Black history month is not for black people, it's for white people. It's for whites to celebrate non-whiteness. What matters is how whites see non-whites, and they see them mostly through American media. By "whites', I don't mean people with light skin, but rather a certain class of people--mostly light-skinned--who are very profoundly conscious of "race". Black history month exists because white people demand it, but this weird fact is just more obvious in Ireland than in the US.
nomenym
1yr ago
I entirely agree. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is willing to make the compromises that are necessary to solve this problem, because even suggesting most of them is taboo. There will need to be a technological solution or natural selection will eventually solve us for it.
nomenym
1yr ago
Among the people who are most likely to say this also, ostensibly, believe that the world is dominated by a white heternormative patriarchal tyranny, or something like that. They claim to believe the world is deeply unfair and they relish pointing out this unfairness everywhere, even when it makes no sense.
nomenym
1yr ago
If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.
This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.
In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.
With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.
This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.
I fear the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people may actually be detrimental to future efforts to fight child sex trafficking. Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing. We can already see how expressing concern here is being interpreted as a dogwhistle for Qanon. Unfortunately, too many people will be far more horrified by the thought of being mistaken for a Trump supporter than they would at the possibility of indirectly aiding child sex traffickers. Sure, they may quietly, and in private, express their revulsion for pedophilia, but in public one would not want to say too much less the inquisitors get suspicious.
This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles, especially those among the Zeitgeist's activist class.
Perhaps this is uncharitable. No, it's definitely uncharitable. However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable. Is there are bridge to far? Everyone says that there is, but then many of those people don't seem to have ever seen a bridge they didn't immediately run across, while dragging as many people along with them as they could. Sometimes being uncharitable is the only way to avoid being scammed, again.
God I hope my fear is misplaced.
nomenym
1yr ago
With regard to number 3, the exact inverse appears to be the current trend. I wouldn't be surprised if throwing money at "mental health" is actually exacerbating the problem.
nomenym
1yr ago
In practice, it's pretty close.
It's not just the superficial transformation, because it's usually accompanied by a kind of religious conversion, and the transition is like a "born again" experience, with the old identity becoming a "deadname". Moreover, if you question or resist this along the way, you will cast as a villain in the ideological grand narrative. There are so many ways this can either ruin your child or ruin your relationship with them, and in the end they are no less likely to commit suicide anyway.
nomenym
1yr ago
The quip is that autogynephiles are men trapped in male bodies. Mulvaney doesn't seem to be that.
nomenym
1yr ago
I'd be curious what a female version of one of these manifestos would read like, especially a female transman. My expectation is that it would try, and fail, to pass, so to speak, but I guess we may never know.
nomenym
1yr ago
It's a strategic relativism. They use relativist arguments to "deconstruct" and undermine opposing views and "structures". Relativism is a weapon, and you use weapons against the enemy, not yourself.
nomenym
1yr ago
Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit that one should never set as a goal. See blueberry porn and homosexuals.
nomenym
1yr ago
It's like a psychological allergy. Growing up in an environment that's too clean prevents your immune system from calibrating appropriately, and it seems that growing up with too much psychological safety has a similar effect. Unfortunately, this trait has become a kind of status signifier among women, and so they're now actively cultivating their psychological allergies.
Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).
Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.
nomenym
1yr ago
Well, the elephant in the room is the inexplicable and ongoing high level of excess deaths being reported among all age groups and across continents. These deaths do not appear to be driven primarily by Covid itself or at least not directly.
nomenym
1yr ago
The best way to understand this ideology is to assume its trying to destabilize society by trans-ing as many people as possible. The purpose of destabilization is to facilitate a revolution toward some nebulous utopia. The individual agents of this ideology may or may not explicitly recognize this, and even fewer say it out loud and in public. Most have internalized some incoherent set of arguments which superficially appeal to liberal principles, and they intuitively understand what they are expected and forbidden to say and think. It is low status to be seen to disagree or oppose this ideology, and the worst fear of many people is to be mistaken for the wrong sort of person.
The arguments are just tools deployed strategically to increase the number of trans people given the context. There are no unifying principles, and there is no explanatory theory that ties it all together. Water is wet when saying so increases the number of trans people, and water is dry when saying so increases the number of trans people. Those individuals within the fold who try to stick to a principle or rationalize the theory inevitably find themselves as outcasts, because at some point they derive a position that doesn't increase the number of trans people.
Incoherence is swept away by continuously redefining and coining new terms. Both the theories and social dynamics encourage dogmatic thinking and suppression of wrongthink. Agents are led to enmesh their personal identity, their sense of self-worth and purpose, with the ideology, such that they cannot be separated. Attacks on these ideas are then reflexively construed as attacks on people. Objectivity is impossible. Rational discussion is prohibited. Conflicts can then only be resolved by manipulation and power relations.
These are the dark arts.
nomenym
1yr ago
A large part of the anti-trans side, such as the religious people you mentioned, wouldn't accept Jane as a woman even if we had magical-level medical technology.
Ironically, they're not the only ones to believe in a immutable gendered soul.
nomenym
1yr ago
This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.
There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.
Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.
nomenym
1yr ago
People usually get away with a lot before they're caught, so I would assume he's done this, or something like this, before.
nomenym
1yr ago
I wonder where that places Iranian trans women. Infamously, Iran has a very high rate of transwomen, because it's the legal alternative to homosexuality. However, this is clearly an instrumental motivation, even if it often coincides with significant efforts to present and live as women.
It's also an interesting definition, because much of what is driving opposition to the rise of gender ideology is the belief that social pressure, contagion, and misdiagnosed mental illness are the primary drivers trans-identification right now, and these are seen as extrinsic motivations that are often misunderstood as intrinsic by those who temporarily self-identify as trans. If the activists truly believe as you say, but then they pretend otherwise for politically strategic reasons, then they are fundamentally untrustworthy on the very important factual question of what is actually driving increasing rates of trans-identification.
This is happening because incentives. We now have established that "hate speech" is an exception to free speech everywhere but the upper courts and The Motte (for now). Only one side can effectively wield this hate speech exception, so when an event like this happens we get each side trying to blame the other. While the left might lose a smidge of credibility when the facts turn against their narrative, the right will be subject to ever encroaching bans and censorship. The right, therefore, will collectively sigh with relief when it turns out the latest murdering lunatic didn't watch Tucker Carlson. However, this ratchet only goes in one direction (Elon Musk notwithstanding), because the hate speech exception almost exclusively applies to right wing values and beliefs only. The activists, whether by Machiavellian cunning or just authoritarian instinct, see an indirect (but obvious) causal link between the utterences of their ideological opponents and these types of mass shootings, and they see an opportunity to cast a wider net for the hate speech exception. This strategy been working quite well for them, and the right doesn't really have a counter.
It's really bad news when one of these shootings really does turn out to be some gun-toting Trump cultist, and I am relieved when it is not. Because when it is, the ratchet will move again, with more institutions enacting incremental bans and censorship of ever more ordinary right wing views and opinions, because their words are literally killing people. It doesn't happen everywhere all at once, but is rather just a slow grinding down of free speech. Once these rules were established, the game to disown violent radicals on your own side, particularly if your on the right, and to try and pin it on the other side, is the correct and only sensible move
The curious part is that there are many things Nyberg could have said and done which would have got them into trouble even with their own side. Circular firing squads are hardly uncommon among these types of communities. Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?
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