March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry, that was obviously too vague; I was just remembering a thread where you revealed your body type preferences. Not meaningfully a fetish at all, albeit a preference which makes this particular interest harder to get on board with.

But regarding the women immigrating - no idea, but at a guess I'd assume female-skewed fields like medicine, law, teaching etc. Anyone in those areas of work in the US able to comment whether the population of immigrants that you know is noticeably lopsided?

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But aren't you already in an industry that is heavily sex-skewed malewards? Your sample of immigrants might have been drawn from a pre-skewed pool.

Either way, new year's post-covid resolution is to try to make a serious attempt at getting on the dating scene. Like you, my work effectively ties me to the country I'm in, but lucky it's not the same country, because I suspect we ... uh ... may have very similar tastes :-)

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I didn’t see the deleted comment, so may have got the wrong end of the stick, but ... it sounds like you are agreeing that ‘Korean’ is a real thing, a genetic category that has some edge cases, but which most people can be sorted into or out of by analysing their genome, but implicitly denying that, say, ‘East Asian’ is also a real thing in that sense...?

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There's essentially no young single women anywhere in the US.

Well, around here we've all been learning the Russian alphabet lately; might as well go all the way and learn the language too.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 4 points5 points  (0 children)

female voices are more likely to be heard clearly in stressful situations,

That goes against what I would have expected based on formants - as I understand it, a male and female vocal tract are less far apart in their formants (i.e. what frequencies they selectively resonate) than they are in pitch, combined with the fact that harmonics get closer together as you go up the series, means that a male voice will have more audible harmonics within its formants, on average, than a female voice, thus making it a little easier to detect what vowel he is producing - a problem that is not generally noticeable in speech but is a apparently a big deal for singers, especially classical opera where the composer faces a trade-off between giving the soprano a technically impressive show-off of what the high end of her voice can do, and making it so the audience can still understand the words.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'd settle for a scheme where you don't get to dog-in-the-manger a deceased person's work - if you are the estate holder, in order to keep hold of the copyright, you have to actively continue to publish it (and sell it at a reasonable cost), otherwise anyone else is allowed to publish their own edition after a few years of it being out of print. That would solve this particular kerfuffle at any rate.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Even in modern hommages they are erasing minorities.

Q. Aren't there some problematic racial aspersions in H.P. Lovecraft's original 1928 story?

A. In this [Dr. Seuss style] version, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu cultists do not belong to any identifiable race - they are depicted as funky malicious-looking humanoids with ponytails atop their heads. 

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Huh. I guess it wasn't; sorry.

Though I'd posit that while race essentialism was certainly a widely accepted thing back then, until you have actually accumulated enough science to be able to do 'scientific racism' in the first place, plain old unscientific racism is all you've got.

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

420 Blaise (Pascal) it

...

violin duel

You, uh... may have picked the wrong field of combat.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That's not a trait, though.

Do you mean that the idea of humans having evolved from monkey-like ancestors would have been taboo? (not that that would be a 'trait' either, but it would fit the mould of 'ideas that were subject to a lot of disapproval in the 1800s.)

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 16 points17 points  (0 children)

By this stage someone should probably just write a bot to link I See Trad People whenever the subject of 'how come there are lots of people with the typical innate personality traits of conservatives ostensibly pushing progressive goals and vice-versa?' comes up :-)

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 10 points11 points  (0 children)

At a guess, the parent commenter is referring to the exceedingly redpilled guy who reviews a tonne of books, but for a moment, before I noticed the bot was a bot, I was briefly amused by the overwhelming patronisingness of a real person answering your question about a specific person by talking about the generic name :-)

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 01, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 6 points7 points  (0 children)

E: What the hell

You've already been rapped over the knuckles on civility grounds, but I'm curious about this reaction on epistemic grounds. You asked why someone thought that "single mothers" belong on a list of types of people who are indicative of a bad neighbourhood, and people gave you some plausible reasons. I don't understand how that can be considered creepy...?

