ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I have no problem with those that choose to experience sex with trans, all the power to them. It's not my cup of tea because I like women, real women, that sounds somehow prejudiced or old fashioned but if you believe sex is real then it actually means something. I viscerally would not want to have sex with a man, and especially a man pretending to be a woman. This is just me and is no reflection on the other person.
The harm I've tried to tell you is deceiving me with appearance. A man passing as a woman can not have babies, and is inhabiting a psychology of pretense that creates a distance that fails the test of intimacy at the first hurdle as far as I'm concerned. It's just not how I'm built I'm afraid.
Now if people disclose, that's entirely another matter. I have no problem with people in all their variety. I'd question whether the person couldn't have found another way that didn't involve medical intervention but I'd take them as they are, I wouldn't likely consider romantic involvement but Id be happy to partake in conversation if they're interesting. But the body to me is not just a sack of meat, it is the primary link to reality and a failure to accept it seems to me like a failure to truly accept oneself. That probably sounds judgemental but it's how I orient to life. Be gay, be a feminine man, be gender non-conforming but why change your body drastically with all the attendant risks, or if someone is trans why would they pretend to be something that they are not - if someone is not born a woman, how could they ever know whether they are a woman? The most one that person could know as far as I can tell is that they feel comfortable appearing as a woman. Well why would they hide that truth in the pretending to be a woman?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I don't condone such violence and cried during 'Boys don't cry', but I think this points to something important that I'm not hearing in the debate. Being trans and trying to pass is a deeply ambivalent stance both for the trans person and those they engage with. Because I am a scientific realist I recognize the difference between someone appearing as a woman and being a woman. If a man appearing as a woman were to encounter me in a romantic sense and not disclose that, I would count it as a deep betrayal. I hope I wouldn't react violently but I would feel violated in some way. This is no judgement on the man and their choice necessarily but when the rubber hits the road, ie biology becomes relevant, then it's fundamentally dishonest to pass yourself as something your not.
Also the psychological stance of trying to pass and worrying about it seems burdensome for the individual and an example of iatrogenic harm. People that are clearly trans and don't pass actually are much easier to accommodate and I can imagine might find relationship building outside their immediate identity more psychologically natural, though this is just a guess.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
But I lose information content if I adopt your trans-inclusive language, a man identifying as a woman is more informative, than just woman. It's also true and scientifically provable. Why is this lossy or ambiguous - the trans inclusive language is ambiguous because it conflates gender identity with biological sex.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Oh I agree the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt in many ways and increasingly suspect but there's a lot of good stuff written on this already. I don't think RKJ adds to this scholarship because he makes unsupported claims.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yes fair call, it was an opinion and I don't spend any time justifying my belief. Part of it is weariness, I forget the name of the rule but it's a lot more effort to rebut systematically someones claims which they can just throw out relentlessly.
Also, I can do this work and highlight exaggerated claims but I will be proxying my trust to others, researchers etc. I haven't overseen large clinical trials or analysed the statistical evidence first hand. I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety. I acknowledge various incentive structures within medicine and assign priors that aren't 100% belief for any source. But the point is not how I can know I'm 100% right, it is that among the epistemic challenge I can assign likelihood to consensus view and RKJ view and because RKJ does a lot of sophistry (selective quoting), insufficient statement of details of statistics, study design etc, it's easy for me to weigh up that he seems not to be oriented to truth and so the things he says get low trust.
In short, RKJ doesn't do all the things I try to do myself in terms of epistemics (mainly acknowledging limits of his knowledge and expertise), so I apply a Kantian rational skepticism for alternative explanations. The one that fits very well is conspiratorial thinker and grifter.
Also, the grift is precisely by occupying a place that is already popular and additionally has some merit. Anti-establishment is nothing new, he just harvests it for clicks. There's nothing even controversial or courageous about stating these things in your bubble. The courageous thing to do would be to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge but the incentive landscape doesn't encourage it.
I'm happy to examine some of his claims if you have any you'd like to interrogate.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yes, agreed, very low effort. I'll update in this comment:
It needs to end so that it can begin again as it's just rainbow propaganda for the TQ+. LGB were sidelined long ago and the function of pride now is just authoritarian mind control.
It needs to end because it has been taken over. While many gay people are presumably still participating in the original pride intent, being out and openly gay in a spirit of community, the movement, its intents and symbology have been taken over.
Currently we have an open culture war around gender ideology and an activist movement that seeks social engineering over how we speak, the meaning of words and a challenge to the existing order of human rights. This has nothing to do with gay people, except that they are a convenient vehicle-Denton's playbook, a legal strategy that outlines the approach the trans lobby should take, explicitly states this.
This is about power, the power to get people to say things they don't believe and to accept ideas that aren't grounded in science or logic. The ability to make people say absurd things under group pressure is a standard marker of authoritarian tyranny.
