5434a
16d ago
Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
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
1yr ago
I've got a plan to dip my toe into salsa classes and other non-formal partner dances. What's holding me back is I'm making a concerted effort to clear out the backlog of loose ends accumulated from sub-diligent general living before I take up new projects and hobbies.
The primary reason I want to try partner dancing is that I've spent years going to clubs, parties, raves, festivals and other gigs and I'm fed up of the atomisation and informality. No matter the size of the crowd or the style of the music the audience were 99% locked in to focusing on the performer over the music or the other attendees, and any dancing that did happen was either self-conscious freestyling, lesser or greater degrees of going berserk, or thinly veiled dry humping.
Since you're here and it sounds like you've got some breadth of experience, how would you describe the differences in the type of people who are involved with the different styles? Any hobby drama or other funny/memorable stories?
5434a
10mo ago
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
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've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").
What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?
5434a
7mo ago
What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.
Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!
I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.
The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.
5434a
9mo ago
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
5434a
11mo ago
Purely idle curiosity: Could someone following the Charles Atlas exercise program achieve Charles Atlas's physique?
5434a
11mo ago
It's not over until they take down the perspex wagie cages in the supermarket. Even banks and the other traditionally physically secured service counters are back to being wide open in the way they were already becoming pre-pandemic.
5434a
1yr ago
Miniscule level question of philosophical aesthetics: Is a television wall-mounting bracket more part of the wall, or part of the television?
I have a black TV set and a white wall, and I'm shopping for a bracket. The one I've chosen comes in black or white. In my mind the true-to-itself colour would be unpainted metal. I've flip-flopped a couple of times but I think I've made my choice. I'm interested to hear others' opinions and reasoning.
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
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
1mo ago
I'm an in-and-out, follow the list, know the layout, largely own-brand supermarket shopper who pays the minimum necessary attention to packaging. Years of internet content have made me selectively blind to anything less attention grabbing than literal naked women (and even then...). But I was lying in bed yesterday reminiscing on being a broke student and getting a "free" Bodum cafetiere by collecting something trivial like two empty coffee packets plus P+P, and some other similar giveaways that I still have in the kitchen cupboard.
Do retail suppliers still do those promotions, or was it a golden age of economic abundance and marketing largesse? What's the best thing you've got from a retail promotion? What do you still regularly use that came as a freebie?
The only one I can think of having seen lately is the tokens on branded yoghurt, which I ignored for years until I one day I caved in to curiosity and looked up the details of the offer. Turns out you basically need to be a commercial kitchen consuming gallons of yoghurt every day to make it remotely worthwhile, and IIRC the offers were split between consumable cross-marketing crap like a sample bottle of artisan moisturiser (which you still needed far too many tokens for) and then jumped up to a weekend in a fully catered holiday cottage, with very little in between.
UK. I flicked on the most popular commercial station while I wrote this which was showing reality contest dreck that's carefully produced to appeal to as many viewers as possible.
Halfway through an ad break when I switched on:
Supermarket - white man cooking Christmas dinner for his white family
Mattress - white man solo
Washing powder - multi ethnic races and genders, white man in background, black man in foreground
Whiskey - black woman solo
Toothpaste - brown woman solo
Perfume - white woman solo
Next full ad break:
Theme park - multi ethnic group of kids, white grandma
Make-up - multi ethnic women, brown and black focus, whites in background
Indigestion remedy - multi ethnic
Perfume - white woman solo celebrity
Supermarket - glimpse of white hand
Bubble bath - brown woman
Bleach - glimpse of brown hand
Flagship phone - white woman
Butter - white man, brown woman
Stock cubes - white family
The only thing I can note in support of your point is that the non-white people tend to appear more emphasised. In the white-centric adverts the emphasis leaned more towards the product, and the more non-white people there were the more the camera gazed at them.
I believe there are a number of software devs here. Are there any Linux / C / embedded devs here that would be willing to mentor or offer some signposting for a (near) total beginner on writing what ought to be a simple single function program? By which I don't mean "make a mobile app", I mean "read this one function call from a piece of hardware and print the value to the terminal".
I've gathered a few of the concepts but I don't have enough knowledge to grasp whether they're the right way to approach the matter and whether I'm focusing on the relevant level of abstraction.
Edit: Help is being provided. Thank you Motters.
5434a
4mo ago
what do you think will be mainstreamed after heterosexual anal intercourse?
We already know the answer to that: BDSM/fetishes, "ethical non-monogamy", analingus, camming, sugar babying, and transgenderism and its associated tumblrisms. The question is what's left? Pedos, furries, unironic incest, cyber relationships with chat apps, and the clickbait of people who want to either marry themself or their favourite inanimate object. The consistently conspicuous-by-its-absence taboo seems to be celibacy, which has become half a by-word for school shooting lone wolf terrorism.
5434a
11mo ago
No, because that obscures more than it reveals. Using a description of "a masculine woman" provides a more useful and accurate description than "man", especially if "man" also now includes masculine women.
Modern gender theory is inconsistent, contradictory and circular. Trying to reason with it is pointless. It by turns enforces then conflates distinctions between sex and gender and within sex and gender to suit its ends. Under this theory your question of whether it's appropriate to label a person a man can only be answered by whether that person wants to be labelled a man or not, which ignores that by advancing this theory the label has become an empty signifier that reduces to "is this person a person with person-like qualities". There is no there there.
