have run for re election; 18 have won.
Is Mr F. a new commenter? Fruit basket? The cognomen doesn't seem familiar.
The fuck? Because she attacked Bloomberg about his own sexual assault accusation issues?
I was thinking of stuff like proclaiming a 9 year old trans child would have veto power over her pick for Sec of Education.
86: O'Malley? Pfffft. The election was Jim Webb's to lose.
90: I first commented here about 15 years ago.
I know it's an article of faith in the Sanders movement that the pre-Super Tuesday drop out of moderate candidates who knew they couldn't win was aimed to prevent a Sanders victory. I think, though, that those candidates and the organized party in general viewed Bloomberg as the bigger danger.
This seems right to me. It can't be the case that Sanders' policies were preferred by everyone and yet his only path to victory required the centrists to split their vote among five or six others. Plus, pretty sure Buttigieg, Klo, etc, just ran out of money and did not want Bloomberg grabbing their supporters.
Still don't get Bloomberg's strategy at all. I got SO MANY flyers from him. None from other candidates. One Warren canvasser, but I work with her. I feel like some cardstock company in Utah must have just taken his campaign for a ride.
I had literally thought of posting a comment saying, "Cue gswift saying the problem was her signaling trans inclusion in 3...2...1" and then I just thought I'd wait for him to do it.
77 & 79 are by far the most illuminating comments in this thread.
Not to endorse Yang in particular, of whom I know nothing, but having a Chinese*-American as president would be a non-trivial propaganda win.
*Taiwanese. But if you're UFWD that distinction isn't available to you.
That's an interesting example of what different people's news sources choose to amplify as the outrage of the month. I never heard of that, googling shows that it was a comment at a rally on education, but the top Google hits are Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Real Clear Politics, National Review, Fox News, Daily Wire, The Blaze, Daily Caller; along with a couple education-policy focused sites, and George Takai and another LGBTQ site. So while she said it, I'm sure some people out there believe it's the centerpiece of her plan for staffing the Department of Education.
Pfft, everyone knows it's "Heils Hitler."
95: The socialist and the identity politics cheerleader just got stomped in the primary by an old man who's barely stringing sentences together so perhaps we should entertain the notion that these are not paths to a general election victory.
98: Don't know about the education rally, I saw her say it at an appearance put on by HRC.
Maybe that's what it was. I didn't spend much time reading the Blaze story.
100: He's an old man who is liked by Democrats. You offered someone who isn't liked by Democrats as someone who should be a future presidential candidate. I don't claim to know how to win an election or who would be a good pick. I just think you are a troll who elevates your specific white dude grievance in evidence free fashion every thread he can, claims it's about something larger or more public-spirited than himself, that his opinion is widely shared, and you're once again doing it here. Literally the only case for Gabbard is that she trolls the libs with an extremely thin *solely identity politics* based cover for it. Incidentally, the same poll I linked to shows great enthusiasm among Democrats for Warren as VP, so your white dude grievance didn't turn Democrats against her, whether she maintained primary support or not.
Perhaps not unrelatedly, Andrew Yang was recently the subject of heavy criticism by various POC for saying that Chinese-Americans should demonstrate their Americanness to stop racism, making him another appealing candidate to people with white dude grievance.
Yes, white dude grievance why I'm advocating for a bigger role in the party for a brown woman and an Asian man.
105: That was exactly my point when I said Gabbard offered the thinnest of identity based covers for it. People with white dude grievance who are uncomfortable with this fact about themselves love women and POC who coddle their sense of white dude grievance.
I don't even know what white dude grievance is.
Honestly, Gabbard and Yang? Credit where credit is due: that's pretty good trolling, man!
107: No one is aware of the air they breathe.
Coincidentally, I was just musing to myself the other day about what bob mcmanus makes of the current state of the world. Is he delighted that society may be teetering dangerously close to collapse? Or is he terrified that he's more vulnerable to the virus than Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang? Why choose, I suppose.
109: Reality is that a large chunk of voters who voted for Obama then turned around and voted for Trump. We need those votes back. Maybe those two aren't the best picks. But if we don't get those votes back we're going to lose again.
In addition, a surefire way to not get those votes back is to call them racists.
My theory is that the small number of people of any party affiliation or voting history who have heard of Tulsi Gabbard and like her would respond to her being the VP candidate by saying "Really? They think throwing me this slimmest of bones will get my vote? They're pathetic" like the way the NYPD treats Bill de Blasio's nonstop attempts to pander to them.
Democrats did quite well in the last election, and the last presidential election would have been a landslide except for the Comey letter, so it's not at all clear that we need to do anything to get those votes back, especially if we nominate candidates who aren't as unpopular as Clinton. All the serious VP candidates are basically fine, and voters don't actually care about VP anyway. It's just very very unlikely that the VP nomination is going to swing the election either way.
I like Susan Rice. Warren and Harris would be wasted in the VP slot; they are more able to move things forward in a Democratic majority Senate which we may very well have.
we need someone with foreign policy experience to fix our damaged standing in the world - Biden's not going to be flitting off to Europe or Asia when the domestic economy is in tatters.
112/113: If you were actually interested in electoral strategy, your behavior would be different. You'd be interested in polling, you'd be considering different kinds of coalitions, you'd be looking into whose turnout drove electoral victories for Democrats in 2018, etc., etc. But you don't. You never show any sign of being interested in information at all. You are just intensely concerned that white ppl who are all about their grievance have their interests catered to and not be called racist. There is no sign this conclusion has resulted from any engagement with information, and every sign that it is exactly consistent with your emotional reaction to "SJW"'s efforts for justice and inclusion, which you show up with all over the place, and then try to retreat to saying it's about Democrats winning elections when called on your bullshit.
VW is right that you are a skilled troll, though.
It's also weird to me that he isn't satisfied with Joe Biden. Isn't he the laboratory perfect candidate for appealing to Obama/Trump voters? If nominating Biden doesn't bring them back, nothing (short of repealing the 22nd ammendment) will.
I will take seriously the desire to get Obama/Trump voters to vote for Obama's party again, but I presume almost all of them are in the category "Will vote for Trump again, because they like Trump" or "would vote for almost any Democrat, but really really hated Hillary Clinton". If nominating Obama's beloved sidekick doesn't get them to vote for Democrats again, what possibly could?
Sure most of them are in one of those two camps, but what about the ones who don't like Trump, but would just have to vote for him if the alternative is the incoming secretary of education doing a photo op with a trans kid?
118: I'm fine with Biden and think he's good for winning back swing states. He needs to hold it together in the debates though. If starts sounding like he's sliding towards dementia that's going to be a problem.
Maybe it's just my white grievance talking. I'll have to ask Tia who has apparently been vested with the power to dictate my motives.
115 is correct, VP picks are either neutral (almost all) or negative (Palin). They so nothing to improve a candidate's chances. But it's still entertaining to argue about since we're all in the 99th percentile of people giving a shit about politics. Plus Biden is statistically closer to death than many previous candidates.
That said, re 116.1, I think the value of Warren as VP depends on what deal she makes if Biden asks her. If she gets to drive things like financial or housing policy she's much more valuable there than in a totally dysfunctional Senate where either McConnell is in charge or best case you have to convince Joe Manchin to support your bill with his deciding vote.
As far as white grievance, I'll give an earnest response even though that might be a mistake. There was a recent column by someone attacking liberals kowtowing to PC LWBTQ+ SJWs by saying how ridiculous Bernie was giving his pronouns at some gathreing earlier this year. "Of course we know Bernie is he/him," our tell-it-like-it-is correspondent wrote. "What a joke/pander that he thinks it's important to tell everyone!" Which completely misses the point but embodies white grievance- He's giving his pronouns to us his privilege of it "being obvious" to normalize it, so that people who do have to give them don't stand out and feel shame about doing so. White grievance: it's not fair that anyone should have to make any additional effort so maybe others don't feel like shit.
Yes, I do have a fairly close trans relative, and while I like to think I'm empathetic enough to support marginalized groups regardless, it helps to know someone experiencing the challenges that most people never have to think about.
To quote Ashley Feinberg, i'm not fixing the typos all of you can go to hell
41: Thanks for the clarification.
49: Why would Brown run against Maine's Republican senator rather than its Democratic-caucusing independent one, or, earlier, Olympia Snowe?
51: What reason is there to think that the nominee who emerges from a contested convention after Biden drops out would do worse than Biden would? Trump's going to spend September and October running ads with the audio of Tara Reade and her mother and others who've credibly attested to Biden's predatorial behavior.
54: I think that I am unwilling to upend the attempt to get rid of Trump over this allegation
What I'm suggesting is that you're upending that attempt by not demanding that Biden drop out.
56: (1) Everyone who wants Trump to lose should pressure Biden to drop out. Once we get this ball rolling, it can easily turn into an avalanche. (2) No role, much like Franken or any of the countless other men who have dropped out of elections for this reason. (3) See 84.1. This isn't a serious objection. (4) See my reply to 51 above.
84: I think, though, that those candidates and the organized party in general viewed Bloomberg as the bigger danger.
If you're right, that was quite silly of them.
If Biden drops out, then do we get Bloomberg back?
No, partly for the reasons you give in 84.2.
86: Kerry and Romney were extraordinarily uninspiring candidates, nominated precisely for their blandness and centrism. Each was a mistake.
I think it's a mistake to frame anti-trans messaging as "white grievance", it's popular with men regardless of gender. Trump is a relatively popular republican among black men. It's about masculinity, not whiteness.
Sorry "men regardless of race" is clearly what that was meant to say.
Your behavior shows your motives, gswift. I'm just making it very explicit so that you can't do this without, at minimum, someone pointing out what is happening.
49 was retelling a half-remembered joke, it wasn't meant to be logical.
Kerry and Romney were extraordinarily uninspiring candidates, nominated precisely for their blandness and centrism.
See, a lot of this seems like media narrative to me. Certainly Kerry wasn't as inspiring as a "first" like Obama or Hillary, but he (and Gore!) weren't nearly as white toast as the media portrayed them. It was choices about coverage- Kerry happens to have two somewhat unusual hobbies that I share, hockey and windsurfing, and rather than "cool, older guy is a pretty good athlete!" or whatever might have been said if GWB did the same, it was about how elitist he was. I didn't like Romney's policies but I'll make the same defense on his behalf. What an awkward stiff, spending time with his adult kids!
I got a very tiny peek behind the media curtain in 2004, when I worked the DNC as a volunteer. I was in the media building across the street during Kerry's acceptance speech, which I thought went over pretty well. As soon as it was over I heard two world-weary media types talking about it- "anything new? Nope, followed the script, everything expected." It's all narrative to people who do this every day and see the same stump speech every day- how boring, they tell the same story and same joke every stop on the tour! Never thinking about people who stood in line three hours for one chance to see a candidate who maybe interests them.
Incidentally on the way back to the T after that I was walking right next to Mickey Kaus and to this day I regret that I didn't take the opportunity to call him a dipshit to his face.
125- Fair enough, I guess I was making an overall point about majority status and privilege, not just the white kind.
Right, my original formulation was white dude grievance. Obviously there are people who are more powerfully motivated by whiteness, people who are more motivated by dudeness, and people who are motivated by, I dunno, what's the complementary color to lavender?
It's not just masculinity, though. My mom and my aunt are motivated by whiteness and straightness while self identifying as feminists.
Canonically, isn't he a goatfucker?
I think a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon is that although he has absolutely zero of the traditional masculine virtues (like "straight-shooter" or "man of his word" or brave or skilled with his hands) he completely embodies most of the traditional masculine vices (bullying, blowing off your responsibilities to go golfing, cheating on your wife with porn stars, sexual assault, bullshitting, misogyny, impatience). This is why he's very appealing to people who place a huge emphasis on the importance of masculinity, and also why this popularity is so confusing since none of the appeal is coming from the admirable aspects of traditional masculinity.
That may have actually been pre-goatfucker google bomb.
And let me chime in with total agreement with the proposition that Gabbard for VP is so colossally dumb that I sincerely hope it's conscious trolling.
The Tara Reade stuff is pretty convincing, you have to come up with a story where she was lying in 93, or she told her Mom something that wasn't nearly as bad and her Mom wildly overreacted on national television, and for some reason she's now lying about what she told her Mom. ( Also her brother is lying about what she said?). Seems like pretty motivated thinking.
But whatever, they party got the candidate it wanted, they can figure it out.
133: what's really confusing is that dude Trump fans either trollingly (actually that would make sense) or sincerely assert that Democrat women secretly find him attractive. I guess this is a fantasy in which indulging in every shitty behavior gets you more of what you want?
I think "her mom wildly overreacted" is not founded. That is, think of the things people have said about Klobuchar as a boss, none of which are sexual assault, and think whether they'd support someone's mother thinking they should go to the press -- it seems to me obvious that they would. Assuming the Larry King call was Reade's mother, I don't think the call is inconsistent with the 2019 story.
I guess that's possible, but Tara was taking a pretty big hostage to fortune that her Moms call wasn't going to contradict the lie she made up 25 years after telling her Mom something else.
The Tara Reade stuff is pretty convincing, you have to come up with a story where she was lying in 93, or she told her Mom something that wasn't nearly as bad and her Mom wildly overreacted on national television, and for some reason she's now lying about what she told her Mom
Clearly we are all engaging in motivated reasoning, but for the same reason it's not hard to imagine "some reason" why someone would try to lie to swing the result of the Presidential election. I mean, the Presidential election is important. Maybe she wants Trump to win the election. Or someone who wants Trump to win the election is giving her $10 million dollars.
Probably not. All we have is the timing being extremely convenient for Republicans. Much like the Kavanaugh situation. Maybe there is a similar explanation to the Kavanaugh situation, which was apparently that Dianne Feinstein's office was told about Blasey Ford's accusations much earlier, and then did nothing out of cowardice until the last minute, and then got worried that it would leak anyway, so tried to maintain control over the leak somehow.
My specific motivated reasoning is that Kavanaugh had absolutely zero importance for the Republican Party, and could have easily been replaced by someone else without anyone caring except the Kavanaugh family, whereas it is not clear how Biden could be induced to not become the Democratic nominee, or what the millions of people expecting to vote for him would do if that happened.
Tara was shopping the story around to fraudulent "me-too" foundations at the beginning of the year when Biden was in 5th place. The big complaint is she should of made the more serious accusation last April, but her behavior makes sense to me.
The timing is really frustrating and upsetting. It seems pretty likely she's telling the truth, or at least something very close to the truth. Honestly it's frankly implausible that Biden, a 77-year old man who has had outsized power most of his life, who has a long history of defending sexual harrassers, and a long history of lower-level complaints, hasn't sexually assaulted anyone. I wouldn't have voted for him in the primary, and if someone primaries him in 2024 over this I'd be likely to vote against him. If he were up against a republican who had a better record on sexual harassment and assault this might be a reason to vote against him. But as it is, it's all just a tragedy that there's not really anything anyone can do about because the allegations came out too late for anyone to do anything in response. There's just no plausible mechanism for removing him and replacing him with someone else. This isn't like Franken where he could just resign and be replaced by the governor, or Kavanaugh where you can withdraw and nominate someone else.
I don't even know what white dude grievance is.
In addition, a surefire way to not get those votes back is to call them racists.
Allow me to put on my "pedantic middle-aged white guy explains things in a slightly patronizing way"* hat for a moment.
It's unclear how much you're unaware of the larger discussions about identity politics, and how much you're aware and trolling. But let me start from a very basic level. The term "identity politics" originated in the context of:
[An] emergence of large-scale political movements--second wave feminism, Black Civil Rights in the U.S., gay and lesbian liberation, and the American Indian movements, for example--based in claims about the injustices done to particular social groups. These social movements are undergirded by and foster a philosophical body of literature that takes up questions about the nature, origin and futures of the identities being defended.
Opponents of the idea have often used to term as an insult to describe things that, reputedly, only appeal to minority groups or appeal in crass or divisive ways. In response to that it has been noted that while "identity politics" may have originated among groups protesting injustice that members of the majority also engage in identity politics, in all sorts of ways -- both overt and subtle, but those are mostly not described as "identity politics."
One particularly blatent example is this famous ad against Howard Dean (seriously, go watch it, it's only 30 seconds long), in which Dean is described as being part of a , "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." The point of that description isn't to argue that Dean supports bad policies, it's to establish an "us" and a "them" and to assert that people who are part of the "us" won't just vote against Dean they should be offended or disgusted at Dean and the coalition that he represents.
Comments that Warren, "decided she was running for student body president at Oberlin" or "[proclaimed that] a 9 year old trans child would have veto power over her pick for Sec of Education." serve a similar function. They are, essentially saying that Warren is part of the "New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show."
This is different than just saying that Warren made political errors, or tried a strategy which didn't work. There are plenty of people on unfogged and in the world at large who would be happy to debate political strategy and electability**.
What makes it, "white dude grievance" is saying things that come across as, "anybody who says anything which would mark white dudes as a 'them' is making a mistake and should behave differently." That's not to say that you can win an election with the support of (some) white dudes. It's necessary that any winning Democrat be able to appeal to white dudes as part of the "us" that makes up the democratic electorate. Anybody who doesn't succeed in that is going to fail. But, it should be possible to operate on more than one political tone. It should be possible to both appeal to white dudes and to still have parts of the campaign and parts of the message which are targeted at minorities. It's possible that those parts of the message may not resonate which white dudes, or feel a little forced or like pandering -- but a candidate needs to be able to do that as well. Part of what it means to be part of a party which represents a coalition of various different groups is that not every message is targeted at every group.
"White dude grievance" is saying that all messages should be targeted at white dudes (or at least tuned to not turn off white dudes), and you do come across that way in some of these debates.
* I'm saying this to flag that I'm sincerely trying to be helpful, not patronizing, but I understand the risk that it might not come across that way.
** For example, Sean McElwee.
Again, Warren and Sanders chose not to invest heavily in polling or focus groups. They crafted powerful messages, and they executed well, but those messages didn't hit the Democratic electorate. That's why we do message testing and survey research! I'm a college-educated 18-to-34-year-old urban professional, so I'm a tiny percentage of the electorate. I'd be pretty surprised if what appealed to me appealed to the modal American voter. The modal American voter is noncollege and over 50. People like me have to stop trusting our instincts. We should make ads that nonpolitical voters want to see, not ads that we want to see. Go look at the ads by [Alabama Democratic senator] Doug Jones or [Michigan Democratic governor] Gretchen Whitmer; they might not seem appealing on social media but they move votes.
Yeah. When I say I'm agnostic, it's because there's a lot on both sides of this one. On the pro side, there's her story which is somewhat supported by her brother (that is, I understand she says she protected him from the full story when she told him something happened in Biden's office in the 90s) and by the friend who will talk to reporters but is staying anonymous. And there's the general presumption about sexual assault survivors that partial or delayed or incomplete or inconsistent stories aren't necessarily discrediting.
On the con side is the inconsistency, which while it's not necessarily discrediting is still something negative; the missing complaint she says she made at the time but that there's no record of; and the timing for maximum fucking with the primary, which is a substantial motive.
The Larry King call doesn't seem like much on either side to me -- I'm not clear on how certain it is that it is her mother, but regardless it doesn't say more than that her daughter believed she had a grievance against a senator. Saying that she considered going to the press rather than the police is an underreaction for sexual assault -- that doesn't make the call evidence against the sexual assault version, but it's not powerful evidence for it.
This gets me to really not having a belief one way or the other about what happened, and therefore not feeling like I can reasonably take action.
I think if there were a reasonable simple action to be taken, not having a strong belief one way or the other would be enough reason to take that action. It's just not that important that Biden be president instead of Sanders or Whitmer or whoever. It's just not clear to me in this case what action is actually possible.
40: Warren looks pretty healthy to me, as well. I mean, if I didn't already know her age (70), and someone told me she was 60, I would believe it. I just don't think it's a great idea to have both the president and the VP in their seventies.
This is just a personal anecdote, and not at all medico-scientific data, of course, but: my mother was a very 'young' and active 71-year old when she was diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer. Prior to the fatal diagnosis ... my (then 9-year old) son: "My Nan doesn't seem like a 'grandmother': she's young and she makes people laugh;" hairstylist at the fancy spa where I took my mum as a Christmas present, 5 months before her diagnosis: "Your mother is a real hottie! I can't believe she's 71..." My mother died 18 months after the initial diagnosis, at the age of 73.
My sense (which is hardly a medically sound, peer-reviewed series of recommendations, to say the least...), is that while healthy living and healthy habits can get you to age 70, once you're into your seventies, it's a bit of a crap shoot.
And I guess I'm just seriously annoyed by the "age is just a number" brigade (formerly marshaled on behalf of Hugh Hefner; more recently marshaled on behalf of Bernie Sanders). It's anti-science, and it reminds me of the anti-vaxxers in its stubborn defiance of bio-material reality...
142: "No plausible mechanism"? How about this: we pressure him to drop out until he does.
What does "pressure" mean? There's not really any leverage, he already has the nomination wrapped up. The only leverage is lots of people voting for Trump instead, which he knows isn't going to happen. Plus there's the problem of picking a replacement, which again is a disaster because there's no clear mechanism for doing so. The delegates picking the nominee would be seen as democratically illegitimate, much like the electoral college picking a different president due to a late-breaking news story would be. It'd be a huge mess.
"No plausible mechanism"? How about this: we pressure him to drop out until he does.
Just as a point of reference -- there have been multiple points during the campaign in which there was pressure on one or another candidate to drop out (most obviously Warren before Super Tuesday, and Sanders after Super Tuesday), how effective would you say that was?
Publicity is the leverage. A breaking point can be reached. See 124 for my response to your worries about the convention. Humphrey lost very narrowly.
149: That pressure wasn't due to criminal activity.
145 is right. That is, the hair-touching allegations were enough, along with the rest of his career, to make me think of him as pretty close to my last choice in the primary (still ahead of Gabbard!), and this would also have been enough for that. But at this point I don't see any reasonable route for him not to be the nominee, unless he drops out voluntarily.
147: What's your sense of the possible downsides of this if it doesn't work, and what's your sense that it will work?
Mine are huge, and zero.
153: See 124, and it's certainly worth a shot. If we don't talk about it now, we're certainly going to be talking about it all autumn.
I don't think it's worth a shot, and I don't think we'll be talking about it all autumn, because of how many people Trump has assaulted.
"Once we get this ball rolling, it'll turn into an avalanche?" Good luck with that. I don't think there are any Biden-first-choice voters here, but there are a whole lot in the electorate, and they're not going to jump on the bandwagon without a less ambiguous story. And unfortunately I don't see any potential at all for any additional evidence that would resolve the ambiguity.
Average life expectancy of a woman who has reached age 70 is 86, and that's not considering social class or that she'll have the best medical care in the world.
And you don't think there's any potential downside. This seems mistaken to me.
(That's not an America Fuck Yeah healthcare statement, senior government officials really do have the best you can possibly get.)
Humphrey was running as a de facto incumbent, not a challenger. Losing that election had really really bad consequences. Losing the next one would be incalcuably worse.
Biden dropping out and Sanders stepping in, despite having been pretty decisively rejected, especially by black voters, doesn't at all strike me as a winning play.
An unsuccessful movement to get Biden out is the only thing better for Trump than actually getting Biden out.
155: We certainly will. Trump will seize on this and refuse to let it go. He s very effective at attacking his enemies for things they have done wrong that he has done worse. What happens is: Trump notes bad things Democrats have done and his criticism rings true because he is RIGHT. Then Democrats, knowing he has a point, are left calling him a hypocrite. But they've completely lost the moral high ground. They can't even claim to be anti-assault.
156: The evidence is stronger than that against Kavanaugh. That should be enough.
If we just talk all year about how irresponsible Hillary was with her information security practices, she'll step aside and let someone else without as much baggage win.
LB is right, you may wonder how anyone could support Biden but clearly there are millions who are passionate about him and they'll be just as pissed if something like that happens as Bernie's supporters are who think he got jacked.
I think Trump isn't likely to take that line of attack because he knows it'll make Biden more popular rather than less popular with swing voters in the midwest. See 133.
158: The downside of pressuring Biden now pales in comparison to the downside of his being the nominee, as I have repeatedly explained.
161, 162: This appears to me to both misjudge the weight of the evidence and the plausible belief of the public in what the weight of the evidence is.
165: What's your guess of the odds of success in pressuring Biden out of the nomination? Considering that you have to get actual Biden supporters on your side? 50-50? Better? Worse?
160: My point in bringing up the narrowness of Humphrey's loss is that whoever emerges from a contested convention this year is not likely to lose to Trump, who is the least popular incumbent since Carter. I responded to your other points in 26.
163: This violation of the analogy ban is extremely egregious.
164: Of course he will. There is no potentially fruitful line of attack he won't take.
167: Regardless of the odds of success, it should be done, for the reasons I have given, so your question is irrelevant.
Our last nominee wasn't likely to lose to Trump either.
As weak as Biden might be, the available alternatives are worse. We had two dozen to choose from, and we didn't, in my opinion, get the best one. But I think we *are* stuck. I'm not right now afraid that Biden is going to lose because of this. Although with enough work, you and folks who agree with you may be able to make it so.
166: No, the allegation against Biden is worse than that against Kavanaugh, and also more believable, given how we've seen Biden behave toward women for decades.
172: Biden is so weak that he is the only nominee with a decent chance of losing to Trump, and folks like you who refuse to pressure him to drop out may be able to make it so.
165: and literally nobody here thinks you're right. But rather than that giving you pause, you keep using words like "certainly" when you have absolutely no idea what the future holds. I'm about as skeptical of Biden's candidacy as anyone I know, and you're doing nothing other than making me consider sending him some money (I won't).
171: Okay, you're either an idiot or you don't think Biden in office is importantly preferable to Trump. But I repeat myself.
Kavanaugh was obviously lying about so many things on stand, which is disqualifying for a judge even if the allegations were false, and makes me entirely disregard his testimony. Also in Kavanaugh's case there were several direct witnesses who weren't called. I believe the Biden allegations, but I think the evidence in the Kavanaugh case was much much higher.
175: I am arguing my case in an adversarial way. It's true that I don't know my claims about the future are true, but I believe them pretty strongly, and haven't yet been given good reasons not to by anyone here who disagrees with them (none of whom can claim knowledge of the future either).
176: No, neither. Perhaps you are an idiot? The odds of success don't matter when the effort, if it fails, will not appreciably damage Biden's candidacy, given how Trump will handle the matter in the fall.
177: It was indeed obvious that Kavanaugh lied when questioned about Ford's allegation. It was not obvious that Ford's allegation was true, and we know nothing of his behavior toward women comparable to what we know about Biden's.
The evidence that Kavanaugh would take his dick out at parties in college is overwhelming. You're really not doing your argument any favors here.
178: You've given zero evidence that Biden can be persuaded to relinquish the nomination (you haven't even offered a mechanism, other than phantasmagorical pressure, for persuading him to do so). You've given zero evidence that were Biden to relinquish the nomination, there's a viable alternative to him waiting out there to carry the Democratic standard. You've given zero evidence that you appreciate the consequences of this election. You've given zero evidence that you're capable of any kind of argumentation other than by assertion.
I have no idea if you're an idiot or a troll or both (or maybe, if I'm being more generous than you've given me any reason to be, someone deeply committed to the idea that Biden, who I have no problem believing engaged in numerous episodes of sexual misconduct through the years, is such a grave threat to the republic that he must be stopped, and the first step to stopping him must be convincing a bunch of weirdos on a nearly defunct blog that they have to join your movement). I guess it doesn't much matter, as you've helped me procrastinate for about fifteen minutes. What you haven't done, again, is make any dent in my faith that we're stuck with Biden, that Biden is so much better than Trump that there's nothing to be done but our best to get the addled codger (from Delaware) elected president, and that we have to hope he chooses a relatively decent vice president who can run and win in four years.
181: That evidence was not brought up in the hearings. Most of it came out after he was confirmed.
And now you're moving the goalposts. Okay, it's trolling day at unfogged. Let's see if we can get this thread to 1,000! For god and queen and country!
182: I do not think a Biden presidency is a grave threat. I think a Biden nomination is, because he could well lose to Trump, unlike almost any other Democrat. I do not have to give the kinds of evidence you mention to make a strong argument that he should be pressured to drop out. Which I have done.
184: How have I moved the goalposts? Please say what you mean when commenting. It saves time.
In 183 you've moved the goalposts from your previous contentions about Kavanaugh and Biden. Please be a better troll. It wastes more time.
I see a long thread on an interesting topic and dive into it only to find that it's mostly responding to two different lines of trolling. Yup, it's still 2020.
God, must every disagreement here end with an accusation of the other person acting in bad faith?
It's lazy and stupid.
187: No, I have not moved the goalposts. During Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings we knew far less about his behavior toward women than we do now about Biden's, during the election. And the allegation against Biden is worse than that against Kavanaugh.
189: It is quite disappointing. I expected better.
weirdos on a nearly defunct blog
Tough but fair.
God, must every disagreement here end with an accusation of the other person acting in bad faith?
It's lazy and stupid.
Just for the record, 143 was not an accusation of bad faith -- I say specifically because it did take more time and effort to respond in a way which was sincere and trying to engage.
175: I am arguing my case in an adversarial way.
The question is why are you doing that? You've established that we're not going to convince you, fair enough, but why not attempt to convince or persuade any of us?
193: I was absolutely not talking about you.
189 and 191: at least one of you has been around here long enough to know that this place has really high standards when it comes to trolling. You have to do better if you want to avoid dishonoring greats like Bitch PhD, what's his face (the leftier-than-thou dude who I quite liked), and Bob McManus. You're not even working at PGD's level right now, guys!
193.1: gswift wasn't referring to 143.
193.2: I am attempting to persuade you. I didn't realize I would be more persuasive if I left out words like "certainly." That's a good lesson. I guess you, LizardBreath, SP, and Spike shouldn't have used that word either if you wanted to persuade me.
The only plausible replacement is Sanders and at least a faction of the Dems would rather lose to Trump than win with Sanders, and so the unity needed to displace Biden isn't there. Now Biden is mind meltingly weak, but there is a chance things get so bad he squeaks in there anyways. Most likely we end up with another Trump term and the collective wisdom is "incumbent presidents are unbeatable" instead of "weak candidate but not her fault" we got with Hillary.
We had a second chance to nominate Sanders who could beat Trump, but well old people on welfare hate young people who aren't so here we are.
195: I'm pretty sure mcmanus believed everything he said, insofar as he could be said to have believed anything. Anyway, I also believe what I'm saying, and I don't understand why you're asserting otherwise, let alone making bizarre claims such as that I think the "first step to stopping him must be convincing a bunch of weirdos on a nearly defunct blog that they have to join [my] movement." Is this not a forum for discussion? I came here to discuss something I think quite important.
197: I agree with you entirely except about Sanders being the only plausible replacement. When no candidate has a majority on the first convention ballot, all bets are off.
WTF, my only use of "certainly" was saying that Kerry wasn't as inspiring as the potential first black or first woman president, which was agreeing with you. I'm done for the night.
198: I'm almost offended on Bob's behalf by that. Bob, unpleasant though he was, was a goddamn artist with the trolling. If he'd actually believed what he was saying there wouldn't have been any craftsmanship about it at all.
I do think gswift believes what he's saying in a sense. You can believe what you say and be trolling. I think it is of primary importance to gswift to express white dude grievance, which ought to be trolling relative to shared values around here, and I think his dressing it up as concern for the fate of the Democrats is half sincere: it's an internal accommodation he's made to the discomfort he feels. Rather than just accepting he's an aggrieved white dude who resents small gains by and accommodations for others, he wants to see himself as public spirited, so that's the story he tells himself and us.
Like, I think gswift is dumb enough to think VP should be VP because his gut feeling is that something is electorally efficacious if it makes him feel good. Getting a rise out of libs makes him feel good. This he is both trolling and sincere.
200: Sorry, SP. I just don't understand the objection to my style of argumentation. I have no objection to your use of "certainly."
*Gabbard should be VP.
I should stop typing on my phone.
198: OK, maybe so. But you must admit he was a complex case.
182: a nearly defunct blog? but I just got here!
201: Bob McM was indeed an artist of the troll genre.
- I am still waiting for Emerson to come back, he gave good comment.
As for the rest: Biden is not going to bail so why argue about it? He is definitely not my preferred candidate but as Kang and Kodos put it, what are you going to do? It's a two party system.
I feel like adding that he's not the only one who ever expresses white dude grievance around here. I like and enjoy the comments of some of the people who sometimes do it! The world is full of occasionally obnoxious white dudes and I try to take the good with the bad. It's just an extremely high percentage of his comments, and the other people who sometimes do it are more inclined to engage with information and data. It's something else for him to call anyone else lazy in argument, when he never supports a claim. He is a challenging presence in the way Bret Stephens is "challenging".
As for VP presumably it's Harris or Klobuhar, my guess is Klobuchar.
Harris I could live with. Warren in my wildest dreams. I don't know enough about Stacy Abrams, but I could be convinced.
