5434a
1yr ago
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
5434a
1yr ago
Without that definition [trans women as completely matching the category of "male"] the category "women" is actually more accurate than the category "male" for predicting the action of trans women
[...] part of being a trans women is performing womanhood such that if someone were to try to predict your actions based off of a gender identifier, then you would try to act so that "women" was a better fit. Since categories are used for predictive modeling then perhaps the category "women" is more accurate.
Strong disagree. Disregarding the fact that trans women are males reduces accuracy in both description and prediction. You're arguing to make their target bigger rather than our aim truer.
5434a
1yr ago
I kind of see what you're getting at, there is something profound in using our human intellects to engineer away bodily suffering and codify the processes of doing so, or formulate an elegantly simple solution to a knotty problem, but it lacks the aesthetic dimensions that satisfy the more earthly senses.
There are some fairly simple principles to what most people consider beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and they carry across from art and architecture to music and magazine models, and they can indeed often be codified in mathematical terms. Repetition, rhythm, ratio, harmony, symmetry, dynamics, variation, proportion, and other more human or purpose specific ergonomics, plus any embedded textual and subtextual communication. These are not idiosyncratic preferences. They're timeless, real, and to a degree they're intuitive. It's the same things that make clowns and caricatures funny by getting it wrong via exaggeration. We have thousands of years of practice and improvement in these matters, and while cost constraints are a perennial consideration there's no reason to abandon them entirely or pretend they don't exist.
It's a bit like cookery. Only the most wretched poor, prisoners on punishment, or an ascetic monk would be expected to eat plain grains. But on the other end of the scale even the richest royalty aren't eating an entire bowl of pure saffron. There's a Goldilocks balance of complexity to aim for and a lot of post-war culture has either gone for too little (brutalism, soylent meal replacement drinks), too much (3D cinema, "experimental" ""music"", 87 flavours of hot sauce, Times Square, tinnitus level audio amplification, etc) or a ruthless bean-counting (sub)optimising (I don't know, plastic cutlery? or pockets that are only deep enough for your fingertips). To paraphrase Marie Kondo, those things don't spark joy, or comfort, or contentment. They spark under/over-stimulation and alienation, and those make society a sad panda.
5434a
1yr ago
Not practical at all but sleeping outdoors has that kind of invigorating effect. I'd guess it's the combination of cold night temperatures, unlimited fresh air and natural levels of daylight. Probably the closest you could get at home is some kind of techno fix that draws your curtains and opens your windows wide.
5434a
1yr ago
Dig. Find something, or just one aspect of something, that you like and follow its tracks backwards to find out where it came from, then find out what else came from that person/team/place/era/tech/genre.
How are you finding your media currently? The idea that going to a shop and talking to people is a foreign experience makes it sound like you're fairly young and have grown up scrolling through Netflix and Spotify.
5434a
1yr ago
once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look
That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.
5434a
1yr ago
I don't know about hiking in particular but there's a conformity to a lot of these activities that at the most charitable are reflective of status and at the least charitable are indicative of pretense. A reasonable rule of thumb is whether a local could do it cheaply, an outsider couldn't do it without paying, and the modest locals might arbitrage their resource to the wealthy outsiders. The status anxious locals save up to imitate being a wealthy outsider, often somewhere else, and the wealthy outsider is already partially imitating the modest authenticity of a locale. It wasn't a PMC careerist who came up with fishing, horse riding, making wine or any of the other stuff that is typically for toffs and peasants, but PMC careerists do come up with sales plans and can probably demonstrate a level of critical insight into that activity that is potentially more interesting than recycling what they've been told about a wine's terroir.
5434a
1yr ago
It's not moral authority, it's regular authority. A tyrannical monarch could write a law that says "all gold belongs to the king" with no reference to morality.
I don't understand what you're driving at, if you'll pardon the phrasing. My starting point was that we're not free in the west/democracy, we're free-er, and that there is no radical freedom where we can do whatever we like under any system or lack of system. That's omnipotence.
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions
Certainly I did not.
I feel this is straying further from my central point but what kind of christmas cracker cereal box licencing body grants licences that don't require abiding by the rules? It doesn't make sense to me. If they don't require abiding by the rules what's the point of a licence? It would be no different to not needing one. The first rule of licence club is "you need a licence". The second rule is "if you don't have one you're not authorised to do it". The third rule is "if you break the rules you lose your licence; refer to rule two".
