quiet_NaN
11hr ago
those men would say an invasion is exactly what's happening
Not a military invasion, no. You could use invasive species rhetoric, but that is quite a different thing. It would be like triggering NATO article 5 because of the nutria invading the US.
Employed illegal immigrants pay taxes, same as citizens. If they murder someone, they are put through the same legal system. These two facts alone set them apart from members of any invading army. If you get invaded by the troops of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, GWB or basically any other commander in the history of mankind, the invaders will not pay federal income tax. The idea that during the sacking of a city, local policemen would go around arresting individual invaders for assault or murder seems totally absurd.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.
"You can own a gun, provided you can file one out of a block of iron and personally mine the saltpeter for the powder because we ban the sale of guns and anything which might be helpful in making or using them" would go very much against the spirit of 2A.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
Its first test and major precedent was a complete inversion of the language.
The general understanding is that "not under the jurisdiction" covers invading armies and diplomatic staff of other countries (and also Indians with internal self-governance).
Of course, the tendency to naturalize immigrants (or at least their descendants) is much older than the 14th (slavery non-withstanding). Most ancestors of today's US citizens were neither Native American nor part of the Mayflower.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.
With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?
To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."
Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.
I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)
Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that the "each parent pretends to only understand a single language" thing is a bit silly if carried to extremes.
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions, but the bilingual parent talks with the kids in the non-shared language on other occasions. If the kid replies in the shared language, she can tell him how to phrase that sentence in her language. "Can I stay up and watch a TV show" -- "Du meinst, kann ich laenger auf bleiben und Fernsehn schauen?"
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay. If an US expat and a German raise a few kids in Germany, teaching them English from age zero will enable the family to move to an English-speaking country without too much trouble. By contrast, if their monolinual son is in seventh grade when they want to move, the first year of school will likely be very difficult for him, because two years of English is unlikely to be enough to follow the lessons.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.
I think you would need to search hard and long to find someone here who will argue that Roe was the correct decision as far as the procedure was concerned. I certainly was happy that abortion was legal, but the fact on how that was determined seemed rather horrible to me, and indeed created a lot of additional problems, such as the politization of the SCOTUS.
I am a procedure fanboy. As far as the direct outcome is concerned, there is not a lot of difference between cops assassinating a drug dealer and him getting arrested, convicted of murder, exhausting his appeals and finally getting executed. Yet the indirect consequences will be very different because once you grant cops the ability to do summary executions, they are unlikely to stick to just killing drug dealers. It is better to suffer the occasional dealer to go free for lack of evidence than to live in some fascist dictatorship.
Roe was basically the judicial equivalent of just shooting drug dealers.
2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.
That depends a lot on your understanding of 2A and what it is for.
As far as keeping the means to fight battles in the hands of the population, the diverge happened no later than WW1. Not all of it is the judiciaries fault either, parts of it is just that the cost of the equipment which tended to win battles skyrocketed: the median American could probably afford to keep a state of the art rifle in 1800 or 1900, but he could certainly not maintain a tank in 1930! Another part certainly was judicial, in that 2A was simply not applied to Tommy guns.
On the other hand, while the judiciary has been fine with not adding new weapon systems to the 2A pool, and has certainly okayed background checks and waiting periods, there was also little attempt to reneg on earlier precedent. Double-action handguns had been in the 2A pool since they were first invented, and there they stayed.
Today the US is one of very few jurisdictions where a citizen can own a rifle or semi-automatic handgun without giving her government any justification why she wants a gun. (Sure, carrying the gun in public is a bit trickier and might require a license in blue states, but contrast this with Germany: to even own a 9mm, I would need to show legitimate need (such as being a hunter or long-practicing sport shooter), and to get a license to carry in everyday life I would basically have to become a cop.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
End the fed, kill the bank, and stop debasing my money.
Are you certain that giving the president direct control of the monetary policy would lead to less debasing of the US dollar?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Why not just have the homeless vote in the first place? Presumably most homeless would also mostly vote for the Democrats, and this way you do not go to jail if your little scheme is discovered.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed.
If you do not allow the drawing of blood for evidence, then any DUI laws become basically unenforceable. At best, they would become a shit-throwing fest with cops arguing that according to their eyewitness testimony, you were clearly inebriated. I will rather take my chances with the BAC results of a forensic technician any day of the week, thank you very much.
If instead you want to get a warrant to draw blood of a pedestrian sitting in a park because you want to convict them of being on some illegal narcotics, then I am much less sympathetic because the scope of the alleged crime does not fit the invasiveness of the search, and would argue that any such warrant is unreasonable. (I do not think this is a common MO for cops though, typically they want to catch you with the substance in a bag instead of in your blood.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Roe v Wade was bad because it was legislating from the bench. It is very hard to make the argument that the constitution grants abortion rights without tying your head into a pretzel.
