Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..
Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…
Is just to pay your politicians more money.
People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.
Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.
I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.
That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.
If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost. Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level? Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…
Minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies are the perfect example of why testing won’t work. All of them will cause effects like migration if tested in a region that won’t apply if used universally. All of them have inflation fears that won’t be seen if tested in a small population. All of them have work disincentive effects that won’t be visible if tested in a small region. And all of them can have effects that are swamped out by economic fluctuations that are unrelated and therefore can have difficult to interpret effects.
And wait, don’t we have to test miti’s iron fist control of the central government before we test any of the rest? I think we’ve gotten trapped in an infinite recursion here, we have to test the act of experimentation before we test experiments.
To a degree, but incremental testing will have less of those effects, as would varied testing across various areas. It should be possible to extract a decent amount of information just from testing lesser versions of all of them in multiple differing areas.
After all, you have to test them in a world where migration exists, unless one of your tests is banning migration. If your policy fails so badly that you have to build a wall to keep people from leaving the country, that is very important evidence in itself. Likewise, if immigrants swarm into one of your districts to free ride.
For some items that do require national-scale implementation (aside from the rather dramatic alternative of splitting the country in two, which would have been quite interesting to see with Commies/Anarchists), the policymakers should be registering their bets before it goes into effect. (Additional considerations modifying those bets can be worked in later, it will get a little complicated, but should be possible.)
Iron fist control of the national government was presented only as a framing device.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
look man, all I’m saying is I want a semi-secret anti-corruption unit to rope in and either get cooperation from or impersonate various businesses and offshore banks so that my politicians never know whether any kickback/bribe attempt is actually an elaborate sting operation,
and make my politicians pseudonymous so that would-be kickbackers can’t be sure who they’re dealing with is the real legislator they wanted to bribe or a member of the anti-corruption task force impersonating one as part of an elaborate sting operation, or replace them with think tanks which cost more money to bribe
I’m really a very reasonable person
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
I mean, you can view the anarchist/leninist debate (which is what I was thinking of) as moral, but you can also see it argued in very technocratic terms. Anarchists argued a Leninist state would become oppressive. Leninists argued a anarchist non-state would be either impossible, or end up a state in all but name.
And the whole concept of “testing“ isn’t really possible. What works for small groups doesn’t for large groups, what applies to a part doesn’t apply to the whole. Meaningfully testing these thing is hard, hell, look at the replicability crisis in the social sciences, and those are much easier problems.
For a total revamp, sure. If you have iron fist control of the central government, though, you can do some pretty extreme tests, far more daring and dangerous than I would do, with the organization of the provincial governments, however. There are ways out of this testability mess, but they don’t really appeal to the political mind IME since political justification is often from perceived moral binding.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Central Director of the North American Union wants to test the results of various new minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies programs, and the National Technocrats have seized power and excluded all others from the legislature. She could have the legislative factions lay out multiple plans that are estimated to have a reasonable chance of success, then have the leadership of various jurisdictions rank them according to which they would like most for their district, and use that to guide district selection with a reasonable variation to choose from. A set date could then be set for evaluation before the next round, probably 3-5 years.
Even the United States in its current form provides some evidence from differing experiments, but our politicals mostly just throw it out amd go with whatever policy they already wanted.
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump.
very relevant
(cw: suicide, drug overdose, Trump, comparisons of things that aren’t like the AIDS crisis to the AIDS crisis.)
This is interesting, but it shies away from a lot of overt revelations.
The author had to lump together various types of death to make the comparison to the AIDS crisis work, but it kinda occludes a serious issue. There is a surprising increase in white (and Native American/Alaskan) suicide rates, but it’s not the cause of that terrifying map atop this post. A 40% increase in suicide rates makes up 6.4 deaths per 100,000 people, but at most that’d drop the red areas to a mere yellow. Suicide’s always been a rural issue, and we’ve had jumps in recessions before. By contrast, the increase in drug-related overdoses looks like this. Some of the more vulnerable populations had 30 death per 100,000 capita increases in drug and alcohol-related deaths (Case-Deaton 2016).
