FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Some other examples I think might add meaningfully to the concept-space you're exploring here: DignifAI was a meme where people used AI image generation to take bikini/lingerie/nude images of various e-girls, and digitally re-cloth them in modest garb. This greatly offended the e-girls and feminists generally, for reasons that they struggled to explain.
Funnily enough, this post originated as something I wrote shortly after the DignifAI brouhaha. It was a Substack post comparing DignifAI, "it's okay to be white" and "Islam is right about women". I couldn't figure out how to wrap it up so it stayed in my drafts for well over a year. When I saw the Clayton clip I had the idea to compare it to "what is a woman?", then realised I could use a few hundred words of copy from the unpublished post.
"Republicans should adopt the strategies used by Democrats in 2020 in every election going forward."
I'm going to plead "Fearful Symmetry".
No, this is base Bulverism.
Bulverism is when, rather than demonstrating that someone is wrong, you assume that they are and then explain how they came to be so silly. Asking them "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" does not assume that they're mistaken about anything. Indeed, you are providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate that their model of how the world works is accurate.
I genuinely don't understand how you arrived at the conclusion that "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" are loaded questions in the way "have you stopped beating your wife?" is.
The reason "have you stopped beating your wife?" is an unfair loaded question is because it assumes a premise which may be untrue of the person to whom it is put. What false premises are assumed by "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?"
Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design.
You'll note that "what is a woman?" is not a question which calls for a one-word answer. "Who won the 2020 election?" does, but it is entirely possible to give a factually correct answer to this question which is one word long ("Biden"). I'm really not seeing the parallels.
Okay, but I like it when my team controls the narrative!
I'm calling gender ideologues and 2020 election truthers stupid. Whose "team" do you think I'm on, exactly?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Some ACX people were really angry about this a few months ago, and I really did not understand the outrage. Libraries, bookshops, charity shops etc. destroy tens of millions of books every year, and no one cares. Besides which, Anthropic bought the books. I had this crazy idea that, if you own an item, it's your right to do with it what you please, provided you don't violate any other laws in the process.
The whole story is just a boo-light for people who dislike AI for other reasons.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
However there are multiple people in line to take her mantle as leader of the left if she does not deliver. Remember AOC crawled back to DSA this year to ask for their endorsement and promised not to support the iron dome. This is after they had un-endorsed her over this.
I was specifically asking you what would happen if AOC took office and failed to deliver. She would obviously have no reason to care what the DSA think of her after becoming leader of the free world. Her concern then would be on securing re-election, not appealing to the far left.
Yes, and winning multiple pro-Palestinian senators + winning primaries against pro-Israel incumbents in congress in one midterm, would be one of these stepping stones.
No, it wouldn't. The entire American senate could have Hamas tattoos on their foreheads, and that wouldn't in and of itself necessarily translate into any kind of material victory for the pro-Palestinian movement. Electing politicians who agree with you is necessary but not sufficient for accomplishing your material goals.
A whole lot of wishful thinking and a fundamental failure to understand the word "material".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
I still think Trump would get very irate if a member of his cabinet directly told him that he didn't win in 2020, incumbency notwithstanding.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Also, incels at least used to frequently use the term while most people do infrequently.
They call them "foids" now.
I also find the idea of trans activists complaining that it's creepy to use the word "female" as a noun more than a little rich, given the changes to the vernacular they demand of the rest of us. Women may not like being referred to as females, but I can't imagine they like it less than being referred to as "menstruators", "birthing parents" or "chestfeeders" (each of which has a "bonus hole").
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Even domestically, I'd say BLM's material gains were fairly meagre (for everyone other than Patrisse Cullors and co.).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Turns out, it's really damn hard!
Look at that, you accidentally wrote something you can reuse as a line of dialogue.
I've realized I've been insufficiently consistent with my points of view in the novel. It's usually written with a single POV per scene, but some scenes utilize omniscient narration, which feels like head hopping. I insert a dinkus every time I have to switch the point of view mid-chapter, but this clearly doesn't work when it's two people hashing out their relationship status.
How Not to Write a Novel has an entire section about this, highly recommended.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
I said it was a powerful counter – I didn't say it was the same as "what is a woman?"