I'm not thrilled with Biden, but he's not an unusually weak nominee. Trump's been obviously pretty worried about his candidacy, and the election comes down to what the Rust Belt thinks, and they like Biden.
It's true that I don't know my claims about the future are true, but I believe them pretty strongly,
Well, okay, sure, that's a pretty convincing line of argument ...
Look, like it or not, Biden is the Democratic nominee. Do I, do most of us (just about all of us, I'd guess) wish that the Democrats had chosen a better nominee? Of course! But Biden is the nominee, and Bernie Sanders is never going to be the nominee. Bernie has been soundly defeated, not once but twice, by actual Democratic voters (and no, it's not just a nefarious "conspiracy" on the part of an apparently all-powerful DNC: the voters had their say, and the voters rejected him).
At this point, if you're attacking Biden, and attempting to rat-f*ck him with very thinly-sourced and highly dubious claims of sexual misconduct, you're basically on Team Trump.
(For the record, I do not think that Democrats did the right thing in pressuring/bullying Al Franken to resign. Not without a full and complete investigation into the allegations.)
I think there is a mechanism by which Biden could be convinced he needed to step down. What it would require is pressure from organized women's groups, with not even the slightest whiff of any hint of cheerleading from Sanders bitter-enders. That is, it's not just Obama, even if it would ultimately more or less require him to join the movement.
The thing is, just like with Bill Clinton -- and just like with evangelical support of the egregious sinner Trump -- the people leading the organized women's movement is likely to make the calculation that overlooking the flaws/misconduct of an individual is justified given the broader context.
I'm not among the folks who think you don't believe what you're saying. I also don't find persuasive at all your hand-waving away what seem to me to be the obvious risks of either successfully or unsuccessfully getting Biden to resign. It would not be surprising to me if the same calculation re downside risks I'm making wasn't fairly widely shared among the people who could actually get Biden to consider dropping out.
202: Jesus, the ego on you.
Read the quote at the end of 143. It's the exact argument I'm making with the Oberlin crack and 100. None of this has a damn thing to do with whiteness or resentment. It's about facing the reality of who actually shows up to vote. Across all races, they're just not very socially liberal. I thought Warren would be a way better candidate than Biden and she ruined it with incompetence.
I think gswift is dumb enough to think VP should be VP because his gut feeling is that something is electorally efficacious if it makes him feel good.
I think that someone who co-sponsored the House versions of both Bernie's Medicare for all and free college bills and wants to end overseas military interventions but also has good cross aisle appeal is someone the party should be cultivating and not shitting on.
217: That writer is the same person who is arguing for Stacey Abrams as VP for her ability to drive Democratic enthusiasm and black turnout. It would seem that his position is not the same as yours.
217: That writer is the same person who is arguing for Stacey Abrams as VP for her ability to drive Democratic enthusiasm and black turnout. It would seem that his position is not the same as yours.
And maybe I'm wrong about Abrams. But that has nothing to do with the fact that two of our three leading candidates couldn't be bothered to tailor their message to actual voters. That's literally their one job.
It's fine to debate the performance of Warren, Sanders, etc. Many people here will happily do it. But McElwee's point was not about identity politics. I read the whole interview when it came out, and found it insightful. Certainly Sanders' messaging didn't fail because of appeals to identity politics. There are lots of ways to criticize Warren's performance without sounding so entrenched in WMG. You don't manage.
Does the question of whether someone is trolling or not hinge on whether they believe the things they're saying? I never saw it that way. I thought trolling--of which there are many kinds, obviously, all represented well here through the years--typically hinged on whether the troll was interested in seeing more heat rather than light.
So, my view was that in this conversation Mr. F, after his initial call for Biden to be forced out of the nomination didn't get much traction, became more interested in getting under people's skin than in winning them over with a thoughtful argument. And gswift, as has been the case for years now, is so pissed off at what he perceives to be the left (maybe the academic left? Or the lifestyle left?), which he associates with this place, that he makes "cracks" about trans people and about Oberlin College, comments that he knows are going to piss people off rather than lead to informed discussion. That's trolling, isn't it?
We're not getting to 1,000 unless there's a meta side discussion, I figure.
I disagree with gswift on a number of issues (Tulsi Gabbard?! are you even serious? why not cut to the chase and nominate Vladimir Putin instead?!)...
But gswift is not "dumb," and he's not a troll, and he's been commenting here long enough that he doesn't deserve to be treated like some sort of beyond-the-pale pariah...
No clue if 226 is directed at me. If it is, I'm not sure what to say other than I don't think gswift is dumb. I've never thought that. I do, though, think he's trolling. I'm perfectly happy to be told I'm wrong but would prefer not to have words put in my mouth.
I think he demonstrates the "something seems good to me, thus I will claim my feelings are broadly shared and I can generalize from my perceptions to make big claims on the basis of no evidence" cognitive bias, which I shorthanded as dumb. Somewhat ironically, this is exactly what Sean McElwee was arguing against. I make no claim that my perceptions are broadly shared, only that persistent, whiny WDG should be considered trolling on this blog.
a bunch of weirdos on a nearly defunct blog
"Nearly defunct" hurts. I've been functing this place steadily for over ten years.
227: Absolutely not, VW. My 226 was aimed at Tia, with whom I am in basic agreement, only I think she's going too hard against gswift.
Anyway, let's keep endlessly, hopelessly arguing about American politics, if only to distract ourselves from the deadly menace of COVID-19...
229: I meant no offense! You're the most funct!
330: absolutely. This conversation has been a welcome distraction from the absolute bullshit that is work at the moment. Holy fuck, please let's keep talking about anything other than whether we're opening again in the fall.
Somewhat ironically, this is exactly what Sean McElwee was arguing against.
Not ironic, intentional (just poorly sign-posted on my part). I was reminded of the interview by your comment upthread about, " You'd be interested in polling, you'd be considering different kinds of coalitions, you'd be looking into whose turnout drove electoral victories for Democrats in 2018, etc., etc." since that is precisely what McElwee is doing. I quote that bit to demonstrate that he is somebody engaging with the questions that gswift was asking, but with the goal of trying to figure out how to communicate those ideas more effectively, not to browbeat.
232: I was actually thinking of that interview in the comment, so it made sense that you were reminded. I guess it's like rain on your wedding day. (Dollars to donuts gswift did not bother to click through.)
gswift, as has been the case for years now, is so pissed off at what he perceives to be the left (maybe the academic left? Or the lifestyle left?), which he associates with this place, that he makes "cracks" about trans people and about Oberlin College, comments that he knows are going to piss people off rather than lead to informed discussion. That's trolling, isn't it?
Ah, I think of trolling as taking a position just to create discord, but I get where you're coming from. I definitely have a tendency to make jabs at stuff that irritates me. Although I will point out, I didn't make a crack about trans people, I pointed out something Warren actually said. The Oberlin comment was totally a jab and I regret nothing.
I think she's going too hard against gswift.
Eh, no biggie.
Yes, I've read McElwee before. Don't agree with him on everything but he seems like a smart guy and pragmatic for someone in their mid 20's.
229: Your resistance against the social media algorithmic onslaught is deeply appreciated. Really.
231: My son, currently a freshman at Temple, has had his entire college experience upended by the coronavirus. He is very much a child of privilege, and he will basically
be okay. So: no violins. But he won't be living the kind of college life that I had always hoped for him.
Lots of smaller colleges will not make it
through this shut-down, they just
don't have the investments/endowments to weather the storm...
I've been wondering if the really small SLAC could manage to cloister. You can come to college, spend fourteen days in isolation, and then college it up with your classmates. (Sex! Dancing! Buffets!) But you'll be doing some of the chores and if you leave you're never coming back.
(Deep Springs?)
237: my older kid is a hs senior. He had to figure out where he's going in the fall without visiting. He's missing prom, etc. As with your son, he's made of privilege, but it's a lot to lose. Anyway, depending on the duration of the shutdowns and then whatever comes next, it won't just be small colleges that close--though I expect you're right they'll lead the way into the abyss. I occasionally start wondering if I'll have a job two or three years from now. I think I will, but it's strange not to be certain (yes, I know this kind of precarity is the norm rather than the exception for many, many people, including contingent laborers in university settings).
I really feel like those are probably the most particularly tough ages to be right now - right around the college years. It's such a period of growth and exploration, and it's sort of amazing that we carve out time in young people's life for this, and it doesn't come around in quite the same way ever again. (I mean, I'm limiting this comment to UMC kids with a traditional residential college trajectory, at least.)
240: I think that's right for the reasons you say. But I also think my thirteen-year-old is having a rough go of it. Being an adolescent trapped at home? FUCK THAT SHIT! And then little kids who are old enough to know that something is very wrong but not old enough to have a good handle on what it is? Also awful!
That said, middle-aged administrators have it the hardest.
Middle-aged administrators at public universities are the Annes Frank of this Holocaust.
Yeah, I'm pretty worried that SLACs are headed for a huge collapse. I have a recent student who is a strong SLAC candidate (had several interviews right out of grad school and currently doing a VAP at an excellent SLAC), and I'm pretty worried that this is going to mean he won't end up with a job because there just won't be any more SLAC jobs ever again.
I honestly don't think missing elementary school is bothering my kids very much.
None of you guys mentioned Bitecofer's VP analysis. We don't know if she's right yet, but she was in 2018. Her data analysis and theory of the vote is that:
1. There is essentially no get-able middle any more. Might have been once, but not in the polarized era.
2. Many Obama-Trump voters are always Change voters. They will not be Trump voters because their world always sucks and they always want change.
3. There are far more niche left voters available to Democrats then centrist votes.
She says absolutely WOC VP. Her take is that it would be folly to do anything else.
Bitecofer likes Abrams, but she's remarkably indifferent to candidates as people.
245.1 I get that this is the case nationally. In 2016 our Democratic governor got re-elected with something like 20% of his votes from people who also voted for Trump. If he wins the Senate race this year, and control of the Senate may well depend on whether or not he does, it'll be with the votes of tens of thousands of people who are also voting for Trump.
If he wins, it's going to be because of his personality. That's why Tester won in the midst of a red wave in the other statewide races here in 2018.
Are we an outlier? I'm sure we are. But the electoral college can be won or lost in outliers.
I think of trolling as taking a position just to create discord
You're in good company, gswift.
Aristotle: On Trolling (Sometimes Crooked Timber isn't entirely useless.)
I'll try that again..
(Probably nosflow or someone linked the original article at the time.)
Yes, my geocities page does feature a lot of different fonts and colours. Why do you ask?
For the record, I think gswift's comments to date should not be considered trolling.
143: "White dude grievance" is saying that all messages should be targeted at white dudes (or at least tuned to not turn off white dudes),
These seem like two very different things and rolling them together is not justified in any way.
The first is not a good idea. The second is an amazingly good idea. Yes, it is probably wise that all your messages should be tuned not to turn off a group that makes up, what, THIRTY-FIVE PER CENT OF THE ELECTORATE.
We had a second chance to nominate Sanders who could beat Trump, but well old people on welfare hate young people who aren't so here we are.
I think you meant "old black people" there - or is that what "on welfare" was supposed to imply? I suppose all those strapping young bucks Reagan was talking about back in 1980 will be in their 60s or 70s by now.
From across the Atlantic, where, of course, we understand US politics far better than the natives ever could, I think Ajay's defence of gswift catches an important point. Getting stuck into the culture wars will lose votes to the Republicans. Don't do it. Get the actually existing voters on your side. This is doubly important when you propose measures which may disadvantage them.
"something seems good to me, thus I will claim my feelings are broadly shared and I can generalize from my perceptions to make big claims on the basis of no evidence" cognitive bias really is a line for the big book of self-awareness.
What further evidence could possibly be needed for the proposition that the positions that pull votes in Brooklyn repel them in the states that the Democrats must win to be rid of Trump? Have you people learned nothing from Corbyn?
Seriously, re-electing Trump will fuck the whole world up, not just the US. And so I have a great rage against the people - even on an almost defunct blog - discussing measures and policy positions which make it more likely that he will be re-elected. I don't think he will. I think the economy is going to crater so hard that his reputation will never recover. But even so. I'd prefer that he lost for other reasons.
NW: I have been totally clear this whole thread that I don't think my sympathies are representative or broadly shared. I've said it several times. I literally never say, hm, I have this gut reaction. Let me now claim that it is an electoral winner! I don't know what you are talking about. I don't even expect the world to cater to my preferences in electing a non-rapist to the presidency, that's how inured I am to the fact that my preferences are not the world's at large!
If you are going to claim that you absolutely need one specific set of white non college voters to win and efforts to reach out to and work for other constituencies are ipso facto alienating (even though the top of the ticket candidate is probably pretty good for them) just because Brooklynites may also feel good about it than you really do have to support that claim.
The only two analysts attempting to martial data that anyone has quoted on this thread both concluded that Stacey Abrams would be the most effective VP pick in terms of vote getting, even though Brooklynites also like the idea of a WOC VP.
Seriously, re-electing Trump will fuck the whole world up, not just the US
Well, will it, though?
It won't be great for the US. Definitely not. But Trump's terrible response to COVID has really just been a problem for the US. If Clinton had won in 2016, we would still be looking at a COVID pandemic and we would still have the responses in other nations we have had, and we'd still be looking at a terrible global economy with a lack of EU leadership and an incompetent UK PM.
Trump's fundamental cowardice and fear of confrontation has actually meant the US hasn't started any major conflicts in the last four years. We still haven't seen a war between the US and Iran or between the US and North Korea, or serious US involvement in Syria or in Yemen. These are all good things.
He hasn't actually destroyed NATO yet or pulled the US out of the UN because Congress has successfully constrained his worst foreign policy impulses. All the "worst" things that Trump has done are not really very significant, in a life-changing sense, to the average American let alone the average non-American; most of it's just pointless noise and smoke and inside-Washington politics. Republican governors and Republicans in Congress are the ones who have really done the damage inside the US; outside the US, Trump has been so unfocussed and cowardly that he hasn't actually managed to do much concrete harm.
Republican governors and Republicans in Congress are the ones who have really done the damage inside the US
This really isn't true. The executive branch of the federal government is very important to day-to-day life domestically, and Trump has broken it. Believing that Trump was too confused to do any real damage was a nice fantasy, but it's not remotely accurate.
Republicans in Congress and Republican governors are also a giant problem, but believing that Trump hasn't done much concrete harm is completely offbase.
What kind of things are you thinking of? The domestic moves that have made the biggest splash in the news are things like judge appointments.
In short, he's reducing the US to a system of personal government. If the next personal governor to come along is FDR reborn, all's well. But that isn't going to happen.
Have you been reading about things like his shutting down the White House pandemic response team? Canceling the contract to maintain the respirators in the national stockpile? Failing to organize any kind of national testing program? Those are kind of vivid right now because there's an emergency, but that sort of malfeasance and non-feasance is throughout the federal government.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been effectively shut down; the EPA isn't doing enforcement; the SEC isn't doing enforcement. And all of those agencies have lost staff and continuity and institutional knowledge. They won't be able to just restart work in 2021, they're going to have to be rebuilt. Michael Lewis wrote a book about this last year, The Fifth Risk. I haven't read it, but from the reviews you might find it educational.
I mean, the judge appointments are shameless and insane. You can blame them on the Republicans in Congress, but no prior Republican president's nominees were comparably awful, which suggests that Trump made a difference there too.
Racism, deportations, ICE and the border policy has been horrifying. I don't know that that affects the whole world, though.
And I'd wouldn't bank on NATO surviving another Trump term. He's been circling around this for awhile and the so-called adults in the room are long gone.
Right, that stuff is the deliberate evil stuff. I was thinking about the blindingly incompetent and destructive aspect, and forgot the intentional evil.
I wonder if Ajay was confused because the UK has much more civil service continuity when an administration changes than the US does. I believe they're career civil servants all the way up to cabinet level in the UK -- there isn't a thick level of political appointees running departments. US Federal agencies, you rely on the current president and his appointees to hire competent, experienced people when they staff their administrations, but if that doesn't happen, the way it didn't happen this time, the agencies are just fucked.
If the long run danger of personal rule is insufficiently obvious I refer you again to Wilhelmine Germany.
I just saw this thread on Twitter, which speaks to the point I've been making: https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/1254757771544801287?s=21
What I meant by "All the "worst" things that Trump has done are not really very significant, in a life-changing sense, to the average American" is that the things that have attracted the most attention - things like sacking various cabinet members, Supreme Court picks, mucking around with Russia and so on - don't generally have much direct and immediate impact on people's lives in the US.
The exception is definitely pandemic response.
I've read "The Fifth Risk", but it was rather an example of what I was talking about - lots about how unprepared and unserious the Trump mob were, but nothing about how this had led to actual effects on people's lives.
So, you mean that the undramatic things that the federal government does, like facilitating access to health care coverage, that keep American citizens from dying because they don't have access to health care, and that the Trump administration has either fucked up through incompetence or deliberately sabotaged, don't get as much coverage in the media as flashier but ultimately less important horrors? Sure, that's true, but I think it's more about the nature of journalism (not even blaming journalists -- flashy stories are just easier to write about than institutional stories) than about how Trump isn't successfully hurting Americans in their day to day lives.
Statistical lives are hard to feel emotional about, but there are Americans who are going to suffer and die because of how Trump has staffed the EPA.
For day to day effects on people's lives, how about the attempts to break the Post Office? If he screws them up badly enough to affect the last-mile rural delivery they do, a big part of the country is in for a world of hurt.
The border situation has been a cluster for a long time. The separation policy is new and all kinds of bad but on numbers Trump's well behind Obama.
What LB said about judges. The lifetime federal judge appointments are the real damage. That's is going to be with us a long time.
272: definitely, if it happens. But it hasn't yet.
Looking at UK politics it's striking how much the government announces it's doing something when it does something, so people know it's happening. It's also striking how the government is understood to have put out a "manifesto" during the campaign, and if they do things that conflict with the manifesto they are expected to explain why.
None of that happens here. Campaign promises are universally known to be impossible to carry out, which is why campaigns have flipped to being all negative campaigning against the other guy, plus "I will fight for X" instead of "I will actually do X". Generally Congress passes about five major laws a year each of which do about 500 things, five of which are big news stories; then half of the things never happen because the executive department responsible for them is run by Republicans who refuse to do them or the executive department responsible for them has no funding, and half of the other half are left to the discretion of opaque regulatory bodies that interpret them based on hearing what industry lobbyists have to say. The way the executive branch makes people's life worse, aside from law enforcement, is usually by refusing to enforce laws that protect people (labor laws, pollution laws), refusing to update things to make people's lives easier because lobbyists want to preserve the status quo, etc. It's just a million small decisions that go against people.
The argument that "appealing to identity politics is how Democrats have got in this mess, and furthermore Democrats should nominate the noted progressive woman of color Tulsi frickin' Gabbard" is not trolling is itself trolling.
Oh, I forgot the things mandated by Congress that then don't happen because judges say they are unconstitutional, or don't happen because everyone is waiting five years to see if judges will say they are unconstitutional or not. Also the things mandated by Congress that don't happen because they are delegated to the states, which then have no ability to do them properly either because they are given a set amount of funding to do them that is inadequate, or because people tend to move from state to state now and then so tons of people fall through the cracks. None of these bad things that happen are seen as anyone's fault in particular, just the fault of government. I see Trump's role as not so much to actively do bad things, but just to increase the probability of bad things happening by removing the ability of good things to happen, by appointing all the worst people to run things and withdrawing funding from things.
229: at the very least, we can say that you put the "fun" in "defunct."
274: Plenty of other stuff has already. What you're saying only makes sense if you think the federal government is presumptively useless, so having it run by feckless incompetents wouldn't change anything. The FDA saves lives. The CDC saves lives. Being able to get health insurance saves lives and the Trump Administration has been systematically sabotaging that..
Screwed up the html. Meant to include this link: https://www.cbpp.org/sabotage-watch-tracking-efforts-to-undermine-the-aca
Looking at UK politics it's striking how much the government announces it's doing something when it does something, so people know it's happening. It's also striking how the government is understood to have put out a "manifesto" during the campaign, and if they do things that conflict with the manifesto they are expected to explain why.
This is in part because the manifesto has a role in the constitution. At the beginning of a new government, the new government has to announce its legislative programme, based on its manifesto, and have a parliamentary debate followed by an up or down vote (the "Queen's speech debate"), which is critical because it's how the constraint that the government must have a parliamentary majority is enforced. (If the government were to lose this vote, it would not be able to take office and either the monarch would ask some other party to try, or there would be an immediate general election.)
Later on, if there is a deadlock between the two houses of parliament, the government can bring legislation that the Lords voted against back after a delay of a year and they can't reject it again - but only if it was announced in a Queen's speech or an election manifesto, the idea being that if it was something the public actually directly voted on, it carries an additional measure of democratic legitimacy.
These seem like two very different things and rolling them together is not justified in any way.
The first is not a good idea. The second is an amazingly good idea. Yes, it is probably wise that all your messages should be tuned not to turn off a group that makes up, what, THIRTY-FIVE PER CENT OF THE ELECTORATE.
Yes, there's a long history of these arguments, I wasn't attempting to cover all of it. I was trying to start with (a) the argument that if one wants to avoid, "Getting stuck into the culture wars " (as NW put it), it's better to not present the argument in a way that sounds like fighting a culture war oneself. (b) to offer my capsule definition of "white dude grievance."
When you get into the question of, "what's the best tactical approach to these questions, assuming that we care about the experience of marginalized communities but also want to win elections?" I don't have a simple answer. But, I will note, my opinion on that question shifted after the debate around Mark Lilla's book. When I saw that he was writing a book on the subject, I was skeptical but interested -- it seemed like a worthy topic of discussion. But then Lilla faceplanted to hard (IMO), that it made me much more skeptical that there a simple "common sense" approach was going to provide a good answer.
See, for example, Michael Berube's socratic dialogue.
ILLE: All right, fine. Tell me what's wrong with Lilla's diagnosis of Democrats' electoral woes: "Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country's problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little."
HIC: That is not wrong at all. Anyone who has followed the Democratic Party over the past 30 years and who has a functioning sensorium knows that the party has atrophied at the state and local levels. Hell, Republicans are this far away from being able to call a constitutional convention and repeal all the amendments except the Second. But blaming that on "identity politics," as Lilla does, doesn't make a fraction of a lick of sense. Take this bit, for instance: "[I]f identity liberals were thinking politically, not pseudo-politically, they would concentrate on turning that around at the local level, not on organizing yet another March on Washington or preparing yet another federal court brief." I can take or leave some marches, sure, but you're writing a book in the early days of the Trump Administration and you decide to piss on the women's marches that constituted the first mass public show of resistance to the guy? More important, what's this about "preparing another federal court brief"? Only someone with no understanding of American politics, someone even less literate about the separation of powers than Glenn Greenwald, would be so cavalierly dismissive of the judicial system.
. . .
HIC: Thank you, my friend. Since we have the book right in front of us, shall we review some of its most ill-advised passages? Here, turn to page 35, if you will. This is Lilla on FDR's four freedoms: "This vision filled three generations of liberals with confidence, hope, pride, and a spirit of self-sacrifice. And patriotism. They had no problem standing for the national anthem." Again, leaving aside the question of the immediate occasion--as if this is the right time for soi-disant liberals to be kicking Colin Kaepernick to the curb--how historically ill-informed is this? Is Professor Lilla acquainted with one Jackie Robinson, who wrote, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world"? Does he have access to an Internet or a televisual device that can acquaint him with John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the Olympic medal stand in 1968?
Now to page 117. "Democratic politics is about persuasion, not self-expression. I'm here, I'm queer will never provoke more than a pat on the head or a roll of the eyes." Where to start? Let's start with the pronoun. It's "we," not "I." It's a collective statement made by gay people taking part in a public demonstration, it's not some kind of solipsistic declaration made by the flamboyantly dressed guy who shows up late to the dinner party. (But that is Lilla's strategy throughout--to cast "identity liberals" as narcissists incapable of thinking of the common good.) More to the point, it leaves out the demand: Get used to it. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." Lilla repeatedly insists that he is happy that so many, though not all, Americans did indeed get used to it. You would think he would refrain from rolling his eyes at those among his fellow citizens who engage in same-sex relations, never mind mentally patting them on the head.
Moving ahead to page 118. Here we encounter the claim that--hey, don't get me wrong, I believe a woman should have the right to control her own body, I'm not opposed to reproductive rights or anything, but . . . the Democrats just have to stop being so rigid about this abortion thing. They should be more like Republicans--a big tent on abortion rights, with lots of rigorously debated alternatives! Why, did you know that the Democrats are so intransigent on abortion that they did not let Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey Sr. speak at the Democratic National Convention in 1992?
Or the Isaac Chotiner interview in which Lilla comes across as confused about the points he's trying to make.
So, that's the bar I would like to see us clear. If we're going to have the conversation about identity politics and electability, I'd hope that we can do so in a way that is better and more nuanced than Mark Lilla did.
It sounds like Politics Is For Power may do a better job. I haven't read it yet, but I'd be open to a reading group or discussion on unfogged.
at the very least, we can say that you put the "fun" in "defunct."
And I ooze out the unct.
Alternatively. Gross!
A matter of context.
Have you people learned nothing from Corbyn?
The lesson I took from Corbyn is that a lot of establishment moderates would sooner lose to a fascist than win with someone on the left.
People here thought I was being uncharitable, but that was before the smoking gun came out that says I was right.
Back to the VP idea.
That writer is the same person who is arguing for Stacey Abrams as VP for her ability to drive Democratic enthusiasm and black turnout. It would seem that his position is not the same as yours.
They conducted a poll, not a focus group. They based their analysis on the degree to which Abrams overperformed name recognition, and could drive enthusiasm. Your claim that Abrams does not bring votes is sill wholly unsupported, and is in fact contradicted. There are plenty of black voters, who Democrats need to turn out, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc.
I'm just wondering how Abrams is going to energize people who don't already know who she is. A lot of this sounds like she's really good in retail settings because she's so likeable in person and now the whole country will see it. Which is what we heard about the opposite of Stacy Abrams, Tim Kaine, last time. It always turns out the VP candidate is never covered by the news at all and their significance is limited to not being alarmingly divisive, plus showing up at local retail events, and the number of people who were highly familiar with Tim Kaine remained limited to people who live in Virginia. Does Stacy Abrams have more of a national profile than he did? That's an honest question.
Maybe slightly? I don't think she's going to turn out anyone who isn't motivated to vote out Trump. I like her, though.
216: There was an article with a lot of off-the-record interviews about how painful this was for some of them, but they weren't speaking out, because they wanted to influence policy in a potential admin. But for those who had personal experience of sexual violence, it was like a gut punch and even brought on flashbacks.
Coming late, many good points, too bad LB's 279 will never appear on Fox unless someone hacks the chyron feed.
To 282's interesting points, I would say that identity politics in general is less immediately relevant than understanding what makes US Spanish speakers vote one way or the other, or skip voting. Possibly common baseline expectations of impossibly corrupt government work against democrats. At least that background clashes with the way democrats speak publicly, maybe there's a way to make their case more effectively? The only Spanish language analysis I read comes from Mexico, Enrique Krauze and Carmen Aristegui, otherwise the local free weekly (fun fact: searching the archives of Washington Hispanic for Ocasio-Cortez turns up inaugural mention only), maybe there are better sources?
39: I have an incredibly idiotic theory I just made up that the reason races have gotten so close is that what people mostly want is suspense.
128: As soon as it was over I heard two world-weary media types talking about it- "anything new? Nope, followed the script, everything expected." It's all narrative to people who do this every day and see the same stump speech every day- how boring, they tell the same story and same joke every stop on the tour! Never thinking about people who stood in line three hours for one chance to see a candidate who maybe interests them.
39 may be right for people in general, but it clearly is the case for many reporters. Of course a lot of it is in the interests of increased audience and bigger stories, but I also think some of it is a jaded boredom. see of course, Trump vs other Repubs and then Clinton. But I think the purest instance was Gore in 2000. Can't find the specific reference but reporters admitted after the first debate (in which Gore handled GW quite easily) that they were not inclined to let Gore "cruise to victory." And this attitude probably helps explain why the sighs/groans/body language attack gained such traction.
The desire for novelty, intrigue and suspense are always there, and if you really don;t think policies etc. really are going to affect you they drive behavior.
The lesson I took from Corbyn is that a lot of establishment moderates would sooner lose to a fascist than win with someone on the left.
Dude, Boris Johnson is not a fascist. He's a hopeless incompetent and lacking in any form of personal integrity or morality, but he's not a fascist.
And what you have there is not a smoking gun. It is a collection of cherry-picked email and WhatsApp messages, collected and carefully leaked by Jeremy Corbyn's supporters, in order to support the argument that he really, really wanted to do something about anti-Semitism, honest he did, it's just he was too distracted by the horrible centrists trying to undermine him. Just like Donald Trump really, really wanted to do something about COVID but he was too distracted by the horrible Democrats trying to impeach him.
Black women will absolutely know who Stacey Abrams is, and will motivate turnout in a way that Tim Kaine could never do.
291: I wonder whether that belief that policies won't affect reporters themselves is shaken by the coronavirus. Rich people get sick and die from it too. Now around here poorer people in overcrowded housing who can't work from home are bearing the brunt of this right now, so maybe people will forget - especially if an effective anti viral for the well-insured appears.
292: I thought not precisely that he was too distracted, but that political enemies within the Labor party to whom responses to that sort of complaints had been delegated were intentionally screwing it up to create the scandal.
I like Abrams' for VP because I'd like her to be president down the road, but like any other VP I don't expect voters to care either way.
293: I think black women already have astronomically high turnout.
Black voter turnout fell in 2016. I think a candidate like Abrams helps turn that around, especially with a vulnerable candidate like Biden at the top of the ticket.
295: correct.
Whichever idiot leaked it has laid the party open to massive amounts of litigation for breach of privacy and libel: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/19/labour-party-financial-peril-keir-starmer-members-leaked-report.
It's also interesting that the Line has changed. It used to be "Labour doesn't have an anti-semitism problem. They are making it all up because they hate Jeremy." Now it's "Labour did have an anti-semitism problem but only because Jeremy's attempts to deal with it were sabotaged."
298 is as plausible (or maybe more so) than any other "VP helps" theory. I'm just skeptical because no one ever cares about VP.
299.2: I'm willing to believe parts of both are true. Also, my heart is warmed by how philosemitic Brits become when there's an opportunity to make the left flank of Labour look terrible.
I thought the consistent line was "Labor doesn't have more of an anti-Semitism problem than British society in general. Problems that need to be addressed, but not unique to the Labor party or strongly associated with the more leftist elements therein."
It's also interesting that the Line has changed. It used to be "Labour doesn't have an anti-semitism problem. They are making it all up because they hate Jeremy." Now it's "Labour did have an anti-semitism problem but only because Jeremy's attempts to deal with it were sabotaged."
I thought the original line was "Labour has had the same anti-semitism problem for (30 / 40 / 50) years. They are all talking about it now because they hate Jeremy". That would be totally compatible with the new one.
Trying hard not to take 301 personally.
302: yes, a fair amount of whataboutery also got involved.
By whataboutery, do you mean to say that you believe the Labor party does have an unusual antisemitism problem, and anyone saying that it's similar to the rest of UK society is bullshitting to distract from that unusual problem? I may be misunderstanding you, of course.
215: "It's true that I don't know my claims about the future are true, but I believe them pretty strongly,"
Well, okay, sure, that's a pretty convincing line of argument ...
It is the case with all arguments about the future, and about what should be done to bring about the best future. Your sarcasm is unwarranted.
At this point, if you're attacking Biden, and attempting to rat-f*ck him with very thinly-sourced and highly dubious claims of sexual misconduct, you're basically on Team Trump.
No, at this point, if you're not pressuring Biden to drop out, you're basically on Team Trump, since pretty much anyone else would be a better nominee. Your comment didn't really respond to my argument at all.
No, at this point, if you're not pressuring Biden to drop out, you're basically on Team Trump
This is McManus level trolling here. Kudos.
216: Thank you for acknowledging that OF COURSE it is possible, however unlikely, that Biden could be pressured to step down. I'm sorry that you don't share my assessment of the risks of attempting to do it. I find it obvious that those risks are negligible, given how Trump will handle the matter in the fall, and am just astonished that no one else here seems to see it that way or can plausibly explain why they don't.
I will note that more corroboration for Reade just showed up -- a neighbor who she told in the 90s who's speaking on the record. https://www.businessinsider.com/former-neighbor-corroborates-joe-bidens-accuser-2020-4
If this doesn't blow up, it changes my sense of the probabilities.
I still don't agree that the risks of pressuring Biden to step down are negligible. I think they're still huge.
