FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
6m ago
my date calls her boss a typical Aries - as long as it helps her to put people into the right boxes, why not?
It's interesting that calling her a typical [ethnicity] or typical [sexuality] would raise a few eyebrows, but we're meant to think of Birthday Racism as harmless and cute.
FtttG
22m ago
These categories are hard to verbalise.
They aren't, though. A male person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of small gametes, even if faulty. A female person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes, even if faulty.
I define a new sort of identity marker (next to stuff like race, sex, age, etc) called "gender identity" (or "gender" for short)
Okay, but I'll ask this question for the millionth time – what is gender identity? Race, sex and age are all traits which can be directly observed or verified via a medical test. What does it even mean to "identify as" a woman? Every single attempt to define this concept inevitably runs into circularity. What does it mean to "feel like" a woman, or to have an "internally felt sense of womanhood" or whatever? You say "I define... this is a redefinition of...", but you didn't even define it, you just asserted that it exists. If I ask you for a definition of the word "ladder", I will not be satisfied if you just repeat "Ladder!" in a confident tone of voice. What actually is "gender identity"?
Being a man/woman means sincerely wanting to be male/female
What, then, to do with the male people who purport to "identify as" women and yet make no effort to make themselves more like women than they could be e.g. the ~95% of trans-identified males who don't undergo bottom surgery?
But I think most anti-trans people are unhappy even in cases where there is clearly a sincere desire (e.g. this one!)
What gives you the impression that the complainant in this case had a "sincere desire" to be female? I can think of few things less typically female than impregnating someone with your fully intact and functional penis.
Correct, she is not a father.
Is your claim then that this child, wholly unique in the annals of human history, has no male biological parent? Because that's what the word "father" means in a legal context. You are committing yourself to a stance that this is the first child in the history of human race with two female biological parents and no male? And you wonder why people assert that gender ideology is anti-scientific claptrap?
FtttG
40m ago
Of course I don't agree with self-ID. Did you think I was trying to pretend otherwise?
Even with adoption we acknowledge that we're using the words "mother" and "father" in a nonstandard way, but it's a social convention that these words can respectively refer to "female primary caregiver" and "male primary caregiver" respectively, in addition to their traditional meanings of "female biological parent" and "male biological parent".
What this man is demanding is rather more radical than that. He is not demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent, even if he is not the child's biological parent. He is not even demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent of a specific gender, while not being the child's biological parent. No – he is the child's male biological parent, and wants that fact struck from public record, because it makes him uncomfortable. He wants it said that this child does not have a biological father, only two biological mothers. Sorry, but no matter how you swing it, this is a lie. It is a lie to say that this child has no biological father. And it is an abuse of the court system that so much public time and resources have been wasted on painstakingly refuting the fantasy of this narcissist, who wants a simple biological fact expunged from public records because it makes him sad.
As an aside, if the prospect of being referred to as the father of your child* makes you so unhappy, maybe you should have considered that before impregnating your female partner. I'd even go so far as to say that a man ostensibly reduced to fits of crying when someone accurately refers to him as the father of his child may not be mentally stable enough to be a functional parent.
*And solely in legal documents: I'm sure everyone in your social circle would be more than happy to indulging your delusions.
FtttG
3hr ago
"Dad" is not a term of art in law, unlike "father". There is no meaningful legal sense in which this person is this child's mother: he did not gestate the child in his womb for nine months, nor is he a woman who adopted a child with different biological parents. I find it almost impossible to divine any sense in which the assertion "this child's male biological parent is not their father" is not simply a lie. You can say that you're not lying, you're just proposing to change the definitions of words to newer, more "inclusive" definitions. Well, I don't care if an official proclamation from a state body that "the earth is 6,000 thousand years old" is followed by a footnote clarifying that the word "year" is here defined as a unit of time equal to 756,667 rotations around the sun. That might make creationists feel more "included", but it's still a lie.
Legal documents do not exist to validate narcissists' claimed sense of self.
