5434a
10mo ago
Trade. Off.
Either "woman" means something, and men ain't it, or "woman" means whatever men want it to mean. There is no Panglossian halfway point where heckin brave transerinos get to be court ratified Real Women and shitlord chuds have to validate them despite their sexist patriarchal "facts". Either transgenderism is epistemically empty and futile or we're all men and women in nothing more than as much as it suits our personal agenda in the moment.
As the incentives to play this word game and the disincentives not to do so continue to stack up the remaining barriers will continue to be eroded. And if people will play it for the sake of joining a no-stakes casual chat app you can bet they'll play it for the sake of preferential treatment in the courts, but I repeat myself.
5434a
8mo ago
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.
By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.
5434a
7mo ago
A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
5434a
1mo ago
If you mean what we call studded football boots then the only time I can imagine someone wearing them off the pitch would be if they were under 12 and so excited about their amazing new boots that they couldn't wait until football practice.
The main reason nobody wears football boots off the pitch is that the studs are hard and provide zero grip and maximum damage on hard floors. I'd expect you would get an immediate request to change them if you wore them at a gym. It's not a matter of bad taste, visually they're no worse than most trainers, they're just anti-practical. It's like wearing golf spikes at a bowling alley.
5434a
1mo ago
Any number of real medical conditions don't prove that Munchausen Syndrome isn't also real.
There's always been a small number of LGB and what we nowadays call T. The social sanctions on these people used to be very strong. Despite those sanctions gay men, for example, would still go cruising public toilets looking for strangers to have sex with. They might get arrested, or they might get their teeth punched out, but that didn't stop them. I think we can credit them with sincerity. Likewise there were men who went into the theatre scene where many eccentricities were tolerated and entertained and given a route for expression, eccentricities like pretending you're a woman on stage and then not fully relinquishing the role off stage. Outside of the theatre scene such a man might push and test the boundaries by exhibiting feminine behaviours, but the explicit claim of wanting to be a (or indeed already "being" an as-yet-unrealised) woman would have been met with disapprobation.
Skip forward and we have seen practically every major avenue of cultural publishing pumping out the message that being trans is something to be proud of, that being anti-trans is something to be ashamed of, and that the diagnosis of trans amounts to whether you've ever felt like you're not totally 100% sure that you fulfill all the expectations of your normal gender role.
It's late here so in short: sometimes you get things despite the disincentives (I'm here posting an ant-trans message right now!), you can reasonably expect to get much more of something if you remove disincentives and increase the incentives, and if people perceive the incentives are strong enough they will adopt an insincere position to acquire an advantage.
5434a
3mo ago
Heard a piece on the radio about this the other day. IIRC apparently what happened was they were paid equally per their contracted hours but the binmen were allowed to go home when their work was finished while the cooks and cleaners had to stay until the end of their shifts. The cooks etc then sued the council for pay discrimination because they were doing more hours active work for the same pay.
It's arguable that the binmen had finished their work, so why sit around the yard drinking tea just to fill out the hours. It's also arguable that the streets are never perfectly clean so why couldn't they pick up a broom and get to work refilling the bins if they've got a couple of hours left, they're not being paid to drink tea or leave early. Obviously at that point they stop working so hard because they don't have the incentive to finish early any more. At some point the council propose reducing either the number of binmen or their hours (and resulting pay) and you get a strike.
5434a
5mo ago
major subreddits [...] have all decided to ban links to X/Twitter
The cost is that those subreddits are largely composed of Twitter links and screenshots. Unless the whole ecosystem can coordinate a move to BlueSky they'll be left with little to offer their users. On the other hand coordinating a move to BlueSky is already clearly an item on the establishment agenda so Elon has effectively scored a big own goal here by providing such an exploitable rallying point to them on a silver platter.
5434a
7mo ago
I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?"
I think a better formulation of the question is: Can men who pretend to be women justifiably expect identical treatment as women? I'd say the answer is no, they can't expect it, they can attempt it and expect push back if/when their pretence is revealed.
