http://freakonomics.com/archive/Tweetstorm Link

This week I’m just doing nothing but complaining, eh? TWEETSTORM THE SIXTH.

Setting: This morning. My ears. A podcast. I’m listening to the Freakonomics podcast. #277, not on the website yet

http://freakonomics.com/archive/

Freakonomics is a pretty good podcast but, like all podcasts, sometimes they run bullshit ads-disguised-as-episodes. Today was that

The episode was nominally about taboos, and specifically ones concerning bodily functions. Instead, it was a woman shilling her startup

The idea: What if your underwear had tampon technology built into it. I can’t really comment on this, but seems sensible

But… around the 16 minute mark things got weird.

She started talking about her experience trying to pitch this startup to VCs to get funding, and all the sexism she suffered

What sexism? She kept going to (MALE!) VCs to ask them for money, and she would tell them all these emotional stories about women

About how women are so hard done by, how they really need something like this. She focused on how. women. feel. About her product

VCs, being way too busy for this horse shit, sensibly were having none of it.

Around 16:20ish, she says “Eventually I figured out how to talk to men about this, because they don’t care about how women feel…

… they care about the industry. They want to hear my economic analysis, my business plan. They don’t care about how I feel”

(This is not a verbatim quote, but it is probably closer to verbatim than you’d believe)

Can you imagine this? She went to Sand Hill Road to ask billionaires for money. Her pitch was a sob story about the feelings of UMC women

These evil sexist asshole MEN refused to give her millions of dollars without asking her hard, unfair, sexist questions about economics

I’m dumbfounded by this. This is “sexism”? Is THIS what Women In Tech mean when they talk about sexism?

Because if it is… the appropriate punishment for such gross incompetence in this country is unemployment, poverty, and starvation

“CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS RICH GUY WOULDN’T JUST GIVE ME MONEY CUZ I WANTED IT REAL BAD?!??! FUCKING SEXIST ASSHOLE!”

/me idly wonders if that “asshole” is gonna retweet this. The twitterwhims of pmarca are inscruitable. Was it he who shot down the startup?

Seriously though, after work I am going to excerpt this audio, or transcribe it, because this is just so blatant

Tweetstorm Link

I’M BREAKING MY DON’T-FEED-THE-EGREGORE RULE TO BRING YOU THIS TWEETSTORM. I hope it was worth it

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/837633820417482754

For the last twoish years, my stateside friends and coworkers have all made some variation of the comment “If Trump wins, I’m moving to .ca”

Trump wins, and starts talking about border restrictions, and my stateside friends say “Holy shit can you believe he hates immigrants…

… I wish our government could be more sane and sensible, like Canada”

Ignoring for the moment the fact that these people are being incredibly disrespectful to my nation, tokenizing us and treating us like…

…that shitty beta cuck you phone to do shit for you when your shithead boyfriend is out of town and probably cheating on you

Remember on the eve of the election when so many of you went to http://cic.gc.ca that you crashed the website

Did any of you actually read the website? Because you’ll find our immigration laws are quite a bit stricter than yours

Do you have a criminal conviction? EVER? Then we will never let you in. Not even for a vacation. You probably really regret that DUI

Only have a highschool diploma? You better hope to god you can find family already in Canada, because otherwise you’re not getting in

Canadian immigration law is incredibly restrictive and intentionally biased towards high-value high-skilled immigrants

Which means that it’s mostly letting upper-middle class whites in, not third world migrants

When Canada brags about it’s track record on Syrian refugees the appropriate response, USA, is “we were letting poors in before it was cool”

It is fucking hilarious to me that in so many ways, US Lefties are reacting to Trumpian policies with “fuck it we’re going to Canada”…

… when they don’t realize that all of those specific policies were already implemented ages ago up here.

If you’re going to protest not letting Mexicans cross a border, it’s strange you’d do that by moving to a place that hasn’t let them, ever.

