5434a
1yr ago
Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.
Power dynamics are weird. Or at least they are to me.
For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn. Because in my mind a kind of intuitive equalising game-theoretical situation would develop where neither would be content to get the short end of the stick over and over and would simply leave. I was surprised to find out that the model is wrong, and that, as you confirm, the active and passive roles rarely swap over. I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays. They're not struggling to find someone to fuck, if anything there's a surplus of those, they're struggling to find someone who'll fuck them. (Apparently a similar situation is common in BDSM communities). As a straight man this is an unfamiliar dynamic. The active and passive roles tend to play out naturally in straight sex. I'm often left wondering why a partner is out of breath afterwards when she's put in about 80% less exertion. If I was holding out for a woman who took a physically dynamic role in sex I'd be setting myself up for disappointment. Women's sexual passivity is such a commonly shared assumption that they frequently criticise men for not knowing where the clitoris is while also neglecting that they've got both hands free should they care to look for it themselves. Men however have to be reminded not to touch themselves in situations that aren't even sexual.
I'm not sure that I expected it to be greatly different on account of the inherently active-passive roles but it's still a disappointment when you grow up fantasising about something vaguely "lady in the streets, freak between the sheets" where the woman can match your sexual dynamism and you find out it's more like "passive in the streets and between the sheets". (And then you look around and notice women pathologically attributing their passivity to men, and that this itself is a manifestation of passivity....)
To formative childhood experiences, even when I was very young there was an intuitive specialness to attractive women. Men were background noise. Big powerful man? I suppose it would be good to be someone like that. Small wimpy man? I suppose it would be worse - unless he has an attractive wife. Image of a woman in a flattering outfit? Entrancing. A naked woman? That felt like discovering magic. If I'd seen a full on porno I would have thought the male lead was incredibly enviable rather than psychologically threatening, you know, if I'd thought of him at all. Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay. Horny straight men know that horny gay men exist. We know that Grindr exists. Some of us even know that the gay men who exist are keener to get dicked than do the dicking, and that there's a common gay fantasy for seducing straight men. We prefer getting rejected by women.
Getting back to competition informing orientation, the flip side of competition isn't limited to withdrawal. There's also cooperation. I lost 90% of interest in competition just as I hit puberty because that age was when sports stopped being a cooperative activity to generate the most fun and became a narrow contest solely to make number go higher than opponent, which as I saw it sucked all the fun out. And to be clear this wasn't a rationalisation to deal with being bad at sport, I was consistently among the first picks for any team sports and chose to drop out of playing for the school team. While I lost interest in conscious competition I still developed a typical pubescent boy's interest in women. I went and found the fun in drugs and music instead, and the sexual interest was (un?)satisfied with porn. I would have been better served if I'd had it explained to me that I could have competed against myself to achieve objective improvements and crucially that those improvements would in turn have afforded me better opportunities in the realm of sex and dating. Sadly/gladly I was in my late 20s when PUA evo-psych gave me a model that explained the world in a way that better mapped to reality than the blend of romantic stories and latent cultural feminism I'd been brought up with (women don't like arseholes, The One exists, be a modern man, it will happen if it's meant to be, etc).
5434a
1yr ago
If there are people here who believe trans men aren't actually men, I kindly ask that they also provide the criteria for distinguishing men from non-men.
Here's some shared foundational rationality. No matter what a man is or does he cannot - in the logic of transexuality too - be or become a transman. And vice versa for the complementary sex and gender presentation. It's paradoxical. Therefore a transman cannot be a man, and a transwoman cannot be a woman. Only a woman can become a transman. Only a man can become a transwoman. Therefore transwomen aren't women, transmen aren't men, and this accords with the logic of transexuality. They are, charitably, transexual men and transexual women for which I can accept the novel and less ambiguous labels of transwomen and transmen respectively.
Winning, or even arguing the trans-are-actually terminology war for the trans side serves to void its own logos and, if you'll forgive the irony, to argue against it is to bravely support transexuals.