5434a
1yr ago
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions when you applied for a licence to drive on the state's roads. You're free to walk at whatever speed you like.
The democratic sausage machine aspires to the freedom to be user serviceable, the other sausage machines don't. It's not like you can get away from the butcher.
5434a
1yr ago
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
5434a
1yr ago
Both the state and the public fail in their own ways, and it can be due to legitimate difficulty or cynical dishonourableness.
A simple example is speed limits. We accept a state regulated limit on our freedom to not drive faster than say 70mph so that our journeys are safer than they would be otherwise, and at the second order they're more efficient too (less road closures due to pile-ups). Our freedom was reduced in exchange for those benefits, but we retain the greater freedom to change or remove that limit via the democratic process. Yet some people still choose to defect from something as easy as not speeding.
There's a difference between failure to deliver on the social contract and failure to honour it. Say we gave the police £200 to patrol a motorway and eliminate 100% of speeding. They would inevitably fail to deliver, point out it's not a realistic target and reasonably request an increase to the budget. But if we gave them £200 million and there was no improvement in their performance it would be reasonable to assume that they're not trying.
On the other hand say we offered a homeless person a subsidised house so that they could get back on their feet and become independent. If the house was cold, damp, and next to a factory pumping out toxic smoke they might have understandable grounds to reject the deal and go back to sleeping rough in the posh part of town where the air is sweet and the begging is easy. But if the house was plain and adequate with access to suitable work nearby and it turned out they sold the copper and then turned it into a combination knocking shop and trap house it's hard to justify trading away more social goods of state expenditure and the loss of potential responsible residents to enable further defection.
In short the rights and privileges we experience as freedom come with responsibilities and associated costs. We, as public and the state, are free to renegotiate the costs and benefits rather than suffering them by diktat or anarchy but we are responsible for exercising good faith in upholding the agreements. The N-word screamer wants the freedom to defect at will and neglects to realise his stance implies other people's freedom to blast a combination of spam advertising and malicious slander back at them. The anarchist/libertarian neglects that zeroing out the state monopoly on violence and legitimacy re-opens a competition which leads back to where they began only de facto instead of de jure.
5434a
1yr ago
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
5434a
1yr ago
I like reading seminal genre classics. They're like the ultimate prequel after growing up in a world of derivatives.
5434a
1yr ago
You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".
It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"
5434a
1yr ago
scenes like this
Lmao. Reminds me of my own school textbooks apart from the dicks and absurd gay sex were added by students who would get a detention for their vandalism if they were caught. What do naughty kids do now, add clothes to the characters and turn the dicks into cans of beer?
5434a
1yr ago
I read it after falling for the hype. I thought the notion of a house that is irresolvably slightly larger on the inside than the oustide was an original surreal idea. The rest of it was just a haunted house story wrapped in layer upon layer of meta. That might be thrilling if the reader isn't familiar with meta-reference but if you are it begins to feel over indulgent.
There's a good enough short horror/surreal story at the core, but it's not quite as big and clever on the inside as it looks on the outside.
5434a
1yr ago
Goals aren't entirely arbitrary. They can make things worse or better. They can be self-interested or pro-social.
Forming your own rules is a good start. One thing that sharpens the focus is to set tight restrictions. "Take a good photo" is so broad that you could spend all week reading about aesthetics and equipment without leaving your desk - or you could take a left turn and begin wondering whether a photo can be morally good. "Take the best photo you can, using what you have, in the next hour" compels you to stop thinking and start doing. Use the challenge and arbitrariness to your advantage.
The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
5434a
1yr ago
That bit confused me too. What does "accruing undesirable" constitute? Did people see a better kept park and start monopolising it? Are better kept parks considered fussy and unnatural? Were you encroaching on somebody else's remit?
5434a
1yr ago
As I remember it it was after Trump mentioned it. At that point it stopped being a point of legitimate query and started being a matter of acknowledging Trump's query as legitimate. It became tribal. Once Trump was out of the picture it began losing that valence and started becoming legitimate again.