So the rainbow flag, pride event is not about gay people any more, they are in fact definitionally undermined by the new gender ideas, and increasingly encouraged culturally to identify as trans rather than gay. It id about symbolic power and maintaining a cultural hegemony.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
It needs to end so that it can begin again as it's just rainbow propaganda for the TQ+. LGB were sidelined long ago and the function of pride now is just authoritarian mind control.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
He points to some true things and may quote worthwhile science in the manner of a broken clock being right twice a day, but he is just another grifter.
The better question is why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me. There are people who would lie down in traffic or give their first born to such heroes without having the ability to do the first-person epistemics needed to find out how true any of the claims are. It's hard to know why people are so gullible in certain directions, it's probably a cult thing.
The current social media environment incentivises this of course and COVID was peak grift. Don't get me wrong the establishment got a lot wrong, but that doesn't mean you just trust random people on the internet cause they have a suck it to the man attitude and a cosy supportive audience you can cult-out with. I'll inflame a few people here but Brett Weinstein and most of his COVID guests were also in this camp.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
That would have been my guess about it. I suspect that the cooption of indigenous cultures by the gender ideology lobby is almost entirely sophistry and really a form of neo-colonisation. I suspect what these cultures really teach us are different models of acceptance of gender nonconformity, which we could actually learn from.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I'm curious about the two spirit as know next to nothing about indigenous American cultures. Taking from Paul Vaseys commentary on the fa'afine and some experience of Samoan culture I would assume other cultures have related versions, ie a way to resolve homosexuality and male feminity as a third way distinct from traditional and actually pretty restrictive gender roles. This is pretty far removed of the born in the wrong body narrative, the body is accepted as what it is. What's the case with two-spirit, I know from tv-history these cultures have ideas around spirit animals, but assume this is in the realm of metaphor/the imaginal. It strikes me that it would be maladaptive for an indigenous culture to sway too much from tangible realities so I'm suspicious how alike these ideas really are to the current ideas, which I put in the realm of luxury gnosticism.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Isn't it the case that many other countries have actually had an acceptance of homosexuality, albeit within some constraints. Is the broader Western stance heavily influenced by Christianity and conflation with sin. It doesn't surprise me that Thailand would celebrate it, though presumably there are different cultural forces, some of which may oppose.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media.
Might be against the rules to high-five, but this struck me as spot on.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Sounds tough, and makes my comment somewhat moot. Keep on, keeping on, sounds like you have plenty of insight already. I didn't come from a traumatic home but did suffer the early death of my father. Go well.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
That's tough, agreed that sort of thing can perpetuate. You didn't ask for advice outside the dating realm and I don't know your financial situation but you could consider something in the therapy line, counseling, or internal family systems. It certainly helped me, though it took a while to find the right person. If our family of origin has patterns and we were molded by them, it does become somewhat inevitable that we reflect these back onto our relationships in different ways. Relationships of different kinds (they don't have to be perfect) can help along the way but I've always thought that at the end of the day it's all down to me, what is it that holds me back with assertiveness, intimacy, resentment, self-doubt etc? It happened for me that being patient and focused and owning my own stuff ultimately put me in the position where the right person came along. I had a lot of failed dating attempts along the way, which were learnings, but I had enough confidence and self-momentum to understand this not as rejection but as poor fit. This self-sovereignty then gives you the allure needed because you're genuinely not desparate. While negative situations in your early life can have negative knockon consequences, it is also true that making positive changes to your own life will have positive knock-on changes. It may be you tend to meet more people on the way up as it were. While I'm in the advice mode, exercise is great and I also found meditation the start of an important journey for me- if you go this route consider learning it from sitting in with an actual tradition such as Buddhism ( you can ignore the fluff but it got me closer to the heart of the matter than going it alone with apps etc. Anyways apologies if I've overdone it.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
My advice - don't rush to dating necessarily though you may be enjoying it. Make sure you have another focus to your life and are creating your own freshness and also reduces the desparate. Two, among other things dating is a game, be prepared to learn it's rules but your question on authenticity is great. It's tricky, sometimes authenticity doesn't pay off but then maybe it's a good shortcut to finding out readiness, suitability. But key is not to look desparate, needy or to assume too much, too early. This requires a bit of strategy about how you're coming across. Also, try different things, you don't want to capitulate in a power sense but you don't want to think entirely in power paradigm and you'll have to take some risks in how to present yourself as a confident person.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yes, this is exactly how I see it, with the kicker that 'they' is 'us'.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I guess I believe in the banality of evil in the sense that we can all get used to things and partake of times when dark reality is superceded by our ordinary day to day cares, where going along with is normal, and therefore normalised. I see it enough in modern times to grok the concept.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yep but it will be one of the first cabs off the rank for AI. People will 'rip it', ie train a model using all his work to create new works, not for sale, which would break copyright but just for themselves and friends. He will still command good prices initially as his meme-print grows but because of the ubiquity and virality of memes, success will inevitably erode value ultimately. Can only have one Warhol period and we've had it.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I'm loaded with cognitive biases against AI, though I've swallowed the bitter pill of it's ever-possible potential. But I think among those images it's notable that some genres are easy to imitate.
