ArjinFerman

Tinfoil Gigachad

2 followers follows 3 users joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC

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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad 7d ago · Edited 7d ago

That is a particular goal you're putting your definitions in service of. If defining something changes how you sense the world around you

You keep criticizing me for how I argue with progressives without understanding where they're coming from, but you're not really practicing what you preach. Instead of listening to how I see and use definitions, it sounds like you're a lot more interested in telling me how I should see and use them.

I'm trying to tell you - it doesn't change how I sense the world around me. I can substitute my definitions for yours, or anyone else's, and the way I see the world will stay the same. It's useful to have symbols in order to reason about reality, but what what symbols are assigned for what is not a big deal, I can do substitutions in my head with little effort.

Either that statement uses my definition of "man" and "woman," in which case it's false, or it's using your own, in which case it completely fails to communicate any information.

Ok, maybe I misunderstood something you said, let's go over this again:

It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.

Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.

I said my definition of "man"/"woman" is independent of the social order I, or the person in question, is living under. Your response seems to be arguing that this makes my entire approach to definitions wrong, because if what I don't change what I consider to be a "man" or "woman" depending on the social order I'm under, that makes those definitions useless. I don't know what other conclusion to draw from that, other than that a useful approach to definition necessitates that the same person can be a man in one social order and a woman in another. If you didn't mean to say that, than I honestly don't know what your response has to do with what I said.

What?

Let's say you tell me "I'm for equality between the sexes", and because I'm cynical by nature, I don't believe you and suspect that this is something you want only for your own benefit. But then I see you advocating for something that would put you at a disadvantage, and benefit the opposite sex. That's an indication that I haven't met you where you are, and I should adjust my perception of you.

Policies are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Obviously once you decide on an end, then it makes sense to talk about policies, but until then it's pointless.

Your argument went:

In order to talk about policies, I need to first talk about what I mean by "man" and "woman".
But before talking about that we need to talk about what goals we're trying to achieve by creating those definitions.

If policies are a means to an end, and definitions are explicitly created is services of particular ends (see also: "A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end.") then decoupling definitions from policies is a largely fruitless task. The only people who can have a productive conversation this way, are people who already signed on for the same end goals (except they won't even kno.

and the glib little propaganda piece you linked falls into the exact same failure state.

I don't see how. People should be able to answer a simple question like regardless of their preferred policies, or the end goals they're trying to reach. My views on this issue are more or less opposite to yours, we have to start with the definitions, in order to make sure we're even talking about the same thing. From there we can try to find out if we agree or disagree on questions of end goals or the means to achieve them.

Okay, let's do that.

On the issue of sports, my position is that the differences in reproductive biology correlate with a whole swath of physical capabilities, such that putting the group with one set of reproductive characteristics against another, will put one of them at a massive disadvantage, and physical danger.

On the issue of prison much the same arguments apply, except on top of them there's the risk of not only physically maligning prisoners of a group with certain reproductive characteristics, but subjecting them to the risk of sexual assault.

On the topic of medical interventions, I believe they need to be stopped because they don't meet basic medical ethics standards. People are being encouraged to participate in what is effectively a medical experiment, without being informed that this is what they're signing up for. This is particularly egregious when it comes to children, but even cases of adults aren't ethically in the clear.

The transgender debate touches on many other issues like education or parental custody, but this should be enough to demonstrate that what you said about definitions is wrong. I argue for my views even with the words tabooed, and it makes no difference to me what definitions we use.

And I don't think a non-catholic government has the correct moral authority to legislate what sports teams do to make money or who's allowed in which bathrooms based off a non-catholic, non-consensus over gender and what the purpose of defining it is.

Governments have been legislating on what people are allowed to do to make money, and how, since we had governments. Unless you're a hardcore libertarian or an ancap, I will need some more meat on the argument for why this is where we must draw the line on government intervention.

m not sure, because doing that requires us to exchange actual information first. I think we're arguing on completely different levels because we can't agree on terminology.

I don't think we've been arguing over the meaning of any particular word.