FtttG
User ID: 1175
Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc... It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example).
Such a large proportion of people will require the use of a wheelchair for some period of time at some point during their life that it makes sense for schools to proactively teach children about wheelchairs, even if none of the pupils in the school are wheelchair-bound. This is also what I was getting at with the myopia example. Mass-release children's books in which the characters are a Five-Token Band wherein one child is shortsighted, one is wheelchair-bound, one is autistic etc.? Given the statistical frequency of these conditions, completely unobjectionable and even commendable. Now, mass-release children's books in which one character is trans, one character has CAH, one character has Huntington's etc.? That I find a lot more difficult to get onboard with.
And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them.
There's also an obvious celebration parallax effect, in which activists will deny up and down that social contagion plays any role in trans identification, and yet are fully aware that teaching children about the concept of transgenderism (particularly when it's defined using an extremely broad constellation of "symptoms" which just about everyone might experience from time to time) is a surefire way to guarantee that at least some of them come out as trans. But of course they'll rationalise this away by claiming (unfalsifiably) that the children in question were already trans, but simply lacked the language to describe their experiences until they were educated about it.
The double standard/isolated demand for rigour is also on full display: any adult who's interacted with a child for more than five minutes knows perfectly well how impressionable how children are. If you teach a class full of children about X (where X is a medical condition, mental illness etc.), by the end of the class half of them will be convinced they suffer from it. (Never mind small children - how many first-year psychology undergrads have become convinced they suffer from schizophrenia after a single introductory lecture thereon?) But these same adults will turn around and insist that transgender identification is governed by a completely different set of psychological dynamics, wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.
FtttG
1d ago
Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm.
A large proportion of intersex people are congenitally infertile. As noted by @vorpa-glavo, "people with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)". People with Klinefelter syndrome tend to have issues with reduced strength, cognitive impairment and mood disorders. People with Trisomy X tend to have IQs a standard deviation or more below average, among other cognitive impairments. And so on and so forth.
"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.
I suspect know that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.
FtttG
3d ago
98k words on my NaNoWriMo project. First draft now projected to run to 120k. I'm hoping it will take me fewer than 22 days to get there.
After the chore that was Magda Szabó's The Door, I needed some light reading, so I picked up The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero's account of his relationship with Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room. It's a very entertaining and easy read. Someone named Dormin posted a review on the Slate Star Codex subreddit in which they compared and contrasted this book with its film adaptation (directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau, and his brother Dave as Greg), arguing that the film had completely missed the point of the book. While Wiseau in the film adaptation of The Disaster Artist is weird, tactless, continually baffled by concepts which come naturally to most people and completely incompetent when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, he is essentially portrayed as a harmless nutcase. In the book, by contrast, Sestero presents him in a much darker light: rude and unpleasant for no good reason, paranoid, jealous, controlling, conniving, manipulative and indeed emotionally abusive. Given that Wiseau was involved in the production of the film adaptation, Dormin speculated that some softening of his portrayal was necessary to get him onboard. Highly recommended so far.
FtttG
5d ago
Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills?
Of course not - I wish these tasks came naturally to me the way they do to so many others.
Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?
When I did my Leaving Cert (Irish university entrance exam), I got a B in both English and maths. But I do think that, in general, I didn't have to work half as hard at English as I did at maths.
FtttG
5d ago
Full scale: 111
Memory: 101
Verbal: 140
Spatial: 107
Not even a little surprised that I'm a wordcel rather than a shape rotator. In future, if you see one of my posts and think it's badly argued, feel free to discount my reasoning accordingly based on the results posted above.
Someone on substack recently pointed out to me that Wikipedia invariably describes people who write for National Review and similar as "conservative journalists", whereas people who write for Vox or HuffPo will simply be described as "journalists".
FtttG
8d ago
Tracing Woodgrains's writeup on a specific Wikipedia editor is a must-read if you haven't done so already.
FtttG
8d ago
Having separate words for talking about biological sex and gender is useful.
For what use?
FtttG
9d ago
I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?
