FtttG
User ID: 1175
do they even pay attention to the Oscar’s?
They don't now, but this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember people being outraged when The Dark Knight didn't receive a Best Picture nomination, a decision which was so controversial that it was the primary impetus for increasing the number of nominees from 5 to 10. In absolute terms, the best ratings the Oscars ever received was in 1998, when 57 million Americans (i.e. 20% of the country) tuned in. For comparison, in the same year the Seinfeld season finale saw 76 million viewers (27% of the country) tune in. Until very recently the Oscars were just as much as part of the Zeitgeist as any major sports tournament and would make for just as reliable water-cooler conversation.
Separately from the Oscars thing, The Weinstein Company produced some of the highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century, meaning millions of people would have seen the name "Weinstein" immediately before watching a film they enjoyed. That's bound to create name recognition and positive mental associations.
If you showed a picture even less would’ve been able to tell you who that was.
A noisy metric. People who work behind the camera are bound to be less facially recognisable than people who work in front of it, but that doesn't mean they aren't famous. A lot of people couldn't identify Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson etc. from their photos, but don't tell me these men aren't famous.
you are demanding we stop discriminating on the basis of one trait we have no control over (sex) in favour of another (gender identity).
No, I am also opposed to discrimination on that basis.
Earlier you said:
To the best of my understanding, the pro-trans faction proposed to divide sex from gender, such that all social distinctions would fall under the latter category
What exactly is the difference between "discrimination" and "social distinction"?
I can't help but notice how parochial your dire warning is. If I'm reading you correctly, it's something like this. If we acknowledge people's sex and use that information to make predictions about how they will behave, this sets a precedent that it's legitimate to discriminate on the basis of people's inherent traits which they cannot control. People will hence begin discriminating on the basis of race more openly than they already do. Eventually, well-behaved blacks who are being discriminated against on the basis of something they cannot control will get so fed up with this that they will start rioting.
(Darkly reminiscent of the old joke about critics of Islam, but that's neither here nor there.)
I note that this dire warning is only applicable in societies which contain a critical mass of black men. In Ireland, they represent about 0.65% of the population. So do I have your blessing to carry on assuming that male people are more likely to be violent and aggressive than female people, and taking proactive steps to avoid being a victim of male violence on that basis?
Subsequently, the same logic was extended to sex/gender
Was it, though? Are you implying that I'm some kind of weird outlier because I think it's legitimate to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male? I actually think I'm the normal one in this regard: you're the first person I've encountered who (claims he) would choose whether to hire a male or female babysitter by flipping a coin. It's trans activists demanding that we abolish sex segregation and the rest of society pushing back. Contrary to your implication that "anti-trans activists" are the weirdo minority, I think the overwhelming majority of people are actually in favour of sex segregation in certain key areas (e.g. sports, changing rooms, women's prisons, hospital wards). So if you're claiming that we as a society collectively agreed that discrimination on the basis of race was wrong and by extension that discrimination on the basis of sex was wrong (in the sense of "acknowledging that male people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of sex crimes"), then I think the latter half of that claim is simply ahistorical. I think it is exactly as difficult for a would-be male babysitter to get a job now as it would be seventy years ago.
If Alan rapes Barb with his penis, and he wears a condom, Barb is unlikely to be impregnated or contract a social disease; he is nevertheless prosecuted no less vigorously.
I'm not suggesting that rape which does not lead to impregnation or STI transmission is more criminal than that which does not. I'm saying that these are the two main reasons that rape (in the "forcible penetration with a penis, without protection" sense) is seen as especially heinous compared to other kinds of sexual assault.
Even Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein weren't celebrities
To echo @FiveHourMarathon: other than Harvey Weinstein, the only single individuals more frequently thanked in Oscar acceptance speeches were Steven Spielberg and God. If that's not a celebrity, I don't know what is.
FtttG
14hr ago
Jewish legal codes speak for themselves
Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar.
I also noticed the overrepresentation of Arab names among the perpetrators.