FtttG
4hr ago
Why? What does it matter to you if the state calls her a woman or man, mother or father?
State-endorsed science denialism is bad. The government should not assert that the male person who fertilised an egg is the child's mother, any more than they should assert that homeopathy works or that the earth is 6,000 years old.
FtttG
4hr ago
Your point about the game telling the player that Amelia has "extreme" opinions without saying what those opinions are reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago. Supposing the journalist Alice wants to smear Bob because Bob said something Alice doesn't approve of. The thing is, while Alice doesn't approve of it, she knows that most people agree with Bob, so simply stating what Bob's opinion is (e.g. "I don't think trans-identified man belong in women's prisons") won't work as a smear tactic. Instead, Alice talks about Bob's opinion in a circuitous way: "Bob has faced criticism for his political opinions, which have been widely characterised as transphobic". This allows Alice to get away with implying Bob said something hateful and in so doing turn her readers against him. The longer this goes on, the more Google search results get clogged up with articles about how hateful Bob is but without quoting anything he's said, and the harder it gets to find out what Bob actually believes. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of people asserting that JK Rowling is transphobic would, if pressed, be wholly unable to cite a specific opinion she has expressed on this issue.
Likewise here. The people who made this game knew full well that the opinions expressed by people like Amelia (e.g. "it was outrageous that the police turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale etc. for so long") sound perfectly reasonable to most people. Actually having Amelia express such opinions in the game would have the opposite of the desired effect, in much the same way it would if Alice attempted to defame Bob by quoting him directly. The only way to get away with it would be for Amelia to jump off the slippery slope by having her express extreme opinions (and naughty words) wholly unrepresentative of the modal British conservative activist.
FtttG
4hr ago
But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient.
It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)
It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.
Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.
FtttG
7hr ago
I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy
Interestingly, this confusion is common enough to seriously pollute survey results. The proportion of people who respond affirmatively to the question "do you believe in horoscopes and star signs?" is dramatically lower than the proportion who responds in the affirmative to "do you believe in astrology?"
No, that was the point I was making alright. I think the whole thing might come down to a Russell conjugation, or Trivers' theory of self-deception: if a strategy is beneficial to us, we unconsciously come up with reasons why it's also the pro-social thing to do. See also "yasslighting": I don't believe that talented actors are consciously thinking "if I encourage a bunch of talentless hacks to pursue careers in acting, it'll make it easier for me to secure roles", any more than attractive women are consciously thinking "if I encourage my friend to get an unflattering haircut and tell her it really suits her, it'll make me look more attractive by comparison". Of course in their own heads they'll tell themselves a story which casts their behaviour in a more favourable light e.g. "it would devastate Bob to be told he's a terrible actor, so instead I'll just give him some pat platitude about never giving up on your dreams"; "I don't want to hurt Alice's feelings, so I'll tell her her new haircut really suits her". But subconsciously, the practical benefit of these decisions to those who make them is obvious. It surely cannot be an accident that actors so rarely encourage their more talented peers not to give up on their dreams.
FtttG
8hr ago
They know that people respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
Well, yes, they do. That doesn't mean that filling talentless hacks with false hope is a pro-social way to behave.
FtttG
9hr ago
The most infuriating thing about this court case is that there may be legal precedent for this in the EU:
McConnell gave birth to a son, publicly known just as SJ, in January 2018. When attempting to register the child's birth, the Registrar denied McConnell's petition to be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate, though allowing McConnell to use his current name. In September 2019, McConnell lost an application for judicial review to be described as father or parent on the child's birth certificate... The president declared that McConnell was legally the child's mother and thus possessed parental responsibility of the child accordingly. Because of this decision, McConnell could not be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate... McConnell announced his second pregnancy in August 2021,[12] with plans to give birth in Sweden in order to be listed as the child's father, rather than mother, on their birth certificate. His second child was born in the UK in January 2022 via emergency c-section.