But anyways, back to the tweet. The tweet is brilliant, because it tantalizingly hints that there might be something there

Most left-leaning millennials (the prime Twitter demo) appear to sincerely not realize that Cdn immigration officials are literally Hitler

They’ll see this and yell “fake news” or whatever. They’ll get outraged at the obvious “falsehood” and hateshare it

The media can’t really call it out because it’s true! So they’ll express outrage but dance around it, bringing more attention

Open minded moderates and neutrals will Notice That They Are Confused, look into it, and probably skew rightward on this issue

Lefty thought leaders will pen lofty thinkpieces to the tune of “how could he be so retarded and insane as to think/say this”…

… while his supporters and flyover America laugh at how stupid lefty commentators are that they can’t understand simple obvious truths

In one tweet this man: 

* Rendered toxic the typical media criticism

* Reinforced Liberal bubble, crippling their OODA loop

* Tempted moderates to his side

* Put Canada in a position where they’re forced to publicly lie or agree with him

* Gave justified support to his policies in a way that his opponents cannot criticize without very obvious hypocrisy

* Gave people like me a reason to make some popcorn.

Four more years of this is gonna be fun

Tweetstorm Link

TANGENT TWEETSTORM (I’m spoiling you guys today)

Media critics often point out that, in media, men can be anything but women have to slot into specific archetypes, most disempowering

This is technically true, but misleadingly framed.

In most media there’s a handful of “women” roles, and most of them are shitty, and the people who complain about them complain rightly

Where I differ is that I don’t think male characters dominate media, and I certainly don’t think male characters can be anything.

Gender critics will read male characters being whatever, and say “HEY LOOK HERE’S A MAN BEING THIS THING WHERE’S THE WOMAN”

But most of the time it’s not a man being that thing. It’s just a that thing.

Most of the time, in media, the female characters are female characters but the “male” characters might as well be neuter

I cannot think of any books I’ve read recently where the maleness of male characters was relevant in any way.

(Note: Romance scenes don’t count in a world where you could s/^m/fem, call it a book about gays, and not meaningfully change the story)

This is important because it shows that the complaint that women “can’t be” all these things is misguided

Female characters can be these things as much as male ones can, as long as they ensure their gender stays out of the way of their character

Male characters do this all the time. Female characters never do this. Whenever female characters start to do this it’s a Sexist Incident

The criticisms come in 2 forms. 1) “It’s not good enough for me to have a vagina and be an X. I must also be seen as a woman while doing it”

2) is “Ms. Pacman effect”. They see men suppress their gender, they assume this suppression is expression, and when it turns out that…

… the fem character needs to do this too, it pattern matches to “acting male” and they get upset.

I am many things, but one of the things I am decidedly NOT recognized as is “a solid, manly man”

This kind of sucks sometimes, but mostly I don’t care. Male identity is a liability, it gets in the way of what I want to do

I see a lot of my success, a lot of my identity, as being enabled by my selective exposure and expression of masculinity

eg. to a large extent “manly” and “computer programmer” are non-overlapping sets. I picked the one that pays more

When I hear feminists talking about wanting to be seen as eg. computer programmers, but also having their female identity celebrated…

… it is doing me a bamboozle. Not only is the gender identity an all-encompassing one that takes priority over other things, BLOCKING them

but, like, while you were bitching about gender the rest of us buckled down and did what we had to do. Why are you a special snowflake?

And I don’t really understand why people care so much about this, tbh. Most men suck. Most women suck. Stereotypical gender roles suck

Why is everyone so hung up on holding on to these shitty roles that make them miserable. GIVE THEM UP. BE BETTER.

If you identify as a woman, and you want to identify as something else, don’t tie yourself in knots being both. BE THE ONE YOU WANT TO BE

There’s a reason all of my past and present coworkers have been scrawny nerdy chronically single uncool outcasts

“Effective Codemonkey” conflicted with “masculine” and nobody cared when we complained so we acted instead

Tweetstorm Link

Humble suggestion: All future discussions of immigration must be disaggregated into types of immigration, and explicitly compared

There’s a common Motte & Bailey that goes around. The premise is something like “6 out of 10 Tech CEOs are immigrants”

“Therefore accepting five million marginally employable refugees is a brilliant economic investment”

It might be true that most tech CEOs are not US nationals. Might be true that accepting 5M refugees is a good idea. But this is no argument

There is almost no meaningful comparison whatsoever between tech CEOs and illiterate refugees.

