FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
44m ago
I still don't understand your point. The number of people killed doesn't make a meaningful difference to what does and doesn't count as a mass shooting? If a lot of people aren't killed, in what sense is it a mass shooting?
Compare "mass casualty event".
FtttG
1hr ago
a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche.
To my eyes, far bigger than this case itself was the announcement that came a few days later, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended against carrying out gender-affirming procedures on people under the age of 19.
With the exception of hormone therapy which falls under the domain of endocrinology, almost everything we call "gender-affirming care" falls under plastic surgery. When the body in charge of that discipline is recommending against gender-affirming care for minors, that does indeed suggest we've hit an inflection point. And it's not just the US, with the UK and several Scandinavian countries also hitting pause on this prolonged experiment.
Another possible response might be "With what purpose do you inquire?".
I have a hard time envisioning a helpful "purpose" for which the answer to the question "what is a woman?" includes people with penises.
It's been awhile since I read the Sequences, but my recollection is that Big Yud put a lot of stock in the idea of definitions that "cleave reality at the joints". Like Zack Davis, I think he ought to take his own advice: I'm baffled as to how he (or anyone else for that matter) could think that the definition "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is one that cleaves reality at the joints, as opposed to "a woman is an adult female human".
And what is a 'female'?
An entity born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes.
FtttG
4hr ago
That principle is downstream of a more general left-wing ethos, that it is unjust for people to be limited by the circumstances of their birth
But with rare exceptions, just about every trans person is quick to claim that they didn't choose to be trans, that they knew from a very young age that they were "really" a girl, that it's not their fault they were born a girl trapped inside a boy's body. Taken at face value, this implies that their (our?) gender identity is just as innate as their sex. Why is it unjust to limit someone on the basis of one trait they have no control over (their sex) but not another trait they have no control over (their gender identity)?
Bad analogy. The question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a query about whether an edge case falls inside a category. In the sex/gender debate, equivalent questions might include "is an emasculated male with breast implants a woman?" or "is a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome a woman?"
It's also a bad analogy because nothing actually hinges on the question of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Quite a lot does hinge on the question "what is a woman?"
The third reason it's a bad analogy is because "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a question which inspires disagreement, but which no one feels the least bit of discomfort about answering, and will be happy to present arguments for or against ("it's a piece of meat surrounded by bread, so it's a sandwich!" "but it's only one piece of bread, while a sandwich has two pieces!"). By contrast, among progressives the stock response to the question "what is a woman?" is a sputtering refusal to answer, usually attempting to dodge it by changing the subject ("I'm not a biologist", "I take care of people with many different identities"). This is not because it's a complicated question, but because progressives know that one answer ("an adult human female") will anger woke people, while the other answer ("anyone who identifies as one") will make them look like a lunatic.
FtttG
5hr ago
Even in the hoplophobic UK
I understand the point you're making, but the adjective "hoplophobic" is weird to me. As tools for intimidation, guns are specifically designed to be scary. You should be scared of guns. If someone is pointing a gun at you, fear is an entirely appropriate emotional response.
FtttG
6hr ago
I think it's profoundly unlikely that Van Rootselaar deliberately targeted people who had bullied him in the past. I suspect the narrative will be something along the lines of "Van Rootselaar faced such a relentless onslaught of transphobic abuse and bigotry that she finally snapped and lashed out", the clear implication being that the shooting is ultimately society's fault.
FtttG
12hr ago
A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.
Especially not when they're already dead, along with most of their immediate family who might care about such things.
(Incidentally, this xkcd comic is very relevant to your username.)
FtttG
12hr ago
How are they not?
For one thing, certain bodies (among them Mother Jones) define a "mass shooting" as one in which at least three fatalities are incurred.
First paragraph:
Canadian police have identified the suspect who carried out a school massacre in remote British Columbia as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems.
The article is 1,291 words long, and it's not until the tenth paragraph, 375 words in that we get any indication that the perpetrator was anything other than a "woman" in the traditional (i.e. adult female) sense of the term: "McDonald said police 'identified the suspect as they chose to be identified' in public and in social media". How many people are going to read down that far?
Also surely not a coincidence that they didn't include a photo of the perpetrator (despite doing so for the Brown University shooting and this UK shooting in September 2024), as no one could possibly mistake him for an adult female.
They may not be burying the story, but they're certainly running interference.
FtttG
14hr ago
'memba when 4chan was referring to young black men as "joggers"? Seems like a lifetime ago.