FtttG
9d ago
I was raised Catholic, I've read significant chunks of the Bible (probably significantly more than most self-identified Christians I've known personally), I've studied the arguments for and against the existence of a personal God for years at a university level. To reiterate - I think I know the worldview well enough to be able to denounce it from a place of knowledge. Your defense of your worldview, frankly, has not persuaded me that there are any massive gaps in my knowledge.
FtttG
9d ago
But what advantage does this worldview have over a secular one? You're just adding in extra epicycles that have zero impact on the bottom line.
Secularists: "Your child died of cancer because the universe is random and indifferent to our suffering."
Religionists: "Your child died of cancer because there are demons out there trying to fuck shit up for their own amusement. There is a God who cares very deeply about your child's welfare, but even though he definitely exists, is benevolent and is powerful enough that 'omnipotent' might be a reasonable characterisation - he nevertheless allowed the demons to cause your child to develop terminal cancer, or was unable to prevent them from doing so. I appreciate that, in practical terms, this looks indistinguishable from a universe which is cold, uncaring and absent of God."
I really, really do not understand why "your child died of cancer because there are demons out there who want to hurt you for no reason" is meant to be comforting (in the "everything happens for a reason" sense), but "your child died of cancer because the universe is cold and indifferent and sometimes bad things happen to innocent people for literally no reason" isn't. The former just sounds like a poetic framing of the latter.
There seems an obvious selection effect. The only people who need to find a way to rationalise away immeasurable (and random) suffering are people who have undergone said suffering - if they didn't rationalise it away, they'd promptly sink into despair. People who haven't underwent immeasurable suffering look at the knots the former group are tying themselves in to persuade themselves that the completely random suffering they underwent is actually meaningful and significant, and not unreasonably conclude that this is all an elaborate cope. Which is not to say they themselves wouldn't be tying themselves in knots if they underwent a horrifically traumatic experience - there but for the grace of God go I, so to speak.
Maybe it's true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but that doesn't actually tell us anything about whether the atheists are right or wrong. If you only find yourself believing in God when you're in a life-or-death scenario, to me that actually sounds like strong evidence against the existence of God, rather than in favour of it.
Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.
Even this interpretation implies that bad things don't happen for "a reason" in a cosmic sense, but just because demons want to fuck shit up out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
To a widow, I can't imagine that "the reason your husband died is because demons were fucking shit up in the south Pacific for their own amusement and God was powerless too intervene" would be much warmer comfort than "the reason your husband died is because he got shot by a mugger and the EMTs didn't get there in time to save him".
FtttG
9d ago
Probably I don't understand the religious worldview terribly well, but I think I know it well enough to know it's not worth pursuing.
FtttG
9d ago
I don't think most of the people on Twitter using the strong form of this phrase would have any aversion to calling American police officers stupid, evil or both.
FtttG
9d ago
Anyone know of a good way I can consolidate all of my Steam, GOG, Epic etc. games into one database? I occasionally run into this issue of picking up a game in a Steam sale only to discover I already own it on another platform.
Daniel Dennett was part of the New Atheists, and coined the term "deepity" to puncture what he saw as the pseudo-profound bullshit being promoted by theologians or apologists for various faiths. In this, I agree with him. The idea that every event is part of some grand cosmic spiritual plan is, to my mind, one of the more transparent copes bestowed on the human race by religious/spiritual people.
(This is a very tasteless joke. If it's too tasteless - mods, feel free to delete.)
The girlfriend and I are currently watching The People vs. OJ Simpson which, after a slightly shaky and didactic start, really hits its stride around the third or fourth episode. There's a scene in which Marcia Clark and Chris Darden have had a few drinks and are happily slow-dancing together, but then a sad, worried expression passes across her face. I joked that at that moment she was thinking "I'm currently prosecuting the case of a white woman who married a black man who went on to beat and murder her - perhaps I'd better not pursue this". And then I realised that the victim is literally named Nicole Brown. It couldn't have been more on the nose if a gang of 4chan trolls had written it collaboratively.
More options
Context Copy link