EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
For me, better mood from exercise is mediated through better sleep, a sense of accomplishment and being fitter in general when walking, climbing stairs, carrying things, so I feel more inclination to do things instead of just sitting on my couch.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Which other language than the English of the last few decades has separate words for the two? It's not that "oh in Finnish both translate to the same word" but that the distinction was made up recently in English (where they used to be synonyms, gender being a euphemism). When other languages need the distinction they have to loan the English word.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
"Gender roles have varied across time and culture" is the motte, "who is male or female has so far been entirely socially constructed to uphold an oppressive patriarchy, but from now on it should actually be decided by everyone themselves based on their inner feelings and this decision is unquestionable" is the bailey.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Just because men and women play different roles, wear different clothes etc at different historical times and technological circumstances doesn't somehow negate that they are men and women. We don't need a new concept (gender) to be able to say that women had lives and jobs like this before but like that after.
Also if gender is merely the difference between the roles in different cultures or times, are transgender people adopting some roles from a different era than today? I thought they transition from male to female etc. and not from 21st century to, I don't know, 8th century.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Is your gender the social expectation from you or is it your inner feeling?
Does someone who doesn't conform to "current gender norms" have a different gender then?
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Feminists who still understand gender as the roles you mention are fringe today and labeled TERFs. Yes, originally gender studies was about these roles and women's place in society etc, but today's woke gender concept is something else. The whole point was that these gender roles are something you are pushed into by your social setting, not something you choose based on your unique snowflake personality quirks. The original goal wasn't to tell people "hey, you don't like the roles/social expectations put on you? Then you aren't actually a woman/man!" but to allow women and men more flexibility in shaping their roles to their personality and temperament without anyone denying that they can live like that as women/men.
Interestingly enough, a significant chunk of the Hungarian left (including a massively popular leftist YouTube show) are also with that earlier definition and are woke-critical/gender-critical. It would be worth a post sometime I think.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
1950s USA is this magical reference point for some reason, that justifies introducing a whole new concept called "gender". Actually that's not even surprising, I just wrote a comment on how we are stuck in the 60s on repeat, so yeah I guess comparing ourselves to one decade ago make sense.
I agree. Parents think they have to be best friends to their kids. Kids crave the boundary, they search for it and want to find it. As a mature adult you play along and provide it. So they can get the adrenaline of transgression but still without ruining their life.
But setting up expectations, rules and boundaries is apparently too authoritarian. And parents themselves don't want to grow up or feel old, so they don't dare to draw a line and take on the role of "the mean parent" (from the kid's POV). Why people don't want to grow up probably has many reasons. One is the media's obsession with keeping people perpetual adolescents, because those are better consumers. Also for some reason teen culture is somehow elevated to be seen as the "real" culture of the times and if you don't follow it, you're a dinosaur who is out of touch and it's cringe and whatever. An adult should have no time to care about getting called cringe, but here we are.
We pretend that all this is about keeping up with the times, but in fact we collectively froze around the 60s in the role of the rebellious Beatles fan teenager.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Pretty sure there were male "nurses" (caregivers to sick people) all throughout history. There are lots of tasks involved that need physical strength, carrying and lifting patients, restraining aggressive ones, etc.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
This definition presupposes that these roles are all learned and are mere societal expectations (presumably arbitrary ones at that).
But actually the same thing that makes your body grow a penis or a vagina also affects the brain, the hormones etc. The gender-sex distinction is made up, it's not even possible to express it in any other language than English (other than outright loaning the word "gender" as is). Gender started out as a euphemism for sex, to avoid referring to the act of sex (before that, it only referred to grammatical categories). They should be nothing more than synonyms.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Well, it's good to bash attention-seeking but this sort of competition is constant. So what, should teens just be good boys/good girls and not compete for status and attention? But it's oneupmanship all the way. A quiet nestling won't get fed.
Teens are right to join fads, going through them creates shared experiences, the acting out of various social roles, etc. It's a form of play, even if it feels serious from the inside at the time.
The bigger question is why our broader culture is drifting in a way that the fads are becoming self serving, narcissistic, self referential, navel gazing and misanthropic.
