Messages

331

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Elections/Politics 2022

« on: November 02, 2022, 01:41:31 AM »

I wonder how the rule of law is in Brazil.  Do people with several times the average income who do crimes and get caught get punished?  Or is it like the USA where unless there is a political struggle the rich honestiores are immune to punishments which ordinary people humiliores face?  If Bolsonoro thinks that if he tried a coup which failed he would spend his life in jail, that might affect his decisions.

We need to figure out how to break the principle "a frozen national government benefits the extreme right."  People like Menicus Moldbug or Netanyahu use it.

332

General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Funny Videos

« on: November 01, 2022, 05:09:59 AM »

Arms & Armor the cutlers in Minnesota got a few submissions for their pumpkin-mangling video contest including Jordan Dahir, epic opponent and eagle cry! YouTube -  piped.mha.fi - blog post with commentary

333

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2022

« on: October 26, 2022, 11:21:15 PM »

I'm told that Putin used ablism to seize power the first time: the other candidate for President looked like he was winning, so Putin made some calls and the news started to be full of detailed descriptions of the knee surgery the other candidate was about to undergo complete with gory photos.

I'm told that the current congress could lift the debt ceiling (or mint some trillion-dollar coins, lock them in Ft. Knox or similar, and use them as collateral) but to septuagenarians and useful idiots in newsrooms that sounds too radical.

On the subject of media narratives, I doubt that what pass for journalists in the USA will repent until they are in President for Life Scudder's patriotic labour facilities.

Vox magazine has discovered the neo-reactionary bloggers such as Menicus Moldbug (link is to RationalWiki).

334

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 25, 2022, 08:58:15 PM »

Birdsite people say that only one UK Prime Minister since the war had a degree from anywhere but Oxford.  Is that really true?  Educated people with fancy jobs often pass around claims about personal politics or current events which a child could show to be false.

I would expect the opposition parties to be laying out a clear policy program at this time in preparation for forming government.  Committing to things in advance makes it easier to overcome the intertia in the system, and lets you think about them at leisure.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2022

« on: October 21, 2022, 06:17:10 PM »

The province of BC has a new leader by default after the candidate who broke with the party establishment by opposing the establishment candidate was ruled to have violated election rules https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/10/20/With-Appadurai-Out-Can-Eby-Rest-Easy/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/david-eby-ndp-leadership-campaign-elections-bc-1.6623522  This really does not look good, because BC is in the middle of multiple crises: floods in winter, droughts in summer, refusal to mitigate COVID-19, mass deaths of trees and salmon, tainted drugs, and unaffordable housing.  To me, this is not the time for the government to say "everything we are doing is fine, this leadership contest should be a formality."

Party leadership contests in recent years have a history of irregularities which the courts and police keep at arms length from.

Another Albertan is calling Daniel Smith's faction of the UCP (foreign, irrational) Republicans rather than (native, rational) Conservatives https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/conservatives-alberta-united-conservative-party-annual-general-meeting-edmonton-1.6623529  That is an eccentric reading of the conservative movement in Canada but it does show that merging two parties into the United Conservative Party did not make factions go away or let both sides speak the same language.  "conservatives and republicans no longer speak the same social language. They do not consume the same media and therefore do not have the same social frames of reference."

IIRC, there is an argument that public opinion does not exist without mass media to create it.

BC had its municipal elections this week, the local mayoral campaign was basically personality politics (the two candidates could not describe different policies they would impliment, just utter polite nothings and accuse each other of being all talk, no action or just in the race out of a desire for attention).

Edit 2022-10-26: oh, and the police who arrested the First nations grandfather and granddaughter for opening a bank account refused to attend the apology feast so the nation says they can't accept the apology https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heiltsuk-reject-apology-call-out-vancouver-police-chief-adam-palmer-for-denying-vpd-racism-1.6628452

336

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 20, 2022, 05:58:46 PM »

Sounds like another good reason not to be on birdsite!  Its like the lottery in 1984, almost everyone puts in far more than they get out because they hear stories about someone somewhere striking it rich.  Anyone who was on the Internet in the 1990s knows that worthwhile sites need moderators, and you can't effectively moderate hundreds of millions of people.  And algorithmic social media has dangerous positive feedback loops (or scams where to be seen you have to pay- Facebook starts cutting off views to businesses' pages when it believes they depend on the page to reach customers, then offers to boost posts on the page for a small fee).

