WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
Yes. This is, in fact, what I have been saying. The discourse is a mess because trans activists actually are doing the thing GCs mean by "transing kids" ("making people seek potentially-frivolous colonectomies"), all while sincerely insisting that they obviously aren't "transing kids" because they understand that phrase as meaning something else altogether that they can't and wouldn't do ("giving people cancer").
But the salient point is that in the progressive terminology, "being trans" maps onto "actually having cancer", not onto "seeking a colonectomy", whose actual equivalent is "transitioning". In the advocates' own view, the transness or cisness of the audience is already an immutable fact whatever you do, and the goal of trans advocacy is to persuade all the undetected already-trans people in the audience to seek transition; you can "transitionerify" people to some degree, much as you can "colonectomy-seekerify" people, and you might choose to do that more or less indiscriminately, but you can't actually "trans someone" any more than you can peer-pressure someone into actually having cancer, that's just not a thing, and moreover, it's not actually something they'd want to do even if it were possible, any more than the cancer awareness advocates would use a give-people-cancer ray on anyone if they had one. So anyone accusing them of "transing kids" comes across to them as a not-even-wrong MAGA zombie accusing them of something ghastly and made-up.
And obviously this is all semantics. That's the point. The right and left talk past each other on this issue because they're stubbornly using different definitions of "trans", sometimes without even realizing it.
WandererintheWilderness
10hr ago
Well, I'm not saying the medical system would have acted correctly - though they might; the optimum number of erroneous cancer diagnoses is not necessarily zero. But I'm not asking you to picture shills who get kickbacks for every colonectomy or anything. Picture, instead, sincere people so keen not to let any actual cancer patients die preventable deaths after ignoring early symptoms that they forget about the effects of their rhetoric on people who are, in fact, healthy. We may criticize such people, but we wouldn't accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible, or of being dishonest when they said their message was targeted at people who actually had cancer. And it certainly doesn't prove otherwise if what they tell the people who got unnecessary surgery is "sorry, turns out you never actually had cancer".
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
No; it just means that they were mistaken for trans, by themselves and others. You wouldn't say that someone who got spooked by a very forceful "are you sure there's nothing deeper to your occasional twinges of bowel pain" campaign, was given an erroneous colon cancer diagnosis, and got unnecessary surgery they regretted, had been cancered.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans. You may shudder at the brute-force utilitarianism - I certainly do; it's why I'm opposed to children undergoing medical transition! - but I genuinely don't see where the internal contradiction is supposed to be.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
(tried to belatedly edit the following into the first post - here it is as a reply)
I'm not saying that in this case the right's opposition to trans rights or immigration is displaying this kind of hypocrisy. But I don't think the left's refusal to concede those points proves otherwise. Lawfare is a good example: the Left may keep suing Trump over January 6th without actually caring about it half as much as they pretend, because they already maximally hate Trump whether or not he really tried to do a coup - but whether Trump himself wants to be seen as a guy who attempted to do a coup is a completely different question and it would be hugely damaging for him if he conceded "yeah, whatever, I confess, I tried to become dictator-for-life" in some bizarre effort to prove his accusers don't actually care about that.
The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.
I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A. In fact, there is a clear strategic advantage in doing so: as long as B is attacking A about X, A will have to sink energy into defending X that it could be using to defend other things, but if A ever decisively wins the battle over X, B, who never actually cared, won't actually have lost anything it cared about, so it's all upside.
This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing
There is a longstanding mutual incomprehension on this question between activists and gender-criticals. Most activists would not deny that they are interested in helping children transition; they may downplay it during election season but it's not some great shameful secret, "Protect trans kids" is a widespread slogan. The reason "they're trying to trans your kids!" gets denounced as right-wing conspiracy-mongering is that active verb "transing". As the activists view it, they aren't transing anybody: they're trying to reach out to kids who are, in fact, already trans, and help them express their true selves. The implied accusation that they have some sort of program to brainwash cis kids into wanting to transition feels offensive and absurd - the only kids they're trying to reach out to really are trans, it's just that you can't tell who's in the closet, so obviously you have to shower everyone with "it's okay to come out, it'd be so brave, so life-changing" to ferret them out.
The problem is that to the typical trans activist, for a kid to "really be trans" basically means "this kid, if they knew transitioning was an option and faced no external pressure against doing so, would choose to transition" - anyone whose ideal self-actualized future self, given perfect information and absolute freedom, would transition, is ontologically trans. (Some theorists take this definition as-is, but the Blue Tribe activist on the street is more likely to hold some notion that if your idealized unconstrained future self would transition, this is evidence that you have in fact had the opposite gender written on your soul since birth.) So obviously, raising awareness of the possibility of transition will only serve to help kids who are, deep down, already trans - completely different from manipulatively "transing" cis kids. Whereas GCs, to the limited degree that they recognize the idea of kids "really being trans" - which wouldn't actually mean recognizing those kids' genders, of course, just acknowledging that they are of a kind with the population of "trans" adults in some deeper sense than parroting buzzwords they've been taught - would think that a "trans kid" must be a kid who already displays gender dysphoria and an active, persistent desire to be the opposite sex. So, of course, any intervention designed to raise awareness of transition among gender-conforming kids does literally constitute an effort to "make" them trans. And so the activists go on loudly and sincerely decrying accusations that they're transing kids while visibly and openly doing what their enemies mean by "transing kids".
