WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
(…) pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.
But that's passing the buck. Why do they need to lie to themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness, and makes them feel bad if they recognize themselves to be falling short of that ideal?
WandererintheWilderness
5hr ago
Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home.
The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death
I think you're underselling the "invasive" point. The idea of forcing someone to go through pregnancy triggers a particular kind of disgust and sympathy in me - it might not be more harmful or evil than forcing someone to fight in a war in an 'objective' sense, but it feels debased and inhumane, belonging to the same category as rape or Mengele-style medical experimentation. Certainly, a legal mandate of pregnancy, at least one that's not enforced through direct sexual violence, would be on the milder end of that spectrum - but the violation of bodily autonomy is still a very particular kind of harm, and one can have a moral intuition that the entire category should be strictly taboo in a civilized society, regardless of what other kinds of harm the government is sometimes empowered to inflict for the greater good.
(Intuitions may differ about whether forced pregnancy falls into that category, but I do think the vast majority of humans would agree that there are particularly 'unclean' kinds of harm that the government should never implement, even in pursuit of its self-preservation; that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice. If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose? The view that the government cannot compel women to bear children is, IMO, a perfectly straightforward example of that: "if it comes to that, better to be a demographically dwindling nation than a nation of institutional rapists".)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Just one example of this racket - in half of US states 0,5% or more of all building budget has to be spend on art.
This does not strike me as inherently a racket. It's perfectly anodyne in western civilization for the government to spend money on public art, not just brutalist utilitarian concrete. Has been since the Romans. No doubt there is corruption in what artists get the commission, particularly if it's always avant-garde artists whose aesthetics are light-years away from the kinds of statues and decorations people actually want in their neighborhoods - but a small fraction of the budget being reserved for art is not in principle outrageous or even surprising.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
How do we think this works out?
Could always go for the Ancient Greek route: recreational bisexuality as the norm for young men until it's time for them to settle down and produce heirs?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
It wasn't an explicit part of the scripts, but they did pointedly only have humans as Imperial officers, never any aliens. I don't know if that was a worldbuilding decision, so much as wanting the dour totalitarians to all look alike while the plucky ragtag goodies come in all shapes and sizes because it's useful visual shorthand; but it was by no means a retcon.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
That depends on what we mean by "believe"; I don't think Judas is suggested to have become an atheist. When the Israelites turn away from God, they turn to foreign cults and superstitions - they become opportunistic henotheists instead of monotheists - but they do not disbelieve in the supernatural itself. Indeed, I don't think they stop believing in Yahweh's existence, just in whether the clearly-real supernatural entity they'd pledged themselves to really is the omnipotent creator of everything. Biblical characters inhabit a very different epistemic landscape from us.
I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down (or, as they case may be, nail up) who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?
As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Well, quite, but they are still distinct; if only one is abolished then the Amendment has only been halved, not made obsolete altogether.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
And what "going armed to the terror of the public" is, is entirely up to the several states. (…) The Second Amendment is done; that's all folks.
Playing devil's advocate rather than staking out a personal position here - nor am I saying that anti-guns regulations are compliant with the following - but, stray thought: couldn't you argue there's a difference between the right to own firearms and the right to carry firearms? Maintaining a broad right to keep firearms in your own home, but restricting your ability to carry them in everyday life, seems potentially in the spirit of the Second Amendment if you understand it in terms of a people's insurance against tyranny. If it comes to a revolt, then you can take the guns out of the basement and ignore the regulations about whether you're allowed to carry them in public; if you aren't participating in a mass revolt against an unjust government then it's not constitutionally important whether you can carry them around or not, so long as you are allowed to have them in reserve in case of a revolution.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
brief leaves on weekends
I think Olive meant being able to go for walks at any time.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Oh, I hoped for nothing as lofty as convincing you - I merely intended to demonstrate that your observations of trans women's behavior aren't sufficient to demonstrate your thesis, as other explanations are possible.
For what it's worth, I think my explanation better fits the way I see trans women behaving "behind closed doors" ie in majority-queer Discord servers and the like. There's a lot of leftist pseudo-theory pontificating back and forth about society's lame constraints happening - and vanishingly little that remotely resembles kinksters acknowledging that this is all so hawt now that the cisses aren't watching and they can let loose.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I think this is true about some things - revealing clothing, certainly; red lipstick, sure, the sexual symbolism is obvious - but I don't especially think it's genetically hardwired that artificially-long bright-blue nails are sexual. You can still argue that "women prettying themselves up" taps into sexual instincts in a broader way, but I don't think it's inevitable that painted nails should be seen as "slutty" in a way that elaborate hairdos or colorful (but not immodest) dresses aren't. I'm pretty sure that's just cultural.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
these things, when done by a grown woman, send an overly sexual message to men
This has historically been the case, but if it becomes so widespread in the younger generations, surely that association is bound to fade from too many false positives?