The other is the definition of “unnecessariat”. Scott Alexander tries to discuss this in terms of the (low) unemployment rate, but between SSDI and the nature of the term, that metric’s essential been consumed by Goodhart’s law. Labour force participation is the central focus, and it’s down significantly in these states. West Virginia notably under 50% of adults, and worse in some counties! But that’s been a long, slow decline for quite some time, and indeed if you look both the total employment count and total population hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. They’re not completely jobless – but they’re increasingly fractured between those with short-term jobs and those on the disability rolls who can’t take any above-the-table work without losing money in toto. There’s not so clear a delimination between the unnecessariat and precariat, or even the secretariat, as implied here.
This also leads to the awkward issue of mobility. Population growth for West Virginia has been incredibly low for over two decades, sometimes even dipping negative. That’s not because West Virginians have lost appetite for underprotected hetero sex, but because those who can, leave for greener pastures. You get a sort of evaporative cooling, with the remaining population too old or ill to work, with too much capital sunk into houses you couldn’t even get fire insurance on, or tied to those who do. Divorce plays a heavy role, not just because of broken relationships, but also from lawyer and court fees.
((It’s worth pointing out, here, that there’s not a single Great White Ghetto, but multiple, just as Baltimore’s problems are different from Detroit’s are different from Oakland’s. The Rust Belt’s issues have overlap with the Appalachia, and the Appalachia’s with the Plains, but they’ve significant differences that adding all the groups together obscure. Indeed, not all of the Great White Ghetto is even white! The suicide and drug epidemic has struck Native Americans first, and some enclaves through the southern Appalacians are majority-black. Not all of these matters with generalize.))
It’s also worth pointing out the sense of decay that’s universal throughout these areas, like something out of a post-apocalyptic film. That’s most obvious in Detroit, of course, where one driving up i-75 gets a scenic view of a crumbling concrete parking garage, of the sort most Coastals would normally only see when visiting other countries after cautions not to drink the water. But between the amateur eschatology on signboards and Grandpa’s Cheese Barn there’s countless barns falling apart, and an even greater number of houses with ill-patched roofs or long-past-expiration siding. Where things are brand new, it’s often because no one owns them – tractors either date back to the seventies or are controlled by a far-off computer, motels are either rusted and closed or ‘safe’ franchises. Skyscrapers in the midwest won’t even publish their capacity (never high to start with), and remain maintained as much by embarrassment as by popular support.
There’s folk who try to undo this – anyone who’s done their taxes through TurboTax has, unknowingly, contributed to an attempt to revive downtown Detroit – but it just ends up being fancy storefront with no actually homes or businesses inside. Literally: there is a class of construction made to look used without occupants.
((This decay combined with deep-but-few-roots end up with bad economic structural differences: you see alcohol, pepsi, firearms, and trucks used as mediums of exchange and stores of value pretty heavily, and then exchanged for labour or cash during hard times. The lure of the tipped employee comes, at least in part, from having their pay today rather than in a week and a half. But increasing commodity value and decreasing land value and manpower value and even utility of extra manpower makes for a weird barter-environment version of deflation.))
The political aspect is… more complex. There’s a whole lot more to the unnecessariat’s dislike of Sanders than just that he can’t win the primary – a good many of them see promises of free or low-cost as just more ineffective job training, hear ‘clean energy’ as another nail in the coal industry coffin and another business in California, and think of infrastructure investment as another highway overpass on the other side of the state. No one’s going to turn road trips into an American past-time again – the closest we’ve seen are folk that want to replace aircraft with trains – and certainly not enough to make the motel industry viable again.
