If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers as to who better recognizes and sees through sophistry, is more comfortable considering,and better understands, the arguments of the opposing side, etc… my money would be on the lawyers (I’d take a Bronx based slip and fall attorney over Masha Gessen).
True, lawyers are trained in Cicero's exercise - need to know the opposing case to know their own - BUT by the same measure, I'd assume the lawyers are lying 50% of the time on average, and that I may not know which.
In the American system lawyers are *supposed* to engage in a degree of sophistry on behalf of their clients — they are ethically bound to be zealous partisans. So in the context of a legal case, everybody knows (or should know) to take their arguments, framing, etc… with a grain of salt. However, that practice, both in doing and in dealing with the other side doing, tends to make them competent at seeing through such things in other circumstances.
A lawyer who isn’t good at recognizing and dealing with such things will suffer immediate negative consequences and won’t be a lawyer for very long. That does not seem to be true for writers/journalists—you can thrive with a combination of pleasing prose and positions flattering to you target audience. (A typical story by an activisty “journalist” with its emphasis, omissions, selective citation and quotation, adjectives, etc…comes across as a poorly written brief to an attorney, but a warm and comfy blanket to somebody that agrees or is sympathetic to the journalist).
But just as there is a winnowing of lawyers who fail to successfully and zealously engage in sophistry AND/OR fail to see and appreciate the apparent (to jury/judge) strengths of 'both sides', there is a winnowing of writers in the interactive forums of critical readers, such as this.
Smart readers, such as yourself, choose where you browse.
Smart readers are a tiny fraction of the market for monetized attention. Small enough to be irrelevant to large media organizations outside of specialized press.
True, but I also feel like I often see that zealous mindset carry through with lawyers on other matters once they've taken a side. Maybe they'll be different with their personal friends, but in any kind of public forum I notice lawyers speak more like they're arguing a case in court than ever trying to honestly assess both sides or be willing to concede points to the side they don't broadly agree with.
Yep. The thing I find tedious about so many lawyers on sites like this is they seem to think that learning a certain narrow skill of argumentation makes them automatically experts on any topic even if they just learned about it 5 minutes ago. It’s also tedious how say tax or corporate lawyers will pontificate about constitutional law because they took one course in constitutional law 30 years ago, and this makes them an expert.
I mean, that’s just people on the internet. Practicing lawyers (as opposed to media people with a JD) are probably among the least offensive in this way in my experience. The smart ones at least know not to walk into a field of land mines because they are professionally trained to avoid exactly that mistake. But give a EE or a VC startup guy a running start, and he’ll plow through bad, ill-informed arguments to defend prior similarly ill-informed positions.
Lawyers have to be able to argue either side of a case.
Journalists used to be able to see all sides of an issue too but that went away in 2016 with the "Journo-list" campaign by major mainstream media reporters to sink the Trump campaign.
It only took 10 years for journalism to be considered a disreputable profession.
Eh…my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession, partly because the historic norm is that of partisan journalism where it was widely understood that the journalists themselves were propagandists.
There was a move away from that to a degree, which led both to more accurate reporting and more misleading reporting (journalists were able to cloak their biases with the objective reputations of their orgs) and over the last 30 of years we had a move back towards the older model.
What happened since Trump was mostly more organizations and journalists spending their “objective” reputational capital aggressively by being more nakedly ideological and partisan…leading their reputations to decline…
"my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession"
Not mine, for example, if you read Orlando Figes' account of the Russian Revolution, "A People's Tragedy", you'll see how diplomats valued foreign journalists in Russia for their in-depth knowledge of Russian politics.
Any foreign diplomat who values American journalists for their knowledge of US politics today is delusional.
The important thing about journo list was not whether they used gmail but that journalists from most of the major media had virtual meetings every week to coordinate their messages and attacks on the Trump campaign.
It was an unheard of lack of objectivity and professionalism.
In 2016 ... quite so. This comment section is infested with lying right wing trolls who seem a lot more interested in Nate's standard use of Gessen's preferred pronouns than in his substantive arguments.
My father, who was born in 1933, was a photo-journalist. In the late 1970s/early 80s he was already starting to watch, with a depth of disgust that was uncommon in him, as journalism started swirling the drain. It hasn't been in just the past 10 years. The degradation has been happening for a long time, or, as Pseudonym Joe says below, maybe from forever.
LOL. Your comment makes it evident that you have never been able to see--or care about--all sides of an issue.
The night before the election the NYT's front page was completely covered with articles about Hillary's emails, in line with the rest of the MSM for months. Trump received billions of dollars worth of free media. If the media had wanted to sink his campaign they would have, much as they did to Kerry's and Gore's.
Right, lawyers don’t represent themselves as the fourth estate, there is much justified suspicion of lawyers trying to argue you into something, and whether in the role of lawyer, hack, or politician they are rightly distrusted and pilloried ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rOAl8EYlz1s ).
The question of whether a poisoner better understands and identifies poison is different then whether you should accept a glass of wine from them.
If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers seeing through sophistry my money would be on none of the above or journalists. Sorry but I’ve just seen way too many lawyers who completely overrate their argumentative and analytical skills.
When you compare the worst in the camp yes of course. But I guarantee, absolutely guarantee, that the dumbest, worst journalists you've seen are much worse than the worst lawyers.
I really, really really doubt that in part because there are so many more lawyers out there. The problem with lawyers is even the worst ones often have a real arrogance to them that just compounds their shortcomings. (The people you see on Fox News and the like for the most part really aren’t journalists.)
You're the one twisting. The No True Scotsman fallacy (not "canard", a word you don't understand the meaning of) doesn't apply here. Angus is *by definition* a Scotsman, regardless of what he puts on his porridge. But no way are the ideologues and political operatives at Fox "journalists" by definition. Fox itself claimed in court that they are "entertainers" and that no rational person would believe that their opinion mongering is factual.
First, take your semantics and shove them. This is an unhelpful "akshually" comment through and through. Everyone calls them journalists. They're journalists. They're bad, but you don't get to say they're not Scots, when everyone refers to them and treats them as Scots.
I have a feeling we're talking about a different group of people anyway. I was thinking more along the lines of Michael Hobbes, who absolutely calls himself a journalist.
LOL, I don’t think I’m being overly pure by saying I don’t consider opinion writers journalists. Opinion writers with the exception of people like say a Paul Krugman when he’s writing about economics are really just better positioned people than people commenting on social media platforms. I am defining journalists as being people who are actually doing what one would consider reporting, and I’d even include people like tech writers who are reviewing gadgets or food critics who are actively going to restaurants to write about them.
I don’t think this distinction is overly pure or hard to understand.
Is Paul Krugman a journalist or not? Oh you think he's good so that's what makes him a journalist?
Would you consider a janitor who's bad at cleaning toilets actually not a janitor? Sure he gets paid for it, but he's not actually doing it, so he's not a janitor? Freaking boring semantics, dude, good luck with that
LOL, that says a lot more about you than it does Gessen. There seems to me to be a huge muddle in terms of the response to the situation in Gaza right now, and many peole are taking Gessen’s position on Gaza across the political spectrum. Unlike say abortion, there doesn’t seem to be clear, obvious positions on this topic. (And I am saying this as someone who for the most part disagrees with Gessen on Gaza though at the same time there are lots of parts of me that is on Gessen’s side.)
Seeing you use "they/them" pronouns for a person makes me lose some respect for you as a truth-seeker. Using incorrect pronouns just because someone suffers from a delusion is not what a truth-seeking person would do.
When I wrote the data conversions for the National Cancer Institute's SEER dataset and the NACCR cancer registries in 1992, it was necessary to preserve a 5 valued sex field, to accommodate the various genetically ambiguous (ie, NON BINARY) tissue types information that had different implications for metastatic risk in the context of various cancers.
Being ignorant of a fact, should not suggest to you that you are correct about it...
We don't know about Masha, and that's her business.
Mark, I just don't believe this. No medical organization in 1992 would have ever thought there were 5 human sexes. (And no medical org does now either; they're just too afraid to say so.) Are there certain X/Y chromosomal abnormalities that affect fractions of a percent of the human population that might be convenient to keep track of in the same data field? Sure. But that doesn't mean there are 5 sexes for humans. The fact that we recognize these as "abnormalities" simply affirms the basic sexual binary of all mammals.
I really can't believe this is a serious conversation in our society. Functional adults don't need to have "the birds and the bees" explained to them.
As you can see, there are only two sexes reported, male and female.
Yes, there can be tissue abnormalities that disguise sex and maybe those need to be tracked in some circumstances. But what fraction of people have such tissue abnormalities? And is Masha Gessen one of them? I would bet a large sum of money that she did not decide she is "nonbinary" by having an assay of a tissue sample.
3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)
4 Transsexual, NOS
5 Transsexual, natal male
6 Transsexual, natal female
9 Not stated/Unknown
Definitions
Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual
phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as
X0/XY mosaicism.
Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.
MarkS, I don't guess you want to know, but I would like to tell:
As I recall from 32 years later, NACCR indeed had a much simpler coding for Sex, perhaps: male/female or male/female/unk or something that you might consider equivalent and BINARY. I was CDC lead for the NAACCR project for CDC for an interval in the early 90's. But it was NCI's SEER ( and perhaps ACoS'd NCDB) that had a 5 valued Sex field (and perhaps more, for Unknown or Missing).
In an adjacent post below, I've provided the citation, link, and coding from the 2023 coding manual and it is now 7-valued, including 'Other', and 'NotStated/Unknown'. I can't be certain if this is unchanged from 1992, but looked to my 70 year old eyes as though they have ADDED a couple Sex values.
When Bernie Sanders got his first bill passed ~1992 (for a National Breast Cancer Registry; in final passage it may have had other names on it, he was a freshman), the way I implemented the bill was to visualize and build the data infrastructure for a US full population Cancer Registry, for ALL cancers and all cancer data, as, within the margin of error, it was roughly just as hard and expensive to do for ALL as for breast alone, and would do a LOT more good.
In addition to:
a) the then (~1988) new shoe-string NAACCR population based registry you noted (I was the second CDC project officer managing the funding, think Ron Aubert did it 1989-1991 or so) and
b) the high-end, high detail high cost but limited scope NCI-SEER (point: Jennifer Seifert) population registry, there was
c) a third major cancer registry, a hospital-based registry used largely by the American College of Surgeons to stage cancer and to accredit hospital cancer surgery programs for quality of care, called then and still, the National Cancer Database, ACoS-NCDB (point: Herman Menck). But it was not population-based.
Also, there were several large (multistate) commercial cancer registries systems (CASURNET, by Barry Gordon out of CA and academic/non-profits? (Rocky Mountain Cancer Data System) by Larry Derrick - a good Mormon out of Utah!, and the Kentucky Cancer Registry (tobacco funded!) point persons: Tom Tucker and a wonderful young redhead tech guy, forgetting his name.
The tech leads of these largest/strongest extant cancer registries supplied the core DB technicians for the 1st national population - based cancer registry, at CDC, which I was charged to pull together to implement Bernie's first Bill.
At the time, there were literally HUNDREDS of other small, often hospital specific and simple, cancer registry systems in the US. So once we had the consensus DB hammered out among the 'big boys' & Jennifer ~1993 we invited 120 of them to Chicago for a meeting to learn about the first US call for cancer data, and by late 1993 or 1994, CDC had a first draft data of a National Population-based Cancer Registry.
But there were many steps. First, I/CDC called a series of meetings of the tech guys to make sausage.
The way you make a single master/national DB out of multiple non- compatible DB's has a LOT of steps, requires a LOT of knowledge about how people have interpreted data entry instructions over the years, in a lot of places, a knowledge of the periodic publications and needs for consistency of coding over time, and is painstaking nerdy work, but generally one wants to do a lossless join and merge to the extent one can. But sometimes one can't.
Back to SEX
One indeed wants a single sex field populated for every cancer case in the DB / in the US. So, if the various incompatible extant registry systems were collecting:
1) a two valued Sex char (M/F), where M = male
2) a two valued integer field (1/0) where 1= male
3) a two valued float field (0./1.) where 0.=male
4) a two valued text string (Female/Male), where Male =male
5) a three valued integer field (1/2/0) where 2=male and 0=missing or unknown,
etc.
Then, to put all the data in one database without discarding any, if one has at least one 3 valued field, one MUST have at least a three valued Sex field in the lossless merge. One needs to keep track of how to 'recode' the M, 1, 0., Male, and 2 from the respective sources into a single consistent code representing the Sex concept 'male' as defined in the data coding manual, when the data are merged into the master DB.
So the situation circa 1992 was similar to the above for nearly ALL cancer registries' Sex fields, most were either 2, 3, or perhaps 4 valued (with meanings of male, female, missing and/or unknown). Note: to put this hypothetical example of a 4 valued field into a 3 valued DB will lose data, technicall - it will lose the distinction between 'missing' and 'unknown'. This difference may be meaningful at the local source level, since a missing may indicate more research to be done, but unknown might suggest one completed the due diligence and this is as good as it gets. But at a national level one may not need to preserve such distinction, and one might decide to merge missing and unknown into a single code. I don't have my records, and don't recall the consensus for Sex in the CDC call for data. These, and many such judgements were made by a CDC organized technical committee with representations as above.
But for the case with NCI-SEER (and perhaps ACoS-NCDB, since both were much more intensive and specific systems than all the rest), I recall specifically that 'Sex was a 5-valued field'. Today it is 7-valued.
Within a 1 year of funding by Sander's Bill, we hammered out operationalizable consensus standards for a close-enough to loss-less merge of targeted ('reportable') cancer data nationwide from over 100 systems.
Then we developed software (EDITS - Exchangeable-edits, Data-dictionary, and Information Translation Standard) to simplify and automate the re-coding of disparate systems' codes for meaning (in a reliable and documented way) into one standard format. The recode logic was written centrally, and used by all systems as part of their submission. Many systems quickly change to national standard on their own for simplicity. Last I checked, 30 years later, CDC was still using (regularly updated versions of ) EDITS for this facilitation of standards and cleanly edited submissions.
