FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5hr ago
FtttG
5hr ago
FtttG
5hr ago
As mentioned earlier this week, I want to A/B test my opening paragraph to see if it's an improvement. I've created a Google Forms survey. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. The combined word count of the two paragraphs is ~400 words, so it shouldn't take more than five minutes of your time.
FtttG
5hr ago
Later on:
Unfortunately, Congress did not like the decisions in Sutton and Toyota, and overrode them in The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008. In determining who is disabled, the law now says institutions cannot consider mitigating measures that one might take. So this counts not only people who are in wheelchairs, but also alcoholics, sufferers of just about any recognized mental condition, and yes, those who need glasses. Congress even struck from the record the finding of 43 million Americans being disabled in 1990, on the grounds that it was too limiting. No numerical benchmark was set, which meant that Congress was implicitly endorsing the Supreme Court’s counterfactual in Sutton in which a majority of the country might be considered disabled.
I misspoke, it would be more accurate to say that Congress considers a majority of Americans disabled.
FtttG
5hr ago
Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone.
Richard Hanania pointed out that, according to certain Supreme Court rulings, a majority of Americans could already be considered disabled. And this isn't me doing the "haha Americans are fat" thing: the Court was categorising any American who requires the use of glasses as disabled (i.e. 160 million Americans, or 57% of the population at the time of the ruling). And that's in addition to all those who are amputees, wheelchair-bound etc.
FtttG
6hr ago
FtttG
6hr ago
consults Google Translate
haha
Have you heard of the clothing chain "French Connection United Kingdom"?
FtttG
6hr ago
I was considering making a joke that it would be cool if you could set a "locale" in your user settings, and for non-US/UK users, it would automatically convert Freedom Units to metric. Then I thought, it would be cool if there was a Chrome extension that did the same. Then I thought, I'm sure there is. And so it proved.
Here's how it looks. Would be nice if it rounded to the nearest kg, but better than nothing.
FtttG
9hr ago
I believe I have seen articles on female only gyms and they always fail and no one goes to them.
Really? That's interesting. Although consider one possibility why that might be.
FtttG
10hr ago
I was referring more to the choices made by the people between whom the distinction is drawn, and whether they have the ability to opt out of it if they personally choose to. It is the distinction between an Englishman choosing to attend a Protestant church and an Irishman choosing to attend a Catholic church, either being able to diverge from this if he so chooses, versus a charity giving food unquestioningly to a hungry Englishman while giving a hungry Irishman the third degree over whether he might fall short of perfect virtue in some way which would allow the charity matron to leave him to starve while thinking her own hands clean.
I'm not being the least bit facetious when I say I've read this passage four or five times, and I still have absolutely no idea what point this "analogy" is meant to illustrate in the context of the trans debate. In this analogy, is the Englishman a trans-identified male and the Irishman is a female person? Is the Englishman a male person and the Irishman is a female person? Is a charity matron leaving a hungry Irishman to starve meant to be analogous to a trans-identified male being denied access to a female-only bathroom or sporting event?
One is imposed on people to deny them opportunities, the other emerges from what people choose and is not mandatory.
What is the difference? You just answered a question with a question (or rather, with a Russell conjugation). What is the difference between "discriminating" against people based on an inherent trait they have no control over, and drawing a "social distinction" between people based on an inherent trait they have no control over? I choose to give drunken male people a wider berth than drunken female people. No one forced me to do this, so it's not mandatory. Couldn't you therefore say that I'm not discriminating against male people, I'm just drawing a social distinction between male and female people?
the Muslim extremists are demanding superiority, that you follow the rules of their religion, under threat of violence
That seems to be exactly what you're threatening, even if you're doing it on behalf of another group of which you are not a member.
...in the thought experiment you gave. "You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex." In actual reality-based reality, I would be allowed to learn other things about the applicants, interview them, ask for references, &c.
Oh, so you mean that in reality you would come up with some pretext to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male, but insist that it's just because the girl is more "experienced" than the boy and their sex has nothing to do with it. Just like a suspiciously large number of white anti-racists just so happen to live in gated communities which are 90%+ white. Try not to twist your arm from patting yourself so hard on the back.
Furthermore, my child might very well have opinions of their own; these could also be a factor.