Bundling under the title of “immigrant” is disingenuous. Hell, you ever think it’s racist af to assume all non-US countries are fungible?

“All these Asians and Indians run our tech industry, therefore we should import Mexicans and Arabs” makes no sense

The only way it makes sense is if you assume “eeh, what’s the diff, all those countries are the same”. I think this is a bingo card tile

I’m sure the Muslim refugees in Pakistan are a-OK with being mistaken for Indian by ignorant Americans. Definitely no issues there.

(Note to ignorant Americans: Pakistan and India are different countries, different cultures, and have basically been at war for 40 years)

(Pakistan is mostly Muslim, India is mostly Hindu, and turns out religious conflict is a thing)

As always, to clarify my position on immigration:

1) There is a strong positive economic argument for open borders. This is strongest at the high skill end

2) There are costs associated with immigration, social and economic disruption costs, and we need to deal with these

3) “Most economics problems are best solved with a suitcase”. Often it’s easier to bring people to good institutions than vice versa

4) Institutions don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the People Of X who make X’s institutions. If X is bad, Xians might bring it with them

5) People have positive moral right to freedom of association. Closed borders generally bad, countries have the right to make that decision

6) Certain cultural and social norms can be said to be objectively better than others. Many US norms are such norms…

… and many in other nations are not. It is reasonable to sort immigrants on this basis…

… and wish to exclude people who would not integrate

6b) expecting immigrants to assimilate is reasonable, denying ones who won’t is also fine. Assimilation support should be provided

6c) if you all listen to me and help build robust cooperation technologies, assimilation does not matter as much…

… I don’t care if conksunk imigrats from SBAHJikistan refuse to integrate, if they live in private enclaves….

…if we have technologies like “bureaucracy” and “markets” and “instant messenger” to facilitate necessary interactions neutrally

7) Many of the rednecks tarred ‘racist’ for being anti-immigrant have completely legitimate, unaddressed concerns. Listen to them

All else equal, I would like to bring in more refugees, and keep as many illegals as possible, on humanitarian grounds

BUT: there are v large, v. real social and economic costs to doing things like this, and the people pushing these policies don’t pay them

These costs are different depending on the specific immigrants and specific context of immigration we’re talking about

EG I’m pretty ok with buy-your-way-in visas. Rich, successful person wants to move in, pay assloads of taxes, and work for America? Do it

The lower volume of really rich people means they can’t cause too much disruption, while they pay millions in taxes so we don’t have to

I want pretty much unrestricted immigration for high skilled workers. Two reasons. 1) Increase supply, reduce price of high skill work

2) Let the world know that my country is the leader, has the best science, best engineering, best historians, best art, whatever

(well, I mean, I’d prefer they came to Canada but I’m not stupid, I know who pays better. I’m speaking realistically here)

Note: I think it is a very good thing to drive down the salaries of, eg… software engineers like me

Aside from believing, pretty categorically, “ceteris paribus lower prices are better”, I think that software dev is esp important

certain high skilled work can be massive force multipliers and a little bit can do a lot of good.

An extra 5 good engineers can build a new startup. There are so many problems to still be solved. Cheaper engineers => more solutions

On the lower skill end of economic migrants, I get more iffy. Both economically and socially

Economically, lower skilled migrants are less likely to be net contributors to society. Moralizing aside, we can only afford so much welfare

And I don’t think it’s intrinsically immoral to prioritize citizens’ welfare at the expense of foreigners. That’s what citizenship means

Socially, large scale migration makes it harder for individuals to integrate, more likely migrant group dominates and replaces local culture

This is a much much bigger problem at the low skill end just because there’s so many more of them

a few thousand (rich) migrants per year aren’t changing any culture. Five million will change culture, even if only by accident

As usual, I prefer the market mechanism. Charging migrants money for their visas, money enough to capture externalities, ideal solution

This ensures, by construction, that migrants will not be an economic drain on society. It also biases in favour of more valuable ones

Human capital mercantilism is sortakinda a thing, after all. And I want my country to be rich. Let foreign wealth come here. We can use it