Think this was a nice example of building a national system that did not step on smaller scale commercial cancer registry interests, and it was done more quickly than anyone hoped. But it took much longer to get quality data entry on the ground at each clinical surgery facility.
But to recap, NCI-SEER standardized on multi-valued Sex data over a generation ago, and it was the gold standard acknowledged by ALL the other US cancer registry systems, except for the competition with the ACoS' NCDB, a peer system but engineered around clinical cancer surgery quality control instead of population-based epidemiology.
You could add that during test trials for the Covid vaccines, results were reported for only two sexes.
Any other sexes should have been prohibited from the vaccine until adequate trials had been conducted. Except trans-nuts never believed their own BS so the male/female vaccine results were good enough for them.
3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)
4 Transsexual, NOS
5 Transsexual, natal male
6 Transsexual, natal female
9 Not stated/Unknown
Definitions
Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual
phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as
X0/XY mosaicism.
Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.
When the name is in service of a lie (that a person has "transitioned" from one sex to another, which is flatly impossible for any mammal), then refusing to use the name is indeed "truth seeking".
To enhance my argument, I will follow your lead by adding the word "fucking". That makes the argument so much stronger!
Humans do all sorts of things that no other mammals do, so that's not really surprising or interesting. It's one of the nice things about having invented surgery and drugs. One can only imagine what kind of surgeries and drugs my cat would elect to take. Oh wait, I suppose we did give our cat a surgery. We neutered him. Conveniently altering his hormones and ending his sexual-dimorphic behaviors.
Anyway, it's just very pedantic. There are real truths to seek, and they don't generally involve obsessing over names.
Humans cannot change sex, period. That is the truth.
A thousand years from now, if anyone digs up your bones, your true sex can be readily determined by chemical means, no matter what drugs or surgeries you may have had. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8967324/
But people who cosplay with drugs and surgeries as having changed sex impinge on the rights of the vast majority to single-sex spaces, places, events, competitions, etc, which have been a feature of every human society ever.
That doesn't answer my question, but at least you used the correct pronoun. You say you care about truth but clearly you don't, you're entirely ideologically driven. The truth is that Gessen's preferred pronouns aren't relevant to the substance of Nate's article (or even to whether Gessen is a woman ... a socially constructed non-scientific term), and his use of them in accordance with standard journalistic practices is even less relevant to the arguments he is making. (It's actually hilarious that you right wing trolls are accusing him of not being a truth-seeker on an article in which he castigates Gessen and "excesses of the left".)
It shows the incredible progress in scientific education that even a layman can examine a newborn baby and within 5 seconds, predict with great accuracy if 20 years later that baby will have upper body strength 20% above or below the population average.
No progress needed, a glance at the genitals of a baby at birth will successfully sort into two groups, one of which will have (on average) upper body strength at least 20% greater than the other. These two groups are called "male" and "female". This sorting algorithm has been known and successfully used for thousands of years.
I give a shit because using plural pronouns when referring to an individual is confusing and breaks the concentration of anyone who was taught proper grammar. Virtue signaling by using plural pronouns distracts from Mr Silver's message.
"They" as a third person singular has been in common usage for decades.
The English language has changed. Be a good boy and adapt.
I'm certain you could survive the trauma.
If one wants to draw on historical linguistic trends, perhaps one can say that modern English has drifted slightly back towards its Germanic roots in that regard, and away from Latin, via the incorporation of this neuter pronoun. The obsessive project of elitist academics for centuries to make English more like Latin is slowly coming unraveled now that Latin is no longer being taught in most schools. I don't see this as a problem. Evidently you do, but I do have to ask, why? Does it really matter?
Every word we type, every word we read, is imaginary. Language is just made up. There's nothing magical about it, and it's always changing. Feel free to read Shakespeare if you are in doubt about this.
It's hilarious that these ignorant right wing bigots are attacking Nate for following standard prescribed usage (https://style.mla.org/using-singular-they/) while completely ignoring his substantive arguments, which include castigating Gessen (unfairly, IMO).
It's not a "virtue signal" to refer to someone how they like to be referred to. It's standard practice. Deliberately eschewing it just reads as being insulting and contentious on a topic that Nate is not currently interested in arguing about.
It's not confusing to intelligent people ... or honest ones; Nate's use of Gessen's preferred pronouns is standard practice among journalists and other decent people, not "virtue signaling" which is actually what all you right wing trolls are doing by whining about it.
P.S. sociopathic garbage blocked
(and complaining about "in order to alter power dynamics in a society" is right there with
"Jews will not replace us". Choosing pronouns in line with one's gender reality is marginally and tangentially related to resisting the power of bigots and other awful people.)
Alternatively, it could also be seen as a post-modern attempt to blur the lines between established truth and "perceived truth" in order to alter power dynamics in a society. Some of us are sick of this shit.
And if you're a public person, and you have problems with being "misgendered" or "mispronouned" by others, you can always shut the fuck up and nobody will say anything about you.
I find the singular use of “they” very confusing. I once changed my mind about buying a book after reading that the main character was referred to as “they” throughout. I’m an old lady. And I suspect I’m not alone in that feeling.
If nobody gives a shit, then why not call her by her birth gender instead of playing along with these silly games? After all, as you said it's not relevant and nobody cares.
To be fair, calling out pronouns when they are irrelevant just because you can't have basic human respect for another person is something that trash would do.
I have basic respect for all people, including the delusional. But I do not refer to someone who falsely believes he is the King of England as "his majesty", and I do not refer to someone who falsely believes she is "nonbinary" (no one is "nonbinary") with misnumbered plural pronouns.
His "king of England" point is a good one. Either someone IS the King of England of he isn't. Similarly, either someone is a man or he is not. His own perceptions don't change anything. And under no circumstances can a person be plural, so "they" makes no sense at all.
I knew someone growing up who insisted (in all seriousness) that he was an 800 year old dragon. I knew someone else who got so caught up in D&D that he sometimes lapsed into his wizard character in real life. Would you foster these delusions in the name of politeness?
In reality, I did not know either a dragon or wizard. And that's the key. It's not about politeness; it's about whether reality exists.
"And under no circumstances can a person be plural
"Brian, surely you know that the King of England persecuted Quakers in the 1600's (my ancestors) for addressing him with the singular form 'thee' and 'thou', instead of the royal plural (which was REQUIRED) 'you'? For religious reasons, Quakers reserved use of the singular 'you' for God. One of the many reasons Philadelphia was founded by William Penn, a Quaker. In English today, we still have the expression, 'the royal we'. Look it up.
The hilarious thing is that you think Gessen is a man. And "they" has a long history of been used as a singular pronoun ... you right wing trolls are simply ignorant.
P.S. I'm pretty sure that Slaw is a sociopath and a bigot.
Or you could maybe look at substance abuse, criminal charges/convictions, mental illness, suicide rates, etc. among the trans population and think for yourself.
So, science is "terrible" now? No. The medical term for it is "gender dysmorphia" and it has been documented in psychology for over 140 years. Or, in other cases, as Katze below points out, it is merely silly people jumping on a virtue-signaling bandwagon to score cheap points at the expense of others.
In addition to science, we have English language grammar and syntax, according to which "they" refers to plural individuals and is therefore not applicable to an individual. An individual who wants others to refer to themselves as "they" is as silly as a person who wants others to refer to them as "your majesty". Shall I insist that you identify me as a golden unicorn from middle earth name "Der Fuhrer"?
Gessen was on that "bandwagon" before there was a band.
DJ Mc is right ... right wingers and transphobes are terrible people. Also stupid.
P.S. What is the lunatic troll below talking about in re multiple names with the same IP address? That's not me, and he has no way to know what people's IP addresses are.
People are complicated. Where we draw the line for what is reasonable is subjective.
As far as I'm concerned, intent is more important than specific words.
A person who wants to communicate malice and hostility, can use any words they wish and still have that malice shine through them.
A person who wants to communicate kindness, can do similarly.
Complete indifference ... we have a lot of that in our society. I'm sometimes guilty of it myself.
I try not to be hostile to people unless I have a darn good reason to be. There's enough cruelty and pain in the world without us making more just for the sake of a dominance competition.
However, when there is that darn good reason, it's best to come prepared to take it as far as necessary.
Pronouns aren't worth fighting about. They really aren't.
"Pronouns aren't worth fighting about. They really aren't."
Since your preferred pronouns can apparently be self selected what's to stop you from choosing a racial slur?
Look, it's a big and diverse country. It's filled with people who believe that the center of the planet is hollow and populated by lizard people. The country is tolerant of craziness because Americans are tolerant and easy going in general.
But the unwritten rule is that you can be crazy and eccentric but you don't get to drag everyone else into your craziness. Choose whatever pronouns you want but don't expect me to play along. That's your crazy. I'm busy over here doing my crazy and I don't have the time.
There's a tiny handful of people in the world that have earned my respect. Everyone else? Frankly I couldn't care less.
In addition if anyone interprets the simple act of describing reality as a personal attack that's a sign of a fragile personality and a weak mind. In other words, someone not suitable for respect.
But you do have a point ... you and other right wing trolls have earned no respect.
P.S. This bigoted trash's rejoinder is an example of why ... we disrespect mass murderers for being mass murderers, not for their gender identity--respect for the latter is basic human respect; the former is not.
I 'indulged' my patients' and my peers' delusions and neuroses day in and day out, formerly, both as a health provider and as a public official, & both as a matter of courtesy and of practicality. Enjoy some forums where that isn't professionally required, but it can still have a useful effect most anywhere.
For instance, I don't think one can be very successful in establishing a conversational bridge to the 'other' party, without being prepared to indulge a modicum of delusions up front. May go both ways.
Gessen's non-binary status is not delusional or neurotic. I can't say the same about all these right wing trolls whining about Nate using Gessen's preferred pronouns according to standard practice.
P.S. In response to the stupid sociopathic bigoted ignoramus who asked "Standard practice according to who [sic]?" ... every style guide.
And, wondered if one of them was perhaps sincere, if a bit unable to process new info.
Suspect they have a volitional religious delusion regarding modern language, combined with an un-American intolerance of difference, and an unsociable in-capacity to control their desires to try to make others to conform to their own blind faith... by... wait for it... trolling!!
Maybe it's just the company that you keep but the people I interact with on a daily basis are remarkably delusional free. At least if they're not they don't feel inclined to reveal that.
Let me rephrase that then: for the vast majority of the population those delusions are not crippling and do no lead to a radically reduced quality of life.
When you're looking at a population that is far more likely to be criminally charged, go to jail, undertake treatment for substance abuse or mental illness or just plain kill themselves--that's clearly not the case.
I'm an atheist. As long as they leave me alone I am more than happy to return the favor.
It is when religion intrudes into the public sphere (prayer in school) that we have a problem. Telling people what pronoun to use is the exact same thing. In fact, I would say woke is a new religion.
They are similar in type but not magnitude. Imo, someone asking you to call them by their imaginary name is nothing at all like being forced to bow before their invisible fairy.
It's not about politeness or respect for the person. It's about respect for reality.
15 years ago, we heard a modification of this same argument in the "how will your neighbor's gay marriage ever affect you?" The answer: ask Jack Phillips. That's why it matters. Because we've seen many times what starts as "please be polite" very quickly morph into "salute you flag and bake the cake of we'll bankrupt you, bigot!"
The current Speaker of the House spent his career fighting against gay marriage because he believed it would destroy America…even he’s moved on and decided to be a productive member of society and not continue to fight the good fight as he believes.
Technically he's not talking about gay marriage per se so much as the drive to force everyone to accommodate gay marriage. That's a barrier that the USSC was not willing to cross.
I'm not sure using the Supreme Court is the best argument for you, since they are plenty happy to cross the barrier of open bribery. So barriers are clearly only an issue when they want them to be.
Anyway my point is that the USSC to a large extent is an expression of mainstream opinion. Most people don't see gay marriage as a big deal (as compared to thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread) but simultaneously most people don't think a Christian baker should be forced to cater a gay wedding.
If you really can't understand the similarity in responses there, you are very deep in precisely the kind of bubble that Nate is trying to shake people out of.
LOL, given how popular gay marriage is acting like gay marriage at this point it’s about as radical as vanilla ice cream which I suspect would actually poor worse than gay marriage.
All of you are missing the point of the comparison. Asserting that I just alter the meaning of a word in the name of politeness to you has already morphed (in just a few years) into "you deadnamed me and must be destroyed." That is the similarity. Changing the definition of "marriage" had all kind of downstream effects on people who were not gay, despite the fact that the proponents all asserted that it wouldn't. Those who would change the definition of "man" and "woman" say "it's just a pronoun; be polite". Based on past experience, I am wary of both their analysis and their candor.
LOL, and how exactly did gay marriage change the meaning of marriage or affect anyone downstream? The concept of what a man or woman is has changed so much in my lifetime I don’t see how changing pronouns is any different. Neither my straight marriage nor my sense of self has been changed by any of this.
You keep asserting things without backing anything up or defining anything. I am wary of people like yours analysis and candor.
You should listen to Yascha Mounks latest podcasts with Helen Joyce. Acting as if a trans woman (biological male) is exactly the same as biological female is different and does have an impact to women in the real world.
lol why should I listen to any podcast by Mounk? Mounk was one of those people I thought sounded interesting and I wanted to like but I really didn’t think in the end had anything interesting to say and I would say that regardless of his views on trans issues. To me he’s like the Harvard equivalent of Malcolm Gladwell.
I don’t really see where it has or should have any impact on women in the real world. Almost all of the anti trans comments people make like this one sound exactly like the anti gay arguments I used to hear.
I personally believe the gender affirming care for minors catastrophe is worse (in totality) than January 6th. I say this based on the reality of what has actually occurred to date. The sterilization of kids with mental health issues based on junk science is very very bad.
lol the fact that you are saying that gender affirmation care and then comforting that this is worse than Jan 6 shows you’re an ideological is a whack job. The two are completely different positions and the fact that you are so different shows what a whack job you are.