On one hand, in the activists' defense, mainstream consensus has largely accepted that "encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay"; many Rowling-type moderate-left GCs would never endorse that conflation, yet take it absolutely for granted where trans is concerned. But on the other hand, in the GCs' defense, the trans activists' definition of "being trans" is obviously so confusing, radical, and esoteric that their continued misunderstanding of what their opponents mean by "transing kids" can only be some mixture of willful ignorance and unfathomable insularity, depending on individual levels of sincerity. Whoever you want to blame most, it's doing the state of the discourse no favors, and some people on both sides clearly like it that way.
(On the third hand, the right-wing discourse around "transing kids" is also riddled with motte-and-bailey rhetoric surrounding the spicier phrasing that trans activists are grooming kids - where, although it can always be claimed that they are simply using the word "grooming" to mean "manipulating impressionable youths" without connotations of literal pedophilia, this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate. There, I think the anti-trans side are clearly at fault, and the activists are justified in rejecting the label even if the innocuous "motte" meaning of grooming is a defensible description of their behavior. I mention this because this reply turned into a bit of an effortpost, and an overview of the topic would not be complete otherwise; but I think the basic, less one-sided conflict outlined above would be with us with or without the "grooming" buzzword in the mix.)
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
What's wrong with "and God help us"?
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
I'm against the death penalty and therefore generally unhappy with this turn of events, but I think, in this case, worrying about how "it should be done humanely" is looking for a stick to beat the decision with in defiance of the facts. Firing squads are the humane option relative to gas chambers, hangings, lethal injections, all of which I understand to be slower and more distressing ways to die. "Slowly torturing him to death" is, in other words, the one thing that they are not doing to this guy. Sure, there's still some small chance the execution could be botched, but that'd be equally (un)likely with a normal, non-public execution. Or are you arguing that it may be deliberately rigged to go wrong for the amusement of the crowd?
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Well, really I was kind of joking here - it's just a fun empirical fact that if someone online is very worried about China in some way, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are either a right-wing patriot or deep in the weeds of AI safety. It's not a very deep observation, though I do think it counts for something.
Regardless, I wasn't thinking of the recent "pause AI" efforts so much as the historical focus among the ratsphere on the necessity of cracking aligned AGI in the West lest China succeed first and turn the lightcone into a CCP boot stamping into a human face forever. Strong anticommunism, and indeed positive enthusiasm about capitalism, remain mainstream within the Grey Tribe in a way they long ceased to be within the Blue Tribe, to whatever extent they ever were.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
AI-risk-concerned EAs are, if nothing else, generally very keen that America achieve a certain pivotal technological discovery before China does. If you can't bond with the DoW over being paranoid about China, what can you bond with them about?
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Misanthropic: AFAIK not at all. The Scotts wrote anti-feminist screeds but they seem to target “radical feminists” (i.e. man haters) and explicitly don’t regard women any lower than men. Aella projects her sex drive onto other women, I think her claims overgeneralize but aren’t critical.
I think you got "misanthropic" and "misogynistic" mixed up.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
The dependency of the claim that the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews" on the gas chamber myth
What do you think the Einsatzgruppen were for? Or do you dispute their existence, too?
I am amazed that you have extruded so many words and still avoided answering my question. If you don't believe the Nazis murdered those millions of Jews, why wouldn't they? If your claim is "They didn't actually want those Jews dead; slaughtering millions of civilians was too evil even for them, however much they loathed those civilians' race" I would like you to write it plainly. If your claim is "They might have wanted those Jews dead in the abstract, but the logistics were just too hard to figure out and/or they needed them alive for their slave labor so long as the war effort was ongoing even if they wanted them dead in the long term" I would like you to write that plainly. There will be follow-up questions depending on which answer you pick, if either, but unless you do answer plainly - preferably without using the words "gas", "chamber", or "shower" - I am going to lose any remaining faith that you are actually taking this topic seriously.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I've called for a rejection of the historical consensus that several million European Jews were murdered inside gas chambers that were deceptively disguised as shower rooms. That claim is the centerpiece of the Holocaust
No; the centerpiece of the Holocaust is that the Nazis attempted to exterminate all the Jews and got a substantial amount of the way there. The alleged means are and always have been secondary at best - it is well-known that the extermination program started with firing squads. We've done this dance before, but on that occasion, you ceased responding when I got to asking an important question which I'd like you to answer now: why, in your view, did the Nazis not try to exterminate the Jews? Do you claim that they didn't want to, that they inexplicably had some moral qualms? Or that they wanted to, but didn't believe they had the means? Or is it that they wanted to, but only meant to get around to it later and hadn't actually started by the time the Reich fell? Which is it, and what makes you believe that?
