You are appealing to downstream consequences of gay marriage validating slippery slope arguments made before gay marriage was legal.
But so far as I can tell, none of the downstream consequences that have occurred (and that you cite) are related to the parade of horribles that social conservatives appealed to ahead of time have come to pass. The pre-gay marriage complaints were about animal marriage (where you have some idiot saying a thing as alleged movement toward that goal) and churches being compelled to marry gay people (when the courts have blocked much less intrusive anti-discrimination measures on religious liberty grounds).
To be clear, I think the way anti-gun activists lump suicide and homicide together when discussing gun deaths or gun violence is extremely misleading. They're both obviously very bad, but that doesn't mean that a policy response to address one is going to do a hell of a lot of good for the other.
Suicide is almost tautologically a mental health problem, while the relation between mental health and homicide rates is much murkier. Outreach to gang members can help with homicide rates, but is unlikely to do much to reduce suicides.
We are sitting, however, in a place where there have been many consequences, but none of the bad ones.
Even if you count "mandating baking of cakes for gay weddings" as a bad outcome (debatable) that was predicted (not so much), such mandates have fared badly in court, and your argument critically depends on court decisions as part of its chain of causality.
In general, gun deaths will be spread across suicide, which is the majority of firearm deaths nationally (~26k, per the CDC), then homicide as a close second (~21k, ibid. and then accidents, which are a distant third, accounting for a few hundred deaths a year. Police shootings are also generally treated as separate and probably account for about as many gun deaths as accidents.
It's maybe possible that gun deaths, which make up about half of both overall homicides and suicides, outpace accidental deaths among people under 18 in NM. Regrettably, the data easily available on the NM webpage neither supports nor refutes this, as it provides age- and cause-stratified death statistics only for the top 10 overall causes of death, with no breakouts between gun- and non-gun-related deaths, and age cuts that don't align with the common definitions of child vs adult.
All in all this is about what I've come to expect from easily accessible state-provided data sources about important public health issues: a complete PITA.
I just wrapped up Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, and I'm sorry to say that it was pretty bad. I'm a sucker for this sort of murder mystery VN-style game, and this one still felt like a slog to get through. It has a lot of the same staff as the Danganronpa series, which carries through to the art, character designs, and music, in a way that begs constant comparisons, and those comparisons are not flattering.
Very mild spoilers ahead
The biggest problem, I would say, is the scenario writing. You have to solve five murder mysteries, and a sixth "ultimate mystery" that explains all the weirdness in the game's lore and setting. Two of the five murder mysteries were actively bad--featuring culprits doing nonsensical things just to make things a little trickier--and none of the mysteries were actually noticeably good or memorable. The ultimate mystery is not so bad on its own terms, but is really dropped in your lap with very little foreshadowing from the earlier chapters. Instead of finally getting to answer questions that have been bugging you all game long, you mostly get to answer questions that were first posed five minutes ago in a series of info dumps.
Once you get past the disappointing plot and pacing, though, you have to deal with the characters, who come in two varieties: unmemorable, and extremely annoying. In particular, Shinigami, your constant companion through the mysteries, is grating in the extreme, providing unfunny comic relief and an unending stream of vicious, gendered insults directed at the other female characters. She gets a little growth towards the end, but not enough to make the supposedly sad parting with her during the denouement feel like anything but a relief. Also, you team up with four other detectives during your journey, and only one of them did anything interesting, instead of just embodying some archetype (cool veteran, irritating horndog, airhead) in an uninspired manner.
There were also cringe-inducing levels of fanservice.
All in all, I would avoid this one, even if you are a fan of the mystery VN genre like I am. Maybe even especially if you're a fan, since this one will constantly be reminding you of other, better games.
I’m wondering why some bog standard liberals or center-right types are tolerate of radical thinkers and others are not.
Here are some reasons, in no particular order:
You can be pretty close to the center in some ways and very open to radicalism in others. My own views are a mix of run-of-the-mill center-left stuff with occasional intrusions of crankery, and I don't think I'm that unusual in that regard. Indeed, a lot of people near the median are near the median not because they have a bunch of milquetoast moderate positions, but because they have a bunch of batshit Leftist beliefs balanced out by a bunch of batshit Rightist positions.