If you want to argue that the 14th does not grant children of migrants citizenship then you would have to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.
Getting controversial things out of the court hands has value to maintain the Court legitimacy.
Would you feel the same way about the rights granted by 2A as by 14A?
I am a big fan of a legal system where words mean things, and courts try their best to interpret the meaning of the text while also keeping previous precedent (where it did an honest job of interpreting the meaning).
If words do not mean things, you do not need much in the way of a constitution, you can simply have a SCOTUS filled by wise elders who can veto any laws or decrees they deem unwise and replace them with wiser ones.
You don’t want a different court in 20 years reversing tomorrows decision.
That is an argument for not torturing the text of the constitution until it confesses to your meaning and the Kennedy assassination.
I am solidly pro-choice, but I fully understand the pro-life's anger at Roe v Wade. It is not like there had been an abortion amendment and the SCOTUS was just "jupp, that means abortion has to be legal". Instead, the court conjured this thing out of thin air, because they felt that achieving the right ends was more important than using the right means (e.g. sensible textual interpretations). So pro-life embarked on a half-century quest to replace SCOTUS with more sympathetic justices, and actually succeeded.
I do not hold overturning Roe v Wade against the current SCOTUS because it was clearly a terrible precedent. By contrast, United States v Wong Kim Ark follows a textual reading of the 14th. If the SCOTUS overturns this precedent without providing a rock-solid argument why it was in fact wrong, they will prove that they are as much partisan hacks as the court which decided Roe.
In that case, filling the SCOTUS with their candidates will be the prime objective of both parties. Either the Republicans win, in which case 14A is only of historical interest, and 1A might not apply to anything Trump labels "left-wing radical", or the Dems win, and 2A will only be of historical interest, and 1A will not apply to anything which president Newsom designates as "hate speech", which will coincidentally include most campaigning by the GOP.
Both of these outcomes would be terrible. I would much rather see the SCOTUS return to being non-partisan referees. Luckily for me, it seems that the current SCOTUS is not afraid to vote against Trump when they feel he is just plain wrong.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
As I understand gender ideology (or whatever you want to call it), a "man" is anyone who self-reports that they are a man, and a "woman" is anyone who self-reports that they are a woman. Have I misunderstood?
As far as I am concerned, this is correct. Obviously there can be people who are gaming this system where self-id is the tiebreaker, like Cartman self-identifying as a girl so he (!) will get his own bathroom in school, or trolls insisting that their gender is "attack helicopter" and making up weird pronouns for themselves or whatever.
his position is that there is nothing inherently incorrect in re-defining categories, it's just a matter of semantics.
To quote the man:
I’ve been told some people are misinterpreting this post as “you can define words any way you want, don’t worry about it”. While nothing is stopping you from defining a word any way you want, you should definitely worry about it.
Definitions should preferably carve reality at its joints. A definition of fish which includes some whales but excludes other whales is probably not a good definition. But sometimes there are multiple options for a workable definition.
That being said, society runs on on polite fictions to some degree. If you are invited to dinner and find the food barely tolerable, it would be poor form to communicate this fact directly to your host. Likewise, if your colleague introduces you to his "beautiful wife", most people know better than to contradict him. If you get asked on a date and feel insulted that the asker even considered you in his league, it is poor taste to let the disgust show, and the appropriate response would be to tell them to that you are not interested without going into the specifics of his shortcomings. If my English teacher introduced herself as Mrs Smith, it would be extremely impolite to call her Miss Smith even if I knew for a fact that she has never been married.
There are topics where other considerations overrule polite fictions. If some parents believe that prayer is better than chemotherapy for their kid's cancer, you can tell them that this is an insane view even if it will likely upset them. However, the gender in the social sphere is IMHO not something which is especially worth protecting. It used to be that your gender/sex had a lot of legal implications, but today in Western societies that is no longer the case.
The reality is that in the social sphere, we generally have to infer the gender of people through indirect evidence rather than just looking at their genitals. That is fine for most social situations, if I am selling you a cup of coffee, I do not really care if I sexed you as "female" because you are a cis-woman or because you are a trans-woman who was able to pass as a woman. There is no law prohibiting the sale of coffee to penis-havers, so I do not care either way. The same is true for most social interactions, with the exception of sex and procreation.