I thought Biden was one of the worst candidates too, but the polling has been fine. And the number of people who simply want to never ever hear anything about politics from anyone, therefore will never hear any of the bad things about Biden or care whether he even appears in public from one month to the next, but still will vote in the election, is going to be a lot higher than I would have thought, assuming there is no good news about Trump between now and then. All the news being about the coronavirus and unemployment has almost been a welcome break from all the news being about Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg for the last 24 straight months. People don't want to go back into campaign mode. And making public appearances is suddenly not a big part of the campaign anymore. So I'm not going to fool myself anymore into thinking Biden is doomed to lose.
307: Let's stop accusing each other of trolling since we don't even seem to agree on what that means. I genuinely believe Biden's nomination is more likely to lead to Trump's reelection than just about anyone else's, and I don't think an effort to pressure him to drop out before nomination occurs will help Trump, for reasons I have repeatedly given. If you disagree, please say why instead of telling me I'm like Bob.
310: You keep saying so, and I keep saying the opposite. I don't think you've refuted my reasons for my position, so I don't know how to respond further. But thanks, I guess, for not accusing me of idiocy this time, or of indifference to Trump's reelection.
313: Because we saw it happen with Hillary. Where Trump's supporters are saying he's a paragon of honesty, and Democrats are saying "well, we have to take the accusations against Hillary very seriously," you have one candidate where there's unanimity on both sides of the aisle that they're sketchy, and one where only one party thinks they're sketchy. We're heading into the same dynamic again.
I don't know what to do about it -- I still think there is no leverage to make Biden step down.
And I still think that both the fact that there's no plausible route to make Biden step down, and that pressure to make him do so is likely to be very helpful to Trump's campaign, are clearly true and your failure to acknowledge that is weirdly clueless.
I'm just more intensely unhappy about it than I was this morning.
Let's stop accusing each other of trolling since we don't even seem to agree on what that means. I genuinely believe Biden's nomination is more likely to lead to Trump's reelection than just about anyone else's, and I don't think an effort to pressure him to drop out before nomination occurs will help Trump, for reasons I have repeatedly given. If you disagree, please say why instead of telling me I'm like Bob.
Going into the primary I would have thought that the most electable candidates were, in some order, Harris, Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar, Gillibrand, Biden. Biden would have been near the bottom of that list but ahead of Buttigieg, Castro, Yang, Gabbard, Williamson, etc . . .
However, the primary changed my assessment! I don't particularly get the appeal of Biden but I have to concede that he did a good job of attracting votes.
That doesn't convince me that Biden is the most electable, but it does convince me that I should have much less certainty about my own estimates of electability. I see weaknesses for Biden but can also see the appeal of the heuristic, "whoever gets the most votes is the best at getting votes."
The reason that I think, "an effort to pressure him to drop out before nomination occurs will help Trump" is that I think attacks coming from allies have different impact than attacks coming from opponents. The other way to put that is, "even the liberal New York Times . . ." When the NYT is pulling in the same general direction as the Right Wing Noise Machine has much more impact than the RWNM by itself. That said, it's possible that the NYT will spend the Fall emphasizing Reade's story regardless of what the grassroots does, but a grassroots effort to emphasize the story makes it much more likely that the NYT will plant itself on that beat as well.
Note that both of those are practical concerns more than ethical concerns. I'm not sure what the correct position is from an ethical standpoint but, as LB says, I think the benefits of pressuring Biden to drop out are minimal and the risks are significant.
The timing is just maximally bad for pressure. I mean, if he were already elected and were president there'd be more leverage to get him to resign (impeachment) and a more democratically legitimate way to pick his replacement (the rightly elected VP).
All the news being about the coronavirus and unemployment has almost been a welcome break from all the news being about Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
True, but can we have a moratorium on "Nothing Will Ever Be Normal Again" think pieces? Honestly, it's like some sort of jobs program, where every writer/pundit/bloviator in America is guaranteed the opportunity to publish one.
The line that the revolution would have triumphed were it not for the wreckers and saboteurs in the pay of British Intelligence was not entirely convincing in Moscow in 1935-37 and it certainly doesn't work as an explanation of Corbyn's defeats. Anyone who believes it is odd that Labour politicians say vicious and even inappropriate or problematic things about their enemies when among has never spent any time drinking with them. The mutual hatreds are legendary and traditional. Corbyn, remember, voted against a Labour government more times than David Cameron ever managed. And now his apparatchiki are shocked! Shocked! to discover that their enemies thought much the same about them. But if you want me to believe that, for instance Seu\mas Mi\lne, a man who spoke every day on the phone to Ge\orge Gall\oway (at least Galloway claimed as much) was much disturbed by anti-semitism among his faction you'll have to come up with some really startling evidence.
Having messages from people within the party responsible for allocating campaign funds saying that they were hoping for a loss at the polls to push Corbyn out of power seems like more than vague allegations of wreckers and saboteurs.
||
Interestingly, the most sought after offering at Guruvayur 'Udayasthmana pooja (which literally means worship from sunrise to sunset), has been booked next 30 years, till 2050 and fresh bookings were closed for the time being.|>
304: it absolutely wasn't directed at you in particular. Apologies that I didn't make more clear that it was directed at a broader phenomenon that's been remarkably striking in recent years.
Tia, thank you for saying on gswift what I have been thinking.
gswift, I don't know what you get out of being here unless you enjoy playing Eris.
||
In 2008, the temple discontinued the tradition of an elephant being offered to the presiding deity after the number of elephants' numbers rose -- now the temple has 56 elephants, the largest collection of captive elephants.|>
I'm trying to decide if the appropriate gif response to this thread is "Grandpa Simpson walks in and out" or "Troy enters with pizzas."
https://giphy.com/gifs/elephant-bye-goodbye-XSQUAevZhaROM
My consolations are:
1.It pretty much doesn't matter what the Dem's do. People are voting anti-Trump, not pro-someone else. We can especially tell that they aren't voting for anything because they selected the blandest most pointless dude out of the large interesting field. Replace him, don't replace him. It doesn't matter for defeating Trump. (It is primarily Bitecofer who convinced me of this outlook. Take it up with her. But everyone here saying 'untrained monkey' is basically validating that theory of this election.)
2. Maybe all the old politicians will die of COVID anyway and bring an end to the gerontocracy.
3. If Trump wins, the odds of the US dissolving get better and that's my preferred outcome anyway. Pacifica!
Anyway, a woman VP would be an actual affirmative aspect of this election and just about the only one for me. (Fuck that we are in 2020 and woman VP would be an accomplishment.)
Yes, as I said, it can be done, but you can't do it. Neither can I.
Can Sen Sanders? I don't see how he can possibly be part of a pressure campaign to get Biden to step down between now and the convention, and then expect to lead a unified party into the general election. He's staked out his position on Biden as the nominee, and had known about the story -- even if not every detail -- for months. If press accounts are to be believed, he actively prevented his campaign staff from making this an issue while the campaign was still on. What are the people who voted against Sanders going to think if he tries to make this an issue now? If asked about a pressure campaign, he'll have to disclaim involvement in or support of it.
The only way Sanders can be the nominee is if Biden asks him to. It would have to be completely outside the nomination process, not a matter of suspended campaigns restarting, and it would be pitched as some new health issue for Biden (a stroke or something) and not as a response to a public pressure campaign.
There are people who can make the thing happen in a way that might not doom the nominee. You're not one of them. What you can do is be part of a movement that makes enough of an impact, at the margins, to re-elect Trump.
Hey if they push Biden aside for literally anyone who supports Medicare for all, i'll Support them regardless of any of their other right wing democratic policies.
Lb, "hoping that Corbyn loses the election" presupposes that he might have won it. I don't remember that anyone really thought he could. It was a huge surprise that he did as well as he did.
Thinking that he could be got rid of once the election was over and lost its just how politicians think. It turned out also to be mistaken but that's another matter.
Gswift errs, ajay errs and NW errs. I am here to set you all straight (if Tia will excuse me for covering ground that has already been trodden).
Here's NW:
I think Ajay's defence of gswift catches an important point. Getting stuck into the culture wars will lose votes to the Republicans.
First, if you're writing about American politics, the correct spelling is "defense." Unless you are in Louisiana and are talking about de fence dat separates de trolls from de folks arguing in good faith. America first!
Second, a lot of folks live in the culture wars. Not me. Not you. But the young person who I used to think of as my "niece" -- who has my mom's name on her birth certificate -- lives there. Telling Democrats -- many of whom are African Americans or gay or trans or women or whatever -- that they ought to be more sensitive to the concerns of old hetero white men is futile, even if it weren't insulting. And remember, your argument is supposedly a practical one.
Gswift's people, the ones we ought not call racists, also live in the culture wars. The thing about wars is that it only takes one aggressor to have a war, and in war, only one side wins (at most). I know who the aggressors are in this war, and I know which side I'm on.
We have tried appeasement over a period of decades, and we will absolutely continue on that path -- as the nomination of Joe Biden demonstrates, as does the nomination of literally every other Democratic presidential candidate. (I mean yeah, Hillary is a chick, and Obama was that other thing, but come on, that can't be too much to ask of the reasonable old white guys who aren't really bigots, can it?)
I find myself wishing that Tia could be a little more charitable to gswift, but I kinda wish everyone were nicer to old white hetero guys who are a bit clueless. These are my people. Like everything, it's identity politics! I suspect us poor old white guys are just going to have to suck it up and get used to hearing other voices, though. I absolutely promise you that increased tolerance for bigotry isn't going to shut people up.
Beeteedubs I'm not trying to make strong arguments about how to win elections here, about which I am characteristically epistemically cautious! I just don't think gswift in particular deserves charity and by far the most parsimonious explanation for his behavior is that he is a hetero white dude who resents gains by and accommodations to people who are not, independent of their effects on electoral success, he chooses to express that resentment in some 95% of his comments, and then uses electoral concerns as dressing for him while he is proving himself to be entirely worthless on this topic by suggesting Gabbard/Yang, suggestions which are, again, most parsimoniously explained by me, upthread, as examples of "good minorities" who coddle a particular kind of white dude grievance.
There surely *is* a way to make an argument that winning some sliver of we-dare-not-say racists in Wisconsin is the only way to win an election, and even if weren't convincing (and it could maybe be convincing!), could at least convince that it was truly a conclusion arrived at more in sorrow than in anger. But that's not what we see.
Anyway, I don't love this but am just unwilling not to name what I see. I appreciate it when people say thanks. Part of why I get bothered by occasional "we're all friends here" kumbaya is that we're not and IRL gswift's behavior would have long since caused me to end any non-familial relationship. Even with family, I do my best to respond with a lot of social punishment and just to cut it off. Just yesterday I told my mom about QRP for the first time because it seems as if he truly is shortly to come here and she ought to he exists, and she started a sentence with, "you'll probably say this is racist ..." and I just didn't let her finish it. If I were in a social group that tolerated this, I'd think either it didn't share my values or its regulatory mechanisms were broken. I'll try to resolve this for myself by using Unfogged less as a substitute for normal social interaction, because obvi it doesn't work very well for that purpose, for me, and because I don't like using my time saying gross white dude is gross over and over again.
This whole situation is lousy because whoever the WOC VP wonder-candidate is will be judged on their answer for his shit behavior affirming that he's not a rapist.
334: I have thought exactly that, and thought how little I envied any of the women in that position.
Maybe that's a reason he'll pick a white guy, just to be safe.
336: Nah, he'll pick Harris, who already has experience covering for sexual harassment by close associates, and who isn't going to lose an hour's sleep over this being the price of the vice presidency.
334-335: I wonder if Gillibrand could/would take it, if offered.
Honest question, gswift why isn't Harris your top choice? I mean, I don't like her cause she's a cop, but that doesn't explain why you don't like her.
It's not going to be Harris, because California isn't in play, but Hillary only won Minnesota with like 40,000 votes.
Oh sorry, he's my quasi romantic partner, or, when I'm annoyed with him, my questionable research practice. Because plague times are ridiculous it looks like we are going to live together now.
If gswift or NW or others are interested in engaging this issue, there's something that interests me here. Gswift raised the issue of Warren's stance on trans issues. Gswift phrased it thusly:
I was thinking of stuff like proclaiming a 9 year old trans child would have veto power over her pick for Sec of Education.
Now I follow politics a little, and I hadn't heard about this. Normal news outlets don't seem to have given this much play. Bill Maher didn't like it, but Maher thinks that it was good that we called it the Spanish flu because, after all, that is where it originated. I mean, Maher is a dumb fuck about a lot of things.
Anyway, gswift is talking about political strategy, and not addressing the policy merits of Warren's approach. I looked up what Warren said, and substantively, I liked it. It made my like Warren more than I already did.
Here it is, referring to a nine-year-old trans person she spoke to:
"I'm going to have a secretary of education that this trans person interviews on my behalf. And if only if this person believes our secretary, or secretary of education, nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment and a full educational curriculum for everyone, that person will actually be advanced to be secretary of education."
So the question is: Leaving politics aside, is this a wrong attitude to have? Should we count this as a mark against a Warren presidency (as opposed to something that doesn't look good to voters that the Democrats must have)? How about it?
I suppose one person's "give a 9 year old a veto" is another persons "If my candidate can't even convince this kid they are serious about this, they aren't close to good enough for this post".
332 A thing to remember about both Hillary and Obama is that while on one single axis they (each, separately) represented a change, they were otherwise chosen in part because they represented such a boring straight-down-the middle and don't ruffle any feathers at the DNC pick. And that is important.
I followed Warren closely and didn't hear about this either. I suspect that it was both cherry-picked and framed by the media gswift listens to.
Objectively, would I mind if she selected qualified candidates and also asked someone who is both the recipient of their would-be policies and the most vulnerable to them to also assess the candidates? No. I would be impressed at a practical application of 'nothing about us without us'. I do not count that against Warren. Wonder whether gswift would think it were self-evidently ridiculous, pandering to SFW and disqualifying if, for example, students of color had a say in their SRO.
In my own field, the rightwing media has misinterpreted new water conservation requirements (the State Board wants to achieve 50gppd of indoor water use (showers, toilet, sinks, washing machine) mostly through new construction appliance standards and leak detection. They did not set non-drought outdoor standards; you can water your plants; it will not count against the 50gppd target.) to make it seem like California will put you in jail for using water!!!! I have never heard anyone in my lefty circles ever discuss the new regs, or wonder how they work, or whether it would be expensive to achieve them. But I believe they're a regular topic on the right. This story about Warren feels similar to me.
I mean, like, Warren campaigned as a SJW, based on this? I watched so much of her and I'd missed any mention of it.
I'm back from the food pantry and delivering science packets to kids. Everyone was very friendly, I don't think they could sense my true motivation of resentment at their incremental successes.
gswift, I don't know what you get out of being here
Because I think there's value in talking about issues and engaging with people you disagree with.
Honest question, gswift why isn't Harris your top choice?
One of the big tells was that back in August Harris and Warren both decided on Twitter to commemorate the anniversary of the "murder" of Michael Brown at the hands of a white officer. That's a pretty clear indicator they're taking talking points from college educated activist types. To me that's just advertising that you have no idea how to win a national election.
Should we count this as a mark against a Warren presidency (as opposed to something that doesn't look good to voters that the Democrats must have)? How about it?
Setting aside the issue of whether a 9 year old actually has the mental capacity to know they're trans, having a 9 year old vet anything signals you're more interested in political theatre with a child as a prop than you are addressing the issues that drive voting. If Trump said he was going to have a 9 year old from a local boy scout troop vet his next Supreme Court nominee I would similarly think he's unhinged.
344 is what I was getting at with my "photo op" comment above. All it means is that the kid gets a fun trip to the white house and the incoming secretary says nice things to him and they do a cute photo op. It's obviously not a big deal or a substantive veto.
I suspect that it was both cherry-picked and framed by the media gswift listens to.
It was an event I watched a bunch of hosted by Human Rights Campaign. I pay attention to them because they are the primary movers of the epidemic of murder against trans people. Loads of media outlets repeat this and apparently no one can be bothered to do the math. By the numbers HRC provides the trans murder rate is like half the national average. I think it's a grift and the Democrats should stop listening to them.
And since Tia would like more data on my posts...
https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-trans-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2020
They claim 26 deaths in 2019. Usual estimates of trans population in the U.S. are .02 or .03 percent. In a country of 330 million that's 660,000-990,000. So a murder rate between 3.9 and 2.62 per 100,000. National average is 5.
FWIW, I don't want gswift to be run out of town. He's been here a long time and contributed to the conversation over many years. My impression is that he sees himself, and is, a fairly liberal guy. He's been working for several years now in a cultural milieu that likely differs a bit from Unfogged. I assume that requires a certain amount of shaping his communications to avoid offending Regular White Guy sensibilities, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he thinks others should do likewise because Regular White Guys are worth trying to reach, not because they're the only people whose sensitivities matter. What tipped it into trolling was the right-wing framing on a bit of overstated but basically anodyne constituency outreach from Warren combined with the shout-out to the Sarah Palin of the Democratic Party. Those are talking points, not arguments, and not good ones.
On Mr. F, I made the possibly uncharitable assumption that he's a Bernie dead-ender who's blithely unworried about tipping two elections in a row against flawed* Democratic candidates despite the horror show at the top of the Republican ticket. If that's not what's going on, I'm still mystified by the idea that there's an available mechanism for replacing the nominee at this stage in the process that can be reasonably expected to do more good than harm.
*I actually thought Hillary Clinton was a very good nominee, but views of her differed dramatically enough that "flawed" will do as shorthand.
"what's the best tactical approach to these questions, assuming that we care about the experience of marginalized communities but also want to win elections?"
It's not a secret, go back and listen to Obama talk to black crowds or go attend a black church a few times. They want good jobs, good schools, more cops in their neighborhood, a plan for incentives fathers to be involved with their kids. They want to start businesses and prosper and buy houses and give their families a stable life. In short, they want the exact same things as everyone else. To tailor that message to them is to acknowledge that they haven't had equal opportunities to get those things and then tell them how your administration will do better.
I go to black church more than anyone I know of here and you'd only ever hear a few of those messages. Maybe we don't count because most of the church mothers are trans? I swear I'm not one of those socialists who reduces everything to class but it's mostly a church of poor people and they want what other poor people want. That part matters.
It's not a secret, go back and listen to Obama talk to black crowds or go attend a black church a few times. They want good jobs, good schools, more cops in their neighborhood, a plan for incentives fathers to be involved with their kids. They want to start businesses and prosper and buy houses and give their families a stable life. In short, they want the exact same things as everyone else. To tailor that message to them is to acknowledge that they haven't had equal opportunities to get those things and then tell them how your administration will do better.
Prominent Democratic candidates talk about all of those things (I remember this coming up in the 2016 election and Clinton was talking about jobs and health care all the time). The question is just what else do they talk about?
I can see why you like Andrew Yang -- he had a core set of economic ideas which were appealing, but he wasn't particularly good about talking about other issues, and that was a real limitation.
Even if a candidate wants to spend most of their time talking about "kitchen table" issues they still need to be able to talk about abortion*, immigration, LGBTQ concerns, climate change, foreign policy, pollution, etc . . . They are going to be pushed to talk about those issues both by activists on the left who want to raise them, and by activists on the right who also want to put candidates on the spot. It is sometimes appropriate to dodge the questions and just return to "good jobs at good wages" but it's important that candidates be able to talk fluidly and comfortably about other issues when they do come up. That means that they won't always get it right, and it's fair to criticize them when they do, but we can't just pretend those question don't exist or can be ignored -- and like athletes politicians need to get reps delivering their answers.
Which is to say again that I'm not arguing against emphasizing any of the things that you list above, just against the idea that being able to do all of that is enough.
* For example, here is Warren giving a _great_ answer about abortion
353: That's probably the difference. The one I've worked security at a bunch is more of a mix and has no shortage of nice cars in the lot. People with businesses, retired military, etc. And class is important. But it's basically the same things I hear from the low income Hispanics and Tongans.
354: Possibly also worth remembering that if you are worried about politicians' outreach to the fringier bits of their party coalitions, the Democrats aren't the obvious place to start.
That means that they won't always get it right, and it's fair to criticize them when they do, but we can't just pretend those question don't exist or can be ignored
Absolutely. My complaint wasn't so much with any particular issue, it's that it felt like the campaigns were being aimed at people in the 20's and they don't vote.
The issue here is not what black and hispanic voters want, it's what non-college white voters want. That is, non-college white voters, unlike black and hispanic voters, vote based on identity politics more than they vote based on good schools, good jobs, and stable lives. If a politician every treats members of other groups as important for a few minutes then that's disqualifying. See gswift's opinion in this thread that telling a trans kid that his opinion is important is deeply disqualifying.
(That said, it is undeniably true that white democrats are way to the left of minority democrats on race and gender issues, and that minority candidates Democratic candidates have a distinct advantage in terms of simultaneously appealing to educated white democrats while also being closer to the median on race and gender viewpoints. But let's not pretend that white non-college voters have the same priorities.)
Man, I really feel like calling you all 'dummies' really touched a nerve.
So... how, after more than 350 comments, has there been no head-to-head argument between Mr. F and gswift? The two strands of argument haven't intersected once, and now everyone seems dangerously calm and quiescent and not getting up in each others' (masked) faces.
My father, a white male swing state voter, started up a text convo with my immediate family advocating for Biden to resign. He is pissed about the allegations being strategically ignored. Of course, if he votes for Trump on this basis*, he'll never speak to any female relative again, so it's all kind of academic. But "people" are taking notice, apparently.
*much less likely than my sorrows being brought to a hasty end by the rona, I assure you.
But let's not pretend that white non-college voters have the same priorities
I think this is very wrong and that NW and ajay are right that we're going to learn nothing from the Labour fiasco.
how, after more than 350 comments, has there been no head-to-head argument between Mr. F and gswift?
I don't know, maybe because what he's saying resonates but at the same time I don't think we have a plausible mechanism for getting Biden out and I don't he's going to be as vulnerable as F thinks, in no small part because the media seems to be in the tank for Biden on this. But damn I hate typing that and I totally get where F's coming from.
My father, a white male swing state voter, started up a text convo with my immediate family advocating for Biden to resign.
Who did your father vote for last time around?
Oh, he's never voted for a Republican and never will, barring unforeseen circumstances like an incredibly corrupt cult leader Dem running against some kind of sensible Eisenhower Republican. But the state, it swingeth.
It's not even what *you* profess to care about in this thread. You didn't say something like "Warren went through a whole debate without mentioning economic issues" or something like that. Literally your complaint is that once she told a trans kid that it was important to her that he feel safe.
Throughout this thread Charley has been harping on the question of who can get Biden to step down. In his latest comment he describes in detail why Bernie Sanders cannot make Biden do so, and why Sanders cannot be the nominee. This is all beside the point. If Biden steps down, it will because articles like the one linked in 309 cause many, many people to demand that he do so--as they should, if they consider sexual assault disqualifying and think the Democratic Party has a better chance of regaining the presidency with a non-rapist candidate.
314: you have one candidate where there's unanimity on both sides of the aisle that they're sketchy
This unanimity ALREADY EXISTS. If Biden is the nominee Democrats will simply have to pretend otherwise. That will not work out well.
LB, Nick, DaveLHI and Upetgi (among others) all hold that it's wildly unreasonable to think a rapist candidate who won the most delegates will do worse than one who emerges from a contested convention. I disagree. It may be unlikely, but it's far from wildly so. Curiously, and pace Megan, there is considerable evidence that the election will not just be a referendum on the incumbent, and that it matters quite a lot who the Democratic nominee is. If it is a rapist, I think it is quite likely that will depress anti-Trump turnout. Why is that a crazy view?
Finally, there also appears to be near unanimous consensus here that a failed pre-convention effort to get Biden to step down will substantially damage his candidacy. But why? The allegation is going to be widely publicized regardless (and it seems likely, just on general principles, that more allegations will emerge). Trump is going to harp on it regardless. Who would vote for Biden under those conditions, but not if there had been a failed pre-convention effort to get him to step down? In my view, hardly anyone. Why is that a crazy view?
360: What do gswift and I disagree about?
365: My complaint, very explicitly stated more than once, is that incident among others gave the impression she was campaigning at 20 something college people instead of actual voter demographics. It's the entire thrust of the Oberlin jab.
362.last to 366.last, apparently. It was just amusing me to see you being contentious in parallel.
368: gswift totally gets where I'm coming from! I'm cool with that.
Sigh, on the "epidemic" again. Whenever anyone who actually cares about this talks about it, they always say that the majority of the violent deaths they can track are transgender women of color. The page you link says "black transgender woman" over and over again (and only makes a claim about disproportionate violence towards trans women of color). I have literally never heard this topic mentioned without hearing "trans woman of color". Everyone is clear on who is being targeted. Surely any comparisons you throw out should minimally adjust for gender and race as percentages of the population.
In fact, no one knows how many trans people are murdered in a year and the individual cases that HRC or AVP can collect only establish a lower bound. It would be interesting if white trans people were actually at lower risk of homicide then the general population but it wouldn't change the degree to which people experience pain and fear from these murders either because they are black trans women, or they feel identification with them for other reasons, like shared transness.
Further, the pragmatics of choosing, at the moment when someone is complaining about transphobia in their relatives, to say, yeah, but those trans people have gone too far, mark the person saying it as being a deliberate asshole, in a way that is just best explained by shitty hostility.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing. The idea that people need to spend all of their time campaigning aimed at old white people (i.e. "actual voter demographics") is exactly the same thing I'm describing. You're unhappy way out of proportion that sometimes she's campaigning at 20-something college people, not that she never campaigned at other groups. The "actual voter demographics" you're referring to are like what, half the voters? But if someone spends half their time focused on them then you feel offended.
I'm ridiculously conflicted-averse considering my job and academic speciality, but I do actually need to jump in here to say that nine-year-olds certainly can know that they are trans, and it's both fucked up and, given the context, obviously trolling to imply that they can't.
Over the years, I've appreciated when gswift has provided insight regarding his experiences as a police officer. I'm also not going to claim some permanent moral high ground--I have certainly made statements here that turned out to be wrong and offensive, and have benefited from commenters gently pointing this out to me. In one case, that prevented me from saying something to an IRL friend that would have been disastrous.
All that said, I'm quickly running out of charity for commenters continually being asses regarding some of these issues.
I'm also not going to claim some permanent moral high ground--I have certainly made statements here that turned out to be wrong and offensive, and have benefited from commenters gently pointing this out to me.
For the record, this is also true of me. I've had racism and transphobia fairly gently pointed out to me on this blog! It was helpful! I responded non-defensively at the time!
It's like the war on Christmas, the issue isn't that you're not acknowledging Christmas, it's not that Christmas doesn't have an outsized impact as you'd expect from demographics, it's that acknowledging that some people aren't Christians pisses off the Christians who think they should have 100% of the attention 100% of the time.
371: According to Pew in the last election just 13 percent of voters were in the 18-29 bracket.
Plenty of people older than 29 care about being kind to trans kids. In particular, the people who are being campaigned at in that interaction are *parents of trans kids*. I bet you that kids parents were over 29. It's literally her telling parents she wants their kids to be safe in school, and you're all butthurt about it.
I mean, *now* I pretty empirically see that I'm at least sometimes a safe cis person and a safe white person for trans people and POC to bitch to about other white people and other cis people, which is a good measure of mostly not outwardly an asshole, but I certainly wasn't always, and it required some capacity for listening to the people who would tell me my behavior was a problem to get here.
366: This is now a two-person campaign, Biden vs Trump. Biden is unequivocally preferable to Trump on pretty much any imaginable issue, including unwanted touching of women's private parts. Anyone who would vote for Trump over Biden because Biden has treated women badly is not a reachable voter, and anyone who would stay home rather than vote for Biden is too unserious to be worth trying to satisfy. But while Trump is publicly shitting himself every day in the midst of a major health and economic crisis, you think that what the Democratic party really needs is a big fight over whether its presumptive nominee is too rapey to continue? And you think that people who disagree have the burden of proof? What color is the sky in your world?
367: Why do you take that as "instead of" rather than "in addition to"? All of Warren's past work on pocketbook issues, and all of her detailed campaign plans, go out the window because you think she pandered too hard to trans people?
nine-year-olds certainly can know that they are trans
The estimates I've seen are that 80-90 percent of prepubescent subjects with dysphoria no longer experience it by adolescence. This book says 80-95 percent. That pretty strongly suggests 9 year olds cannot in fact "know" this about themselves.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Np8xxP6pcdUC&pg=RA1-PT483#v=onepage&q&f=false
378: This is now a two-person campaign, Biden vs Trump
No, that could change.
you think that what the Democratic party really needs is a big fight over whether its presumptive nominee is too rapey to continue?
Yes. If the fight produces a different nominee, I think Trump is much less likely to be reelected, and if it doesn't, I don't think that will make Trump more likely to be reelected. Your comment does not address the reasons I have given for thinking so.
381: So just out of idle curiosity, who was your preferred candidate when the primaries started?
Do you really not understand that there's a difference in the effect within our coalition between Trump saying 'don't vote for Biden because X' on the one hand, and Klobuchar, Pelosi, Sanders, or Gillibrand, on the other, saying 'don't vote for Biden because X'? The message is the same but the identity of the messenger is critically important to how people act on it.
Do you not get that a creating within our coalition a mass movement to knock out Biden will have an impact that outlasts whatever decision Biden (and then the DNC) make about the campaign going forward?
382: The question is off topic, so I won't answer it.
383: If all those people demand that Biden drop out, he will.
(Too be clear, "bye" because you're trolling, not because you may be a Bernie supporter engaged in highly motivated reasoning about why the campaign still isn't over. Insisting that others conduct the debate according to your rules and declining to engage with the possibility that the purity of your reasoning about the process may be impacted by your personal preferences for the outcome is a pure troll move and not one that I feel any need to humor further.)
All I know is that anyone who can read the DOJ's investigation into Darren Wilson's killing of Michael Brown and not realize that it was written to reach its conclusions, and the maximalist summaries thereof, is a cop.
376 and 378: Lord, your laser like focus on the trans kid. That was just an offhand example. Read the quote in 143.
388: Attempting derail an objective discussion about whether Biden should drop out by probing one of the participants' personal politics is a pure troll move. I don't care who you originally supported. It isn't relevant to the discussion.
389: Yeah I can't believe a black president's black AG's department conspired to cover a murder for a white redneck. Crazy.
378 it is certainly true if you run a rapist the: "people who won't vote for a rapist" are probably going to be unreachable. If only this was avoidable somehow. Also it's pretty inane to say the people who supported the runner up can't have an opinion about the nominee they are like 30-40% of the party.
Why did I respond to that. I'm sure as hell not going to rehash Michael Brown unless someone has a specific question.
390: Not sure which quote you're pointing to, but if you're making the argument that Warren's campaign would have been more effective with different messaging, what should she have changed? I thought that your argument was that Warren had trampled on an otherwise viable economic message by engaging in too much identity politics and not doing enough to push a broadly inclusive economic message. If I'm misreading, please clarify.
gswift's offhand example was so characteristically predictable that I was debating writing the comment predicting it. I knew he would complain about exactly that, because I knew he would take the opportunity to air some grievance about trans kids getting a small amount of air time. (The issue wasn't even just about trans kids. It was about safety in schools.)
The Sean McElwee piece, I'll repeat, has nothing to do with identity politics, or whether it's somehow a problem to signal trans inclusion.
And I mean, I knew it would literally be that incident he'd complain about because I'd already gotten this from my mom, who also complains about trans people.
369: now I'm actually confused. It sounded like you want people to affirmatively commit to trying to get Biden out. You wrote:
If Biden steps down, it will because articles like the one linked in 309 cause many, many people to demand that he do so--as they should, if they consider sexual assault disqualifying and think the Democratic Party has a better chance of regaining the presidency with a non-rapist candidate.
You haven't really gotten into specifics about where these demands would be directed or what this mobilization would look like, whether through slacktivist-style petitions, calls to elected officials, socially-distanced protests in major cities, etc. But my understanding was that you expected anyone who agreed with you to then take the next step of committing to action, without which agreement would be meaningless. I'm sorry if I misunderstood your objective. Let me be clear here that I have far less than zero interest in a discussion of this matter for the sake of discussion, but if you really are trying to rally troops, I'll certainly hear you out. The situation also makes me uneasy.
393: If you believe the accusations against Biden, then we are, God help us, looking at a choice between two rapists. Biden was not high on the list for at least most of us here, but we've run the primaries, he's won, and he's a hell of a lot better than Donald Trump. How could having a big intra-party debate about whether Biden should be replaced now, after he's won, not be damaging to both Biden and any nominee who might replace him, especially if the prospective replacement nominee was already seen by a non-trivial number of Democrats as having damaged the party's nominee in 2016 by failing to get fully on board after the primaries were over?
I don't at all think that people who support Bernie can have an opinion about what should happen now with Biden. I just think that it needs to be acknowledged that being a strong supporter of a two-time runner-up who won't get a third chance could possibly have an impact on one's analysis of the plausibility of replacing Biden now without damaging Democrats' prospects in the fall. When you really believe in something and you fight hard for it, it's hard to let it go and easy to keep working to find a way that it could still happen.
