07mk
18hr ago
What is interesting to me, and I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, is that so many trans women start off looking like nerdy and loser guys -- these guys seem like they would be vulnerable to becoming incel in the first place. Likewise, a lot of nonbinary girls start off with an unattractive face shape and are probably fat.
"Transmaxxing" or the "incel-to-trans pipeline" has been joked about for as long as incel was a commonly used term. I've seen at least a couple of memes that take on some form of "which way, autistic man?" with 2 diverging paths towards "trans" and "incel" or the like. My pet theory is that nerdiness/near-autism tends to make young men extremely unattractive to women (citation needed), which pushes them to becoming incels, which leads some of them towards "transmaxxing" for cultural reasons.
07mk
18hr ago
This is just word games around what "attractive" means, though. If you mean "someone that I am sexually attracted to," as in, "imagine a very attractive young woman" means "imagine a young woman that you are very sexually attracted to," then yes, obviously it's a scene where it's a woman for whom I have some knowledge of her genitals and all that (likely personality too). But that's rarely what people mean when they say someone is "attractive," which is really just short-hand for referring to those "gender expression" characteristics, since most interaction with most people happen on surface-level, and often has little to do with "am I sexually attracted to them?" I find Hanry Cavill an "attractive" man, but I'd find sex with Oprah Winfrey - whom I find "not attractive" - to be more appealing than with him.
Obviously, those are two different things. Again, your thought experiment perfectly demonstrates the opposite: that a straight man is unlikely to be "attracted" to trans males, even if they might find their superficial characteristics to be "attractive."
Also, I would prefer if you did not engage in Bulverism.
07mk
19hr ago
One intuition pump for you is (assuming you are a normal straight guy): imagine a very attractive young woman, and then imagine learning later she has a penis. You probably don't want anything to do with her anymore. That's fine! But it is proof you can be attracted to trans people.
I don't understand how this wouldn't be a demonstration of the exact opposite: that a transwoman being a transwoman (i.e. male) is exactly what makes them unattractive to a straight man, overriding how they appear superficially.
07mk
1d ago
So I don't think state legislature calling for the school board to make a list of required books is a great idea, though I'm also not sure that I'm right on that, either. Both the school board and the local individual teachers can be corrupt so easily, that I'm not sure which one should have that sort of power, or how to regulate the corruption properly.
If we take for granted that the school board must compile such a list for public schools to follow, it occurs to me that having Bible stories in it actually strengthens the separation between church and state instead of the other way around, because it's treating Bible stories as equivalent to any other literature, rather than placing the Bible on a special pedestal as having status that's different from any other significant piece of writing. But I don't think anyone could have the confidence that individual teachers - perhaps especially in Texas - wouldn't teach these works of literature strictly as works of literature. In the private secular high school I went to, I was made to read Genesis in English class, and our teacher was very clear about this, but teachers and students in such environments are filtered so heavily that I'm skeptical that we can count on the same phenomenon repeating all across the public schools in any given state.
I'm not sure how to adjudicate this other than just letting someone sue and having the Supreme Court eventually make the call. It could ultimately rest on an empirical question of how real schoolteachers actually teach real students.
It's been pointed out, of course, that we already allow religious proselytization in schools by schoolteachers and administrators directed towards students in the form of social justice ideology, and so this is a "good for the goose, good for the gander" situation even if this led to the Bible being pushed as anything more than literature in schools. But I think the solution to that would be to find a way to declare such ideologies as religious in nature, which I'm not sure how would be done in a legal perspective, even if they clearly are in a logical and fact perspective.
07mk
1d ago
Christianity's influence is mostly historical, like how mammals in the time of the dinosaurs were mostly tiny mouse creatures. They had tremendous influence in a certain sense. We are descended from tiny mouse creatures. There are still tiny mouse creatures around. But the tiny mouse creatures around today are not really influential and we are not really tiny mice. Even if most of our DNA is mouse there are important distinctions.
This one paragraph seems to completely override any point made earlier on in this post. The bible and stories therein aren't the tiny mouse creatures that are still around; the evangelical Christians and Catholics and such of today are the ones that are still around. The parts of our DNA that are mouse DNA (which in this hypothetical is most of our DNA) is the bible. Which means that it has tremendous influence.
07mk
1d ago
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
This is a terrible argument, though. I would personally prefer it, but that doesn't mean that I'm transgender, it's just an indication of my autogynephilia. Or perhaps my assessment of gender roles in society. All this argument proves is that different people can have different preferences about hypothetical fantasy scenarios, and then maps it onto "gender" which is fine as it is, but is also trivial and tautological.