Few people would support tattooing people their birth gender on their forehead or criminalizing cross-dressing, so the social gender will not be co-extensive with the sex assigned at birth either way. Given that background, I think it is not a huge step to let people pick their pronouns. Of course, if someone is a trans-woman presenting as a bearded guy, I will probably misgender her a lot more by accident than if she is presenting at least somewhat feminine, and I will not lose a lot of sleep over it either.
So for example, if my mental problems will be greatly alleviated if my therapist starts addressing me as "Your Highness," then he should do so.
In the SSC article, the canonical example seems Napoleon, but that is the same up to isomorphism.
For a psychiatrist, how they will refer to their patient is up to them. If they decide to indulge some fantasy or not I will not second-guess them. If you feel they do not have your best interests at heart, find a different psychiatrist.
In a world where a few percents of the population identify as Napoleon, I think it would probably not be helpful for strangers to go to them and tell them that they are not Napoleon, and that the real Napoleon died on St Helena a long time ago. Perhaps the psychiatric community finds that the best outcome is for the public to indulge their fantasy (within limitations -- no invading Russia). Let them put Napoleon Bonaparte as their artist's/order name in their passport, whatever.
It is pretty much the same for your "king of England". Obviously Charles has constitutional duties which we won't let everyone handle who claims they ID as the British monarch. But if it affected multiple percent of the population, I would be fine with making "king of England" free-for-all and having a separate term, like "constitutional monarch of Great Britain" to refer to Charles.
It is different if you were to id as a physician, because society has good reason to not politely play along with you. We should not change the laws to grant you a MD to make you feel better.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that a compromise would be to require postal votes to be date-stamped a week earlier than the date of the election (plus some extra slack when they are sent from out of state). Don't like making your mind up early? Vote in person.
In the unlikely case that some postal votes take more than that, I would still count them simply to disincentivize someone delaying their delivery on purpose. (On the other hand, without a confirmation of delivery it would be easier to just "lose" them altogether.)
Over here in Germany, the mechanics of voting are non-issues. Of course you have to show government-mandated ID to vote. Of course municipal workers try their best (and succeed, as far as I can tell) in making voting easy. Your polling place is often the nearest school, kindergarden or large public building, and you might need to wait five minutes or so. Of course we are using paper ballots, and of course you can observe the counting of the votes.
In the US, there has been a long and proud tradition of voter suppression at least in the southern states. My understanding is that the waiting time in the polling line can be hours. Charitably, digital voting machines are simply a way to shovel government funds to companies, but the intransparency is at least accepted. Besides the other net negatives, this also turns anything about election mechanics into culture war fodder.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Are you adopting his position? Because I would like to ask some critical questions.
Mostly, I am. I still reserve the right to say "oops, I do not agree with him on this sentence in particular".
Feel free to ask some questions. Note that I am defending SA's position "it is worth having trans-inclusive gender definitions", not woke positions like "it is fine to put a third of a school class on puberty blockers" or "if you have any preference for genitals that makes you trans-phobe".
Ok, so I take it that you are disputing that according to gender ideology (and by that I mean the general progressive/leftist/woke position on transgenderism) if a person claims to be "superstraight," they are considered to be transphobic? And that other than that, you agree with my summary?
I am sure that people who use the term "superstraight" are widely decried as transphobic by the wokes. On the other hand, I think that there is not a consensus in the LGBT community that lesbians who are not into dicks are transphobic. On priors, I would expect that a lot of lesbians are not into dicks.
I agree with your summary that trans acceptance requires that we separate sex and gender, and have actually argued previously that we should.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Is it enforced by the state, though? I think the state mostly messes with dating as far as age of consent is concerned. Social disapproval seems out of scope for libertarian demands, I imagine.
If I dress in a nonstandard way (e.g. as a clown), and this results in the cops arresting and fining me, I imagine this would upset libertarians. If I dressed as a clown and it turns out that most ice cream vendors will not sell to people dressed as clowns, this is something which would likely not upset libertarians.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Does anyone who is pro-trans want to steelman gender ideology for me
The canonical defense in these parts would be what Scott Alexander wrote almost twelve years ago. He is always worth reading in full in my opinion, but the trans defense starts in section IV.
So that a straight man or a lesbian woman should be okay dating an individual who is of male sex but female gender, and if not they are a "transphobe."
I am not doubting that there is some penis-haver who is asking women in a Lesbian bar if they would want to suck their cock and cries trans-phobia once they get kicked out. From my personal experience, this is rare. As a straight guy, I do not have to fend off trans-women cancelling me for refusing to fuck them basically ever. Love is the last bastion of libertarianism. You can be into one gender, one sex, one type of genitals, hair or skin color, a certain BMI or age range and people will usually accept this and not try to cancel gays for having some anti-women bias in their dating partner selection or whatever.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Side notice: Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Grashopper and the Ants seem both a bit heavy-handed for kindergarden.