5434a
1yr ago
Competing for female attention in latin dance totally fits my model. Here's my completely uninformed stereotypes of open classes (I assume the competitive level acts as a filter), please correct or confirm.
Rock'n'roll/Ceroc/Lindyhop: High metabolism neurodivergents with that weird blend of woke politics and retro aesthetics.
Salsa/swing: Casual singles. Divorcees dancing with unmarried tech workers and suave manlets.
Kizomba: As above but the divorcees are older, hornier and outnumber the men who are scared off by the more direct sensuality.
Tango: Trad types who like rules and following them. Etiquettists.
Ballroom: More stable relationshippers, enjoy the glamour, inclined to take the activity seriously and with all the conflicts that follow.
Street: DDR variety Asians, retired b-boys, female actual-dance-students polishing their moves.
Not sneering, I could probably fit in with nearly all of them to some degree.
Given that the activity involves dancing all night how pervasive are drugs? What's the drinking culture like? I guess the need to both be coordinated and coordinate with another person puts a natural ceiling on that aspect.
5434a
1yr ago
Object restoration hobby videos. A lot of them are suspiciously clickbaity but some are more straight forward. Clickbaity ones tend towards digging up a cosmetically damaged high value object like a Rolex, the straight forward ones are more like restoring a rusty antique bench vice or a pair of bespoke leather shoes.
Big Clive. An affable Scottish electical engineer who dismantles and analyses the circuitry of discount shop gadgets.
Techmoan. A man who buys and reviews a mixture of high end vintage hifi components that were out of the ordinary buyer's reach when released, or low end Amazon novelty hifi components that are beyond the ordinary buyer's good taste.
SoftWhiteUnderbelly. A retired commercial advertising photographer conducts open-ended studio interviews with the inhabitants of Los Angele's Skid Row. This is the one I'd most recommend to Motte readers for the obvious sociological aspects. The common thread running through many of their narratives is a shitty childhood that the person assumes is basically normal. While they often have a sympathic story reading the comments is mind boggling to see people praising pimps, johns and heroin dealers with bottom shelf platitudes about what nice boys they are. It's like they watched The Wire and can't tell Bubbles from Snoop.
IsaacArthur. A man with an amusing accent (Virginia?) analyses sci-fi technology through the lens of real world engineering possibilities.
This guy who builds huts and other primitive technologies in the woods by himself
The ones I've watched always seemed dubious, it might just be the one channel I landed on. A guy makes a beautiful swimming pool in the jungle using only a knife and a bucket... hmm. At the least it seems like they always pick a spot with the softest, loosest, most diggable dirt in the whole world. There's never half of two brick walls buried four inches down.
People doing traditional crafts (especially Japanese art craft like urushi and kintsugi, wagashi making etc)
Link it up. I love watching craft and Japanese woodwork videos.
5434a
1yr ago
There's lots of programmers and software devs on the internet, you can hardly move without encountering them. Seems like there's a lot less sysadmins and network engineers. Clearly both are deeply engaged with the internet as a technology and equally essential to its functioning. Am I right to think it's because programmers have a lot more free time to shitpost leading to a skewed impression of the tech landscape? Maybe network engineers just call themselves programmers to save on splitting hairs when talking with laymen? Or can software engineers do all the network tasks if they need to but chose software because it's a better salary? It shows up in the "learn to code" memes too where people offer advice about leetcode practice but I rarely hear anyone suggest getting a Cisco cert. On the other hand I sometimes read posts by software developers who admit to having no idea how anything works outside of their IDE.
Asking mainly out of idle curiosity but if I ever get to the point where I need to look for a job in tech I feel like I'd be more inclined towards network tech than working in a game studio or brewing up a new algorithm for FAANG.
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?
Ah, I was going to suggest something small scale to reduce costs (electronics, crafts, etc) but motor issues rule that out. Gardening might have been a good substitute but if you live in an apartment in Alaska then that's probably not going to work either.
Still if you can think of something that suits your situation I think it can help with the "why get out of bed, what's the point" problem. Seeing something that makes physical progress, that you direct, that presents discrete problems to solve, and that you can point to whether to show other people or just to yourself provides hard evidence that you're making an impact on something. It also gives you a clear objective where upon completion you can make a judgement of whether you've succeeded, failed, or can improve. I think all those aspects are valuable to mental wellbeing and not half as legible in areas like religion/community, exercising, or creative-aesthetic-intellectual activities.
Edit: Reading more of your replies (not much money, government hand outs) maybe consider starting a cash-in-hand pressure washing business? The equipment is cheap enough to make it low risk and small scale, the work isn't fine skilled, you can earn some money, you leave things noticeably better for your efforts within minutes, you can work alone part-time or build it up into a legit business, and having seen a few pictures of Alaska it looks like all the slush makes everything constantly flithy meaning repeat business. Sure it's not a "higher" purpose but keeping things clean and getting paid is a positive sum contribution and should be sufficient for basic self/social esteem. If you're really savvy you don't even have to buy any equipment to start, just make some flyers and see if there's any interest before you lay out any cash.
As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
More options
Context Copy link