That would be a solution I could get behind, if the last fifteen years hadn't featured a nonstop deluge of handwringing about the dangers of young white men becoming radicalised by far-right/incel content, and how this poses such a grave threat to our society that we need to suspend freedom of expression and browbeat young white men into submission with artfully produced agitprop about how loathsome and contemptible they are (which no less than the prime minister of the UK erroneously referred to as a "documentary" on two separate occasions).
If it's legitimate to speculate on the societal factors that led to Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz etc. to commit their horrific crimes, it's legitimate to speculate on why this guy did so. If young white men are susceptible to radicalisation by social media echo chambers, I see no reason why young white trans-identified men couldn't be also. Being trans should not be a get out of jail free card.
The sort of mildly-spectrumatic social misfits that would historically have been overrepresented as school shooters are now being nudged hard into transitioning
It's funny to think that, if Columbine had happened today, the names that would have lived on in infamy would have been Erica Harris and – well, I suppose Dylan can be a girl's name too.
FtttG
15hr ago
Third option: the fact that this person was driven to commit such a horrific crime is testament to how widespread transphobic bigotry is, even in an ostensible progressive utopia like Canada.
I'm sure the TRAs themselves are pushing this one on the backchannel. Trans cannot fail, they can only be failed.
The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.
In the article, I said that the buyback program must be judged a roaring success in the limited sense of reducing mass shooting deaths in Australia, even if it's only a qualified success relative to the equivalent metric in the US. But correlation obviously does not prove causation, and it's entirely possible the steep decline in mass shooting deaths after Port Arthur was just a particularly pronounced regression to the mean and the gun buyback program was coincidental. But even if the scheme did have an effect, its success relative to the US has been vastly overstated. The way progressives (namely John Oliver) talk about the scheme, you would think that mass shootings literally never happen in Australia anymore, as opposed to them occurring 20% less often per capita compared to the US.
The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously."
Agreed, it's just the politician's fallacy.
FtttG
1d ago
Yes, likewise with Bennington and Ransone, with journalists falling over themselves to highlight how both men had been victims of child abuse. I'm sure they meant well (attempting to highlight how abusing a child can traumatise them for literally decades hence), but the clear subtext was that their suicides were logical decisions in light of their experiences.
FtttG
1d ago
as is the case for celebrity suicides
I feel like that long standing journalistic practice is being more and more flagrantly ignored these days. To give one recent example, multiple outlets in different nations had zero qualms about specifying that James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire) died by his own hand. Going a few years back, Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. I really don't think there was any pretense of discretion.
I was more surprised than anyone else to find that, per capita, Australia reports 80% of the deaths from mass shootings as does the US. And that's after multiple gun buyback schemes which supposedly prevented mass shootings altogether.
"The only country", indeed.
FtttG
1d ago
Oh sure, I'm aware that the Zoe Post was just the catalyst for a whole bunch of cultural issues which had been stewing for years prior. But I still think it's misleading to say that there was an event called "Gamergate" which took place in the period 2008-13.
FtttG
1d ago
I was running outside for a couple blocks and slipped and fell on some ice last Thursday and hurt my elbow and my knee.
Oof. Last year I tripped and sprained my ankle, whole thing turned purple and swelled up such that the only pair of shoes that fit me were my Timberlands. Best off just resting and keeping your leg elevated, if you try to exercise on it you'll only make it worse.
FtttG
1d ago
- I published my fourth blog post on Tuesday, a review of Tony Tulathimutte's sophomore novel Rejection (glad you enjoyed!). I was so busy on Monday that I fell a day behind my self-imposed deadline, but as we're in week 7 of 2025 and I've published four posts, I'm technically within the letter of my target of "at least one post every two weeks". I'll aim to publish the next post a day early to compensate. (Incidentally I meant to offer: if you'd like to send me a private link to your posts before they go live just to give them a spot-check, I'd be happy to.)
- Went to the gym three times last week. Haven't yet gone this week as I was moving house, but planning to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 5 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
Once I get settled into our new flat I want to finish the SQL course and start writing the next album, although I think I may need to get my guitar set up as I think there's a bad connection.
FtttG
1d ago
This seems like a completely irrelevant response. I'm not asking you to dox yourself or disclose any more identifying details than you already have. I'm just pointing out that it's factually untrue that Gamergate occurred in that period. You literally did not hear the word "Gamergate" at any point between 2008 and 2013.
I mean, I don't think even the TERFiest TERFs really have any objection to 16-year-olds undergoing laser hair removal, even if it's nominally under the auspices of "gender-affirming care".
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