Also, the Texans (or Americans) really seem to love their founding fathers and presidents. Though I will also notice that Texas had the good taste not to make a hagiography of The Greatest President of All Times required reading. And I do not even want to speculate what kind of dirt Bennett (whose Children's Book of Virtues provides texts no less than seven times) has on the state board of education.
I think that religious background knowledge is often important context and the school should probably try to teach kids the basics. Quite a few of the great writers did have an education heavy on both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman mythology. If Melville's narrator introduces himself as Ishmael, he is implicitly assuming that the reader knows of the biblical namesake.
On the other hand, there is a thin line between education and indoctrination. Jonah (author credit: Jonah in the HC article, which is amazing, like crediting Odysseus with writing the Illiad) is basically a story about God railroading some unwilling guy (whom he gave free will for some reason) into delivering some ultimatum to some city, then chickening out when it came to follow up on his threats (remind you of anyone? Sadly, God does not always chicken out.), leaving Jonah pissed for a lack of fire and brimstone. Kindergardeners might not understand that the character of God is every bit as fictional as the character of the Grandmother Spider from How Grandmother Spider Brought Fire, because adults around them take one more serious than the other.
On the third hand, there is also merit to letting kids discover for themselves that the adults are full of shit. I got a bible in fifth grade (German schools have opt-in religious education), which is the book I credit with turning me atheist around ninth grade or so.
Also, it seems likely that blue states will retaliate by finding out what stories are most effective at turning kids away from Christianity and making them required reading. They can even co-opt Texas guise of providing Judeo-Christian context, the story of Lot should be enough to give most teens the Ick.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
It is up to the courts, not the executive to interpret what the laws mean. And courts tend to follow past rulings for the most part, which is bad news for anyone who wants to get rid of birthright citizenship.
If the executive could just define what words in the constitution meant there would be no point to having rights in the constitution in the first place. President Newsom could just define that 2A meant "the portion of the upper human appendage, from the shoulder to the wrist and sometimes including the hand" by "arms".
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The German Tourist doesn’t pay US taxes.
Because they are not allowed to work on a tourist visa.
If you manufacture cocaine in Colombia the US claims jurisdiction.
That is an interpretation I could get behind. As the US de-facto claims worldwide jurisdiction, and enforces their laws through kidnappings and drone strikes, every human is born under their jurisdiction and is as such entitled to the US citizenship, so they at least get to vote on the people who will order drone strikes against them.
(TBH, I would much rather have the US stop attacking random people than offer citizenship to every Afghani and Venezuelan, but it is still better than nothing.)
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The phrasing in 14A is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof".
Think about it this way: if a Native American killed another in some reservation in 1840, it seems very likely that US officials would have considered that to be a matter for the tribal authorities to deal with. Likewise, if the French ambassador murdered another Frenchman in the embassy, it seems possible that the US would decide to let the French justice system deal with it rather than figure out if they can arrest him without causing a diplomatic incident.
By contrast, if a German tourist stabs another German tourist in NYC, the state of NY will very likely claim jurisdiction over the matter. Same if one undocumented immigrant murders another one.
By your standard, an Irish migrant could have decide to take his family back to Ireland, and would likely have gained the Irish citizenship for any US-born children, so all of his family "belong[ed] to a sovereign polity that is not the USA" -- but that is simply not the text which was ratified as the 14th.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
There are a lot of very good reasons to get rid of it in the modern world.
We have a process for it. It is outlined in Article Five, same as for getting rid of any other amendment (e.g. the second).
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Side notice: Maduro is hardly a Bond villain.
First off, 2A does not only guarantee the right to bear guns, but also the right to buy or sell guns (I know, with certain restrictions). If an anti-gun government passed legislation which outlawed all commercial manufacturing of handguns and all sale of firearm parts, the SCOTUS would be very likely to say that this would have the end effect of making it implausible for civilians to own firearms.
So for the purpose of the thought experiment, we do not need to assume that the weapon will be lovingly hand-crafted by some deranged group in some compound any more than mass shooters printing their own handguns.
Nukes and F-35s are only really affordable for the billionaire class, though I suspect that plutonium for bombs could likely be bred rather cheaply if there was sufficient demand for it, perhaps a few millions per nuke?