To be clear about my own biases, I was not and am not a huge fan of either Biden or Bernie. I was initially dubious about Warren but was impressed by the campaign she ran and would have voted for her if it had gotten this far (which, along with my warming to Hillary over the course of the 2016 campaign, further convinces me that my thought process is not well-aligned with the median voter). I really, really want Donald Trump out of the White House, and I don't have any problem voting for Joe Biden to achieve that. I do think his vice-presidential selection is unusually important, partly because of his age and partly for his other issues, and I hope we will eventually get to have the discussion that Heebie set out to have here.
Sorry, too many negatives in the first sentence of that second paragraph. Should be "I don't at all think that people who support Bernie CAN'T have an option about what should happen now with Biden."
393: Thank you!!!
398: I'm not sure what you're confused about. I want people to demand that Biden drop out. All the means of doing so you mention sound good to me.
399: I don't think acknowledging that one's analysis might be affected by whom one previously supported makes for a more productive discussion. I acknowledge it, you acknowledge it, so what? The arguments have whatever merit they have regardless.
No great troll is recognized in their time. (Okay, mcmanus got his due, but he's the exception.) Mr. F is smart and witty, and mixes a lot of genuine insight into his craziness. He's a really, really good troll.
Look at 92.1. That cracked me up, and was a fine jab at Unfoggetarian. Run-of-the-mill trolls are incapable of a slick bit of irony like that.
Like others here, I am tempted to accuse Mr. F of Bernie Bro-ism. But there is a key marker of that malady that Mr. F avoids: Mr. F is pro-democracy.
Look at 147, where Mr. F is asked about how we can rid ourselves of Biden. The Bernie Bro response is that the powers-that-be must stop protecting Biden, and must overturn the will of the voters as expressed at the ballot box.
Mr. F has the correct answer:
How about this: we pressure him to drop out until he does.
That's not incidental or accidental. Mr. F's 174 reiterates that theme. He's not assuming that shadowy forces made Biden the nominee, or keep him as the nominee. He's suggesting that given new information, Democratic voters ought to be repelled, and ought to act on that repulsion.
That argument cannot be dismissed, and requires a rebuttal. I mean, yeah, in the context of Mr. F's other comments, this is trolling, but it's quality trolling.
With all the praise in this thread of the Unfogged trolls of yore, I'm surprised that nobody has brought up the first-rate troll that Mr. F most resembles.
In 92.2, Mr. F tells us that he has been around here for 15 years. I feel as though I remember an "F," or maybe even a "Mr. F."
But you know who Mr. F reminds me of? Mr. F is the rhetorical spitting image of strasmangelo jones -- who has somehow been overlooked in this thread as one of the all-time great Unfogged trolls.
Thanks for the high praise, politicalfootball. I blush.
That argument cannot be dismissed, and requires a rebuttal. I mean, yeah, in the context of Mr. F's other comments, this is trolling
How so? What other comments?
403: I'm pretty sure that "what's his face (the leftier-than-thou dude who I quite liked)" from von wafer's 195 was stras. But I could be wrong.
Also, yes, I did sometimes sign my comments "F." I had forgotten that!
395 and 396: So are we arguing that identity politics resonates with the modal voter? That's not been my experience. Aspects of it, sure. If you think you're going to court black voters without talking about race and policing and housing then GTFO. But the announcing pronouns? That's not been my experience, maybe I'm wrong.
But this:The issue wasn't even just about trans kids. It was about safety in schools
Come on now. A scripted moment from a trans kid at a HRC hosted event wasn't about trans kids? It sure wasn't about crosswalks and bike helmets.
No great troll is recognized in their time.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
To the contrary, I'd say that being an asshole to unusual kids is exactly the kind of identity politics that appeals to gswift and to pro-Trump swing voters.
Of course the *modal* voter doesn't give a shit about pronouns. That doesn't mean it's wrong to do it, or that it costs votes in whatever coalition you're aiming to win with, or that it is persuasive to argue it does without evidence. Not *everything* you do in campaigning is designed to appeal to the modal voter. Sometimes you speak to specific audiences.
*My* specific point is that you were definitely going to complain about that, because you weren't going to pass up an opportunity to complain about trans inclusion that had already been making the complain-about-trans-people rounds, because that's what you do. Like my mom.
Safety from bullying is something that trans kids and parents of trans kids have in common with all parents, except, I guess, indifferent parents of bullies.
Although I'm inspired to wonder what "modal voter" even means. Actually I think if we pick modal across some of the most obvious categories first we're already at white women from California, so they're not who determines the general election. The primary, sure.
All presidential elections should be fought on the basis of what appeals to Megan.
Jesus F. Christ. Why don't we have nice things? Simple, it's because people want to be nice to trans kids. I mean, hasn't anyone ever listened to conservative talk radio? This is just common sense.
410: Is there still a lot of bullying over that with the youth? Genuine question. My middle school of 800 kids is around 90 percent ethnic minority, mostly Hispanic and Tongan, with some white kids and refugees from southeast Asia and Africa, and 92 percent low income. AFAICT it's not really a thing with them. Trans, non binary, gay, bi, the kids just seem to roll with it. Very "you do you" attitude.
407.1: But your argument requires not just that a scripted moment of outreach to a trans kid fails to appeal to modal voters, but that it's disqualifying with them. Otherwise you need to explain why that moment is a bigger part of Warren's campaign for you than the endless "I have a plan for that" on economic and other issues with plenty of broad appeal.
415: I am a 40-year-old childless cis woman and am not well-placed to speak to this. I have trans friends but in the scheme of things I'm not that plugged in to trans issues.
416: I just thought it was part of multiple indicators of a misdirected campaign, not really a disqualifying event in isolation. But regardless of what any of us liked or didn't about her messaging or campaign, the fact is that what she did came in a distant third in her own party's primary, and it wasn't a lack of funding or exposure or name recognition.
Just say what you mean: "I want democratic candidates to do more identity politics that appeals to me and people like me, for example, I'd like it if more candidates would complain that they sometimes people ask them to say what pronouns they use. I'd also like them to say "kids these days, am I right?" more often."
405: stras! That's totally who I meant! It turned out that he did that amazing comic strip! Did he later become Inland Island Rail? Anyway, it's wonderful, in the context of a nostalgic thread like this one, to see pf recapitulating years of the purest, uncut dumbshittery by speaking up for Mr. F in 403. What's old is new again! And we're heading for 1000! I can feel it in my old, tired bones!
I lay claim to 420. I plant the wafer family flag there.
Great, someone else claiming to read my mind. Yeah man, that's what I want.
There's a perfectly clear explanation for Warren's third-place finish, which is that her "pragmatic revolutionary" angle only played well with a small part of the population, and couldn't compete with either "pragmatic dullard" or "impractical revolutionary." It's too bad, because I thought she was by far the best candidate, but electoral politics is not a morality play.
Inaccessible Island is the best island.
I forget the name. The one where Hillary Clinton talked about wrestling a water buffalo and blowing up the moon. I'm maybe suffering from a bit of early-onset dementia. Or I'm just very overtired. I probably won't know which it is until it's far too late.
Fafnir and someone? Jeez, getting old is the worst.
How so? What other comments?
I actually started out 403 with the intent of addressing this question, but didn't have anything that would be 1.) easy to express 2.) reasonably original and 3.) respectful of the genuine bits of nuance I see in your argument.
So if I never get to a more complex response, I will say that I agree with the consensus here that an effort to push Biden out (given our current knowledge) would be damaging to liberal political goals, and that I don't believe you have provided a serious counter-argument to that assertion.
Fafblog. With Giblets and Medium Lobster as I recall.
430: Thanks for the response. I don't believe a good argument has been provided that an effort to push Biden out would be damaging to liberal political goals.
it's wonderful, in the context of a nostalgic thread like this one, to see pf recapitulating years of the purest, uncut dumbshittery by speaking up for Mr. F
Oh yeah, motherfucker. I'm coming for you next! It's on.
418: No argument that her campaign failed to catch on broadly enough. But I think there's an alternate explanation for that, at least in part, which is that generally well-meaning people who liked much of Warren's substantive platform but were turned off by "identity politics" need to assess exactly what made them feel that way. The world is full to the gills of screwed up shit, there are lots of people trying to guide us to which particular bits we should be outraged about, and Regular White Guys are not well-served by where they're getting pointed. (I say that as someone with Regular White Guy DNA and great regard for the Unfogged of yore, along with an appreciation for those who have kept it going as some of us mostly dropped by the wayside.)
432: Ha. No fair, I'm not entirely sober.
434: bring it, old man. I took down the cop, and he's armed. You don't scare me.
435: I don't think you can point to white dude grievance when a female candidate comes in third with women in her home state. Yglesias put up some numbers on this.
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/10/21169166/elizabeth-warren-working-class-women
Warren ended up in a class/gender cul-de-sac where she was very popular with white women with college degrees but considerably less popular with men and women without college degrees -- the majority of the population.
OK, regular white people of whatever gender who are worried about the wrong outrages. I also am no longer completely sober -- working with a colleague on a research project to determine the optimum proportions for a Boulevardier -- so will have to leave the remainder of the argument for another day.
Is all this heat about whether her campaign was aimed the wrong direction? I'm happy to agree that her campaign didn't make all the connections that it needed to, and yes she appealed to educated people who are doing well and not to the rest of the D-curious US.
Personally, I think there's two parts to that. EW talked about some big changes to the existing system; that scares a lot of people whose votes dems need. I beleive that Sanders scared them too, and that he got most of the votes of people interested in voting for big change, maybe even pulled in some people who wouldn't have voted otherwise, which Warren did not do.
The other part of it, Warren was not as appealing (in the sense of quickly making herself likeable to a multitude) on TV, I suspect in large part because she's female. We can curse the need for viable candidates to also be kind of entertaining, but it seems like a fact. Lizzo 2028 I guess.
Oh or Lori Lightfoot. She drove around the city haranguing people who were hanging out in groups to get their asses home, at least some people liked that style. Plus aldermanic takedown in the back room.
I also am no longer completely sober
WORD. But I will get one last shot in that she also came in a distant third with nonwhite voters.
The other part of it, Warren was not as appealing (in the sense of quickly making herself likeable to a multitude) on TV, I suspect in large part because she's female.
This just seems like a wrong assumption when the popular vote in the last national election was taken by a not great woman candidate.
To NickS way back at 282, thank you for the Berube quotes which cheered me up, and also:
It sounds like Politics Is For Power may do a better job. I haven't read it yet, but I'd be open to a reading group or discussion on unfogged.
Yes, please! That sounds great. That book may be preaching to a very small choir, but it is a choir whose repertoire I know very well. Or something like that.
I am subjectively pro gswift here; had I had a vote, I would have voted for Warren, but held my nose because of the trans posturing. I have learned from this thread - thanks - that it was seen by some people as a stand against bullying which is an aspect I hadn't seen.
What it looked like to me was the erection of a new structure of privilege, one that said "obviously, in the real world, we wouldn't let the opinions of any nine year old, however cute, determine political appointments. That's why we don't have absolute monarchies any more. But if you're the right kind of nine year old, with the right kind of parents, then of course you can have a veto."
Thinking about this, and about privilege generally, I remembered Pope Francis's gesture, when he did the annual foot washing. ceremony in a prison, washing the feet of Muslim women prisoners. That seems to me a piece of practical theatre far superior to Warren's. This isn't a judgment about whether a black woman in an Italian jail suffers more, or more unjustly, than a bullied child. I don't think that's possible to know. It's more that the gesture asserts common humanity in the face of an imbalance of power rather than inverting the structure of privilege so that people in Brooklyn can lord* it over people in the flyover rather than vice versa.
*In a completely non-patriarchal way of course.
But this is why I think you need a concept of sin, or of ineradicable human imperfection and tendency to fuck things up, if you're going to have a realistic model of moral calculation.
Tia: "if we pick modal across some of the most obvious categories first we're already at white women from California, so they're not who determines the general election. "
Well... aren't they? They're 29% of likely voters. Without white women the Democrats risk losing California and without California they probably almost never win an election. It only looks like they don't determine it because California is not a swing state - but that's partly because of that solid white female vote. But if you have a coalition of a lot of large blocks, each one of those large blocks "determines " the election.
" I think you need a concept of sin, or of ineradicable human imperfection and tendency to fuck things up"
I wish to subscribe to NW's rewritten Book of Common Prayer.
It's partially stolen from Francis Spufford, who wrote about "The human propensity to fuck things up"
Perhaps the point I'm struggling towards is that Officer Krupke poses a false opposition, and that depravity and deprivation are orthogonal to each other. There is obviously a very strong and cross-cultural tendency to confuse the two, especially at the top of the scale. In the West it goes back at least as far as Aristotle. Some Christians, building on some Jewish models, detached them at the bottom of the social scale, so that the most deprived figure imaginable was simultaneously the least depraved, or best. But of course other Christians, not least other Popes, tended to knot them very tightly together again.
In Europe, this led to societies stratified on a largely hereditary basis, where social dominance stemmed ultimately from proficiency in violence among your ancestors. In the US, that was - broadly - replaced as the basis of legitimacy by money. So to be rich was virtuous in itself, and to be poor was morally disgusting. But it still is knotted together at both ends. And I still want to unknot it. Some at least of the women whose feet the Pope washed belonged in prison - but they still deserve to have their humanity recognised.
I think we are, unfortunately, stuck with Biden. But I'm wistfully remembering back when we were hearing that the problem with Bernie was that he wasn't vetted.
And I recall a postmortem on the Warren campaign that reported that they didn't do polling which is major malpractice.
445: Right, sorry, sure. I guess what I was really reacting to was that initially I adopted gswift's frame of who the modal voter is who must be appeased, but then I realized that whoever he's imagining as the swing factor in an election it's not actually the modal voter, and implicitly he thinks the modal voter shares all his prejudices about trans inclusion, etc., which is likely not true. If you accept the city as the relevant geographic unit and not the state, LB and I are the modal voter! Actually, part of the point of the McElwee piece was an argument for discarding tired models about who you have to chase. That piece was mostly about left power within the Democratic party and the results of the primaries, but that's what's relevant if you're purporting to analyze why EW didn't win.
It's more that the gesture asserts common humanity in the face of an imbalance of power rather than inverting the structure of privilege so that people in Brooklyn can lord* it over people in the flyover rather than vice versa.
*In a completely non-patriarchal way of course.
This is really something else. I'm going to let you in on something. I don't see trans inclusion in terms of some shitty tired culture war. It's not some big victory for my tribe and fuck you to Iowans -- some of whom are trans! -- that Warren says she would ask her SoE to speak persuasively to a child and tell him she cared about him and his safety. I am not trans and internally experience a bunch of bog standard cis resentments, and I have to use my own experiences of not having power as internal analog when confronted by those resentments so that I can respond to them in some way other than spewing grievance all over the place, a practice I would recommend, although it does get harder the more favored categories you are in. I sometimes get angry on behalf of people I care about when gswift shits on them here, but that's not the same thing as thinking that trans rights and safety are somehow a way for me to exercise power in national elections. (I really just can't stop boggling at this.) So when I see Warren do that my reaction is not like, yeah, man, my boot's heading straight to Minnesota's neck. It doesn't seem about me or a victory for me. It just seems like Elizabeth Warren is working on caring about people who have less power, and who feel less safe, for all the reasons they might have less power. Of course it's scripted. Politics is scripted. If you choose some access to the mic for trans people, you are unusual in the space of politicians for the degree to which you are trying to show you care about trans people, which is important for all trans people, regardless of where they live. Of course that particular child asked the question because his parents had media access. Whiteness and money facilitated that. It does not mean that the point of it was so east coast urbanites could oppress Kansas. Trans people live in Kansas. It wouldn't surprise me if somewhere there is a trans person who heard about it and thought the whole scene was alienating because of the whiteness and/or money involved. That does not mean that an effort to signal trans inclusion is oppressive exercise of power by Brooklynites.
448 should have been two comments to help the push to 1,000.
I'm very online and followed the Democratic races fairly closely but this comment thread is the first time I've ever heard about incident where Warren said something nice about a trans kid (and good on her). This is an obsession of the right wing in the US which is unseemly at best. And I hardly think that's what cost her the race.
I'm very online and followed the Democratic races fairly closely but this comment thread is the first time I've ever heard about incident where Warren said something nice about a trans kid (and good on her). This is an obsession of the right wing in the US which is unseemly at best. And I hardly think that's what cost her the race.
Yes, this. I also hadn't heard of it, or if I had I immediately forgot about it because it's totally innocuous, admirable, and consistent. My take is precisely what soup said in 344 ("If my candidate can't even convince this kid they are serious about this, they aren't close to good enough for this post").
449: yes, I was irritated, and I'm sorry. You're probably right about Warren's motives and in the grand scheme of things this doesn't matter nearly as much as the iniquities (as I understand them) of the bankruptcy bill that Biden sponsored. It's easy to misread tone online and I probably misread yours.
449.2: have you misread NW? He meant, I think,
"Warren's gesture asserts common humanity in the face of an imbalance of power.
The gesture isn't about inverting the structure of privilege so that people in Brooklyn can lord* it over people in the flyover rather than vice versa."
And you seem to have read him as saying
"It's more that the gesture asserts common humanity in the face of an imbalance of power rather than inverting the structure of privilege.
The aim of Warren doing this is so that people in Brooklyn can lord* it over people in the flyover rather than vice versa."
453: The passage you quote is praising the Pope's footwashing gesture and contrasting it with Warren's trans outreach. Tia read it correctly.
453: No, I don't think so, and see 452.
452: I appreciate this. Obviously my tone towards gswift has been very deliberately contemptuous, because IMO it's past time. I even understand feeling some kind of sympathetic threat response to seeing someone go after one of your own. I feel it! I really struggle to watch videos of white people being racist because I have a cringey sympathetic humiliation response. I am happy to engage with anyone else here in good faith and as I said echoing J, Robot, I'm not some eternal font of wisdom and perfection and really the fact of commenting here at all is a strong signal of the kinds of comfort that create blinders to what other people experience that it really takes work to remove.
This is a fun thread to cut through a pandemic with. Ah, strasmangelo!
Also: yes to a new book group. I just twice-posted, so let me wait a bit and then get it up.
It surprises me that a discussion of the great trolls of Unfogged doesn't mention Halford or ajay (no offense, intended!). To me, they are more the classic trolls as their trolling is just for the purpose of getting arguments started, not in the service of an ideology. And the fact that they aren't always commenting as trolls -- that even an experienced Unfogged reader often can't tell if they are trolling -- makes their trolling all the more effective.
In regards to Mr. F, I don't think he's trolling at all. And after reading the Rebecca Traister article on this, I'm somewhat sympathetic to his position -- if I was in a position to do this, I might be trying to get all the women vp prospects to agree that they won't accept an offer to be vp, and have them contact Obama and other such to ask Biden to quit the campaign. Maybe Biden's doctor could say he's had a serious setback.
I am slightly aghast at 460 because I think of trolling as stating positions that you don't actually agree with, just for the sake of starting an argument, which isn't something I generally do. I mean, is Chetan in 4 trolling, because he disagrees with Cyrus and says he doesn't think Warren should be VP? That would start an argument. Lots of people here think Warren should be the VP candidate.
462: It's a waste of time arguing definitions, but that won't stop me. The best trolls work from a place of conviction. Back in the old BBS days, I used to troll creationist chat boards, and was always, always acting from a place of genuine belief, doing my best to construct careful, sincere arguments. The mark of a troll is offering an argument that is deliberately provocative, regardless of its validity.
Am I right in thinking trolling is sometimes used to mean something like: arguing indelicately, preemptively assuming your opponent won't argue in good faith, and trying to create a fight around something that could merely be a disagreement? On preview, seconding 463.
Which just seems weird to me given that we've mostly all been here for a long time. Even when we disagree, we're largely on the same side--at least, in terms of genuinely wanting things to be better for most people. And we're largely not dumbasses. So I think we'd get more light than heat by assuming good faith and a reasonable disagreement until shown otherwise.
4 doesn't strike me as trolling at all, although I have some agreements and disagreements with that perspective. It's just a statement of preference. We can state our preferences without being assholes about it.
463: yes, for example, I'm fairly certain that Emerson sincerely believed that Harry Potter sucked, but arguing this in Harry Potter fan sites just as the last book in the series came out, was definitely trolling.
4 doesn't strike me as trolling at all,
No, nor me! That was my point. I don't think it would be trolling even if Chetan knew in advance that most people here would disagree with him.
19 is trolling, though. "Hey, you are all wrong to be talking about this. Instead you should start discussing this different subject, which I know in advance will be argued forcefully on both sides and will bring up a lot of ill feeling."
463/465: I agree, and it is in this sense that I say that gswift is trolling. I'm making a normative case that his schtick ought to be out of bounds in this community, and that his behavior has exceeded the bounds of deserved charity or civility. I think he is maybe sincere, but not genuine, to attempt a distinction. Genuine concern for Democratic electoral success would not look like this. It should not be okay to mock and belittle people's identity-based concerns. I am sort of befuddled that there could be any debate that this is happening. To take just one point, gswift unironically uses "SJW" as a term of abuse. That isn't even a tell, it's just gamergate-type signaling *right on the surface*. If he didn't want to be doing this, if it were all just an accident, he'd express some regret when it was pointed out to him. But he never does. I don't think a community can be simultaneously welcoming to everyone and at some point people have to articulate some boundaries about what is and isn't okay.
Obviously my tone towards gswift has been very deliberately contemptuous, because IMO it's past time.
One scold calling me a racist on a blog matters not a bit but your type is political poison and that's why I want your ilk out of political campaigns. We just watched this play out in the UK.
Labour:"how could you all vote for Brexit you racist buffoons" (cue slack jawed amazement as voters leave in droves)
I'm making a normative case that his schtick ought to be out of bounds in this community, and that his behavior has exceeded the bounds of deserved charity or civility.
CANCELLED, BITCHES.
your type is political poison and that's why I want your ilk out of political campaigns.
We get it. You despise us and want us silenced. You can hold whatever positions you like, but it doesn't make you appealing to have a civil discussion with.
I mean, honestly, I'm far from sure the presence of voices like mine in political campaigns is an electoral winner! I'm not offering myself as a campaign consultant. I just think it should be a fundamental value of this blog that the gamut of identity concerns are important and worth treating respectfully. gswift very consistently does not do that.
appealing to have a civil discussion with
I don't think you have much to teach me about civil discussions.
But yes, I use SJW as a perjorative because these fools are having an impact on criminal justice issues in our cities and it's an ongoing disaster. The murder rate increase alone is apalling.
Indeed, nightmarish. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/takeaways-2019-crime-data-major-american-cities
468: maybe open your mind to the possibility that your read of what happened in Britain is straight out of the aging-white-dude, centrist-Democrat, pissed-off-at-the-hippies playbook about which Tia has commented. I mean, it's possible that your read, which I guess is also ajay's read, is absolutely right. It's possible that Labour lurched too far in the direction of the Social Justice Warriors and the PC faggot lovers and the Chardonnay-sipping elites and their ilk, and that alienated the real British voters, who must, in every instance, be understood to be the bedrock of Western Civilization. I bet that's not entirely wrong!
But it's also possible that what happened in Britain is that the left and the center split, because the center decided that the left was absolutely beyond the pale and preferred to see the right win rather than ceding significant electoral power to the left. See too: nearly every episode of political infighting since the liberation of Paris at the end of WWII through the evisceration of Warren's campaign by the geniuses in the DNC. Are these two possibilities mutually exclusive? Nope, they're not.
Dude, if you would ever even fucking acknowledge the general trend in crime and violent crimes over the last several decades (as LB's article shows for instance) I would grant you some credibility on that or any other subject.
. . . but your type is political poison and that's why I want your ilk out of political campaigns.
I had been planning to come back to this thread with a longer, comment attempting to engage productively, but I see that window may have passed.
Gswift, at the very least can you understand why people reading your comment find that (a) they emphasize complaining about things you object to, rather than advocating for things you would like to see and (b) that you do so in a way that pisses people off?
You've referred to the quote in 143 a couple of times as substantively similar to the point that you're trying to make. My point in including that quote was to provide an example of how to make the substantive point without pissing people off, but it doesn't sound like you're interested in that.
To NickS way back at 282, thank you for the Berube quotes which cheered me up, and also:
Thanks, I appreciate it.
474: And we are all basically following the same playbook. As am i with this comment. For instance What fucking evisceration of Warren's campaign by the DNC?
Blake got it very, very right.
468: come on, Labour did not get mullered in the last election because they spent too much time talking about minority rights, or because they called their supporters racist buffoons. We know why they got mullered, and it was for these reasons, in this order:
1) people hated Jeremy Corbyn. They thought he was lazy, untrustworthy, stupid, unpatriotic, incompetent, dogmatic, extremist, and (at the least) far too tolerant of the extremely unpleasant far-left faction in the party which had supported him. They thought the same about his shadow cabinet, in particular McDonnell and Abbott.
2) Brexit. Labour's Brexit policy successfully alienated Leave voters who had voted Labour in the past, but (partly because of 1) failed to attract enough Remain voters who hadn't to make up for it. They didn't leave Labour because Labour called them racist; they left Labour because they wanted Brexit, and they didn't trust Labour to deliver it. It also alienated a lot of Labour Remain voters, who would have stuck with Labour despite Corbyn if Labour had had a better Brexit policy.
3) To quote a colleague: "In England, people like voting for the officer class". They don't particularly want a prime minister who "sounds like them". Johnson and Corbyn are both from privileged backgrounds, but Johnson looks and sounds like it and Corbyn doesn't.
This is, I think, one of Starmer's biggest advantages. He isn't actually from a privileged background - if he makes it to PM, he'll be the one of the least privileged Prime Ministers since 1945 - but that's how he comes across.
Jeremy Corbyn is a garbage person who ran a garbage campaign. There isn't much of a lesson for us to learn from his campaign for this upcoming November, unless Corbyn is surprisingly a natural-born American citizen.
474, see 479. This is absolutely not my read.
You are also, I would say, wrong in saying that "the center decided that the left was absolutely beyond the pale and preferred to see the right win rather than ceding significant electoral power to the left". The Labour policies of 2019, as polling showed, were popular (with the exception of Brexit). The leadership was not. What drove people away - including members of my own family, Labour voters since before you were born, and definitely of the left not the centre - was the leadership.
And right now we're seeing how important competence is. Policies change in response to events. Competence doesn't.
479: I didn't mean to imply it was the major factor, just a part of why that cohort has a visceral dislike of him. And as you note, a big part of why he lost was people hated him, for a host of reasons.
I've got to go to work but like Stormcrow I have no idea what evisceration wafer is referring to.
For instance What fucking evisceration of Warren's campaign by the DNC?
There was a coordinated campaign to kill Warren's campaign when it was ascendant. That campaign pivoted on suggesting that her position on M4A was outside the realm of the possible, even laughably naive. It featured scores of op-eds and appearances on TV. It happened very suddenly, very swiftly, and was quite successful. If you think it wasn't run through the DNC (in part), you're as embarrassingly wrong about politics as gswift is about violent crime statistics.
That said, let me be absolutely clear about something: it's okay for political campaigns to be bloody in this way. My point isn't that there was a nefarious conspiracy to destroy Warren's candidacy. My point is that the center-right in the Democratic Party believed (for shitty reasons, I think) that Joe Biden was the preferable candidate and threw its considerable resources into making his (in that moment) principle challenger non-viable. They succeeded. That's how primaries are supposed to work. I'm not appalled by what happened, except that we now have a Democratic standard bearer who's addled, has a history of misogyny and sexual misconduct, and isn't nearly as media-savvy as the seated president. Oops.
467. Really? The number of participants here is not growing, and already pretty homogeneous. Speaking for myself, it's nice to hear a cop's perspective, even if it's obnoxious half the time.
I have enough meetings where people avoid saying what they think. Seeing people joke about California seceding is appalling, basically reasonable and compassionate people should be able to talk with each other while disagreeing.
Also, vw, I don't mind you attempting to read my mind, and I don't even mind particularly when you get it wrong, but I mind quite a bit when you airily say "Imma just assume here that ajay is a caricature semi-literate hard-hat racist homophobic bigot" because I'm fucking not and it's not the first time you've done it, so be so good as to wind your neck in.
What drove people away - including members of my own family, Labour voters since before you were born, and definitely of the left not the centre - was the leadership.
I don't understand why people fail to allow that the center-right's stranglehold on political discourse is critical in defining whether leadership is popular. To be clear, I thought Corbyn ran a shit campaign. But he was ALSO knifed by the center of his own party. And that knifing helped define him as somehow utterly unpalatable, even worse than Johnson. And it started long before the most recent campaign, of course. The center-right has hated Corbs for literally decades (and vice versa). Why this is even in dispute at this point is utterly beyond me.
the center decided that the left was absolutely beyond the pale and preferred to see the right win rather than ceding significant electoral power to the left. See too: nearly every episode of political infighting since the liberation commune of Paris
Parting shot on the crime issue, I'll outsource this to Peter Moskos who is someone anyone interested in the issue should be reading.
https://twitter.com/PeterMoskos/status/1180268356953415682
Or a more expanded view of that thread.
https://twitter.com/PeterMoskos/status/1180268342453719040
A quick observations and gripe, since this seems to be the ongoing politics/culture wars thread.
From the WaPo:
Developments in allegations against Biden amplify efforts to question his behavior
Who the fuck teaches these people to write? This presumably came from a professional journalist.
485: you're saying that Jews have unusually long, mechanized necks? And that you'll behead us if we speak out of turn?
Seeing people joke about California seceding is appalling
To be clear (again), I am absolutely not joking. I've yearned for it all my life. It will always be my first choice option. I am only baffled why the rest of the regions don't want it for themselves and we can't just dissolve the U.S..
You can be appalled, whatever.
Who the fuck teaches these people to write? This presumably came from a professional journalist.
Presumably some combination of powerless headline-writer and CW-diseased editor, rather than someone who primarily reports and writes.
Warren lost because her campaign ignored me when I repeated pointed out that they should be advertising on the radio in New Hampshire. The only candidate who did end up doing radio advertising was Amy Klaubacher, who ended up winning more votes than Warren, then promptly disappearing from the face of the Earth. Warren couldn't get traction after that.
Also, AOC made a really dumb move by endorsing Bernie after his heart attack, splitting the left when it could have been united. I still love AOC, but that was an unfortunate mistake.
Yglesias today (somewhat relevant to this thread): https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1255099745275711488
A common take among left-wing intellectuals is the donor class pulls Dems right on economics.
It's more likely the donor class pushes politicians to the left on social issues (just like left-wing intellectuals do!) which causes electoral defeats leading to bad economic policy.
Trolling or not?
Why this is even in dispute at this point is utterly beyond me.
Maybe you just aren't very knowledgeable about politics in other countries.
The number of ways 392 fails to even understand the point, much less engage with it seriously, suggests it's at least intentionally in bad faith.
Citing this Moskos thread as authoritative proof that "SJWs" are causing vast increases in crime rates, with the overt implication that the advocates are unserious liberal hypocrites, is damning. Unexamined biases, cherry-picking data; this isn't a serious argument or source for truth, it's a transparent attempt to find evidence to bolster prejudices.
484, do you have any trans people in your life you care about?
(I think talking about California seceding deserves to be intensely criticized, but Megan talks about other things.)
Responding to 495 I think the complicating factor is that lower-income people and less-educated people simply have no belief that the government can ever accomplish anything good, therefore don't vote based on ambitious plans. Or they do only at the local level.
||
U.K. Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove says the EU isn't treating Britain like a sovereign state, underscoring the risk of an economic shock at the year-end if they can't reach a trade deal.No! How could they?
495 Yggles is a classic troll.
Ajay is not a troll.
"SJW" is definitely gamer-gate/pepe the frog/right-wing lingo. If anyone wants to be taken seriously I suggest they refrain from using it.
"SJW" is definitely gamer-gate/pepe the frog/right-wing lingo.
Thank you. It's incredible to me that I even have to point it out.
501 could also be phrased as lower-income people being more risk-averse - which makes sense, right? - and therefore voting "conservatively" - not in a left-right sense, but in the sense that they aren't willing to swing and miss at ambitious targets but would rather have a high chance of modest gains.
But it's difficult to know how to test this. Moderate Biden's supporters were richer than ambitous Sanders', on average, but that might just be because they're older. And Trump's support base was disproportionately less-educated compared to the Republican average, and his policies were pretty ambitious.
I'm not familiar with Moskos, but the link at 488 makes a verifiable claim--what is the trend of crime per capita among non-white victims (and particularly young black males) since 2000? I was able to find a dataset on murders tagged by victim's race, but it ended in 2014. That's a start, though--if someone has something better, let me know. Put it in R, filtered to start at 2000, divided by total African-American population. There seems to be two trends: from 2000 to 2007 it increased from 193 to ~219 murders/million; then, in 2008 there was a dramatic drop, and it decreases steadily until the end of my dataset, from 189 to 169 murder/million. (Note that this is almost four times the murders per capita of the overall US population.) If you restrict victims to be black males under 35, the trend is similar but I don't have data on how many people are in that set, so I only used total African-American population as a proxy.
