WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
We now know that the people running the occupation were systematically lying to the public about the occupation's prospects and achievements for most and perhaps all of those twenty years, because in fact the occupation was achieving nothing of identifiable value. (…) What goal would staying longer have achieved?
Not dr_analog, but an obvious answer - not necessarily mine, but obvious - would be "the same goal as keeping a dangerous terrorist in prison even if the rehab program he's supposedly signed up for has a snowball's chance in hell of reforming him". The people in charge lying about how well the turn-it-into-an-enlightened-democracy project was going looks like a grievous blow to the entire enterprise if you think westernizing Aghanistan was actually the point, but not if you think that "we're just staying as long as it takes to turn them into a peaceful democracy" was always just a fig leaf to make the bitter pill of "we're indefinitely occupying this colonized territory to keep the barbarians suppressed" go down.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
There's something to this. But… a political party isn't an unbiased entity trying to maximize the number of votes whatever it takes. At any rate, it shouldn't be. A political party has principles, values, an agenda; and it wants votes as an instrumental goal to implementing that agenda, because they think it will be good for the world if they do. Their duty is to try to convince the voters their ideas are right; and if the voters aren't convinced, they should vote for someone else who's selling a different set of ideals. Trying to convince people they should support an agenda they're currently unsure about can look a lot like lecturing them, but that's only to be expected.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
For the same reason we don't make reverse-indictment praising random citizens for laws they didn't break, I suppose. Elected officials are meant to keep their promises, it's their job description, they don't get special credit for it - but they do warrant special scorn when they renege.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
A better experiment would be to take 10,000 people who present with GID, transition half, stop the other half from transitioning, and compare outcomes 40 years later.
This is interesting, though yeah, it'd never fly, at least in the Western world. But the problem here is that it restricts us to trans people who meaningfully 'had' GID in a psychiatric sense before, which puts us askew from my theory. As I said, I'm very much of the mind that there are lots of people who aren't dysphoric with their birth sex, but still find themselves happier once they transition. Genderfluid people, for a start. Indeed, this is what I think is behind a lot of the "social contagion" model: people who definitely didn't have dysphoria before they learned transition was a thing, but definitely want transition once they know it's available, because they correctly predict they would like it. I don't find there to be anything sinister about this.
If we had invented surgery that can make people fly like Peter Pan, I expect a lot of people would start to yearn for it very badly, and be very miserable if it were denied to them for arbitrary legal reasons - even people who hadn't previously thought of "I want to be able to fly" as some great unfulfilled desire in their life. That doesn't make "wanting the flight surgery" a mysterious social contagion, and it doesn't mean huge chunks of the population were flight-dysphoric "all along" without knowing. It's just people starting to desire desirable things once they're on the table.
(I picked an out-there example here, but the same reasoning might apply for a completely mundane intervention with legal ramifications. Suppose that "changing your legal name" or "moving houses" was this bold new concept that had only recently and tentatively been enshrined in law; not such crazy hypotheticals, both might be difficult to get across to an indentured medieval peasant. Let them know the option exists and I predict a lot of peasants would start to want to take it; and be happier once they had; which doesn't mean they had 'name-dysphoric' or 'house-dysphoric' written on their soul from birth, or that I've done them some great evil by broadening their horizons.)
Well, I'm not necessarily assuming medical transition here. I agree the medical dependency and side-effects should be weighed very carefully.
Either way, I think a poll would support my claim. I think if we polled trans people who live in very trans-friendly communities, and detransitioners/people who considered transition but decided against it, about their self-reported level of happiness, life satisfaction, sense of fulfillment, whatever - the trans people would as a matter of fact come out ahead. Do you predict otherwise, or do you simply write them off as too biased to report their own happiness level accurately?
(Which, to be clear, I wouldn't consider crazy. It's not the vibe I get from the trans people I know personally - most seemed massively happier and more at peace with themselves after transitioning than they had ever been, not just before they transitioned, but before they themselves decided/discovered they were trans. But I can see why you would think that.)
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
because "desist and become happy with birth sex" and "never become dysphoric in the first place" are much better than "transition"
Disagree with this, along with the general framework of transition as a solution to a problem.
Take out social stigma, and I think transition, on balance, is a very positive experience for the average person who tries it. Trans people talk a lot about "gender euphoria", and it clearly means more to them than just "the absence of dysphoria"! Now I'm not at all sure that's a distinct, gender-specific feeling in the same sense that medical dysphoria is. But I think it's sheer common sense that a years-long process of reinventing your entire identity would make people happier: it gives you a sense of purpose while it's going on, and a lasting sense of accomplishment when it's over.