To be explicit, if a transwoman can be a woman then it must subsequently render either the word transwoman or the word woman empty of any meaningful significance. With only net negative meaning to be attained the struggle to claim membership of the pre-existing categories is not only moot but actively counterproductive. If womanhood is meaningless there's no rationale for pursuing it.
Please note, I am not anti-trans actions. I am anti-trans rationale. Adults have been free to change their name, their wardrobe and undergo any elective medical procedures they can afford for decades and while I might not endorse those choices I have no issue tolerating them on the basis that my own choices are tolerated. What I cannot tolerate is being expected to unquestioningly accept a glaringly unignorable contradiction. After that's acknowledged we could get into any broader concerns that may be more based in prejudice than reason.
5434a
3mo ago
I looked through and downloaded IMDB's top rated original (1959-1964) TZ episodes a while ago. I ended up with 9 episodes from S1, 8 from S2, 9 from S3 and 4 from S5. There's lots of other selected Twilight Zone episodes lists out there to browse, they're all roughly in agreement. If you're not bothered about filtering the best of the best you can't go far wrong by starting at the start as that's where the benchmark that justified the additional series and reboots was created.
I don't know about the '80s and '00s reboots but I'd avoid Jordan Peele's 2019 reboot, it's more concerned with moral commentary on $current_year American culture war than it is the human condition.
Like Atelier says TZ is lacking in the sci-fi aspect compared to The Outer Limits. You could try 2017's Phillip K Dick's Electric Dreams but I haven't seen any of those. TZ is a bit dated and unsophisticated compared to modern counterparts like Black Mirror but like OG Star Trek it's classic television that stands the test of time.
5434a
3mo ago
it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
5434a
5mo ago
wiki:
Schettino said he left the ship when it turned over, and that he fell into a lifeboat
[...]
the on-duty Italian Coast Guard commander told Schettino, "Vada a bordo, cazzo!" ("Get on board, for fuck's sake!"), but Schettino did not do so and was one of the first to reach land.
lmao
5434a
8mo ago
there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation
Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.
The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.
Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!
5434a
9mo ago
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
5434a
10mo ago
Goals aren't entirely arbitrary. They can make things worse or better. They can be self-interested or pro-social.
Forming your own rules is a good start. One thing that sharpens the focus is to set tight restrictions. "Take a good photo" is so broad that you could spend all week reading about aesthetics and equipment without leaving your desk - or you could take a left turn and begin wondering whether a photo can be morally good. "Take the best photo you can, using what you have, in the next hour" compels you to stop thinking and start doing. Use the challenge and arbitrariness to your advantage.
5434a
1yr ago
The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny
Yes, but I think cross sex exogenous hormones play a significant role here. I remember reading a piece by a trans man about his partner complaining that since beginning receiving testosterone he'd become more terse and less expansive about his emotional experiences. Isn't it plausible that trans men in receipt of testosterone become more stereotypically masculine, either bottling up their emotions and/or more likely simply experiencing a significantly reduced valence of emotions, while trans women experience the opposite where their exposure to oestrogen manifests in the stereotypically feminine behaviour of feeling strong emotions and coping with those emotions by proactively sharing them for inspection and validation. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease technician's attention. Yes that's sexist but in this subject talking about sex-isms is unavoidable.
5434a
2mo ago
37 according to the substack post.
It's about as edifying as a man signing up to 37 porn sites in one day. It's an anti-achievement.
5434a
7mo ago
Finished Conan The Barbarian in The Phoenix On The Sword. Only 24 pages! Phew. Short stories rock.
Over to the other side of the spectrum for Brothers Karamazov at ~900 pages, and Dostoesvky doing his reverse Columbo act of "Chapter 3: I beg the reader's patience, for before I begin the introduction to the beginning, I must first include a preface to the beginning of the introduction".
What is it with old books and these interminable beginnings? It doesn't take that long to set the scene.