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I don't think "it is often a sex thing" actually follows from "trans women often dress more provocatively than cis women". I believe the main reason for the latter fact is, rather, that once you've broken one taboo, you're more likely to break another. Or to put it another way, when you've already made yourself a freak in the eyes of an appreciable fraction of society simply by transitioning, when you've already joined a class that a good deal of normies will find disgusting on principle and decided to love yourself in spite of their contempt, you're well on your way to unlearning all other socially-constructed shames. You're very likely to think "to hell with fatphobia, I don't have to disguise my figure to gain the approval of a bunch of snobs"; to think "radical feminists had the right idea, forcing women to shave their legs is patriarchal bullshit, body hair is natural, body hair is beautiful, why should I hide mine if I don't want to?"; and so on, and so forth. I believe there's a fair number of trans nudists.
And like… I think this explanation is broadly neutral? You might believe, as I do, that this is a basically healthy, enlightened attitude and that the kinds of cis women you describe, who regard small breasts and body hair as "defects", would be a lot happier if they adopted at least parts of. Or you might believe that it's a slippery slope of post-modernism where throwing out the basic division of the sexes leads inexorably to the breakdown of any belief in aesthetic principles or social norms of any kind, in favor of a kind of feel-good hippieslop. Either might follow. The point is that your observations are handily explained by my framework of "people who've transed their genders have basically thrown out the social rulebook already, so they're likely to be unconventional and scandalous in all sorts of other dimensions", with no need for transness to itself be a sex thing.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I appreciate this in turn! Thank you.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Well, certainly I don't think violent and non-violent offenders should be less segregated than they are in normal prison. That seems to be an odd epicycle to the thought experiment; is the notion that the budget requirements for both a non-violent-offenders trans wing and a violent-offenders trans wing would be a bridge too far? That seems… strange when we're already entertaining the expense of the trans prison at all.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
how do you propose to distinguish (…)
I don't propose to do any such thing; I'm just choosing the lesser evil. There are some male rapists who will take the reputation hit of crossdressing to get to the pussy, but I would be surprised if it were so prevalent that the number of male-on-female rapes caused by such a policy would exceed the number of male-on-effeminate-male rapes it would prevent.
(If you're still unconvinced, it would already be a start to limit the policy to medically-transitioning MTFs; I would be really surprised if there were statistically significant numbers of male rapists willing to castrate themselves just to get to the female block. Or, of course, there's Celestial's notion of a trans-only block. There would still be a risk of opportunist male rapists declaring themselves trans to go there rather than men's prison, and then raping the legitimate MTFs - but I think the MTFs themselves, if asked, would rather take that chance than the much higher probability of such rapes if they all had to go to men's prisons; don't you?)
But I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following questions in complete honesty. (…)
Ironically, and I don't know whose case this helps if anyone's - I do, but they're biological females who identify as male. (No, not my trans relative. I know multiple FTMs.)
I do know of the type of trans woman you describe, but I still think parsing their lifestyle as a sex thing is reductive. For a start, many of them consider themselves lesbians - that is to say, they are, in biological terms, heterosexual - so I don't really buy that they get a sexual thrill from being acknowledged as women by men. Mostly, I think it's a combination of the queer community having relaxed sexual mores, and of biological males starting out hornier than the average biological female, but suddenly unlearning all the specifically male norms that cause men to disguise and obfuscate anything to do with their raw sexuality.
'Bob' is perhaps a different matter if she really was so taken with pornography, but 'Charlie' seems a very good example of the kind of thing I mean: boys in a state of nature love showing their willies to people, including straight boys showing theirs off to other straight boys. The only reason men don't do it to women is that society teaches them it's very, very rude indeed. (Perhaps ruder than it actually is, I daresay, but then, as I said, I have naturist leanings at a philosophical level, though the actual hobby has never appealed to me.) Now here comes 'Charlie', who, because she now holds herself to be a woman socially, no longer feels bound by the "it's very rude for a man to ask women if they want to see his willy" rule. But neither is she especially aware of a "it's very rude for a woman to ask women if they want to see her foofoo" rule; even if she knows of one, she'd would write it off as patriarchal prudishness. So the exchange you witnessed ensues.
I don't want to claim that the boyish impulse to show off one's cool willy is a wholly non-sexual one, or that this end result is okay; but I think it'd be wrong to necessarily treat expressions in trans women's behavior of this kind of spontaneous exhibitionism, or even more explicit male-style horniness, as a specific form of fetishism, or to conclude that they're sneakily getting off all the time just from being perceived as female.