The 2007/2008 boundary is weird. My data is from the Murder Accountability Project, so I dunno if they started doing something different then or it reflects a real change.
In some earlier links, it looks like 2014 is an inflection year, so if anyone has links to more recent murder data, or other appropriately tagged crime data, I'd be interested.
Even taking the Moskos thread at face value, though, it's a claim that the homicide rate for young black men has been roughly stable, rather than falling, over recent decades. This is not good, obviously, but as a justification for gswift's iré at SJW's (leaving aside his frankly mystifying Oseas about causation), it's weak tea.
Things that would tend to predict whether you find someone not even covertly signaling allegiance to right-wing harassing troll armies to be inconsistent with your comfortable presence in an online space: being younger, being more female, being less straight, being less gender conforming, and probably although in this case I really hate to speak for anyone else, possession of more melanin.
508: Wow, my phone's autocorrect has gotten wackier and wackier.
508: I knew that the overall murder trend was falling, but wasn't sure if it also applied to young black men. It turns out it does, but with one interesting observation (that doesn't change my overall conclusion that yes, it's going down): the absolute number of murders/year in my sample has been pretty much stable over that range, the trend only really appears when population growth is taken into account. Which might be the source of Moskos's claim, I dunno.
Agreed that the SJW thing is not convincing in the slightest. And for the record, not that anyone cares, I mostly agree with what Tia is saying.
also 484, were you around for Shearer? Was it useful to hear what he thought? Was there a time it stopped being so? Can you imagine that some other people's emotional relationship to hearing what he thought might have been different from yours?
Equating "SJW" and pepe the frog strikes me, with no citable evidence at all, as making an error of two orders of magnitude. SJW has such wide currency that people will ironically, or even non ironically, refer to themselves that way, right? Also, the Moskos thread in 489 [never mind, mega-pwned before I finished typing]
SJW was originally a non-ironic way people spoke about themselves. Then it was turned into a pejorative by right wing trolls. People will sometimes still ironically use it about themselves, but anyone using it as a non-ironic pejorative is minimally aligning themselves with right wing trolls. If being perceived as aligning yourself with right wing trolls seems like a bad outcome to you, you drop it when it's pointed out.
515 See "politically correct"
Also see 504
I think the complicating factor is that lower-income people and less-educated people simply have no belief that the government can ever accomplish anything good,
This is what I think, too, particularly restricted to over age 35 or so. The things government does well are invisible or deteriorating. Political promises are always empty. Nothing ever connects optimistic policy blather with tangible benefit in one's life.
SJW was originally a non-ironic way people spoke about themselves. Then it was turned into a pejorative by right wing trolls. People will sometimes still ironically use it about themselves, but anyone using it as a non-ironic pejorative is minimally aligning themselves with right wing trolls.
As an example of the ironic usage, here is John Scalzi announcing his book titled Virtue Signaling with a cover image that he describes as himself, "In my social justice warrior garb!" I presume that does not align him with right wing trolls.
Right. But the ironic use doesn't really soften the hostility of the non-ironic pejorative use.
499, 513. An acquaintance's kid. I have gay friends if you're trying to ask whether I'm a homophobe. I'm sympathetic to trans people having a right to normal lives. I'm less immediately accepting of advocacy groups that speak for them, good intentions are not enough.
Yes, I was here during Shearer's tenure-- I didn't talk to him. Unlike gswift, who I don't think is suggesting that trans people be treated worse than anyone else, Shearer regularly suggested that black people were inferior. McManus is another example of someone whose presence made things worse. To me, Mr F above is as well, but I'm not going to suggest that others reject him.
Yes, I understand that it can be unpleasant to have someone you disagree with write disrespectfully about something that's personal. You seemed to be staking a claim about where the boundary should be here in 467. I'm responding.
So the other day the wife of one of my favorite film/TV critic's wife died of cancer. She was Nancy Dawson (he's Matt Zoller Seitz). She founded an awesome charity in Cincinnati called Transformcincy where trans kids donate their old clothes and pick up new ones that conform to their true gender identity free. I'm glad I donated while she was still alive. And I'll donate again.
Details here: https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1254911003390853121
520: I was trying to figure out how personally upsetting gswift's schtick might be to you.
With gswift, it's just strong implicature. I say, hey, my family's transphobic. That sucks. He shows up to say that trans people have gone too far. I knew ahead of time in this thread he was going to complain about Warren's trans outreach. He uses a pejorative that aligns him with right wing trolls, and doesn't care.
And right, that's what I'm doing in 467. And yes, really.
501, 517. Cosign, and I think this is the split in the Democratic party in the US. I don't know the right way for democrats who seek office to say this out loud, but it would be great if they found one. LB had something concise, the CDC saves lives.
468: Corbyn was genuinely an unlikable guy. He's like all of the worst tendencies of the post-Cold-War left condensed into a single candidate. He couldn't even get Brexit right, because he was one of those "the EU is a neoliberal institution" dudes. At some point "the center-right's control of the discourse" just becomes an excuse to ignore obvious fact that Corbyn was a uncharismatic loser. He reminds people of every time that they got into a long argument about something they didn't care about.
Reagan's asshole line about the scariest words being "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," has been incredibly effective at destroying society.
Also no serious Democratic presidential candidates are anything like Corbyn. Sanders is much much more pragmatic and charismatic than Corbyn. Candidates like Kucinich have never stood a chance. We're not going to suddenly end up with Barbara Lee as the nominee (who I'm proud to have voted for for congress, but realistically might have Corbyn-like problems if in leadership).
What is the opposite of trolling? Tia in this thread is the opposite of trolling.
It is hard to think of a genuine American equivalent of Corbyn. Sanders is a million times better candidate than Corbyn.
I don't think - I know I wouldn't - that gswift is part of a right wing troll army, or even the catspaw of one. What does he do? He's a cop, working among disadvantaged children. That's good, necessary work. More useful than mine; then he come on here and blows off steam, which is, at worst, bad manners. But it is also informative. Part of the craft of reporting is talking with people until you understand how they think. This has, sometimes, a lot to do with disagreeing with them. But it is very rarely an experience from which you learn nothing.
I have known to talk to at length one genuine Nazi (his father worked for Hans Franck; his godfather was hanged at Nuremberg) and one man who, I am morally certain, would have joined the party had the opportunity offered but was born 50 years too late and had to settle for being a fervent Bannonite. I've known a lot of British conservatives and one or two American ones.
Gswift doesn't fit into any of those categories as I read him. He and Tia have a remarkable gift for triggering each other - as I guess I and tia do too. But this is something to be worked around, rather than an occasion for a witch trial.
There's so much I could say about that, but I'm gonna leave it at ugh, "witch trial" to describe pointing out that someone's behavior is deeply and persistently shitty, and saying that in your opinion it should be considered a normative violation of the group.
"Jeez, you don't have to execute the guy."
Concur to the extent that "witch trial" seems like a fantastically inappropriate, and offensively so, description of anything in this thread.
You may not be aware of this, NW, but it's a recognized trope that men use fantastic overstatements of harm to describe harsh criticism of men by women.
Gswift is an asshole, not a witch. It'd be more interesting to have a witch as a commenter. We should burn neither witches nor assholes at the stake.
We should tan them, gently, so that good vibes may wash over us.
530: "He's not an actual Nazi, you know ..." is a tepid defense. And I think "triggered" is a dismissive description of Tia's response, which is calm, specific, carefully reasoned and (as previously noted) extraordinarily non-trolly.
Anyway, I get being interested in different kind of fuckwads and their voices. The other week when I mentioned the self-describe psychopath I met, I didn't make clear that I totally knew what he was about before we met, and I was interested in hearing from him. There should be standards in bilateral relationships, in which each person can monitor their own boundaries, and communities as large as this partially funct weblog.
Doesn't that ad seem like it from a completely different era?
I agree with 527 and 536, btw.
FWIW, I don't think being a cop has done good things for the quality of gswift's contributions to Unfogged, but I do think he's still fundamentally on the same side on a lot of what I care about, and his wrong-headedness is of the sort that needs to get sorted for our politics to improve. I'd rather convince him of the error of his ways than run him out of town, partly because this community is about the only one I can think of online that actually changes minds from time to time.
Now that Charley's here, I'll just say that I regularly disagree with him quite vehemently--albeit typically at the margins, I guess--when it comes to politics. But it never occurs to me that he might be trolling, because a) he seems genuinely interested in hearing what other people have to say, even when those people disagree with him, and he's willing to give rhetorical ground in order to take part in challenging conversations (for example, he doesn't use codewords that are associated with the radical right, and when he punches hippies, which he does fairly often, he does so with some acknowledgement that hippies may smell bad, but they mean well--that, in other words, they're difficult to have as part of your political coalition, but they're not actually bad people); and b) he's obviously invested in these issues in ways that most people are not, meaning he walks the walk as opposed to just talking the talk. I would say that both of these things are also true of Tia, for what that's worth, but not as obviously true of gswift or Mr. Fuckface. I mean, gswift is deeply invested in criminal-justice issues. But I don't think that investment maps productively onto good-faith discussions of politics.
Mostly, though, I waned to say that I know there are other threads that have a bit of momentum now. That's all well and good, I suppose, but I still have faith in this one hitting 1000! You're all racist!
521: Jesus. My first reaction was, wait, wasn't that a few years ago?
544: Mr. Fuckface
It actually stands for "Fastidious." AWB bestowed it on me.
Can we wait until I actually do something racist before wondering if I'm a literal Nazi? It only came up as Tia's special armchair diagnosis that my views were because I secretly am driven by racial resentment of minority success.
I don't really care if the SJW thing bothers one person but several of the more reasonable people here say it's shitty so I'll try and not use it. My contempt though for the crowd I'm referring to with that term is well earned. I'm coming up on 12 years working these neighborhoods and the sign waving activist crowd is completely absent from the day to day work being done out here. My school is the poorest minority school in the district and this campus houses the middle school, the elementary next door, a community learning center, food pantry, low income health clinic, and a pre K. It's ground zero for trying to make a difference on the west side. You know how many times that crowd has shown up to help, volunteer time, donate money or equipment? 0. They then want to wave signs and smear the cops and education system as racist and oppressive. I'm done with them.
I'm sympathetic to trans people having a right to normal lives. I'm less immediately accepting of advocacy groups that speak for them, good intentions are not enough...Unlike gswift, who I don't think is suggesting that trans people be treated worse than anyone else
This, exactly. I'm not saying trans people as a whole have "gone too far". I'm saying certain advocates and their groups are aggressive assholes about what should be valid differences of opinion on policy and they end up alienating self described feminists and liberals. Trans people should be able to lead normal lives without stigmatism. But I also don't think biological males should be competing in women's sports or be incarcerated in women's prisons. This is not an uncommon view with left leaning people but there's some people and organizations that immediately scream you're a bigot or a TERF for even having these views.
You're upset with activists for not providing comprehensive social services? And you're convinced that everyone who does work in your school isn't a member of the "activist crowd"? Both of those seem plausibly ill-founded
You said the kids in your school are very live and let live about trans issues, and I think that there are visibly trans kids in the school. Are you certain that if you talked to one of their teachers about Warren's trans outreach, and said that you thought it disqualified her as a candidate, that the teacher would agree with you?
I mean, I know people who work in food pantries, and a very large percentage of them are people I'd describe as activists. Maybe not at the specific location where you're working, but if not, I don't think that generalizes well.
Does it really have to be clarified that words can have distinctly different meanings/implications based on both speaker and context?
If they're going to shit on all the public servants actually doing the work without the faintest attempt to help in a meaningful way then they can go to hell. They all seem to have free time when it's time for sign waving and yelling at people in front of city hall.
There's one teacher in the school who identifies that way. She means well and is a reasonable person and we work together fine.
I've already very explicitly said the trans issue was not a disqualifying event, at all. It was merely one of several things that gave the vibe (to me at least) that the campaign was geared at younger college educated people. That's not a winning general election strategy. If she was able to get the votes I would have happily voted for her. I'd rather Warren was holding drag queen story hour in the White House than see this orange fool in there for another four years.
550: I would consider many of the people on the campus as real activists but that's not how they describe themselves.
So, good activists are good and do useful work, but the ones you know mostly don't identify as activists except this one teacher, bad activists are bad and only do counterproductive things and don't help anyone. Okay, sure, but at that point I don't think fulminating about the activist crowd adds much information to the discussion.
Sure and I could be more cognizant that I'm talking about a specific subset of people I have direct experience with and can't expect you guys to read my mind. But it's definitely a general rule here that anyone who likes to loudly claim they are an activist is almost certainly useless.
(I do appreciate it if at least SJW is going to stop. Small mercies!)
Doesn't Sturgeon's Law apply here --if most self-proclaimed activists are useless that may be a corollary of most people being useless.
556: Maybe dedicated trans wing in prisons? Because the flip side of that article is trans women who are in prison as sex offenders or other violent crimes. I don't see how we can ask women to be housed with them and feel remotely safe.
I think 557 is a large part of the answer. The world is full of dingbats, some of whom are activists. When dingbat activists make your life harder, it's important not to over-generalize about "activists" when the relevant category is "dingbats."
But look y'all, no one who waltzes into a thread where someone's complaining about her transphobic family talking about '[grifters] with autogynephilia" has some high minded critique of NGOs. I know it's hard to see this if you don't have a little familiarity with the landscape here, but it's true.
I hear people talk all kinds of shit about HRC, but they say it's racist, sexist, and transphobic. I have no direct knowledge.
There is a difference between trying to change systems and policies to make the world a more just place, and doing the hard work within systems like schools to help others. It's just separate things that both need doing. I wouldn't call teachers activists though for teaching in poor schools. That's more like choosing a job with a community service function to it.
But look y'all, no one who waltzes into a thread where someone's complaining about her transphobic family talking about '[grifters] with autogynephilia"
I think you have good reason to be annoyed with gswift; he's clearly made digs at both you personally and at things you care about.
For myself, I am inclined to try to both respond to (some of) the substantive points that he's making as well as (sometimes) flagging when I think he's being rude. That's not to say that you should respond in that way; I'm conscious of inserting myself into a conversation in which I'm not the person doing the most emotional work.
But I also think about a bon mot that Kara Swisher mentioned at some point (which I'm not remembering with complete accuracy) -- she said a homophobic relative made some comment to her about half the country being opposed to same-sex marriage and she replied, "10 years ago that was 80 percent; what do you think has changed the minds of 30 percent of the people?"
One reason to have patience for engaging with people is that I think awareness of trans concerns is one issue on which the trendline is moving in the right direction. The longer the conversation goes on (it is likely) that more people will agree with you . . .
Tia thank you for speaking up. Gswift sucks.
|| Speaking of activists, my friend Rushan posted this letter from her husband to his mother on social media. Feel free to pass it along to anyone who might be moved by it. |>
'[grifters] with autogynephilia"
I honestly forgot that was the phrasing I used. It's not an inaccurate description of how I view certain trans activists but you are right that it was not the way to respond to what you were posting.
Definitely at least part of the problem is mine. Because this place is reflexively familiar I sometimes comment in the same manner as I would with a co worker or my cop brother and don't think about how that type of interaction plays very different in this sphere, especially in text form.
Hey dalriata, come back. No longer the darkest timeline.
565: I appreciate at least some movement. You should not be talking like that anywhere; you are not a competent judge of the reality of people's transness, but I have no influence over how you act in other spheres. In general, I think it is a good idea to always act as if trans people and the people who care about them are in the room. Here they certainly are, and the thing is, you actually never know where else they are *because you don't know who is going to die closeted because they are afraid of being rejected*. I know I have been intense in this thread; that is what it takes to get you to listen.
Hey dalriata, come back. No longer the darkest timeline.
What? Dalriata didn't go anywhere.
I think the reference is to 326, where dalriata brings up the "darkest timeline" gif.
that is what it takes to get you to listen.
You think yelling and calling me a racist and a bigot all thread is what did it? Seriously? Ok, stepping away from the keyboard now.
Setting aside the thing that gswift didn't like (and sorry for the confusion over my presence), 568 makes some really good points. I'd add further that saying that trans women don't belong in female sports or female prisons tells them that their gender is contingent. They're female until they're not. A lot of trans women have said precisely how harmful that is. It's accepting their gender only as some sort of make-believe, instead of part of one of the conceptual categories we, for better or worse, organize our society around. It's not the worst thing one can do in the situation, but I don't think it meets the minimal standard for decency.
These things are hard. I think we're at the point now where general consensus among cis people is that trans women are fine, they shouldn't be made fun of, they shouldn't be treated as mentally ill, they should be referred to by the gender they use to refer to themselves, and also that they don't belong in female sports. And the idea that "telling them their gender is contingent" is the one thing that must absolutely be avoided is not accepted.
We must protect the integrity of foxy boxing.
They're female until they're not...It's accepting their gender only as some sort of make-believe
If a trans woman wants to identify as a woman, live as a woman, etc. have at it. But if you go a step further and think you can assert you are a biological female then yes, now you're in the world of make believe. Sexual dimporphism exists and human males have a massive physical advantage. I don't think inclusiveness trumps a right to female only spaces.
573: I agree it's hard. I think you're only making descriptive statements, not normative ones, but even so "general consensus" is doing a lot of work there and I don't think it's an accurate description of the state of things. We're in a moment of change and there's not much consistency across fields. Even, say, the percentage of news articles that use preferred pronouns is changing rapidly by the year (but I think we're nearing the end of that curve).
575: Sexual dimorphism is an approximate description of the conjunction of a bunch of correlated bimodal distributions that have extreme overlap. It's a pretty good approximation except where it horribly fails. Intersex people exist. Confusing population traits with individual traits is a category error.
It's going to fail more often at the extremes, like with top athletes. See for example the picture that was going around Twitter of the four female Chinese runners. Transphobia hurts insufficiently feminine cis women.
My guess is that sometime in the next decade we're going to have a sudden phase shift in how we segregate high-level sports. Even setting aside trans folks, it doesn't handle edge cases like Caster Semenya well. There's a certain weirdness of it: we want a competition of the best people in set X because people in XC have innate advantages. Well, some of them do. Actually just a handful of them, most of them suck, their innate advantages are only relative to the median of X. And of course some people in X have natural advantages--and we only care about natural advantages, none of this artificial stuff, that's unsporting--and they should be celebrated for those unfair advantages. But if those advantages are too big, or they're just icky, we're going to give them tests that a lot of people find insulting (sometimes with a creepy, racist overtone) to guarantee they should be counted as in X.
I've seen people suggest testosterone levels, but that has, for now, the same culturally insulting issues, and I dunno if that's actually a good measure of potential muscle or whatever. Maybe combination of weight class and some other measures. But regardless of what would be better, the current state leads to controversies every year. It's worth examining our assumptions.
I don't think inclusiveness trumps a right to female only spaces.
I agree with this statement as written, modulo ascribing different meanings.
Sexual dimporphism exists...
So do intersex individuals. So do cis women with naturally occurring high levels of testosterone. Is there a single example of a trans male athlete dominating their sport? So far it seems this is a non-issue.
So this is how we get to 1,000 comments, is it? Not what I would have chosen.
Completely pwned by dalriata who also added much more value.
The sports thing seems both unimportant to me (who actually cares that much? Sports people, but I don't care about them) and like it's not going to be resolved with bright line rules.
If you took the position that trans women were entitled to compete in women's sports regardless of their level of gender-affirming medical treatment, you'd probably get weird results pretty soon even if they haven't happened yet. There seem to be a lot more trans people than anyone would have thought a few years ago, not all trans women use HRT, and physiological differences between AMAB and AFAB people are big enough in the ways that matter for a lot of sports to turn into a serious advantage on average for a trans woman not using HRT in women's sports.
But as far as I know, mostly elite sports organizations are instituting non-bright line, kludgy rules that are letting trans women participate in women's sports without being egregiously unfair. It's a little messy, but I don't think it's a meaningful problem.
So this is how we get to 1,000 comments, is it? Not what I would have chosen.
No, let's keep talking about Biden. I am extremely worried. For maximum comment churn, there is the interesting contention in 174 that "Biden is so weak that he is the only nominee with a decent chance of losing to Trump," a claim for which I don't know how you could muster credible evidence, but I bet I get a quick and efficient one-sentence reply from Mr. F definitively settling the question (uh, thanks in advance!). Or we could talk about options in a more pragmatic way. Or we could talk about the Traister piece. Anything.
580 They all could lose to Trump. They all could beat Trump. If 2016 has taught me anything it's that no one knows anything. Least of all me.
That sounds like a plan. I don't think Biden is that weak -- I hate it, and did long before the Reade allegations broke, but he's genuinely popular among conservative and minority Democrats, and that's a whole lot of the party. I'm not a pollster, just talking about people I know, but Latinos in my neighborhood really seem enthusiastic about him.
How much is the Reade story going to affect that? I don't know, but my guess is not much.
I assume I'm just repeating something close to somebody else's view, but the claims against Biden are concerning, should be treated seriously, and he's by far the best chance we have of unseating Trump. A world where Biden is president is going to be better for women than Trump being president. I'm not convinced there's a plausible path to any alternative besides those. And that's awful and hypocritical, but I don't see a way out of it.
Interview with an olympic swimmer on the transwoman thing. I too conclude that sport just isn't worth caring about, but interesting.
People are way overestimating the strength reduction from HRT. It doesn't even close the gap with a juiced up female.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/782557v1
This is all just wildly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, both in terms of trans rights and in terms of women's sports. The first (and second, and third, and fourth) biggest problem in women's sports is that other than tennis, roughly no one watches any women's sports more often than once every 4 years. If people spent half the time watching NWSL games that they spent arguing about trans women in sports, then maybe the argument would matter. Even when it comes to trans people in women's sports, there seems to be as much of an issue in practice with trans men being forced (and dominating) women's sports as there is with trans women in women's sports. Finally, if trans women were more accepted as women throughout the rest of life, and it really were just about elite sports, then it'd be easier to find a workable solution in just this one area.
For maximum comment churn, there is the interesting contention in 174 that "Biden is so weak that he is the only nominee with a decent chance of losing to Trump," a claim for which I don't know how you could muster credible evidence,
In its weaker form of "other candidates would do better against Trump", you could use polling data to address this, and there the picture is mixed: this poll on hypothetical elections https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/01/16/polls-trump-matchups-michigan-wisconsin-florida/4488735002/ looks at Florida and finds that Warren, Sanders, and Biden all beat Trump, and Biden does so by a wider margin than Warren. Buttegieg draws with Trump. So Biden is maybe weaker than some but stronger than others.
And "Biden has a decent chance of losing against Trump" - yes, can't argue with that. You'd have to be very optimistic, I think, to give Biden better than 85% chance, and one in six chance of losing is a decent chance.
But Mr F. is actually asserting that no other conceivable nominee has a significant chance of losing against Trump. This is too ridiculous to be worth discussing.
Wildly unimportant does seem to sum it up.
This is too ridiculous to be worth discussing.
Shhhhhhh. It is deadly serious, absolutely earnest, and 100% true. 1000% true. Furthermore, neither you nor anyone else here has mounted a serious challenge to it. I am patiently waiting.
(...people, THE GUY WAS TROLLING. 1000% TROLLING. JESUS. And, contemptibly, about a serious matter.)
It may be contemptible but if it helps get us to 1,000 comments also laudable, in its way. Who can say?
I actually assumed he was Russian at first sight.
No, let's keep talking about Biden. I am extremely worried. For maximum comment churn, there is the interesting contention in 174 that "Biden is so weak that he is the only nominee with a decent chance of losing to Trump," a claim for which I don't know how you could muster credible evidence,
I would say Biden is the only nominee with a decent chance of losing a televised debate to Trump. Possibly also Buttigief. But that doesn't extend to anything else.
He's been around off and on for a while, and said, unless I misunderstood him, that he's a RL friend of AWB. So, not a professional troll, even if certainly being trolly in this thread.
The first (and second, and third, and fourth) biggest problem in women's sports is that other than tennis, roughly no one watches any women's sports more often than once every 4 years.
NOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOO! Clearly none of you people actually play sports! Which is fine! But I do (well, did). Lots of people do. They like it. It is important in our lives, even if we're just playing at amateur regionals. I'm not competing these days, but when I was, I put tremendous thought and time and effort into it. Whether people watch it is barely an afterthought. We know they don't, but that's not only because it is women's sports. No one is watching the men's all-Sacramento volleyball finals either.
I want to be trans-affirming and I hope I am in other aspects of life. I don't want sexual dimorphism to exist either and I was horrified when I realized the extent of it. But sports cannot be what they are and provide fair competition to all that includes trans-women. One response could be, well then, change sports, and to people who don't care, that's fine. But lots of people are invested in what sports are now and with no malice, they can't accept either changing the nature of sports nor having their chance to win wiped out by a trans athlete.
I don't have an answer on this. It is a genuine muddle. But handwaving away the nature of sports and the nature of bodies isn't gonna get to the answer.
I would rather talk about Biden anyway. Yesterday there were tweets circulating showing him nodding off during his town hall thing with Clinton and I'm just so dismayed and disheartened. But I can't deny that most people voted for him in the primaries. A vigorous VP would help a lot.
I will hope that Trump-hatred takes Biden over the top, and that part is looking good.
593: I interpreted it to mean that AWB had christened Mr. F on this blog, not IRL.
I'm shocked a bunch of nerds aren't interested in sports. But some people's lives revolve around their sport and there's sponsorships and scholarships on the line. Even at a lower level, I've helped train my daughter in a couple amateur muay thai fights and a biological male has no place getting in the ring with her.
It's a very visually elegant case of trolling, with the multiple lines being tended in parallel... unfortunately not a lot of substance. That's what I'm hoping to get, even possibly from him. Like, what is anyone doing? Is there some initiative among the people who are (laudably, as I understand it) still on the Sanders campaign payroll to try to push for a contested convention? Even if it's a bad idea, which it probably is, it would be good to know what discussions are happening.
594: Don't you play mostly coed sports? At any rate, we were arguing about elite sports. Rec sports are a completely separate issue. I'm mostly familiar with coed summer ultimate, where the main issue seems to be recruiting enough women so the team doesn't have to forfeit. The other big problems are people not actually throwing to the women on their teams, and when one team has a woman who is a varsity athlete and the other team doesn't. Are trans athletes really causing problems at anywhere near the rate of those kinds of things? It also doesn't seem like a big deal to me, because in pickup sports I often end up matched up with women who were varsity athletes because I'm short and we end up being a fun matchup without a big physical advantage either way.
591: I think we had all better hope that old unfogged comments can't be used as kompromat.
599: Megan did elite-level TKD in college.
I am not that worried about women's sports, because the vast majority of situations just don't matter if you have some trans-women superstars. High school soccer? Who cares if there's a trans supserstar who gets a full ride to play on a college team? Rodney Dangerfield aside, it's just going to be a nice thing that befell a kid with a lot of challenges.
Before sports were integrated, people were worried that black athletes would take over sports, and then it mostly happened and it's okay I would never make an unwise analogy in a 600+ comment thread.
For individual sports, I think you could do a lot with the individual rankings kind of thing that they do in tennis, and make divisions for competitions based on rankings.
I don't know what you do for the world championships, but there are people smarter than me who could figure it out.
593: Yes, I did a search of "posted by: Mr. F"and "posted by: F" in Unfogged" and I see comments in several dozen threads* spread out though the years going back to at least 2005. Looked at a few and nothing stands out.
*One of which was an actual 1000-comment thread responding to heebie postulating a letter to her younger self. In my quick perusal I did not find any topics of particular heat (I may have missed it, though) but beyond a lot of actual on-topic comments it prompted discussions of statewide nerd camps, geology, and pro basketball among other things.
Lurid, were you the person who mentioned a while back map projections centered on Antarctica? I'm feeling an itch for wall maps.
Nodding off in the middle of a Clinton speech is the most relatable thing Biden has done in a while.
Justin Amash running as a Libertarian is another election concern of mine. But am not actually convinced of which way it will go (and in Michigan in particular), but my default pessimistic model is that the Trumpers will stick to Trump no matter what.
You're asking for wall maps and I'm right here, Mossy. I feel hurt.
Arabic, me no habla. It isn't you, it's me.
One gets more credibility about concern for women and their safety and their participation in sports when they don't have a history of trolling on trans/gnc issue.
If one are deeply concerned for women and their safety, the way to improve your ability to speak about it it is to lay off trans issues, don't bring them up in unrelated threads, don't try to claim that false reports of rape are common, get totally demolished on one of your three supposedly paradigm cases even taking your own reporting at face value, then make the same claim again later as if it hadn't been debunked the first time, and show some consistent interest and concern about women's safety in other contexts when it isn't a chance to complain about trans women being treated as women. Or better yet, let *women* be the opinion leaders and work out this issue.
607: Wait, is that your job? I think I assumed you just worked for MI6 or something.
611 It is indeed, among other things. I've bought maps for money I could retire on.
It's a big deal for those interested in sports. We have two recognized categories in sports, men and women. In most sports, the difference between men and women is so significant that the elite women wouldn't be competitive at a much lower level of amateur competition against men, and that's true all the way down the amateur ranks. Sub-elite women marathoners around here (qualified for Trials, e.g.) train with the men's over 50s master's group. Endogenous testosterone is a hell of a drug. This makes women's sports what some call a protected class. But it's also true that there aren't only two biological sexes, so we can't just sort people based on chromosomes or blood tests, because it's profoundly unfair to someone like Semenya who, e.g., thought she was biologically XX (she's not, as it turns out) and a woman (she is). Complicated also by the fact that elite athletes are likely to be genetic outliers in all sorts of ways. Mapping social categories onto sports categories is hard even without taking into account the egregious history of gender-policing and discrimination. And that's setting aside the question of trans athletes who quite reasonably don't want to have an asterisk next to their gender, or who don't want to have to take hormones to pass blood tests, but who may retain biological advantages. But if we're going to have two categories of sports, then we need to draw a line somehow.
612: I'd ask you for some wall map suggestions--my office here is pretty bare still--but I'd rather just nice prints than something priceless. Good cover for your spying, though.
Who cares if there's a trans supserstar who gets a full ride to play on a college team?
I'm going to treat that as a rhetorical question.
615 It's the best. You looking for a world map?
I feel strongly like I'm being successfully sincer-a-trolled again here, but did anybody notice the assertion that because there can be tricky cases with trans people in prison, all of them should be presumptively treated as sex criminals just to be on the safe side?
Also you can get some really beautiful 17th and 18th century maps for not very much money, you'd be surprised. I don't collect myself (other than an MTA subway map hanging in my apartment) but feel free to email me for recommendations.
It's also just weird to me, as someone who cared a lot about playing sports for a long time, to feel bad for people not having a chance at being the very best at their sport. I never had a chance at being an elite athlete! Almost no one does! Caring a lot and never having a chance at being the best, or even close to the best, is the normal state of being an athlete. (It's also the normal state of everything, it was obvious I never had a chance at being as good at math as Jac/ob Lu/rie when we were teenagers.) A bunch of people going from being the best in their county at a sport to second or third best just doesn't seem like one of the most important issues in the world to me.
(Safety concerns are, of course, valid. But they can and should be handled on a sport-by-sport basis based on the actual safety issues involved. None of the sports I've played would there be a safety issue in my playing with varsity women. I don't know enough to have opinions on what the rules should be for safety in sports I don't know well.)
On the trans athlete dominating their sport I asked for a single instance. The canonical ask is three. But I haven't seen a single one. This is a complete non-issue.
The bathroom thing is just gross and reflects really badly on those who are obsessed with it. There are stalls. Only stalls in women's bathrooms. Do your business, move on, and keep your minds off of policing other people's junk.
612: Barry, do you have any [smudge smudge] stories?
618: I also thought that was absolutely awful, but let myself get side-tracked. I don't think sports are unimportant like half the people here do--people care about it, therefore it's important, even if I don't--but prison is a much more important concern.
Barry, I'll hit you up. Thanks!
621: This seems like a weak argument, because we don't currently have a sports regime where trans women have an unrestricted right to compete in women's sports. Saying that such an unrestricted right wouldn't change anything because the change hasn't happened yet doesn't seem to work.
I'd rephrase Barry's argument as we can't wait until this is actually a problem and deal with it then. It may turn out never to be a problem and it may turn out that by the time it's a problem it's easier to solve than it is now.
Ack "can wait"
622 Lol. I'm a bit worried you didn't munge the name (heebie, can you, JP will you ask?). He's been trying to recruit me for the last couple of years in order to move into this region but I gave him my honest assessment, they aren't buying the kind of stuff he's selling here anymore (primarily natural history stuff, but also some great maps but few of the region). 10-20 years ago you could buy Audubon prints of raptors (they do love their falconry here) and sell them for a pile of cash but now if it's not an Arabian raptor no can do. You do know the story of his disbinding of The Birds of America? Major scandal. And he lost a ton of money. I could do it but I prefer to be on the institutional buying side though I know a lot of high end vendors and could work it if I had to (one of my standard questions for a vendor when they sell something to someone else I've been hunting is whether they sold it to a private collector or an institution, I like to see nice and important things end up in publicly accessible collections). One of his people wrote roman-a-clef about him, I think it's called Original Color, I've yet to read it though.