I positively adored A Scanner Darkly. I read The Man in the High Castle and felt distinctly underwhelmed; so far, I'm enjoying Ubik more than that. Come to think of it, I think those are the only of his novels I've read, with everything else of his that I've read being the contents of this short story collection, each of which made a sufficiently big impression on me that I can still recall the premises ~20 years later. I particularly recall "Second Variety" (which anticipated Terminator by thirty years) being terrifying.
FtttG
16hr ago
Only a few chapters into Ubik. It's remarkable how high-variance a writer Philip K. Dick is when it comes to his level of horniness. Some of his books are remarkably soberly written: others, it feels like he was typing with one hand. A nineteen-year-old girl comes over to a guy's apartment for a job interview: partway through, she begins stripping off for some reason I still don't understand, and of course she has a real set of badonkers. Did any writer in the Western canon love tits as much as Dick? This was commented upon in the 2023 edition of the Lyttle Lytton prize:
Loris is in her womb now, as I’m looking at her. And one day she will nurse at those superb breasts.
Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick
The book quoted above (and yes, the italics are in the original) is from 1960. In 1974, Dick suffered from a series of drug-induced hallucinations and spent the rest of his life in the grip of a sort of religious insanity, believing at various points that he had been possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah and that he was living a parallel life as a persecuted Christian in first-century Rome. During this period he wrote a book called The Divine Invasion which I had to read for a college class. “In the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism,” the novel explains, “a sifting bridge had to be crossed by the newly dead person. […] Judaism in its later stages and Christianity had gotten their ideas of the Final Days from this. The good person, who managed to cross the sifting bridge, was met by the spirit of his religion: a beautiful young woman with superb, large breasts.” So I guess it goes to show—you can go mad, you can become a radically different person, but perhaps there is always some deep-seated element fundamental to who you are that will never change.
Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex.
That's less a stereotype than a factual statement. But @ToaKraka is far from the first person I've seen claiming that attractive women are crap in bed, while mid women are demons in the sack. I don't think there's anything to it, but I have independently encountered multiple men making such a claim.
In the UK among other jurisdictions, rape is defined as forcible penetration with a penis. No one has ever been impregnated via digital penetration alone. I imagine the number of people who have contracted STDs via digital penetration is vanishingly small.
WRT the baby-sitter, I flip a coin
Do you have young children? If so, have you really just multiplied their risk of being sexually assaulted by 9x purely to prove how progressive you are?
I believe it most likely is
You claim that a basic principle of leftist thought is that it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of traits one has no control over. But by your own admission, you are demanding we stop discriminating on the basis of one trait we have no control over (sex) in favour of another (gender identity).
Disagreeing with you does not necessarily constitute a 'tantrum'.
I wasn't accusing you of throwing a tantrum, but you claim that some males feel "humiliated" by people correctly inferring that they are male and hence members of the demographic responsible for disproportionate amounts of assault and rape, and that they might lash out in consequence. "Tantrum" seems like an accurate description of the foregoing.
Less of this, please.
No. It literally is a rapist's credo. Even if it wasn't consciously designed with the intention of making it easier for rapists to commit and get away with their crimes, that's it's practical effect. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice and all that.
If their baby-sitter makes them feel uncomfortable in some un-nameable manner, listen to them
In other words, "if the babysitter has sexually interfered with them, don't hire the babysitter again" as opposed to "avoid hiring a babysitter who is a member of the demographic most likely to sexually interfere with them in the first place". Being progressive and not discriminating against male people is so important to you that you are completely fine with a male person sexually interfering with your child as many times as is necessary for your child to come to you and tell you that the babysitter has touched them inappropriately – as opposed to just taking the commonsense approach of not hiring a male babysitter in the first place.
This will lead to escalating tensions in society, until it boils over. If we're lucky, we get a rerun of 1968 or 2020
I truthfully don't get what the threat is here. Unless we stop acknowledging that male people are male (and allow rapists and sex pests free reign to rape and sexually assault to their heart's content), then the gamers incels autogynephiles will rise up and wreak havoc on our society?