OP's family member "suggested that they've shifted right". Right-coded is still assessing the subject in tribal terms but it's an attenuation from being Trump-coded. And I'm not sure it's grossly off target. Is OP excited about the report because he has a material interest in whether covid came from a lab, an academic interest in "the science", or because he has a political axe to grind? He may well be a pure intellectual, but his family member can have justifiable reasons for assuming otherwise. How many people were excited about virology before covid made it cool and the Trump era made it tribal.
5434a
1yr ago
It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
5434a
1yr ago
Is that the 2 button on a 0-9 keypad? This microwave doesn't have a keypad. IIRC it has +10s, +1m, +5m, maybe +1h, a button to cycle through power levels and a button to cycle through cooking modes (micro/combi/conv). And a start/stop button.
5434a
1yr ago
Identity politics is bullshit. [...] look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is.
As I understand it identity politics caught on as an alternative to class politics. It was a means for the left to scoop up the various previously un/under-represented minorities in an effort to gather enough extra votes to tip the scales in their favour. In the 1970s politics was class politics with labour unions playing a significant role. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along, crushed the unions and identity politics followed. It had little to nothing to do with what you "identified as" and lots to everything to do with who you voted for. It was about politics, not identity, and although the academic material and its derivatives that explore identity are 99% socially corrosive bullshit the political appeal is arguably pragmatic, albeit on a short-term and short-sighted basis.
It seems to me your point is that people from outside the left have adopted the identity lens with the difference being that they largely denigrate the minorities to flatter the majority. This has taken over from the socially synthesising MLK colour blindism and classical albeit imperfect liberalism that preceded the idpol era. Well, yeah. You can't form an ingroup without creating an outgroup. This is what has always baffled me about the identity politics of the true believers rather than the pollsters. It makes sense for the majority to adopt idpol, they're the majority. The minority are at a democratic disadvantage by definition, and the only way it worked/works is that it depended on the majority adhering to fuzzy social liberalism while the minorities rally around their flag/s. Once the idpol mindset takes root in the wider discourse, even if it's just via objection to it, you get the opposing side being drawn onto the pitch and you start to see MRAs, HBDists, trans denialists, principled free speech trolls and so on take up position. And if the idpol nonsense gets too fevered you arrive at the yeschad.jpg ethno-nationalism of white people, after having been identified as such externally, coming to a position where they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It ain't pretty.
In summary the idpol left promoted it, the minorities adopted it, the classical liberals and class-first left adapted to it and the majority are progressively shifting from passively accepting it to being boxed into actively adopting it in kind. It's less The Matrix's "you think that's air you're breathing" and more the fish noticing the water it's been swimming in. It's less red pill vs blue pill and more black pill vs white pill.
Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.
Quite, and like the saying goes just because you do not take an interest in [identity] politics doesn't mean [identity] politics won't take an interest in you.
I'd be weirded out, but only in the "this is too good to be true, and if it's not true then it's probably up to no good" sense. Even then we know that men have a greater propensity for risk-taking so a lot of them will play those odds regardless if the potential reward is high enough.
A watered down version happens all the time on dating sites when you get unprompted messages from accounts that use what looks like a photo of a professional swimwear model modelling swimwear. Yeah, riiiight.
What would you say they're trying to provoke? I think that's the bone of contention and also the disconnect between the sexes. I suspect straight men are limited to being provoked to lust, and thus hope that sending a dick pic will get the same reaction, while women are provoked to... Fear, maybe? As if it were a threat rather than a grossly miscalibrated offer. And it's much the same with the yoga pants and the thongs and the button-popping blouses - I don't think the woman looks cute or slutty or some other moral-aesthetic judgment, I'm too preoccupied with, having been prompted/"provoked" into doing so, thinking about what she looks like under those clothes (and how I shouldn't be preoccupied with that (and how I am anyway, so let's try to be subtle about it instead of gawping like the cartoon wolf)).
If OP's current social setting is frequently little more than two small bits of fabric more modest than a nudist beach I can understand how a monastery might begin to hold some appeal because if I was at a nudist beach then I basically have the option of looking and feeling lustful, or else studiously not looking at all. Outside of more limited contexts like, say, medical exams or such I don't see how I could take a value-neutral look at a woman in no clothes. He can choose not to go to a nude beach but it might feel like short of joining a monastery, or the army, or some other strongly fraternal institution, he can't opt out of this society.
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