That article also misses the sense of randomness, of assault under the pressure of unpredictable and maybe unpredictable outsiders. The speeding ticket is definitely part of it – you’ve not seen midwest decay til you see someone break down over a fifty dollar speeding ticket – but it’s really just the shadow. West Virginia’s coal mines didn’t lose production because they tapped out, but because of an intentional domestic coal phaseout and increasing political protest preventing even international shipment. For the midwest plains, the Bundy group started because a single wildlife determination put his business under, and even if most people don’t take it as far as he did, most know or know of someone who’s had to fight outsiders over similar stupid problems. ((And linking to the SLPC as a summary of LaVoy Fininicum is… tasteless, especially given the current investigation in FBI misbehavior.)) It doesn’t help that ‘outsider’ can be someone who married and moved into the county a decade ago, but if you want to understand the distrust, you have to examine that.
interesting, and sad.
Of course, having seen a bit of Tenchi again recently, it strikes me just how much each of the characters is SPACE [feudal fantasy type].
Mihoshi is of course a Space Constable and so on. Overall it’s still a chosen one farm boy warrior hero fantasy, but further emphasized by making the entire planet the backwater rural area.
And I can’t say I really object. It injects life into the setting and characters in a way that works for the kind of genre it is, and what is creativity but the finding new links between existing concepts?
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
my dream is to be cited by Vox as “Tumblr teen argumate”
It is also my dream to be cited by Vox as “Tumblr teen argumate”
the confusingly obscure nature of the Tumblr reblog makes this a virtual certainty
> in which both @argumate and @disexplications are cited by Vox as @ranma-official, who is described as a teenager living in Atlanta, Georgia
To all y'all liberal kids that are getting icky feelings about punching Nazis and other forms of violent protest:
Voldemort was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
Darth Vader was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
Jeanine Matthews and the Eurydice faction were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
President Snow and the government of Panem were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
The Homeworld Gems were stopped from destroying Earth by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
I mean damn. One Piece, Bleach, Ghost in the Shell, we can stretch it and say The Silmarillion, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron, I could probably name more if I had time, all this has in common is that the bad dudes with power WILL NOT GIVE THEIR POWER UP. EVER. It had to be TAKEN from them.
If y'all can understand this and relate to fictional characters, why can’t you do this to your fellow humans in real life?? Y'all are supporting the Death Eaters, the Empire, the bad guys you say you hate. Get your priorities in order. Get over that “Non-violence” bullshit.
I never saw Princess Leia shake hands with the Sith.
Where’s the picture, one of my followers has to have it.
@klubbhead @jetpack-jennyI’m on mobile dammit
The difference was all those baddies INITIATED the violence. Here, you’re the one initiating violence which makes you the baddies.
Hi yes umm the presence of a Nazi/fascist is an inherently violent act. Someone saying stuff like “I want a white enthnostate!” Or “[insert type of person] aren’t really human!” IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.
The existence of Nazis is violence
The existence of white nationalists is violenceThe antifa or any other group protesting the Nazis are a reactionary force. They would not exist if the Nazis didn’t exist, but they do so here we are.
The violence has already been initiated. These Nazis and fascists are killing people, are taking away rights, they’ve infiltrated police and government, they want people DEAD.
The violence is already here, and if you cannot/will not see that, you are complicit.
Words are not violence. Opinions are not violence. Nazis existing is not violence. The fact that you believe those qualify as violence tells me you’re either a troll or delusional and in either case having any kind of rational discussion will be a fruitless endeavor. Though I am curious what you’ll try to pass off as examples of Nazis and fascists killing people or taking away rights in the U.S. and what bullshit CNN article you’ll try to use as evidence.
Words lead to physical violence. Also, these people don’t stop at words, they stab people, they take away peoples rights, they murder and destroy lives. That’s violence. If we tolerate the existence of fascism, we allow it to grow and infect others. We are complicit in the violence to come. Also, I’m at work and on mobile, so I can’t hunt for sources right now, but give me a few hours, I’ll post some later tonight.