Can men walk around dressed in women's clothes? Yes, I don't think a person's outfit requires the consent of other people assuming it adheres to basic modesty. That doesn't mean other people have to approve of it though, they just can't formally prevent it.
Can men wearing women's outfits walk into a women's toilet and expect to be treated as if they belong there? No.
Can men become so skilled at pretending to be women that they successfully deceive people into thinking they belong there? Yes, some of them can.
Does that mean they really do belong there? No, they're men.
And finally, some men and women are not accepted in their own toilets. You should't start masturbating at the sink or shitting on the floor, grabbing people to dance with them, asking them to show you their dick, tipping the bin over, smashing the fixtures or offering around a plate of finger foods. Being the correct sex is not an unrestricted licence to misbehave in a single sex area. Pretending to be the opposite sex is one of those unacceptable behaviours.
5434a
10mo ago
This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
5434a
3mo ago
You scored an average of 1390 over 10 rounds in today's EthnoGuessr!
Your best round was round 1 with 2696 points guessing ProtoEthiopid!
5434a
2mo ago
How narrow are your goalposts? Does it need to be on a par with Shakespeare's sonnets to qualify or is anything more intelligent than Love Me Do good enough?
There's a certain ceiling as rap is based on simple loops and unpitched AAAA BBBB rhyme schemes and the further you go beyond that the more you risk a counter of "that isn't rap".
Stan by Eminem is a fairly easy example of something that surpasses the guns, drugs, whores and gold stereotype without having to reach for a laboured meta analysis that the guns and whores are a reflection of those artists' social environment akshually and are being held up as an ironic means to confront society's hypocrisy ("I was only pretending to be a violent greedy thug!"). On the other hand a vast amount of rap genuinely is wilfully degenerate so I can understand why so many people condemn it and write it off wholesale.
5434a
2mo ago
Having separate words for talking about biological sex and gender is useful.
Yes, and we already do: Male/female and man/woman for sex, and masculine/feminine for gender. And people are already free to choose whether to be masculine or feminine. Sadly for those who would like it to be otherwise there are hard and inescapable limits on how far gender overlaps with sex such that no amount of changing one's gender will ever change one's sex.
If someone starts a Pretty Dresses And Nail Art Club then there's nothing stopping men from joining. If someone starts a Women In STEM scholarship grant it should be for women, not people in pretty dresses.
5434a
3mo ago
He could reason. Sports mean prizes. Winning means cash. If women were equally good at football you could make a stronger team by replacing the second best men with the best women and winning more cash.
The same principle is more stark in warfare. If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men? Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
As I talk about frequently on this blog, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of autism creating these blindspots. Are there two types of autism? It seems like there's one type that says "You utter utter moron, how could you mistake the northern lesser spotted arctic giullemot for its close cousin the lesser spotted arctic northern guillemot! Can't you see the distinctive circle around the eye doesn't fully extend to the beak? What?! Of course it matters!" And then there's this other type that says, I don't know, something like "The television must be true because only the best people are on television, and lying is bad, and the best people don't lie. That's just basic logic".
Can anyone explain this for me?
people would pick up location based hobbies
Kind of a tangent but I think there's a widespread problem with people ignoring their locale and imitating the activities of other locales. People who live in the mountains want to be surfers, people who live in the city want to keep a farmyard menagerie, people who live surrounded by pine forests want to make mahogany furniture, etc.
Instead of people grouping around the opportunities that are present and available you end up with people separating and going to lengths pursuing aspirations that aren't present or available. That's fine in moderation but it can diminish the base until there's not enough people to sustain the local activities that require that kind of group.
I feel it's parallel to how people continuously opt for breadth of experiences, whether that's foreign travel or high cuisine or multiple partners, and then lament a lack of depth in their lives when they come to a rest.
