I recently realized that Rob Henderson’s theory has echoes of Thomas Sowell:
“The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”
I've been rolling the framing of transitioning as suicide around in my mind. Very thought provoking. It must surely be an exaggeration even if it provides some insights as an analogy. There is still shared experience , legal connections, and more connecting you to someone who transitioned.
But there are two senses that made it seem correct. The first comes from the trans rights movement, the idea that your old name, from before you transitioned, is called your "dead name". That old person, the one with that old name, is dead to them too it seems.
Second, in the movie The Emerald Forest, there is the following exchange:
Tomme, you think you are a man...
but I only see a stupid boy.
Your time has come to die.
Must he die?
Yes.
I will never see my boy again.
The boy is dead...
and the man is born.
Basically, the tribe's position is that the boy has to die for the man to be born. That there are stages and rituals that fundamentally separate people from earlier in their lives. I think there is a recognition that puberty and parenthood can be like that and it can be traumatic but good. Maybe transitioning is an example of a similarly irreversible transformation of the self.
It's hard to know what to think about your analogy between transitioning and suicide without further elaboration. You don't really say what the two have in common, except that they both have a tendency to cause pain to loved ones (but of course there are many good things that have that same tendency on average, like children moving out of the parents' home). I get the sense that some members of your audience are so much "on the same wavelength" as you when it comes to these issues that vague analogies like this will get through to them, but if you want to communicate with readers who'd perhaps score a bit higher on Openness in a Big Five personality test, you're going to need to explain what you mean more clearly.
I agree with what Alex Tabarrok really said: ' Put it all together along with the timing and other evidence and the case is strong that the 2020 BLM protests led to police pullback which led to a spike in murders, especially in black communities.'
‘… who told him that her daughter was transitioning, with the help of an online community, and felt that this community “had essentially taken her away from me.”
No Madame, you abdicated your parental responsibilities! How can the ‘on-line community’ do anything if your daughter were not on-line? Look up the word ‘discipline’ and also ‘no’.
Too bad you refuse to link to Steve Sailor, who has long been showing the spikes in homicide and car deaths, especially in the black, er Black, communities. Like June 26
"Just as blacks have gotten 49% more likely to die by homicide from Jan-Nov 2018 to Jan-Nov 2021, they’ve gotten 38% more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents. Hispanics are up 40% in homicides and 30% in car crashes.
Perhaps less worry about racial profiling during the racial reckoning contributes to both?"
Yeah, Steve is too snarky, maybe bitter about his exile, but he does good work in data.
Arnold, not quite Berensen, says "this a problem for the left, as the party of government". Nobody voted "left", they voted Democrat Party - they voted stupidly. Including Scott Alexander and Glenn Loury and most of our drafted Fantasy Intellectuals. [Not thenewneo.com ]
Berensen concludes: "The Democrats offer expertise, Ivy League brilliance, the smartest folks in the room; the Republicans personal control.
...
Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast."
Because it's a worldwide OECD phenomena, the "left" is a reasonable phrase for globalist secular humanist elite policy, but in US voting, the problem is the voters who vote Democrat.
And the elitist intellectuals who, based on emotional dislike of Trump, use their Big Brains to rationalize why voting against his policies was good.
All Biden voters are useful idiots, whether intellectual or merely loud & annoying. Terrible results from terrible policies; policies entirely predictable and accurately predicted by many anti-Biden folk - few who are considered intellectuals by the elites, tho.
The drug experimentation comment hits home with me. I reject most libertarian philosophy because they refuse to recognize the second and third order effects of the drugs we have largely legalized (alcohol and tobacco, with weed coming up fast) and it appears that the relative affluence of most people pushing libertarian ideas plays a large role in that.
The Berenson anti-vax idiocy against the sane protective actions of the Canadian government, idiocy that you endorse, are me nearing the point of cancellation.
I began to follow you for sound economic analysis. Now you are falling through the rabbit hole.
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
I think that the evidence is rather that the spike was the result of police (non) response. If we knew that we need police reform before the spike, this really proves it.
Berenson is an anti-vaxxer. And your carelessness in equating trans with suicide is cruel to those of us who know people who have lost a child to suicide.
I find your posts to be a net negative. I am cancelling.
That last one is a genius analysis because it differentiates between what we tolerate in an elite - the king of the hill has more to lose through misbehavior, its a long way down - and what we won't - the king of the hill is insulated from the impact of misbehavior.
Tragedy is when the great are felled by their flaws. Comedy is when the little people strive and succeed. When only the little people suffer and see the powerful escape justice, it is a powder keg.
I recently realized that Rob Henderson’s theory has echoes of Thomas Sowell:
“The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”
I've been rolling the framing of transitioning as suicide around in my mind. Very thought provoking. It must surely be an exaggeration even if it provides some insights as an analogy. There is still shared experience , legal connections, and more connecting you to someone who transitioned.