Jesus christ how do people think these fictional facist powers rose? With ‘charm’, guile, with WORDS. Theyre posion-tongued bastards that are trying to weasel their way into power. They know that if they start with all their views than they’ll be shunned right off the bat. So they sugarcoat it, they say its just their opinion, that theyre just exercising their right to free speech. It starts small and it depends on people like you @mister-christmas saying that theyre not doing anything wrong. Excusing their behaviour and, in the process condoning it, until its too late. Until theyve seized power and they can start to do what you qualify as violent acts. Get over yourself you milquetoast motherfucker.
WHY ARE WHITES LIKE THIS OH GOD
Don’t you have drugs to sell and police officers to bribe, neetsocks?
*white person voice* omg thats something only voldemort would say
“Ghost in the Shell” a series based around an elite police unit stopping terrorist and dealing with political/intelligence conspiracies is somehow “radical antifa story” doesn’t this go against the whole ACAB shit antifa spews out? Or let me guess you only saw the live action film.
Yes, must’ve been the live-action one, “left-wing anti-fascist radicals“ is not how I would describe a group of paramilitary counter-terrorist cyborgs that report only to the Prime Minister.
Of course, that isn’t the real problem here.
The real problem is the citing of fictional evidence by which liberal society feeds its own mythology about democracy, justice, tolerance, acceptance, and so on back to itself.
Yes, mythology, dear readers. The way Hitler is treated, the way World War 2 is treated, is not as a historical study but as the founding mythology for the post-war order. That doesn’t mean that Hitler was a good man - he wasn’t - but he’s essentially treated as a borderline supernatural adversary figure with an inverse halo effect.
As for the OP and some of the others, true White Nationalists are not anywhere close to obtaining real political power in the United States, unless you do definitional game-playing that essentially amounts to lying. However, every AntiFa dumbass out there hitting people with bike locks, pepper-spraying bitcoin hat wearers, and so on, is contributing to an increase in White Nationalism.
Normally, the White Nationalists don’t have much to offer. Normally, of course, when you don’t brand every single voter for a rival presidential candidate as “Fascist” and then say “we need to kill all Fascists” and a few people are stupid enough to take both seriously.
Need to get someone to promise to eat something ridiculous if Donald Trump get impeached. A hunk of granite maybe? Maybe some of the Swedish rotted fish thing?
can i volunteer to eat abstract concepts
people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.
the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.
Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors. After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.
I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.
Who do you think you are to make a reference like this, some kind of guardian?
If one is creative enough, one can reference scenes they’ve never heard of from movies they’ve never seen, books they’ve never read, mangas they’ve never written.
Or maybe I really am from the alternate timeline and I’ve just been ripping off video games and movies that will never exist, Super Love Love Demon Battle included.
The proof, using advanced Time Cycle Theory, is left as an exercise for the reader.
abstractagamid said: that’s just sweat!
nightpool said: why not just add liquid combiners to Splashing Sweat Symbol
and skin tone modifiers to the eggplant, yes
The lack of a green skintone modifier is disriminatory towards orcs! I demand RGB modifiers!
remember capitalism made your iphone so it is uncriticizable
Originally read this as the iPhone itself being uncriticizable, which, well, Apple fanatics…
The year is 2064. It has been 26 years since the United States of America collapsed in the Justice War, replaced by the Special Action District by order of the World Court as punishment for its sins. The last surviving members of the Alt Right are a group of buff tradgay paramilitary cyborgs existing in the forgotten Undercity of New York. They have just radicalized a group of trapwives into spreading the WHITEOUT virus into major Population Replenishment Centers…
You are detective GEOF BAILEY, an agender multiple system cyborg and member of the New York SAD Police, tasked with ensuring the interjustice of the last metropolis in the land that used to be known as America. Can you stop the last fascist remnants of a dead country from destroying the diversity of the city?
Shining Darknet Entertainment presents…
“I don’t like antifa because I don’t consider political violence a hammer for every nail”: good opinion worth engaging
“antifa is a terrorist group, are the real fascists” etc: really bad political analysis here, friend
describing yourself as “anti-antifa” and talking about human rights are secondary to stamping the “antifa scum” out forever: hello, friend! we have plenty of rope left since Nuremberg, so I implore you to reconsider
Antifa is a terrorist group, they are also real fascists.