07mk
1d ago
Like, even if you accepted a "maximalist" supernatural trans position, and said that souls are real, and trans people are acts of the Abrahamic God putting souls in bodies of the opposite sex, nothing about that would imply anything about how we should treat such individuals as a matter of law or custom.
I agree with this. However, many people seem to disagree with this, and they insist on making sure that people who think like you or me must behave like we think like them.
My personal preference is that trans people are free to metaphysically perceive their transness in whatever way they want and also to prefer that society at large respect that perception. I think the conflict comes from the ones who seem to believe that "respect" is a synonym for "submit to" and demand the latter under the guise of the former. IMHO, a trans person should be exactly as free to have the preference that others treat them like their felt gender to the same extent that everyone else should be free to treat the trans person like the gender that the treater perceives the trans person as.
07mk
2d ago
I also think there's a strange way in which a lot of the trans debate is primarily a linguistic debate. I've said this before, but I think well-informed pro- and anti-trans people are generally in agreement on empirical questions like, "Can trans women get pregnant?", or "What chromosomes do an overwhelming majority of trans men have?"
I don't think much of the trans debate is a linguistics debate, actually, though some of it certainly is; it's primarily a coercion debate. That is, e.g. whether trans women are women is somewhat a linguistic debate, but it's more about coercion, of whether people who don't think that trans women are women ought to be coerced away from being able to refer to them as men or with male pronouns or to deadname them or etc. Of course, a strong argument is that private organizations ought to be able to coerce their members in this matter, but an equally strong argument is that people ought to be free from such coercion from private organizations, such as existing rules and norms against discriminating on the basis of race in certain circumstances. But that's where I see the real debate taking place, and the specific meanings of words are merely tools by which to put forward arguments around that.
07mk
2d ago
I don't think that sexuality can be partially a product of one's culture or coercive environment has much to do with the initial notion of how, e.g. a lesbian who doesn't find sex with a male who self-identifies as a woman is being transphobic, where we're using "transphobic" to mean something to be judged as irrational or morally negative or. If you ran an experiment of sticking one lesbian in prison with a bunch of trans women, I'm sure on at least a few of the trials, the lesbian would find sex with the trans women to be fine or even desirable, but the situation in real life that we're dealing with is where lesbians aren't so limited in their choice of partners.
07mk
3d ago
FWIW, Kalshi is showing about 20% chance that Take Two announces more than 5 million preorders before July 4. There's the factor of the odds that Rockstar announces this before July 4 that's multiplied by the odds that they get that many preorders, so it's hard to figure out what the odds of the actual preorder count being that are. But I'd personally bet against it being 50 million as of today.
07mk
3d ago
To take the most charitable interpretation possible, Trump should understand, based on how he's been treated over the past decade+ in politics, that everything he does will be attacked and subverted in the dirtiest way possible. As such, not successfully hardening the defenses of the pool against predictable vandalism indicates incompetence on his part.
Of course, had he done that, that would likely open him up to other attacks of incompetence or corruption or other negative qualities.
07mk
3d ago
It's hard to say, but my perception of those folks is that, for whatever reason, they prefer to see themselves in a video game as the protagonist, rather than to see sexy female protagonists who appeal to their male gaze. Could be cultural, could be psychological, could be just random chance, or could be nothing.
07mk
3d ago
With some luck, by the time the PC version comes out, generative AI tools will be such that hobbyist modders can mod in the type of content from the older games that's almost sure to be missing in this one, including actual AAA-level cutscenes with voice acting.
07mk
3d ago
Those are what stood out to me, too. If I had to bet, I would easily bet that either this comment was AI generated, had significant AI generation with minimal human editing, or was intentionally human-written to appear AI generated, almost purely based on multiple paragraphs starting with:
Guys, I'm new here, so I'm not sure if this fits
Here is the nuance I want to add,
But here is where the jurisdictional land-grab happens
Let me give a concrete example, carefully
07mk
3d ago
I'd guess you need to be some male equivalent of a hot woman, in this case likely charismatic.
07mk
4d ago
That very well may be true. It seems to me that progressives ought to try to do actual credible scientific research to to figure that out, and, to whatever extent that's true, to use actual scientific tools to figure out how to structure society, systems, organizations, etc. to channel people's tribalism in productive or, at least least deleterious ways. Instead, most have been just embracing their own tribalism as well as ignorance while also destroying our very ability to do credible social science research.
