ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
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User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
This is an extremely pedantic point to make, but sure, I can agree that the metaphor I chose was perhaps not totally correct.
Sorry about the pedantry, but I find it frustrating because to me the metaphor has a clear and useful meaning, it says the the way one drew the categories is fundamentally broken. In biology you can create categories like "mammal" and "reptile", and even though nature will throw a duck-billed platypus at you sometimes, these categories will still cleave reality at the joints. On the other hand, if you tried to draw a boundary in a way that includes half of all known mammals, and half of all known reptiles, that division would be broken, and wouldn't cleave reality at the joints.
The broader point I made was that there isn't one correct way to define "white" (which you seem to agree with) and therefore who is white and who isn't is socially constructed.
The important thing to note is that even though there isn't one correct way to define any particular race, the core is usually the same, and people fight over the boundaries. This makes broad statements like "white is socially constructed" clearly false, as that implies the core of the concept is up for grabs.
like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native
They're just operating at a different level of granularity. It does nothing to disprove the point that race is not socially constructed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.
Originally you said race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. Even if there's no objectively correct size of the category, it doesn't prove what you originally said. If there's a lot of joints, one person can cleave slightly to the left of how another would do it, and they'd both cleave at the joints.
If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?
In one case I meant "how related they are to each other" in the other I meant physically, so a person can take a look at each of them, and mark their similarities and differences. As opposed to just name-dropping "Native American" and "Siberian" to a person who has never seen either, and is only aware of the geographical separation between America and Siberia.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
Maybe I'm pedantic, but I'd call that "language is a social construct".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
You're talking about language, I'm talking "sort these according to how hard they are to separate with your eyes".
Yes, I'm sure. I even know which exact video you got this from. It also had an example of an African tribe that supposedly can easily tell very similar shades of green apart, because they have more words for it in their language.
The phrase you quote does not imply an inability to perceive blue - the sea is pretty damn dark during a dark storm, and wine is also often dark enough that you can't tell it's color - and the African tribe thing was outright made up for the clicks (or views, I guess) by the BBC and a corrupt academic they were filming.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.
If you're going to say that no one claimed that the sameness of colors is not socially constructed, then I don't know what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality
I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.
which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?
If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.
Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language
That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.
That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used.
If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.
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.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints.
Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.
This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually
(Disclaimer: I am definitely in a glass house here.)
Fun fact: it used to be a sand castle.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
Or perhaps they opted for exactly the same chicken dinner.
Don't know how they do things in Germany exactly, but votes don't necessarily translate to seats 1:1. It's been a while since I bothered voting but 30+% was often enough to form a stable government, depending on how the competition did.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13d ago
C*U + BSW? No less reasonable than C*U + SPD, and Wagenknecht can't complain about playing second fiddle.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
Elites have been dreaming of technology that would make boots on the ground obsolete since the invention of artillery. Maybe one day it will happen, but hasn't happened yet.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
Ok, but how would those spikes change the conclusion about what happened from 2016 to 2024?
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.
On the contrary, definitions shouldn't be put the in service of a particular goal, they're basic building-blocks of sense-making. I can have different personal and/or social ends, and a constant definition makes it a lot easier to reason about which ones are more desiderable for me. It's the fluid definition that's useless.
Also, I think this pretty much vindicates my earlier prediction that your definition effectively means you think men can be women.
It looks like you still think, "meeting them were they are" means discussing the same object-level policy preference.
No, I don't. Their actions regarding policies are just a verification mechanism for whether or not I met them where they are.
But that's way above the level of discussion I'm talking about! Before you can have a productive conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about what a "man" and a "woman" are...
First of all, do you have any idea how evasive progressives are about this question? There's literally a movie about it
Secondly, actually according to your approach to definitions, trying to decouple definitions from personal and social ends (i.e.: "object-level policy preferences") is pointless, because definitions are put them in order to reach a particular end to begin with. You literally say that in the following sentence.
If you just come at it from the level of, "men can't be women," and then try to have a discussion about the bathroom question, of course it's going to be unproductive.
Sorry, but you're not meeting me where I am. That's not how I approach these conversations at all. I can argue for my position even after tabooing all those words, like you originally suggested.
and consequently that said establishment (that they trust more than you) must have some information they don't about how allowing trans women in bathrooms actually serves that shared fundamental value better.
That's perfectly fine though, but if it's the case, is it too much for them to just say that?
By the way, you seem pretty convinced that you understand mine, and the hypothetical progressive's approach very well. What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind, and end up believing that my description of how progressives think is more accurate?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
I don't get the impression that they want to return to the good old days of pre-woke liberalism like I do.
Well, that certainly describes me accurately, but as a counterpoint I'd say I'm probably a lot more open to "I'll leave you alone, if you leave me alone"* type deals, more than the typical leftist.
*) Which, to be clear, means "go do your thing in California, or somewhere, and don't impose your rules on other jurisdictions".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia,
I'm not seeing it. If there's a truce, especially an uneasy one, I'm betting all the young to middle-aged men who are currently stuck will immediately bail out. Though I suppose they can try and keep the war-time decree, that forbids them from leaving, in effect.
Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does.
No, sir. 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.
But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways.
I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.
- I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.
Which is quite a bit of an issue. I rate my chances of having a reasonable (though not necessarily productive) conversation with a liberal, far higher than I do with a leftist (unless it's one of those old-school /r/stupidpol types)
My model for how Elon's companies work is something like:
- Create hype for
$thing - Investors get hyped and shower Elon with money
- Deliver
$thing - Thing does not bring enough profit to justify investment
- Create hype for
$new_thing - ...
This worked well enough until now, but there are signs things are starting to break. I don't think they'll be able to repeat the same thing past Starship, so to answer your question - if Starship becomes their workhorse, or they'll bin the program, but it won't end the company*, I'll concede.
*) Modulo the shady stuff he can potentially do with a direct line to Trump, but I don't know how to explicitly factor that into my prediction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
An independent audit would be nice. Also, just time, I guess - at some point it will start looking awfully silly if they keep doing their thing, and I keep insisting it's price dumping.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
I'm pretty sure I recall that it was both, with a marked change in how hamfisted it was the moment Biden got into office.
They're oblivious to more than one problem. I don't know if they realize what effect these sort of "now that this affects Jewish people, it will be acknowledged as a problem" proclamations could have.
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