Edit: even if one believes that the rise in trans and nonbinary identities is just a result of greater awareness and more acceptance, that is a cause for the trend (ie. "society changed in ways which allow more people to recognize and express their trans and nonbinary identities, therefore more people recognize and express them")

337

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2022

« on: October 19, 2022, 04:27:10 AM »

Is that sort of platform Smith has sufficient to win in somewhere like Alberta? Or does it actually pass the point of "slightly too wingnut for the electorate"?

I would take a bet at 2:1 that her UCP will lose the next election, because they are physically or ideologically incapable of dealing with the big issues AB faces such as overdependence on oil revenues and COVID-19 and because they are incumbents in hard times.  In many ways, they have similar problems to the British Conservatives: a large share of the party membership has lost contact with physical and political reality, so leaders have to either satisfy them and outrage most of the electorate and nearby powers (whether Ottawa or Brussels) or use normal politics and be pulled down by members who see this as betrayal.

Electing her will raise questions among the voters who accepted the UCP as heirs to the old Progressive Conservatives who were corrupt but not so blatantly wingnutty (former premier Ralph Klein was an alcoholic and problem gambler, but AFAIK he did not invent new policies after downing five shots of whiskey and losing $7,000 at the casino)

Edit: Journalists are systematically going through Smith's public statements and newsletters from the past year and finding flirting with the idea that Ukraine just needs to be neutral to stop the Russian invasion here and sharing posts from an antisemitic blog there.  Lots of people had to reorient their thinking about Russia and Ukraine this spring and sort through competing narratives from convincing sources with agendas, but it shows that she is not great at avoiding saying things which critics can turn into soundbites, even after she was pretty sure she would be premier soon (and that she absorbs a lot of ideas from weird rightists).

338

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 18, 2022, 10:51:09 PM »

Sounds like you see groups in the UK overlap with the groups in the US who want medical exams to verify sex in school sports!

Now that sounds like a great way to keep kids safe from sexual abuse. Can't imagine any unnecessary trauma there.

There was a case where a Republican state governor vetoed a bill like that saying "I can find one out trans person in high-school girl's sports in my state.  I don't understand why they feel they way they feel, but I can't believe that further excluding them would help anyone."

Re transphobia in politics generally, again it's not really something I've looked into, but it does often seem to largely be a weird mix of people who are also homophobic and generally right wing, along with people who could be described as the "man hating" feminists that the reactionary types are always railing about. Those types seem to think (if I very crudely boil it down) men = dangerous/bad -> transwomen = men pretending to be women so they can take advantage of cis woman because men dangerous. There are also the genuine issues where more "normal" people get dragged into it and it's hard to guess the intent, like with sports or prisons.[/size]

There are also lesbians who suspect that many gender nonconforming youths today decide they are trans, whereas a few decades they would have decided they are lesbians.  That drains off support for some aspects of the LGB movement, both practical ones such as employment discrimination against women and their theoretical argument that gender stereotypes are made up and that understanding this will reduce the amount of suffering in the world.

There are many people pushing contradictory theories about where the trans trend comes from and whether shadowy forces are pushing it, and my own experience only covers a little bit of a few corners.  I don't grok the 20th century sports culture which lead to medical exams and pee tests, and I don't know how to separate weird Internet ideas and newsroom fashions from real movements which will cause harm to real people, so I try to be polite to people I know and to avoid having an opinion on things which are beyond my experience or my training.

339

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 18, 2022, 07:28:06 PM »

Sounds like you see groups in the UK overlap with the groups in the US who want medical exams to verify sex in school sports!  I guess there are all those Bathroom Bills in the US too.

I'm more familiar with general xenophobia being directed against trans people (ie. people who don't like LGB people or visible minorities or people of different religions also don't like trans people) and with the theory that the explosion in trans and nonbinary identities is driven by sinister propagandists.  The only 'predatory trans person in Canada' narrative I can think of is about Jessica Yaniv.  I did a quick DuckDuckGo and it looks like there are still a lot of right-wing nonsense sites screaming about Yaniv.

I think one controversy in the Green Party of Canada was about one person using the wrong pronoun once and correcting themself, and it looked to me like basically an interpersonal conflict being rationalized as about sacred values.  Its easier to recruit supporters for a Moral Crusade than for monkey politics.

It does not surprise me that this got started on twitter, that site is to stupid like stagnant water is to mosquitos.