Of course your child would: nine times out of ten, your child would feel safer being left alone with a female babysitter than a male, because "discrimination on the basis of sex" is instinctive, not learned. "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but the female babysitter was more qualified than the male, and my kid liked the female babysitter better, so I hired the female babysitter. Complete coincidence that I ended up making exactly the same decision as every other parent who would never leave their child alone with a male teenager, I swear to God."
defaulting to a definition based on hormone levels.
An extremely noisy and unreliable metric, given that male puberty imparts permanent changes to bone density and lung capacity.
If you must have changing rooms divided by sex, use the 'currently possessed anatomy' or 'hormone levels' definition, the former of which would shield people from having to be exposed to the other genitals
Trans activists sometimes accuse TERFs of being perverts who want to subject everyone to mandatory genital inspections before they're allowed to get changed. Interesting to see the shoe on the other foot. Note that such a rule would prevent ~95% of trans-identified males from using female changing facilities: advocating for it might get you tarred as a TERF by your erstwhile fellow-travellers.
Designate one facility specifically for trans-women
You realise what will happen, don't you? All of the male inmates who suddenly "realised" they had a female gender identity immediately after being convicted will be transferred to this shiny, comfortable facility. For a few months, all will be well in this facility. But eventually the number of "trans women" being transferred to this facility will reach the point at which the population density in this facility is the same as any other male prison, with all the opportunistic violence and rape that that implies, and "trans women" will be no safer in this facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Actually, if you look at the prison population as a whole, the proportion of prisoners who've been convicted of at least one sex crime* includes a disproportionate number of trans women, and trans women are nearly three times more likely to have at least one sex crime conviction than ordinary men are: hence, it's entirely possible that trans women would be more at risk in the dedicated trans women facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Meanwhile, the overrepresentation of sex offenders in the dedicated trans women facility would mean that, in the popular imagination, people would quite reasonably think of the trans women's prison as being "the prison where all the nonces are". As an advocate for trans rights, is this really the kind of connection you want to impart to the general public?
Perhaps you'll say that admission to the dedicated trans women facility would be made conditional on some kind of gatekeeping. Now would be an excellent opportunity to suggest what that might look like.
if you cannot protect a trans-man among cis-men, designate one for trans-men.
No need: convicted trans men are staying put in the women's prison because they know they're safer there. Per this article, of requests for trans people to be transferred to the opposite-sex facility, 96% came from male inmates. There are even examples in this article of trans men being incarcerated in the male facility, realising they weren't safe there (presumably shortly after learning that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet) and requesting to be transferred to the women's prison. So much for their "male identity".
there will still be male and female doctors even in a single-sex ward
Yes, but doctors are gatekept and subject to safeguarding requirements. The only requirement for a patient to be admitted to a hospital is that they be sick. Hospitals cannot simply turn patients away because they are violent or prone to sexually assaulting other patients. There is simply no way that admitting male patients to women's wards does not greatly increase the rate of sexual assaults therein.
and the patients are unlikely to be in a condition to cause much if any harm.
*Before you ask: no, that does not include prostitution.
FtttG
1d ago
Month over month spending is slightly higher than last month, which is almost entirely due to gas and junk food when driving back and forth to my father's
Under the circumstances, I wouldn't even count this as an expenditure. You have enough to be dealing with without worrying about small stuff like this. I'm sorry for your troubles.
FtttG
1d ago
Ed Gein, infamous for exhuming corpses from nearby graveyards so that he could fashion a "woman suit" resembling his deceased mother and literally crawl inside "her", was arrested in 1957. The case inspired Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho (the film adaptation came out the following year) and Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. The latter novel bent over backwards to clarify that its villain, Jame Gumb, is not actually transgender (the 1991 film adaptation wasn't quite as emphatic, but still includes a line of dialogue in which Hannibal Lecter explicitly states that Gumb only thinks he's a transsexual, but isn't really).
This actually strikes me as a case which an American in the 1950s would have a much easier time comprehending than a modern American. A modern American hears about a cross-dressing man with breast implants and far-right opinions committing a horrendous act of violence and splutters "this is statistically rare, trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators*, anyway how do we know he was really trans". An American in the 1950s would hear about a man committing a horrendous act of violence, read that he also enjoyed cross-dressing and had received breast implants, and would think "well, that checks out. The writing was on the wall."