I call all kinds of people with junk Ph.D.s doctor, even when I seriously question the appropriateness of the title. I am not disrespecting all P.h.D.s here (most doctorates in any subject deserve the honorific). I am just saying that if someone has an advanced degree (even in a really obscure topic or from a questionable source) and wants me to call them Dr. I will do that to be polite.
I kind of look at pronouns the same way. If it costs me nothing and makes someone feel better or more accepted, I am all in. Or at least all in until I feel like I am being pressured. Then I can be very stubborn.
I think many of us are the same in that regard. We want to be respectful (or are at least ambivalent about it) to fellow human beings, but it can be difficult if pushed too far. Given the nature of post and conversation, I think Noah's being respectful is the decent thing to do.
If you know someone to be biologically male, say your cousin, an old high school classmate, a coworker, and so on, being forced to refer to them as a woman, use female honorifics, you are being forced to lie for their ideology. So, yes, it does cost you something.
I would also tell my cousin she looked lovely in a dress, even if it made her look fat. I guess I lack integrity, or perhaps place a greater value on people's feelings. However, to be completely truthful, experience has been that the truth/integrity card is often played in a highly selective manner.
Many people are quite comfortable with things like a president lying, but they inexplicably get quite worked up about pronouns. It's kind of like the social equivalent of isolated demands for rigor. People will appeal to some greater value or moral, but only on topics they find objectionable.
I get it...the entire pronoun thing is annoying, and clearly you feel like you are being "force to lie." My guess is that many folks feel the same level of frustration with feeling "forced" but maybe are not willing to assess their own reasons for behaving that way and just want to appeal to integrity, honesty, or whatever.
This the classic Marxist tactic of declaring an obvious falsehood and forcing you to accept it. Drill sergeants also use this tactic. In both cases, it is the first stage to attempting to break down your mental resistance so that you will accept any statements as facts or orders.
Thank you! That article is absolutely hilarious. The funniest things poke fun at your own absurdities.
More seriously though, the operative line (from that article) for this debate is this one: "When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of dividing them into categories." In the case of "man" and "woman", these actually are terms that are defined by the God of all 3 Abrahamic religions as biological categories not linguistic ones. (I can't speak to the others, since I don't know Hinduism or Buddhism well enough.)
I actually don't personally think pronouns are that important, but arguing that _either_ side of this issue is "the truth" demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of what language is. There _is_ no single arbiter of correct language usage. Your beliefs about the correct way to use pronouns is exactly as valid (or not) as every single other persons belief on that topic.
To rephrase: there is no such thing as "truth" when arguing about the "right" way to use language.
You do not understand the point I am making, which has nothing to do with politeness. It has to do with what "truth" means and what language is.
If you and I agree on what "dragon" means, then it is trivial to prove whether or not someone is a dragon. If you and I do not agree on what "dragon" means, not only can we not prove whether or not they are dragon, we can't even prove which of us is using the word correctly because what words mean does not have any correspondence with base reality.
Language is a tool that humans invented. There is no single "right" way to use a tool. If some people choose to use it one way, you can have a discussion about the pros and cons of using the tool in that particular manner. But they _cant'_ be right or wrong because the concept, when applied to how a tool is being used, _fundamentally does not make sense_
If I tell you that gravity is green, the correct response is not "no, it's blue", it's that _color does not apply to the concept of gravity_.
I didn't understand your point. If clarity of language is your goal (do we both mean the same thing by dragon?), the use of the tool of language is critically important.
So if language is a tool that we use to describe reality (as everyone from Plato to Kant says it is), saying that the tool "can't be right or wrong" effectively says "any words used to describe reality are equally valid". This is a core feature of the postmodernists, and as you said, it's not entirely wrong, but it's also not fully correct.
The single arbiter of (as you put it) "correct language usage" is whether that usage corresponds to an accurate version of reality. If you abandon that standard, words can no longer have any collective, shared meaning across time or people. Orwell would recognize such a linguistic world as inherently dangerous.
Language means what people say it means. If one group of people decide that it means something else, they are not wrong. This is what it means to have different languages.
If it makes you feel better, then feel free to say that these people aren't speaking english, they are speaking wokelish, I don't care. The point is, they are not wrong. Because being wrong is a concept that doesn't make sense in this context.
Just like Germans aren't "wrong" when they call trash "Müll". Neither trash nor Müll are more correct or correspond better to base reality.
I don't speak German though. And anyone who does speak German can tell that because "German" refers to a particular language. In fact, that illustrates my point perfectly. By your argument "German" doesn't exist. There are a bunch of people of people that happen to use the same grunts for the same things and agree to call those grunts "German". If they started using different grunts, does "German" go away? Or does it change to accommodate the new grunts? There's no way to answer that question in your framework.
More importantly whether you call it "trash" or "Müll" or "basura" (Spanish) it still refers to the same real thing: a pile of rubbish. It would be fair to say that a German person who starts calling trash "basura" instead of "Müll" is "no longer speaking German". But a German person who starts calling cars "Müll" hasn't changed what language he's speaking but rather is speaking his language incorrectly. (The same way I might, since I don't speak German.)
I realize this seems esoteric, but it isn't. Words (in any language) have to connect to real objects or attributes. Severing that link is a philosophical disaster and a linguistic black hole that makes communication impossible.
I was just about to write something similar myself. Pronouns are a linguistic and societal constructs, and encode the tradition of calling something with a set word. For example in Russian language, somethings have a sexless pronouns assigned to them (like the sun for example), and those pronouns are used as derogatory to trans people. In English there is the "it" pronoun that doesn't imply sex as well, even though it is used for beings that definitely have sex (like dogs).
"Using incorrect pronouns just because someone suffers from a delusion is not what a truth-seeking person would do"
Maybe not, but it's one heck of an insurance policy against being run over by a woke mob. J.K. Rowling didn't have one and was even excluded from the Harry Potter anniversary events.
Sure! And standing up to the woke mob is something I respect. Kowtowing to it, especially from someone whose angle is following the data wherever it leads, is not something I respect.
This reminds me of a good point that Yglesias made recently and that has stuck with me. How many Obama-Trump voters do you know? Because those are the people that decided the 2016 election and might end up deciding 2024. Your reliably partisan friends are irrelevant.
Maybe a little simplistic because it ignores turnout, but yes, it's still worth contemplating. I looked at myself and realize that I'm pretty sure I know zero Obama-Trump voters, and I'm not quite sure what such a person would even be like. But I do sense that this sort of person is very important to our present electoral politics, especially if he lives in a swing state.
And I don't think I even live in that much of a bubble. I know plenty of Obama-Hillary voters, plenty of Republicans who were more reluctant on Romney than Trump, and plenty who were more reluctant on Trump than Romney. Also some, like myself, who switched from a major party to a third-party vote in 2016. I get why people both love Trump and hate Trump, but Obama and Trump seem to represent such opposite valences that supporting both of them is hard for me to wrap my head around.
I think it helps when you try to decouple identity from voting behavior, or rather, remember that many normie voters do not view their vote choice as some expression of themselves the way that a lot of super-engaged or ideologically driven people do. For many, it's just "who should practically drive the next leg?" or "maybe we should try something different" or "who seems as though they're for my interests?" It's a choice they make at the time and then they get back to living their life and until the next go-round.
Also, a lot of voters see the two parties and their nominees as just being two sides of the same coin, a big blob of establishment that is not as differentiated. Hence why Trump, as an outsider who challenged norms, drew in even some former Obama voters in 2016. (It's also worth remembering that Obama in 2012 successfully painted Romney as the ultimate aloof elitist. In that sense, despite their differences, Romney and Clinton both scan as "phony" and focus-grouped and corporate. So I can see why the same voter would vote against both of them.)
Yeah, that makes sense in the abstract. It's just that I don't know anyone who is actually like this, and I'm still struggling to imagine him or her as a real person and not a cartoon character. The people that I most think of as "apolitical normies" were shocked by Trump's coarseness and in no sense saw him as better than Romney. But of course, they were mostly college-educated.
The people I know who were not college-educated, and who were receptive to Trump's coarseness and found it greatly preferable to Romney's "elite aloofness", were more along the lines of Fox News viewers. They hated Obama, especially by 2012.
Maybe it's because I have lived in Wisconsin for some time and grew up in NE Pennsylvania, but it's not hard for me to imagine Obama-Trump voters at all. I grew up around (and now work with) some folks who have that voting pattern. They're not the norm, but they're not a mystery to me. It may also help that, although I am college-educated, I now work primarily with people who are not. I cannot overstate the fact that there are just many, many people who vote but who do not have super-strong feelings about it. Or they vote, but only in Presidential years, which kind of demonstrates this. Or they vote but are still kind of disengaged because they often feel that however they vote, it won't make as much of a difference in their lives as everyone says it will.
It varies in the conversations I have had, but I know a number of people leaning back toward Trump even if they voted for Biden in 2020. Here are a few observations on why with the usual caveats that apply to anecdote:
1. Biden reads as weak, old, not in charge, "doing what his staff says." Trump reads as strong even if impulsive or brash.
2. Inflation is key and people resent being told the economy is great when everything is more expensive. Regardless of the details, they associate Trump with good economic times and Biden with bad. (My personal take is that even though COVID was not good, they also associate the stimmy checks, child tax credit, enhanced UI, expanded food stamps, etc with the Trump era more than the Biden era regardless of who did what. Inflation is extra bad for Biden because it comes jarringly after a time when working people were actually doing OK.
3. "There weren't any wars when Trump was in office."
4. Abortion bans are not popular and do cut against Trump.
5. Trump court cases, especially the NY one, don't register much.
6. The "threat to democracy" framing is not all that powerful or persuasive, at least with these types of voters.
7. Trans stuff comes up as an example of Democrats going too far left.
8. Israel/Gaza rarely an issue for these folks except that they do NOT like seeing people on TV burning the flag or saying "Death to America." They do not like anything that even vaguely resembles George Floyd / BLM protests.
9. "I don't have to like Trump personally to vote for him" or "He might be racist but he can run the economy." etc.
10. (forgot to add this one) Crime and immigration. They don't like the idea that rules don't matter. They like order. They see videos of people shoplifting and it makes them angry and Biden/Dems never talk about that or try to downplay it.
I know one Obama-Trump voter. My Hispanic mother. She had hated how Romney and the rest of the Republican Party had become the party of the rich, and appreciated how Obama improved the country in his first term. She absolutely despised Hilary, especially after the deplorable comment and appreciated that Trump actually cared about poor, working class people like many of her relatives. She herself was a firmly middle class teacher, who before the election would only tell her close relatives and friends about her support for Trump, and never answer a poll or attend a rally since her circle around her was pro Hilary. She was the main reason I suspected Florida would go for Trump in 2016.
From what I recall obama to Trump voters are disproportionately white blue collar workers concentrated in the Rust Belt. Not surprising if a lot of people don't know any personally.
I have relatives* who went from Obama to Trump. Most of them stayed with Trump in 2020 but i know at least a couple voted for Biden because they'd had it with Trump's mouth. (They were fine with his policies.)
This time? None of them have much good to say about Biden, and I don't see him retaining more than half of his 2020 supporters. But only two (of about 10) are diehard Trump supporters, so we'll see.
Notes:
* - This refers to about 10 cousins and spouses, ages 55-75, living in Colorado, Michigan, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey.
-- My perception is also that my Obama-to-Trump cousins are objecting to Blue Team policies as much as to Biden. They don't dislike Biden personally, but they hold him accountable for inflation and strongly object to blue policies on immigration, crime, and education.
Conversely, they either like or don't hate Trump's policies, but most have a hard time stomaching the man.
Not really, because most people couldn't even describe what the economic policies of the two candidates are. I have seen many many people who will argue in favour of Trump because "the economy was way better in 2019" but I haven't seen a single person say what policies are part of the Trump platform and how they will be better for the economy compared to what Biden's plans are. The vibes matter more than anything.
When domestic conditions are bad people blame the incumbent. That's it. I'm not suggesting that the electorate has a sophisticated grasp on the policy issues, but when the economy sucks they lash out against whoever is in charge. I don't think that's particularly controversial.
That said I think Biden deserves it. The biggest problem for the last few years has been inflation and he is large responsible for that by pushing too much liquidity into the economy via overstimulation.
You're really just re-iterating my point. Yes, people really just blame/credit whichever guy happens to be in charge at the time, and usually overestimate how much power the president has over the economy in the short term. The actual proposed policies each person has to address the problems rarely even get a mention.
Yeah, there's definitely a very regional element here. I live in a state that shifted a few points (R) from 2012 to 2016. Turnout was close to flat -- so it would seem Obama-Trump voters DO exist here, somewhere. But in parts of the Midwest, that shift was 10+ points, so those voters are maybe 3-5x as numerous there.
Yeah I lived in New York City for both Obama elections and South Carolina for the last two elections so most of the voters I’ve known pretty much stayed with their original partisan votes.
It's a decent question. I can only say that I don't know anyone that has told me or implied to me that that was their voting pattern.
But perhaps if you're Obama-Trump, and the vast majority of people around you hate at least one of those men, you might be more inclined towards keeping quiet about it than a dedicated partisan would be.
I am just here to note that it is confusing and irritating to read an individual be referred to as "they." The points about Gessen are interesting but every time I read that I kept hoping that part of the discussion would end as soon as possible.
Maybe it’s just me but I think people should refer to people how they want to be called, and it’s rude otherwise. If someone introduces themselves as “Tom” it would be dickish for me to call them “Tommy”. Pronouns work the same way. It’s the same principle that when someone says they’re a Christian I don’t tell them I don’t believe in fairy tales. Being respectful as a default position goes a long way I think.
Pronouns are fundamentally different than "Tom" though. Tom is a proper noun which refers to a single individual precisely because he claims that it does. And it is unique to him. There are other men named Tom (and these days, perhaps women too), but the category of "all Toms" does not convey anything other than a linguistic similarity. However, the category of "all he's" is meaningful in reality not just linguistically: it refers to men. By claiming that the term "man" or "he" is also simply a category of linguistic similarity, you divorce it from any grounding in the objective reality of maleness. Regardless of how much the postmodernists want to insist otherwise, the category of "men" refers to something very real.