Not every weird radical position has an overwhelming Left-Right valence. I occasionally advocate for UBI, which would be a radical overhaul of our approach to the welfare state, but one that is popular more with people who are weirdos than people who are identifiably Left or Right. It's no coincidence that the last person to get non-zero attention for UBI-boosting was Andrew Yang.
You can engage with politics for all sorts of reasons, and many of them will push you towards tolerating weird ideologues even if you have little use for their positions. Maybe you think you can harness their energy to pull your diverse coalition forward without having to concede too much. Maybe you find it entertaining to think about something other than whether a 3 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough for a change. Or maybe it's a good way to burnish your reputation as someone who is open-minded enough to just talk to anybody.
Rather paternalism is the view that the state may coerce citizens for their own good. Food stamps are paternalistic but a universal basic income is not.
This is a great example, and also, I think, a way in which you sometimes end up as a paternalistic result due to a compromise between other, less paternalistic impulses.
Some people who politically support food stamps would definitely prefer UBI, and an objection to paternalism is a big part of why.
Other people who politically support food stamps would prefer not spending on welfare at all, but if their taxes are going to the poor, they want to be sure the poor "really need" it.
The resulting compromise is more paternalistic than either faction's preferred approach.
(That said, there are doubtless sincerely paternalistic food stamp supporters who think it's the right policy instead of the least bad policy they can eke out.)
Some of this is the different party makeups. The Democratic Party is much less cohesive than the GOP, which has many downsides, but one major upside is it’s very hard to herd cats off a cliff
You'll get a lot more of that by citing her than saying it's been going around, because these things do go around--it's the nature of virality and outrage in this modern age. Less still if you find it after some other, less incendiary sources have had a chance to follow up and investigate, which has happened in a few cases.
You will make that much easier if you simply do not us LoTT as a source.
Because when you do use her as a source, a lot of people (including quite a few parents) are going to see those as the only two choices, because she is presenting those "worst examples" as part of a program to smear a larger group of people, and they won't want to cooperate.
You want to get them to have the conversation you want to have, acknowledge the bad behavior, and agree to address it in ways that rebuild a measure of trust?
Make it easy for them to trust you enough to have that conversation. An easy--even trivial--way to do this is to exclude LoTT from the conversation except to condemn her and make it clear that you have nothing to do with her.
That's incompatible with treating her as someone who raises good points that must be addressed.
The problem is not that the videos are fake: the problem is that she lumps in innocuous things--basically people just being gay or trans--with the nuts and then calls the whole lot of them groomers.
Also, she's happy to broadcast others' lies without any sort of correction. A lesser sin, perhaps, but still not remotely good.
OK but are you interested in awful stuff not being condoned, or are you interested in it being somehow connected to the specific nuts she's picking?
Because I cannot imagine why the specific nuts she's picking matter, and if they don't, there should be no problem building a consensus against it which doesn't refer to them in detail.
If there is a problem there--if you can't build that consensus without reference to an alleged dataset being compiled by a far-right bigot who is very obviously building an anti-LGBT Death Laser--that should perhaps give you pause about what's really going on here.
Q is "You should not make it appear like you are on her side."
Like it or not, that's what drawing attention to the nuts that she picks will do. It will be counterproductive by polarizing the issue in such a way that the people you think should be acknowledging the nuts will have very strong incentives not to do so.
So that's the downside to using her to support your argument.
It’s not walking and chewing gum. It’s having your cake and eating it too.
She’s building an Alexandrian Death Laser. It’s really obvious to the people she’s aiming said Death Laser at, and lots of other people besides.
Asking the targets to forget all about that to pay attention to the nuts she’s picking to power her Death Laser is not going to work.
You can pick your own nuts.
Or just come up with the kinds of policy solutions that people can comfortably sign on to even if they don’t believe the nuts really exist. That could work too.
Critics, including moderate Dems, have treated “defund” as synonymous with abolition, which is strange, because the abolitionists I know were not fond of “defund” as a policy or rhetorical strategy.
One key reason I think is that it was often being floated and defended on the grounds that it would be a good way to hold the police accountable.