As I've previously stated, the overwhelming majority of male people have no problem with people acknowledging that they are male and treating them accordingly. The only demographic who seems to have a problem with this is "trans women", who (as they are quick to remind us) are a tiny minority, perhaps as little as 0.5% of the population if we're being generous. They do not exist in sufficient numbers to pose a credible threat to the functioning of Western society. "Don't negotiate with terrorists" is sensible advice virtually all the time: all the more so when the terrorists in question are a tiny minority of extremely thin-skinned who can be reduced to floods of tears simply by catching a glimpse of their own reflection in a mirror or having a stranger address them as "sir".
FtttG
19hr ago
No, absolutely not, provided the scrutiny is actually warranted (the Duke lacrosse case being a prominent example in which it was not).
FtttG
19hr ago
I'd never heard of Epstein prior to his arrest. "Celebrity" is a bit of a reach.
Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?
I've encountered this claim on many occasions. There's no way to express the following opinion without sounding like I'm humblebragging, so consider this an inb4.
I've had an unusually high number of female sexual partners, so my sample size is unusually large. Some of those partners I would consider quite attractive (with the caveat that none were literal supermodels or Hollywood actresses); some were "mid"; some were not even that, and I only had sex with them out of sheer desperation at the tail end of a lengthy dry spell. If this claim (that attractive women put in less effort in the bedroom) has any truth to it, then in my fairly extensive sexual history I honestly cannot claim to have observed it firsthand. I've been with hot girls who starfished and passable girls who starfished; I've been with hot girls who were rearing to go and passable girls who were rearing to go. I think the best predictors of how enthusiastic a woman will be in bed are a) her basal sex drive (controlling for how long it's been her last sexual encounter); b) her sexual experience (everyone's a little shy and awkward their first few times; the trope of the pure virgin who's a demon in the sack during her deflowering only exists in porn); and c) how attracted she is to her sexual partner. In the latter case I'm thinking in particular of a fairly hot girl I met ~7 years ago, who did have sex with me but seemed of two minds about it. I imagine it would have been a very different experience if I'd been someone with whom she had more chemistry.
Frankly, I think this "hot girls are all crap in bed, while mid girls give it socks" thing is one of the purest, most transparent examples of sour grapes in human history. I daresay most men claiming as much have literally never had sex with an unusually attractive woman, and so aren't in a position to make any kind of generalisation.
The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.
I assure you, it is not. I've had sex with women who seemed a bit unenthused or tired etc., but I would never dream of having sex with a woman who was literally unconscious.
I know you think you're being really clever by bringing up the Sequences, and that the answer to the question "is Bob a woman?" depends on the reason you're asking the question and what information you're looking to get out of your interlocutor.
But like, I've read the Sequences, I understand the argument Eliezer was making, and I still find gender ideology incoherent. Regardless of the question being asked, I cannot imagine a situation in which "Bob is a woman" would provide more information than "Bob is a male person".
And for someone so eager to tout the virtues of the Sequences as a tool for navigating the universe, it strikes me that there were two Sequences you conspicuously failed to internalise: "Categorizing has Consequences" and "Making Your Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". We expect women to behave one way, and men another. A particular group of men (alternative phrasing: a particular group who would have historically been categorised as men) demand to be included in the category "women" instead. We observed that, along on a range of important axes, this subset of women behaves identically to the modal man. Does that not rather strongly suggest that this new category has been artificially gerrymandered, and does not in fact cleave reality at the joints? If you believe that all men who demand to be called women are women, but nevertheless expect them to behave exactly as men would, can you really claim that your belief (that these men are really women) is paying rent in anticipated experiences (therefore, these men will behave much the same as you would expect the modal woman to behave)?
The ones that, if you don't know her very well, and aren't being hired for purposes involving her body, are any of your business.
What? I literally don't understand what this means.
"Bob is a woman for most purposes."
"Well, here is a list of the most pertinent ways in which women differ from men, or in which society treats female people differently from male, none of which are applicable to Bob. How, then, is Bob a woman?"
"None of your business."