It's a little like the term "white supremacy". It used to mean something real (KKK, torches, burning crosses, Nazis, etc...). Then the Left took it up as a moniker to refer to anyone they didn't like ("the scientific method is white supremacy"). Because of that, we have all lost something very important: the ability to talk easily about people who are willing to use violence to elevate white people. That's serious problem -- when you call everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi, you no longer have a word for real Nazis.
The postmodernists have made "man" and "woman" into arbitrary linguistic categories, but the underlying reality of "man" and "woman" as meaningful differences is still there (because it's not just linguistic -- it's real.) So we've had to come up with stupid terms like "pregnant people" or "penis possessors" or "chestfeeders".
It isn't about being polite. It's about whether language can be used to accurately describe reality or not. And as Phillip K Dick wrote: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, is still there." Male and female exist, even if a bunch of over-educated, navel-gazing, elitists want to disbelieve in them.
LOL, but Tommy means something very different from “Tom” which is a point you elided past. If I insist on calling Jordan Peterson “Jordie” I am making a very insulting position, and denying who he is. (We’ve all known people who purposely called people the wrong name repeatedly). My point about being polite is even if you disagree with someone, it’s jerky thing to call them the wrong pronoun on purpose.
I am very neurodivergent. I have Tourettes and I have dyspraxia. Because I have dyspraxia I largely don’t feel most of my body, at least the way most people do, and so I’m pretty divorced from the rest of my body. This is definitely biological in origin. So I have no trouble understanding why someone would feel alienated from the gender they were assigned at birth, and why this would be biological in origin in the same way autism clearly is (I have several friends who are autistic as well as people who are trans). So I honestly don’t get the anti-trans sentiment I see from so many. I mean, why do you think people are trans? (I would also add there have been plenty of trans people over the years, most of them closeted or hidden on the margins, this is nothing new to anyone over say 40 who’s spent anytime in the world).
LOL, that is not how people used to define white supremacy. The whole Jim Crow world was built on white supremacy. It fell out of fashion for a time so it’s come back in a similar form, but I live in a MAGA county, there are plenty of white supremacists about me who aren’t in the KKK. I do agree that at times the left overuses the term, but pretending that if you’re not in the KKK you can’t be a white suprematist is just silly.
You do realize that words and terms shift over time? They’re not immutable. You’re making ahistorical arguments
Yes, words do shift. In fact, the word "liberal" is a great example of that -- in Shakespeare's time it was an insult. John Locke rehabilitated it. And today, a sizeable portion of the population is reasserting it as an insult again. they may succeed; they may not. But that sort of actual linguistic change is quite slow. And that's not what's going on here. This is a concerted attempt to separate words from their underlying meanings for political purposes. It is essentially Orwellian Newspeak. And it's double-plus ungood.
"My point about being polite is even if you disagree with someone, it’s jerky thing to call them the wrong pronoun on purpose." I would actually agree with you on this and have written here that I would generally call people male or female based on what they appear to be or what they say they are, unless it's patently obvious that it's absurd (obvious dude with a beard in a dress.) The vile and transphobic Jordan Peterson has said the same thing. What he (and I) object to is being told that we have to pretend under threat of sanction. That's not liberal (in the Lockean or Millian sense) at all.
You live in MAGA country. I live in deep-blue CA, where we recently passed a law to seize the children of parents who refuse to go along with their kids gender delusions. This is most definitely not just about being polite.
LOL, whenever people use “Orwellian doublespeak” they’re almost always the ones employing Orwellian doublespeak. The notion that the only white supremacists as opposed to pretty much the whole white South was the KKK could not be more wrong.
I’ve known a fair number of trans people, and none of them have gotten upset at me if I slip and use the wrong pronoun. They’ve all been super chill about it at least to my face. There are obviously some jerk trans people out there but it’s a big country so you have all kinds of people out there, and trans people have their mix of good and bad people just like every other group out there. But the vitriol is definitely coming much, much more from transphobes than from the trans community and its allies. When we start seeing laws aimed at restricting cis people or Christians, we can have a both sides argument but right now the bad stuff is almost entirely coming from the right.
LOL, I like the way you wrote “gender delusions”, that’s an amusing phrase by you. The hard part with not posting links about things such as the gender law you’re talking about is I am not entirely sure what law you are talking about. I will say it doesn’t seem to pass the smell test, not with you going on about “gender delusions”. The nearest i can come up with is California passed a law giving parents of gender dysphoria children sanctuary from right wing transphobic states. There also appears to be a law that allows courts to take into account gender affirming care when it comes to custody battles. I am not sure whether this is for any parent in California or if this already existed and it applies to say a parent who moves to California from Texas to get it rather than allowing Texas to have jurisdiction. I may be wrong, but the burden of proof that California is yanking kids out of their homes if on you.
California will refuse to honor parental rights if a minor says they're trans but their parents won't affirm. That simple.
Also, CA judges are now routinely considering parental affirmation as part of child custody proceedings. So Mom wants to put a 12 year old on hormones that will sterilize her and make her grow a beard. Dad wants to let normal development play out. Many judges will now side with Mom automatically.
I live here. Please don't lecture me on the loony laws of my own home state. people who aren't here have no idea just how crazy our government is.
By politeness I mean on the part of transphobes. If you go around intentionally being provocative about someone else’s pronouns the only real point you’re making is you’re a dick.
I can’t think of any trans person I’ve known who in person has been super particular about how I use pronouns and I’m 61 so I’m hardly some “woke” college student. They’ve all been very chill and understanding.
I have been referring to folks as they my whole life. Very common in the US South and other parts of English world (Ireland for example) to use the singular they, regardless of gender identity. Just because it bothers you doesn’t mean lots of other folks don’t do it and use it. Which is kind of the point of Nate’s article.
So have I. But using "they" to refer to someone regardless of whether they are male or female is not the same as being told "I'm a 'they' and you must call me that." That has long been Jordan Peterson's point as well. Politeness goes both ways. Be polite and call someone what they appear to be. But be polite enough not to persecute others who choose not to call you something that is clearly inaccurate or absurd.
If I kept calling Jordan Peterson Jordie or Jordo no matter how many times he corrected me at some point Peterson would be justified in calling me a jerk. Also, the pronoun police who keep refusing to call people by their profound pronouns are the ones who are actively engaging in persecution. No one in America is passing laws against people who refuse to use “they/them”
See my reply to you above. Jordan Peterson is "Jordan" precisely BECAUSE he says he is. It's a linguistic category of uniqueness, of size 1. Og sure, tehre are other "Jordans", but they don't share any real attributes with Jordan Peterson other than that linguistic similarity. If he said he was actually "Jerry", we should call him Jerry. But that's not the same as Jordan Peterson saying that he's actually a woman. Because woman isn't a linguistic category of 1. Woman is a set of things in the real world, not just a category of language.
I can claim to be "Brian" or I can claim to be "Paul" and expect you to call me that. But I can't claim to be a dragon and expect you to treat me as a dragon. The first 2 requests are reasonable and polite; the 3rd is simply absurd.
“But be polite enough not to persecute others who choose not to call you something that is clearly inaccurate or absurd.”
And, please be polite to realize you do not get to decide neither what is “inaccurate” nor “absurd”. Just because it is “clear” to you doesn’t mean it is either right or polite. You can simply be “clearly” wrong and lack insight to your own incorrect belief. Hence, why it is polite to err to other’s statements of identity instead of your judgements about their identity. You silly goose. : D
Who does get to? If a group of people insist that the sky is green, are we all expected to nod along and say "yep, the sky is green" just so we don't offend them? Or if they say "bullets don't actually kill you"? Or "men can get pregnant"?
These are patently absurd statements not because I or anyone else say they are. They are absurd because they they fail to accurately describe reality. A bearded man who insists he should be allowed to use the women's showers at the gym because he "identifies as a woman" is no different. It's not about his identification; it's about whether that identification corresponds to reality.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, is still there." - Phillip K Dick
No single human being can be a "they". Period. And demanding that I pretend otherwise (under threat of social or economic ruin in many cases) is simply authoritarian, actually theocratic.
“Who does get to” - They do, it’s their identity. It continues to be the reality even when you fail to believe it. Just because you fail to understand identity and fail to respect others’ face value declarations of identity, doesn’t mean it isn’t still their identity. The only thing that is absurd is your failure to see your own logic and appeals to authority undermine your beliefs, hence you’re a silly goose. Have a nice day, and when you describe yourself to others I hope they respect your wishes instead of yelling about how your identity is like empirical observations and it’s polite if you would simply let others decide facts about yourself.
I honestly don't understand this position, Jabberwocky. I try to. But then Lia Thomas goes and blows away all the NCAA women's swimming records, or some 10 year old shares a locker room with a dick. I have 3 teen daughters -- this stuff isn't abstract to me.
Americans are actually amazingly tolerant people overall. We have a live and let live ethos ingrained in our history. So if it was just "respecting their identity" it wouldn't be a problem. But it stops being that when their need to have their identity affirmed interacts with the needs of others.
You're right, endorsing the protests would cost Biden. And that is the reason he's opposing them (finally). But it's probably the worst reason to do so.
Your cease-fire question is amazing. Even Democrats oppose a cease fire if Hamas doesn't release the hostages!
Finally, using "their" as a pronoun for Masha Gessen kind of undercuts your case that it's important to use data and science and reality to form and state your opinions. It also betrays your own biases, since only the college educated and Left voluntarily use fake pronouns. Gessen may be many things, but absent multiple personalities, he's not plural.
In English "they" is not a pronoun that refers a singular object. In rare cases, we sometimes slip it in place of "it" (where sex is uncertain) since hopefully everyone recognizes that "it" is unacceptable to use for a person under any circumstances. However, that is not the case here. Gessen appears to be a man. Playing along with his desire for "they/them pronouns", endorses a belief that human sexuality is somehow uncertain or changeable based on the preference of the subject, and that is a distinctly scientific belief.
It's not about being polite. It's about whether reality actually exists.
Actually, Charlie, no you can't. If you saw an article that said "Masha Gessen is a man" what does that mean since the word "man" no longer refers to biological reality? That's the whole point of this discussion and why this is a problem.
And no, "Masha" wasn't a clue. I don't speak Russian and don't know the common sex-specific Russian names from the 1960's.
If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers as to who better recognizes and sees through sophistry, is more comfortable considering,and better understands, the arguments of the opposing side, etc… my money would be on the lawyers (I’d take a Bronx based slip and fall attorney over Masha Gessen).
True, lawyers are trained in Cicero's exercise - need to know the opposing case to know their own - BUT by the same measure, I'd assume the lawyers are lying 50% of the time on average, and that I may not know which.
In the American system lawyers are *supposed* to engage in a degree of sophistry on behalf of their clients — they are ethically bound to be zealous partisans. So in the context of a legal case, everybody knows (or should know) to take their arguments, framing, etc… with a grain of salt. However, that practice, both in doing and in dealing with the other side doing, tends to make them competent at seeing through such things in other circumstances.
A lawyer who isn’t good at recognizing and dealing with such things will suffer immediate negative consequences and won’t be a lawyer for very long. That does not seem to be true for writers/journalists—you can thrive with a combination of pleasing prose and positions flattering to you target audience. (A typical story by an activisty “journalist” with its emphasis, omissions, selective citation and quotation, adjectives, etc…comes across as a poorly written brief to an attorney, but a warm and comfy blanket to somebody that agrees or is sympathetic to the journalist).
Mostly agree, Joe.
But just as there is a winnowing of lawyers who fail to successfully and zealously engage in sophistry AND/OR fail to see and appreciate the apparent (to jury/judge) strengths of 'both sides', there is a winnowing of writers in the interactive forums of critical readers, such as this.
Smart readers, such as yourself, choose where you browse.
Smart readers are a tiny fraction of the market for monetized attention. Small enough to be irrelevant to large media organizations outside of specialized press.
Exactly why this 'under the radar' forum is a pleasure, for me.
True, but I also feel like I often see that zealous mindset carry through with lawyers on other matters once they've taken a side. Maybe they'll be different with their personal friends, but in any kind of public forum I notice lawyers speak more like they're arguing a case in court than ever trying to honestly assess both sides or be willing to concede points to the side they don't broadly agree with.
Yep. The thing I find tedious about so many lawyers on sites like this is they seem to think that learning a certain narrow skill of argumentation makes them automatically experts on any topic even if they just learned about it 5 minutes ago. It’s also tedious how say tax or corporate lawyers will pontificate about constitutional law because they took one course in constitutional law 30 years ago, and this makes them an expert.
I mean, that’s just people on the internet. Practicing lawyers (as opposed to media people with a JD) are probably among the least offensive in this way in my experience. The smart ones at least know not to walk into a field of land mines because they are professionally trained to avoid exactly that mistake. But give a EE or a VC startup guy a running start, and he’ll plow through bad, ill-informed arguments to defend prior similarly ill-informed positions.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/your-friends-are-not-a-representative/comment/56383945?r=7nqyc&utm_medium=ios
Lol this comment is so trying to be clever I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to say.
Lawyers have to be able to argue either side of a case.
Journalists used to be able to see all sides of an issue too but that went away in 2016 with the "Journo-list" campaign by major mainstream media reporters to sink the Trump campaign.
It only took 10 years for journalism to be considered a disreputable profession.
Eh…my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession, partly because the historic norm is that of partisan journalism where it was widely understood that the journalists themselves were propagandists.
There was a move away from that to a degree, which led both to more accurate reporting and more misleading reporting (journalists were able to cloak their biases with the objective reputations of their orgs) and over the last 30 of years we had a move back towards the older model.
What happened since Trump was mostly more organizations and journalists spending their “objective” reputational capital aggressively by being more nakedly ideological and partisan…leading their reputations to decline…
"my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession"
Not mine, for example, if you read Orlando Figes' account of the Russian Revolution, "A People's Tragedy", you'll see how diplomats valued foreign journalists in Russia for their in-depth knowledge of Russian politics.
Any foreign diplomat who values American journalists for their knowledge of US politics today is delusional.
“JournoList” was from 2008. Slack channels have replaced Gmail groups.