There are many ancient myth story types, killing one's father, the father devouring the sons etc. Is there an archetypal story of the daughter refusing to give birth to the new generation just to spite the tyrannical father? Because I think that's the story our current culture is playing.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
We attach social roles to many attributes of people. For example, there are social roles for old people and young people that can differ between cultures. So do we need a new word for "age" that describes the social role attached to one's age?
change their name, and let everybody know that their pronouns are "she/they" now - while changing nothing else about their appearance or presentation. [...] I often feel baffled by why they find it so important?
How do people in your circles react to them coming out? Is there an outpour of love, applause and validation?
Being nonbinary in gender or bi-curious in sexuality are cheap ways to become LGBTQIA2S+. No need to transition. You suddenly become an interesting person. It's basically the next level of "ally". There was some leaflet I saw on the Motte how the gender spectrum goes from Barbie to GI Joe. If conceptualized like this, it's not even a lie for them to say they don't feel fully female, as they are not some plastic barbie doll or stereotypical extremely girly girl. They see the female role as too weak, too patriarchy-defined, to male-gaze-defined.
Call it fashion, peer-pressure or whatever. People want to belong. And today, especially online, you can belong, be interesting and validated by showing that you are "diverse". Identify as mixed-race, discover your 1/32 indigenous roots, be nonbinary with 'they' pronouns, have "mental health struggles" etc.
There's also this gender hobbyist/enthusiast community who like to catalogue all the genders, like stamp collectors. They are the same sort of people who made Tokio Hotel fan club websites in 2003 on Geocities. The sort of people who make the Aesthetics Wiki. I think this hobby community (who debate the fine differences between demigirls and whatever else) is also really just a small subset of the whole progressive pro-gender crowd, a kind of autistic/aspie subset probably. They also probably don't quite understand it so they obsess about systematizing it, and probably a lot of them are wannabes. The rest probably just go about their lives, or go to weird quirky bars and have nontraditional sex and so on, instead of arguing online.
This is not to say that it's all based on nothing. There certainly are some rather androgynous people, tomboyish girls. But now it's hard to distinguish because it's become a fashion too.
It's certainly more healthy to do this, than to go full HRT+surgery. It seems to me to be an alternative path towards becoming LGBT instead of just a step on a slippery slope. It might be a memetic evolution to allow teen (which nowadays extends to the 20s) girls to do their teen girl stuff without also destroying their bodies and their ability to have kids once they grow out of this.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It's not the tech, it's the distrust of your rulers. But rulers have always had ways of preventing or eliminating protests even without rerouting self driving cars. It involved blood but at a time when people were more used to it anyway. Yes, the AI will serve the ruling class but so did law, religion and much of what we call civilization.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
After reading the linked post, I find your associations strange. To me, it's not at all about understanding how routers work, it's all about the social aspects, trends, fashions, services, the gig economy, the fake ess of online interaction. None of this changes much if you understand TCP/IP.
The nerd likes tech for the sake of it, the enjoyment of the tinkering, the fiddling. To see the machine do a thing. Once it's figured out and it works, it's no longer interesting. Like the data hoarder who endlessly organizes and categorizes tens of terabytes of media but watches none of it, the nerd builds and mods things for the process itself, not for prolonged enjoyment of its use. And so this has little impact on whatever happens to the social significance of the internet.
Richard Stallman already said in the 80s that if users can't control their computing, the software makers will control the users. But general users have little interest or capability to control any computation.
So how are things changing? In my tech bubble I see a lot of anti-tech sentiment as it relates to modern tech companies' practices, the criticism of walled gardens, censorship, locked down devices etc. People who understand tech seem to want none of the smart home stuff, they keep their kids away from gadgets. The new status symbols are logging off and being physical, appreciating ancient literature etc. There's also a different type of tech person, the fan boy who is loyal to big tech brands, loves the prospect of the metaverse, fills his house with proprietary automation tech and lives his techiness via owning the latest iPhone at any given moment.
But nerds, tinkerers and tech enthusiasts don't matter so much in the big picture. The question is how the mass of consumers will react. Is there something in humanity which will reject the matrix and turn away from the algorithmic dopamine machine? Will people get exhausted or can the machine adapt and transform to keep people hooked?