Finally, the difference in economic opportunity is so massive that this is a positive value proposition for almost everyone involved

Moving from Canada to the US tripled my salary. If I had had to pay the $15k for an H1B myself, it would have been worth it

The difference in salary alone was enough to pay that off in full after one year, while expending zero effort to do so

It might be harder for, say, an African immigrant with a grade 6-equivalent education to make $15k in the US, but is there any question…

… that their life is $15k better, and their opportunities $15k more valuable? No. It’s an obvious investment

Tweetstorm Link

You know that post that was going around rationalist twitter the other day? About how protestors and activists do silly things?

tl;dr it argued they are products of their environment. University is a fully controlled environment where the way to get things done is…

… to be a big enough pain in administrators’ sides until they do what you want to shut you up.

So when SJWs do highly visible but low impact things, and are generally raging douche canoes, it’s because in their home turf that works.

Every time someone bitches about Jack (Noir) fucking with twitter, shadowbanning them, etc., it feels the same as the SJW criticism to me

It’s a similar situation, too. Twitter is a fully controlled environment where all that happens happen only at the whim of Jack (Noir)

In lieu of effective resistance, or routing around censorship internet-style, it’s complaints, passive aggression, and awareness building

Guys, when Jack (Noir) came to destroy the universe and everything Skaia holds dear, what did our plucky protagonists do?

Did they sit around bitching and complaining until someone stepped in to snap Jack (Noir) out of paradox space? No!

They scratched their universe, made a new one, and went there.

You know if we all left, went to gab.ai, went to gnusocial, went to blogs, fuck, went to irc, Jack (Noir) couldn’t fuck with us

Course then there’d be nothing to complain about and sometimes I wonder if that’s the real point.

Something Something Nobody Can Escape The Miles

This tweetstorm brought to you by obsessively reading Homestuck in my spare time

Tweetstorm Link

WHAT TABLE? WHAT DIVERSITY? WHAT INCLUSION?

It’s kind of embarrassing that I have to explain how a lefty protest march works, to lefty protest march organizers, but listen up

Here’s how a march works: 1) Anyone who feels like it, shows up 2) They walk in a direction

That’s it. That’s literally all of it. That is what a march is.

Let’s accept for a moment that literally everything SJWs say about, say, sexism in science is true

Let’s say that science employers are sexist assholes, and that we need to stop them for the good of women in our society

In that case, a committee kind of makes sense. There are people opposing women unfairly, and your committee tries to stop them

Hell, even if it’s all ~*~StRuCtUrAl SeXiSm~*~ there is still an action item. Fix the pipeline. Give women more opportunties

But a march? There’s nobody sitting around there telling women they can’t come. There’s no historical inequality of walking ability

IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR A MARCH TO HAVE INCLUSION PROBLEMS BECAUSE EVERYONE WHO SHOWS UP IS AUTOMATICALLY INCLUDED

I’m sincerely curious: what does this committee even do? Because clearly I don’t understand the word “march” used in this context.

Last I checked, “science” was orthogonal to these concerns. Express these concerns, fine, but you don’t speak for scientists

The world is more and more starting to feel filled with Commissars and Heresy Examiners

The next time some lefties lie and tell you they’re not trying to take over, throw this back in their faces

You can’t CHANGE the culture to be diverse if you’re claiming you’re representing the existing culture, which is already diverse. Pick 1

Either science is already Blessed™ with diversity so you have nothing to change. Or it’s not, and people opposing you have legit concern

Cool thing about science is that it’s a process people can derive for themselves. There’d not be these issues if they stayed on message

Science = methodically asking measurable questions to establish truths about reality. If you’re not unified on this, you’re not scientists

Even if a million people interpret that a million ways, let them. Their interpretations are not the message.

When literally every political event in California in the past six months ends in looting and burning, how is this an invalid concern?

Also since when the fuck is “political” =~ “minority”. THAT’S SOME PRETTY HORSE SHIT RACIST ASSUMPTIONS THERE, INNIT

Alternatively, assuming every reference to violence is a dogwhistle for minorities is also pretty fucking racist.