The important thing about journo list was not whether they used gmail but that journalists from most of the major media had virtual meetings every week to coordinate their messages and attacks on the Trump campaign.
It was an unheard of lack of objectivity and professionalism.
They did it to coordinate against Hillary in 2008 and not Trump.
In 2016 ... quite so. This comment section is infested with lying right wing trolls who seem a lot more interested in Nate's standard use of Gessen's preferred pronouns than in his substantive arguments.
lol I know. It’s interesting how many bad faith right wing nut jobs are on Nate’s comment section whenever he posts anything.
My father, who was born in 1933, was a photo-journalist. In the late 1970s/early 80s he was already starting to watch, with a depth of disgust that was uncommon in him, as journalism started swirling the drain. It hasn't been in just the past 10 years. The degradation has been happening for a long time, or, as Pseudonym Joe says below, maybe from forever.
LOL. Your comment makes it evident that you have never been able to see--or care about--all sides of an issue.
The night before the election the NYT's front page was completely covered with articles about Hillary's emails, in line with the rest of the MSM for months. Trump received billions of dollars worth of free media. If the media had wanted to sink his campaign they would have, much as they did to Kerry's and Gore's.
Unlike the very reputable law profession.
Right, lawyers don’t represent themselves as the fourth estate, there is much justified suspicion of lawyers trying to argue you into something, and whether in the role of lawyer, hack, or politician they are rightly distrusted and pilloried ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rOAl8EYlz1s ).
The question of whether a poisoner better understands and identifies poison is different then whether you should accept a glass of wine from them.
If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers seeing through sophistry my money would be on none of the above or journalists. Sorry but I’ve just seen way too many lawyers who completely overrate their argumentative and analytical skills.
I would take a reporter over a "journalist" any day.
I am defining a journalist as a reporter, and Gessen is for the most part very good on Russia and Russia related matters which Gessen covers.
When you compare the worst in the camp yes of course. But I guarantee, absolutely guarantee, that the dumbest, worst journalists you've seen are much worse than the worst lawyers.
I really, really really doubt that in part because there are so many more lawyers out there. The problem with lawyers is even the worst ones often have a real arrogance to them that just compounds their shortcomings. (The people you see on Fox News and the like for the most part really aren’t journalists.)
Okay if you play the no true Scotsman canard, of course you can twist what you were saying into being true. Have fun with that.
You're the one twisting. The No True Scotsman fallacy (not "canard", a word you don't understand the meaning of) doesn't apply here. Angus is *by definition* a Scotsman, regardless of what he puts on his porridge. But no way are the ideologues and political operatives at Fox "journalists" by definition. Fox itself claimed in court that they are "entertainers" and that no rational person would believe that their opinion mongering is factual.
First, take your semantics and shove them. This is an unhelpful "akshually" comment through and through. Everyone calls them journalists. They're journalists. They're bad, but you don't get to say they're not Scots, when everyone refers to them and treats them as Scots.
I have a feeling we're talking about a different group of people anyway. I was thinking more along the lines of Michael Hobbes, who absolutely calls himself a journalist.
LOL, I don’t think I’m being overly pure by saying I don’t consider opinion writers journalists. Opinion writers with the exception of people like say a Paul Krugman when he’s writing about economics are really just better positioned people than people commenting on social media platforms. I am defining journalists as being people who are actually doing what one would consider reporting, and I’d even include people like tech writers who are reviewing gadgets or food critics who are actively going to restaurants to write about them.
I don’t think this distinction is overly pure or hard to understand.
Is Paul Krugman a journalist or not? Oh you think he's good so that's what makes him a journalist?
Would you consider a janitor who's bad at cleaning toilets actually not a janitor? Sure he gets paid for it, but he's not actually doing it, so he's not a janitor? Freaking boring semantics, dude, good luck with that
I'd take Marcia Clark and Chris Darden over Masha Gessen... read into that what you will.
LOL, that says a lot more about you than it does Gessen. There seems to me to be a huge muddle in terms of the response to the situation in Gaza right now, and many peole are taking Gessen’s position on Gaza across the political spectrum. Unlike say abortion, there doesn’t seem to be clear, obvious positions on this topic. (And I am saying this as someone who for the most part disagrees with Gessen on Gaza though at the same time there are lots of parts of me that is on Gessen’s side.)
Better call Saul.
Seeing you use "they/them" pronouns for a person makes me lose some respect for you as a truth-seeker. Using incorrect pronouns just because someone suffers from a delusion is not what a truth-seeking person would do.
Pronoun debates aren't relevant to Nate's argument, so who gives a shit?
I give a shit. Truth matters, always. Masha Gessen is a woman.
When I wrote the data conversions for the National Cancer Institute's SEER dataset and the NACCR cancer registries in 1992, it was necessary to preserve a 5 valued sex field, to accommodate the various genetically ambiguous (ie, NON BINARY) tissue types information that had different implications for metastatic risk in the context of various cancers.
Being ignorant of a fact, should not suggest to you that you are correct about it...
We don't know about Masha, and that's her business.
Mark, I just don't believe this. No medical organization in 1992 would have ever thought there were 5 human sexes. (And no medical org does now either; they're just too afraid to say so.) Are there certain X/Y chromosomal abnormalities that affect fractions of a percent of the human population that might be convenient to keep track of in the same data field? Sure. But that doesn't mean there are 5 sexes for humans. The fact that we recognize these as "abnormalities" simply affirms the basic sexual binary of all mammals.
I really can't believe this is a serious conversation in our society. Functional adults don't need to have "the birds and the bees" explained to them.
Here is the most recent data from NAACCR on the "Top five Most Commonly Diagnosed Cancers in North America by Sex, All Races":
https://www.naaccr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-sex.pdf
As you can see, there are only two sexes reported, male and female.
Yes, there can be tissue abnormalities that disguise sex and maybe those need to be tracked in some circumstances. But what fraction of people have such tissue abnormalities? And is Masha Gessen one of them? I would bet a large sum of money that she did not decide she is "nonbinary" by having an assay of a tissue sample.
Here are the 2023 SEER coding instructions for Sex, p. 76
https://seer.cancer.gov/manuals/2023/SPCSM_2023_MainDoc.pdf
Code the sex (gender) of the patient.
Code Description
1 Male
2 Female
3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)
4 Transsexual, NOS
5 Transsexual, natal male
6 Transsexual, natal female
9 Not stated/Unknown
Definitions
Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual
phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as
X0/XY mosaicism.
Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.
MarkS, I don't guess you want to know, but I would like to tell:
As I recall from 32 years later, NACCR indeed had a much simpler coding for Sex, perhaps: male/female or male/female/unk or something that you might consider equivalent and BINARY. I was CDC lead for the NAACCR project for CDC for an interval in the early 90's. But it was NCI's SEER ( and perhaps ACoS'd NCDB) that had a 5 valued Sex field (and perhaps more, for Unknown or Missing).
In an adjacent post below, I've provided the citation, link, and coding from the 2023 coding manual and it is now 7-valued, including 'Other', and 'NotStated/Unknown'. I can't be certain if this is unchanged from 1992, but looked to my 70 year old eyes as though they have ADDED a couple Sex values.
When Bernie Sanders got his first bill passed ~1992 (for a National Breast Cancer Registry; in final passage it may have had other names on it, he was a freshman), the way I implemented the bill was to visualize and build the data infrastructure for a US full population Cancer Registry, for ALL cancers and all cancer data, as, within the margin of error, it was roughly just as hard and expensive to do for ALL as for breast alone, and would do a LOT more good.
In addition to:
a) the then (~1988) new shoe-string NAACCR population based registry you noted (I was the second CDC project officer managing the funding, think Ron Aubert did it 1989-1991 or so) and
b) the high-end, high detail high cost but limited scope NCI-SEER (point: Jennifer Seifert) population registry, there was
c) a third major cancer registry, a hospital-based registry used largely by the American College of Surgeons to stage cancer and to accredit hospital cancer surgery programs for quality of care, called then and still, the National Cancer Database, ACoS-NCDB (point: Herman Menck). But it was not population-based.
Also, there were several large (multistate) commercial cancer registries systems (CASURNET, by Barry Gordon out of CA and academic/non-profits? (Rocky Mountain Cancer Data System) by Larry Derrick - a good Mormon out of Utah!, and the Kentucky Cancer Registry (tobacco funded!) point persons: Tom Tucker and a wonderful young redhead tech guy, forgetting his name.
The tech leads of these largest/strongest extant cancer registries supplied the core DB technicians for the 1st national population - based cancer registry, at CDC, which I was charged to pull together to implement Bernie's first Bill.
At the time, there were literally HUNDREDS of other small, often hospital specific and simple, cancer registry systems in the US. So once we had the consensus DB hammered out among the 'big boys' & Jennifer ~1993 we invited 120 of them to Chicago for a meeting to learn about the first US call for cancer data, and by late 1993 or 1994, CDC had a first draft data of a National Population-based Cancer Registry.
But there were many steps. First, I/CDC called a series of meetings of the tech guys to make sausage.
The way you make a single master/national DB out of multiple non- compatible DB's has a LOT of steps, requires a LOT of knowledge about how people have interpreted data entry instructions over the years, in a lot of places, a knowledge of the periodic publications and needs for consistency of coding over time, and is painstaking nerdy work, but generally one wants to do a lossless join and merge to the extent one can. But sometimes one can't.
Back to SEX
One indeed wants a single sex field populated for every cancer case in the DB / in the US. So, if the various incompatible extant registry systems were collecting:
1) a two valued Sex char (M/F), where M = male
2) a two valued integer field (1/0) where 1= male
3) a two valued float field (0./1.) where 0.=male
4) a two valued text string (Female/Male), where Male =male
5) a three valued integer field (1/2/0) where 2=male and 0=missing or unknown,
etc.
Then, to put all the data in one database without discarding any, if one has at least one 3 valued field, one MUST have at least a three valued Sex field in the lossless merge. One needs to keep track of how to 'recode' the M, 1, 0., Male, and 2 from the respective sources into a single consistent code representing the Sex concept 'male' as defined in the data coding manual, when the data are merged into the master DB.
So the situation circa 1992 was similar to the above for nearly ALL cancer registries' Sex fields, most were either 2, 3, or perhaps 4 valued (with meanings of male, female, missing and/or unknown). Note: to put this hypothetical example of a 4 valued field into a 3 valued DB will lose data, technicall - it will lose the distinction between 'missing' and 'unknown'. This difference may be meaningful at the local source level, since a missing may indicate more research to be done, but unknown might suggest one completed the due diligence and this is as good as it gets. But at a national level one may not need to preserve such distinction, and one might decide to merge missing and unknown into a single code. I don't have my records, and don't recall the consensus for Sex in the CDC call for data. These, and many such judgements were made by a CDC organized technical committee with representations as above.
But for the case with NCI-SEER (and perhaps ACoS-NCDB, since both were much more intensive and specific systems than all the rest), I recall specifically that 'Sex was a 5-valued field'. Today it is 7-valued.
Within a 1 year of funding by Sander's Bill, we hammered out operationalizable consensus standards for a close-enough to loss-less merge of targeted ('reportable') cancer data nationwide from over 100 systems.
Then we developed software (EDITS - Exchangeable-edits, Data-dictionary, and Information Translation Standard) to simplify and automate the re-coding of disparate systems' codes for meaning (in a reliable and documented way) into one standard format. The recode logic was written centrally, and used by all systems as part of their submission. Many systems quickly change to national standard on their own for simplicity. Last I checked, 30 years later, CDC was still using (regularly updated versions of ) EDITS for this facilitation of standards and cleanly edited submissions.
Think this was a nice example of building a national system that did not step on smaller scale commercial cancer registry interests, and it was done more quickly than anyone hoped. But it took much longer to get quality data entry on the ground at each clinical surgery facility.
But to recap, NCI-SEER standardized on multi-valued Sex data over a generation ago, and it was the gold standard acknowledged by ALL the other US cancer registry systems, except for the competition with the ACoS' NCDB, a peer system but engineered around clinical cancer surgery quality control instead of population-based epidemiology.
You could add that during test trials for the Covid vaccines, results were reported for only two sexes.
Any other sexes should have been prohibited from the vaccine until adequate trials had been conducted. Except trans-nuts never believed their own BS so the male/female vaccine results were good enough for them.
Here are the 2023 SEER coding instructions for Sex, p. 76
https://seer.cancer.gov/manuals/2023/SPCSM_2023_MainDoc.pdf
Code the sex (gender) of the patient.
Code Description
1 Male
2 Female
3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)
4 Transsexual, NOS
5 Transsexual, natal male
6 Transsexual, natal female
9 Not stated/Unknown
Definitions
Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual
phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as
X0/XY mosaicism.
Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.
Yes, exactly. The intersex/DSD category is 0.018% of all people:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
The other categories you list are purely internal mental states: "self-identifies psychologically and emotionally".
Sorry, you don't believe that Masha Geshen is one of these microscopically rare intersex cases. Stop gaslighting.
Calling someone by a name they don't like has got to be the number one stupidest fucking definition of "truth-seeking".
When the name is in service of a lie (that a person has "transitioned" from one sex to another, which is flatly impossible for any mammal), then refusing to use the name is indeed "truth seeking".
To enhance my argument, I will follow your lead by adding the word "fucking". That makes the argument so much stronger!
Humans do all sorts of things that no other mammals do, so that's not really surprising or interesting. It's one of the nice things about having invented surgery and drugs. One can only imagine what kind of surgeries and drugs my cat would elect to take. Oh wait, I suppose we did give our cat a surgery. We neutered him. Conveniently altering his hormones and ending his sexual-dimorphic behaviors.
Anyway, it's just very pedantic. There are real truths to seek, and they don't generally involve obsessing over names.
Humans cannot change sex, period. That is the truth.
A thousand years from now, if anyone digs up your bones, your true sex can be readily determined by chemical means, no matter what drugs or surgeries you may have had. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8967324/
But people who cosplay with drugs and surgeries as having changed sex impinge on the rights of the vast majority to single-sex spaces, places, events, competitions, etc, which have been a feature of every human society ever.
