FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1d ago
Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?
How many people have you had PiV or PiA sex with?
FtttG
1d ago
I agree that if you're pursuing some activity for your own amusement, it can sap the fun out of it to be constantly trying to "optimise" it and so on. But outside of that narrow sphere, people do need to do things they don't necessarily want to do. If everyone just did what they felt like all the time, society would collapse.
They would have to be very prolific indeed to be a significant cause of this uptick.
According to the Guardian, there were 97 sexual assaults in the female estate between 2016-19, of which 7 were committed by transgender inmates. At the time there were 3,795 people housed in the female estate, of whom 34 were transgender. In other words, a transgender inmate is more than ten times more likely to sexually assault a fellow inmate than a cisgender female inmate. In light of this (and the fact that transgender inmates are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned for violent offenses, including sexual offenses) and given there are only six women's prisons in the UK, I don't find the idea that the newfound presence of male people in the female estate could be a significant contributing factor to the recent spike in prison violence in the female estate the least bit implausible.
Talking about murders rather shifts the goalposts.
Why? Homicide rate is usually considered a robust metric in determining how violent a country or region is. "Assault" is a heterogenous category which includes everything from a savage beating which renders the victim paraplegic to a rough shove on the shoulder.
At that point, how can you fault wokes if their principle isn't "protect women" but "protect women from direct assault by people who have systemic power over them"?
Because if that was the principle on which they were operating, presumably they would be opposed to the presence of male people in female prisons, given that male people have systemic power over female people by virtue of being systematically stronger.
If you cared for women in prisons being submitted to punishment beyond the fact of being imprisoned, you could campaign for improving conditions or donate to charities that aim to do so.
"You need to do more to help the less fortunate than you are currently doing," says a person who (unless I am very much mistaken) is doing even less to help the less fortunate than I am. Isn't it always the way?
My point is that you don't seem to care if inmates, male or female, get beaten, mentally abused, or slowly poisoned by mycotoxins
On several occasions over the last decade I've volunteered to perform music for church services at two of the men's prisons in my county. That may not sound like much, but I'm quite confident it's a damn sight more than the average person has done to improve the wellbeing of male inmates. So in point of fact I rather resent you deciding on my behalf whose welfare I do and don't care for.
in fact I am fairly sure that I have seen stories of abuse of female prisoners by male guards
none of which you care to provide, of course. And while I don't dispute that this must happen sometimes, in most Western jurisdictions it's much more difficult to become a correctional officer if you've been convicted of a crime (the US, the UK) — no such restriction applies to male inmates who claim to be trans. If you don't understand why a female inmate would be more concerned about the presence of a male person whom they know for a fact has a history of violent behaviour serious enough to warrant imprisonment vs. a male prison guard who has never been convicted of a crime — then I don't know what to tell you, really.
FtttG
1d ago
I was surprised to run into the same rhetoric IRL from the patrons at that gay bar.
You seem to be spending a lot of time there bro 👀
Do you assume women's prisons are meaningfully less violent than men's prisons?
I don't assume, I know:
One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Given that your article is from the UK, it won't surprise you to learn that the story is much the same over there as far as homicides go. It appears that not a single woman or trans person has been murdered in prison since at least 2015. If per capita homicide rates between the male and female estate were identical, you would expect two women murdered in the period.
Were you aware of headlines such as this?
Interesting that the UK is one country in which male inmates have been housed in the female estate, this is a recent phenomenon, this article comments on a huge spike in violence in the female estate, and yet doesn't mention the sexes of any of the perpetrators of this violence. I'm not saying that this spike is entirely attributable to the relatively new presence of male inmates in the female estate, but it sure is interesting that the source you provided specifically comments on the fact that the current rate of violence in the female estate is
None of this other mistreatment seems to trigger the same instinctual reaction in right-wingers, at least not to the extent that I have even once seen them bring it up.
As I said previously, I think a great many people have an instinctive reaction of horror and outrage when they learn about a male person assaulting a female person, and this reaction isn't triggered when they hear about a male person assaulting a male person or a female person assaulting a female person. We can debate whether that's fair, appropriate or logical until the cows come home, but I think that instinctive reaction has a great deal more explanatory power in why conservatives might object to male people in women's prisons or contact sports than the pat answer of "they hate trans people and want to make their lives difficult out of sheer bloody-mindedness".