606: Amash is only an issue if you feel like you're running out of things to worry about. He'll get votes from people who don't want to vote for either candidate but still want to vote. Very few of those people were ever going to go to one of the candidates anyway. That said, it's nice that he enters the race as a Trump-hater, and you'd have to guess that Trump has more libertarian cred than Biden.
You should anonymize "MI6" too, just to be safe.
Daughter, entering bedroom and quoting Edward Eager: "Alas for human dignity!"
Me: Oh, is it lamentation time for dignity again?
Daughter: YOU are in my bottom bunk, eating crackers, with your legs in a sparkly mermaid tail, leaning on a pillow. Alas for human dignity.
It's a fair cop. The tail keeps my feet warm. I do remember writing something about Antarctic maps, but I don't have a source for them, so Barry has carte blanche to dump a bunch of links to vendors here.
You should anonymize "MI6" too, just to be safe.
It's OK, it's an alias. Their real name is SIS. Their friends call them The Service and their colleagues call them The Friends. (MI5 is known as Box 500, or just Box).
630: at least SOMEONE in the household is being raised right!
And to earlier stuff, the ideal that people in prison should feel safe from physical or sexual violence is of course one I agree with, but claiming that trans women are the source of the problem seemed more ridiculously offensive than offensively ridiculous. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise on that last point but not to consider other options. Trans and non-binary people are people. I don't see any reason for any exclusion that respects that humanity, so those of us who are cis and cranky need to just cope.
Amash might hurt Trump here. Probably not enough to make a difference, but November is a long way away.
oh well, 1000 comments here we come:
Preliminary remarks: these opinions are based on English law. Two points are relevant. The first is that both gender and sex are protected classes under the Equalities Act. It is illegal to discriminate against someone on either of those grounds. The second is that surgery is illegal and puberty blockers will soon be strongly discouraged for anyone under 18.
In those conditions, any trans adolescent girl, insisting on playing with girls, will be entirely male bodied and at a huge and completely unfair advantage. In some sports, such as rugger, a genuinely dangerous advantage. To allow them to compete as female would entirely nullify the point of women's sports. Even if you're doing the calculation by mouse orgasms, more people would be harmed by this than would benefit. So it shouldn't happen.
The physical advantages, as I understand it, of going through puberty as male, persist throughout the adult lifetime. So in any kind of competitive physical sport which is more than merely a friendly pickup game, trans women should not be allowed to compete as if they were cis.
The case of Caster Semyana is genuinely tragic. I think she should compete as a woman, even though other chromosomally normal women are at a permanent disadvantage against her. But this is simply the result of a genetic lottery. It's not the consequence of any decision she made.
But in general the whole debate is poisoned by the demand for bright lines and shibboleths. Trans women are not the same as cis women, and sometimes the difference matters. But not very often. Prisons, competitive sports, and I think some single sex institutions like swimming pools - but even there judgments would have to be made on a case by case basis, and you'd end up, quite rightly, with fuzzy lines.
Sex and gender are distinct. They're both important, and neither can claim primacy over the other. In different situations one or the other is salient and should guide us. But as soon as either side claims that one should always annihilate the other the discussion becomes futile, nasty, and often cruel.
622, 628: Heebie, per 628 can you or someone "munge" the name...
I think some single sex institutions like swimming pools
I know this is going to ruin the reputation I got for careful argumentation upthread, but what the actual fuck?
(I know other people will come along to take care of this (and I deeply appreciate the other cis people who are stepping in and helping. I just needed, once again, to boggle at some bullshit.)
I mean my therapist is waiting. But good god, this is transphobic.
Puberty blockers are ONLY appropriate for those under 18, obviously, and it seems highly unlikely the US will successfully restrict these use for trans youth, though my state is one of the ones trying to do so. I've had children in my care evaluated for precocious puberty and I absolutely would have accepted blockers if we'd met the criteria. Caring for children who hit puberty at single-digit ages is doable but not fun. And I don't think believing either of those things makes me a bad parent. Parents of trans kids who commit to blockers similarly seem to be making the right choice to allow appropriate changes to happen later.
Is there some UK segregated swimming tradition I've never heard of?
puberty blockers will soon be strongly discouraged for anyone under 18
Good God, what the fuck is going on in England. Ya'll have serious problems, and I stand by the claim that this isn't close to the most important problem in sports or in trans rights.
(While I'm on the subject of the UK and women's sports, I'm still completely flabbergasted how hard it was to find the women's world cup on TV in soccer bars when I was in Edinburgh. The most obscure men's soccer took precedence.)
("This" meaning trans women in sports, not "this" meaning puberty blockers, which is an example of a more important issue.)
I keep writing and not posting apologies to our trans commenters for this entire accursed thread, in part because I miss hearing from them in general and don't want those odds to drop to zero. I think I will just go ahead with this one and hope it's not too ostentatious. The prison thing is just... where the hell do you even start?
639: a lot of pools have women-only sessions. Don't they in the US? It's a big thing for Muslim women in particular but also for non-Muslim women who feel safer or more at ease when segregated.
613: Better, but still in the hospital.
Not really a thing that happens much here. But also doesn't seem like it should be a meaningful issue around trans women -- no one's racing.
643: I only know about them in the US from Muslim friends. There are some, but it's by no means standard.
The Minister for Women and Equalities has recently said that there's going to be a review focusing on three areas: protection of single-sex spaces, "making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system" and preventing under-18s from making irreversible decisions. Although campaigners have said the last one may result in teens being prevented from accessing puberty blockers, I think this actually refers to sex hormone treatment, which does cause irreversible changes, unlike puberty blockers. Surgery is already not available until age 18.
But also doesn't seem like it should be a meaningful issue around trans women -- no one's racing.
It's not a sports-competition-fairness issue; it's a having-male-bodied-people-in-a-women-only-pool issue. That might make other women
It does seem that the vastly greater hatred and suspicion of trans women in the UK compared to the US is mostly due to feminism in the UK having a much bigger emphasis on the need for segregated spaces where no men are allowed.
Maybe not vastly greater. Vastly greater than expected given the general lack of any religious right influence on anything in the UK compared to the US.
I think vastly greater among kind of generally left wing people works? Here, being shitty about trans people correlates (imperfectly, but pretty well) with the left/right political spectrum. In the UK, it seems much less so.
Trans women are women. I am all for spaces where cis men aren't allowed, and not infrequently participate in them. I love segregated spaces. The presence of trans women or non-binary people does not damage the safety of the segregated space.
Anyway, count me in the camp, as am consistently on any issue, that holds that religiously motivated sex and gender discrimination is not something that should be catered to in the law when it regards public accommodations. Like, if an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man wanted to not sit next me me on a plane (I believe this has come up?) or something similar, he can pay for three seats.
I'd be sympathetic to a religious community wanting an accommodation for gender-segregated swimming, if it was going to keep a lot of women (and men, I suppose) from having access to a pool in a way they could use without violating their religious practices, and if it didn't screw things up too badly for everyone else. But that doesn't extend to saying a religious group should be able to define trans women as not women for that purpose.
There is a particular case in London of the Ladies' Pond on Hampstead Heath, which became a bit of a cause celèbre which is what I was thinking of. I don't know of any comparable tradition in the US.
LB, you are entirely right that this is an issue that doesn't really split left/right in the UK.
I don't think the left/right split on trans rights is accurate here either.
653: Ok, sure.
I mean, what are even the logistics of trying to ban trans women from a women-only pool? How would you possibly enforce it?
It's not perfect, but there's a center of gravity of opposition to trans rights in the Republican party -- they've organized around it in the same way they organized around the opposition to same-sex marriage. There are certainly left of center people who are imperfect on trans rights, but not nearly as many for whom it's a really hot political issue.
In the US the famous cause celebre for lefty trans-exclusion was the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, But it's been shut down for 5 years.
653: this is a nice illustration of why I think that it is completely futile to claim that trans women either are or are not women. They are human beings, with human rights. But rights can clash. If you, LB, think that a religious -- (or any other?) -- community ought to have accommodation for sex-segregated swimming, you have to take into account that they want that accommodation precisely because they don't think trans women are women. You seem to be arguing on utilitarian grounds that if enough of them would be deprived of the right to swim by this belief if they were forced to share a pool with someone they thought not female, then their happiness should take precedence over the trans person's. It's a reasonable position. But it amounts, surely to saying exactly what you don't want to say -- that at least in this limited case a religious group should be allowed to define a trans woman as not a woman.
Tia is entirely consistent. She thinks that her interpretation should always and everywhere take precedence over her opponents'. Sometimes this is clearly the right approach. I don't think it helps with trans questions. Some things will be fuzzy, some things will be inconsistent.
you have to take into account that they want that accommodation precisely because they don't think trans women are women.
Do they all? I doubt that it's true that there are no religious women who object to mixed gender swimming but don't object to trans women. In any case, as Tia points out the necessary genitalia check to enforce a ban on trans women seems impractical and intrusive for all the women using the pool, cis and trans. As someone who has been shooed out of a ladies room as an intruder because I was tall and scrawny with short hair, enforcement wouldn't be trivial.
don't try to claim that false reports of rape are common
They are but boy I am not getting suckered back into that. You simply have no knowledge of how these cases are built, classified, and prosecuted or any of the pressures or policies behind the scenes that affect the numbers people use for their research. Not worth my time.
trans people in prison, all of them should be presumptively treated as sex criminals
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying there's multiple very different safety issues when it comes to trans prisoners and the quickest and most likely way to get that addressed would be a dedicated pod of single occupancy cells for trans persons.
657: That's what I thought. If you substituted gay for trans, don't you pretty much get the state of things fifteenish years ago? Most Republicans and a small number of Democrats actively opposed, a plurality of Democrats not really caring, and a moderate number of Democrats very concerned about expanding rights. And not to say that lefty trans-exclusion is gone, but it seems weak in the US.
I'm still kinda surprised by how US and UK liberals differ on this. If anyone has any good reading on this, please let me know.
you have to take into account that they want that accommodation precisely because they don't think trans women are women.
Not necessarily. It's possible to include trans women in sex-segregated swimming while still having concerns about gatekeeping.
I mean, what are even the logistics of trying to ban trans women from a women-only pool? How would you possibly enforce it?
This is exactly the issue with self-ID, and it's potentially as much a problem for vulnerable trans women as it is for cis women. Either you have some sort of gatekeeping - and how do you do that? - or any man can say they identify as a woman and walk in, and there goes your segregated space. This is a concern that tends either to get hand-waved away as not actually a problem in real life or to be greeted with defensiveness as equating trans women with abusers. I'm certainly not doing the latter, but it is an issue that needs to be taken seriously if we're going to try and square the circle of enthusiastically supporting trans women and trans men to flourish while protecting women's rights.
The depths of exclusion of trans people from public accommodations and the threats to them when their right to choose public accommodations consistent with their gender identity is not aggressively protected in law would far outweigh any other harms being discussed.
661: Indeed, this is a claim you made that you have never supported. You do not argue in good faith.
660: The yinzer JCC has gender-segregated swimming hours--they pull down blinds over the windows for privacy--and while I can't find any specific evidence they welcome trans people in them, I can find general statements about trans inclusion and an article where they talk about encouraging trans people to use the locker room for their gender.
664: This is a bureaucracy issue, but doesn't self-ID mean that someone transitioning can legally change gender without jumping through medical hoops? Checking ID for single-sex swimming seems to keep out cis men being jerks for the afternoon without requiring a genital check. I don't know exactly how the bureaucracy of it works, but that shouldn't be prohibitive.
621: Off the top of my head.
Rachel McKinnon-cycling
Cece Telfer -NCAA track, 390th in the country as a man, 3rd in the country as a woman
Laurel Hubbard-weightlifting
Hannah Mouncey-Aussie football
660: I think that in the case of Muslim women (which is what we're discussing in England) it's a safe bet that they don't think TWAW.
The question of genital checks brings up exactly why I think we should drop principles and deal with it case by case. I think they're a horrible idea, cruel, demeaning, and as you say difficult to enforce. But at the same time, there are people who identify as women while remaining entirely male bodied in a way that would make genital checks quite unnecessary. The idea that they should be able or entitled to march into a woman's changing room is also horribly wrong. So, again, we end up with a wriggly, fuzzy line. And that seems to be the best available solution.
669: I don't know about Muslims generally, but, e.g., gender reassignment is well accepted in Iran (in a kind of fucked up way, but still). I don't think you can generalize and say that no religious Muslim women in England accept trans women as women.
669*: "Muslim women" is, like, what, six hundred million people? I don't think it's a safe bet, although maybe Muslim England is particularly uniform in opinion. On the other hand, Iran is a leader in gender reassignment surgery going back to a fatwa in the 90s.
* Nice.
667: Self-ID is interesting in the context of English law because there is an implicit distinction between social and legal self-ID at present. To qualify for legal gender reassignment you have to have lived for two years as a member of your chosen gender -- and what is that but social self-ID?
Dalriata, I think that some of the difference between British and US attitudes is because we don't have the deep cultural narrative of civil rights, of slavery and redemption. Americans - it seems to me -- very easily and naturally see a kind of meta-narrative of history as a story of successive revolutionary liberations, from King George, from slavery, from patriarchy, and so on. That's not nearly so resonant in the English imagination. That's not how we understand our own history.
That's an annoyingly specific pwning.
I've had children in my care evaluated for precocious puberty and I absolutely would have accepted blockers if we'd met the criteria. Caring for children who hit puberty at single-digit ages is doable but not fun.
Of course, precocious puberty has all kinds of potential negative outcomes.
Giving them to trans teens is straight up medical experimentation on kids. Blockers were developed specifically for precocious puberty and preventing puberty in an otherwise healthy teen isn't remotely the same medical scenario. We have no idea what the long term health effects are and given that it's observed only 10-20 percent of juveniles with dysphoria end up trans giving teens blockers is a grossly irresponsible thing to do.
But overall, even if you were right about all religious Muslim women, gender segregated swimming is a possible accommodation that doesn't deprive anyone of meaningful access for a reasonable share of the time and facilities. Swimming hours reserved for cis men only and cis women only exclude trans people from access. In my mind, that makes the first a reasonable accommodation to religion or preference, and the second not.
not actually a problem in real life
I'm skeptical that it actually is an issue in real life. I'm struggling to see how the pool issue is different than the bathroom/locker room issue, and in that case I can say that never in my long years of life have I seen someone in a women's locker room or bathroom who seemed like a cis man trying to enter that space just to be violating. If any women have a different experience I'd be interested to hear about it but honestly it seems like voter fraud. On the other hand, people getting harassed because of some perceived mismatch happens all the time, even when they're cis women in the women's room. Someone tried to kick me out of women's dressing room once when I had a shaved head.
The kind of Muslim women who make a point of segregated swimming in Britain are overwhelmingly likely to come from the conservative Kashmiri-origin communities of Yorkshire and to some extent Birmingham. When you consider what their mosques teach about gay people, I think my money is safe. Of course Muslim opinion in Britain as elsewhere is not monolithic. But there are recognisable blocs within it, and the socially conservative Yorkshire style is one of them.
It's really weird and creepy to know that off the top of your head... Why do you care so much?
I don't understand what 678 is to.
Sorry, 668
No one should be able to name the winner of 35-49 age bracket track cycling without looking it up unless they're competing in that sport or a close personal friend or family of said winner.
While I'm firmly on the side that sports don't matter much, I've seen the implicit point, that trans women aren't unusually successful in women's sports, made before, and if I cared I might have tried checking it. I'm guessing that's what gswift did.
681: They're names I've seen in articles. And the real off the top of my head part was pretty general. I remembered the sports more than anything. Had to google a little to get all the names.
672: Hrm. That might be part of it, and I need to do some more research on this, but there might be something peculiar to the UK (or at least England) going on here. I'm not familiar enough with the situation in other Anglosphere countries, but after some furious googling they seem to be closer to the US than the UK. Which is not the usual way of things. I'm outside my ken here, not that that's stopped me as recently as, uh, now.
Also only jumping from 390th to 3rd seems like pretty strong evidence for the "not really a big deal" point of view. At the very least pretty strong evidence against "so far outside the norm it's an urgent safety concern that she be banned" point of view.
Ok it was the "off the top of my head" that's bizarre, looking it up is very different.
The idea that they should be able or entitled to march into a woman's changing room is also horribly wrong.
Ok, so we've established that NW doesn't think people should be able to choose the bathroom consistent with their gender identity and make the choice that's safest for them. I might add that NYC has had this principle enshrined in law for some time now and nothing is amiss, other than becoming the world epicenter of a deadly pandemic.
I, like lk, want to apologize for this wretched thread. I both hate letting these things slide and also dislike further drawing it out.
685: It's a jump from way back in the pack to on the podium. Not a safety concern (nothing really could be in track, that I can think of) but for someone who cared about fairness in sports, significant enough to think about.
NYS has had it enshrined in law, I should say.
688: Right, and this isn't a small pool of athletes. Google says Division II is about 300 colleges.
And to be explicit, genitalia are a very poor predictor of who will feel safe where. I'm also still wondering about enforcement. Does everyone have to carry an "I have the right to use this locker room" card? What happens to cis people who don't look like what you expect? Where do you apply for this card? Who decides? Who checks the card? What kinds of questions do you have to answer to get it?
Sports aren't fair. But what I meant was just that it means the number of people we're talking about is really really small. How many trans people are there who were in the top 400 in their sport pre-transition? How many of them are going to continue trying to compete after transition? I'm not saying it doesn't raise some issues, but I can't see how it's very important either to the sports or to trans rights.
685: The issue is less "they're winning so we need to ban them" than it is "if we're going to have women's sports and then we need to define for the purposes of sport what is woman." Caster Semenya has gone to court over this, so I don't think we can say it's only theoretical. If the definition is "anyone who self-identifies as a woman competes in the women's league" that leads to different answers that "anyone who self-identifies as a woman and meets these biomarkers" or "anyone who meets this disjunctive list of criteria that sort of tracks genetics, hormones, self-identification, and biomarkers." The last one seems to be where the conversation is on the sports science side and it's very hard to figure out what counts as an unfair advantage. E.g., McKinnon (who is a philosophy professor, so same professional circle, not weird stalking.) is a much better track cyclist than I'd ever be, because she can put out a lot more power than I can. She's a lot taller and stronger than I am, too. But... that's kind of what track cyclists are? People who put out stupid amounts of power on a bike? Being good at the sport can't be disqualifying.
And if there's no card, how does someone assert their right to be in the space? What happens to people of any gender identity who get pressured to leave? Do they have to show their genitals? (Note that this is a real thing that both LB and I can report has happened to us.)
I don;t have anything to add personally to the debate, but I do think this interview with Renee Richards is an interesting read (from 2019), if for nothing else a historical perspective. I was led to from interest in Martina Navratilova's* outspoken feelings on the subject (she is OK after the surgery (like Richards) but not prior). It turns out that Richards coached Marina which I did not recall. I find her position somewhat self-serving, but as i said and interesting read.
*Navratilova herself was subject to innuendo on her physicality when she began to dominate with strength and a very different style from the baseliners.
I'm not saying it's theoretical, I'm saying it's not a big deal. Rules around eligibility for elite athletes are already weird and complicated (especially around amateurism and doping), and this is probably another situation where they'll be weird and complicated. Yes someone has to make some rules and they'll suck for a few people either way (a person who went from second to third or a person barred from competing) but it's just not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things where exactly that line gets drawn. It's a distraction from important issues both around women's sports (eg ACL injury rates) and trans rights (eg safe bathroom access).
Being good at the sport can't be disqualifying.
Yeah but this isn't ping pong. Putting out stupid power is exactly the kind of endeavor where there's a huge advantage for male bodies.
You simply have no knowledge of how these cases are built, classified, and prosecuted ...
The truth of a rape claim and the manner in which such cases are built, classified and prosecuted are separate topics. No?
I think the non sports players might not really appreciate the sheer magnitude of the physical strength differences between the sexes and just how crushing it would be to try and compete against someone like that. I still follow powerlifting a bit. Becca Swanson is a genetic freak of a lifter who holds the women's record in every lift. Her deadlift is 683. On the mens side there's multiple guys north of 1100.
A couple years old now, but this is a couple competitive female gymnasts reacting to men do women's gymnastics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvz3F4HP170
698: That's the process by which we ascertain these things. We're not shaking a magic 8 ball.
696: Agreed it's totally separate from the important issues you mention; disagree that it's a distraction. Legally defining "woman" is a big deal even if it's occasioned by figuring out who's eligible for the 800m.
697: I should have elaborated more. McKinnon is roughly 60 pounds heavier than me and I'm a natural climber which I think is cyclist-speak for 'weak.' It's pretty good odds that a 190 pound cis-woman is going to put out stupid amounts of power compared to me, and McKinnon is not putting out stupid amounts of power compared to other elite cis-woman track cyclists.
I do know the magnitude of difference, which is why I though only jumping from 390 to 3rd was surprising and shows that trans women competing in women's sports is very different from making all sports coed.
Up until Cala's recent comment, I was going to remark that the only two women in the discussion have both been accused of trying to pass. Not that this is proof any one ever trying to pass, but, at least, of a deep enough seated fear that someone might. I'm not saying we should pander to fear, but it's not a good idea to be oblivious to it. Fact is, we're all evolving on this.
I haven't been in a women's changing/locker room, but my speculation is that it's going to be like a men's changing/locker room in that, unlike a bathroom, the user's genitalia is going to be visible generally. And while not everyone is going to use a bathroom -- you can go to a restaurant, for example, and not use the bathroom there -- everyone is going to use the changing room, and the way public pool session timing works, everyone is going to be there at the same time. I say this not to suggest that there should be a blanket rule, but that some amount of nuance while we're evolving might be worth considering.
I'll add that in practice the way I managed to assert my right to be in the dressing room was to show enough of my body so the attendant understood that I was a cis woman with a shaved head. Even for my own sake, I would prefer a world in which only creepy behavior gets someone pressured out of a restroom, and I've long since grown my hair and don't have to deal with this much at all. I have a friendquaintance who is a butch lesbian to whom it happens constantly, or did -- I hope it has changed with the passage of the law. She expressed a lot of pain and frustration about it. But it's not like the idea that I could live in a world where if I'm too masc-presenting someone could scare me out of a locker room is totally irrelevant to me, because sometimes I do play around with more masc looks. Because where I live is safe for that, I assume I'm not going to meet any negative consequences. It would suck if I lived in NW world where I had to judge whether how I dressed was going to affect the comfortable accessibility of a restroom or locker room.
Cis women have been far from the most affected, of course, but really the range of people who get screwed over by gender policing is broad. There are either card checks or there are no card checks and ad hoc enforcement by whoever is around who adjudges someone to be insufficiently gender conforming. I can report that current status quo in New York is just fine. If you want us to go back to ad hoc enforcement, or institute card check, please answer some questions about how that should work. Or by all means don't and let this rest, and contemplate the fact that the thing you proposed would make the world worse for a bunch of folks.
Honestly traditional locker rooms (with no privacy for changing and showering) maybe aren't the greatest spaces in general. They're a traditional locus for bullying and sexual assault (especially in high school, and it's mostly straight cis men sexually assaulting men who are less gender conforming). Rethinking them would be a feature, not a bug.
I didn't even go to school and I remember once literally changing *inside* a locker as a tween because there was relentless bullying calling kids gay if they were seen naked inside the locker room.
I like the idea that it's behavior not status that gets a person tossed out. This is a lot harder to handle objectively, though, and harder to resist. There's nothing Tia could have shown the attendant to satisfy her that someone's complaint about the way she looked at them was unfounded.
Except that there wasn't actually any such complaint. Now that I'm older and heavier, no one's misgendering me anymore, but anyone who wanted to could still claim I was harassing them -- that's not a problem with anything to do with gender conformity.
698: That's the process by which we ascertain these things. We're not shaking a magic 8 ball.
Ah, okay. I was wondering if your claim was as, um, literal-minded as it appeared.
But no. This is not how "we" ascertain these things, for values of "we" that include everybody except the criminal justice system. I, for instance, find Reade's claims against Biden quite credible, but (leaving aside issues like the statute of limitations) it is not clear to me that there would be sufficient evidence to prosecute him. Does that mean that I really think Reade's claim is false? Or unsubstantiated? It does not.
Seems like we need to either stop worrying so much about nudity (our own or others') or provide more single-occupant spaces for stuff we need to be nude for. People being people, it's going to be a lot easier to change the way we design facilities, and that seems to be underway.
Even if we worry less about nudity on the margin, there's lots of valid reasons for people to be uncomfortable being naked around strangers, and it's a good norm that seeing someone nude or showing your nude body to someone else requires some level of consent. It's not good to require people to be naked around strangers to go to gym class or to go swimming. It doesn't serve any purpose and it's going to make lots of people uncomfortable for lots of reasons. Specifically singling out some people for having bodies that you find more disturbing is extra shitty, whether they're cis or trans.
703: The locker room thing is just heinous, like the bathroom thing. I've compared notes with AJ, and women's locker rooms involve a lot less genitalia somehow. Until, er, the gyms all closed due to the pandemic, I was at the gym most mornings. Every now and then, I'd see boobs. Even more occasionally, I'd see someone's ass or maybe bush. There could be dudes in our locker room, and I might notice, but if they changed and showered like the women, it would be NBD. On the other hand, I understand the dudes will put a foot up one bench to air out the jewels and talk at you for 10 min. Also, I suspect a lot of trans folks using locker rooms might do their changing in bathroom stalls. Seriously, nobody is gonna rape me in the locker room. Odds are, nobody's gonna ogle me, either. Maybe let everyone pick which locker room they prefer, and members can call the front desk if there's an issue, and that person gets their membership revoked? I don't think most places have communal showers or anything. At any rate, if the locker room is that big a concern, maybe change at home?
You're not changing out of a wet bathing suit at home.
I've got no problem at all with redesigning spaces so there's less nudity. A pool presents a different issue from a gym because you have to have a lot of spaces available at the same time.
713: I've done it - rinse off, towel off, throw on shorts and a T-shirt, go home? It's like when you go tubing? Or drive to a lake to swim? Or, at my gym, you could take your clothes into the shower stall and hang them up. Some women, I swear, have these funny terry cloth robes they wear out of the shower, like a towel wrapped around their body with straps. You could put on underwear and skirt/shorts/pants without showing anything! At any rate, my larger point is that this is (to me) a very weird thing to worry about.
which is why I though only jumping from 390 to 3rd was surprisingI
Only?! That's basically jumping from the back of the pack to a bronze medal, or something like that.
I don't much care about sports, because I'm basically a bookish nerd, but: I do understand that many people do care about sports, and that increasing the participation of girls and women in sport has been a feminist initiative for the past 50 years or so.
I like Cala's comments in this thread. How to reconcile trans rights with the rights of girls and women to participate in sport is not always easy. But hand-waving away the difficulties (male bodies are typically bigger and stronger than female bodies, which really does matter in a whole lot of sports) convinces almost nobody, and it's just not an honest response to a genuine dilemma.
And it's not just about "elite athletes," as I understand it. Some of these controversies are now playing out at the level of high school sports, where there is significant scholarship money involved.
I'm not opposed to trNscwomen going into locker rooms, but honestly, open locker room make me kind of uncomfortable. And I was distinctly uncomfortable when a woman at the Y brought her kids into the world ens restroom. Her son was around 6 or 7. There's a family changing room for a reason.
I regularly swim at the Y (or did) in a place where everyone's right to pick their appropriate locker room is law. I have never seen a penis and imagine that the people who are using the women's room and have them are changing in the stalls because they are afraid of any sort of confrontation about it, which would be scary and humiliating for them. It is a non-issue. These discussions are always so bonkers for how they confuse real and intense harms with hypothetical and slight ones.
I have as deeply held concern for women's safety from male predation as anyone here, and more of one than some assholes. It is partly because I know what it is to be threatened that I recognize the difference between a fantasy about hypothetical harm and actually feeling alone and powerless and like you have no place to go or be.
Her son was around 6 or 7.
From having been in parenting groups for years, I can assure you there's a lot of hysteria about the odds that children will be abused if sent solo into men's changing rooms. Family rooms are often busy and I have children in different age ranges and have defaulted to women's over family even though it often has meant a little Selah running around nude and occasionally making comments about what she notices on others there. Everything about changing rooms is already a balancing act.
Side point about transatlantic differences: I think I read a different variant of the article about J.K. Rowling and transphobia in the UK here (in Vox, by Katelyn Burns). On the UK-specificity, she mentions "the influence of the broader skeptical movement in the early aughts" on British feminism, as well as significant support by the British media. I am in no position to evaluate either of those claims, but there they are. The point about skepticism does somehow feel right to me: both in the way "gender critical feminism" took the form it did, and in how it appealed to a wider audience. But I'm no expert.
I kind of expect left leaning females to be proponents (rightfully so) of things like the pervasiveness of the male gaze, the prevalence of sexual harrassment in the workplace and in public, etc. Seems like an odd juxtaposition with "Odds are, nobody's gonna ogle me".
This really doesn't seem to be how it manifests. I invited women upthread to say if they'd ever had an experience with someone who seemed like a cis man creeping in the locker room. Maybe someone will pipe up but they have yet to. I live in a place where this is very clearly law, and everyone knows it -- it's on all the signs in gyms -- and yet no creepers. I have literally never had any experience like this in my entire life. Yet I hear of cis women getting gender policed in the locker room from people I know personally; I don't have to look for these stories. If someone of any gender is ogling people you call security; there is nothing stopping people from complaining about behavior. Maybe men really do want to be creeping in the locker room but that last thing is what's stopping them.
We either have cards with locker room access rights that have to be checked and involve detailed intrusive questioning by people incompetent to handle it, we have ad hoc enforcement by security or other clients who will just decide who seems like they belong, never mind if their decision that they do not is harassing or humiliating, or we trust people's judgement about where they belong and deal with people behaving poorly on an individual bases.
I can't believe this thread is relitigating bathrooms. This whole thing is so shitty for trans readers, although I bet they checked out long ago.
I'm against bathroom laws on the grounds that enforcing them is silly, and that we've managed to survive for a very long time without checking junk in restrooms. It seems like a giant well-the-gayz-aren't-getting-the-voters-to-panic-what's-next thing to me. But it's also not crazy to think that lots of cis-women aren't OK, for a variety of reasons, with open unisex locker rooms. It seems it's a bigger deal in the UK.
719: The "family room" is always too small and also doing double duty as a safe space for people who don't want to change in the men's or women's room. So the Calabat comes with me (he usually needs help with his swimsuit) and Pebbles to the women's locker room if shiv isn't at the pool with us. Might be a Utah norm, but if you're wanting to avoid the gaze of children, there's private stalls (that aren't the bathrooms! +1 local public high school pool!) for changing, and if you want to avoid the gaze of children, also, you probably want to pick a different state.
open unisex locker rooms
Just to be clear, I'm fine with this, but wouldn't expect everyone to be. That's definitely not what laws passed to protect trans peoples' rights mandate. They mandate that everyone be able to pick their bathroom and locker room based on what's best and safest for them. That's not the same thing as open and unisex.
Also this has nothing to do with trans women, gswift's complaint is about lesbians. And as people who spend time in women's locker rooms say, ogling from lesbians doesn't seem to be much of a problem, and no ID system is going to keep lesbians out of women's locker rooms anyway. That said, there should be private changing spaces so that people who are uncomfortable changing in front of other people, like Bostoniangirl, can change privately. Optimally there would be private spaces for everyone, but as long as there's enough private spaces for people who want them that's fine.
Utah: Where a kid can make inappropriate comments about your aging scrotum.
721: I mean, maybe I'm not hot enough to appeal to the laydeez in my locker room? Too old? Possible. I can tell you I've run into plenty of shitty dudes in the rest of my life, been grabbed and ogled and what have you (now too old or maybe unhot), but not in a women's locker room, ever, so I think the odds are pretty low. Like, I'm way more upset by the dudes on the gym floor. Hello, old guy who keeps dropping the fucking weights to watch me startle! Hello, guys staring at the hot girl's ass while she does squats. My point is just that the locker room (here, at least), is hilariously prudish and just not really a place where I'd expect trouble.
721: I mean, maybe I'm not hot enough to appeal to the laydeez in my locker room? Too old? Possible. I can tell you I've run into plenty of shitty dudes in the rest of my life, been grabbed and ogled and what have you (now too old or maybe unhot), but not in a women's locker room, ever, so I think the odds are pretty low. Like, I'm way more upset by the dudes on the gym floor. Hello, old guy who keeps dropping the fucking weights to watch me startle! Hello, guys staring at the hot girl's ass while she does squats. My point is just that the locker room (here, at least), is hilariously prudish and just not really a place where I'd expect trouble.