Every tribe's grand narrative of how the world works is flawed in some way. The Red Tribe came up with a great "gotcha" designed to expose a flaw in the Blue Tribe's model of the world ("what is a woman?"). Recently, the Blue Tribe has managed to catch up, developing a gotcha of their own. Not being American, I am fortunate enough to be afflicted with neither delusion, but have little doubt that my own model of the world is flawed in some way I'm unaware of. When I encounter a gotcha question of my own, I'll be sure to let you know.
But the argument actually seems to be built on a consensus which doesn't exist.
Is it? Consider the following propositions:
- Most Americans believe the results of the 2020 election were legitimate.
- Most Americans believe that trans-identified males are not women.
It does not therefore follow that most Americans believe both of the above propositions, and I don't recall ever claiming or implying that it did.
But it's worth mentioning that it wasn't so long ago that most Americans could be assumed to believe both propositions (that American presidential elections are safe and legitimate, and that no one born with a penis is a woman). That consensus may not exist now, but it did quite recently, and I suspect it will again.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
Two-thirds of Americans sounds like "most people [in America]" to me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
Support for ending aid to Israel is on the rise for 3 continuous years.
Just like support for BLM was on the rise for six continuous years (the Ferguson riots were in 2014) before abruptly falling off a cliff in 2020. Very interesting!
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
Remind me to check back with you in six years. I suspect know AOC is not quite as incorruptible as you would have me believe. I look forward to the day the DSA turns on her for being a "Zio stooge" and claim that Mossad has some dirt on her that means her hands are tied.
Well like any movement, they build their case gradually.
Eighty years since the founding of Israel, an independent Palestinian state has not come a millimetre closer. How much time do you people need?
"Building a case gradually" suggests that you're winning tangible stepping-stone victories along the path to one's terminal goal. But I will reiterate that, aside from meaningless symbolic victories, the pro-Palestine movement has accomplished nothing, in the US or elsewhere.
The idea that anyone could consider the pro-Palestinian movement an example of a "successful political movement for change" is so laughable that I literally thought you were joking at first brush.
Okay, but what has any of this actually accomplished for the Palestinian people with which the movement is ostensibly so concerned?
You claim that the pro-Palestine movement is rallied around a singular cause of preventing Israel's "genocide". In your opinion, did the movement succeed in preventing said genocide?
Many pro-Palestine activists likewise claim to want to establish an independent Palestinian state, a goal that has not come a millimetre closer since 1948.
"Boycott, Divest, Sanction" died on its arse. No major American tech company can afford not to do business with Israeli tech firms. Neither can the US, if they want to stay competitive with China.
Netanyahu is still a free man. The US still provides plenty of armaments to Israel. Israel's economy is thriving. The likelihood of Israel facing ICC charges for genocide appear ever slimmer. Hamas is militarily weaker than it was prior to October 7th. The Abraham Accords remain in effect.
Let's say AOC secures both the Dem nomination and the presidency. At the end of her first term (in 2032) do you honestly think relations between the US and Israel will have significantly changed in any way? Do you honestly think an independent Palestinian state will have been established?
"But Mamdani is mayor of New York!" "Multiple European countries have recognised the state of Palestine!" "Lots of Americans agree with us!" "AOC will be the Dem nominee in 2028!" I have to ask – so what? Changing people's minds and "raising awareness" is only valuable in so far as these are instrumental goals – if they never translate into actual policy shifts and material gains, they're meaningless. Bragging about meaningless symbolic victories like this is what you do when your movement has nothing real to show for itself, and it's frankly embarrassing. The pro-Palestinian movement is not "an underdog": they have accomplished none of their ostensible goals. What's worse, they don't even seem to be embarrassed by this. They're not earnestly engaging in soul-searching and trying to figure our what they can do better – they're just carrying on business as usual.
Funnily, @ymeskhout has not one but two articles on this very particular pathology.
Comparisons with BLM are illustrative. There's no question that BLM was "very successful in shaping public opinion". And yet six years on from the movement's peak, what material goals have they accomplished? Police departments remain un-defunded, prisons have not been abolished, and if there's been any meaningful decline in the rate of black Americans getting killed by police officers, I'm not aware of it. By any objective, material metric, the movement must be judged a failure in its ostensible goals. Likewise here.