Other elements made good sense to me, but I never really understood how that part would work. It also, probably inadvertently, mirrored a lot of Rightward rhetoric about defunding various agencies, usually ones that the Right regards as performing fundamentally illegitimate functions.
Because LoTT, as awful as she is, is merely acting as a nutpicker. If Team Good isn’t even willing to argue “LOTT IS NUTPICKING!” but “YOU JUST HATE GAY PEOPLE!”, they’re going to find themselves explaining the subtle nuances of the Abolish the Police movement and how, seriously, the Police cannot be reformed. Despite, you know, examples.
She is not merely acting as a nutpicker, and the ways in which she is not merely being a nutpicker goes a long way towards explaining why your recommended approach will not work. People won't ignore the overall bigoted sleaze she engages in, and they shouldn't. Especially when it comes to LGBT activists, who have a long history of being thrown under the bus by Team Blue when it became just a little to inconvenient to stick up for their rights, it won't work to say, "Well just look past the way she's smearing people who aren't doing anything wrong but being gay to focus on the other people who say crazy shit," because they know goddam well what's going on and it's not about protecting kids from teachers who say crazy shit.
You can't split the difference here. If you want people on the Left to be amenable to a compromise on this, you can't make it look like part of a wide-ranging plan to roll back LGBT rights and acceptance. The answer to LoTT from people looking for those concessions has got to be, "Fuck her, you're right to despise her and her bigotry, she is irrelevant and best ignored, and I am going to prove it by ignoring her."
If you need to bring in evidence of teachers behaving badly, find it elsewhere. Don't rely on bigots to aggregate for you.
Or else you aren't going to get a compromise. LoTT's side may get victory, but that sensible compromise you want will not be happening.
The weirdest folks are the libertarians who’ve started at least defending, if not absolutely adopting, Republican talking points, especially on culture war issues.
I believe there were a lot of libertarians who were socially and/or culturally conservative, but also confident that capital would always share and uphold their conservative values.
Responding to JB's comment from pretty deep in a thread:
But the “DEFUND!” argument really got in the way and, today, it’s embarrassing to the people in power.
The argument over what LibsOfTikTok is dragging under the streetlight is similar.
I, personally, think that arguments for making sure that LGBT kids are made to feel valid, kids in LGBT homes are made to feel valid, and so on, are GOOD ARGUMENTS. WE NEED TO BE DOING THAT.
OK, so you have this precisely backwards.
LoTT is the person yelling about "defunding the police" (or, you know, firing gay teachers for the crime of not being closeted), and calling anybody who disagrees with her a "bootlicker" (or, you know, a "groomer").
She's advancing an alleged reform agenda aimed at bringing alleged accountability to alleged corrupt institutions.
And you're saying that people who are appalled by her extreme rhetoric and far-right bigotry should look past those things and focus on the stuff almost everybody agrees is bad. Why is the expectation different here than it was people who were turned off by the policy agenda and rhetoric of Defund advocates?
I am already not looking forward to the “nobody was arguing for that! You’re nutpicking! He was an outlier!” conversations.
Really? Because it looks to me that the outliers that we're being told to ignore here are not only high-profile Twitter coprophages like LoTT, but also actual GOP officials holding statewide office, not a few randos with green hair on TikTok.
OK, so you just want to laugh at the libs being owned, and think that none of us have any sort of valid concerns about the impact of the campaign to pass laws like FL's on LGBT kids, parents, and teachers.
That's what I conclude from your use of the second person pronoun in your reply.
If that's not what you think, you are not communicating what you think very well
It wouldn't resolve it, but it make it much easier to resolve.
Like the best way to peel off the extremist members of the Left from more moderate ones is to present the moderate ones with a clear understanding that your approach will respect their entirely reasonable concerns.
So far the strategy undertaken by the Right, here, is to do the exact opposite at pretty much every turn.
Again, if you just want to laugh at libs being owned, this may work out in a way you enjoy. If, on the other hand, you agree that those reasonable concerns should be acknowledged and respected, you would do well to presenting an alternative that does that while blocking the stuff that the vast majority of people are uncomfortable with
Also not for nothing but it's absolutely diametrically opposed to the stance that parents who consent to their kids receiving gender affirming care are abusers who should suffer criminal penalties and lose custody of their children.