Not every dumb ideology is Fascism. There is also Communism, of both the intentionally and unintentionally authorian kinds.
While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.
Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.
right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.
On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.
I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.
I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.
The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!
No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.
The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.
Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.
And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.
“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”
Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.
While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
All we need is a revolutionary vanguard, and-
Donald Trump has spent years telling outrageous lies. He’s continued to do so since assuming office, even lying about obviously verifiable things like what he’s tweeted about or the size of his inauguration crowd.
He is attacking the idea that truth matters, and trying to make people give up on telling the difference between the truth and a lie. This is dangerously disoriented.
In order to stay oriented, we need to care what’s true. This is easier said than done. In the short term, bullshit is often much more politically convenient than the truth. In the long term, if we create a world in which the truth doesn’t matter, we will end up defenseless.
We need to keep in mind that being on the right side doesn’t make everything someone might say true. Good people can tell lies. Good people can get things wrong. Their goodness doesn’t make the lie true.
Being marginalized doesn’t mean that someone always knows what they’re talking about. Being oppressed doesn’t make people infallible; being wrong doesn’t make someone privileged.
Similarly, not every rumor about a bad person is accurate. Lies told about a bad person are still lies. (And not everyone who has a bad reputation is actually a bad person.)
Be careful about spreading rumors. Learn to recognize fake news, and avoid spreading it. If something doesn’t sound true to you, ask for citations or investigate. Everyone can be wrong, and you don’t have to believe anyone without being persuaded that they are right. Evidence matters, arguments matter. (And being a good person isn’t a substitute for either.)
You can’t fight evil with bullshit. In order to fight evil, we have to care what’s true.
The rivals have been lying/bullshitting/misrepresenting/omitting a lot in their attacks on Trump. Every time I go and investigate one of the claims, I come back less trusting of the media and less trusting of the left and liberals, instead of more.
But it’s growing less surprising every day, since why was I ever foolish enough to think the Left and Liberals weren’t every bit the truth-apathetic political operatives as their rivals, when correct only correct by coincidence and not by process?
And I don’t mean to say that Trump is great, because he isn’t, but one can’t beat him on his level. He lives there.
The future of meme warfare lies in staging fake corporate versions of memes in order to discredit them.
Anyway, before I miss out on the other discourse going on: Piper Harron has basically said that universities need to fire white mathematicians, because WOC have no chance to be hired to do math otherwise.
Problematic?
Or super problematic?
No. Woke.
Dammit! Are you sure?
Does she look white to you? Woke.
Granted, I was just shitposting and hadn’t checked first, but this whole edge case wokeness thing has been more stupid than politics in general so it seemed like a good guess. Of course if a white man said the same thing it would be a sign of his racism, but SJ informally asserts that truth value is based on race, sex, and orientation of the speaker, so…
Massively uninterested in anything following the phrase “his personal demons” unless it involves a bunch of wacky demon minions that follow this guy around.
“His personal demons, Laila, Kovi, and Jiala, all battled for his affection - sometimes leaving a trail of destruction in their wake!”
- back cover, Super Love Love Demon Battle!
Anyway, before I miss out on the other discourse going on: Piper Harron has basically said that universities need to fire white mathematicians, because WOC have no chance to be hired to do math otherwise.
Problematic?
Or super problematic?
No. Woke.
I understand now that you’ve rediscovered the 13th amendment everything looks like a nail, but murder isn’t a status crime like vagrancy, some pretext to reincarnate slavery as convict leasing. We were always going to punish murder (traditionally, by hanging).
And against the complaint that even fixed-term sentences don’t come with an exit plan these days, “ease out your last few years doing off-campus catering around the most powerful people in the state” doesn’t strike me as rank barbarity tbh
The real issue isn’t the amount of suffering by inmates performing janitorial work, but creating a system in which there is a reward for incarceration other than lowering the crime rates. You get what you pay for, after all.