I don't really understand trans and nonbinary identities, but we have survived for 100,000 years without chromosonal tests or genital exams to verify everyone'e sex, and if we just keep calm we can find new policies which work.

340

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 17, 2022, 09:41:43 PM »

What does 'transphobia' mean in this context?  In Internet and Old Media discourse it can mean anything from physical attacks to having a different estoeric opinion on how a particular type of sporting event should be segregated or whether "male and female" in policies from the last century mean sex, gender, or gender identity.

Edit: are the English and Welsh Greens inviting Jordan Peterson and those people who insist that puberty blockers are part of a sinister conspiracy by drug companies to speak at policy events, or did one person once use the wrong pronoun and not apologize profusely enough after correcting themself?  I have seen both types of things called 'transphobia' in Canada.

341

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2022

« on: October 13, 2022, 05:30:57 PM »

COVID is exploding in some provinces but provincial governments are holding firm to their denialist positions (acquired immunity acquired immunity notbody wants to go back to home office).

Its mid-October and there has been no rain for months on the west coast of Canada.  This is killing salmon and cedar trees.

Danielle Smith is now head of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta.  Among her policies are unilaterally passing an act to remove Alberta from some areas of federal jurisdiction such as gun control, and making the unvaccinated a protected group in AB human rights law because, quoth Smith, the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group in Canada the past 50 years (so in Smith's words as soon as the Canadian government stopped mass kidnapping of indigenous kids into schools or foster homes, the most discriminated-against group was not visible minorities or religious minorities or gays and lesbians but people who refuse to be vaccinated; some of the restrictions such as on cross-border travel were requirements by the destination country, but never you mind).

342

General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Funny Videos

« on: October 12, 2022, 11:14:44 PM »

Aurelio Voltaire has a variety of songs on TV / film geeky topics, many of them dirty (The USS Make armadillo Up or the one about gang rape at the Mos Eisley Cantina) and a few sweet, such as Stuck With You with Amanda Palmer)

Roy Zimmerman went bad places like a lot of lefty Americans after 2008 and 2016 (some songs make it a little to clear that he does not see us non-US persons as people whose abuse by the US state is just as outrageous as the abuse of US persons), but he has a few amusing filksongs such as The Don and Four Season Total Landscaping

343

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: October 12, 2022, 04:04:36 AM »

On the court front, one Ian Bremmer claims that the narcissist wannabe owner of birdsite claimed to have been given his peace proposal in a direct conversation with Vladimir Putin https://nitter.ca/joshtpm/status/1580000350626799616#m https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-knows-kremlins-red-lines-spoke-putin-ukraine-bremmer-1750950 

While Russia made Sauruman's choice and learned Saruman's lesson (you can subvert, or you can invade, but its hard to do both) Russian talking points still have a wide reach in right-wing and pseudo-leftist Anglo circles due to a kind of inertia.

344

Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: October 12, 2022, 01:02:15 AM »

I don't read a lot of fiction since undergrad (maybe three new novels a year and a dozen rereads) but I recently finished the third Heris Serrano novel,  Winning Colours.  Feminist military science fiction for the win! (link points to a review of volume 1)

345

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: October 11, 2022, 03:56:15 AM »

The inimitable Laurie Penny has a piece on the UK Conservative Party conference:

The unfortunate Toby Young, a living monument to the English Art of failing upwards, is on one of their panels, and seems distressed to be the most liberal person here by far, making an asinine but apparently genuine argument for academic freedom alongside some of the most racist speeches I’ve heard that weren’t improvised by thugs on a night bus. At one point, an old man next to me in the audience genuinely finds it necessary to comment that are “rather too many black players in Premier League football”. He turns out to be a former government minister.
...
And that’s when it hits me. What’s wrong with the suits. They’re too good. Really, actually posh people don’t wear a perfect three-piece to a wingnut fringe event. The Chipping Norton set has left the building.

Once you've spotted it, you see it everywhere. These men – there really are very few women here – were never in the club. They may be known in Tufton Street and seen in the best restaurants, but they were only ever tolerated because they make useful scapegoats. They aren’t real insiders. They’re the middle-class, or foreign, or brown-skinned, or grasping little scholarship kids – and I can spot one of those staggering drunk down a Birmingham side street any day, because I’m one, too. It’s times like this that you remember that the British ruling class has never shown mercy to its expendable members.

I don't see any masks in the crowded conference hall in the picture which illustrates her essay.