And it further ties in with schools, since teachers are being told they're mandated reporters who have a legal responsibility to report parents of trans kids to CPS.
But it's the Left that treats parents as the enemy.
Sure.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
You are appealing to downstream consequences of gay marriage validating slippery slope arguments made before gay marriage was legal.
But so far as I can tell, none of the downstream consequences that have occurred (and that you cite) are related to the parade of horribles that social conservatives appealed to ahead of time have come to pass. The pre-gay marriage complaints were about animal marriage (where you have some idiot saying a thing as alleged movement toward that goal) and churches being compelled to marry gay people (when the courts have blocked much less intrusive anti-discrimination measures on religious liberty grounds).
"
Following up because I missed the edit window:
To be clear, I think the way anti-gun activists lump suicide and homicide together when discussing gun deaths or gun violence is extremely misleading. They're both obviously very bad, but that doesn't mean that a policy response to address one is going to do a hell of a lot of good for the other.
Suicide is almost tautologically a mental health problem, while the relation between mental health and homicide rates is much murkier. Outreach to gang members can help with homicide rates, but is unlikely to do much to reduce suicides.
"
We are sitting, however, in a place where there have been many consequences, but none of the bad ones.
Even if you count "mandating baking of cakes for gay weddings" as a bad outcome (debatable) that was predicted (not so much), such mandates have fared badly in court, and your argument critically depends on court decisions as part of its chain of causality.
"
One comment on the statistics:
In general, gun deaths will be spread across suicide, which is the majority of firearm deaths nationally (~26k, per the CDC), then homicide as a close second (~21k, ibid. and then accidents, which are a distant third, accounting for a few hundred deaths a year. Police shootings are also generally treated as separate and probably account for about as many gun deaths as accidents.
It's maybe possible that gun deaths, which make up about half of both overall homicides and suicides, outpace accidental deaths among people under 18 in NM. Regrettably, the data easily available on the NM webpage neither supports nor refutes this, as it provides age- and cause-stratified death statistics only for the top 10 overall causes of death, with no breakouts between gun- and non-gun-related deaths, and age cuts that don't align with the common definitions of child vs adult.
All in all this is about what I've come to expect from easily accessible state-provided data sources about important public health issues: a complete PITA.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Starfield”
I just wrapped up Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, and I'm sorry to say that it was pretty bad. I'm a sucker for this sort of murder mystery VN-style game, and this one still felt like a slog to get through. It has a lot of the same staff as the Danganronpa series, which carries through to the art, character designs, and music, in a way that begs constant comparisons, and those comparisons are not flattering.
Very mild spoilers ahead
The biggest problem, I would say, is the scenario writing. You have to solve five murder mysteries, and a sixth "ultimate mystery" that explains all the weirdness in the game's lore and setting. Two of the five murder mysteries were actively bad--featuring culprits doing nonsensical things just to make things a little trickier--and none of the mysteries were actually noticeably good or memorable. The ultimate mystery is not so bad on its own terms, but is really dropped in your lap with very little foreshadowing from the earlier chapters. Instead of finally getting to answer questions that have been bugging you all game long, you mostly get to answer questions that were first posed five minutes ago in a series of info dumps.
Once you get past the disappointing plot and pacing, though, you have to deal with the characters, who come in two varieties: unmemorable, and extremely annoying. In particular, Shinigami, your constant companion through the mysteries, is grating in the extreme, providing unfunny comic relief and an unending stream of vicious, gendered insults directed at the other female characters. She gets a little growth towards the end, but not enough to make the supposedly sad parting with her during the denouement feel like anything but a relief. Also, you team up with four other detectives during your journey, and only one of them did anything interesting, instead of just embodying some archetype (cool veteran, irritating horndog, airhead) in an uninspired manner.
There were also cringe-inducing levels of fanservice.
All in all, I would avoid this one, even if you are a fan of the mystery VN genre like I am. Maybe even especially if you're a fan, since this one will constantly be reminding you of other, better games.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/28/2023”
Here are some reasons, in no particular order:
You can be pretty close to the center in some ways and very open to radicalism in others. My own views are a mix of run-of-the-mill center-left stuff with occasional intrusions of crankery, and I don't think I'm that unusual in that regard. Indeed, a lot of people near the median are near the median not because they have a bunch of milquetoast moderate positions, but because they have a bunch of batshit Leftist beliefs balanced out by a bunch of batshit Rightist positions.