Legitimately – what the fuck does that even mean? You're saying I have to treat Bob like a woman because he demands it, but if I express the slightest curiosity about how, exactly, Bob is a woman, you accuse me of invading Bob's privacy? I'm just supposed to take it on faith that Bob is a woman "for most purposes" (none of which he cares to enumerate) and should be treated accordingly? Wow, I can't imagine how this policy could be (has been) exploited by bad actors.
An individual is responsible for what they, personally have done; they are not responsible for what they are capable of doing but haven't done, or what people who share characteristics with them have done.
With respect: bullshit. Not only does this not describe how anybody lives their life, not only does it not describe how anyone should live their life – it doesn't even describe how you, personally, live your life. You literally aren't following the moral principle you demand everyone else follow.
When you are walking down the street late at night, and you pass a drunk person acting aggressively, I'm going to hazard a guess that the size of the berth you give them depends heavily on whether they're male or female. You do this not on the basis of what they, personally, have done (you don't know if they have a criminal record, they're a complete stranger to you). You do this on the basis of: if they're a male person who gets in your face and tries to hit you, if they succeed, they will do a lot more damage than if they're a female person.
Another example. If you're not the parent of a small child, imagine that you are. You need to leave your child alone for an evening, your child is too young to be left alone, and none of your friends or family are available to look after the child. You put up an ad saying you're looking for a babysitter, and receive two applications: a fifteen-year-old female, and a fifteen-year-old male. (If you like, the fifteen-year-old male can claim to "identify as" a girl, but still has fully intact and function male genitalia.) You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex. Who do you hire?
Am I wrong about any of the above? If not, I'm dying to hear your explanation for how you aren't a complete and utter hypocrite.
this is dependent on the axiom that the well-being of individuals is the measurement of ethics
My worldview is also dependent on that axiom, and a related axiom that not all harms are created equal. In order to prevent harm coming to their children, it makes sense for parents to hire babysitters who are not members of the demographic responsible for the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults of children (not to mention penetrative rapes, given that this demographic is the only demographic capable of penetratively raping others with anatomy alone). I do not dispute the fact that it's upsetting for the sexually well-behaved members of this demographic to be denied employment opportunities on the basis of traits they have no control over (although most of them are mature and empathetic enough* that they can eventually learn to understand why parents are more willing to leave their child alone with a female stranger than a male, without throwing a tantrum about being the victims of sexist discrimination): I just think that the amount of mental distress caused is infinitesimal compared to the amount of mental distress caused by a child being sexually assaulted or penetratively raped by an adult male. It's a trade-off I am perfectly willing to make (along with virtually every other reasonable adult), basic utilitarianism. I think it's frankly disgusting that you're invoking the historical example of marital rape when the policy you're advocating is a rapist's credo. If parents legally could not take "candidate's sex" into account when hiring a babysitter, can you envision any scenario in which this wouldn't result in tens of thousands of additional child rape victims every year? If so, how?
But you don't dispute that: you just think a man's right not to feel sad supersedes a child's right not to be physically violated by his or her guardian.
You still, still, still have not answered my question on whether "gender identity" is innate or not. Gosh, I wonder why.
*A category which includes me but, apparently, not you.
No, if she identifies as a woman, she is a woman for most purposes.
What "purposes" are these? Not physical strength and speed; not aggression; not propensity to commit assault (including sexual assault); not absence of the male reproductive organs (as previously established, only 5% of trans women undergo bottom surgery); not the corresponding ability to rape and impregnate female people; not the corresponding ability to infect others with STIs; not likelihood of being a victim of sexual assault; not ability to bear children; not menstruation; not likelihood of suffering from assorted medical conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, uterine cancer and so on; not likelihood of holding typically female interests (indeed, the overwhelming majority of "trans women" I know hold stereotypically male interests like math rock, D&D and video games); not likelihood of being sexually and romantically attracted to male people only (it seems to be a toss-up as to whether "trans women" are heterosexual or homosexual males, and female lesbians have been complaining for decades about how many lesbian spaces have been effectively colonised by "transbians" i.e heterosexual males, many of whom don't even make the most token effort to pass).