How do you know? Have you given them a physical exam?
They were examined at birth.
That doesn't answer my question, but at least you used the correct pronoun. You say you care about truth but clearly you don't, you're entirely ideologically driven. The truth is that Gessen's preferred pronouns aren't relevant to the substance of Nate's article (or even to whether Gessen is a woman ... a socially constructed non-scientific term), and his use of them in accordance with standard journalistic practices is even less relevant to the arguments he is making. (It's actually hilarious that you right wing trolls are accusing him of not being a truth-seeker on an article in which he castigates Gessen and "excesses of the left".)
Using obfuscating language is a form of lying.
Like George Carlin’s treatise on “real chocolatey goodness” meaning “no fucking chocolate.”
"They were examined at birth"
It shows the incredible progress in scientific education that even a layman can examine a newborn baby and within 5 seconds, predict with great accuracy if 20 years later that baby will have upper body strength 20% above or below the population average.
No progress needed, a glance at the genitals of a baby at birth will successfully sort into two groups, one of which will have (on average) upper body strength at least 20% greater than the other. These two groups are called "male" and "female". This sorting algorithm has been known and successfully used for thousands of years.
I give a shit because using plural pronouns when referring to an individual is confusing and breaks the concentration of anyone who was taught proper grammar. Virtue signaling by using plural pronouns distracts from Mr Silver's message.
"They" as a third person singular has been in common usage for decades.
The English language has changed. Be a good boy and adapt.
I'm certain you could survive the trauma.
If one wants to draw on historical linguistic trends, perhaps one can say that modern English has drifted slightly back towards its Germanic roots in that regard, and away from Latin, via the incorporation of this neuter pronoun. The obsessive project of elitist academics for centuries to make English more like Latin is slowly coming unraveled now that Latin is no longer being taught in most schools. I don't see this as a problem. Evidently you do, but I do have to ask, why? Does it really matter?
Every word we type, every word we read, is imaginary. Language is just made up. There's nothing magical about it, and it's always changing. Feel free to read Shakespeare if you are in doubt about this.
"they" as third person singular has been in use since the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
It's hilarious that these ignorant right wing bigots are attacking Nate for following standard prescribed usage (https://style.mla.org/using-singular-they/) while completely ignoring his substantive arguments, which include castigating Gessen (unfairly, IMO).
It's not a "virtue signal" to refer to someone how they like to be referred to. It's standard practice. Deliberately eschewing it just reads as being insulting and contentious on a topic that Nate is not currently interested in arguing about.
It's not confusing to intelligent people ... or honest ones; Nate's use of Gessen's preferred pronouns is standard practice among journalists and other decent people, not "virtue signaling" which is actually what all you right wing trolls are doing by whining about it.
P.S. sociopathic garbage blocked
(and complaining about "in order to alter power dynamics in a society" is right there with
"Jews will not replace us". Choosing pronouns in line with one's gender reality is marginally and tangentially related to resisting the power of bigots and other awful people.)
Alternatively, it could also be seen as a post-modern attempt to blur the lines between established truth and "perceived truth" in order to alter power dynamics in a society. Some of us are sick of this shit.
And if you're a public person, and you have problems with being "misgendered" or "mispronouned" by others, you can always shut the fuck up and nobody will say anything about you.
I find the singular use of “they” very confusing. I once changed my mind about buying a book after reading that the main character was referred to as “they” throughout. I’m an old lady. And I suspect I’m not alone in that feeling.
No, you're not the only ossified person.
If nobody gives a shit, then why not call her by her birth gender instead of playing along with these silly games? After all, as you said it's not relevant and nobody cares.
To be fair, calling out pronouns when they are irrelevant just because you can't have basic human respect for another person is something that trash would do.
I have basic respect for all people, including the delusional. But I do not refer to someone who falsely believes he is the King of England as "his majesty", and I do not refer to someone who falsely believes she is "nonbinary" (no one is "nonbinary") with misnumbered plural pronouns.
"I have basic respect for all people..."
The rest of your statement suggests this to be false.
His "king of England" point is a good one. Either someone IS the King of England of he isn't. Similarly, either someone is a man or he is not. His own perceptions don't change anything. And under no circumstances can a person be plural, so "they" makes no sense at all.
I knew someone growing up who insisted (in all seriousness) that he was an 800 year old dragon. I knew someone else who got so caught up in D&D that he sometimes lapsed into his wizard character in real life. Would you foster these delusions in the name of politeness?
In reality, I did not know either a dragon or wizard. And that's the key. It's not about politeness; it's about whether reality exists.
"And under no circumstances can a person be plural
"Brian, surely you know that the King of England persecuted Quakers in the 1600's (my ancestors) for addressing him with the singular form 'thee' and 'thou', instead of the royal plural (which was REQUIRED) 'you'? For religious reasons, Quakers reserved use of the singular 'you' for God. One of the many reasons Philadelphia was founded by William Penn, a Quaker. In English today, we still have the expression, 'the royal we'. Look it up.
:-) I will gladly accept that the senior member of the royal family of a country may be addressed as plural, Mark.
The hilarious thing is that you think Gessen is a man. And "they" has a long history of been used as a singular pronoun ... you right wing trolls are simply ignorant.
P.S. I'm pretty sure that Slaw is a sociopath and a bigot.
I am pretty sure Gessen is a woman.
If you accept that a lot of transgenderism is driven by mental illness are you really doing them any favors by indulging their delusional beliefs?
"f you accept that a lot of transgenderism is driven by mental illness..."
But only terrible people think that.
Or you could maybe look at substance abuse, criminal charges/convictions, mental illness, suicide rates, etc. among the trans population and think for yourself.
So, science is "terrible" now? No. The medical term for it is "gender dysmorphia" and it has been documented in psychology for over 140 years. Or, in other cases, as Katze below points out, it is merely silly people jumping on a virtue-signaling bandwagon to score cheap points at the expense of others.
In addition to science, we have English language grammar and syntax, according to which "they" refers to plural individuals and is therefore not applicable to an individual. An individual who wants others to refer to themselves as "they" is as silly as a person who wants others to refer to them as "your majesty". Shall I insist that you identify me as a golden unicorn from middle earth name "Der Fuhrer"?
Silly slippery slope, isn't it.
Gessen isn’t mentally ill. She’s just jumping on a stupid bandwagon.
Gessen was on that "bandwagon" before there was a band.
DJ Mc is right ... right wingers and transphobes are terrible people. Also stupid.
P.S. What is the lunatic troll below talking about in re multiple names with the same IP address? That's not me, and he has no way to know what people's IP addresses are.
Apparently your reading comprehension is poor.
No, it's perfectly fine.
Are you sure?
Great, then please call me "your royal majesty", since I self-identify as the absolute ruler of the world, and you have to respect that.
Respect has to be earned. People should treat each other with basic courtesy but indulging their delusions and neuroses isn't basic courtesy.
People are complicated. Where we draw the line for what is reasonable is subjective.
As far as I'm concerned, intent is more important than specific words.
A person who wants to communicate malice and hostility, can use any words they wish and still have that malice shine through them.
A person who wants to communicate kindness, can do similarly.
Complete indifference ... we have a lot of that in our society. I'm sometimes guilty of it myself.
I try not to be hostile to people unless I have a darn good reason to be. There's enough cruelty and pain in the world without us making more just for the sake of a dominance competition.
However, when there is that darn good reason, it's best to come prepared to take it as far as necessary.
Pronouns aren't worth fighting about. They really aren't.
"Pronouns aren't worth fighting about. They really aren't."
Since your preferred pronouns can apparently be self selected what's to stop you from choosing a racial slur?
Look, it's a big and diverse country. It's filled with people who believe that the center of the planet is hollow and populated by lizard people. The country is tolerant of craziness because Americans are tolerant and easy going in general.
But the unwritten rule is that you can be crazy and eccentric but you don't get to drag everyone else into your craziness. Choose whatever pronouns you want but don't expect me to play along. That's your crazy. I'm busy over here doing my crazy and I don't have the time.
Whatever, just don't expect people to react well to you if you are clearly going out of your way to be a jerk to them.
There's a tiny handful of people in the world that have earned my respect. Everyone else? Frankly I couldn't care less.
In addition if anyone interprets the simple act of describing reality as a personal attack that's a sign of a fragile personality and a weak mind. In other words, someone not suitable for respect.
*basic human respect* is earned by being human.
But you do have a point ... you and other right wing trolls have earned no respect.
P.S. This bigoted trash's rejoinder is an example of why ... we disrespect mass murderers for being mass murderers, not for their gender identity--respect for the latter is basic human respect; the former is not.
Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler and Sean Penn are all technically human.
Not a universal call.
I 'indulged' my patients' and my peers' delusions and neuroses day in and day out, formerly, both as a health provider and as a public official, & both as a matter of courtesy and of practicality. Enjoy some forums where that isn't professionally required, but it can still have a useful effect most anywhere.
For instance, I don't think one can be very successful in establishing a conversational bridge to the 'other' party, without being prepared to indulge a modicum of delusions up front. May go both ways.
Gessen's non-binary status is not delusional or neurotic. I can't say the same about all these right wing trolls whining about Nate using Gessen's preferred pronouns according to standard practice.
P.S. In response to the stupid sociopathic bigoted ignoramus who asked "Standard practice according to who [sic]?" ... every style guide.
Yeah, Jibal, was somewhat surprised. :)
And, wondered if one of them was perhaps sincere, if a bit unable to process new info.
Suspect they have a volitional religious delusion regarding modern language, combined with an un-American intolerance of difference, and an unsociable in-capacity to control their desires to try to make others to conform to their own blind faith... by... wait for it... trolling!!
Standard practice according to who?
Maybe it's just the company that you keep but the people I interact with on a daily basis are remarkably delusional free. At least if they're not they don't feel inclined to reveal that.
now that's a bloomin' delusion, if I ever saw one! ;)
- not everyone picks up on them, guy -
but we've all got them, and thinking we don't, is one of the most common
Let me rephrase that then: for the vast majority of the population those delusions are not crippling and do no lead to a radically reduced quality of life.
When you're looking at a population that is far more likely to be criminally charged, go to jail, undertake treatment for substance abuse or mental illness or just plain kill themselves--that's clearly not the case.
Your comments and your substack content are pure delusion.
Was there an argument or a point in your post?
How do you talk to religious people?
Do you go way out of your way to point out that they are delusional every time you interact with them?
Do you refuse to call them by their religious identity-- Christian, Muslim, Hindu-- etc. even though they're all just insane in the same way?
No, you just ignore whatever silliness they have and move on.
I'm an atheist. As long as they leave me alone I am more than happy to return the favor.
It is when religion intrudes into the public sphere (prayer in school) that we have a problem. Telling people what pronoun to use is the exact same thing. In fact, I would say woke is a new religion.
They are similar in type but not magnitude. Imo, someone asking you to call them by their imaginary name is nothing at all like being forced to bow before their invisible fairy.
Both sound crazy to me. Male/female isn't imaginary. It all boils down to denying reality.
It's not about politeness or respect for the person. It's about respect for reality.
15 years ago, we heard a modification of this same argument in the "how will your neighbor's gay marriage ever affect you?" The answer: ask Jack Phillips. That's why it matters. Because we've seen many times what starts as "please be polite" very quickly morph into "salute you flag and bake the cake of we'll bankrupt you, bigot!"
Bringing up gay marriage in terms of something you view as radical and unpopular is telling far more about yourself than anyone or anything else.
The current Speaker of the House spent his career fighting against gay marriage because he believed it would destroy America…even he’s moved on and decided to be a productive member of society and not continue to fight the good fight as he believes.
Technically he's not talking about gay marriage per se so much as the drive to force everyone to accommodate gay marriage. That's a barrier that the USSC was not willing to cross.
I'm not sure using the Supreme Court is the best argument for you, since they are plenty happy to cross the barrier of open bribery. So barriers are clearly only an issue when they want them to be.
"Bribery". Hoo boy.
Anyway my point is that the USSC to a large extent is an expression of mainstream opinion. Most people don't see gay marriage as a big deal (as compared to thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread) but simultaneously most people don't think a Christian baker should be forced to cater a gay wedding.
If you really can't understand the similarity in responses there, you are very deep in precisely the kind of bubble that Nate is trying to shake people out of.
LOL, given how popular gay marriage is acting like gay marriage at this point it’s about as radical as vanilla ice cream which I suspect would actually poor worse than gay marriage.
Gay marriage isn't "popular" I would argue. Instead it's just Americans deciding to mind their own business.
For the flip side try asking people if somebody who identifies as a Christian should be forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay marriage, for example.
The combination of irony and cognitive dissonance in this reply should be crushing like a black hole.
Ad hominem attacks are the sign that you have no argument or point to make.
DJ Mc is right ... you people are terrible, and in so many ways.
None of the virtue signaling comments by the right wing culture warrior trash here have anything to do with Nate's arguments.
All of you are missing the point of the comparison. Asserting that I just alter the meaning of a word in the name of politeness to you has already morphed (in just a few years) into "you deadnamed me and must be destroyed." That is the similarity. Changing the definition of "marriage" had all kind of downstream effects on people who were not gay, despite the fact that the proponents all asserted that it wouldn't. Those who would change the definition of "man" and "woman" say "it's just a pronoun; be polite". Based on past experience, I am wary of both their analysis and their candor.
LOL, and how exactly did gay marriage change the meaning of marriage or affect anyone downstream? The concept of what a man or woman is has changed so much in my lifetime I don’t see how changing pronouns is any different. Neither my straight marriage nor my sense of self has been changed by any of this.
You keep asserting things without backing anything up or defining anything. I am wary of people like yours analysis and candor.
You should listen to Yascha Mounks latest podcasts with Helen Joyce. Acting as if a trans woman (biological male) is exactly the same as biological female is different and does have an impact to women in the real world.
lol why should I listen to any podcast by Mounk? Mounk was one of those people I thought sounded interesting and I wanted to like but I really didn’t think in the end had anything interesting to say and I would say that regardless of his views on trans issues. To me he’s like the Harvard equivalent of Malcolm Gladwell.