Ugh, how did that happen?
Same in general for bathrooms. In, wash hands, out - maybe there are horrible bathroom predators, but I've been to way more bathrooms than frat parties, and I'm pretty sure I've performed an accurate risk assessment.
JFC, what a hot mess of a discussion. I've been confused by Gswift's bizarre obsession with saying shitty things about trans people. It's weird and sad.
I was thinking about this for a bit and I think the real women's locker room enforcement mechanism is that it's a women's space -- if a creeper wanted to come in he would be vastly outnumbered by women, who would all say, who is this creeper, and get him out. But a behavioral definition of creeping should be required, not just a vague sense that someone doesn't look right, because that extends all the way to "has the wrong hair". In other spaces where men hang out in equal or greater numbers, they feel empowered to creep.
711: That's more or less what I was saying in 710. I think it would be a better if we lived in a world in which incidental exposure wasn't potentially traumatic, but we don't. In our actually existing world, many people don't want to be naked around other people or have other people naked around them, especially if those people are of a different gender or have different genitals. Minimizing the need for anyone to be naked around anyone else to use public facilities makes the issue go away and is something to work toward as new facilities are built and old ones are updated.
730: A discussion to which you've contributed nothing. I'm asking a question because it's something I have little direct experience with. Without googling, as I recall something like around 30 percent of trans women identify as straight or bi, as in they're sexually attracted to women. So yes, I'm going to ask biological females if they are comfortable with biological males who are attracted to women being in a female space.
I really think this discussion needs to stop. 721 and 733 are way over the line for me. I don't know how the rest of you feel.
Could you clarify what line you're talking about?
I mean, talk all you want, I don't have or want the power to shut anyone down. But talking about trans women as "biological males" and all cis women and trans/NB men as "biological females" actually does make me viscerally uncomfortable and uneasy. I'm not optimistic that I can make you see why those constructions seem so far off base to me (and to many other people), and opening up about why requires a vulnerability that I'm reluctant to offer up gratis for the sake of argument. I get that you want some insight, but you also want to argue. I guess all I can say is that I've never met a trans woman I found remotely threatening, and I figure there's a nonzero chance you'd mock anything I said about gender identity from my own perspective. I don't see how anyone benefits from taking this further, including you, to be honest. Maybe I'm wrong.
The stock answer is that "the line" is openly misgendering people. I know you're maintaining a distinction between "trans woman" and "biological male," but it's slipping a lot if you describe a "straight trans woman" as "attracted to women" (I was confused by this). If that's where you are after hundreds of comments, I don't think we have enough common ground to have a meaningful discussion about this stuff. Tia has more patience than I do, god help her, and if other people want to engage, adelante. But I would recommend trying to reach a conclusion.
I just scrolled through this after a few weeks, and hope everyone as well. Noticed above I was identified as a "troll." "Troll" has a bunch of different meanings -- I don't think I ever deliberately argued insincerely just to piss people off -- but one meaning is "deliberate shit stirrer" and that I think is fair, I definitely prolonged arguments for fun and procrastination value.
Thing is, I now think this is really bad. Like, not funny, a serious sin. At home and in person, provoking a mild argument among friends is fine. On the internet, with anonymity, with people watching, with the way text works, with the way politics in particular gets heightened -- it's bad. It destroys discourse and makes everyone, even readers, stupider and more aggressive. Less bad here than elsewhere because of the size of the community, but still. If there is one lesson I want to preach it's the value of shutting the fuck up. Just scrolling up, multiple people (on all sides of the "debate") of this discussion, many of whom I know personally and independently and objectively to be extraordinarily smart and well intentioned, have embarrassed themselves by saying stupid inflammatory nonsense. That's not anybody's fault, it's the fault of the medium. God knows I embarrassed myself here with stupid inflammatory nonsense. The better rule is that if you don't actually know what you're talking about -- and this is especially likely to be true re politics -- be silent. If you're not sure your conversation is adding value -- be silent.
I realize that the foregoing is both preachy and uncalled for. Nobody has to agree. But it's accurate, I think. Anyhow, not into discussing further, but love you all and stay well.
I definitely prolonged arguments for fun and procrastination value
Good times. Good times.
Halford!
But talking about trans women as "biological males"
That's reality. In terms of gametes there's two sexes and if you thrown in people whose chromosomal sex doesn't match phenotypic sex you're getting maybe another .02 or .03 percent population on board.
There's a widely circulated photo of R/achel McKin/non the cyclist on a podium, and one of the people lower on the podium is my wife. The way I see it is if someone jumps from 390th to 3rd, or, like McKin/non, puts out so much power that nobody racing against her beat her in a sprint, then...that's 383 people who have put in their 10,000 hours in an activity where winning is a really big deal, and also been lucky enough to be born with talent, but who can't win that day so that one person with an unfair advantage can win. I have read the whole thread, and it seems likely I'll be considered shitty for this use of the words "unfair advantage."* But sports, and winning, are important to a lot of people, and if you allow trans women to compete that's generally going to be the situation, and a trans athlete doesn't have to be best in the world at their sport to affect a lot of people. Maybe it will get worked out, maybe time and more argumentation will change my mind. I'm not there yet. My wife's proposed solution: just have everyone compete in the same group because with trans women competing the reason for a women's division in sport evaporates. I think the reason it does not seem like a bigger deal is that the numbers of trans women athletes are small. If there were 10 Rachel McKinnons and every women's 35-49 race podium had only trans athletes on it...well, you can decide how you would feel about that.
*That's not why I went presidential, just didn't want to make it too easy to connect my wife's photo and my marginal pseud as I'm writing about her.
737: RH, I know you left here with some bad feelings, and didn't feel you were doing yourself any good. But did you leave behind anybody who had bad feelings toward you? I'd be surprised.
I'm
The exact dispute is over what constitutes "sex" so you can't really appeal to definitions.
743: I'll never forgive him. I forget why, but I'll pass that animus on to my children and my children's children. But compared to how I feel about you? I love halford like a brother.
In the wafer family, the stabbed-by-halford-in-the-back legend animates nearly everything we do.
737 - Pretty sure that at least a few people have (justifiably) bad feelings towards me personally. But that wasn't the point (and something for which I apologize, and definitely not something I'm into discussing further - I don't want a chorus of "oh you were OK asshole," I genuinely personally like everyone here). The point is that I thinkinternet, especially political, argument is worse than a waste of time, it makes the whole discourse worse. It's not anyone's fault! No one knew that the internet would be like this! It was new for our generation! But it is, so be responsibly silent except when you for real and for sure know of what you speak, is my message. Ironically the same belief keeps me from responding further, so. Back to exile! Love you all.
it seems likely I'll be considered shitty for this use of the words "unfair advantage."
Not by everyone. That's just the hand we've been dealt. My wife is the same age as me, maybe an inch shorter, super athletic. Four years of varsity high school basketball, took state in high jump her senior year, etc. Match us up in wrestling and I could rag doll her around like a child.
And note that I am NOT saying that there is anything wrong with sexual confessions (except about me of course) or rap battles. Keep that going and I will check it out in a few weeks and be happy.
748: I miss your presence and also share the sentiment. This is the most I've commented in a long time. A quarantine phenomena that won't last.
This is good news for John McCain:
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/29/847840765/new-information-emerges-around-biden-sexual-assault-allegation
(It turns out I totally forget how to embed links. I also don't care. Slack's where it's at. Get with the now, pussy shavers.)
(That said, is that really new? I feel like I heard that story, about the neighbor, already.)
The neighbor thing came out a couple days ago.
757: Maybe he still has the limp. Show some empathy.
I don't care how slow your updates come Wafer.
(I hadn't seen that either. Not been paying that much attention because I don't a a viable alternative outcome)
Halford! I became weirdly invested in the "Meghan Markle leaves the UK" story, simply because you were so enthused when she married into the British royal family.
But talking about trans women as "biological males"
That's reality.
It's clearly the piece of reality that you find most salient, yes. I get that. It's not the whole story. It sounds like you're significantly less interested in the gender part of the story, and that is what it is, but it does make it harder to talk about gender experience in terms you'll find interesting or engaging.
This is silly but we still have 237 comments to go ...
I write The question of genital checks brings up exactly why I think we should drop principles and deal with it case by case. I think they're a horrible idea, cruel, demeaning, and as you say difficult to enforce. and Tia glosses it as It would suck if I lived in NW world where I had to judge whether how I dressed was going to affect the comfortable accessibility of a restroom or locker room.
I did also go on to say that I didn't think obviously male-bodied people should be "able or entitled" to use women's facilities. And I think this morning that "able" went too far. Because, obviously, if the other women were happy with it, why not.
"Entitled", though, would imply that legally no woman could object. At least the objection would have to be on grounds of behaviour. As someone said upthread, that is both more attractive and harder to police.
Either way, I think I have actually learned one thing from this wrangle: that nudity is quite as much of a social construct as gender.
Goddamn straight. Toughen up, you privileged assholes.
The other thing comes from the ydnew and AJ conversations. Clearly there are very different social norms about genital visibility as between men's and women's changing rooms.
Halford!
God, this thread took an odd turn. From VP picks to track cyclist champions...It's like a vivid coronavirus bad dream.
whether or not you have laws protecting trans peoples' rights to public accommodation, it is the case that trans women, some of whom are attracted to women, will sometimes be in the women's room changing, because that's where it is safe. Other people will just not be in a position to know. The difference is whether individuals are empowered to do some kind of policing of who looks feminine enough, which they will sometimes do enthusiastically because women have their own ways of punishing gender non-conformity, not in whether there are trans women in the locker room. There always will be.
But I agree that this should stop, and that it's totally destructive to trans people's participation here, and is really more like the Shearer thing than lk was willing to grant. It's watching a bunch of people who aren't in your group have a debate about your full humanity and right to safely participate in public life. Some of them will now inevitably pop up to deny that's what they're doing. I think good faith debate is possible on the sports thing but it's coming in a context of a ton of nastiness toward trans people. That is a conversation that might theoretically be interesting in a context that had shown itself to be able to regulate that nastiness effectively and possibly be comfortable for trans people themselves to participate in; that's not this one. I still think gswift is an unpleasant troll although I appreciate that the SJW thing stopping, and in my opinion we as the blog should at minimum formally ask him to stop commenting on trans issues in particular. I would be particularly interested to hear if any trans people disagreed with this, but as I said I imagine they checked out.
These discussions are always so bonkers for how they confuse real and intense harms with hypothetical and slight ones.
This. (And your point about the harm in this conversation towards trans readers is well taken.)
lurid, thank you for the link. It further links to this NYT article, and I'm going down the rabbit hole from there--this is what I was curious about, what are the specific differences in communities, prominent personalities, historical accidents, etc. that lead to such different outcomes? I had forgotten about Mumsnet.
Good to see you, Halford. I think you're mostly right--and it's a prescription I'm quite bad at following--but on the other hand, I think people are thinking about this more. There are some people here who are not just a lot smarter than me, but a lot wiser, and that includes being able to change their minds, and we're at least seeing a bit of that. It might not be much, but it isn't nothing.
That being said, the women here are adding so much more than the men, pretty much to a tee. I suppose that isn't surprising, but it's a bit depressing. I'll try to limit my noise to increase the signal. Have a good day, yinz, and stay safe.
||
Gansu Highway Aviation Tourism, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gansu province's transport departmentI shall choose to believe this is an adventure travel agency specializing in unscheduled light aircraft landings on highways.
I suppose in my ideal world we should distinguish between gender and sex without making inappropriate ethical judgements on the basis of either. An illustration.
A couple of years back, Ume and I were picking our way across the sands at low tide to Holy Island. Ahead of us there was a woman in a blue dress, walking much faster, with a confidence and agility suggesting she had done this many times before. When we reached the island, she was resting on a bench. We talked for a while - she was a deaconess, she said, and this was the end of a 100 mile pilgrimage walk down from Scotland.
After we moved away, I said to Ume that she had never been born a woman and in due course, to gratify my curiosity. I googled her. It turned out that, as a man, she had been a lieutenant colonel in the army. There was also a page full of American right wingers sputtering and fulminating about the decision to ordain her as a woman* and to give her a job. And they were just horrible. They filled me with sympathetic rage and made me admire the bishop who had stuck up for her here.
If the only choices open were a forced binary - that Diana either is or isn't a woman - then decency and humanity compel the answer that she is one. But I don't think that choice is forced. Instead, there are a whole succession of choices in which for the most part the right answer is that she should be treated as a woman, ordained and employed as one, and so on. But if she caught covid, or developed prostate cancer, then she should be treated as a man.
The point is that her courage and - I want to say courtesy: a quality of genuine attentiveness to the other person - are the salient qualities which I can and do admire. They don't compel me to have a view on whether she is ontologically a woman. Her sex and gender are not irrelevant. She wouldn't be the particular person she is were she not trans. But they are, so to say the raw materials of her personality. They don't define it.
* There are other trans priests in the C of E, one of whom I know rather better.
Oh ffs, that is a long winded illustration of absolutely nothing. Literally nothing. It makes no point, unless you were just trying to illustrate that on one occasion in your life you felt sympathy for a trans person and so should get a pass on other nonsense.
Actual trans women who get prostate cancer, actual trans men who get pregnant, etc etc understand that they have needs that are different from those of cis people. In fact it is a critical (and often inaccessible) aspect of safe health care for them that that they be able to have their needs met without someone "treating them as" the gender they were assigned at birth, and just accepting that they have a prostate/uterus/whatever. The fact that they often can't have this is a dangerous barrier to health care that you'd hear people expressing a ton of pain about if you ever listened to trans people.
If you would like to bolster your sense of your high mindedness, nuance, and decency make it a point to find some spaces online where trans people are talking about their lives and just listen for a while.
But I repeat that this should stop. It is very probably destructive to trans people's participation on the blog. I think we need should formally ask gswift in particular never to comment on trans issues. I'm going to keep saying that unless some trans people say they disagree.
Incidentally, the NYT piece that dalriata linked to struck me t the time as a ludicrously obtuse and misleading attempt to confirm the prejudices of NYT readers rather than an actual enquiry. Still does.
In fact it is a critical (and often inaccessible) aspect of safe health care for them that that they be able to have their needs met without someone "treating them as" the gender they were assigned at birth, and just accepting that they have a prostate/uterus/whatever.
This should probably read something like:
In fact it is a critical (and often inaccessible) aspect of safe health care for them that that they be able to have their needs met without someone "treating them as" the gender they were assigned at birth, and that their provider just accepts that they have a prostate/uterus/whatever without needing to treat them "treat them as" anything other than what they say they are -- a trans man, a trans woman, etc.
Since I made another comment I'll say, really, is there a more common ISO in the local queer forums I'm on than trans-affirming medical provider X? I think maybe not.
Jesus fucking wept. "Treated" in the sense of medical treatment, not social treatment.
You're still not making a point. Are you taking five paragraphs to say that trans people have importantly different bodies than cis people of the same gender? We know!
Oh ffs, that is a long winded illustration of absolutely nothing. Literally nothing.
Oh, c'mon Tia, could you be at least a little more generous toward people's honest intentions to genuinely engage, and to add a little more value to this very weird thread?
I, for one, had no idea that members of the C of E went on pilgrimages like that. I had thought (my bad, my ignorance) that walking a camino was basically a Catholic thing (having been raised in the C of Rome, and we tend to be a little arrogant about the Protestants....). And NW's 770 is not nothing to me: it has opened my eyes to the existence of some interesting neighbouring practices.
JPJ, if NW wants to talk about C of E, maybe he could just do that?
Can I ask you, in particular, to imagine this analogy?
You say, hey, as a woman I need this particular material accommodation for safe participation in public life.
And someone else says: Once I had a conversation with a woman. She spoke to me about her struggles and sorrow and pain. She was a human being. Her being a woman was not of primary salience to me, but instead her personal qualities. Women have different bodies than men. Oh, and about that material accommodation, no.
How does that read to you?
I have given reasons why I think that bathroom laws, either way, are a bad idea more concerned with social signalling than with righting pressing wrongs, and that when there is a problem it should be dealt with by social accommodation. This is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree, so I wouldn't expect tia to understand the point.
Analogies are of course banned here, otherwise I would point out that the situation re single sex facilities is that there are *women* asking for "a particular material accommodation for safe participation in public life", and it is Tia who responds "Women have different bodies than men. Oh, and about that material accommodation, no."
On an entirely different subject, can any mathy person explain a small mystery to me?
The latest LRB has an article on disease modelling which explains the SIR model thus:
This model has four parameters: 13, the average number of contacts per person per day; 3 per cent, the probability that a contact will lead to transmission; 15 per cent, the rate at which people recover; and 10,000, the size of the population. The product of the first two numbers determines how fast the population flows into the Infectious group, while the third number determines how fast it moves from Infectious to Recovered. Dividing the product of the first two numbers by the third gives the expected number of transmissions from a single case, also known as R0 or the basic reproduction rate. In this example it is 13 x 3 ÷ 15, which is 2.6: in other words, when everyone is susceptible, each infectious person will infect, on average, 2.6 others, leading to an exponential increase in infections until the supply of non-infectious people begins to run out.
And I don't see why it is 13 x 3, and not 13 x .03.
Is the model not about individuals but aggregates? Is it that the three per cent figure says that if 100 people all have 13 contacts a day there will be 103 infections the next day? If this is the case, which makes sense, the very simplest model is also missing the length of time in which someone is infectious. But it suggests that when there are very few cases, it will take a very long time for the infection to reach the point of sustained growth. Which would explain the retrospective discovery of a few cases long before anyone knew the disease was going to be a problem.
779: the two percentages cancel out in the division. It's a slight of hand to avoid scaring people with decimals.
oh, and, JPJ, the next Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, walked the Camino in Spain a few years back and published a diary of his time.
Similarly, Rupert Sheldrake, who is a serious Anglican, has been trying to revive the art of pilgrimages across the South of England.
This is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree, so I wouldn't expect tia to understand the point.
You can try to tone police me because I argue a case fervently all you want, but I pick fights I know I can win, and yes, I'm confident you're wrong side of history on this one. I can only hope you someday come to be properly embarrassed by this, as I am by some of my own past bullshit. In any case, the point of 777 was that that long narrative only reads as bizarrely condescending puffery about your ability to see a single trans person as a person. You just shouldn't have to protest that much. If someone had a conversation with me in which I talked about something difficult for me, and then years later that person tried to use me as a shield I would feel pretty betrayed.
I have given reasons why I think that bathroom laws, either way, are a bad idea more concerned with social signaling than with righting pressing wrongs
You have no idea of the wrongs, because you do not listen to trans people. I actually described harms to cis people in the absence of the laws in this thread, but you don't care about that either. Some cis women will face persistent discrimination if there isn't a standard that people need to be able to pick a safe safe for them free from the fear of of ad hoc boundary policing that is not about behavior. Do trans people like these laws? Why do they like them if they're just empty social signaling? Did you ever think of actually asking some trans people before arriving at this conclusion?
Also, I have heard a lot of women talk about this. I've actually never heard a sincere concern about it that wasn't embedded in transphobia. Like, I've heard, "What does the word queer even mean? And Asians aren't discriminated against. And what's up with bathrooms?" I've literally never heard a complaint about men creeping in locker rooms (I invited people to offer them upthread) and it seems vanishingly rare. I've been living in someplace with one of these laws and it does not happen, perhaps, as I said upthread, because spaces that are definitionally majority women are actually not comfortable places for men to creep. If there are women around who have some remaining unreflective concern, I have guest passes at the Y, and I invite them to come with me to the gym when it reopens and see if there is any actual problem.
Again, this should stop, and I think the blog should ask gswift in particular never to comment on trans issues.
It should be 13 x 0.03 / 0.15, I think. 13 x 3 / 15 comes out the same, obviously, but that does seem to be a bad way of explaining it.
If this is the case, which makes sense, the very simplest model is also missing the length of time in which someone is infectious.
No, that's covered by the parameter determining the rate at which people recover.
13 x 0.03 is answering: how many new infections will one infectious person produce per day?
So to get total number of infections until they recover, you can either multiply that number by "how many days are they infectious for" or divide it by "what percentage of sick people recover every day" - those two things are equivalent. If infections always last two days, and you take a bunch of people that are infectious at one specific moment, you'd expect half of them to recover within a day, because that's the half that were in day 2 of their infection already when you picked them up. So "infectious for two days" equals "proportion recovering per day is one over 2".
723: They have signs where we are asking people not to bring kids into the women's room. It makes me uncomfortable and it makes enough other people uncomfortable to put the signs up. But then I felt uncomfortable saying anything when I saw them walk by and I was half undressed with the kid looking right at me. People can change their kids at home or advocate for better spaces for children. Ours did not have private stalls for changing - unless you mean the toilet stalls.
I see that a Utah has private changing stalls. Our locker room had a sign at the door saying nobody 12 and under allowed.
Wake Halford with thy trolling! I would thou couldst.
778.2: The point of factual disagreement is whether there actually is any safety issue for cis women from allowing trans women to use single-gender public accommodations, and like Tia I've never seen any data, heard any anecdotes, nor had any experiences suggesting that there is. Tia, while being vehement about this, has been clearly talking about facts all along, while you've been blithely making up generalizations, such as your claim that all Muslim women reject trans women as women. At that point your getting snippy about how she's the one being unreasonable seems out of place.
Also, Halford! Obviously I like a nice recreational argument more than most, but you're probably right about how bad they are for everyone.
Hi Halford, you were an ass sometimes but I still thought you were also funny and interesting a lot of the time.
783: yes, that makes sense, too. I think was confused by looking at it from the wrong side of history the distinction made in other contexts between infectious and symptomatic. But symptoms are irrelevant to this calculation. Also - I now understand - irrelevant is whether you die or recover. Either way you're no longer infectious.
791: yes, sort of. The very simplest models assume no births or deaths - the population moves between Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered. Hence SIR model.
If you include deaths, it has an effect on transmission, because what brings the epidemic under control is that more and more of those 13 contacts a day are with Recovered people, and therefore don't lead to any additional cases. If some or all of them are instead dead, you aren't going to be having contacts with them. To take the extreme case, if everyone who gets the disease dies, then it'll just keep burning until everyone's dead - there won't be any Recovered around to deaden the transmissions.
And then you also need to include births...
LB, I did not claim that *all Muslim women* reject trans women as women. I claimed that the subset of Muslim women in the UK who want segregated swimming probably do, just like the similar subset of Jewish women. I know what I'm talking about there. You don't. Come back when you have found an organisation of Hasidim for Trans Rights.
Given the old saying "Two Jews, three opinions", it's not surprising that there are at least some orthodox authorities who say that trans people should be considered for halachic purposes as members of the gender they are living as. I'm sure it's a minority opinion, but it's there: https://jewishjournal.com/culture/184017/
And it took a lot of pushing, again, to move you from your universal claim: "that they want that accommodation precisely because they don't think trans women are women" where "they" referred back to religious people without more specificity, to a claim of specific knowledge about a specific group of Muslim women in the UK. Arguing like that, it is a bad look to be hostile about anyone else's level of reasonableness.
I think, after years of research and experimentation, Halford has finally crafted the perfect troll! *
The point is that I thinkinternet, especially political, argument is worse than a waste of time, it makes the whole discourse worse.
It's easy to sympathize with this sentiment, misguided though it is in this context. But the beauty of it is that it allows for absolutely no counter-argument.
*I don't actually think Halford's comments, including this one, are characterized by trollery.
[this is me, seeing enough of myself in Halford's comment to drop out of the thread and apologize to any trans readers I may have offended]
Tia complaining about tone policing is just..."chef's kiss"
796: I agree with it in the context of the larger internet and social media, but it makes me mostly irate when applied to this little haven. I think that the blog-heyday was a beautiful thing, and very different from FB/Twitter/etc, and blogs take a lot more work. It's the scale that's the problem. A good blog requires human relation-building, and social media is dismal in large part because of algorithms and lack of human judgement.
Whenever Halford shows up here every 6 months and shits all over this place, it makes me furious, because I see this place as a carve-out from an entirely different time and place, and one that is somewhat precarious and one that I'm invested in keeping alive.
746: I will cut you.
Also: George Washington was our greatest president! Jefferson was second-best.
I mostly have not read this thread, but to 798: the thing that jumps out at me is the asymmetry in emotional intensity level between you and Tia.
I'm inferring that Tia is feeling an 8-9 on the intensity level, and you are feeling a 3-4 on the intensity level. I may be wrong, but that is my guess. That asymmetry comes with a power dynamic - the more mild person can easily knock the more intense person off balance, but is protected from swings coming the other direction. So it's a little disingenuous to pretend that the same comments have the same impact coming from the two of you.
Heebie - I appreciate very much your investment in keeping it alive.
Yes. Me too. Everyone went to Facebook, which is objectively the worst.
801: I don't think that's quite right -- I think the big difference is a disagreement about how important the issues are. Gswift and NW seem to be thinking of trans issues as suitable for theoretical posturing about thought experiments, because no one they care about is deeply affected. Tia's arguing as if keeping trans people from using public accommodations safely and in a way that respects them is a serious wrong to them. I obviously side with Tia, but I wouldn't say that it's about her individual level of emotional heat, rather than a real disagreement about importance.
801: Probably more like 2-3. But seriously, the hectoring and constant accusations of bigotry and trolling are approaching parody.
798: No, I'm content policing. I do not think there should be transphobic content on this blog.
799.2 I understand where you're coming from but I don't see it that way, he's clearly fond of the place and can't keep away.
802 Seconding or thirding the sentiment.
806: No one is making transphobic comments. Everyone is operating from a baseline that trans people should be respected and be able to live normal lives. All we're doing is recognizing that there's some competing issues at the margins and how to best accommodate that. Your constant bigotry accusations are purely a tactic employed for you to shout down people you disagree with. It's stupid and counterproductive.
it makes me furious
This sentiment is obvious, natural, reasonable and appropriate. And yet - speaking solely for myself - I am always pleased when Halford conducts his little drive-bys.
A theme of this thread is about drawing lines -- what amount of offensiveness and stupidity should we allow? I find that I have nothing useful to contribute on this, except my own subjective preference: I will say that bob and strasmangelo were appropriately kicked the fuck out. Nothing else, ever, has crossed that line for me. (I mean, yeah, there's read and the Troll of Sorrow, but those go without saying, I think.)
Part of this arises from my gratitude at the level of foolishness I have been permitted here. Part of this is a function of my privilege at not being a particular target.
Anyway, heebie, we are all aware of and appreciate the effort you put into this. (Can I speak for everyone on that? I think so!)
809: You very reasonably noted above that in retrospect, you used some unfortunate language ("autogynophilic grifters") when you showed up talking about trans people here. While I do appreciate the recognition that that kind of language is going to be offputting to people who aren't the ones you normally spend your time with, maybe you could make the further jump to realize that your judgment about what's transphobic is not authoritative?
809: No, you say a bunch of shit that basically amounts to "at least some trans women are men in dresses who women should be afraid of" and then only partially sidle away when called on it. The prison comment, the "biological males" comment, all of it amounts to part of this campaign. You never truly retracted "grifters with autogynephilia". The fact that you sometimes slide away from it because you know you can't actually say "trans people shouldn't be able to live normal lives" (as if *using the bathroom* isn't part of normal life), doesn't make it any less clear to someone who understands transphobic tropes.
I do think you, in particular, should be shut down on this because it is destructive to trans (and queer) participation on the blog, and actually in the great world asshole cops exercise more power, as a class, than trans people. I think there are conflicting access needs to certain spaces and sometimes you have to decide who and what to prioritize.
809: Or to put it another way, I think "stupid and counterproductive" sums up what it's like to assume that people who care about trans issues will treat you as a good faith interlocutor in a conversation you've opened like that. There are lots of other topics in the world: if you really need to focus on this one, you have the emotional needs you have, but it's probably going to stay hostile.
really more like the Shearer thing than lk was willing to grant
It is, and I'm a coward, sorry. Almost no one else was awake to back me up and I have a reputation for reasonableness being one of the guys being loftily bemused by all these silly Internet debates whatever it is that covers up the cowardice. So I tried to explain myself, and it got zero uptake (other than explaining the reality of biological sex), I guess because I wasn't talking about either muscles or violence so yawn, who tuned it to the Sundance Channel?
I agree that there should not be transphobic content on this blog. So now that you're all awake, let me ask you: if you agree with Tia's and my contention that there has been transphobic content in this thread, can you please speak up? Let's at least get a partial head count.
wait, I'm sorry, I meant lw. You're not a coward, lk.
your judgment about what's transphobic is not authoritative
Of course it isn't. But I'm not also going to play along with Tia's belief that she gets to dictate to others what their motivations are.
815: Again, speaking solely as a matter of my own personal preference, he didn't cross that line for me. It is not difficult for me to see that he did for other people, and while I wouldn't have given him the boot myself, his ostracism here makes complete sense.
Even as I disagreed with Halford here, I found his comment provocative and interesting. It was also a direct insult to heebie. I find that I have a high tolerance for insults -- even really gross, awful ones -- when they are directed at other people.
(My actual proposition on the table is no comments about trans issues, not banning.)
815 Seconding. Definitely Shearer.
I guess what constitutes transphobia is going to be the rub here. I think putting that label on recognizing some conflicting interests at the fringe is ludicrous. Is Megan a transphobe for not wanting to compete against males?
I'm seconding lk, I think this thread should be put to bed. Let's argue about something else to get to 1,000.
796: I think, after years of research and experimentation, Halford has finally crafted the perfect troll!
Yes, I think he has executed a time-reversed Wittgenstein (who one must admit was truly an exceptional troll).
Wittgenstein 1: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wittgenstein 2: For since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book [the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_].
Halford 1: [Yellowstone visitation statistics are a scam!]
Halford 2: Whereas one can only inflame thereof one must be silent.
796.*: *I don't actually think Halford's comments, including this one, are characterized by trollery.
But they really are. To translate Halford into semi-Quinian:
"Reasonably positing that all internet argumentation is actually trolling when posted to the internet" is actually trolling when posted to the internet.
822: No, and this is a disingenuous distraction as to what you have done and said. Also, accidental transphobia is going to happen! We can talk about it. You have been on a repetitive tear since the beginning of the year, have invoked many hostile transphobic tropes, and it should not continue.
I maybe attempting to keep Halford around by flattering him with Wittgenstein comparison.
But I don't know, maybe Wittgenstein. I mean the dude was rich enough to afford some really sweet cars, but don;t think he ever indulged.
822: For crying out loud, gswift, stop digging! Yes, there are difficult aspects to agreeing on a definition but you framing things as you do in 822 is not helping yourself.
some trans women are men in dresses who women should be afraid of
A lot of trans prisoners are in prison for violent crimes and sexual assaults. Women in prison have disproportionate levels of trauma in their past including sexual assault. It's criminal to ask them to share a cell with a sex offender with a penis. This isn't a thought experiment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-45436953
Disappointed in myself for editing out the Halford-as-Wittgenstein reference I was going to make above.
Discourse would be a lot healthier if people in privileged groups just assumed that they themselves are being bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/classist/etc. until proven otherwise, and that while it's not great that they're that, it's the default state of our society currently. It takes work to see it, and even more to stop doing it. We need to get over ourselves when we or our actions are described with these words.
I don't like being invoked that way in 822 and wouldn't have put it that way myself.
Is Megan a transphobe for not wanting to compete against males?
Megan did not say this. Here are Megan's actual words:
But sports cannot be what they are and provide fair competition to all that includes trans-women.
Refusing to distinguish between trans-women and males is a bright line. Your choice in this makes you a bigot. Period.
823: As you wish.
The Mercator projection is the only proper projection for maps, hallowed as it is by tradition. Equal-area maps are a lunatic distraction because anyone who looks at a country's apparent size on the map and uses that and that alone to decide how much respect to give its people and culture is too dim to be taken seriously, and probably - like a lot of the population - can't find their own or any other country on the map anyway. Generations of kids have not grown up with a Mercator-distorted impression of the importance of Greenland and Novaya Zemlya in the history of the world. Humans are also very bad at comparing the areas of different shapes, so it's debatable whether a map that correctly shows the proportionate sizes of, say, long skinny Chile and fat round Spain would actually make much difference. Far more important for educational purposes is that countries should look the same on the world map as they do on individual maps: if you know what shape Iceland is because you're looking at a map of Iceland, you will easily find it on the Mercator map by looking for the Iceland-shaped thing. This is not the case for other projections.
I have so many thoughts to the last 30 comments, but it's overwhelming.
I am going to limit myself to pf: Anyway, heebie, we are all aware of and appreciate the effort you put into this. (Can I speak for everyone on that? I think so!)
Thank you, and I generally feel well-appreciated here! you all are very kind to me.
(There was a time, 2009-13ish I'd guess, when people constantly mourned Ogged's absence, and that definitely used to chafe. But then he came back and that has been nice.)
831: Thanks pf. I can't even catch 'em all (!) because this gets so exhausting. He's a bigot!
