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I am very skeptical that you're actually serious. This is the sort of edgy "Well, I guess I'm on Team Sauron then" take that young people use to express their disgust with The Man. The reality is that you have a pretty good life under the Western elites, however much their policies and hypocrisy might disgust you, which you would not have under the Taliban.
"Well, they'd forcibly convert me to Islam, forbid me all Western decadences, my wife and daughters would have to stay inside for the rest of their lives or risk beatings or worse, and the economy under their management would almost certain drop below third world levels, but at least I wouldn't have to call anyone by their preferred pronouns!"
If you actually are serious, you either know very little about the actual Taliban, or you have become so blackpilled by the culture war that you've become the sort of person who will blow himself up to spite your neighbor.
You just tried to roast me for being too slow to see how terrible wokes would become once put in charge. It's hard to take seriously an assertion that the Taliban would be less bad.
Both of these are somewhat accurate, though only to a minor wxtent, and they're not the reasons for me holding this opinion. Though you'll probably see the actual reason as no less insane. It's not that I believe the Taliban are cool, or that I think the current state we're in is worse than Afghanistan, it's that I believe our elites actually, no shit, have a plan to abolish humanity, at least in any form I would recognize it. We've been talking about various slippery slopes, but what we've discussed is nothing compared to what's coming, and the sudden promotion of things like surrogacy and euthanasia offer a glimpse into it. Even trans issue, as controversial as they've been, are only the thin end of the wedge for transhumanism.
It's all far off into the future, so I understand anyone thinking things aren't quite so bad yet, but it seems pretty clear to me this is where they want to push us.
could you please be more specific? You say that transsexuality is associated with transhumanism?
Yeah, the way I see it transsexuality is straight-forwardly a form transhumanism - you don't like the limits imposed on you by nature so you start hacking away at them until you get something you like. My point is that this idea won't stop at the normalization of transexuality. Once changing to the other sex becomes accepted, why not start pushing for the acceptance of becoming both or neither? From there it's not long until people start asking what's the point of keeping the human form at all, the goal is to have everything customizable like you're a character in an RPG. This isn't just my interpretation or extrapolation of my opponents' position, this idea is written down in manifestoes and has open advocates, including on this forum.
If you're tempted to say this is not representative of the modal transgender person, that does not matter. I fundamentally reject the democratic framework of analyzing ideas and movements. Democratic majorities only provide inertia, but ideas are driven by influential individuals and small groups.
Including... on this forum... hmm...
Wait...
Did you just say there's a clinic in Austin Texas that can give me a vagina without removing my penis? AWESOME!
Lumen! Add that to the TODO!
I kid I kid. Naturally I already knew about the existence and limitations of current gen phallus-preserving vaginoplasty tech.
Anyway. In terms of manifestos, you really have to throw the Xenofeminist Manifesto on the list!
P.S. If you've ever seen Lumen choose that name before... Nice.
I was debating whether I should tag you or not, but I tend to err on the side of not bothering people. But since you're here, I did want to mention that even though we're probably couldn't be further away philsophically, I really enjoyed the conversations we had so far.
Linking to that old thread, I also realized I never got back to you, and was thinking of resurrecting that topic and going into details about my issues with the transhumanist approach of keeping the good bits of humanity, and discarding the rest.
Ah, yes. I am interested in those details. I do have my own reservations with discarding bits of humanity carelessly. I think there's value even, in having cultures of low tech humans.
But I believe you have more core reservations than just pragmatic concerns regarding safe exploration. When trying to relate... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/specialization comes to mind.
But even here, I expect this world looks primarily dystopian to you, whereas to me, its a mix of dystopian and exciting. The parts of this comic where efficiency is crushing the humanity out of people distress me, but the parts where the weird individuals in the comic choose to embrace something new and alien excite me. So... my life's work tends towards struggling to thread the needle in such a way as to somehow resolve this conflict between... Art and Efficiency.
And as for not pinging me- It may be for the best. I try not to come to TheMotte too often. Its good to experience the perspectives here but there are diminishing returns and- I have a bit of an addictive personality. The easiest way for me to regulate my usage is just to block the site for weeks at a time. Which is to say it would have taken me a while to get back to you anyway.
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I think the difference is that most transhumanism is grounded in reality in the present, even if it is utopian about the future. It may claim we'll be able to make ourselves into cyborgs or Gods, but in general it doesn't say we're there yet. Transsexuality claims we either can become or (in its pure modern form) actually ARE a member of a different sex, today.
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I believe the current transgender advocacy, on the reverse, requires trans individuals to be recognized as such even without surgery and/or HRT, Laws requiring surgery and/or HRT, sterliziation are widely seen as transphobic.
I don't think this has anything to do with mainstream.
It does both, denying blockers, hormones and surgeries to people too young to have the wisdom to make irreversible decisions is also seen as transphobic. It aims to abolish social categories as well as physical limits.
10 years ago the current trans movement had nothing to do with the mainstream.
Ok, lobbying for unrestricted (or barely restricted) usage of blockers and hormones by youth can be seen as libertarian and transhumanist. But others? The same people push for obligatory pronouns and orwellian phrase "gender affirmative therapy" referring to transition. They make to fight for trans represenation. If I implant a multispectral camera in my body so I could enhance my vision, there people would be amongst the first for me to be punished.
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I would like to believe the blue elites were as based as you're painting them, and pushed for a true shedding of human limits rather than breeding a kind of docile homo podlivingus.
The classic* elite desire is to split into two races, one shedding human limits and the other a docile homo servus to serve the former.
* See e.g. Sterling (1988)
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Okay, well, I am not going to try to talk you out of this kind of irrational doomerism. I'll just point out that in the vastly unlikely event of the Taliban or their equivalent actually taking over the world, I cannot imagine their end game being any less bad than whatever bug-eating transhumanist dystopia you imagine the "western elites" are going to inflict on us.
I don't know if I'd want them to take over the world either, but on the bright side, I don't think their philosophy is particularly conducive to that. By contrast, I think transhumanist techno-surveillance states are totalizing by nature.
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