Every time I pay attention to antifa black bloc assholes, they’re almost all white. I’m not the one assuming minorities are violent

You know, there’s no law against just calling it a Diversity March, right?

Finally something I can agree with. If your actions don’t clearly demonstrate your principles, shut up about them

Good! I’ve asked several tech confs to add autism and neurodiversity to their CoCs. Request denied every time.

Tweetstorm Link

I’ve been halfassedly following this and it’s kind of hilarious to me

https://twitter.com/ChrisStigall/status/837015995919265793

Philly just passed a soda tax. The theoretical purpose of soda taxes is to make unhealthy drinks more expensive so people stop buying them.

And just so we’re clear, the real purpose is a combination of money grab and vanity legislation for nanny state assholes

(Trivial proof: Under most soda tax laws, how many 600+ calorie Starbucks beverages are taxed? At least in Berkeley: Zero)

Anyways, so Philly passes this soda tax. And what happens? The price of soda goes up, and people stop buying it. PUBLIC HEALTH VICTORY!

As best as I can tell, this is a shining example of successful legislation doing exactly what it’s supposed to

But… a few weeks ago I read an article. The mayor, and other Very Concerned Assholes in Philly, are upset at this terrible failure.

Their main gripe? Instead of doing the “right” thing and eating the tax, Coke/Pepsi passed it on to consumers in the form of higher prices

Coke and Pepsi are evil corrupt corporations who would rather fuck over you and me than pay for their crimes. Allegedly

So my first wat is: “what the fuck did you think would happen?”. Pepsi/Coke are immorally passing the costs on to consumers

Even if this wasn’t EXPLICITLY the purpose of the soda tax(*), how the hell else do you think this would shake out

“The government just imposed a double digit cost increase, but I think we should take one for the team” COMPANIES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

Morality doesn’t come into it. Coke costs $x per unit to produce. You just made the costs go up. The money has to come from somewhere

If you thought that a soda tax would be a de facto looting of Coke’s profit margins to pay for bullshit, you are sadly mistaken.

If you wanted to tax Coke’s profits directly, maybe you shoulda just said that. Then again, such a predatory policy would get shot down.

(* from earlier: In Berkeley, the way the tax was structured, it was applied to retailers. They chose to eat it instead of passing it on

Soft drinks being very high profit as it is, stores just dropped the price by the amount of the tax so they wouldn’t lose business

In Berkeley everyone considered this the failure. “How will soda tax make people drink less soda if people don’t pay it?”

So now you have two cities with 100% opposing results, each of which believes their results are the failure case)

But it gets better. In Philly this policy was a raging success. Sales of Pepsi products are down 40%

So Pepsi responds by, well, I’ll let you guess.

Did you guess “making less pop?”. If so, your 15 silver points are in the mail

That’s right, evil corporation Pepsi responded to falling sales of Pepsi by… producing less Pepsi

Thing is, when you suddenly overnight reduce production by 40%… suddenly there’s a bunch of people at your factory not doing anything

So Pepsi, in response to a 40% drop in local sales, is laying off about 25% of its local staff. Which is reasonable and completely expected

In fact, this is EVEN STRONGER evidence of the policy’s success, because it means Pepsi doesn’t believe it is temporary

If Pepsi thought the policy would be repealed, or not enforced, or wouldn’t impact sales, they’d just ride it out

But reducing production means they believe this reduction on soft drink consumption is here for the long haul. WHICH WAS THE POINT OF THE LAW

So check out what Philly city government has to say about that

“This evil corporation is holding jobs hostage to force us to give them what they want” THEY ARE LITERALLY DOING WHAT YOU TOLD THEM TO DO

What Philadelphia wants: New tax on Coke. No change in Coke production. No change in Coke consumption. No change in Coke price

They want to levy a new tax that has zero effect on the outside world. I WONDER WHY THEY WOULD WANT THAT

Hint: It’s sure not for health reasons. That would be an EFFECT ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD

The same thing happened in Berkeley. They originally sold the law as a fundraiser for public health initiatives

Like, specific public health initiatives for children. Existing initiatives that schools lacked the money for

But a really strange thing happened. The law, as passed, does not earmark the money for anything. Funnels it straight to general revenue

As far as I know, the claimed beneficiaries of this tax are not receiving it. Or, at best, not receiving all of it

Since it was passed we’ve heard nothing about this. No new initiatives. No public health funding. No real impact.

