Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1hr ago
About sixty pages into My Brilliant Friend. It makes Italy sound like Beirut.
Folamh3
3hr ago
I think this probably comes back to one of the points Scott made in "Can Things be both Popular and Silenced?". If you're a woke person or a leftist and want to hear woke or left opinions, you have an entire media ecosystem made up of hundreds of thousands of extremely qualified writers, journalists, academics etc. If you have more unorthodox opinions, you are not nearly as well-served, and so the bar is lower for a writer or journalist trying to gain a foothold. A woke person trying to make a living as a blogger or journalist is going up against The New York Times; an anti-woke person trying to make a living is going up against a bunch of other small fries with Substack accounts.
I think this argument is applicable not just to honest people acting in good faith but also to "grifters", broadly defined. If you want to make a living by cynically parroting woke opinions or selling obvious woke-inflected bullshit you don't really believe in, the competition is so stiff that you have to be really good at it to do it at all, so it tends to be a long con (perhaps as much as ten years' training in academia before you set up shop as a "corporate diversity consultant" or whatever). But for anti-woke grifters, the demand for comparable content is just as high but the competition isn't as stiff, so just about any idiot who can string a sentence together can start a podcast and be inundated with Patreon subscriptions within the year. Candace Jones can literally wake up one morning and announce "hi everybody, I'm black and I hate wokeness!" when she was a woke person quite literally the night before. That option is not open to Ibram X. Kendi - he must put in long hard hours in postgraduate degrees and speaking engagements before people are willing to throw money at him for doing nothing.
Folamh3
12hr ago
Everyone knows about Epstein, I'm interested in the people who aren't famous and whose deaths were page 4 stories.
A reference to https://youtube.com/watch?v=nCuf_O2xaw8&ab_channel=NT ?
Folamh3
16hr ago
The percentage of people who believe that... Shakespeare is mandatory reading off the top of their heads is also likely in a small minority
On the contrary: more than half of Americans still believe Shakespeare was "one of" the greatest playwrights of all time. That's not exactly the same question as "do you think Shakespeare should be taught in schools?" but I find it hard to imagine that only a small minority of Americans would answer "yes". Open to correction though, if you have a source.
Conspiratorial types often talk about whistleblowers dying in suspicious circumstances strongly suggestive of foul play, but which were officially ruled as suicides. I seem to recall that many such accusations have been levelled against the Clintons. Are there any examples of this which strike you as particularly suspicious? (Research for NaNoWriMo.)
If you know anything about mixed martial arts, you'll know the name Conor McGregor. If you're not resident in Ireland, you may be unaware of what a generally scummy and loathsome person he is: the "Controversies" section on his Wikipedia page is nearly 500 words longer than the "Professional mixed martial arts career" section. He's also running for President next year. It need hardly be said that I'm having a hard time envisioning a worse brand ambassador for the Irish nation (I would sincerely prefer Barbie Kardashian, Gerry Adams, Dustin the Turkey or Jedward over him), and it infuriates me that in many cases he's literally the only thing non-Irish people know about our country.
After numerous criminal investigations for rape and/or sexual assault which were dropped for lack of evidence, one such complainant, Nikita Hand, sued him in a civil action. The jury has found in Hand's favour, and now that the trial is over, the injunction on the media has been lifted and they are permitted to disclose various details about the case, including the fact that Hand alleges that, after she filed the civil action, masked men broke into her home and stabbed her partner.
One reaction to the outcome of the trial I found particularly sharp was from Waterford Whispers News, a satire website which aspires to be sort of like the parochial Irish equivalent of the Onion. Between 2013-16, the website did not miss, and they'd have a wittingly biting take on virtually every major news story in Ireland. After that golden era the website kind of fell off and stopped seeing nearly as much traction on social media. Much like their main source of inspiration, they dropped all pretensions to neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, to the point that, earlier this year, they were literally selling merch with the dictionary definition of the word "woke", defined as "1. Alert to prejudice and injustice 2. Not a prick" - what is this, 2014? (That one's no longer available from their webshop; guess it wasn't a top seller.) But occasionally they can still knock the ball out of the park, as with this post: "'Keep Women Safe': Hundreds of Far Right Nationalists Protest Outside Rapist Conor McGregor's House". The joke being, of course, that the kinds of working-class activists attending anti-immigration protests ostensibly in the name of protecting Irish women from predatory foreign men tend to be fervent admirers of Conor McGregor.