5434a
7mo ago
Selection bias. You only notice the socially refined peers, you won't see the ones who are failing out because they get nervous at the idea of making a phone call.
If you want to relate to your peers then ask them what motivates them and talk about it, and maybe discuss/explore how it doesn't motivate you. You're not obliged to agree with them.
Finish out the master's degree while thoroughly researching which branch and role of the military suits your aims (air force seems like the comfiest option to my untrained eyes). Talk to currently serving members before you even consider talking to the recruitment office. Sign up, travel the country/world (avoid front line combat), learn marketable skills within a clear hierarchy and away from the general public (about as far from an office job as you can reasonably get), get a solid reference from doing something generally held in good esteem by society, make friends and contacts, save your pay, leave ~30 with a good CV and much improved prospects. Also women like a man in uniform. If you don't like it you're still only 30 and you've got a decent foundation to pivot on. Reading Ancient Greek is cool but it's a luxury pursuit.
If you don't like that then you could learn to code and try to land a WFH/remote job, and if you don't like that then you need to start looking for a lucrative niche or building a business from scratch. Otherwise it's the office life for you. I'm guessing you don't like sales, see academia as an up-hill dead end and aren't about to retrain as a doctor or hit the jackpot as a YouTuber or a Substack writer.
Forget about "the best years are gone". Concentrate on setting yourself straight in the medium term so that when you do figure it out in your "still pretty good, maybe on reflection arguably better years" you're able to pursue it and achieve it instead of being stuck even deeper in a hole. Remember that you will turn 30 whatever happens, so you might as well look forward to doing something worthwhile before you find yourself looking back and wondering what you could have done.
It's corny but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria is a good way of planning your actions, you just need to make sure your scope is appropriate. You have to keep a good balance of short term plans to stay motivated by steadily ticking them off otherwise it can feel like the end goal is too far away.
5434a
8mo ago
I'm not a fan of the other comments here about how the attacks on him are justified by his unpopularity rather than whether he's guilty of anything more than a faux pas.
It's apology-and-move-on tier, but instead it's been placed in the fire-him-for-sexual-assault tier.
Okay. If that's how they want it to be. But the door swings both ways, and this overly broad interpretation logically leads to claims of having been sexually assaulted becoming comparable to enduring a sub-second celebratory kiss for a national triumph. Their own tactics are trivialising sexual assault. Perhaps that's how Rubiales should have responded.
I for one am still coming to terms with the revelation that I've been the victim of countless sexual assaults since I was a baby, mostly at the hands of my own family. I'm not sure I'm ready to unpack whether I myself may have inflicted the same disgusting crime on other innocent victims.
5434a
1yr ago
The openly intentional result of what you're calling her sexism is that biological men are excluded from using the services of the rape crisis centre that she funds despite those men calling themselves women, ie trans, and so is plainly Trans Exclusionary. More accurate would be to say that she doesn't believe a biological man can be a woman, which is to say that she is a trans denialist. She doesn't hate transwomen (the transphobia charge), she simply doesn't recognise "transwoman" as a meaningful category.
Calling it sexism is similarly trans denialist as it casts the question solely in terms of objective biological sex, which trans ideology takes great efforts to escape from by introducing the subjective frame of gender.
One major reason radical feminists and other trans denialists deny transgenderism is because it requires not only that women identify with and express their gender but that doing so is what makes them women, and by extension not doing so diminishes their womanhood. A woman who becomes a radical feminist because she's been treated like shit by men, often in part for not being very feminine, while also being vulnerable to all the disadvantages that women suffer will rightly bristle at the implication that she's less of a woman, particularly when it's coming from men.
5434a
1yr ago
I was going to mention the same video as a welcome change from the Pollyanna-isms.
