Getting married is not a matter of simply deciding, one day, to get married, and then going out and picking a marriage off the marriage tree. You generally need to find another person who you want to marry, and who wants to marry you, and then get married. If you want a marriage that brings all the benefits that Kearney describes in a book, the person who you marry needs to be able to up to the task of providing the emotional, practical, and economic contributions that make those benefits happen.
Finding the right partner is not entirely trivial. A lot of the social concerns that conservatives have been quick to point out in recent decades, and which land more heavily on people with lower incomes, make finding that sort of partner even harder.
If you're bowling alone, you aren't going to be meeting a future spouse at the bowling alley.
The underlying assumption of a lot of the pro-marriage discourse assumes that marriage would provide the same sort of benefit to everyone that gets married, but this is not a foregone conclusion, and it might well be that the people who would benefit the least overlap greatly with the people who choose not to get married. Indeed, it would be kinda weird if those people weren't less likely to get married!
The deteriorating social norm against having kids outside of marriage is doubtless connected with the increase in single women having kids, but how many of the marriages that aren't happening are the ones that would have happened not due to practical or economic benefits, but simply due to the need to avoid social stigma?
The case that gun control reduces suicide is, in my understanding, much stronger than the case it reduces homicide. But people aren't generally terrified of suicide the way they are of homicide, so it doesn't provide nearly as much traction for gun control advocates.
Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?
Unless the other seed somehow clarifies what exactly we mean by "poly marriage", and what giving it legal recognition would accomplish, the answer is no.
On the slippery slope question the question is this: What is the Secular Argument against Poly?
The most critical argument is that there's no concerted push for them, and without that push, there's no one pointing our a clear policy problem that they would solve.
This stands in stark contrast to gay marriage, which was pushed by activists who wanted straightforward things for obvious reasons.
Pretty much all of the other slippery slope arguments founder for the same reason.
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Brief Aside On Cancel Culture”
The stupid games and stupid prizes involved differ in nuanced ways, but the underlying principle remains the same.
On “The Marriage Privilege”
Getting married is not a matter of simply deciding, one day, to get married, and then going out and picking a marriage off the marriage tree. You generally need to find another person who you want to marry, and who wants to marry you, and then get married. If you want a marriage that brings all the benefits that Kearney describes in a book, the person who you marry needs to be able to up to the task of providing the emotional, practical, and economic contributions that make those benefits happen.
Finding the right partner is not entirely trivial. A lot of the social concerns that conservatives have been quick to point out in recent decades, and which land more heavily on people with lower incomes, make finding that sort of partner even harder.
If you're bowling alone, you aren't going to be meeting a future spouse at the bowling alley.
The underlying assumption of a lot of the pro-marriage discourse assumes that marriage would provide the same sort of benefit to everyone that gets married, but this is not a foregone conclusion, and it might well be that the people who would benefit the least overlap greatly with the people who choose not to get married. Indeed, it would be kinda weird if those people weren't less likely to get married!
The deteriorating social norm against having kids outside of marriage is doubtless connected with the increase in single women having kids, but how many of the marriages that aren't happening are the ones that would have happened not due to practical or economic benefits, but simply due to the need to avoid social stigma?
At a certain point, "Why don't you
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
The case that gun control reduces suicide is, in my understanding, much stronger than the case it reduces homicide. But people aren't generally terrified of suicide the way they are of homicide, so it doesn't provide nearly as much traction for gun control advocates.
"
Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?
Unless the other seed somehow clarifies what exactly we mean by "poly marriage", and what giving it legal recognition would accomplish, the answer is no.
"
It's one thing to predict that M (or N, or even Q) will follow L.
It's another thing entirely to invent a horrifying new letter called "flarg" and insist that it will follow L.
"
Turing Police, arrest this man...
"
The most critical argument is that there's no concerted push for them, and without that push, there's no one pointing our a clear policy problem that they would solve.
This stands in stark contrast to gay marriage, which was pushed by activists who wanted straightforward things for obvious reasons.
Pretty much all of the other slippery slope arguments founder for the same reason.
"
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.