Folamh3
1d ago
There is a debatable correlation between wearing Goth clothing as an adolescent and going through troubled times, but teachers do not routinely make a habit of notifying parents of such things, and rightly so.
I read a book by Michael Moore in which he claims that he went to an American high school and one of the students pointed out to him that all of the students were wearing neutral colours like white or pastels. Moore asked why they were doing that, and the student explained that if they came into school wearing black clothing, the principal would pull them into his office and ask them if they were planning on committing another Columbine. No idea how common this is.
Moreover, many American high schools have dress codes, and if a student is sent home from school for violating the dress code, presumably their parents are going to hear about it.
Put another way, a public school's goal is to indoctrinate children with the beliefs that are commonly accepted in the society they're a part of.
Many components of gender ideology are not commonly accepted in the broader society, but educators indoctrinate children with them anyway. Because they are not commonly accepted, educators have to do this by subterfuge. Sure, they'll claim that they're only doing this because of a minority of far-right fundamentalist Christians who might kick up a stink about teachers informing children that "trans people have a right to exist", but the reality of the situation is that, while almost everyone in the West thinks that trans people should be left alone to do their own thing, the percentage of people who believe that "sex is a spectrum" or in the "genderbread person" is low, perhaps single digits.
There's also the plainly obvious fact that there's a world of difference between factual education (gravity is what pulls you down when you jump in the air; every sentence must contain a subject, a verb and an object) and normative education (it's wrong to hit your classmates). Gender ideology is objectionable at least from the former perspective, as many of its assertions are pseudoscientific woo or simply unsupported by the best available evidence ("puberty blockers are completely reversible"), and probably from the latter as well.
To clarify, I'm not saying that obsessively texting or calling someone should be illegal, and it's rarely more than an annoyance for the person at the receiving end. But I also think that pestering or bothering someone is bad behaviour, and that when the object of your affection has made it perfectly clear they aren't interested, you should respect that. I'd put on the same level as ghosting someone: obviously not calling for it to be banned or made a criminal offense (how could it?), but I consider it inconsiderate and disrespectful unless proven otherwise.
Folamh3
2d ago
I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
Folamh3
2d ago
How big would the number have to be to justify the framing, in your opinion?
Folamh3
2d ago
But what would he sue them for? Fraud? What exactly is fraudulent about the scam?
You're correct that aspies, nerds or whatever tend to display more feminine traits. In terms of their interests, I would argue they're "hypermale" not just in terms of statistics but also in terms of their character. Men tend to be high-systematisers and interested in abstract systems, while women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. "Intensely interested in abstract systems but utterly lacking in social skills" is about as pithy a definition of "nerd" as you can get, whereas more typically "bro" males tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: they'll have a passing interest in abstract systems (e.g. have memorised Nomar Garciappara's on-base percentage or the acceleration on a '67 Ford Mustang), but without sacrificing the ability to "read the room" and charm people. Most of the stereotypically nerdy interests (systems-heavy video games; hard sci-fi; fantasy universes with elaborate magic systems, conlangs and extensive worldbuilding; electrical engineering; tabletop gaming; computer programming; progressive/technical death metal; IDM; math rock) are about complex abstract systems first and human beings/interpersonal relationships a distant second, if at all. Even saying "nerds like video games" doesn't really sell the distinction I'm getting at: plenty of ordinary dudes will play a little Call of Duty to unwind in the evening, but it takes a certain kind of nerd to log thousands of hours in high-level grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive or learn the entire metagame for Starcraft II. The reason nerds don't have much of an interest in team sports isn't because they're more interested in traditionally feminine interests, but the same reason they don't like playing Call of Duty: they find these activities mechanically shallow and uninteresting from a systems perspective, and are usually not shy about expressing their contempt for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who do derive enjoyment from these activities (the latter clause is "in character" and not what I personally believe, in case it wasn't obvious). Show me a nerdy dude or trans woman who's into knitting, astrology and murder podcasts, and then we can talk about how feminine their interests are.