They publicly declared it a failure, at least when they say retailers eating the tax. Weird how they don’t repealed “failed” laws

It’s almost as if city council just saw another bucket of money they could steal to fund their stupid bullshit

(Fun fact: did you know that ~10% of Berkeleyans work at UC Berkeley, and another almost 10% work for the city? Fucking parasites)

The only purpose to laws like this are convincing low-information-but-arrogantly-misinformed voters (eg NPR listeners) to pay up

But, at least in Berkeley, it gets EVEN WORSE

The tax has carve outs for “beverages of nutritional value”. This is defined as to basically gerrymander the tax to only apply to coke

One thing considered to have nutritional value is milk. So suddenly all those 500-1k calorie Sbux drinks are exempt

Tea and fruit juice have “nutritional value”. So those 300 cal per can Arizona drinks…. untaxed

Let me ask a sensitive question: Do you think there’s demographic differences between $0.25 coke drinkers and $5.00 juice drinkers?

Berkeley did. They repeatedly pointed out that “underprivileged youth” are at higher risk of obesity, and we must help them specifically

(For Canadians like me who didn’t realize it: This is a euphemism. It means African Americans)

So, to summarize: Berkeley passed a tax that falls disproportionately on African Americans, “for their own good”

They taxed a nice thing that poor folks enjoy (and, if poverty in the US is as bad as I’ve read, who desperately want enjoyment)

While very carefully whitelisting everything that rich people like

They claimed the money would be spent on health initiatives but instead it’s used to patch budget shortfalls.

And this is bragged about as a great success.

Meanwhile, Philly ACTUALLY GOT SODA CONSUMPTION TO DROP DRAMATICALLY, and they think this is a failure

This is what your society looks like when the government plays morality police. Don’t encourage them.

Epilogue: I lived in Berkeley when this happened and it was a fucking vicious battle. Pro-tax people screamed in my face on the subway

Groups of dudes (caught on tape!) would go around stealing anti-tax signs and threatening to assault people who told them to stop

Berkeleyside ran op-ed after op-ed talking about how anyone who opposes it is evil

“Coke spent ONE MILLION DOLLARS meddling in Berkeley city politics. FUCK CORPORATIONS” was spammed into everyone’s face

“Michael Bloomberg spent FIVE MILLION DOLLARS meddling in Berkeley city politics. Fuck rich people” was mysteriously absent

(He was the primary funder of the pro-tax campaign. He couldn’t pass it as mayor of his own city, so he forced it on a different one)

I moved away two years later. People STILL had “Yes on Measure D” signs in their yards

Because to Berkeleyans, this was about saying “Fuck you” to Coca Cola, and nothing more.

The soda tax was rich people levying poor people(’s money) to fight a war against Coke because Coke threatens their dignity

Measure D was the most perverse example of privilege I’ve ever seen and it was perpetrated by the SJW faction. Fuck those guys

Soda Taxes: not even once.

P.S. “Hey let’s pay farmers a shitload of money to grow sugar, but then slap a shitload of taxes on sugar to make people not eat it”

Commerce Clause: not even once

Tweetstorm Link

This is an important point

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/836907116203921408

Media features male protagonist, either it won’t get criticized, or it will get the standard misogyny criticism

SMC is cookie cutter, you will never avoid it, but nobody takes it seriously, so you (the designer0 don’t care.

You make a female character, though, and some group of people will scream bloody murder at you because of something specific

Maybe she’s too hot. Maybe she’s not hot enough. Maybe she’s too gay. Maybe she’s not gay enough.