P.S.: I think it's rather telling that you don't say the pro-Palestinian movement has "been very successful in shaping public opinion in favour of Palestine in the past few years", but rather that it has "been very successful in shaping public opinion against Israel." The pro-Palestinian movement purports to want to put an end to the "genocide" and to establish an independent Palestinian movement, goals at which (according to the activists themselves) it has obviously failed thus far. But if these goals are just smoke and mirrors for the real goal of ostracising and harassing Jews, then I must acknowledge you've had slightly more success in that venture. The top-level post was inspired by my longstanding impression that so-called pro-Palestine activists are motivated less by genuine concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people and a desire for them to achieve national self-determination, and more by a hatred for Israel and the people who live there. This interaction with you has done nothing to disabuse me of this impression.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
Living in an antisemitic society is not the same as being a part of a successful political movement for change.
Well, "successful" is just about the last thing you could describe the Palestinian movement as.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
This is quite weak from Meshkout and gives the impression that he has never been a part of a movement.
By his account, @ymeskhout grew up in Morocco, in which hatred of Jews was the air he breathed:
I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It’s a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn’t about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. The Yahud aren’t to be trusted, they warned, as evidenced by the fact that no Jew was ever killed on 9/11, or by the fact that Mossad created ISIS as a bid to make Arabs look bad (I’m not joking, these claims are unironically professed by several of my family members).
Additionally, I believe he has lived in several Dem-leaning American cities, and on his Substack he occasionally posts videos of himself trolling Palestine activists in person. Suffice it to say I think he has more than a passing familiarity with the movement.
The pro-Palestinian movement is, like the pro-lifers aligned, on 1 very potent political cause: "Israel is committing genocide. We should not give Israel any of our money". Thats it, that is the winning message according to every poll
Well, for one thing, the pro-Palestine movement exists outside of the US, so the second half of that cause obviously doesn't apply to pro-Palestinians in Europe or Australia.
My answer¹ to "What is a woman?" is "It depends on the context."
To most people, such an answer would make you appear suspicious and dishonest, not unlike responding "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
In most contexts, a woman is a person whose gender identity is that found more commonly in people who have, or feel viscerally that they ought to have, concave genitalia.
Which is to say, your definition of the word "woman" rests on unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. And despite many of these people claiming that they viscerally feel that they ought to have female genitalia, the overwhelming majority of them choose not to undergo a surgical procedure which would give them an approximation (however crude) of said genitalia, even though many of them could presumably afford to do so.
It's also a strange definition in that you're using the exact same word for people who are X and people who wish that they were X, which is not how we define any other word in the English language. The word "billionaire" does not mean "a person with a net worth of at least 1 billion, or someone who wishes they had a net worth of least 1 billion": it only means the former. For the latter concept, we have "aspiring billionaire" or "wannabe billionaire".
This, again, makes you appear weird and dishonest.
Unless the question is being asked by someone rudely shoving a camera in my face while I'm busy, in which case my answer will be "A large happy pile of public information". (If you know, you know.)
Why would your answer change depending on whether a camera is being rudely shoved in your face? Does a word have a different meaning depending on whether the person defining it is being observed or not? Is "woman" an example of Schrödinger's word?
Part of the reason 'adult human female' rubs me the wrong way is that using 'female' as a noun in reference to humans is associated with misogyny.
But not referring to female people as "menstruators", referring to mothers as "birthing parents", or referring to their genitals as their "front" or "bonus" hole. Curious.
'hormonally male/female' = how much testosterone versus estrogen they have
A nonsensical categorisation. A bodybuilder is not "more male" than a nerdy coder.
'aspirational-anatomically male/female' = what they intend to have between their legs, or would have given the opportunity
I will reiterate that the vast majority of trans-identified males have not undergone bottom surgery. I genuinely don't know what "would have given the opportunity" means here. Many trans-identified males do have "the opportunity", and voluntarily pass it up. But this appears to have no impact on your opinion that they ought to be categorised as women.