But there are two senses that made it seem correct. The first comes from the trans rights movement, the idea that your old name, from before you transitioned, is called your "dead name". That old person, the one with that old name, is dead to them too it seems.
Second, in the movie The Emerald Forest, there is the following exchange:
Tomme, you think you are a man...
but I only see a stupid boy.
Your time has come to die.
Must he die?
Yes.
I will never see my boy again.
The boy is dead...
and the man is born.
Basically, the tribe's position is that the boy has to die for the man to be born. That there are stages and rituals that fundamentally separate people from earlier in their lives. I think there is a recognition that puberty and parenthood can be like that and it can be traumatic but good. Maybe transitioning is an example of a similarly irreversible transformation of the self.
It's hard to know what to think about your analogy between transitioning and suicide without further elaboration. You don't really say what the two have in common, except that they both have a tendency to cause pain to loved ones (but of course there are many good things that have that same tendency on average, like children moving out of the parents' home). I get the sense that some members of your audience are so much "on the same wavelength" as you when it comes to these issues that vague analogies like this will get through to them, but if you want to communicate with readers who'd perhaps score a bit higher on Openness in a Big Five personality test, you're going to need to explain what you mean more clearly.
I agree with what Alex Tabarrok really said: ' Put it all together along with the timing and other evidence and the case is strong that the 2020 BLM protests led to police pullback which led to a spike in murders, especially in black communities.'
‘… who told him that her daughter was transitioning, with the help of an online community, and felt that this community “had essentially taken her away from me.”
No Madame, you abdicated your parental responsibilities! How can the ‘on-line community’ do anything if your daughter were not on-line? Look up the word ‘discipline’ and also ‘no’.
‘They took our rights.’
Did They The Elites take them, or did We The People give them?
Too bad you refuse to link to Steve Sailor, who has long been showing the spikes in homicide and car deaths, especially in the black, er Black, communities. Like June 26
https://www.unz.com/isteve/homicide-and-motor-vehicle-accident-death-rates-through-2021/
"Just as blacks have gotten 49% more likely to die by homicide from Jan-Nov 2018 to Jan-Nov 2021, they’ve gotten 38% more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents. Hispanics are up 40% in homicides and 30% in car crashes.
Perhaps less worry about racial profiling during the racial reckoning contributes to both?"
Yeah, Steve is too snarky, maybe bitter about his exile, but he does good work in data.
Arnold, not quite Berensen, says "this a problem for the left, as the party of government". Nobody voted "left", they voted Democrat Party - they voted stupidly. Including Scott Alexander and Glenn Loury and most of our drafted Fantasy Intellectuals. [Not thenewneo.com ]
Berensen concludes: "The Democrats offer expertise, Ivy League brilliance, the smartest folks in the room; the Republicans personal control.
...
Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast."
Because it's a worldwide OECD phenomena, the "left" is a reasonable phrase for globalist secular humanist elite policy, but in US voting, the problem is the voters who vote Democrat.
And the elitist intellectuals who, based on emotional dislike of Trump, use their Big Brains to rationalize why voting against his policies was good.
All Biden voters are useful idiots, whether intellectual or merely loud & annoying. Terrible results from terrible policies; policies entirely predictable and accurately predicted by many anti-Biden folk - few who are considered intellectuals by the elites, tho.
The drug experimentation comment hits home with me. I reject most libertarian philosophy because they refuse to recognize the second and third order effects of the drugs we have largely legalized (alcohol and tobacco, with weed coming up fast) and it appears that the relative affluence of most people pushing libertarian ideas plays a large role in that.
> Perhaps I should double-down on my analogy between transitioning and suicide.
I think the trans community would agree with you. After all, they refer to use of their old name as "dead-naming"
Edit: I see OneEyedMan beat me to the point.
The Berenson anti-vax idiocy against the sane protective actions of the Canadian government, idiocy that you endorse, are me nearing the point of cancellation.
I began to follow you for sound economic analysis. Now you are falling through the rabbit hole.
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
I think that the evidence is rather that the spike was the result of police (non) response. If we knew that we need police reform before the spike, this really proves it.
Your last few posts have made me angry.
Berenson is an anti-vaxxer. And your carelessness in equating trans with suicide is cruel to those of us who know people who have lost a child to suicide.
I find your posts to be a net negative. I am cancelling.
These are all real valid concerns. The problem is we hear a lot of justifiable resentment not translated into ideas for what to do differently.
That last one is a genius analysis because it differentiates between what we tolerate in an elite - the king of the hill has more to lose through misbehavior, its a long way down - and what we won't - the king of the hill is insulated from the impact of misbehavior.
Tragedy is when the great are felled by their flaws. Comedy is when the little people strive and succeed. When only the little people suffer and see the powerful escape justice, it is a powder keg.