Longways Turnip

My understanding is that a lot of men in the USA do have "normal but historically actually really low" testosterone, and which seems like a real public health issue, but it's become a whole Thing for deeply concerning manosphere types who are very attached to a particular form of macho BS.

My impression is that some low risk drugs can help improve the testosterone side of the endocrine system without the severe risk from just having testosterone itself.

I mean, at the risk of pithy one-liners: yeschad.jpg

My understanding is that a lot of men in the USA do have "normal but historically actually really low" testosterone, and which seems like a real public health issue, but it's become a whole Thing for deeply concerning manosphere types who are very attached to a particular form of macho BS.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

The idea that you’d reduce crime is like saying you’ll reduce thunderstorms or droughts, the point is to harshly punish criminals so the law-abiding citizenry feel that they are valued, protected, and are the priority of the state. Similarly, they support harsh penalties not out of a belief that it’ll lead to rehabilitation but out of a sort of desire to balance the moral scales of the universe. “To each what he has sown” and all that

There certainly was a time at which we didn't really know a lot of these things and/or couldn't measure them, but now we can and the natural conservative resistance to chance has become a resistance to acknowledging reality.

It's just obviously incorrect and a simpler motivation is easily apparent.

I also think those contradict both themselves and similar but more typical left wing arguments on similar topics.

(And to be fair, there very much is a certain level of tribalist conceit. A lot of medium-severity crimes are done by people who have done those crimes numerous times in their lives and a lot of "respectable" people have never done any of those crimes. And so there's a distinction, and then tribalism. However, this is more a matter of habit and habits can be changed with enough sustained pressure.)

I think the general conservative view of crime is more very much about a voluntary choice albeit one made under the influence of habit. I think many conservatives have a pretty harsh view about people who do self-destructive things that you and I would never do.

Frequently conservatives accuse *you* of believing what you accuse them of.

Under this concept, draconian penalties are 1. To incapacitate criminals long term and 2. To shock them out of their habits. (Sometimes it's also a bit, uh, eugenic. And that's terrible.)

Social measures, to these right wingers, often resemble danegeld or are (unfairly) presumed ineffective if there's still no harsh cost to doing crimes.

I also understand that conservatives view it in the three ways that you described, but the point is we now have mountains of evidence from decades of studies that show that these ideas don't actually work to reduce crime.

If you read the posts I linked then you saw that I also linked study after study after study that shows that harsh punishment for crime does not deter or reduce it but that materially changing the conditions of society does. It's not that people are mind controlled, it's that the same person under different conditions will make different choices and we can show that this happens consistently.

At this point the differences between how liberals and conservatives think about addressing crime are no longer just a difference of opinion, conservatives are actively denying all the evidence we have about how crime happens and advocating policies that we know don't work. It's one thing to say that harsh punishments will take criminals out of commission or make them rethink their choices when data is lacking, it's another thing to do so in spite of mountains of evidence.

Your "simpler explanation" just doesn't hold up. Either conservatives are holding to their ideas in spite of the evidence or they simply don't care what the evidence is in the first place. In either case, reducing crime cannot be their primary motivation.

Contrasted then with someone who nominally retains much more of their 'original' body, but who for various social reasons has focused on exceeding or avoiding as much of the ordinary human experience as they can (e.g. control over the endocrine system for better emotional regulation, an always-on AI helper & connection to cloud computing/other people, inserting fake memories to make learning new subjects instantaneous, etc.).

Contrasted then with someone who nominally retains much more of their 'original' body, but who for various social reasons has focused on exceeding or avoiding as much of the ordinary human experience as they can (e.g. control over the endocrine system for better emotional regulation, an always-on AI helper & connection to cloud computing/other people, inserting fake memories to make learning new subjects instantaneous, etc.).

The original form, as I see it:

1. There is endless cultural mythological BS about warrior classes which is untrue or doesn't apply to modernity.

2. The Spartans in specific were terrible ethically and decidedly mid at war for all their image.

3. Warrior-concepts don't necessarily map very well to industrial societies, democratic societies (these guys were generally either aristocrats or tribal nomads), or to societies where you're desperately trying to *restrain* violence and people's egos. (Can you imagine Bertran de Born with a nuclear weapon?)

4. Warrior-cults can easily devalue everyone who isn't a warrior, their own logistics, etc as well as people who don't want to fight or benefit from peace

5. Fascism tends to take all of this and make the stupidest possible version of it.

I'm not making them out to be Bertran de Born types (and yikes that guy is extremely unsympathetic; one is tempted to assume he is a chicken-hawk except he really, really wasn't.)

Plus, it's not like the meme ever clearly lays out what counts as a warrior ethos, or how it's going to define success. Genghis Khan's empire might've broken apart not long after his death, but you'd be hard pressed to say it wasn't militarily quite successful. Ditto for the Umayyads in Iberia (much more long-term success though!), and Alexander the Pretty-Decent. If your examples of 'warrior ethos' is wide enough to include the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and Sparta, but not Macedon, the Umayyad Caliphate, or the Mongols, then I have to ask if your definition is actually pointing at anything real.

#I respect ACOUP a great deal but don't agree with him about everything ever

Because rats are some of the least pro-murder people you can find! Both of the competitors for the title of Giant Rationalist Who Makes All Of The Rules haven't just "rejected political violence," they have gone on at length and in extreme detail about why violence is both wrong and a bad idea and pointed out all of the cognitive failures on the way that lead to a person to commit political / "kill someone in my way" violence. Like this is not just saying "we are a peaceful movement," the whole movement is about constructing a world-model that does not arrive at that conclusion because it sees it as a stupid and wrong conclusion that doesn't work and makes everything worse.

And the Zizians recruit from that movement and just instantly it's Immediately Escalate To Violence Time. Apparently the people who had contact with them said even before they started murdering they were ridiculously aggressive and confrontational. "I know we're all here because we agree in epistemic humility, and I know we all know about the processes and biases that lead people to think that they're so right they should get to kill people, and how that is the result of several failures we're all actively trying to avoid. But what if -- and hear me out on this -- I actually was so completely right about everything that I should get to kill people and I don't need epistemic humility because I know I'm right?"

Add on some weird shit about infinity and utilitarianism and animal suffering and dust specks and trolly problems. Never intended to instruct anyone to kill anyone while you make a career of saying shit like, “Will no one save the world by xenociding this troublesome mosquito ?” Then attract and accumulate mentally unstable people as a resource.

Specifically, the rationalists were/are very conflict-averse, but also very accepting of disagreeableness/otherwise-socially-unacceptable behavior. So zizan aggression is more likely to work in the immediate, and less likely to bring the kind of long-term negative repercussions it would in other conflict-averse environments (e.g. threaten to slit your white-collar boss's throat & he' might give you Friday off, but come Monday you'll be meeting security at the door).

because I forgot about the airlines. It wasn't just the FAA, or just Boeing or Douglas, everyone's bloodied by this shit.

Well, except Lockheed. The L-1011 was probably not perfect, but Lockheed really let their engineers lock the accountants in a closet for that thing, and it never killed anyone out of a grossly negligent design flaw.