Not every weird radical position has an overwhelming Left-Right valence. I occasionally advocate for UBI, which would be a radical overhaul of our approach to the welfare state, but one that is popular more with people who are weirdos than people who are identifiably Left or Right. It's no coincidence that the last person to get non-zero attention for UBI-boosting was Andrew Yang.
You can engage with politics for all sorts of reasons, and many of them will push you towards tolerating weird ideologues even if you have little use for their positions. Maybe you think you can harness their energy to pull your diverse coalition forward without having to concede too much. Maybe you find it entertaining to think about something other than whether a 3 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough for a change. Or maybe it's a good way to burnish your reputation as someone who is open-minded enough to just talk to anybody.
"
The driver was charged with a mooving violation.
On “Paternalism as Government Policy”
This is a great example, and also, I think, a way in which you sometimes end up as a paternalistic result due to a compromise between other, less paternalistic impulses.
Some people who politically support food stamps would definitely prefer UBI, and an objection to paternalism is a big part of why.
Other people who politically support food stamps would prefer not spending on welfare at all, but if their taxes are going to the poor, they want to be sure the poor "really need" it.
The resulting compromise is more paternalistic than either faction's preferred approach.
(That said, there are doubtless sincerely paternalistic food stamp supporters who think it's the right policy instead of the least bad policy they can eke out.)
On “Kevin McCarthy Under Fire”
Some of this is the different party makeups. The Democratic Party is much less cohesive than the GOP, which has many downsides, but one major upside is it’s very hard to herd cats off a cliff
"
Our heavily institutionalized parties are the underlying problem, and primaries don’t fix them
On “Here Comes the Groom(ing)”
And one of the best reasons to believe you don't need to talk about it? The only source anyone ever cites is an obvious scumbag bigot!
You get how that works, right?
I will. I often have in the past.
It's usually not terribly difficult if you're discussing real problems instead of Culture War chum.
And that should carry over here, too.
"
There's dose-response.
You'll get a lot more of that by citing her than saying it's been going around, because these things do go around--it's the nature of virality and outrage in this modern age. Less still if you find it after some other, less incendiary sources have had a chance to follow up and investigate, which has happened in a few cases.
"
Yes, and you make her relevant by citing her as someone who brings up important examples!
"
You will make that much easier if you simply do not us LoTT as a source.
Because when you do use her as a source, a lot of people (including quite a few parents) are going to see those as the only two choices, because she is presenting those "worst examples" as part of a program to smear a larger group of people, and they won't want to cooperate.
You want to get them to have the conversation you want to have, acknowledge the bad behavior, and agree to address it in ways that rebuild a measure of trust?
Make it easy for them to trust you enough to have that conversation. An easy--even trivial--way to do this is to exclude LoTT from the conversation except to condemn her and make it clear that you have nothing to do with her.
That's incompatible with treating her as someone who raises good points that must be addressed.
"
The problem is not that the videos are fake: the problem is that she lumps in innocuous things--basically people just being gay or trans--with the nuts and then calls the whole lot of them groomers.
Also, she's happy to broadcast others' lies without any sort of correction. A lesser sin, perhaps, but still not remotely good.
"
OK but are you interested in awful stuff not being condoned, or are you interested in it being somehow connected to the specific nuts she's picking?
Because I cannot imagine why the specific nuts she's picking matter, and if they don't, there should be no problem building a consensus against it which doesn't refer to them in detail.
If there is a problem there--if you can't build that consensus without reference to an alleged dataset being compiled by a far-right bigot who is very obviously building an anti-LGBT Death Laser--that should perhaps give you pause about what's really going on here.
"
Q is "You should not make it appear like you are on her side."
Like it or not, that's what drawing attention to the nuts that she picks will do. It will be counterproductive by polarizing the issue in such a way that the people you think should be acknowledging the nuts will have very strong incentives not to do so.
So that's the downside to using her to support your argument.
What on Earth is the upside?