Maybe you made her too hot and too gay at the same time, and one or the other is fine but not both (Lol overwatch)

When you make female characters you’re playing Russian roulette. SOMETHING you do is going to piss the fuck out of SOMEONE

Much easier to just hedge your bets, avoid the whole thing, make male characters, and ignore the standard screaming

This is something I wish I could forcibly inject into the brains of SJWs: Incentives and systems matter. Feelings do not

They take this incredibly patronizing arrogant authoritarian position of “we will not be happy until everyone purges their wrongthink”

The less sarcastic less insulting version is: “If we ensure that peoples’ motives and ideals are pure, everything will work out”. It doesn’t

That might work for people who already buy into your authority, but fundamentally does not work with strangers, and most people are strange

To strangers, you are an environmental effect. You are creating inconveniences and incentives and their job is to go around you

Call this evil, selfish, whatever, but it’s a fact. Effective people learn to accept reality on it’s terms and make it work for them.

When you scream bloody murder about the correct representation of women, but phone it in when criticizing men, think of the incentives

To somebody who neither knows nor cares who you are, their minimum-effort hysteria avoidance is “just ignore women”

So if your goal is to increase the proportional representation of women in media, criticising ANY depiction of them is counterproductive

If your goal is to promote a specific representation of women, then maybe this is acceptable, but understand the tradeoffs involved.

You’re not taking market share from men. You’re taking market share from women, and giving it to your specific token woman instead.

But if your goal is “make there be more vaginas and x chromosomes in media”, shut the fuck up and stop self sabotaging

If you want that, you should cheer every time any woman is depicted ever.

And you could use your ~*~*~InTeRpErSoNaL sKiLlS~*~*~ to tilt the balance in your preferred direction

But that would be too much work. It wouldn’t FEEL good. You wouldn’t get to enjoy the crunch of your enemies’ bones underfoot

A year or so ago, I forget exactly what prompted this, I realized something: basically all sexism is female intrasexual competition

Imagine if an alien came to our planet earth and observed what we are doing.

They would see WOMEN (marketing + media overwhelmingly female) making caricatured depictions of WOMEN….

… in order to sell images to WOMEN and tell WOMEN how they are expected to behave. Then, WOMEN come along and declare this to be evil.

The entire thing is women negging women. Making each other feel shitty for who knows what reason. It’s sick. Perverse. Sad!

I wish I could talk to all the kindhearted, good intentioned women who get made miserable by this, and give them some empathy

Like my feminist (ex-)friend who for years has been in therapy because of the anxiety she gets from “not being a good enough feminist”

I wish I could tell them they didn’t have to sit there and take emotional abuse from self-declared superiors

I wish I could tell them that looking away steals power from these people, and ignoring them is the quickest path to victory.

I wish I could invite them all to the cool community clubhouse we’re trying to build, where everyone is just fuckin’ nice to each other.

And I wish I could tell them that anyone who would impose these crazy anxieties on them, kick them in the nuts, as hard as possible.

Of course I can’t tell them that last one. Media and marketing women do not have testicles.

I’m pretty sure that last tweet was transphobic but whatever. My heart was in the right place and by SJW logic that means it’s all fine

People you look up to and respect should not tell you what to do, how to act. And they should not make you feel like shit if you ignore them

That’s called ‘abuse’ and we as a society are great at recognizing when men do it. It’s the other ones that slip under our radar

Tweetstorm Link

I disagree, mostly, with the strong anti-immigrant push but contingent on that push this is not unreasonable

https://twitter.com/DuitsyWasHere/status/836846333042520065

Illegal immigration is illegal. By definition. You might think it shouldn’t be, you might fight against it, but the law is the law

You don’t get to tell libertarians that they’re retarded and then go ignoring the laws you don’t like

And when you think about it, the government funding police to enforce the law, then also funding lawbreakers to break the law, is silly

From the leader’s point of view, and contingent on deciding illegal immigration is a pressing problem needing solved, this is reasonable

I see it as analogous to the government saying “we’re going to stop spending money on buying drugs & start spending it on arresting dealers”

You might think drugs should be legal, but AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT, this is a sensible policy

Note, for the record, once again, I think that there’s a massive human cost to policies like this and am not convinced they’re worth it

But the decisions have been made. Pro-immigrant people lost and by the rules that means you have to accept rolling the clock back a bit

Maybe you can get off your high horses for long enough to realize your hand in this, and do better next time

Until then, spreading your opinions as facts and emotionally polarizing people is a dangerous and ineffective strategy

Instead, try living the values you keep professing online. You’re never going to save 12M illegals. Help the 5 people you’re closest to

If everyone sensibly aspired to be excellent to their five closest friends/family, think of how great it would be. All these things fixed

Hell, if Mexico had this social norm, they wouldn’t be so desperate to move here in the first place.