'male/female presenting' = whether they look like a man or a woman
This is not generally how I see the phrase "male/female presenting" being used. It's usually used to mean "this person is dressed in a conventionally feminine manner" without passing judgement on whether they successfully pass.
progressives actually believe that trans-women are women
Some and some. I don't think Swinson's response to this question is remotely consistent with her "actually believing" that trans women are women. The purpose of this "gotcha" question, as I said, is designed to expose ideological rifts: separating the true believers in gender ideology from those who are merely pretending to endorse it out of convenience. I think Swinson falls into the latter category.
Even among those progressives who do actually believe that trans-women are women (and I acknowledge that such people do exist), the question is useful in exposing how many of these individuals are unable to provide a definition of the word "woman" which is coherent and non-circular, thereby demonstrating how fundamentally nonsensical gender ideology is. On some level you obviously know it's nonsensical, given that by your own admission you would refuse to define the word "woman" if you knew you were being filmed.
What are we comparing it to? Attitudes that seem retrograde compared to XXI. century progressivism look a lot more enlightened when compared to ante-Islamic Arabian paganism.
We're not comparing it to anything. I take the assertion "Islam is right about women" to mean "the collection of factual and normative assertions the Islamic faith makes about women are correct". If I say "the statement '2+2=4' is true", it's meaningless to ask "compared to what?": factual claims are true or they aren't ("directionally correct" notwithstanding). Likewise if I said "respecting people's preferred pronouns is the right thing to do", you would never ask "compared to what?"
And the Greek characters are such a pretentious affectation.
They also overlap with the noble savage myths in woke academia, which insist that any retrograde practices like slavery and superstitious anti-female, anti-gay violence in indigenous cultures were amplified (if not outright imported) by white colonialists.
I've certainly encountered these people before, and people who believe in a kind of secular original sin where all homophobia exhibited by Islamic cultures is ultimately the fault of white colonists. But I can't personally recall ever seeing someone claim that Palestine would promptly become a progressive paradise were they to be granted their own nation-state.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
The guy who runs the competition had the same thought:
The thing that gets me about these land acknowledgments is that they generally only go back so far. The ones I hear in my neck of the woods acknowledge the Ohlone speakers who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish in the eighteenth century, but we never hear about the Hokan speakers those Ohlone speakers displaced when they migrated in from the Central Valley. Sequent occupancy has a little bit more complexity to it than the “traditional homeland” formulas tend to acknowledge!
I hate land acknowledgements with a passion. I saw the tweet the other day that suggested starting off a meeting in the US with "we acknowledge we are gathered here today on former British land". Come to think of it, one could do the same thing in Ireland.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
Clayton can't answer the question because if he says "Biden", Trump turns on him and he needs Trump's support, and if he says "Trump", he is firstly saying something on the record that is verifiably false, and secondly alienating everyone who isn't MAGA.
Oh I completely agree with you. I was specifically arguing that that interpretation (that Clayton thinks Trump won in 2020) is false. I think many progressives will arrive at that conclusion, but I think it's the wrong one:
But I would put money on Clayton knowing full well that Biden won, but being too afraid to say so publicly for fear of angering the lunatics in his camp. (And by "the lunatics", I of course mean "the current occupant of the Oval Office and his army of true believers"). Ossoff appears to agree, asking Clayton if it's "humiliating" that Clayton is expected to "indulge the President's delusions". Clayton isn't crazy or stupid: he's just a coward who lacks integrity.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
I think it's more like 32% Ashkenazi to 45% Mizrahi.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: in Israel, Mizrahi Jews far outnumber Ashkenazi Jews.
I agree that being opposed to the existence of Israel doesn't necessarily imply that you want to see its citizens exterminated. But the two do often seem to go hand in hand, explicitly or implicitly.
Yes, I know. I'm asking you what material things the pro-Palestinian movement has accomplished. So far you haven't been able to name one.
I don't think Mamdani's policies will have a meaningful impact on the basic relationship between the US and Israel, nor on the existence of Israel, nor on the hypothetical existence of an independent Palestinian nation state. I do believe his policies and rhetoric could make life meaningfully worse for Jews living in New York (and in the rest of the US), and that is entirely legitimate for American Jews to freak out on that basis.
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