@cromulentenough
FWIW, i’m someone born in the UK but with background in bangladesh, and i get annoyed when other asians ask me ‘where are you FROM from’ after i tell them i’m from london the first time. It’s not just a white thing.
“But I’ve always lived in the UK,” he said, “never anyway else. I’ve not even set foot outside the British Isles.”
“Yes,” said the man, “but where are you FROM”
The man’s face opened, revealing several strange, glossy, robotic orbs. Beams of various colours and intensities swept over the questioned man’s body.
“HAPLO GROUP 2A, PRIMARY GENETIC DENSITY,” the robot man said in the middle of the restaurant.
A hush fell over the guests at the dining tables as the robot’s face slowly closed, synthetic skin seamlessly fusing to hide the cold mechanical components underneath.
“So anyhow,” said the robot man, “how about Liverpool vs. Manchester United?”
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
“Where are you from?”
California.
“No, I mean where are you from?”
Pasadena.
“No, what are you?”see also:
“What are you mixed with?”When it goes away from “hey, what’s up, are you traveling, fellow human” to “how can I categorize you” is where people start to see a clear problem.
Like, look there are tons of blonde-haired, blue-eyed 8th generation American people who are happy to natter on about the small Dutch village and French provincial town where Gran-gran-gran-mere and UberGrosOpa lived until the war brought them together, but asking someone to bring out that story upon first introduction is a bit rude, especially when the answer is “well my family has been here for four hundred years but we lose the thread somewhere in the middle passage” or “we’ve only been here two generations and fled from an oppressive regime” or “I’m not telling you because I’m not actually from here and I don’t know if you’re an ICE agent who’s going to follow me home and deport my parents.”
Seems like the kindest question is “so do you live/work/go to school around here?” for light chatter, but you’ve gotta be a level four friend to unlock someone’s backstory whether it’s tragic or mundane.
Also this sort of thing comes up a lot after people hear an “exotic” name or if someone isn’t easily slotted into a stereotypical category, which intensifies its interpretation as a microaggression - Janey from Omaha likely doesn’t get asked where she’s from as much as Zuelma from East LA does. The vast majority of people I know who interpret “where are you from” as a microaggression only do so after experiencing another microaggression (a long assessing stare or a comment on the strangeness of their clothes, hair, or *loudly* commenting on an accent).
Most people I know don’t see “where are you from” as an irritation, it’s the “where are you *really* from” that’s read as hostile.
[I work with a man who has a really hard-to-pronounce-for-the-unpracticed name, even though he’s the owner of the company and I’m fielding calls from cold-call vendors I hear “wow, I’m not even going to try to say that right - where is Boss from?” about 2-3 times a week. Montrose. He’s from Montrose.]
Aaaaaaalso the question of when it’s appropriate to use Spanish [or insert applicable language] is somewhat fraught. Another man I work with is the son of immigrants, has dark skin, and has a name that reads as Mexican, but his parents never allowed him to learn Spanish or speak Spanish with them because they though it would make it hard for him to get a job or would get him in trouble at school. As an adult he speaks only rudimentary Spanish and each time it comes up he insists that he doesn’t speak Spanish and is embarrassed by his poor command of the language. It’s difficult for him to talk to his parents because their command of English isn’t very strong. So when someone speaks Spanish to him he A) gets reminded of all that history and B) has to explain to the Spanish speaker that he doesn’t speak the language, and I’ve seen people call him a liar or stuck up for not speaking Spanish. No one speaking Spanish to him knows all that history and is bringing up that strain for the sake of being mean, but fuck I can’t blame him for getting worn out by it coming up on a regular basis. If I, a white woman, speak Spanish to a Latinx person am I making the assumption that they can’t speak English or am I trying to be accommodating and accept the fact that I live in an area with a dozen languages in use and a wide array of cultures sharing space? Am I being rude by asking them to tolerate my poor Spanish or polite by making the attempt? Both. Neither. It’s complicated.
Different people have different ideas about what’s rude, and I think that may be a better context to set that in. Is is rude to ask someone where they’re from? Probably not the first time, but it is rude to stare at someone then ask where they’re from.