Funny how the pro-immigrant-anti-wall people don’t seem to think Making Mexico Great Again is a priority. Or at all

The shitty colonialist mindset of the progs in charge is the US is the only civilized country so people must come here to have civilization

I try to avoid news these days, but this one made itself known to me despite my best efforts. Disclaimer: I basically just read some headlines, nothing more. I am assuming the headlines are literal and honest (a dangerous premise in the era of FakeNews™) and assuming as few details as I can. There’s a very real chance I am incorrect about things, and welcome solid sourced disagreement.

But before commentating, I am going to ask you all a question. I’m purposefully not arguing for the premises of this hypothetical until after you all think about it, because I don’t want to muddy the waters with partisan garbage or poorly-checked facts. It is very important we can think about and discuss things like this with a clear head, because this is one case where if we fuck up, people die in droves. 

I’m talking of course about Obamacare, which as I understand it, is in the process of being repealed. We as a nation spend a bit under 18% of our income on health care. In some sense this means, literally, that one day out of every week, we are all working for the purpose of supporting someone’s health, either our’s or others’. This is a massive sum of money, and it’s size means that the potential for harm is massive.

I make no secret about the fact that I am highly skeptical of single payer universal health care, like Canada’s. I believe as well that the ACA was a bad policy, and have said as much when prompted. I will write a post outlining more of this later. Right now, like I said, I have a specific question:

Take as an assumption that the ACA is bad policy. I don’t care if you believe this; I suspect most of you do not. That’s fine, that’s for another post. Right here, right now, assume this hypothetical with me. 

Assume that the ACA is bad policy. It has not delivered on its goals. It is economically unsustainable. It will fail, eventually. For the sake of argument, take this as a given.

If you knew that this was going to happen, and you were a politician in Washington, what would you do? If you were a Democrat, how would you conscientiously object from your party line? If you were a Republican, how would you dismantle it without people trying to assassinate you? What would you replace it with? How would you replace it? How would you break the news to the people you know will be very negatively affected by this? What do you say to the people who may well die because this happened?

(And, as an aside: I think the people freaking out about “millions dying” are insane, in a fantasy world, and that their predictions will not come true. But it is also a very real fact about the world that when you play politics with 1/5th of the US’s GDP, there will be unintended consequences). 

You all love the ACA, you’re all for universal health care. Maybe many of you have greatly benefitted from it. But please understand that others have had a very different experience. As one example, I tweeted this story the other day. Iowa’s only remaining individual insurer is pulling out of the market. There will now be 70,000 Iowas who are legally required to buy insurance, but who cannot legally buy insurance. They will each be punished with a several thousand dollar fine for breaking the law and “refusing” to buy health insurance. These people have a very different view of things.

Many of the politicians who are pushing to undo Obamacare really, truly, seriously believe that it is in the long term best interest of Americans to do this. Just as Obama did the best he could under the political constraints he faced, the right is doing the best they can to do what they sincerely believe is right. They have very good, fair, and reasonable motivations for doing so. They also hold literally every branch of government right now, so you’re not going to stop them by rallying your side. If you really want to stop the dismantling of the ACA, shit like this isn’t going to convince anyone. If you want to be effective at opposing things like this, it’s important that you consider why its supporters support it, and you need to understand their actions in the context of their motives and constraints. They’re the ones you need to convince, after all. 

And, incidentally, your regular reminder: If politics in the US escalates into open lethal violence it will be more hellish than anything any human has ever before experienced. We abso-fucking-lutely do not want that. Any of you who are seriously pushing the revolutionary rhetoric: you should consider stopping. It’s hard to keep the moral high ground when you’re responsible for a quarter billion deaths.