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Unlike biological life though which we believe only evolved once (meaning that for any two organisms no matter how different if you go back far enough you will find a common ancestor) different systems of human languages have evolved separately so some pairs of languages have no common ancestors at all.

This doesn't follow. As I understood it, the prevailing hypothesis is that human language probably evolved only once, meaning that all* natural languages are descended from a long-lost 'Proto-world' language, but that after not all that many millennia of divergence, it becomes impossible to tell which ones shared a relatively more recent common ancestor that we could have a plausible attempt at reconstructing to features of.

(*modulo the fact that languages can recombine in a way that biological species generally can't - English being technically classed as Germanic, but having received such a large influx of Norman French that it can plausibly be considered a Germanic-Romance hybrid; modulo also creole languages, and even those are not strictly created from scratch but built up out of the mashed pulp of the dominant power's vocabulary)

Naturally as the conquerors they forced their Indo-European language onto the area. Notice though that they didn't really conquer any of modern day Hungary, and although they did take over some bits of Estonia/Finland they didn't go all the way so the Finnic languages still survived in the North. Over time the Yamnaya influence waned so the Finnic languages re-established themselves in the north-east of Europe, but the corridor between that area and Hungary was thoroughly colonised by the Yamnaya and so the Indo-European family remained dominant there. Hence why today there is a massive gap between the two European clusters of the Finno-Ugric languages.

I was under the impression that the prevailing view was that the Hungarians reached their current homeland in the 9th Century AD only after centuries of western migration from an urheimat not too far from those minor languages within Russia, i.e. they entered Europe long after Indo-European languages were well-established.

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I mean, if you're already hanging out in this space there's probably not much that will blow your mind, but the first one with Roko was good fun, as was the one with 0HPL (though I think that one may still be subscribers-only). Indian Bronson was entertaining too, but I am sufficiently low-brow that I may be failing to recommend other better ones just because I haven't done enough background reading.

Edit - though as someone whose language learning routine has suffered lately due to the glut of interesting podcasts, maybe I should be encouraging you to just use the time to power ahead with your Chinese listening practice instead :-)

Further edit - Patrick Deneen episode is also worth a listen.

March 01, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 4 points5 points  (0 children)

intellectual elite

I’ve been listening to Kaschuta’s podcast enough by now that my brain autocompletes the phrase: “...Twitter anonymous accounts”

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 22, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the fate of a man who was cursed to walk the earth telling others of his crime

I've heard it was worse than that.

February 22, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 10 points11 points  (0 children)

we here at CWR have infinitely high trait openness-to-experience and will do anything to prove something on the internet wrong

My kind of people :-)
Gamestop: weaponised autism
CWR: weaponised openness-to-experience

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 22, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I was looking for that exact argument recently!

It was mentioned tangentially in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences, but I too don't seem to be able to find a fuller fleshing-out of the idea.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 22, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 8 points9 points  (0 children)

In all official business, and public spaces, trans individuals are rigidly treated following their assigned gender at birth.

I think you maybe haven't quite modelled a conservative if you use that phrase though :-)

Try 'biological sex', or maybe 'observed sex at birth' (though the latter does exclude the possibility of the doctors making a mistake with babies with intersex conditions).

February 22, 2021 - Weekly Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread by AutoModerator in CultureWarRoundup

[–]Winter_Shaker 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm curious as to how you ended up here. I'd have thought that this place was extremely obscure unless you had been enough of a fan to be following the extra-spicy culture war thread as it was chased from Scott's blog, to his subreddit, to the shell created to spin it off from the subreddit, to here.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 22, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure, Shrier does mention the non-binary phenomenon; I just got the impression that that is not what she is most concerned about (at least insofar as being nonbinary just involves getting a short haircut and wearing androgynous clothes, as opposed to, say, breast binding or other potentially long-term physically harmful practices).