*As pointed out by Freddie deBoer in the context of mental illness, this claim is true, but vacuously so: violent crimes are committed by such a small minority of individuals that "[demographic] is more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator" is true of literally every demographic you care to mention: men, women, old people, young people, white people, black people, trans people, cis people.
I had some back-and-forth with @jake on this topic, and I think it ultimately comes down to knowing your audience. If you're writing a work intended as pure escapism, your readers will be a lot more forgiving of contrivances and illogical character decisions. If it's meant to be a work of ruthless psychological realism, your readers will expect the characters to act accordingly and make rational, believable decisions: if the characters just do whatever is most convenient for the author, they will feel cheated. You can also aim to strike a happy medium, having the characters make all the decisions you would expect a character in a work of that genre to do, but also include little details and in-universe justifications for "why didn't he just do X?", to reward readers who are reading more closely than the casual reader. (This is arguably the most difficult approach of the three: escapist genres are escapist for a reason, and it takes quite a bit of work to make them seem grounded and psychologically realistic.)
There's also the Coen brothers' favoured approach, which is to have your characters make all the foolish decisions you would expect a character in a noir thriller to make, but establish that those characters are morons in-universe, so that their idiotic decisions seem in-character. Sometimes this can work, especially if the work is a black comedy (as many of the Coen brothers' films are); sometimes it just raises further questions. In Burn After Reading, it makes sense that two airheaded personal trainers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when they attempt to blackmail a former CIA analyst, and end up hopelessly out of their depth. It does not make sense that they are only marginally more moronic than the CIA analyst himself (his alcoholism and grandiosity notwithstanding), or another character who is a US Marshal. Inevitably the audience starts to wonder why such overtly blithering idiots weren't put out to pasture years prior. (All that being said, I did enjoy Burn After Reading, but it's a movie you have to switch your brain off while watching to properly enjoy it, which wasn't the case with Fargo or The Big Lebowski.)
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Was moving last week, and so didn't manage to get to the gym until Thursday. I went again on Friday, and during my second deadlift set I managed to throw my back out. (It's incredible how quickly you lose the muscle memory for what proper form "feels" like.) I'd mostly recovered by Sunday morning, and decided not to push myself too hard and just did some cardio instead. Went again last night and was sure to do some stretching before deadlifting: the first three sets were absolutely fine, but after the fourth set I started to feel a little twinge in my lower back, so decided to stop there. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .98x for 8 reps and bench press .77x for 7 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
@thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @oats_son: you're up.
FtttG
1d ago
I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth".
What was the book?
The other day, I read this article from a literary agent-turned-novelist who made the point that a literary agent has to be hooked by a submission from the very first paragraph, and that, in her experience (and contrary to unpublished novelists' claims that their books "start slow, but get better later"), most books which didn't capture her interest from the first paragraph tended not to improve thereafter. She gave very specific instructions for how the first paragraph ought to grab the reader's attention: namely, surprises and discordances that provoke their curiosity, but without overwhelming them with weirdness.
It may seem like obvious advice, but for whatever reason, it prompted me to look at my novel with fresh eyes, and I think the opening needs to do more to grab the reader's attention. (Even if I didn't think that, no literary agent has yet requested the full thing, so I'll have to meet them halfway.) Fortunately, I came up with an idea for a new first paragraph to be inserted immediately before the old first paragraph, and the old first paragraph becomes the second paragraph, largely unchanged. Still need to finish editing the remainder of the manuscript to get it down to ~100k words.
I'd like to A/B test this to see if I'm on the right track, so if any of you would be interested in offering feedback on just the opening paragraph (without knowing if it's the old one or the new one), I'd really appreciate it. They're both no more than 300 words.
FtttG
2d ago
I dislike the vast majority of discussions based around tribal politics (present company excluded)
I like to imagine that, at the best of times, we're one meta-level up, discussing the fact of tribal politics and why some topics or events acquire valence in the culture war while others don't. Whereas I assume most people asking you "are you a Democrat or a Republican?" just take it as read that their team is Good, the other team is Bad, and they want to know which team you're on.
it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions.
Thank you!
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