In my limited experience their personalities seem to not just be male, but hyper male. Like take for instance the prevalence of trannies in the speedrunning community, it is hard to think of a more hypermasculine activity than speedrunning.
I have an acquaintance who came out as a trans woman a few years ago, and the irony of her situation has not escaped my attention. She claims to be a woman trapped in an "assigned male at birth" body, and yet the number of cis women I know personally who
- compose angsty math-rock
- have logged 1,000+ hours in League of Legends
- spend a great deal of time in Games Workshop
- consume so much pornography that they've actually had to confront the ethical dilemma of whether or not they should pay the "content creators" for it
are zero, zero, zero and zero, respectively. Likewise the recent micro-scene of bedroom black metal solo projects whose members identify as trans women (most famously Liturgy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(band)], but it seems every other band on this label meets that description exactly): does anything scream "socially awkward man with some autistic traits" more than starting a bedroom black metal solo project?
What you're describing is autistic traits, and many feminists have argued that autism is "extreme masculinity" (men tend to be high-systematising, and autistic men are almost totally systematising). I'm sure you're already aware that the correlation between autism and gender dysphoria is extremely strong and seems to becoming stronger with every year.
I have always suspected that I am in the "at-risk for AGP" demographic, even though I've never felt it myself.
I'm a man who several people have independently suggested might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, high-systematising, bookish, socially awkward, didn't fit in at school (as a result of which I retreated into social media and anonymous online chatrooms), love video games enough to have done a master's in game design, listened to black metal obsessively as a teenager, passively interested in anime and manga as a teenager. If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now. (At least then my enormous ass would have been more of an asset in my dating life.) By the same token, had my aforementioned acquaintance been born five or ten years earlier, I think the chances of them coming out as trans at the age they did would have been somewhere around nil. Anyone who thinks social contagion plays no role in this phenomenon must be blind.
I don't think your comparison of gender dysphoria to intense romantic infatuation is quite as illuminating as you seem to think it is.
We've all had the experience of being romantically infatuated with another person. Probably almost all of us have felt "lovesick" at one point or another, in the sense of being romantically attracted to someone who's unavailable, or being attracted to someone but being too afraid to tell them how we feel for fear of rejection, or telling someone how we feel and finding out that it's unreciprocated, or getting dumped by someone we're still very much in love with. Short of bereavement, romantic rejection is one of the most unpleasant, destabilising and humiliating emotional states that the average person is likely to find themselves in, and I would never dream of making fun of someone who's having a tough time because they got rejected by their crush or broken up with (one of the reasons "Radicalizing the Romanceless" really resonated with me). (Of all the toxic, antisocial behaviours that social media aids and abets, there are few worse than that trend when a guy texts a girl to tell her he really likes her, and she immediately screenshots the conversation and sends it to her group chat with the caption "OMG CAN YOU IMAGINE 😂😂😂".)
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
Likewise with gender dysphoria. Obviously I have no idea what gender dysphoria feels like, having never experienced it personally. But I can certainly relate to the experience of hating how your body looks in the mirror (both directly and indirectly, as I've had multiple friends who suffered from severe anorexia). I've been depressed for lengthy periods of time, and sincerely wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Much as I'd never make fun of someone who's sad because they love someone who doesn't feel the same way, I'd never make fun of someone whose gender dysphoria is causing them intense emotional distress. I am sincerely sympathetic.
But some people's gender dysphoria can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy or toxic ways: emotionally manipulating lesbians into having sex with you by accusing them of bigotry if they don't; getting lesbian speed dating events cancelled; suing women who refuse to wax your male genitalia; sending rape and death threats to a female victim of sexual assault who expressed discomfort about using a bathroom alongside trans women; physically assaulting a gender-critical woman in her sixties; shooting up a primary school and so on. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone suffering from gender dysphoria, my sympathy vanishes the instant they engage in behaviour like this.