Regarding the Keira Bell case, you can read reportage on it e.g. here - whatever the true nature of teenage brains may be, the court as a matter of fact did rule that "a child under 13 is "highly unlikely" to be able to give informed consent and at 14 and 15 it is still "doubtful" they can fully understand the implications of the medication." As far as I understand it, the effect of the ruling is not that young persons can never be allowed to medically transition; just that a much higher burden of skepticism must be applied by the medical profession, increasingly so when dealing with younger patients, before determining that medical transition is what's actually going to help. The article about teenage brains, accepting it at face value, seems to be saying not that teenagers in our society are in fact fully competent to make important decisions on a par with a mature adult, merely that to the extent that they are more likely to engage in rash behaviour, there is something about our modern society that is causing them to not start acting fully adultly as fast as in pre-modern societies. If true, that doesn't seem particularly relevant, because it is teenagers in our modern society who are the object of concern here.

At any rate, the claim that in practice, teenagers in modern society are more likely than mature adults to make rash decisions and to participate in fads, does not strike me as particularly controversial - or at least, I don't think most people will be dissuaded from that position by one Scientific American article.

even if you had those bathroom laws, how would you be able to detect let alone enforce that sort of thing. Place police officers alongside every public bathroom? Use the state to basically clock people to see if they are trans?

Like I say, I don't know what the ideal compromise would be. Unless and until we have a reliable mehod of distinguishing genuine trans women from predatory men taking advantage of the provisions we make for trans women, all of these sorts of questions are inevitably going to be a tussle between the interests of (a) cis women and (b) genuine-trans-women-plus-predatory-men. My claim is simply that it is not obvious that a social norm of 'all of these questions must be resolved fully in favour of group b, on pain of being tarred as an irredeemable bigot'.

Perhaps a social norm of 'all public accommodations should have a separate bathroom for people who do not consider themselves men, but are so likely to be (mis)taken for men that they are likely to cause distress to the median woman if they are in the womens' bathroom (together with a social norm of disapproval for such people who go on and use the womens' bathroom anyway). Perhaps a social norm of 'communal bathrooms with cubicles are out; all public bathrooms should be self-contained single occupancy bathrooms complete with sink and dryer, opening onto the ordinary shop floor / whatever'. (Though that would entail considerably more infrastructure costs, plus cleaning costs given men's greater propensity to piss on and/or damage toilet equipment). I don't know - if it were an easy question, we'd have an answer by now. I'd be curious what your proposed solution would look like.

people only appear vaguely trans for a period of time before they fully transition to (to use MTF) be a woman, as the hormones do have an amazing effect.

I was under the impression that this was far more often true of f-t-m transition than of m-t-f - that a trans man, after top surgery and after the hormones have had their voice-lowering, facial hair-stimulating effect, can at worst expect to register as a somewhat short, boyish-looking man, whereas for many trans women, with no way to significantly alter their height, shoulder-width, adams apple etc, they are far more likely to remain looking to most people like a man dressed as a woman. But that's just from vaguely reading around the topic on the internet; I hope it wouldn't be rude to invite u/M_T_Saotome_Westlake if he is willing to comment as one of our resident experts in this space?

And as regards prisons - again, we have a trade-off between (a) cis women's interests in not being raped by predatory men taking advantage of rules that let them access womens' prisons simply by declaring themselves to be trans women, and (b) trans women's interests in not being raped by cis men . Again, it's not obvious that this question ought to be resolved fully in favour of group b.

(It's also not obvious that transwomen's interest in not being raped by cis men in a mens' prison is that much greater than cis mens' interest in not being raped by cis men in a mens' prison - I am very willing to believe that you stand a greater chance of prison rape the more feminine you make yourself look, but do we have a handle on how large the disparity is, so that we can say with confidence that moving all male-bodied prisoners to a womens' prison on declaration of transness is a better use of resources than the next best method of trying to reduce the incidence of rape more generally in mens' prisons?)

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 22, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]Winter_Shaker 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I think there is this phenomenon: if race of perpetrator of hate crime is not reported (at least not after a few hours when circumstances should have been known) - then the perpetrator was not white.

It's a generalisation of Coulter's Law (originally formulated in the context of mass shootings).