I don’t really see where it has or should have any impact on women in the real world. Almost all of the anti trans comments people make like this one sound exactly like the anti gay arguments I used to hear.
Why would you tell someone who rejects bigotry to listen to podcasts from bigots?
Lord but you culture warriors are dim. Perhaps say something about Nate's arguments, which have nothing to with this idiocy.
lol anti trans people who go on about truth seekers are among the silliest people out there. The notion they’re truth seekers is just silly
What specifically do you think they get wrong?
I personally believe the gender affirming care for minors catastrophe is worse (in totality) than January 6th. I say this based on the reality of what has actually occurred to date. The sterilization of kids with mental health issues based on junk science is very very bad.
lol the fact that you are saying that gender affirmation care and then comforting that this is worse than Jan 6 shows you’re an ideological is a whack job. The two are completely different positions and the fact that you are so different shows what a whack job you are.
I call all kinds of people with junk Ph.D.s doctor, even when I seriously question the appropriateness of the title. I am not disrespecting all P.h.D.s here (most doctorates in any subject deserve the honorific). I am just saying that if someone has an advanced degree (even in a really obscure topic or from a questionable source) and wants me to call them Dr. I will do that to be polite.
I kind of look at pronouns the same way. If it costs me nothing and makes someone feel better or more accepted, I am all in. Or at least all in until I feel like I am being pressured. Then I can be very stubborn.
I think many of us are the same in that regard. We want to be respectful (or are at least ambivalent about it) to fellow human beings, but it can be difficult if pushed too far. Given the nature of post and conversation, I think Noah's being respectful is the decent thing to do.
It does cost you something, your integrity.
If you know someone to be biologically male, say your cousin, an old high school classmate, a coworker, and so on, being forced to refer to them as a woman, use female honorifics, you are being forced to lie for their ideology. So, yes, it does cost you something.
I would also tell my cousin she looked lovely in a dress, even if it made her look fat. I guess I lack integrity, or perhaps place a greater value on people's feelings. However, to be completely truthful, experience has been that the truth/integrity card is often played in a highly selective manner.
Many people are quite comfortable with things like a president lying, but they inexplicably get quite worked up about pronouns. It's kind of like the social equivalent of isolated demands for rigor. People will appeal to some greater value or moral, but only on topics they find objectionable.
I get it...the entire pronoun thing is annoying, and clearly you feel like you are being "force to lie." My guess is that many folks feel the same level of frustration with feeling "forced" but maybe are not willing to assess their own reasons for behaving that way and just want to appeal to integrity, honesty, or whatever.
"Many people are quite comfortable with things like a president lying, but they inexplicably get quite worked up about pronouns"
A president lying does not require me to lie. Any ideology that requires me to lie is, by that alone, evil and immoral.
Clearly you have no problem lying. Which says quite a lot about your character.
This the classic Marxist tactic of declaring an obvious falsehood and forcing you to accept it. Drill sergeants also use this tactic. In both cases, it is the first stage to attempting to break down your mental resistance so that you will accept any statements as facts or orders.
Well...we can't all be the Upright Man, can we...
P.S. the PhD might be junk in your eyes, but they have still been awarded it, hence the honorific.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Thank you! That article is absolutely hilarious. The funniest things poke fun at your own absurdities.
More seriously though, the operative line (from that article) for this debate is this one: "When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of dividing them into categories." In the case of "man" and "woman", these actually are terms that are defined by the God of all 3 Abrahamic religions as biological categories not linguistic ones. (I can't speak to the others, since I don't know Hinduism or Buddhism well enough.)
I actually don't personally think pronouns are that important, but arguing that _either_ side of this issue is "the truth" demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of what language is. There _is_ no single arbiter of correct language usage. Your beliefs about the correct way to use pronouns is exactly as valid (or not) as every single other persons belief on that topic.
To rephrase: there is no such thing as "truth" when arguing about the "right" way to use language.
I knew a man who thought he was an 800 year old dragon. By your standard, it would be impossible to assert that he was not an 800 year old dragon.
It isn't about politeness. It's about whether reality exists.
You do not understand the point I am making, which has nothing to do with politeness. It has to do with what "truth" means and what language is.
If you and I agree on what "dragon" means, then it is trivial to prove whether or not someone is a dragon. If you and I do not agree on what "dragon" means, not only can we not prove whether or not they are dragon, we can't even prove which of us is using the word correctly because what words mean does not have any correspondence with base reality.
Language is a tool that humans invented. There is no single "right" way to use a tool. If some people choose to use it one way, you can have a discussion about the pros and cons of using the tool in that particular manner. But they _cant'_ be right or wrong because the concept, when applied to how a tool is being used, _fundamentally does not make sense_
If I tell you that gravity is green, the correct response is not "no, it's blue", it's that _color does not apply to the concept of gravity_.
I didn't understand your point. If clarity of language is your goal (do we both mean the same thing by dragon?), the use of the tool of language is critically important.
So if language is a tool that we use to describe reality (as everyone from Plato to Kant says it is), saying that the tool "can't be right or wrong" effectively says "any words used to describe reality are equally valid". This is a core feature of the postmodernists, and as you said, it's not entirely wrong, but it's also not fully correct.
The best summary of why is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnpB49iP5uU It's about 6 minutes of Jordan Peterson explaining precisely why this is not the case.
The single arbiter of (as you put it) "correct language usage" is whether that usage corresponds to an accurate version of reality. If you abandon that standard, words can no longer have any collective, shared meaning across time or people. Orwell would recognize such a linguistic world as inherently dangerous.
>the single arbiter...
Language means what people say it means. If one group of people decide that it means something else, they are not wrong. This is what it means to have different languages.
If it makes you feel better, then feel free to say that these people aren't speaking english, they are speaking wokelish, I don't care. The point is, they are not wrong. Because being wrong is a concept that doesn't make sense in this context.
Just like Germans aren't "wrong" when they call trash "Müll". Neither trash nor Müll are more correct or correspond better to base reality.
I don't speak German though. And anyone who does speak German can tell that because "German" refers to a particular language. In fact, that illustrates my point perfectly. By your argument "German" doesn't exist. There are a bunch of people of people that happen to use the same grunts for the same things and agree to call those grunts "German". If they started using different grunts, does "German" go away? Or does it change to accommodate the new grunts? There's no way to answer that question in your framework.
More importantly whether you call it "trash" or "Müll" or "basura" (Spanish) it still refers to the same real thing: a pile of rubbish. It would be fair to say that a German person who starts calling trash "basura" instead of "Müll" is "no longer speaking German". But a German person who starts calling cars "Müll" hasn't changed what language he's speaking but rather is speaking his language incorrectly. (The same way I might, since I don't speak German.)
I realize this seems esoteric, but it isn't. Words (in any language) have to connect to real objects or attributes. Severing that link is a philosophical disaster and a linguistic black hole that makes communication impossible.
I was just about to write something similar myself. Pronouns are a linguistic and societal constructs, and encode the tradition of calling something with a set word. For example in Russian language, somethings have a sexless pronouns assigned to them (like the sun for example), and those pronouns are used as derogatory to trans people. In English there is the "it" pronoun that doesn't imply sex as well, even though it is used for beings that definitely have sex (like dogs).
Are you here for the content of the posts, or to be a culture warrior?
"Using incorrect pronouns just because someone suffers from a delusion is not what a truth-seeking person would do"
Maybe not, but it's one heck of an insurance policy against being run over by a woke mob. J.K. Rowling didn't have one and was even excluded from the Harry Potter anniversary events.
Sure! And standing up to the woke mob is something I respect. Kowtowing to it, especially from someone whose angle is following the data wherever it leads, is not something I respect.
If Nate's goal is not to be run over by a woke mob, then I am done giving him money. His choice.
And I expect better than that from Nate.
This reminds me of a good point that Yglesias made recently and that has stuck with me. How many Obama-Trump voters do you know? Because those are the people that decided the 2016 election and might end up deciding 2024. Your reliably partisan friends are irrelevant.
Maybe a little simplistic because it ignores turnout, but yes, it's still worth contemplating. I looked at myself and realize that I'm pretty sure I know zero Obama-Trump voters, and I'm not quite sure what such a person would even be like. But I do sense that this sort of person is very important to our present electoral politics, especially if he lives in a swing state.
And I don't think I even live in that much of a bubble. I know plenty of Obama-Hillary voters, plenty of Republicans who were more reluctant on Romney than Trump, and plenty who were more reluctant on Trump than Romney. Also some, like myself, who switched from a major party to a third-party vote in 2016. I get why people both love Trump and hate Trump, but Obama and Trump seem to represent such opposite valences that supporting both of them is hard for me to wrap my head around.
I think it helps when you try to decouple identity from voting behavior, or rather, remember that many normie voters do not view their vote choice as some expression of themselves the way that a lot of super-engaged or ideologically driven people do. For many, it's just "who should practically drive the next leg?" or "maybe we should try something different" or "who seems as though they're for my interests?" It's a choice they make at the time and then they get back to living their life and until the next go-round.
Also, a lot of voters see the two parties and their nominees as just being two sides of the same coin, a big blob of establishment that is not as differentiated. Hence why Trump, as an outsider who challenged norms, drew in even some former Obama voters in 2016. (It's also worth remembering that Obama in 2012 successfully painted Romney as the ultimate aloof elitist. In that sense, despite their differences, Romney and Clinton both scan as "phony" and focus-grouped and corporate. So I can see why the same voter would vote against both of them.)
Yeah, that makes sense in the abstract. It's just that I don't know anyone who is actually like this, and I'm still struggling to imagine him or her as a real person and not a cartoon character. The people that I most think of as "apolitical normies" were shocked by Trump's coarseness and in no sense saw him as better than Romney. But of course, they were mostly college-educated.
The people I know who were not college-educated, and who were receptive to Trump's coarseness and found it greatly preferable to Romney's "elite aloofness", were more along the lines of Fox News viewers. They hated Obama, especially by 2012.
Maybe it's because I have lived in Wisconsin for some time and grew up in NE Pennsylvania, but it's not hard for me to imagine Obama-Trump voters at all. I grew up around (and now work with) some folks who have that voting pattern. They're not the norm, but they're not a mystery to me. It may also help that, although I am college-educated, I now work primarily with people who are not. I cannot overstate the fact that there are just many, many people who vote but who do not have super-strong feelings about it. Or they vote, but only in Presidential years, which kind of demonstrates this. Or they vote but are still kind of disengaged because they often feel that however they vote, it won't make as much of a difference in their lives as everyone says it will.
Good food for thought. So then the big question: how do you see them thinking about this election?
Perhaps part of the conclusion is that they may flip on a dime and make a last-second call based on their gut.
It varies in the conversations I have had, but I know a number of people leaning back toward Trump even if they voted for Biden in 2020. Here are a few observations on why with the usual caveats that apply to anecdote:
1. Biden reads as weak, old, not in charge, "doing what his staff says." Trump reads as strong even if impulsive or brash.
2. Inflation is key and people resent being told the economy is great when everything is more expensive. Regardless of the details, they associate Trump with good economic times and Biden with bad. (My personal take is that even though COVID was not good, they also associate the stimmy checks, child tax credit, enhanced UI, expanded food stamps, etc with the Trump era more than the Biden era regardless of who did what. Inflation is extra bad for Biden because it comes jarringly after a time when working people were actually doing OK.
3. "There weren't any wars when Trump was in office."
4. Abortion bans are not popular and do cut against Trump.
5. Trump court cases, especially the NY one, don't register much.
6. The "threat to democracy" framing is not all that powerful or persuasive, at least with these types of voters.
7. Trans stuff comes up as an example of Democrats going too far left.
8. Israel/Gaza rarely an issue for these folks except that they do NOT like seeing people on TV burning the flag or saying "Death to America." They do not like anything that even vaguely resembles George Floyd / BLM protests.
9. "I don't have to like Trump personally to vote for him" or "He might be racist but he can run the economy." etc.
10. (forgot to add this one) Crime and immigration. They don't like the idea that rules don't matter. They like order. They see videos of people shoplifting and it makes them angry and Biden/Dems never talk about that or try to downplay it.
For me, I gotta think the deciding factor here will be the economy.
I know one Obama-Trump voter. My Hispanic mother. She had hated how Romney and the rest of the Republican Party had become the party of the rich, and appreciated how Obama improved the country in his first term. She absolutely despised Hilary, especially after the deplorable comment and appreciated that Trump actually cared about poor, working class people like many of her relatives. She herself was a firmly middle class teacher, who before the election would only tell her close relatives and friends about her support for Trump, and never answer a poll or attend a rally since her circle around her was pro Hilary. She was the main reason I suspected Florida would go for Trump in 2016.
From what I recall obama to Trump voters are disproportionately white blue collar workers concentrated in the Rust Belt. Not surprising if a lot of people don't know any personally.
I have relatives* who went from Obama to Trump. Most of them stayed with Trump in 2020 but i know at least a couple voted for Biden because they'd had it with Trump's mouth. (They were fine with his policies.)
This time? None of them have much good to say about Biden, and I don't see him retaining more than half of his 2020 supporters. But only two (of about 10) are diehard Trump supporters, so we'll see.
Notes:
* - This refers to about 10 cousins and spouses, ages 55-75, living in Colorado, Michigan, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey.
-- My perception is also that my Obama-to-Trump cousins are objecting to Blue Team policies as much as to Biden. They don't dislike Biden personally, but they hold him accountable for inflation and strongly object to blue policies on immigration, crime, and education.
Conversely, they either like or don't hate Trump's policies, but most have a hard time stomaching the man.
My suspicion is that when the economy is bad and people start to suffer that policies start to matter.
Not really, because most people couldn't even describe what the economic policies of the two candidates are. I have seen many many people who will argue in favour of Trump because "the economy was way better in 2019" but I haven't seen a single person say what policies are part of the Trump platform and how they will be better for the economy compared to what Biden's plans are. The vibes matter more than anything.
When domestic conditions are bad people blame the incumbent. That's it. I'm not suggesting that the electorate has a sophisticated grasp on the policy issues, but when the economy sucks they lash out against whoever is in charge. I don't think that's particularly controversial.