Let's dispense with corporate Memphis which is surely about as good as Microsoft clipart from what the wiki shows.
Midjourney does futurist, fantasy and animation guff very well, the house I find particularly evocative and it is a great blend of realistic and fantasy. The mock stop motion animal style is pretty good though a hint of something not quite right is there (particularly the cat). Least good are the humans-something uncanny creeps in, though I said I was biased. Doesn't help they have that HDR style which has been overdone in the last decades. Particularly bad is the Indian girl, though the blue hair girl 'passes' as far as I'm concerned but then it's quite low res in the face and additionally cliched Californian type art.
But all of this is to say it won't be that long before it's as good as the real thing in most styles in in imitation and enough variation in the imitation will create enough novelty to be considered as good as genuine art today.
So, what then? Surely it will just become over commodified, lose peoples interest and become devalued. People will play with it for a while and get bored, but otherwise we will become more attentive to the actual art (and not the image). Art and sculpture still require humans hands, though bit by bit I guess they'll succumb with various printing technologies. Then we will move to arts that require living, breathing humans. Drama, dance, ballet and live music will become more popular and people will reconnect with the 'vibe' of humans and life. Of course AI will come for that,and some of us will be captured by the addiction of non-reality and give up on caring about the really real. But others will be drawn to greater contact, with AI providing the contrast needed to point in the direction of the true.
There's something of the motte and bailey about your comment. The motte 'trans people have always existed', if presented without qualifications, sweeps a lot of metaphysical assumptions under the rug that people are liable to take on, eg that it's some kind of fundamental human category, that people can be born in the wrong body etc.
The bailey is that trans are 'people with dysphoria who benefit from medical treatment so they feel more congruent with their bodies'.
I accept that their are people who experience gender dysphoria and that a proportion may be content with changing their sex appearance. But there are also people that experience dysphoria even after transition. The simple truth of the matter is we don't know the effectiveness of transition as a treatment in terms of long term follow up, especially for the recent cohort of people. In particular we don't have any evidence against a counter-factual such as alternative treatments.
Also it seems likely to me that the popular trans narratives of the motte are actually contributing to the dysphoria bailey.
Ed: well, that's embarrassing appears I have the motte and bailey the wrong way round...
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
There are a lot of people with comprehensive and well articulated arguments to trans issues, but an even bigger group of people who don't want to listen to them.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
As I've said elsewhere, I think phrases like 'anti-trans camp' are low-resolution and actually serve as a subtle ad-hominen.
To lay out my beliefs on the matter, I think we need a much deeper frame to understand this issue. For me the very phrase 'trans-person', while it can serve as a descriptor, or an identity, is actually fundamentally question-begging. I don't see empirical evidence proving a fundamental category of trans person, beyond the self defined identity. I see different groups within trans that potentially have little to do with each other, including autogynephiles, dysphoric youth, gender non-conforming people, gay people and people with a mixture of mental variation including autism, obsessive people and those with other comorbidities such as trauma, anxiety and depression. And I see evidence of social contagion.
Which is not to say there are not well adjusted trans people who are content, and I am personally willing to meet them as they wish to be met, but in my opinion, phrases like anti-trans, while they might describe a certain demographic, are also fundamentally misleading, and are potentially deliberately reducing the resolution of the issues.
This keeps being trotted out - surely it's possible that people can be concerned about the broader trans question and specific justice issues in sports. And, there's nothing inconsistent about concern for justice in sports and not having any interest in sports. Concern for justice is baked into humans. Everyone can have an opinion. Not to mention that sports is big within culture. If you are concerned about the spread of self-id in relation to women's private spaces, for example, you are going to be interested in what's happening in the wider public space.
Im not suggesting this is your argument, but this type of thing does seem to end up in 'why do you care so much about this small thing'.
Tldr, of course people are concerned about the big thing that includes the small thing, but they can also concerned about the small thing, and different aspects of the small thing. Humans have multi-caring capability.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Did you just lay out a basis for fair competition, admit it might not be sufficient and then finish with saying you don't care? Interesting argumentation.
Yes agreed, but the goal is not context-dependent usage, it's controlling choice of information conveyance in entire tranches of life, media, workplaces. It's implying this is the actual reality with no need to dig beneath. Why people would insist on the usage of third-person pronouns is perverse to me. People should be free to use whatever descriptors they consider useful.
More options
Context Copy link