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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.
There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!
Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either, though of course there the disputed set is much smaller (consider the case of that Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. I do not believe in transitioning or self-id and do not consider any transwoman I am aware of an instance of the class "woman", but I would genuinely struggle to assign them to one of the categories based on what I have heard).
Either way, this should not be relevant - transwomen are in general not saying something that amounts to "there is a fuzzy boundary between men and women, I understand I am somewhere near it, but I contend that on the balance of evidence I should fall on the 'woman' side", but rather "whatever the boundary between men and women is, I am a reasonably central example of the category 'woman'". OP essentially has to contend that the latter is something that is transparently false to his camp and ambiguous to progressives, i.e. whatever notion of women they have is so weak a separator that it can't even refute what to conservatives is a claim that a central example of a man is actually a central example of a woman. OP proposes that the test that evidences this is that they cannot provide a verbal definition of "woman". However, I would argue that the reason people fail to do this is the real or imagined fuzzy boundary of the category - progressives would also have no trouble identifying what they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women". The same situation holds for the category "black" for either side, where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it, and yet neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
Compare to a hypothetical progressive definition of women:
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if they look unambiguously female
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if they look ambiguously progressive, claim to be a woman and at least one woman agrees they are a woman (recursively)
Of course you might be tempted to argue that parentage is somehow more solid as an axis of identity conveyance than being part of the same society, but this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
On their side against whom? Transwomen? Do you think "I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity? Consensus men (men as defined by progressives \cap men as defined by conservatives)? I'm pretty sure they do side with cis women against consensus men much more than a few accidental times; let me know if you actually need examples.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
I expect any breakthroughs in the physical domain to lag significantly - customer service, contracts, sales and coding will be automated, but no self-driving cars and humanoid robots*, and the humans that were formerly in those jobs will be pushed into somewhat less cushy replacements that make use of their skills but also involve some hard-to-automate real-world component - assembling and maintaining bespoke machinery, driving cars, installing cabling, etc. There is a certain possibility that this correlates closely with the jobs that have already been bullshittified, to an extent that the metrics of success in them are now also bullshit - ChatGPT may be a 100x more productive legal brief writer than the human it replaces, but more and better legal briefs could amount to somewhere between a little more and infinitely less productivity. Meanwhile, the humans freed up by this to do more productive work like driving deliveries may not actually be that great at those jobs, so you get something between a slight improvement and a net negative change to baseline productivity while also having to contend with an overall productivity tax from social upheaval (as large strata of the population curb their consumption due to uncertainty or personal socioeconomic drop).
* Always seemed obvious to me once you take away human conceit. In the former domain, you are fighting to outperform maybe 40000 years of evolution; in the latter, some tens or hundreds of millions.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
No, at this point you can like Coke and McDonalds without feeling kinship to the US for it, see CN/RU(sort of). Relatedly, the leading "anti-US" countries have made anti-LGBT a pretty prominent part of their brand, and not anti-fastfood.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
What happened with your post? I found it kind of hard to read in an "am I getting a stroke or is sleep deprivation finally getting to me" way from the start, but then halfway in it seems to reach the point where words are actually unambiguously rearranged out of their proper places, like in
The interpersonal exit veto (I won't be dissuaded) has a lower barrier to execute than Move to Canada. Lana's collection of ideas, beliefs, ailments, and suffering in were normalized, grown, and reinforced in she spaces sought out.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
It's funny that you say HBD, because, uh, what exactly do you figure is the group of people that should have been marginalized and contained to prevent these outcomes?
I continue being a big fan of the theory that almost all the stereotypical "SJW" behaviours we are seeing are the result of (at least partially heritable) conservative temperaments grown on a liberal cultural substrate that was made by and for people who are disposed quite differently. "Lana" coming from a committed evangelical background clicks with this theory just as well as Puritan Harvard of all places being considered the main cathedral of the capital-c Cathedral, and I can't help but notice the overrepresentation of various priestly castes and theocratic cultures (Brahmins, Ethiopians, ...) in SJ activism. Leftism seems to simply have choked on its own success - much like England would probably have been spared Rotherham if their ancestors had been a little worse at subjugating Pakistan, the Left probably could have avoided getting taken over by people building a sacred hierarchy full of arcane behavioural rules around their ideology of toppling sacred hierarchies and arcane behavioural rules if they (we?) had resisted the urge to assume suzerainty of places full of people thus inclined.
(Are people like naraburns the rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
Word on the street (who knows if true) is that the drone containers were assembled inside Russia by Ukrainian sleeper agents. There's a photo circulating claiming to depict the interior of the same warehouse in Chelyabinsk (I think) that was in the Ukrainian propaganda release depicting the assembly process.
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
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