Is this description of the US from Hananias recent post Conservatives Win All the Time Conservatives Win All the Time accurate?
“[...] Recently major institutions [have] become openly anti-white and anti-male. Gay propaganda in schools has exploded, as has the percentage of young people identifying as LGBT. School libraries basically now carry porn, and since it’s LGBT porn instead of heterosexual, the media considers any attempts to keep it away from minors to be fascism. There are now fat women in underwear ads.”
I believe he is making 7 separate statements in this paragraph. I have rewritten them somewhat to make them easier to judge.
Many major institutions have become openly anti-white
Many major institutions have become openly anti-male
There is now much more Gay propaganda in schools
There are now many more young people identifying as LGBTQ
School libraries basically now carry porn
Because it is LGBTQ porn, the media is very against every attempt at removing it from schools.
There has been a significant increase in the number of overweight women in underwear ads.
In 2035 I and other trustworthy people, if he wants, Richard Hanania can also help us, will evaluate if these statements were an accurate description of the US in 2023. They don't all have to be correct for the market to resolve YES. I am not yet sure what we will do in 2035 to resolve this market but it will be something like assigning every statement a truth value between 0 and 100. So the total could be between 0 and 700. And the market will resolve yes if this value is above 450. We probably won't be using this exact measure but maybe something similar.
Basically if the consensus among smart people is that Hananias paragraph is accurate we resolve yes and if consensus is that the paragraph is not accurate we will resolve no.
1,000People are also trading
@stardust at the moment some people think it's true some think it's false, in a couple of years it will be easier to see who was right
Lesbian/gay porn is actually good for teens. I know because I became a Coomer at young age and it was very spiritually uplifting. Look, teens these days aren't having sex like they used to, and society thinks this is good, but actually it leads to loneliness. The problem is not that sex is promoted to kids, but that it is not promoted enough. Kids learn about STIs and consent but missing is the cultural understanding that sex is really really fun and it is your sovereign right as a teenager to sneak out of the house to do it.
These are mostly subjective judgments, and none of the relevant facts are really in dispute. The market creator's idea of "smart people" seems to mean "Richard Hanania, himself, and unspecified others", so the resolution criteria amount to "will Richard Hanania and some guy named Timothy hold these opinions (about the 2023 US) in 2035?"
Personally I think that YES, it seems likely Hanania will still think this (and likely that the market creator agrees with him now and then), but I don't really care to put mana into this market for 12 years or appear to be endorsing these takes (4 and 7 seem true, I think the rest are false but this is partly a moral judgment).
@AMS Hanania seems very biased I wouldn't count him as a smart person (At least for this market). My main reason to make this market was that I thought 10 years might give people distance and time to reflect so they can make better judgement. I was especially thinking of the time of the Iraq war. It seems like 15 years later people would be much better at evaluating all the facts.
The aim of this market was to something like being a culture war equivalent of "Is it the right decision to invade Iraq, resolves to 2020 consensus". That question would clearly resolve no, most people agree the US/UK invading Iraq was a mistake and horrible decision.
But I could imagine that the resolution criteria are too vague and this question will be useless.
1 and 2 are clearly true. We have (or had?) affirmative action admissions & hiring and contracts & loans set aside for minority-owned business. In college, I got emails promoting scholarships, internships and RAs which said “no white men need apply” in politer terms.
4 is true per surveys
3 is a semantic question. Certainly schools have become more accommodative of gay students.
5, 6 sound like hackish spin. Educators haven’t lost their minds.
7 might be true. Hard to see how it matters or why it would be bad if true.
Education>propaganda
Two sides of the same coin from opposing ideology. The way someone equated Israeli propaganda and "education" is due to the other not liking the message. Are the teachers forcing the kids to read books that say you should be gay or you'll be thrown in jail forever or that heterosexual people should be put in camps and exterminated? That would be propaganda. But I'm always wrong.
These are disputes about complex values, not facts.
Let's say all universities fixed their demographic distribution to that of the general population. Is this anti-asian? Is this anti-white? Whatever we're discussing here, it's basically 'is affirmative action good or bad', and not some dispute about orientation we can resolve without resolving the values dispute. Not that vaues and facts are ontologically separated, conservatives concretely believe AA reduces competence and liberals don't, just that this is trying to elide complexity that can't really be
Universities already have fixed their gender distribution to be 50/50 male/female, irrespective of ability. Is this anti-male? Er - in the past, this was to correct for a lack of women. But now, women are more qualified and graduate at higher rates at general-population universities. So is fixing gender ratios anti-female now?
There is now much more Gay propaganda in schools
This is purely a word game. What does propaganda mean? If propaganda means 'promotion', this is objectively true! There's plenty of pro-american propaganda in schools, plenty of anti-genocide propaganda in schools. This is fine, because america is pretty nice and genocide isn't so nice. If 'propaganda' means something more like 'malicious and manipulative promotion', then ... well, you see the issue, whether promotion is malicious is basically just a value judgement. Schools also have lots of "vaccine propaganda" and "pro-science propaganda". Which is fine.
There are now many more young people identifying as LGBTQ
this is true and disputes this. It's almost all B and T though, there hasn't been much of an increase in G
School libraries basically now carry porn
I don't even think hanania actually believes this, I think he was just saying it for rhetorical effect
Because it is LGBTQ porn, the media is very against every attempt at removing it from schools.
ditto
There has been a significant increase in the number of overweight women in underwear ads.