But you do not need that level of firepower to cause a state to fail. Elderly MiGs are probably in the price range of anyone who can scrape together a few millions. If they were protected by 2A (so you are free to take your MiG with full weapon systems when crossing the US), this would challenge the present US air defense concept, which I assume is based around the fact that hostile jets will not generally appear out of nowhere over the skies of Kansas and attack random towns. Likewise, if the law allowed you to buy 18-wheelers full of chemical explosives for your 2A needs, that would tremendously increase the amount of damage any given mass murderer could do. Radiological weapons would be another low-hanging fruit, if it became legal for citizens to own dirty bombs as an area-denial weapon (e.g. for use in cold wars against their local HOA), we have enough spend nuclear fuel worldwide to give every American 30TBq or so, which would certainly be enough to kill a few people by accident -- or dozens with malice (to say nothing of crashing the local property market).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Before Bruen, the 2A was primarily considered using "interest balancing" unlike every other constitutional amendment.
The difficulty with 2A is that a straightforward reading is not really compatible with a stable modern society. A crazy man with a flintlock musket can only do so much damage, despite it having been the state of the art weapon system for the bulk of military forces. A crazy man with a flock of explosive drones or a fission bomb can do much more damage, and no country can survive engaging in mutually assured destruction diplomacy with the craziest 1% of their citizens individually. Different people may draw the line in slightly different places for 2A, but very few believe that no line should be drawn at all.
This is not so much different from limitations on the 1A. Should it be allowed to promise people rewards for committing crimes? Should it be allowed to make fraudulent bomb threats or SWAT people? Should a mob boss go free as long as all he did was talk to his underlings? All of these are restrictions on free speech, but they are obvious restrictions which are required to have a functioning state at all.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.
Now, you could claim that it is only true in that technically sense, as in "it is more reliable to tell apples from oranges through genome analysis than it is to tell them apart through looking at them" -- which would be technically true if there is some weird apple where eyeball id is less than 100% accurate, but functionally false, because nobody is ever likely to encounter that counterexample in the wild, and insisting on running every fruit through PCR is utterly pointless from telling apples from oranges.
For pre-pubescent kids, I do not think that it is particularly easy to tell their sex absent social norms ("boys have short hair and wear blue clothes with dinosaurs, girls have long hair and wear pink clothes with unicorns").
I will grant you that after puberty, most people can reliably pass for their sex even without social cues. Voice register alone probably suffices. I will also grant you that societies can eliminate most adversarial examples by simply punishing trying to pass as a sex you were not assigned at birth by stoning: if I see a bearded Taliban gunman, I do not really have to check the inside of his pants to know what genitals he will have. It is technically possible that it is a trans-man on T, but I would expect there to be less than one such instance in all of Afghanistan.
In freer societies, people are allowed to pass as the other sex/gender, or not prominently display their beard or breasts to the world and thereby sort themselves into one of the categories.
It might be that the rest of the world is much better at id-ing sex in Western adults than I am. Perhaps the rest of you have basically a built-in millimeter wave scanner and I am just to autistic to notice. I mostly rely on secondary sexual characteristics (which can easily be acquired through HRT, or even faked through props) and social conventions.
Luckily, there is very little reason for me to know the sex of a random person in the street. The only exception would be "can we produce offspring together" (which of course also hinges on other factors). I am a member of a K-selected species, the number of times a trans-woman has tricked me into courting by pretending that she could bear my children has been exactly zero. In practice, "could we beget viable children?" is rarely the first thing on my mind when I encounter a person in the street.
The way I see it, genders have their origins in traditional sex-based roles in societies, but I do not think that it needs to stay that way. Things evolve. Ridley Scott is obviously not a mounted warrior aristocrat. To my knowledge he does not maintain any warhorses or plate armor, does not have a fief granted to him, does not follow the code of chivalry and has never been seen leading a cavalry charge against the enemies of his liege. Yet he is a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
Still, I am totally fine with saying "he got a knighthood". In case there is any confusion, I can use the term GBE and everyone will know what kind of knight he is. In 1100CE this would never have been possible, but today cavalry has been obsolete in warfare for a century, so we can repurpose the term.
Human females were mostly reduced to their reproductive capability in earlier societies. This seems obvious from the quaint custom of referring to them as either Miss (eligible) or Mrs (married). (There was probably a third category of woman who had sex before marriage and was therefore ineligible to bear heirs, but I doubt there was a honorific for that role.)
Today, society has recognized that human females can also contribute in other ways than making babies. Very few people are interested in whether an unmarried woman who has her uterus removed for medical reasons should be called Miss or Mrs. Granted, gestation still happens in vivo, so the bearing of children is not yet as obsolete a concept as shock cavalry, but much less important than it was 100 years ago.
Sure, but like most defense contractors, they are bound tightly by government regulations. They can't just decide to outsource their production to China, or hire Indians, or to offer their products to arbitrary countries or sell their company to a state-run Chinese company in the way Ford can make decisions about their civilian car production.
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