"
It’s not walking and chewing gum. It’s having your cake and eating it too.
She’s building an Alexandrian Death Laser. It’s really obvious to the people she’s aiming said Death Laser at, and lots of other people besides.
Asking the targets to forget all about that to pay attention to the nuts she’s picking to power her Death Laser is not going to work.
You can pick your own nuts.
Or just come up with the kinds of policy solutions that people can comfortably sign on to even if they don’t believe the nuts really exist. That could work too.
"
One key reason I think is that it was often being floated and defended on the grounds that it would be a good way to hold the police accountable.
Other elements made good sense to me, but I never really understood how that part would work. It also, probably inadvertently, mirrored a lot of Rightward rhetoric about defunding various agencies, usually ones that the Right regards as performing fundamentally illegitimate functions.
"
She is not merely acting as a nutpicker, and the ways in which she is not merely being a nutpicker goes a long way towards explaining why your recommended approach will not work. People won't ignore the overall bigoted sleaze she engages in, and they shouldn't. Especially when it comes to LGBT activists, who have a long history of being thrown under the bus by Team Blue when it became just a little to inconvenient to stick up for their rights, it won't work to say, "Well just look past the way she's smearing people who aren't doing anything wrong but being gay to focus on the other people who say crazy shit," because they know goddam well what's going on and it's not about protecting kids from teachers who say crazy shit.
You can't split the difference here. If you want people on the Left to be amenable to a compromise on this, you can't make it look like part of a wide-ranging plan to roll back LGBT rights and acceptance. The answer to LoTT from people looking for those concessions has got to be, "Fuck her, you're right to despise her and her bigotry, she is irrelevant and best ignored, and I am going to prove it by ignoring her."
If you need to bring in evidence of teachers behaving badly, find it elsewhere. Don't rely on bigots to aggregate for you.
Or else you aren't going to get a compromise. LoTT's side may get victory, but that sensible compromise you want will not be happening.
That seems bad to me. AFAICT it seems bad to you.
"
I believe there were a lot of libertarians who were socially and/or culturally conservative, but also confident that capital would always share and uphold their conservative values.
Amazingly enough, things didn't pan out that way.
"
Responding to JB's comment from pretty deep in a thread:
OK, so you have this precisely backwards.
LoTT is the person yelling about "defunding the police" (or, you know, firing gay teachers for the crime of not being closeted), and calling anybody who disagrees with her a "bootlicker" (or, you know, a "groomer").
She's advancing an alleged reform agenda aimed at bringing alleged accountability to alleged corrupt institutions.
And you're saying that people who are appalled by her extreme rhetoric and far-right bigotry should look past those things and focus on the stuff almost everybody agrees is bad. Why is the expectation different here than it was people who were turned off by the policy agenda and rhetoric of Defund advocates?
Really? Because it looks to me that the outliers that we're being told to ignore here are not only high-profile Twitter coprophages like LoTT, but also actual GOP officials holding statewide office, not a few randos with green hair on TikTok.
"
OK, so you just want to laugh at the libs being owned, and think that none of us have any sort of valid concerns about the impact of the campaign to pass laws like FL's on LGBT kids, parents, and teachers.
That's what I conclude from your use of the second person pronoun in your reply.
If that's not what you think, you are not communicating what you think very well
"
It wouldn't resolve it, but it make it much easier to resolve.
Like the best way to peel off the extremist members of the Left from more moderate ones is to present the moderate ones with a clear understanding that your approach will respect their entirely reasonable concerns.
So far the strategy undertaken by the Right, here, is to do the exact opposite at pretty much every turn.
Again, if you just want to laugh at libs being owned, this may work out in a way you enjoy. If, on the other hand, you agree that those reasonable concerns should be acknowledged and respected, you would do well to presenting an alternative that does that while blocking the stuff that the vast majority of people are uncomfortable with
"
Also not for nothing but it's absolutely diametrically opposed to the stance that parents who consent to their kids receiving gender affirming care are abusers who should suffer criminal penalties and lose custody of their children.
And it further ties in with schools, since teachers are being told they're mandated reporters who have a legal responsibility to report parents of trans kids to CPS.
But it's the Left that treats parents as the enemy.
Sure.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.