07mk
4d ago
I work in a team of fewer than 10 people, more than half for 6+ years, more than half of those for 15+ years. I also spent roughly 10-15 years in my 20s-30s with a friend group that I'd known since middle school, living with some of them for a decent chunk of that time, and certainly spending many hours with them most weekends for a lot of that time. That has not been my experience.
07mk
4d ago
The one thing I've found that works is combination of being family + regular interaction. If you ever figure out how it could be done to non-family, I hope you'll tell me!
07mk
4d ago
Socializing is a lot like eating well or exercising. Some people naturally stay thin and fit, while others are just really lucky and actually love working out.
I think this is an apt analogy (along with the stuff about how society has failed a lot of people both in terms of loneliness and obesity) but also not quite right. Eating well or exercising, by nature of physics, definitionally causes someone to stay thin (tautologically by what "eating well" means, to some extent) and arguably fit. But socializing doesn't have similar effect for loneliness. I'd say that building meaningful connections with others is what leads to preventing the deleterious effects akin to preventing obesity. One of my great insights that I had as an adult is that socializing by, e.g. spending lots of periodic time with like-minded people who enjoy your company and like you for who you are and vice versa, doing activities that everyone enjoys and/or is passionate about doesn't actually lead to building meaningful connections or relationships.
07mk
4d ago
If we assume that those whose ethnicity was listed as "unknown" are disproportionately Pakistani, there might have been as many as 3,000 Pakistani men charged with sex crimes every year since 2017. If each of these defendants had sexually exploited, on average, two white girls apiece, and for each one who was charged, another Pakistani wasn't charged – all of a sudden, the 250k figure doesn't seem half as implausible as I thought two days ago.
That's a lot of assumptions, though, and I think 2-per-defendant seems particularly hard to justify. By the accounts I read, the ratio tended to be skewed the other way around, where each victim had multiple rapists, often in quick succession. These are grooming gangs, so that makes sense. Of course, a gang of, say, 20, could rape 40 girls for the 2-to-1 ratio, but also, it could be gangs of 40 raping 20 girls.
As you say, we don't know. Which I'd guess is just as keikaku by whoever's in charge of collecting data for the British criminal justice system.
07mk
4d ago
Anecdote from my freshman year of college. I found myself turning down invites because I liked watching pirated shows, and films. A few weeks in I decided to never turn down an invite unless I had a very good excuse. Not disappointed in that choice at all.
I made this kind of decision sometime after college. It's one of my bigger regrets in life, as it raised the amount of suffering I went through in everyday life without providing any meaningful positives. No particular big negative event came out of it, just a constant long-term significant reduction in quality of life compared to the alternative. I ended up regretting it enough to basically reverse it about 5 years ago, never saying Yes to an invite unless there was some specific reason I really wanted to go or to hang out with those specific people. My life has been a lot better in those ~5 years.
07mk
4d ago
I'd consider a World Cup game easily worth it to go if I had the opportunity to do so without paying, but I'd say that basically any public entertainment event as intrinsically torturous, due to proximity to crowds. Doesn't mean it's never worth it, but the positives better be high enough to outweigh the significant figurative torture.
Either that, or it all counts, and as such all fans of sexualized anime are actually pedophiles.
Of course, vanishingly few sex-negative folks or "wokes" believe this, but, like basically all "woke" criticism of any media, it's a convenient tool to reach for when one wants to criticize some piece of media that they dislike in a way that appears to be based on anything other than arbitrary personal preference.
Arguably, this is the very phenomenon happening with Blood Rain, as Stellar Blade, like other East Asian semi-realistic video games such as Capcom's Resident Evil or Square Enix's Final Fantasy, uses a stylized anime-inspired visual style in terms of character design, rather than going for actual human-like realism. The first game actually featured a support character named Lily who actually looks very similar to Evie in terms of hair and facial features (some have speculated that Evie is the child of Eve and Lily, which wouldn't be impossible given the technology of the setting, but also, seems both way too on the nose in name and out of left field in the relationships) and was also commented on as appearing younger-looking in part due to the anime-inspired style.
The version I've encountered IRL is pointing to the center of one's forehead versus tapping one's palm against one's open mouth, right before saying "Indian," usually with "not" and then the other variation followed immediately after. I think that went out of style in the 2000s in Massachusetts, though.
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