laxam
2mo ago
Pretty much anywhere there was an abundance of land that was tied into the global trade network. If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap any time before mechanization in the 1920s, you'd be set, no matter how you started off.
laxam
2mo ago
The failure to prevent a unified Germany is pretty much what I mean when I say Britain 'failed [to] balance sufficiently'.
laxam
2mo ago
Austria was not entirely considered a Great Power by the middle of the 19th century (France, 'prostrate' or not, was viewed as the 1000 pound gorilla of the Continent until the unification of Germany) and, as you note, Britain balanced against the Russians when it seemed to be necessary.
However, when the British failed balance sufficiently, they got the two World Wars and an Arms Race or two so, to the extent they didn't balance, they were being actively taught by events why it was important to do so.
laxam
2mo ago
The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.
Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.
It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.
Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.
Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.
I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course
Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.
laxam
2mo ago
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
This is the 'gender role' terminology: The social role played by a particular gender.
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
And this is the 'gender identity' or 'gender performance', depending on the exact thing being discussed: Either that internal feeling of what 'gender' you are or the behaviors that feel natural to you on account of your felt 'gender'.
But here is the hard part: What is 'gender' separate from all of those individual nouns? What does the modifier 'gender' alone mean in front of all of these?
The truth is that it's an empty signifier unless you treat it as as synonym for 'sex'. But that has a whole lot of implications that aren't like by the kind of activist theorists who invented 'gender' as something different: Someone with a 'gender identity' discordant with their physical sex has a body dysmorphia, for example, and not something more deeply psychologically central. If that's true, the drive to 'affirming' care runs up on the rocks of evidence based medicine, where it's not entirely clear that that paradigm is actually the best. And it also means there are only really two genders, because sex and gender are the same thing and there are, in humans, only one big gamete and one little gamete and the machinery to produce each (which may or may not actually work in any particular implementation). That means that the 'nonbinary' clique is a philosophically incoherent trend, rather than anything more meaningful (not like there is anything wrong with that -- there's a reason punk ranges from anarcho-communist radicals to skinhead Nazis: there's something at a the heart of punk that doesn't make sense or, more likely, there's really nothing there but loud, angry music).
But these results are disturbing, so the desperate pretense must be continue.
laxam
2mo ago
Progressive just wasn't a word used much at the time, but the kind of liberalism TOS/TNG Star Trek embodied could have pretty uncontroversially been called 'progressive'. It's not that modern progressives are claiming some past non-progressive ideology as their own, it's that the word 'progressive' itself has morphed in meaning since the 1960's (and before...), to the point where most people who would identify as 'progressive' today are really just Leftists. Most modern 'liberals' in the old progressive sense are just confused and can't tell this has happened.
laxam
2mo ago
It was at the time, although progressivism was a dead word that only got revived in the 90's after conservatives succeeded in making 'liberal' a dirty word.
laxam
2mo ago
Media was dark back when it was worse, but it wasn't grimdark and it was good.
And it could play its darkness off really lightly. Crocodile Dundee is very family friendly for how it portrays the dregs of Manhattan in the 1980's.
laxam
2mo ago
And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.
laxam
2mo ago
But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.
It's probably further up the pipeline, too. They're recruiting writers who aren't particularly good at their trade, but they have the right politics and personal identity, so they get hired.
laxam
2mo ago
I think Trump actually has gotten worse at getting a point out. When he wanted to cite Snopes fact checking Charlottesville at the Biden debate he couldn't quite land the point in a way where you knew what the hell he was talking about if you weren't already familiar with what he was trying to say.
laxam
2mo ago
You take on a risk and want to restrict others to deal with it?
Sounds like fascism, to me.
laxam
2mo ago
the previous conservative mayor John Tory
Sometimes, nominative determinism just becomes unbelievably on the nose.
laxam
2mo ago
Luckily, our Constitution bans titles of nobility. In Constitutionalist America, no one is allowed to be black or gay, only the subaltern white or straight.
laxam
2mo ago
Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?
Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.
laxam
2mo ago
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
laxam
2mo ago
I'm not sure. I think Trump could beat Harris pretty easily if he were ten years younger, but we won't really know the contours of the election until it's over.
laxam
2mo ago
No, it was absolutely said at the time.
Here's an example from early on in the 2016 election process.
Here's another one from later on
You can find a lot of them. She was not well liked.
laxam
2mo ago
Maybe I'm the one that's off my rocker
You are. Clinton was a profoundly weak, unpopular candidate. She had 35 years in the public spotlight and there just was not anything to like there for the majority of Americans. No one running in 2016 could have beaten her in the landslide she deserved, but the 2016 election was Generic, Boring Republican Candidate's to lose.
2016 was a very Republican year and Clinton was a terrible candidate. As it was, Republicans across the country ran ahead of Trump, from House races to Senate, Gubernatorial, and even further downballot. A more boring election where you don't get all the negative partisanship Trump creates that has lower turnout than 2012 instead of higher turnout benefits those other Republicans even more.
laxam
2mo ago
There were no great candidates in 2016, but probably any of them but Bush could have beaten Clinton fairly easily. Bush's name would have dragged him down harder with the kinds of voters he needed to make up for the lack of immigration restrictionists that we really got to see when it was just the primaries.
There was a time when people were thinking, "I we really going to end up with Bushes and Clinton's again?!"
laxam
2mo ago
The war was a big deal at the time, so it was no small thing. He had credibility on it, too, rather than being a flip flopper. Combined with his personal charisma and the dissatisfaction of the on-going financial crisis and all sorts of people had something to be excited about.
laxam
2mo ago
Dramatic shrinkage of the deficit, from almost 10% of GDP in 2010 to less than 2.5% of GDP in 2015, was the primary immediate accomplishment.
The Trump judges were coming no matter who the GOP President was after 2016. They were fruits of the Federalist Society cultivating actually philosophically conservative jurists for several generations and were chosen by advisors and movement conservatives. Whoever was formally appointing them after 2016 would be appointing the same people, or similar people.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is gentility. The genteel life of the landed aristocracy in 19th century Britain was something of a paradise -- for them, that is. It must have exercised a powerful magnetic attraction, even for people who understood foundations of deprivation it stood on. Tolkien idealized it rather explicitly: Bilbo's party is practically something out of a countryside daydream for the Midcountry gentry.
More options
Context Copy link