Frankly a lot of people might find it enjoyable to reinvent themselves in the same way, including picking a new first name etc., without bringing a sex change into it. I'm sure lots of self-help books have been written about this, few of them ever implemented. The way I figure it, the gender element just gives people an extra motivator to really make a clean break with their old self, whereas it's all too easy to backslide and fall back into the same old doldrums if you've just made a series of arbitrary choices with no unifying target-identity in mind.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
What is the benefit of doing it that way, rather than simply saying "we are declaring your people of colour will get preferential treatment void and will punish you if you try to implement them; otherwise, carry on"? That way, proposals where the diversity statement was hot air with no influence whatsoever on how the science was being carried out can go on with their work.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
The greengrocer gets what he deserves for hanging that "workers of the world" poster.
Does the entire town deserves to not have accessible groceries? The problem with cutting science altogether isn't that it's mean to the poor widdle scientists, for God's sake. It's that it harms the country.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
And let yourself get lost on a maze of bureaucracy so nothing changes.
Why? The suggestion isn't "have normal grant reform instead of DOGE". Anyone with sense agrees that wouldn't work. The hope was that DOGE would exercise reason, while remaining the same independent group made up of the same free-spirited people. Are you saying that Musk & Co couldn't figure out a rough guess of which programs are good and bad on their own? How would that descend into a maze of bureaucracy?
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
But the institutions have to be destroyed.
Why? Academic science got on fine for generations before woke capture. It's not an inherent consequence of the founding principles. You don't have to hack the arm off to cure an ingrowing nail.
I have a hard time accepting your apparent claim that wanting to live your life as an embodied anime girl and not being able to constitutes some kind of unspeakable tragedy, on a par with (or in the same ballpark) the reality of sickness, aging and mortality
That's not exactly my claim. Beating mortality is clearly more urgent than guaranteeing anatomical freedom for all sapient beings. And at the individual level, "I really wish I could turn into a flying octopus" is not typically an immediate crisis in the same way as "I really wish I wasn't being raped right now".
But I do claim it would be a terrible waste of a universe if we made it past a technological singularity and yet continued restricting ourselves to some marginally-improved, sharp-edges-sanded-off approximation of "classic" Homo sapiens existence, even though the technology for much more interesting avatars and transformations existed, purely out of some weird sense of parochialism. I do claim it'd be an existential tragedy to get Brave New World instead of the Culture. HOAs who demand that everyone's garden be an identical plot of uniform flat turf, tiling the universe. A Luddite boot stamping on the face of human whimsy, forever. The prospect horrifies me.
(The anime girls and anthro dogs were more of a gag than anything else; I expect they'd be popular choices in the very earliest day of the technology but be gradually replaced with less shitposty things that are less funny to say out loud, but are more fun to be. Note also that I'm not saying my utopia doesn't have classic Homo sapienses anymore, either; it just seems very unlikely that everyone would choose to remain a baseline-human if given the choice.)
This being the case, I think it's important to get trans rights right insofar as the kind of post-singularity world we get, if we get one, may very well depend on today and tomorrow's prevalent values. It's the kind of question where the underlying moral principle. This is a time to open people's minds, not close them.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I didn't say it made sense, I said it was what @some meant. Guy has me blocked for some reason, I'm not endorsing his points.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
therefore there should be nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in our world
My point is "therefore there is nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in principle". By all means we can discuss the cold hard utilitarian consequences of promoting the practice. But the Singularity thought experiment was meant to refute the idea that it's inherently, irreducibly "wrong/"a lie"/etc.
You might think this is unimportant pie-in-the-sky thinking, but I think it makes a great deal of difference to how we approach the moral quandaries nowadays. By analogy, it's the difference between "we recognize that it's a moral tragedy that thousands upon thousands of Africans starve to death, but America physically wouldn't have the resources to feed everyone while still caring for itself in the long term, so we should stop ruining ourselves by trying; we can only hope that someday we are secure enough to start the work anew", which is very sensible; and "thousands and thousands of black people dying is fine and none of our business, we should actively beat the urge to help them out of our children if possible, it's a disease holding them back from being Übermensch", which is fucking evil.
It's the difference between drawing an apologetic but firm line in the sand ('we will delineate bathrooms by biological sex to prevent rapes; this doesn't mean we don't think you're real women in some ineffable way, it doesn't mean we don't think you should live as trans women if you like, it just means we've found it's the statistically most effective way to prevent rapes') and the current way gender-criticals fight the great lavatory wars, where they treat it as just a sub-item of their general and much less defensible point that they don't think trans people should exist at all.