That said I think Biden deserves it. The biggest problem for the last few years has been inflation and he is large responsible for that by pushing too much liquidity into the economy via overstimulation.
You're really just re-iterating my point. Yes, people really just blame/credit whichever guy happens to be in charge at the time, and usually overestimate how much power the president has over the economy in the short term. The actual proposed policies each person has to address the problems rarely even get a mention.
Yeah, there's definitely a very regional element here. I live in a state that shifted a few points (R) from 2012 to 2016. Turnout was close to flat -- so it would seem Obama-Trump voters DO exist here, somewhere. But in parts of the Midwest, that shift was 10+ points, so those voters are maybe 3-5x as numerous there.
Yeah I lived in New York City for both Obama elections and South Carolina for the last two elections so most of the voters I’ve known pretty much stayed with their original partisan votes.
I know myself, and I am an Obama-Obama-Clinton-Biden-Trump voter.
Alright, but you're commenting here and therefore an irrelevant weirdo, like me.
Oh, I happily admit to being an irrelevent weirdo!
Also an irrelevant weirdo, but I went Obama, (held nose) Romney, anything but that ****( so, Johnson), Trump. And I will happily vote for him again.
you might know some Obama Trump voters, but would they be open about it?
It's a decent question. I can only say that I don't know anyone that has told me or implied to me that that was their voting pattern.
But perhaps if you're Obama-Trump, and the vast majority of people around you hate at least one of those men, you might be more inclined towards keeping quiet about it than a dedicated partisan would be.
I am just here to note that it is confusing and irritating to read an individual be referred to as "they." The points about Gessen are interesting but every time I read that I kept hoping that part of the discussion would end as soon as possible.
Maybe it’s just me but I think people should refer to people how they want to be called, and it’s rude otherwise. If someone introduces themselves as “Tom” it would be dickish for me to call them “Tommy”. Pronouns work the same way. It’s the same principle that when someone says they’re a Christian I don’t tell them I don’t believe in fairy tales. Being respectful as a default position goes a long way I think.
Pronouns are fundamentally different than "Tom" though. Tom is a proper noun which refers to a single individual precisely because he claims that it does. And it is unique to him. There are other men named Tom (and these days, perhaps women too), but the category of "all Toms" does not convey anything other than a linguistic similarity. However, the category of "all he's" is meaningful in reality not just linguistically: it refers to men. By claiming that the term "man" or "he" is also simply a category of linguistic similarity, you divorce it from any grounding in the objective reality of maleness. Regardless of how much the postmodernists want to insist otherwise, the category of "men" refers to something very real.
It's a little like the term "white supremacy". It used to mean something real (KKK, torches, burning crosses, Nazis, etc...). Then the Left took it up as a moniker to refer to anyone they didn't like ("the scientific method is white supremacy"). Because of that, we have all lost something very important: the ability to talk easily about people who are willing to use violence to elevate white people. That's serious problem -- when you call everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi, you no longer have a word for real Nazis.
The postmodernists have made "man" and "woman" into arbitrary linguistic categories, but the underlying reality of "man" and "woman" as meaningful differences is still there (because it's not just linguistic -- it's real.) So we've had to come up with stupid terms like "pregnant people" or "penis possessors" or "chestfeeders".
It isn't about being polite. It's about whether language can be used to accurately describe reality or not. And as Phillip K Dick wrote: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, is still there." Male and female exist, even if a bunch of over-educated, navel-gazing, elitists want to disbelieve in them.
LOL, but Tommy means something very different from “Tom” which is a point you elided past. If I insist on calling Jordan Peterson “Jordie” I am making a very insulting position, and denying who he is. (We’ve all known people who purposely called people the wrong name repeatedly). My point about being polite is even if you disagree with someone, it’s jerky thing to call them the wrong pronoun on purpose.
I am very neurodivergent. I have Tourettes and I have dyspraxia. Because I have dyspraxia I largely don’t feel most of my body, at least the way most people do, and so I’m pretty divorced from the rest of my body. This is definitely biological in origin. So I have no trouble understanding why someone would feel alienated from the gender they were assigned at birth, and why this would be biological in origin in the same way autism clearly is (I have several friends who are autistic as well as people who are trans). So I honestly don’t get the anti-trans sentiment I see from so many. I mean, why do you think people are trans? (I would also add there have been plenty of trans people over the years, most of them closeted or hidden on the margins, this is nothing new to anyone over say 40 who’s spent anytime in the world).
LOL, that is not how people used to define white supremacy. The whole Jim Crow world was built on white supremacy. It fell out of fashion for a time so it’s come back in a similar form, but I live in a MAGA county, there are plenty of white supremacists about me who aren’t in the KKK. I do agree that at times the left overuses the term, but pretending that if you’re not in the KKK you can’t be a white suprematist is just silly.
You do realize that words and terms shift over time? They’re not immutable. You’re making ahistorical arguments
Yes, words do shift. In fact, the word "liberal" is a great example of that -- in Shakespeare's time it was an insult. John Locke rehabilitated it. And today, a sizeable portion of the population is reasserting it as an insult again. they may succeed; they may not. But that sort of actual linguistic change is quite slow. And that's not what's going on here. This is a concerted attempt to separate words from their underlying meanings for political purposes. It is essentially Orwellian Newspeak. And it's double-plus ungood.
"My point about being polite is even if you disagree with someone, it’s jerky thing to call them the wrong pronoun on purpose." I would actually agree with you on this and have written here that I would generally call people male or female based on what they appear to be or what they say they are, unless it's patently obvious that it's absurd (obvious dude with a beard in a dress.) The vile and transphobic Jordan Peterson has said the same thing. What he (and I) object to is being told that we have to pretend under threat of sanction. That's not liberal (in the Lockean or Millian sense) at all.
You live in MAGA country. I live in deep-blue CA, where we recently passed a law to seize the children of parents who refuse to go along with their kids gender delusions. This is most definitely not just about being polite.
LOL, whenever people use “Orwellian doublespeak” they’re almost always the ones employing Orwellian doublespeak. The notion that the only white supremacists as opposed to pretty much the whole white South was the KKK could not be more wrong.
I’ve known a fair number of trans people, and none of them have gotten upset at me if I slip and use the wrong pronoun. They’ve all been super chill about it at least to my face. There are obviously some jerk trans people out there but it’s a big country so you have all kinds of people out there, and trans people have their mix of good and bad people just like every other group out there. But the vitriol is definitely coming much, much more from transphobes than from the trans community and its allies. When we start seeing laws aimed at restricting cis people or Christians, we can have a both sides argument but right now the bad stuff is almost entirely coming from the right.
LOL, I like the way you wrote “gender delusions”, that’s an amusing phrase by you. The hard part with not posting links about things such as the gender law you’re talking about is I am not entirely sure what law you are talking about. I will say it doesn’t seem to pass the smell test, not with you going on about “gender delusions”. The nearest i can come up with is California passed a law giving parents of gender dysphoria children sanctuary from right wing transphobic states. There also appears to be a law that allows courts to take into account gender affirming care when it comes to custody battles. I am not sure whether this is for any parent in California or if this already existed and it applies to say a parent who moves to California from Texas to get it rather than allowing Texas to have jurisdiction. I may be wrong, but the burden of proof that California is yanking kids out of their homes if on you.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/10/facebook-posts/new-california-law-transgender-youths-doesnt-remov/
"pretty much the whole white South was the KKK."
I was in agreement with much of what you post, until I saw this.
I am Black and grew up in the South. This is probably the most ignorant, insulting and bigoted statement I have seen. Disappointing.
You apparently don't know much about American history. Millions of southern whites risked their lives to help Blacks fight for their civil rights.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/california-governor-signs-bill-offering-legal-refuge-transgender-youth-rcna50240
California will refuse to honor parental rights if a minor says they're trans but their parents won't affirm. That simple.
Also, CA judges are now routinely considering parental affirmation as part of child custody proceedings. So Mom wants to put a 12 year old on hormones that will sterilize her and make her grow a beard. Dad wants to let normal development play out. Many judges will now side with Mom automatically.
I live here. Please don't lecture me on the loony laws of my own home state. people who aren't here have no idea just how crazy our government is.
To this I will just say that politeness is fine, but it should not take precedence over effective communication.
By politeness I mean on the part of transphobes. If you go around intentionally being provocative about someone else’s pronouns the only real point you’re making is you’re a dick.
I can’t think of any trans person I’ve known who in person has been super particular about how I use pronouns and I’m 61 so I’m hardly some “woke” college student. They’ve all been very chill and understanding.
I have been referring to folks as they my whole life. Very common in the US South and other parts of English world (Ireland for example) to use the singular they, regardless of gender identity. Just because it bothers you doesn’t mean lots of other folks don’t do it and use it. Which is kind of the point of Nate’s article.
So have I. But using "they" to refer to someone regardless of whether they are male or female is not the same as being told "I'm a 'they' and you must call me that." That has long been Jordan Peterson's point as well. Politeness goes both ways. Be polite and call someone what they appear to be. But be polite enough not to persecute others who choose not to call you something that is clearly inaccurate or absurd.
If I kept calling Jordan Peterson Jordie or Jordo no matter how many times he corrected me at some point Peterson would be justified in calling me a jerk. Also, the pronoun police who keep refusing to call people by their profound pronouns are the ones who are actively engaging in persecution. No one in America is passing laws against people who refuse to use “they/them”
See my reply to you above. Jordan Peterson is "Jordan" precisely BECAUSE he says he is. It's a linguistic category of uniqueness, of size 1. Og sure, tehre are other "Jordans", but they don't share any real attributes with Jordan Peterson other than that linguistic similarity. If he said he was actually "Jerry", we should call him Jerry. But that's not the same as Jordan Peterson saying that he's actually a woman. Because woman isn't a linguistic category of 1. Woman is a set of things in the real world, not just a category of language.
I can claim to be "Brian" or I can claim to be "Paul" and expect you to call me that. But I can't claim to be a dragon and expect you to treat me as a dragon. The first 2 requests are reasonable and polite; the 3rd is simply absurd.
“But be polite enough not to persecute others who choose not to call you something that is clearly inaccurate or absurd.”
And, please be polite to realize you do not get to decide neither what is “inaccurate” nor “absurd”. Just because it is “clear” to you doesn’t mean it is either right or polite. You can simply be “clearly” wrong and lack insight to your own incorrect belief. Hence, why it is polite to err to other’s statements of identity instead of your judgements about their identity. You silly goose. : D
Who does get to? If a group of people insist that the sky is green, are we all expected to nod along and say "yep, the sky is green" just so we don't offend them? Or if they say "bullets don't actually kill you"? Or "men can get pregnant"?
These are patently absurd statements not because I or anyone else say they are. They are absurd because they they fail to accurately describe reality. A bearded man who insists he should be allowed to use the women's showers at the gym because he "identifies as a woman" is no different. It's not about his identification; it's about whether that identification corresponds to reality.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, is still there." - Phillip K Dick
No single human being can be a "they". Period. And demanding that I pretend otherwise (under threat of social or economic ruin in many cases) is simply authoritarian, actually theocratic.
“Who does get to” - They do, it’s their identity. It continues to be the reality even when you fail to believe it. Just because you fail to understand identity and fail to respect others’ face value declarations of identity, doesn’t mean it isn’t still their identity. The only thing that is absurd is your failure to see your own logic and appeals to authority undermine your beliefs, hence you’re a silly goose. Have a nice day, and when you describe yourself to others I hope they respect your wishes instead of yelling about how your identity is like empirical observations and it’s polite if you would simply let others decide facts about yourself.
I honestly don't understand this position, Jabberwocky. I try to. But then Lia Thomas goes and blows away all the NCAA women's swimming records, or some 10 year old shares a locker room with a dick. I have 3 teen daughters -- this stuff isn't abstract to me.
Americans are actually amazingly tolerant people overall. We have a live and let live ethos ingrained in our history. So if it was just "respecting their identity" it wouldn't be a problem. But it stops being that when their need to have their identity affirmed interacts with the needs of others.
You're right, endorsing the protests would cost Biden. And that is the reason he's opposing them (finally). But it's probably the worst reason to do so.
Your cease-fire question is amazing. Even Democrats oppose a cease fire if Hamas doesn't release the hostages!
Finally, using "their" as a pronoun for Masha Gessen kind of undercuts your case that it's important to use data and science and reality to form and state your opinions. It also betrays your own biases, since only the college educated and Left voluntarily use fake pronouns. Gessen may be many things, but absent multiple personalities, he's not plural.
Referring to the word "they" as a "fake" pronoun says a ton about your actual relationship to data and science.
In English "they" is not a pronoun that refers a singular object. In rare cases, we sometimes slip it in place of "it" (where sex is uncertain) since hopefully everyone recognizes that "it" is unacceptable to use for a person under any circumstances. However, that is not the case here. Gessen appears to be a man. Playing along with his desire for "they/them pronouns", endorses a belief that human sexuality is somehow uncertain or changeable based on the preference of the subject, and that is a distinctly scientific belief.
It's not about being polite. It's about whether reality actually exists.
"In English "they" is not a pronoun that refers a singular object."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Technically I am pretty sure Gessen is biologically female.
Perhaps so. I was going on a photo not extensive experience.
Actually, Charlie, no you can't. If you saw an article that said "Masha Gessen is a man" what does that mean since the word "man" no longer refers to biological reality? That's the whole point of this discussion and why this is a problem.
And no, "Masha" wasn't a clue. I don't speak Russian and don't know the common sex-specific Russian names from the 1960's.
Biological sex is data and science. Gender is culture and social norms, including social contagion.
Except that "they" is quite literally a pronoun. So calling it fake is a lie.
It's fake here in the sense that the underlying ideology is ridiculous. That was obviously the poster's meaning.
"in the sense that the underlying ideology is ridiculous"
Only terrible people think that, so I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.
DJ, you know who else insists that anyone who disagrees with his interpretation of the world is "a terrible person"? Donald Trump.
I think you're a wee bit brainwashed here.