So I think I'm actually being perfectly consistent, per the terms of your analogy.
I'm open to correction on this and fully admit I may be falling victim to confirmation bias or the availability heuristic, but my impression from this community is that, when trans issues come up, it's usually not so much people complaining about the former (i.e. "this person has gender dysphoria, gross, what a disgusting fetishist") and more people complaining about the latter (i.e. "this person is suffering from gender dysphoria, which is leading them to engage in behaviours which would be grossly unacceptable if carried out by anyone"). And I admit there's a bit of Chinese-robbering going on, wherein people highlight bad behaviour by self-identified trans people which obviously bears no causal relationship to their gender dysphoria as a means of casting aspersions on the whole group, which I'm not cool with for the same reason I'm not cool with any use of the Chinese robber fallacy.
Folamh3
2d ago
The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening.
Do you have a source for this?
The other night I rewatched a movie I liked when I was younger, Heartbreakers. If you want a light comedy featuring a funny performance from Ray Liotta and a hysterical one from Bob Hoskins (and also a leading turn from Jennifer Love Hewitt in her prime, displaying acres of leg and cleavage), check it out.
The premise of the film (this is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie so it's hardly a spoiler, but the movie would probably be more entertaining if you go into it blind) is this:
Folamh3
2d ago
They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy who needs to use the women's room for pragmatic reasons.
While it's true that males who have undergone penectomies or vaginoplasties can no longer rape women (according to the UK definition of the word, defined as forcible penetration with a penis) or forcibly impregnate them, this does not mean that said males pose no sexual threat to women. They can still grope them, spy on them, take photos of them without their consent, digitally penetrate them etc. And if they choose to physically overpower a woman, they will almost always have a very easy time doing it, unlike a 3-year-old boy.
Folamh3
2d ago
Laverne Cox gets my vote. Of all ethnic groups, black women tend to be the most androgynous looking anyway, which probably helps.
It could give birth to a sort of "trans-o-sphere" equivalent of the "man-o-sphere" where trans people optimize on the traits that allow them to "pass" most effectively and efficiently, following a sort of "passMaxxing" strategy, if you will.
Why are you talking about this like it's a hypothetical? This space arrived years if not decades ago. Like some sort of weird bizarro-world version of rule 34, if you can think of some trait or activity which is even remotely gendered, you will find an online community of trans people tearing their hair out because they aren't "doing" it properly and/or a guide on how to do it more effectively:
- Feminine handwriting? Check.
- Vocal training? An entire subreddit.
- Gait? Check. (Bonus points because the post commences with "This is probably gonna sound like I'm way over-thinking / over-analysing this, but bear with me...")
Folamh3
2d ago
This article made me laugh probably more than anything I've ever read on Substack: https://suedonym.substack.com/p/the-real-lesbian-master-doc
(Mods, please delete if it's too culture-warry.)
If half of the rapes are committed by men in women's bathrooms who had previously invoked their gender identity as an excuse to be there, then I would agree that this was a huge fucking problem and we should restrict access to improve women's safety.
But the point habitually made by gender-critical feminists is that, once these policies are in place, a bad actor doesn't even need to invoke the concept of gender identity as an excuse to enter the ladies' room. Once you've established a precedent that certain male people are allowed to use the ladies' room, and you're not allowed to kick up a stink about it even if they have fully intact male genitalia (because not all trans women want to undergo bottom surgery - indeed, the overwhelming majority haven't) or if they're making zero effort to pass (because "trans women don't owe you femininity"), it is inevitable that bad actors (many of whom don't even consider themselves trans) will exploit this ostensibly well-meaning policy for their own ends.
A policy of allowing certain male people to enter the ladies' room presents obvious risks for female safeguarding even if literally 100% of people who call themselves trans women are perfectly pure angels who would never hurt a fly. (It need hardly be said that many are not.)
With the possible exception of Hogwarts, gender restrictions in bathrooms are not strictly enforced. Someone who is entering a women's bathroom to commit rape is unlikely to care that he will also break some trivial statute about not going to the women's bathroom.
I think Middleton is the exact guy I was thinking of when I posted this question.
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