I mean when have we ever seen large scale voluntary rejection of tech, except for deeply religious communities like the Amish or orthodox Jews? I don't really see a way around AI seeping into your coffee machine, your dishwasher, the fridge. Rejecting it might become a hobby for some upper class people, like having a fancy fireplace in your mansion just for the aesthetic. But for the gen pop...
People don't Münchhausen their way up to self-reliant rugged tough people without external pressure. There has to be a crisis big enough that it forces people.
On the other hand there's always some cyclicality to the generations. The sexual revolution, drugs, free love and tolerance led to metoo, low levels of risk taking and sex and drug consumption among young people, the wokescold moral police etc. But just as the original social rebels rejected conservative Christian moral authority, new generations may reject the DEI religion.
It cycles but stays the same. One can argue that the original matrix that made us prisoner slaves was agriculture and the settled life. That true life is living off the berries of the forest, fighting mammoths and facing the beasts of the night, and watching your children die, that that's what chisels a firm soul.
The heart flies high like this author's, but he, like many before, imagine some cataclysmic realization by humanity of their own need for true freedom and agency, but it never comes.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It's probably easier to tack on additional oppression points than to get the first one and move from full blown oppressor to a little bit also victim. Women already have one layer of protective shield making it rude to question their motives.
Similar to becoming "queer" (in genZ):
Only 53 per cent of Gen Z consider themselves exclusively straight, and 40 per cent have patterns of attraction that could be described as queer.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57149/1/its-official-gen-z-is-really-really-gay
Since being straight white cis is like being the devil in the current media environment, and bonus points are given if you aren't one, why not just identify as queer? Similarly, people don't want to be just white, that's dusty boring dinosaur boomer stuff.
And Warren wanted to be a cool fellowkid who totally keeps up with the young ones.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Isn't the relevant split just humanities vs STEM? As an aside, it's strange that there was no standard way to say STEM until the clunky acronym was invented. In Hungary it's common knowledge that there are "humán" and "reál" subjects and kids get categorized by parents and teachers into one or the other quite early. I don't think this is very good by the way (historically science and math was very connected to philosophy and humanities).
I also wonder where a pure math prof would fall in the dichotomy. They are certainly "reál" but not a "physical" maker. And a lot of artists are hands on makers, craftsmen, sculptors and painters (digital or not), they don't just talk. Maybe your split is just bullshitters/talkers vs doers/makers.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
In the real world, normal guys who study art and hope to support themselves off it are ridiculed as lazy unserious dreamers who have no willpower to study something difficult or work hard. In Hungarian they are nicknamed canteen-cloakroom degree programs, implying they don't have to go to lectures. I get the impression that it's similar in Western Europe too, not sure about the US. If a normal middle class parent hears that their kid wants to "become an artist" the reaction is "what the fuck, you want to flip burgers at McDonald's?". Art as in Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc. is in high esteem but not "art grads". It's a rockstar profession where a tiny minority gain high status with it.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
The universal meme advice for men's problems is "delete Facebook, hit the gym, lawyer up".
Okay, you say the penny's gonna drop and it will be illegal to train (and sell) art generators on copyright protected data. But what then about other types of AI, can you train language translation AI on parallel corpora consisting of copyrighted books and other texts? Can Google crawl the web and train image captioners on any data they find? How about their search engine using language models?
It will be interesting where the line gets drawn.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Crimea had somewhat of a "Schelling fence" around it, it was not so long ago still part of Russia, largely Russian population, etc. Attacking Kiev is a whole another deal.
I don't accept the explanations that tie all this to wokeness. There's nothing particularly diverse or marginalized about Ukrainians. Slavs are not around the top of the totem pole. And in fact things like Azov are the polar opposite.
So, don't only view it through an American lens. It's a legit big deal elsewhere too.
And if you explain it through war hawks, military industrial complex, Big Gun, then you realize that aspect has not changed since the awokening. It fits with decades of American proxy wars that the media has supported.
The "see banned posts" opt-in is a non-starter because then what about replies to such posts? If you allow them but also hide them, then you create a shadow platform of absolute free speech below your sanitized platform. If you disallow replies, then you do kill off that strand of conversation so it's still censorship in effect.
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