This is probably objectively true?
Mostly regarding the first University example. I think the two things that will make most clear what I mean are the Irak war and thinking about how the question will actually be resolved, and thinking about what goes on in people's heads.
1. If we had a question now "Did people have excessive fear and obsession and craziness after 9/11 and that helped cause the US invade Irak" or some other similar question I think this would clearly resolve Yes. Now, 20 years later, we are better at judging the facts.
So, imagine me forming a coalition with 6 other people to resolve this market. We will look at this question and think "Was the world like that 10 years ago?" and then also look at some data and resolve based on that.
2. The second thing is that what matters the most is what goes on in people's heads, at least for the first question regarding universities. Imagine if taxes were just made to help everyone vs if taxes were made specifically to punish rich people. In both cases the taxes might look exactly the same, but only in the second example would I say the taxes were made because of anti-rich sentiment.
Same here do people actually think "Whites are so evil" or do they just think "If we allow in more minorities then that will help their communities, they need this because they were victims of discrimination in the past".
@ShadowyZephyr What do you think "Gay propaganda" would look like? If it were to exist?
I find it interesting because we never consider things we agree with to be propaganda. For example in Israel we call pro-Israel propaganda "Hasbara" (hebrew for "the act of explaining").
@Timothy I'm gonna symbolically put 10 mana on NO after the white supremacist revelations, if only because I think it means his judgment on #1 should be entirely discarded (that, and I really, really dislike him.)
1 is true of you count anti-racism or CRT.
2 is an overstatement.
3 is true if you call pride flags etc. "gay propaganda"
4 is true.
5 and 6 are mostly referring to the book that had a graphic depiction of a gay blowjob. Again I agree with the general sentiment but I think the framing is pushing it.
7 is true.
@TiredCliche Would probably count if the book was put in schools with the main purpose of arousing homosexual feelings. And especially if in general the amount of books like that has gone up significantly. Because the question is if there is now much more Gay propaganda in schools than there used to be? So if there has always been a little it would not count. Only if it has gone up.
@Timothy Well, that's not the question you originally asked, so I think you're just changing the market criteria in anticipation of a YES resolution.
@TiredCliche What do you mean exactly? I didn't try to change any resolution criteria.
I meant to say that "Lord of the Flies" would count as gay propaganda if it was put into schools to be gay propaganda. If it was just put there because it's a cool book but it just happened to arouse gay feelings in some people it wouldn't count.
@Julian Maybe? In theory, I think you could evaluate #1 and #2 by searching institutional codes for anything that discriminates against white men, or evaluate it by determining if the percentage of white men in positions of power was significantly lower than the percentage of white men in the population. The most powerful people in America are CEOs and politicans, and as of 2022, roughly 90% of CEOs are men, and roughly 90% are white; as of 2021, a majority of politicians are white men despite white men being a minority of the population. I'd say that #1 and #2 evaluate as "laughably false."
I agree that #3 is impossible to evaluate cleanly because it depends on what counts as "propaganda." IMO, also "laughably false," but I don't know if I can back that up with hard data.
#4 evaluates as "very true."
#5 should be possible to evaluate by gathering data about what books are in school libraries. The definition of "basically porn" might be subjective, in which case I'd default to the "I know it when I see it" rule, i.e. things like sex ed or anatomy books aren't "basically porn." Probably "false" but I don't have data.
I agree that #6 is impossible to evaluate, because it relies on weird assumptions and is wrong on just about any level.
#7 also evaluates as "true."
If it was entirely up to me to resolve this market (it's probably a good thing that it isn't), I'd rate the truth values as something like 0, 0, 0-25 depending on what "propaganda" is, 100, 0-5, 0, and probably 100, for a total value of roughly 200-230 out of 700.
@Julian My main reason to make this market is that I think even if these are really hard to evaluate it will probably be easier do this with a couple years of distance than doing it right now.
Imagine trying to evaluate the time leading up to the Irak war. Asking questions like "Is there anti Muslim hysteria in major institutions?", "Are politicians openly spreading hate towards islam?", etc.
It seems like these Questions would be far easier to evaluate now than in 2004.
@TimothyCurrie Sure, there are conceivable scenarios under which some of these would be provably true. Like if schools started actually distributing pamphlets about how hets must be eradicated or something. However, obviously that's never going to happen and the people who believe these statements are true are operating on entirely different definitions from the people who believe they're true.
@Julian Yeah, that's the major problem here for sure. Living in a post-truth world sucks, and it's probably impossible to convince anyone who believes that schools are full of "gay propaganda" that they're wrong.
@evergreenemily That seems wrong to me, there is no such thing as a post-truth world. I could easily be convinced that schools are full of gay propaganda or that there is no gay propaganda in schools. There are some pictures of books that students supposedly have to read in school that I might consider gay propaganda. For example I have seen claims that the book "This book is Gay" is read in schools and pictures of the book that look like possibly gay propaganda.
If I was shown that very many schools use this or similar books and that the content really was gay propaganda I would be convinced that there was propaganda. If I was shown that this or similar books were never read in schools or that the book wasn't gay propaganda a at all. I would be convinced that there was no gay propaganda in schools.
@Timothy Well, the question here is what "gay propaganda" is. What makes something "propaganda" as opposed to "education?" I'd be willing to bet that there's plenty of stuff that Hanania would consider "propaganda" that I consider "education."