All I am asking is that you apply the same standard that, in your opening post, you wanted to be applied to the "woke coalition"
What standard am I failing to apply? I am strongly opposed to violence against women, as a consequence of which I've donated literally thousands of euros to my local rape crisis centre and am strongly opposed to male inmates being housed in the female estate. I don't feel any kind of inconsistency.
FtttG
1d ago
For deep-seated reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology, almost everyone feels an intrinsic protectiveness towards women, even in cases where the woman in question has broken the law. Most people feel more horrified when hearing about a woman being penetratively raped than they do when hearing about a man being penetratively raped. This is probably related to the fact that female people can be impregnated against their will, and are systematically weaker and less able to defend themselves than male people are.
You don't need to agree with this, or think it's fair or logical, to understand the instinctual reaction. I think "instinctual horror against women being mistreated" has a great deal more explanatory power than immediately jumping to the conclusion that conservative opposition to trans women in female prisons has nothing to do with a desire to protect female inmates, and is solely rooted in hatred of trans people.
FtttG
1d ago
First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies
None of my colleagues strike me as terminally online, and yet the day after his death I heard several of them listing off his "problematic" opinions about abortion and gun control, the clear implication being that he got what was coming to him.
But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself... To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):
- Someone said it was a truly "poetic" death
I don't really understand the distinction between celebrating someone's death and saying that their death was "truly poetic".
so unlike the Palestinians he has no excuse for his regressive worldview
Soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again.
He actually causes harm to the LGBT community in the West, in a way the Palestinians don't.
How did Charlie Kirk cause harm to the LGBT community? Meanwhile, how many LGBT Palestinians have been executed (judicially or otherwise) because of their sexuality or gender identity?
these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.
Agreed on trans children. Several of the examples you listed (such as "non-binary people") do involve males in women's spaces. Others don't really strike me as "flashpoints" in the same way: for entirely understandable reasons, female people wanting to enter men's spaces doesn't inspire half as much ire as the converse. The main reason for this is that it doesn't really happen: trans men and non-binary female inmates are hardly clamouring to be housed in the male estate.
Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other.
You're correct. I just wish that progressive people would acknowledge that conflicts and trade-offs between terminal goals like this exist, instead of loudly insisting that they don't and that anyone who claims they do is a crypto-conservative. That's what I meant when I said that "trans awareness" and "opposition to violence against women (or AFABs, if you must)" are "in tension": some of their goals sought by TRAs and by people who want to minimise violence against female people really are mutually exclusive, and this should be acknowledged and discussed openly instead of ignored.
FtttG
1d ago
develop a strange and very isolated compassion towards women prisoners who are forced to share their prison tracts with men.
There's nothing incoherent about thinking the punishment should fit the crime. When a woman commits a crime, her punishment is to be sent to prison. Her punishment is not to be penetratively raped (and possibly impregnated) by one of her fellow inmates.
I would be surprised if their objections to this state of affairs evaporated on learning that Palestinians were anti-trans or misogynistic.
Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.
When people are thinking of something like "Transgender Awareness Week" they are thinking about struggles trans people have accessing healthcare. Or discrimination they might face in employment in housing.
I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.
"Male rapists claiming to be trans to access women in prison" are just not salient to either groups conception of what the events are about.
I agree that they aren't salient. My argument is that they should be. My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.
FtttG
2d ago
All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.
But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.
And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month. I don't think this trend can be attributed to feminisation (or if it can, not in a fashion which is synonymous with "feminism").
FtttG
2d ago
That being said, maybe the set of pro-Palestinians I am exposed to is non-representative, but my sense is that unlike the pro-Israelis they at least don't generally outright gaslight away half of what is happening.
That certainly has not been my experience of the pro-Palestine faction. I've encountered plenty of outright denial of any sexual assaults on October 7th, lots of allusions to the Hannibal doctrine, and at least one guy who outright claimed that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th and that all of the footage of them doing so was deepfakes created from whole cloth by Shin Bet. "That isn't happening, and it's good that it is" seems to be the order of the day.