(I don't deny that some trans women arrive at their decisions through sexual fantasies; but I don't think this means that their subsequent female identification need be a purely sexual thing, in much the same way that attraction between two people can start as sexual desire and blossom into the full spectrum of romantic love. You might put on a dress because you think it's hot, then look at yourself in the mirror, and realize, oh wait, this feels right, I want this even when I don't have an erection. It might be helpful to think of a certain kind of transition as a process of falling in love with a person you're becoming.)
And as an aside, I find it a profound insult to my intelligence that I'm expected to believe that males like this "identify as woman" or have an "internally felt sense of womanhood" (…)
Oh, the perfect-platonic-essence-of-gender-written-on-your-soul approach isn't my position either.
but I think it's fair to assume they were not complaining about these people wearing plaid despite paisley suiting them so much better. Glossing their complaint as amounting to the trans people in question "dressing in ways they don't like" is an uncharitable strawman
My intention was to gesture at the "showing skin is fine, and prudish fussie-duddies should get over it", free-the-nipple sort of liberal memeplex without getting into the weeds. I obviously didn't mean that I thought Amadan and SnapDragon thought the colors of the trans women's clothes clashed, but I did mean to imply that they were, perhaps, being judgemental in taking it for granted that revealing clothing is always "sexual", let alone "off-puttingly" so. In your example, I think Bob is doing something inappropriate insofar as his showing himself off to Alice is intended to seduce her or pressure her into sex - but if Bob, in fact, began wearing shorts because he likes the feel of them or thinks he looks good in them - if we forget about the deliberate posing - I don't think the mere fact that Alice might find the look sexually suggestive means she has a complaint against Bob, except to the extent that his genitals are so visible as to fall afoul of actual indecency laws, which is a very different conversation.
(It may very well be that at least some of the trans women SnapDragon and Amadan have encountered were doing more deliberate things in line with Bob propping his feet up when he knows Alice has to look. It certainly seems to be the case with the person you also, perhaps confusingly, called "Bob" in your other reply. But I do think I'm right in saying that SnapDragon and Amadan object to the revealing clothing itself already, hence why the sentence you quoted was focused on the clothing itself.)
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
The fact that women are physically weaker and hence more vulnerable than men is why protecting women from rape is a higher priority for me than protecting men.
ChickenOverlord seemed to be saying a much less anodyne thing - that even if, in fact, a lot more MTF prisoners get raped than bio-female ones, protecting the cis women is always, axiomatically, a higher priority. This is quite different from the heuristic you describe, which breaks down in a context where (a specific subcategory of) men are, for whatever reason, at an elevated risk of rape too. If we afford free women special protection out in the world because they're especially likely to be raped, we should afford MTF convicts special protection in prison because they are especially likely to be raped.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.
Well, there is a body of thought behind the notion that although obligate homosexuality is an inborn minority, a much greater slice of the population can develop an interest in bisexuality depending on prevailing cultural norms, as per the Ancient Greeks.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
As I said in another prong of this thread, I do agree that this is mostly symbolic in either direction - but I care about the government going the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety w. regards to the franchise. In any case I didn't necessarily mean to die on the hill of this particular argument, merely to point out that in my experience that is the principal argument in favor of letting felons have the vote, as opposed to concern about their inalienable human rights yada yada.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
"being trans is in practice a sex thing"
But that's not Amadan's claim. Amadan claims to know a lot of transgenders whom he finds over-sexual in their demeanor. I granted this claim; but it still leaves us with the fact that I know a very different sub-population of trans people than he does (so at most you should only conclude "being trans is in practice a sex thing for some").
Neither does it prove, for that matter, that transness itself is a sex thing even to the over-sexed transgenders that Amadan knows; there are many subcultures whose members are a lot more promiscuous than the general population, it doesn't mean that the subculture's anchor-point is itself a sexual fetish. At the broadest possible level, liberals are more likely to be sexually liberated than conservatives, even to outré extents, but that hardly makes liberalism itself "a sex thing" even "in practice".
No - again, I think it comes from a deep-seated intuition that the body is a temple, something private and sacred; that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent. I am struggling to explain this without repeating myself - but a substantial portion of mankind finds it intuitive that having your body interfered with is traumatizing and wrong in a kind of metaphysical way that you can't crush down into utils and compare to other forms of harm. Throughout history, it has been considered self-evident that an honorable woman would rather die than be raped - that a woman who has been raped, even if there is no pregnancy, even if there is no social shame, has suffered a much more grievous and deeper harm than the amount of physical pain endured during the act.
Ergo, it seems intuitively, primally obvious to me that forcing a woman to bear something within her womb, within her most private organs, against her will, is wrong, disgusting, taboo, in a way that's not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from forcing a male or female soldier to risk his/her life in battle. I would feel the same disgust if a mad scientist tried to implant a fetus inside a non-consenting man.
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