If I'm reading this correctly, the second child was actually born in the UK rather than Sweden, meaning the same legal ruling would apply to the second child as the first. If the child had been born in Sweden, would the Swedish courts have ruled in McConnell's favour, and allowed her to be listed as the child's father? Apparently so.
FtttG
9hr ago
Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people
Aww thanks bae.
FtttG
1d ago
Don't forget the spiritual successor.
FtttG
1d ago
I'm trying to think of how explicitly racist someone would need to be before I would cut ties with them. Certainly I wouldn't want to be friends with someone if I found out that they had a swastika tattoo they had no intention of removing.
FtttG
1d ago
So much so even The Onion cracks jokes about it.
I watched Lanthimos's Poor Things in the cinema. I kind of liked it, but watching Emma Stone fuck assorted men for forty-five minutes isn't exactly my idea of a good time. I don't really understand the hype around Barry Keoghan (he was dreadful in The Banshees of Inisherin, the only thing I've seen him in), though I'd heard he was good in KSD.
Last night I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene with the girlfriend, which I saw exactly once in the cinema ~13 years ago. It's remarkable what a big impression it made on me: there were specific shots and line-readings in it that I remembered so clearly, as if I'd only seen the film the day before. Along with Kill List, probably the best film about a cult I've ever seen,* highly recommended. Keen to see director Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw; his second film The Nest was also excellent.
The night before we watched Casino, which she'd seen before and I hadn't. Comparisons to Goodfellas are unavoidable (the two films' style, grammar and use of licensed songs are nigh-identical, and Joe Pesci might as well be playing the same character), but in some ways it's the superior film. When Henry and Karen got into ferocious arguments in Goodfellas, there was always this blackly comic undercurrent to it, a sense that you shouldn't take it too seriously. By contrast, I found it genuinely upsetting watching Sam and Ginger scream at each other in Casino, even though Ginger is arguably a more despicable character than Karen. This is primarily down to Sharon Stone's performance, which is committed and forceful: she's entirely believable as a booze- and coke-addled BPD nutcase, and in a way that somehow manages to come off as sympathetic rather than caricatured. Afterwards, I remarked that being exceptionally attractive as an actress can be something of a double-edged sword: on the one hand it does make it easier to secure roles, but it's easy to wind up pigeon-holed as just a pretty face, and in both of the previous Stone films I've seen (Total Recall and Basic Instinct; love the former, the latter is meh) she was essentially playing a one-dimensional femme fatale. But in Casino, she really demonstrated her acting chops.
*Yes, I'm including the original The Wicker Man.
I haven't thought about this in a systemic way, but if I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had done one of the below (without having been punished), I think I would have no choice but to cut ties with him:
- Murder
- Rape
- Wife-beating
- Anything involving the sexual exploitation of minors (including downloading CSAM)
I'm sure there are others that one might add to the list, those are just the first few that come to mind. If I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had stolen someone's wallet or defrauded someone out of a significant amount of money, I would probably cut ties with them as well (although in that case it would be more out of concern that he might do the same to me).
What if I don't know for sure? If my friend has been publicly accused of one of these serious crimes, but I personally think he's innocent, then I don't think I have any obligation to cut ties with him (indeed, probably the worst thing about #MeToo was the number of men who lost their livelihoods and entire social circles on the basis of allegations which were implausible on their face). If he hasn't been publicly accused, but rumours are starting to circulate, then I think one ought to do one's due diligence, investigate if the rumours sound credible, and escalate if so.
FtttG
2d ago
I disagree. Knowing that an acquaintance of yours is a pederast (or "merely" an ephebophile) and refusing to report him or cut ties with him reflects badly on you, even if it's not legally actionable, and this social convention long predates wokeness.
FtttG
2d ago
Have killed the third and final Chosen in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Now back to the main storyline.
I read it as they were describing themselves boring. See this delightful article "The Mainstreaming of Loserdom": it's remarkable to think how recently people would be embarrassed to say that their weekend plans consisted of rotting in bed alone watching their shows all day.
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