As I mentioned back in July, every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. A lot of these are harmless days and observations that no one could take exception to (World Friendship Day, World Chocolate Day etc.), but a significant number this month were of a more... strident nature. In descending order from the top of the notice board:
- Movember
- Time to Talk About Mental Health
- Transgender Awareness Week (November 13th-19th)
- International Men's Day (November 19th)
- International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25th)
- International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (November 29th)
Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 are unobjectionable (curious if I'll hear the "ugh, every day is International Men's Day!" joke two weeks from today). With regard to #3, my immediate thought was "for God's sake, how many days do you people need?" But my primary reaction was a feeling that 3, 5 and 6 are all in tension with one another, and that anyone who thinks about this for long enough would realise how unstable the coalition is.
- Trans — Palestine: The absurdity of the "Queers for Palestine" slogan (and facetious comparisons to "Turkeys for Christmas") has been well-enumerated and I'm not going to relitigate the whole argument. Suffice it to say that a given LGBT person is much safer in Israel than they are in either Gaza or the West Bank, and leave it at that. Accuse me of pinkwashing if you must, it doesn't make me wrong.
- Trans — violence against women: My opposition to violence against women is precisely why I am opposed to housing convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons, or allowing male sportspeople to compete in women's contact sports.
- Violence against women — Palestine: As a rule, the woke coalition adopts a maximally credulous approach to women's claims to have been sexually assaulted — unless the women in question are Israelis who claim to have been raped by Hamas squaddies on 07/10/2023. (As one commentator ruefully put it, it's "#MeToo — unless you're a Jew".) The entire reason I'm uncomfortable about the idea of solidarity with the Palestinian people is that the activists are constantly muddying the waters about whether they support solidarity with the Palestinian people or solidarity with the Palestinian cause; if the latter, there's another layer of intentional ambiguity about whether it's support for a Palestinian state via peaceful activism or via armed resistance. If the latter, this logically implies that adherents support Hamas squaddies gunning down unarmed women at a music festival. And even if you have zero sympathy for Israeli women, even within Palestine, women are treated spectacularly poorly relative to their Israeli peers.
More than anything I'm reminded of Scott's evergreen post "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle":
In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.
Were I to argue that male rapists with intact penises don't belong in women's prisons, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace, but observing Trans Awareness Week is just being a decent person. Were I to point out the shockingly brutal acts of violence against women Hamas committed on October 7th, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace*; but announcing that you "stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people" is just being a decent person.
I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.
*Even if I prefaced it by saying that Israel's response was disproportionate, and acknowledging that Israel has also committed crimes against humanity.
FtttG
2d ago
About halfway through The Story of a New Name. The story is starting to pick up now.
FtttG
3d ago
If they say "British nationals" as opposed to "Englishmen" or "Britons", you can join the dots.
FtttG
3d ago
Nine people injured after a stabbing attack on a train from Doncaster to London. Police have two suspects in custody, British nationals in their thirties.
FtttG
3d ago
people-on-manic-spectrum hugs are like unsecured loans
What do you mean by this?
FtttG
5d ago
Have you read the book? I found that all the points in the film's favour that you mentioned came across more effectively in the book. I really cared about the characters in the book, and didn't care about the characters in the movie.
FtttG
5d ago
Agreed, I was so disappointed by the film of A Scanner Darkly, especially in light of how it was my favourite of the Dick novels I've read.
In fairness, both Minority Report and Total Recall were based on his short stories, so a certain amount of Adaptation Expansion was unavoidable. TV Tropes argues that, while Total Recall explores themes that aren't mentioned anywhere in its source material, they are themes that Dick returned to again and again throughout his oeuvre. So Total Recall isn't so much an adaptation of the specific short story on which it was based, as it is an adaptation of Dick's work as a whole.
In contrast, the film version of Minority Report takes the basic premise but drops most of the philosophical complexities around precognition and completely inverts the message: in the short story,
I remember reading somewhere that Blade Runner was the only adaptation of one of his works that Dick saw in his lifetime (well, a rough cut anyway), and he said he loved it.
FtttG
5d ago
Chinatown was made in 1974 and set in the 1930s, and with its themes of public corruption, it can easily be read as a commentary on the Watergate scandal.
Its spiritual successor from 1997, LA Confidential, was set in the 1950s. With its narrative about corrupt police officers, police brutality, institutional racism and muckraking journalists, it's easy to read it as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King, the subsequent riots, and the trial of OJ Simpson and surrounding media circus.
I live in Ireland.
In fairness, my colleagues were only talking about it the day after. I don't think I've heard his name mentioned around the office since.
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