This isn't to say I concede that the optimal amount of state recognition of transgenders in 2025 is as low as you probably think it is. (Though I don't think it's as high as radical trans activists want it to be.) But the point of reaching for the thought experiment, and the principle that derives from it, is that even if I conceded all the immediate practical points it would imply a very different platform from mainstream gender-criticals.
I presume, as a self-identified progressive, you are a staunch opponent of racism and think that colour-blind policies which don't take historical oppression into account make the lives of people of colour worse
(You presume wrongly.)
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
It's not internal enemies. What the fuck am I supposed with an email from "hr@opm.gov" that has never emailed me before? Asking clarification from my chain of command is the right and proper thing to do.
I don't think @some was saying you were an "internal enemy" for sending it up the chain; they were talking about whoever gave the "directive from very high up" to ignore the email even after some time had passed.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
See my post here — in my idea of a post-Singularity Utopia, a large number, perhaps even a majority of living people would no longer be using what we'd recognize as human bodies at all. They would consider "she/her is appropriate for a trans woman" obvious not as its own free-floating principle specific to 21st century trans people made of flesh and blood, but because they would recognize that using "she/her" might be trivially correct for a digital consciousness which presents itself as female, whether it's the upload of a once-biologically-male brain, the upload of a once-biologically-female brain, or indeed an A.I. that never had a biological sex.
I think the problem is that we have very different ideas of the ideal transhumanist future. Any transhumanist future worth its salt is by definition going to be, well, transhumanist: to involve people transforming themselves beyond the standard human forms and lifestyles. Never mind fretting about people who want to inhabit bodies that have mismatched but naturally-occurring sexual characteristics: I expect that quite a lot of people, in the long run, will find that they prefer to interact with the (virtual?) world as glowing obelisks, anthropomorphic cats, anime girls complete with Roger Rabbit black outlines, and, doubtless, all manner of much stranger things we couldn't even predict from our pre-singularity vantage point. It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
(And, indeed, people who may never have had any because they only ever existed as digital consciousnesses. Thus far I've talked about VR, brain uploads, and so on - but what about A.I.? If we crack sentient A.I.s, what will that do to our understanding of gender, do you think? Do you think it's radically wrong for people in the Star Trek universe to call Data a "he"?)
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender?
I can't fathom that people can only parse "Alice is non-binary" as "Alice belongs to an objectively real third gender that abstractly exists" (a falsifiable claim about the world, and thus, a lie if you don't think it's true) rather than "Alice identifies as non-binary" (an undeniable objective fact about Alice's behavior and therefore not a lie whether or not you think Alice ought to be non-binary).
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I can simply call him a guy, which is a true statement.
I'm not arguing that it would be untrue of you to call zir a guy; I'm saying it wouldn't be a lie to call zir non-binary. Very different. (Compare: this guy is a furry/this guy is a Homo sapiens.)
I'm not sure what behavior you're referencing
That ze is liable to tell you that ze is non-binary, refer to themself as a "ze" or a "Mx", wave a yellow-white-purple-black flag around, dress ambiguously, not want to hang out with to you if you insist on calling zir "Sir" or "Ma'am", and so on. When I tell you someone "is nonbinary", that is what I am telling you; it's not rocket science, and it's not synonymous with the information I'd be conveying if I told you a guy was metrosexual.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I agree, though with the caveat that this only describes today's conservatives. Salami tactics aren't the sole purview of the Left; in a world where 1, 3, 4 and 10 become hitching points of the Overton window, hardliners will find it easier to drum up support for the rest of the list. For example, if you had 3, 4 and 8, 12 might not be codified into law overnight but would run a high risk of quickly becoming the unspoken norm, in exactly the same way that DEI-style measures became endemic even in institutions with no hard legal mandate to apply them.
I also think you phrased 4 as a needlessly weak version of that particular fear. With things like the withheld Disney cartoon, it goes beyond drag shows qua drag shows: the concern is that conservatives want to legally equate "being publicly trans" with "drag", and qualify any media depicting transition as adult-only media, not just live drag shows. I couldn't care less whether minors can go to drag shows, but I would consider it very damaging and illiberal to restrict their access to non-sexual books, comics and cartoons with trans characters in them. And I'm pretty sure you could get majority support for that among today's conservatives, albeit perhaps by not that wide of a margin.
Yes I do.
No you don't. Ze is a biological male. I agree with this, you agree with this. When I tell you "ze is non-binary" I am saying "ze dislikes being described as he or a man in social contexts", which is a true fact about this person's behavior, as apparent to you as it is to me. The sentence is only a lie if you interpret "non-binary" as meaning "physically intersex" which is not what I understand the word to mean in that sentence, nor, for that matter, how anybody else defines it.