Do you know how hard it is to organize the alleged events? Teenagers do not think like this. There is not a single man on this forum who would participate in something like this
Not knowingly, not with full consciousness of the heinousness of what they're doing. But many rapists lie to themselves to maintain plausible deniability within their own minds - they tell themselves soothing stories. This is what she wanted, this is what she came here to do, slipping her a little something to loosen her up is just insurance to make sure she follows through on what she implicitly promised already. In an environment where casual sex and casual drug use are already normalized group mentality could easily reinforce that sort of self-deception rather than unravel it.
Indeed, in a scenario like this, some participants might well be earnestly unaware that the encounter is non-consensual - that when the group-chat guy told them "I've got a girl up on the bed, naked and high as a kite" they might have honestly assumed the implication was that the girl had gotten high on purpose, and preemptively consented to sex before the drugs kicked in. That sort of thing probably happens fairly often in its own right. And the relative reasonableness of that assumption feeds back into the self-deception/plausible deniability: even if the non-consensual-roofie hypothesis has occurred to them as a more-or-less-distant possibility, horny boys will feel a strong incentive to continue to operate on the assumption of consent rather than double-check and find themselves unable to proceed without guilt. Schrödinger's Pussy?
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
and he'll be dead before long.
He has kids. One of the things I'll give him (insofar as it's a compliment: a pseudo-aristocratic clannish mindset is perhaps not ideal for a POTUS? not that Biden was better on that front) is that the guy seems to genuinely care about the wealth and welfare of his family, not just about his own.
WandererintheWilderness
23d ago
Well, phailyoor said that it had the appearance of such a situation, not that this was actually the case - I think the idea is that mods should avoid even the impression of impropriety, and thus, should remain neutral in "mod posts" even when their reason for modding someone in this particular case is clearly unrelated to any personal disagreement, so that it never looks as though they're modding someone for disagreeing with them. This doesn't seem crazy to me in principle. Although you guys get accused of bias so frequently anyway that I'm not sure officially adopting such niceties would move the needle in terms of public perception.
WandererintheWilderness
25d ago
I sometimes muse on the viability of an armchair utopia where most police work would function as a kind of national service that ordinary citizens are called to for a couple of years, so that the average beat or traffic cop is not someone who's made "cop" the core of their sense of self.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
How come these spaces don't just get overrun with undesirables who are too low-functioning to participate in a "community meeting"?
Gangstas are culturally homophobic, like the vast majority of criminal subcultures that thrive on machismo and personal honor. No thuggish, unsophisticated black man is going to risk being seen in a gay bar, never mind a gay women's bar - nothing this place can offer him is worth the risk to his reputation among his peers.
WandererintheWilderness
28d ago
I'll give you Alexa, but Siri has always scanned as a sci-fi robot name to me.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
So? Surely most Ed Sheeran fans wouldn't have stumbled onto the fairly obscure Happy Merchant performance by chance, either. The only way it was ever going to lead to his cancellation was a social media brouhaha brought on by someone stumbling upon it and signal-boosting it, and that could happen just as easily for a problematic skeleton in a character actor's closet. It's noteworthy that it didn't.
In both cases, the fact that it didn't happen seems to be down to it just not being all that likely that a sufficiently vindictive SJW is going become aware of the obscure scandal-in-waiting and push it on social media until it gets sufficient momentum to make a real difference to the public perception of the celebrity. Hence I don't think the target of the racial caricature was the issue.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
It's a chosen political position, and anti-Zionist Jews are welcomed in anti-Zionist spaces, not targeted.
Outspoken anti-Zionists are. Jews who are in no proactive sense Zionists but are insufficiently enthusiastic about denouncing the government of Israel, less so. I think there is a genuine and widespread anti-Semitism-based issue where Jews are assumed to be Zionists by default, and are called upon to furnish themselves with the appropriate anti-splash shibboleths if they want protection from the superweapon.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Well… Reece Shearsmith had a recurring blackface part on the BBC's League of Gentlemen comedy series in the 2000s and still got a cushy guest turn on Good Omens in pre-Gaiman-cancellation days when it was still Tumblr's favorite hyper-cozy comfort food without anyone raising much of an eyebrow. Likewise Matt Lucas of Little Britain (2003-2008) getting a recurring role on Doctor Who in 2016 in the season with the first black lesbian companion and the Doctor triumphantly punching a racist. Granted these are both British actors and I'm struggling to think of an American actor who got away with something similar in that time frame, but the relevant online fandoms were well-stocked with woke Americans so I'm not sure it should make that much of a difference.
Another nuance here is that wanting to be the opposite sex and viscerally yearning for SRS are different things. I think @Primaprimaprima was talking about e.g. sad young men who wish that they'd been born as women in a daydreamy, intellectual kind of way but don't have the dysphoric "ick, ick, ick, get that thing off of me" reaction to their penises that pattern-matches to the arm thing, and who, if they attempt a surgical transition, would only do so in an attempt to make the dream come true. I think it's true that that sort of trans desire is no more pathological, and no more difficult for normies to grok, than yearning to have been born to different life circumstances in some other way.
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