Once you subtract all of those, I'm genuinely curious which "purposes" are left by which a "trans woman" can be considered a woman. This really seems like a "what have the Romans ever done for us?" situation. When trying to predict how a trans woman will behave or what life experiences they will have, for what purpose does their maleness provide worse predictive power than their "identifying as" a woman? I've interacted with far more than my fair share of trans women in my life, some of whom had gone to significant lengths (up to and including medical interventions) to modify their appearances to more closely resemble a typically female one. At no point did I ever experience a subjective sensation that I was talking to a female person: 100% of the time, I felt like I was talking to a nerdy man who expressed himself exactly as I would expect a nerdy man to, and who had all of the interests and habits of mind expected of a nerdy man, coupled with an incidental fondness for cross-dressing (and sometimes not even that). A subset of these trans women barely even pretended to hide how pornsick they were (outside of pornography, female women do not typically walk around wearing t-shirts with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across them) or their unabashed hatred for female people, but that's beside the point.
You also haven't answered my earlier question as to whether "gender identity" is a trait just as innate as "sex".
Here's why it didn't get much press coverage:
- Based on their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of obviously Arab descent (hence likely Muslim), despite Arabs representing 7% of the French population. In this regard the case is a bit like France's small-scale answer to the grooming gangs scandal.
- Contrary to your claim that the perpetrators came from "all walks of life" and represented a cross-section of French society, they were in fact overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds (if professions like canteen worker, car mechanic, farmhand, mason's helper, supermarket receptionist, construction worker, factory worker, video rental shop owner, soldier, restaurant manager, construction worker, truck driver, firefighter, forklift driver, delivery driver, carpenter, electrician and food processing worker are any indication).
"Woman gang-raped by scions of the wealthy elite" is a man-bites-dog story that woke journalists can't get enough of (see Epstein's island, "A Rape on Campus", the Duke lacrosse scandal, Brock Turner – I posit it's not an accident that two of those turned out to be completely made up, and it still seems to be an open question as to whether any actual "gang rape" occurred on Epstein's island). "Woman gang-raped by working-class men, many of them first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Arab countries" is a dog-bites-man story, in addition to being profoundly dissonant with the woke worldview.
It also explains why feminists don't want to talk about it, as most modern feminists have been so compromised by intersectionality theory that they can only conditionally agree with a statement like "rape is bad" after they know the ethnicities of victim and perpetrator. Following the October 7th attacks, a popular slogan highlighting this hypocrisy was "#MeToo, unless you're a Jew". To be more exacting, I think the modal Western feminist is functionally operating on the principle "#MeToo, unless your rapist was a man of colour" – less pithy, admittedly, but more precise. Liberal feminists simply do not want to acknowledge or pay attention to sex crimes committed by Arabs, Pakistanis, immigrants etc. for fear of "giving ammunition to the far-right". They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous).
The US is not unique in this regard, even among developed Western nations. There are parts of Dublin where public bus drivers simply won't stop because the risk of being assaulted by the (overwhelmingly white and native) underclass is too high.
FtttG
1d ago
Oh I'm aware. I was just under the impression that The Stand was widely considered King's masterpiece, as opposed to IT.
FtttG
1d ago
I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.
Do you consider IT his magnum opus? In On Writing, he bemoaned the fact that The Stand is widely considered his best work i.e. he did his best writing 22 years earlier.
FtttG
2d ago
So you think a male person can flip back and forth between being a woman and being a man, purely depending on what clothes he's wearing at any particular moment?
I'll say the same thing every gender-critical feminist I know has said at one point or another: femininity is not just a costume to be put on and taken off at will. A male person does not become a woman just because he's wearing a dress and makeup.
FtttG
2d ago
Do you think it's bad that female people look at male people and correctly infer that they are male?
FtttG
2d ago
Every time I see a section of a brick-and-mortar bookshop called "booktok" I cringe.
I've heard of video games that include a little notice at the start inviting the player to stream the game on Twitch, which strikes me as tacky in the same way.
We should compare spreadsheets. (You do have a spreadsheet, right?)
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