You might as well say that I'm lying when I say "this person is a red-head" because you insist on only applying that word to someone whose entire head is painted cherry-red, rather than someone with orange hair. You can come up with a strained argument for this being the literal meaning of the phrase if you showed it to a space alien, but it's not what anybody who uses the word means by it. (Or, for an even closer example: if I tell you "this guy is a furry", are you going to insist that this is a lie, because he's only wearing a suit, and doesn't have literal fur? No. Regardless of your opinions on whether either is an advisable lifestyle choice, "nonbinary" is a perfectly good descriptor for a certain type of person as defined by their behavior, just like "furry" is.)
If you've got another non-derogatory descriptive word for "person who dislikes being called a man and wants to be addressed as a ze", I'm all ears. But I think "non-binary" is a perfectly good descriptive term which people are unlikely to misunderstand as being in reference to a hormonal condition.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement
Not in my experience. Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.
the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide.
It's not really my basic reasoning for this, FWIW.
But also, at an epistemological level, I simply don't grant that using a trans person's preferred pronouns constitutes "lying". Like I said elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't involve communicating any untrue belief about physical reality. When I say "this trans women is, socially, within the object-class for which we use the pronoun she" I am not telling you she has a uterus any more than I'd be telling you a sailing ship had a uterus if I told you "traditionally, seafaring vessels are referred to with the pronoun she". If calling a wooden floating object anything but an 'it' bothers you for the same reason, well, I'm sorry for you, but so it goes.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Okay, first off, I said this stuff wouldn't necessarily happen in our lifetimes. I don't grant that it's outright unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, depending what you mean by 'unlikely'. I think I'm right even if it takes a thousand years, but I do think there's something like a 1/10 that we live to see it. And there's a much better chance that our children live to see it, which makes it very relevant to the kind of values we want to educate them with.
Second, I am against sour-grapes morality. We must acknowledge that good things are good even if practicalities prevent us from getting them just now. We must shout it from the rooftops. We must write it on our monuments in letters ten feet high, so that even if we cannot seize the chance, our children or our children's children will as soon as it is possible for them. If trans rights are currently socially unworkable, but desirable in the long term, both these truths need to be communicated and promoted. The state owes it to trans people to tell them, "we can't give you everything you ought to have just yet. but we know in an ideal world you'd obviously get it. we're sorry, we're so sorry"; not "what you want is incoherent and bad, stop asking for it". Sometimes you can't save everyone, but you have to acknowledge the sacrifices you make, and bear them in your heart forever. To do otherwise is morally outrageous. That is why, regardless of the facts re: practicality, I would view an intellectual alliance with gender-criticals of the breed whose idea of Heaven/Utopia includes no trans people at all as viscerally unacceptable.
Third, sour-grapes morality is a great way to turn your nose up at solutions that already exist, or that could exist in the short term. "In a perfect friction-less Utopia trans rights work" is an extreme assumption that proves a point. I'm not sure the social engineering needs to be quite that extreme, nor that we need this many technological miracles, to get us there. I think there are ways for a society at our current level of technology to allow for a lot more trans rights than conservatives would be willing to grant; and if we don't keep a firm hold of the premise "trans rights are highly desirable if they can be obtained", we won't look for them, we won't find them.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I'm not saying they are now, I was bouncing off of @Fruck talking about the days when things were "fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population". I think going back to those days would be prima facie unacceptable. Fruck disagrees.
I think I have a much higher probability than you of some sort of singularity in the future. Not necessarily in the near future, not necessarily in the exact form current A.I. gurus talk about - but somewhere between now and the year 3000, yeah, I do think technology will hopefully have improved humans' daily lives very, very radically. I very much anticipate a world where the murder rate plummets to literally zero thanks to automated surveillance, where most people spend their time in V.R. so that the very idea of harping on about what our flesh bodies look like at birth becomes quaint and irrelevant, etc. Quite possibly not in our lifetimes - but eventually. When I consider the moral law, I am asking what principles will make sense to these people of tomorrow, as much as anything. When they look back on our tragic and barbaric times, these people, I want to be remembered as one of those who were clear-headed enough to acknowledge the rights that will be self-evident to them, even when it was costly, even impractical to do so; to be like those rare Ancient Greeks and Romans who spoke out against slavery, even if they had no particular concept of how their empires' economies could have been sustained without it. Again, read Scott's post.
I think by "bestiality" I think RandomRanger meant the aliens genuinely have some inscrutable moral code that makes them want to force us to have sex with ordinary Earth animals, not with the aliens.
More options
Context Copy link