The post was motivated partly by South Asian exchange students in $REDACTED ordering curry in Hindi and asking where the waiter is from when he does not understand.
Everybody immediately assumes the asker is white. Kind of my point here.
My dad has a co-worker who married a son of an Italian immigrant. The other day he (the father-in-law born in Italy) came to the shop and my dad used it as an opportunity to practise his Italian.
Turns out the co-worker took it as a slight. She had never learned to speak Italian.
This is also part of the more indirect costs of multiculturalism. A dozen different cultures, cultures mixing and flowing but simultaneously being prohibited from mixing and flowing because it’s “appropriative”…
You don’t just get 12 scales of what’s polite and impolite behavior. You get somewhere between 12 scales and one scale for every person in the area.
It was said some study found that above a certain level, diversity imposed a higher cost due to all the needs to overcome communication and negotiation barriers, effectively wasting what could have been productive time for insufficient gains. I wish I cold find it.
You realize when you cut out the beginning of the post like this it’s practically impossible to tell what you’re responding to? In this case, your point stands alone, but it’s still mildly irritating.
Huh. I was trying to do my readers a service by not cluttering their dashes so much with long posts that they’d already read 90% of.
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
But also your Chinese-American grandparents will tell you where you are from and tell you how important it is to not forget that and always get it right and point to it on the map. They also never want to go back because that place was a hellhole and they’re so glad they made it out of the cultural revolution alive.
God Bless the United States of America, friend.
The effect wears off over generations, until it becomes a “well your great great grandfather was German” but you don’t speak a word of German and the most that’s left of unified German ethnic experiences in your life is some hollow copy of Oktoberfest.
(Right now I’m trying to figure out if East Asians are the next group that will be absorbed by America’s homogeneous Generic White Identity, if it will be some other group instead, or if some other path will happen.)
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
This person seems anything but rational. I’d say start with giving working minors the right to vote because they pay an income tax
“Rationalists” is more of an anthropological label, and one I don’t claim for myself, in part because most of them believe in Open Borders or something similar, but I’m an unironic Nationalist.
Anyhow, I give a more direct/accessible and serious reply later in the thread.
Although the irony that what I said is less impenetrable than certain philosophers or schools is not lost on me. I can provide a close reading if you’d like.
Oh, and I’m not actually a time-travelling supervillain. My blog description does convey real information about my positions, but it isn’t literal.
THE PAST MUST BE DESTROYED
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.
the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.
Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors. After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.
People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.
I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.
> in which soup is defined as referring to a weighted cluster of objects, both real and uninstantiated, which is socially negotiated between communicators, reaching an overlapping mutual understanding which does not include cereal with milk
I wish there were a conservative party anywhere that was conservative in the sense of ‘it rarely gets the computer working to smash it and also it rarely gets the country working to smash it, our policies will all be reversible and tested before they are scaled up and we will treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions like the courts and good diplomatic relations with our neighbors’.
“We’re going to test this incrementally” is an admission to the clueless public that you think you might be wrong. It’s a very smart view, because given the history of politics there is a reasonably high probability of being wrong, but the political rivals will jump all over it instantly.
Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.
A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.
Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article:
Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.
“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”
But again, the article gives no source for this figure.
I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.
Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.
Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.
And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.
I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.
But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for Addressing Violence Against Transgender and Gender Non-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.):
Promote Hope for the Future
It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)
One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:
These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.
The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimated lifespan figures coming from?
FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list. Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]
But not everyone is murdered.
Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by other people. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).
Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.
Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.
In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.
It’s very interesting that STEM bros worship men like Einstein, hail him as a god among men, but entirely ignore his economic views … like how he was a socialist … lmao.
Are you suggesting they admire him for his contributions to physics, which is his field, but not his economics, which is not his field? Maybe I should go ask the world’s most cited economists particle physics questions - after all, Hollywood said all scientists are supergenius generalists, and would Hollywood ever lie to us?
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