Can I actually ask a question before I type out a comment? There's something *I* don't totally understand about how you shouldn't make analogies between different kinds of oppression. I have in mind an extended comparison of how these same dynamics would play out in regards to [oppressed group I'm definitely not in]. I think it would be helpful and clarifying in the sense that I think commenters here would have a better gut level understanding of it and clearly see the parallels. But I am really inhibited about doing it because I think it may be wrong for a reason I don't understand. Does anyone have a better sense of this than I do and can they explain it to me?
This is not what you're asking for, which is the ethics of making the comparison. But I think in a contentious conversation like this, anything where the ethics are even slightly unclear is very likely to turn into a delighted leap into arguing about how you have just shown yourself to be the real racist/homophobe/Islamophobe or whatever, so this is probably a bad time to do it.
826 should read" But I don't know, maybe Halford hates Wittgenstein."
Is it a typo when you totally leave out the main thought of a sentence.
This might be a good time to revisit the Thread About the Terrible Philosophy Paper from 2017. Fewer than 200 comments, nuance, trans voices, academics behaving badly, Canadians behaving badly! Tia, did you catch this one?
Also the Mercator recognizes that the countries in Europe are tiny, and its helpful to make them bigger so that you can see them. The countries in Africa are mostly pretty big so they aren't as difficult to see on a Mercator Projection even if making them smaller is somehow unjust, whereas if you look at, say, a Peters Projection, it puts a lot of emphasis on the Sahara Desert.
The countries in Africa are mostly pretty big
*joyfully smashes through wall, leaps into room*
GHANA ISN'T!
837: I do remember that and it's part of why I feel like what is happening now is such a sad regression. I learned from conversations here and at the other place about context about that Hypatia stuff and used it when I heard simplistic takes in the wild.
835: ok, I actually think I can eventually write it in a way that doesn't invoke a specific other group, but that actually just talks about dynamics in bigoted narratives in general. I don't have the energy now, but I may at some point.
Heebie, thanks for putting in your time and effort.
Ghana is precisely the right size for a country. Gambia, Togo, Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho, Eswatini, Comoros, Cabo Verde? Yeah, they're tiny. But Ghana is just right.
Ghana is almost exactly the same size as the UK. I thought it was smaller. Damn you, Mercator!
832 Mercator is clearly the superior projection to use when you want to get from point A on the globe to point B. But I'm also rather fond of the Lambert project which is superior for when you want to drop a 155mm shell on the heads of your enemies.
Hoping for a glorious, 1000 comment future where we all use Dymaxion, the one correct projection.
839: hee hee. Is that guy still around doing his thing?
Both are also very close to being the median size for countries; 78th and 80th out of 194, according to Wiki.
||
Anyway, in a preview of one of the darker timelines:
Embattled regional lender Bank of Gansu Co. Ltd. has published more details of a state-led bailout that will see entities owned by the Gansu provincial government provide most of the funds to recapitalize the bank.And if that isn't messy enough for you,
[...]
Net profit [for 2019] crashed 85.1% to 511.3 million yuan after impairment losses on assets held by the bank, mostly bad loans, more than doubled
[...]
Gansu Highway Aviation Tourism, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gansu province's transport department, is currently the bank's biggest shareholder [...] to subscribe for 40% of the new yuan-denominated domestic shares
[...]
Gansu State-owned Assets Investment Group Co. Ltd. [...] 41.3% of the 3.75 billion new yuan-denominated shares [...] two other state-owned companies - Jiuquan Iron and Steel (Group) Co. Ltd., an industrial conglomerate, and Jinchuan Group Co. Ltd., a metals and chemicals producer [...] about 9.33% of the new yuan-denominated shares [each].
The bank's troubles emerged in late 2018 and were triggered in part by the mounting debt problems of privately owned Baota Petrochemical Group Co. Ltd., one of its shareholders [what could possibly go wrong]. Baota relied on its financing arm to raise money through the issuance of short-term debt securities, and by the end of 2018 had racked up overdue payments of 17.5 billion yuan related to debt financing. A total of 79 commercial banks, including Bank of Gansu, held such debt instruments totaling almost 8.2 billion yuan. Bank of Gansu had also given Baota a line of credit amounting to 5 billion yuan, of which 4.3 billion yuan had been drawn downAFAIK this kind of spaghetti-bowl clusterfuck is the norm through most of the PRC financial system.
Can we get to 1,000 with meat packing in Nebraska?
It's amazing how many people work in these plants.
845: well, exactly. We should be encouraging kids to want to travel from point A to point B. See the world. (Not right now, obviously; they should stay firmly at Point A. But later.) When they meet people from different countries and cultures, they may well decide that they want to drop 155mm shells on their heads, but in the UK that is a decision prohibited to those under 18.
||
On the general subject of trolls, I noticed this comment on CrookedTimber by Bob McManus which might be of interest (sincere apologies if this isn't appropriate, but if there would be a thread to post it in, it would be this one).
Total lockdown, ain't been off tiny property in two months, preexisting conditions (stage four cancer (it's ok, 3rd year stable, lots of survivors in that industry), nephrostomy, debilitating chemo side-effects) need maintenance but busy and dangerous hospitals.
|>
Gansu Highway Aviation Tourism
Their business model is unorthodox, but you haven't lived until you've gone down a rutted Gansu highway in a Piper Cub going just under takeoff speed.
852 Thanks for posting that Nick. I'm glad to see he's alive and mostly doing well. I was indordinately fond of Bob (maybe it was all the Ozu content?) and resisted the general consensus that he had to leave until a few commenters reached out to me off blog and made me aware of just how destructive his presence here was.
850 is clearly fiction because "Governor Ricketts" has to be a made-up name.
855: need I remind you of the existence of Butch Otter and Luther Strange?
The thread in 837 is great, this one is... not. I apologize for my part in extending it. I also want to say that I both think there's value in what Halford is saying, and that in particular it speaks to ways in which I could improve as a person, but that Heebie's also right that there's more to this place than threads like this one. Speaking of Halford, in the last year or two I've really started to process my religious trauma in a more productive way, which has made me a little more tolerant of religion in other people's lives, even if I know it could never be a positive part of mine in any way. I don't know if I really have anything specific to apologize to Halford for, but I do want to acknowledge that I had some room for growth on that topic in the past.
Until there are one or two more accusers I'm just steadfastly refusing to follow the Reade story all that closely. But it does look like it just got a lot more complicated.
857 Heebie's definitely right about this place. For me it has been a lifesaver. I'm sorry if I didn't pick up that Halford was insulting to Heebie.
I've basically come around to Mr. F's point of view on the Reade story, but hoo-boy, do I not want to litigate that again in this thread.
When this thread reaches about 950 comments there is going to be a mad rush to comment in order to be the thousandth so I want to lay down some ground rules. At 950+ comments you may only post your SAT scores or salary.
860 No? You good with the other alternative in this thread? I don't think so.
850: Yep. It's unknown how many of them have family members who work in nursing homes. But that's what I'm worried about.
850. Also chicken plants on the eastern shore of MD. There's a cluster of disease inland in DE, and there are plans to kill millions of chickens because many of the hapless underpaid workers there are getting sick
https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-poultry-producers-coronavirus-20200424-hufdfzs24zhqpeptx4w6yngztm-story.html
There's a screamingly obvious question that I haven't seen any reporting on (maybe someone has): With all of these covid-positive people handling processed meat, isn't there a risk of contracting covid from the meat? Covid isn't food borne in the way e. coli is, but there must be workers breathing in the vicinity of the plastic packaging, which then stays refrigerated until in reaches the consumer, and consumers typically touch the packages at some stage.
All I know is that anyone who uses "females" as a noun is a cop asshole.
"cop" was intended to be struck through. That was the joke. But legit it reads better now.
No evidence of foodborne transmission in Singapore or Germany, during the interval when both were doing careful contact tracing.
Epidemiology of spread would help a lot in understanding what to do, but will only come from civilized places without too many cases. There's some classification of how spread happened from Colorado public health authorities also I believe.
865: I think in practice surface transmission has to have been via contact with a surface an infected person recently touched. Here's an article with comprehensive consideration of food safety concerns. But the thing about "three days on plastic", as Jennifer Kasten's Facebook page was good about pointing out, is that "any detectible RNA" is different from "live virus in sufficient quantity to infect", and time passes in between plastic leaving the plant and consumers getting it in stores. I think it's nowhere near as risky as sharing an indoor environment with a sick person who is touching the same things as you, and that's nowhere near as risky as actually breathing near the person. If anyone else has better knowledge, pipe up. But I really recommend Jennifer Kasten on Facebook.
I will note that the Oscar Pistorius thread only got to 658 comments. (and mostly on-topic right up until the end, probably one of the most on topiclong threads that I can recall.)
Should I congratulate myself that I trolled Halford into posting?
For the duration, I'm not eating any raw chicken for fear of Covid-19.
Congratulations to von wafer! His undying hatred is an honor. A fellow, indeed!
866: My mother-in-law does this, and it drives me crazy. But they're pretty conservative.
All I know is that anyone who uses "females" as a noun is a cop asshole.
I don't want to get into an argument about important things but I strongly believe that THIS is way off. I see women saying "females" all the time. My wife says "females". Usually it seems like a product of awkwardness about being in a situation where you feel odd about saying either "women" or "girls" and want to default to a more general term. There being no female equivalent of "guys".
For real, who knows a vendor with a good weirdo antarctic-centered projection. (Not actually Antarctic centered, projected to present the ocean as contiguous, which puts Antarctica near the center. And can't remember the name of the projection, and stupid firefox lost my history.) I looked at NGS but the didn't have any.
876: Somehow I remembered the phrase to search in TFA was "tweet link to PDF," and I think I found it again: https://twitter.com/meredith_mmm/status/1141613571471749120 "Spilhaus projection" is the name. Now I kinda want one too, so please share if you find one!
875: Gal or Gals, but that just seems weird.
875:
"gals" is right there, but I'll admit to overstating the case. Still, the way that a lot of men use the term "females" is off-putting and objectifying to my ears.
Brazil just started on what could become an impeachment of Bolsonaro.
"Bolsonaro is so explicit in his madness from an institutional point of view that, in the Supreme Court, both sides would unite against him,"(Also Brazil, unlike the more mature United States, apparently has explicit mechanisms prosecuting a sitting president.)
Didn't they put the prior guy in jail?
It's a predictor of being an asshole, just a weak one. You definitely see "females" used a lot in asshole contexts.
The prior gal too! (I think.)
The police use both "male" and "female".
Sergio Moro, the justice minister who launched this in the midst of resigning, is also the judge who led the Lava Jato investigation that put Lula (and Dilma?) in jail, while also shredding so much of the political establishment that Bolsonaro became a viable candidate.
I really want NGS to do one, basically their current (re-projected) map but with an added layer with lots of detail on currents and winds and stuff.
885: Agreed, although I think it is becoming over time a slightly stronger one, particularly for people who pointedly use it in differentiation to "women".
Man, if I keep reading Traister, I'll just get madder and madder about Biden. I'm so tired of that whole rape-y generation and I wish they would die faster since they evidently will not learn.
830: Sorry Megan, I should have used a generic question of "are women bigots if they don't wan't to compete against men in a combat sport"
831:Refusing to distinguish between trans-women and males is a bright line. Your choice in this makes you a bigot.
It's not a choice, it's reality. You can transition your gender. You cannot transition your sex. I refuse to abandon objective reality in service in the name of inclusiveness. This is the impasse we're at I guess. Probably a good time to stop.
WTF Cyptic Ned?? Females? Really? Would much prefer dames or broads instead.
If sex and gender are being discussed as separate things how on earth can the term "female" even be avoided? Is there a new term now?
Also for the record and to soothe Barry's wounded pride I had my childhood bedroom largely papered with early-modern maps (including I think some of the original Mercator projections). So my antique wall-mapping appetite is long since glutted.
If you don't want to be an asshole, I believe the currently accepted term is "womxn."
At this point I can't even tell if 898 is a joke.
It's not a choice, it's reality. You can transition your gender. You cannot transition your sex. I refuse to abandon objective reality in service in the name of inclusiveness. This is the impasse we're at I guess. Probably a good time to stop.
I'll say again; stop digging.
Regardless of whether or not that's a reasonable position to take in some circumstances (or, at least, a reasonable thing to talk through and try to agree on precise terminology) it is a deeply obnoxious response to:
I'm not optimistic that I can make you see why those constructions seem so far off base to me (and to many other people), and opening up about why requires a vulnerability that I'm reluctant to offer up gratis for the sake of argument. I get that you want some insight, but you also want to argue.
It's not a choice, it's reality. You can transition your gender. You cannot transition your sex.
(You literally can have surgery to transition your sex, to match your gender.)
To be more precise, 893.last is deeply obnoxious following 736 regardless of whether or not is a direct response to 736.
901: You literally cannot. Transition surgery cannot give you female organs and swap out your chromosomes. It's surreal that this is even considered debatable. I think I'm done. Some of you have lost your minds.
I actually just need to point out that it's getting worse and worse in misgendering terms as the thread goes on:
I should have used a generic question of "are women bigots if they don't wan't to compete against men in a combat sport"
Is this okay here?
One of those old maps had the vast oversized Terra Australis Incognita, and the routes of various voyages of discovery plotted. I pleased myself greatly once by realizing the outline for Terra etc had been inferred from one of those voyages happening to reach just far enough south to see the mountains on S Georgia, but not far enough to realize it was an island.
905: Sorry, I meant to say male bodied athletes. I'm doing more than one thing at once.
907:me
Speaking of combat sports, three UFC events in a 10 day period next month. I'm sure you're all as excited as I am.
907: I am far past the point where I trust that this is sincere, but if it is, stop commenting at the very least until you can stop misgendering trans people.
Also, never comment about this again. But, if I can't have that, stop commenting now since you can't do it without misgendering trans people.
Late to the party, but since we're trying to hit 1000 I'll drop in a note. 831 beat me to it, but pf's sentiment there is exactly correct:
"Refusing to distinguish between trans-women and males is a bright line. Your choice in this makes you a bigot. Period."
gswift is a transphobic bigot and the fact that he gets to exercise state power should worry everybody.
To 802 or 803 or just to Heebie. I only discovered this place maybe two years ago, but without overly gushing...it is such a wonderful hidden corner of the internet. Heebie was welcoming from the minute I delurked, the rest of you were sympathetic and responsive and smart when I posted a problem here, it's the only room I'm ever in where my SAT score is in the bottom rung and I love that. I guard this place jealously even from my friends and have read, I think, every word posted in the last two years. I feel so lucky it exists sometimes. ok, well, some gushing.
I would like to make it clear that I think Tia is in the right in this argument. For what it's worth.
Aw, thanks Chill. I like having you around.
One more post will probably push this whole thread off the front page, anyway.
I also want to say that while I almost never post, I do enjoy the site. Thanks, Heebie.
Biological essentialism seems such a weird hill to die on to me.
* you can't logically accept gender assignment surgery (NB I'm not arguing for that practice) and reject gender transition surgery as fundamentally different categories. Once you've accepted that you have to give up on a binary view as fundamental, so you already have to have a discussion with more nuance.
* Nobody thinks you can change your chromosomes (be they XX, XY, XXX, XXYY, whatever). But in the vast majority of scenarios both real and theoretical it doesn't matter much compared to other sex or social characteristics, and the people pulling it into that discussion are doing it disingenuously approximately 100% of the time in my (limited) experience.
* There are difficult edge cases, sure, but they are edge cases. Why do essentialists seem to be so invested in the edge cases but so uninterested in the majority of the cases, where there are real problems? I haven't seen any argument for this that doesn't essentially boil down to bigotry.
I think almost always if you think there's a reason to refer to "biological sex" or some similar notion that isn't gender in reference to people, it means you haven't really thought through the issue and should you should think about it more and say something more precise.
I love the Spilhaus projection in 878 because the only point of ocean contiguity you miss is the Bering Strait, which therefore functions like the secret passage between the kitchen and the study on the Clue board. (If you like, the Panama Canal can be treated as the secret passage between the conservatory and the lounge, but that's the work of man and I am concerned with the ocean God made.)
I've basically come around to Mr. F's point of view on the Reade story, but hoo-boy, do I not want to litigate that again in this thread.
But you want to redo the primaries, now with some unspecified ad hoc process?
(My new school has maps in every class. Mercator. I am displeased.)
I kind of want a bunch of novel projections. Roc-centred, Eurasia centred, North Pacific centred, Pac centred but with west at the top.
The school maps are also those weird ones that duplicate Alaska and Chukotka in the top corners.
921: There's a lot of room in "basically" to include not advocating for anything that's going to blow up any chance of beating Trump.
Not to speak for Spike, but I wouldn't take that as a stronger statement than "Wow, I wish there was some workable way for Biden not to be the nominee." Which I think plenty of us could join hands and sing Kumbaya over.
Oh but it's all going to be okay, Megan @ 892 provided us with stirring news of the Chris Dodd selection. Yeah, I know I should be happy about Bolsonaro, I know you have to take the good along with the bad, but I'm still as inclined to go lick cart handles at Costco as I was ~850 comments ago.
917: ok, so this is me being dumb. And I could probably find literature on this, but what is the right way to talk about cervical cancer screening in trans men? Gender discordant health screenings? I don't know whether trans men on testosterone need mammograms, but it isn't gender discordant genitalia.
But you want to redo the primaries, now with some unspecified ad hoc process?
Yes: I want to seize the opportunity created by Covid-19 to blow up the entire corrupt primary/convention system that we have and replace it with a nationwide, mail-in, ranked choice primary in which all registered Democrats get an equal vote, and whoever comes in second gets the VP nomination.
928: You've already found the way in your question: cervical cancer screening for trans men.
"Wow, I wish there was some workable way for Biden not to be the nominee."
And as a second-best option, this.
Dang it, I was trying to time that after 929.
929: You have to overweight swing state votes.
Did you just call me overweight?
You have to overweight swing state votes.
No we don't. Fuck swing states. After we fix the primary process we are coming for the Electoral College.
928/930: Yeah. I actually typed a comment that I didn't post because I was hoping this could stop, but it went:
__________________________
If he comes back, I think we need some guidelines about one baseline bit of language. I really hate that I have to do it because I am not the queen of the trans spokesallies and might get something wrong, but I'll try. So:
Let's not with "male-bodied" either.
We are are discussing, to my dismay, trans men, trans women, and maybe non-binary people. Those terms should really suffice for our needs. If one wanted to -- and PLEASE LET'S NOT FURTHER -- discuss trans women's participation in women's sports and wanted to discuss advantages conferred, words like "muscle mass", "androgens", etc., should really suffice to communicate any important point. There is no need to call attention to the supposed maleness of trans women. It has gotten worse and worse but it started off bad.
____________________________
And if that's an example of a more general phenomenon, then you speak to the general phenomenon that you have in mind. For example. "We're working to increase appropriate cancer screening rates in our trans patients, particularly cervical cancer screening in trans men and prostate cancer in trans women." Or in a different context "Our inclusive OB/GYN office provides a wide range of services for women and trans men." (It's possible, even likely, that those could be further improved in various ways, but they're both pretty clearly improvements on using language that refers to "sex" as a general concept rather than specifically what you want to talk about.)
938: Prostate cancer screening is likely not a priority, since many think the PSA is unreliable and overused. Some OB/gyns were treating men who have sex with men, because there was an inadequate supply of providers who did anal paps and could treat anal cancer.
We haven't discussed non-binary people yet. Has everyone here heard of Public Universal Friend? I found out about Friend a little while ago, and I still feel like I need to google the name again to prove to myself this person existed.
"You have to overweight swing state votes."
Only the ones further south, because they don't look important enough on the map.
People look at the Mercator projection and don't realize that Rhode Island is actually the same size as Tennessee.
Instead of primaries staggered over months, you have months of campaigning, half (or 2/3) of it in swing states, remainder elsewhere. Then you have Spike's Big Mail In. The candidate with most points is nominee, runner-up VP. Half (or 2/3) of points come from results of large-n head-to-head (D v R) polling in swing states, remaining points from ranked votes of Democrats.
It isn't about FAIRNESS it's about WINNING
One person, one vote. Why is this so difficult?
2/3 of the Senate or State legislatures going for that is never going to happen.
It's your constitution, bro.
946: I'm talking about the primaries, not the general.
I was referring to Spike's "coming for the Electoral College". We'll get hit with an asteroid before we get rid of that.
I love how we finally managed to return to electoral politics.
951: Yes! No one ever gets worked up about that!
"One person, one vote. Why is this so difficult?"
Except for the disenfranchised ones who get zero votes.
And restricting it to one or zero is very unsatisfactory to non-binary people.
Its true, we may need to dissolve the Senate first.
It sounds like Part 1 of the plan is Spiketatorship.
Part 2 is Perfect Democracy.
929: That.... actually sounds pretty good. It's still a ratfuck, but there are so many other reasons I'd sing Kumbaya. I'm not holding anyone's hand, though.
940 Public Universal Friend was the best and everyone should google them.
951 is neither an SAT score nor your salary.
Fuck, I'm going to wake up to +1,000 comments.
Regarding the need to specify something other than preferred gender when talking about a person - I think about it in terms of how results from medical tests are reported, because that's part of my job. For most diagnostic tests there is an expectation that there will be a "normal range" or "reference range" of what sort of values are seen in people who don't have a relevant medical problem - therefore the doctor gets a quick way to see that there is a potential problem because the result is outside the reference range. Seeing a number with no context is only helpful if the doctor has seen a million other numbers in the past to provide their own context.
A lot of these reference ranges are sex-specific. Not just hormones but other basic things in the blood like ferritin, insulin, uric acid. Bone density. Also many are age-specific of course.
Not only are these reference ranges used to inform the doctor, but there are often "critical values" or "panic values" where if you see a value above or below a certain limit, you are required to make some sort of decision, e.g. the lab has to inform the doctor IMMEDIATELY instead of just within the requested turnaround time, the doctor has to make a note in the record that it was seen and dealt with, they have to explain in the record that either they gave the recommended treatment or they take responsibility for deciding not to, etc.
So, the very existence of trans and nonbinary people challenges this. Of course the reference range always needed to be taken in context to begin with, based on other facts about the patient. A doctor would say oh, this is a super high granulocyte level, well of course it is because they are on this therapy that mobilizes granulocytes, so nothing to worry about. And you also have lazy doctors who don't know the patient, react reflexively and treat based on a single number without knowing more than what's written in the test report. They would be even more lazy without the reference range - at least it's objective.
Here at UCI clinical lab's website are a collection of sex-specific reference ranges (along with their disclaimer that they put in medical reports for nonbinary people).
Here's a good and long article from the primary trade magazine for clinical labs. The first half is about how providers are adjusting to treating trans people thoughtfully and the second half is about how labs can try to report results more usefully for trans people. They would hate to throw out established reference ranges, even though there's always been an understanding that they are imperfect, and now there are more and more "exceptions" to the rule. Knowing why someone is an exception is important.
908: I recently started rewatching some of the early UFCs. I loved watching it develop into a sport but I miss violent absurdity its early years.
This discussion is not merely theoretical or taking place in a vacuum. People are going to die https://twitter.com/aclu/status/1255864986435416065?s=21
Yep, that's the Republicans for you. Freedom to discriminate is second only to freedom to fire your workers.
+the+of
Hey, Cryptic ned, does the amount of initial exposure have any influence on the course of the disease?
951 is neither an SAT score nor your salary.
You first.
959: sometimes endocrinologists order FSH and estradiol for men, but the only reference range they provide is the one for women.
940. Yes !! Heard of, didn't go deeper than Wikipedia. Public universal friend, truly a mindset of generosity.
929 makes campaigning more expensive by a lot I think. There were plenty of candidates in this primary, I don't hhink that a broader field is always vetter.
I don't have any specific better way forward though, so should maybe stay silent.
Wait, there's a line in Hamilton, spoken by a lawyer-- "smile more, talk less"
Eh, 963.2 isn't really worth answering. I have some naive model in mind and that was a first pass at building some intuition, but I should really just, like, do a Wikipedia dive first. At the moment, all I know about the immune system is from some some student's presentation on the modelling autoimmune diseases dimly recalled from 20 years ago and Cells at Work.
According to legend when someone actually tells their SAT score and salary the blog disappears from the internet forever.
We haven't discussed non-binary people yet. Has everyone here heard of Public Universal Friend?
I hadn't! Fascinating.
This must happen. It's the only way out of the simulation, I suspect.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/495371-as-biden-struggles-hillary-waits-for-the-call
That is almost as dumb as Tulsi Gabbard.
It's a terrible article, sure, but we only need 26 more comments.
I think we could get at least 10 comments out of the wikipedia article about Public Universal Friend and Whig history?
I didn't expect this thread to be abruptly pushed off the front page on a Thursday afternoon. I guess I hadn't paid enough attention to the blog's machinations.
I wonder what Public Universal Friend would have made of Genesis P-Orrige and vice versa?
I've been having a series of interesting conversations with my new obgyn practice about what steps they can take to make their clinic more trans + non-binary inclusive. I don't know how fruitful they'll end up being, but it felt like one potentially helpful step I could take as a cis woman.
(This came up in part because I've been thinking a lot about how obgyns can be more sensitive to people in all sorts of situations: infertility, cancer, sexual assault histories, etc.)
Okay, it was somehow all worthwhile for that comment, soup. Bravo.
(I know it's actually more of a question than a comment. But still.)
Wittgenstein really would have been a great blog commenter.
I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.
If you assholes don't actually make it to a thousand after all this shit that would be a tragedy pretty on-brand.
982. The Tractatus Wittgenstein of course, but the Blue and Brown Books Wittgenstein would be a mere aphorist.
What this blog would really benefit from would be the great epistaolary writers of the 18th century, Madame de Pompadour or Mary Wortley Montagu. Also possibly Robert Hooke, who was reputed to be full of great ideas he couldn't focus on enough to really finish.
Early trans synth pioneer Wendy Carlos.
Fantasy sport is a genre that makes money, why not fanatsy blogging. A squad of software people and AI training. a simple venture capital pitch, and then all founders with an equity stake both get to read an intersting blog, grow wealthy, and ....
At least some of these comments need to be trolling Barry for when he wakes up and staggers over to check the tally. So hard to decide which specific films to insult, though.
Or there's the "collusion between Elon Musk and MBS" angle... (For those keeping score in reality, Saudi Arabia sold most of its Tesla holdings fairly recently, which is boring. But we can invent something heinous.)
("Saudi Arabia bails out Live Nation" is real news though. "The Saudi Arabian government now effectively owns a piece of the Austin City Limits Music Festival. . . . Live Nation owns a majority stake in Austin-based concert promoter C3 Presents LLC, which runs ACL.")
929, 957: Can we please keep some time spread between primaries? Run them regionally, shift the order around, etc., but there is some value in having the decision emerge through a filtering process. Having it all happen on one day would give even more power to the "invisible primary" among the donor class to sort out who's going to have enough money to be competitive on the big day.
Also, I would like a pony.
Zooey Deschanel and Christopher Walken star. Ivan Reitman returns to direct.
986. lw
So how about Bill DeBlasios William Wilhelm's LOOK HERE JEWS twitter moment. I laughed, knew what he was getting at, and figured he'd take some shit for it.
Wouldn't a single day primary be a lot more likely to produce a winner with like 30% of the vote? Or less, if the field is big enough?
It seems to me that Super Tuesday is a bigger problem than what came before. If they'd limited the number of delegates available per week, you wouldn't have the race effectively over based on a single day that so closely follows the 'boutique' round. (I'm not troubled by the boutique round -- it's a mix of regions, with smaller markets.) That is, instead of a single day, why not an even spread of delegates over March, April, and May?
I guess I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve by having it all on a single day.
989: Niiiice. Also financed by the Saudis. All rights to the original film purchased by Disney.
596: That's correct, but she and I are in fact IRL friends.
603: The comments posted by "F" in that 1,000-comment thread were by someone else! Maybe I never posted as just "F"; I can't remember.
And someone else says: Once I had a conversation with a woman. She spoke to me about her struggles and sorrow and pain. She was a human being. Her being a woman was not of primary salience to me, but instead her personal qualities. Women have different bodies than men. Oh, and about that material accommodation, no.
How does that read to you?
Well, that does not read well to me at all, of course, but that's not how I read NW's comment. We read things differently, as people often do.
Anyway, I'm listening to you, Tia, and maybe even learning something from you via this very weird thread. But I don't like attacking people, and attributing to them the very worst possible motives, especially when they are long-time members of this strange little space on the internet, who have often made this space a more interesting and intelligent place. It makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable, and I just don't want to participate in that sort of thing.
963 is a good question. It's not known yet in people exactly, but the evidence points that way. In lab animals, higher viral dose for infection leads to more severe disease. It's a fairly common phenomenon, enough so that folks who are working with animal models in infectious disease have to look at how much contagious material to infect the animals with to get something that looks like the normal course of disease in humans. Low doses sometimes don't create symptoms that mimic conditions and high doses sometimes cause illness to severe to be suitable as a model for humans.
The point of my modest proposal isn't about the single day election (though good God does the world need a shorter election season), it's about introducing harder data about who can actually win the general. The point of the campaigning isn't to get party votes, it's to give the candidates enough publicity in the swing states to make the head-to-head polling useful. Staggering over some months could do that. You could also have two rounds, the first one staggered, state by state, with some filtering as CC says, the second round national all at once.
The second round having the benefit hopefully of conferring additional legitimacy on the ultimate winner. It wouldn't be just that the dropped out candidates endorse the winner, but that the winner is also directly elected by party members.
Also, real question, why exactly is Cuamo considered the spawn of Satan or whatever?
1003: I see you, needing a hug. Boop.
We could have been on topic, heebie. But no, it always has to be about you.
We did it!!!
Just got back from a long walk with a good friend. It was good to get out.
Heebie deserves this, Mossy. Let it be.
I was drawing up a report on my financial secrets, specifically how I offset hundred-million-dollar losses in ordinary business income by shrewdly licensing out my name to various franchises under arrangements not disclosed to the IRS, but the odometer slipped while I wasn't looking.
997: Woah, the first result for my search on "immune response model" gave me what I'm pretty sure is the 1995 paper the student presented. Chaos theory!
There's a 2000-comment thread somewhere in the not too distant archives, and as you'd expect, once the numbers got close to familiar dates in the modern era it just turned into a recap of historical disasters and embarrassments.
1004: Among various other things, Cuomo collaborated with Republicans for years to hand them control of New York. The New York Democratic Party may be the shittiest in the country, and he's got a lot to do with it.
1013: here you go http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12905.html
wow, I had no memory that we ever hit 2000.
Also, to 1006, I love it when it's all about me.
The whole thread was almost worth it for 982.
The lockdown is not good for either emotional intelligence or the other sort.
This next link is not quite pure clickbait. It's about a Vatican action on trans sex workers and <Buzzfeed> it will blow your mind</Buzzfeed>.
Also it wasn't insomnia until the second kid got into bed with Jammies and me. But now it's been hours.
996: ok. In terms of motive attribution in general, there is a point when "charity" and "civility" become simple-minded and a failure to state clearly what is happening and defend vulnerable people (even if it's just an effort, very probably too little/too late, to defend their participation on a 2/3 funct weblog). There are costs to letting longevity obscure that you see that something has changed. Sometimes, other people who are going to be more familiar with tropes and tactics of certain kind of bigots are going to have their antennae up sooner than people who maybe aren't, because they don't belong to the same communities. You feel like people are attacking your friends? I do, too, and my friends are people who actually get attacked and have their right to be who and where they need to *all the goddamned time*, not just have their feelings hurt on rare occasions on a .73 funct weblog. To the extent that the thing in asterisks isn't *every day of their goddamned lives* (and for many people it still is) it's because of their own exhausting efforts, and to a much lesser extent, the efforts of the other people who listened to them and when necessary called things what they were.
I'm also quite confident my friends would not enjoy extended poetic meditations on their humanity from people opposing laws that protect their right to access basic public accommodations but I'm sure as hell not going to show them this thread to find out. For a while I tried to conceal from some of them that this was even happening, but after a while it became such a salient feature of this week I really couldn't. Asking them to read it would be like, here, smell this. But I have no hard feelings from this except for the one person for whom I obviously do, and I am confident of everyone else's ability to evolve for the better, and my own.
And you're great, JPJ.
I can't believe I didn't think to post this classic commentary on this thread until now.
Halford is a twisted Kantian who makes self-loathing the basis of all moral law. This is what keeps people from murdering him.
Self-loathing as the basis of all moral law is a time-honored western tradition.
Ranting about trans issues a certain way will make an online space unwelcoming to trans people (and their partners etc) even if you're not being hateful per se or advocating anything in particular. Unfogged is an active forum and not defunct even if it's not a ton of new people all the time, still an issue.
Let's stop the thread there -- 1024 comments. It's a nice number, two-to-the-tenth. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.
Thank you for nice information. Please visit our web:
https://uhamka.ac.id