I'm only a casual Youtube user but it's clear that they set up an aggressive automod for comments a few years ago and I assume people have begun conforming to the unwritten rules in order to have their comments posted instead of being shadow-banned. I suppose it was necessary and probably a net improvement, it gets a bit uncanny though when I watch the videos from SoftWhiteUnderbelly interviewing the by turns desperate and criminal denizens of LA's Skid Row and then read the comments and see they're full of glib praise and hollow platitudes for pimps, addicts and proud gang bangers (in both senses of the term).
5434a
1yr ago
Agreed that it's difficult to properly judge a comment without its context. @ZorbaTHut can the janitor page posts be tweaked to include their parent comment?
5434a
1mo ago
I blinked and my comment got eaten. TLDW find a practical project that puts work in your hands, not your head.
5434a
3mo ago
I re-read Shogun last year for the first time in 20 years. Is the plot slow? Well, I also read Crime & Punishment and Brothers Karamazov last year, and compared to those the plot is a rocketship.
I found the plot moved faster the second time because I was familiarised with all those aspects of foreign culture and language that are used. More importantly, on reflection the feudal Japanese culture is a critical plot mechanism; the extreme honour based social structure is exactly what the main character has to adapt to in order to understand and participate in the power struggle he finds himself caught in. And the more his understanding improves the more his agency develops giving the result that the plot is pushed along faster.
I won't say that it's a "great" book but it was good enough to make me think I should get around to reading the next book in Clavell's Asian Saga. On the other hand I won't be looking for any more Dostoevsky.
5434a
5mo ago
Sounds like a stated preferences versus revealed preferences problem. You can't know which is true until you've had a genuine opportunity to choose.
5434a
10mo ago
Lately it's been the robin because it's sociable and likes to join in with the gardening.
5434a
10mo ago
If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.
Let me switch from the general to the specific.
If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.
Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.
[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]
5434a
1yr ago
Empirical reality is cool but the point is that putting it to one side and taking modern/woke/trans gender theory on its own merits can demonstrate that either their logic fails by its own standard or their logic doesn't have any standards to fail by.
Either there will always be some asymptotic essence of otherness that upholds the delineation between man and woman with their respective qualities and qualifiers and renders the idea of switching from one to the other impossible, or there's no difference to functionally separate the two meaning there's no other to contrast against and so no position to move away from or towards. At that point the only thing left is a subjectivity of aesthetics, which amounts to the label-claiming we observe where we might see a woman who feels like the kind of woman who has a penis and wants to have sex with women but doesn't feel like the kind of woman who might get pregnant by having sex with a man (pronouns: yak/sax).
This is without touching on the unwelcome and unintended implications of these theories, such as how they would account for people who over-identify with their gender (boob jobs and steroids, trans rights are cis rights), male/female neurotypology that would necessarily disqualify otherwise typical men and women from belonging to their pre-existing category, and the plain old basic feminist argument that women are capable of more than housekeeping and looking pretty.
Taking it seriously leads to the conclusion that it's unserious, and by extension that it shouldn't be taken seriously. The regressive absurdity of it would be tragic if it wasn't so funny [reverse according to personal taste].
So what do we call a masculine woman? Call her a masculine woman. There's nothing to be gained by doing otherwise, and much to be lost. Whether we redefine reality or redefine words it necessitates the loss of the prior definition.
5434a
1yr ago
It's entirely a pragmatic choice (in short piracy suits my self-interested ends better), but if I had to frame it as a matter of ethics I would say I have been presented with a choice of a) free as in speech plus as in beer, versus b) paying to conform and suffering artificial restrictions for the privilege.
The second order effect is that I have spent money on creative works that I absolutely would not have bought when I was buying other media. It could be argued that provides some justification for pirating but it's a hollow claim to virtue.
5434a
1yr ago
Any recommendations for good books or articles about stupidity? I can only think of McNamara's Folly. While that one works on both the object level of low IQ soldiers and also the higher level stupidity of advancing the policy for actively recruiting them I'm more interested in the object level stuff.
Darwin Awards is another good source. Also any Erowid trip report for datura.
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
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