5434a
13d ago
Rod Stewart (age 80!) played Glastonbury this weekend with his customary troupe of sexy blonde model-looking backup singers/musicians in tight cocktail dresses. Out of curiosity I looked up who his wife is. A sexy blonde (age 54) who was a lingerie model when they started dating. His ex-wife? A sexy blonde model (for the same lingerie brand nonetheless). His ex-ex-wife? Another sexy blonde model. The ex gfs who were notable enough to make it into Stewart's Wikipedia entry? Sexy blonde models.
I don't care for Rod Stewart's music, I like his fashion sense even less. I'm not qualified to judge how physically attractive he is but at his peak he seems average at best? And yet whether it's by fair means or foul he's continually surrounded himself with sexy blonde models for more than 50 years.
In reference to his divorces, Stewart was once quoted as saying, "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."
I don't have a point, just adding supporting material. I'm not sure I get your point either. It can't just be "rich men like hot women", poor men do too! Rich men get hot women? Somebody has to, and if the choice is Man A, rich, or Man B, poor, it's understandable why a woman might pick the rich one.
Rich women exist too lest we forget, and according to the prevailing theory they don't care too much about underwear models and want to marry rich(er) men too. But rich men are already rich. What use does Bezos or Stewart have for a woman's riches? Woman A likes him because he's rich, Woman B likes him because he's rich. Looks like he'll turn to the tiebreaker.
And what of Mackenzie Scott's now 2nd ex husband? Where does he fit into this? Neither rich nor a model, but she divorced him after one year of marriage. Just #rebound things?
5434a
1mo ago
all of the physical changes can also be reversed in short order if you desist [...] Can reverse it later by stopping them whenever.
Voice breaking and breast development won't be reversed just to name two. That physical changes aren't reversible is pretty much the entire basis for puberty blockers. If physical changes were reversible the kids with gender misidentification could develop without interference until they were 18, or any age thereafter, then decide they weren't happy with their body and change it without any issue.
I want to add on that this kind of thinking seems to only occur around the trans-osphere. Nobody thinks that the 5'0 weakling with the weak chin can become a gigchad by taking some extra testosterone. At best he'll get bigger muscles (and smaller balls). Women and men around the world want bigger tits and dicks respectively, but the tits require surgery which produces ugly Frankenboobs and we still haven't cracked dick embiggening. But we tell trans identifying people that yep, with a little medicine, a bit of routine surgery and a ctrl-H to switch M and F in their paperwork they can slide into a whole other body. It comes over as somewhere between wishcasting and denial of reality.
5434a
2mo ago
Ownership is possession that is maintained via power, whether that is de jure or de facto, de jure just being de facto by formally distributed means. You can't create an alternative because you can't nullify possession.
Set aside legalities, if someone has possession of a piece of property and doesn't want anyone else to have it what are your options for taking it from them? Overpowering them. If you successfully overpower them and take possession yourself, how meaningful is it for the first person to say that they "own" that property while it's in your possession and they lack the power to deprive you of it? They could say that they're the rightful owner, but without a greater power to grant, recognise and enforce those rights they're not worth the paper they're not even written on.
I'm not a poli sci nerd but surely this has all been covered centuries ago. Hobbes, maybe?
The only plausible alternative I can think of is something like gay luxury space communism where there's such abundance that the value of material goods has come down to basically zero. Even then certain things can't be replicated, such as standing space at the top of the Eiffel Tower. At that point your faced with the problem of assigning that limited resource, and no matter what system or philosophy you come up with it will rest on you having the possession of that resource to enact your preferred method and defending it from others who would deprive you.
5434a
3mo ago
It depends how you define castration. The strict definition would be a double orchiectomy. If these chemicals made your balls wither up and drop off then yes, that plainly qualifies as chemically induced castration.
It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].
If you define it as anything that reduces normal sexual function then you put it on a vague and very wide spectrum and it becomes a matter of arguing the balance. The trouble is that would drag a lot of other things into the category. Too much whisky? Recreational amphetamines? SSRIs? It's starting to look like I've been chemically castrated a few times and it reversed rapidly with a good night's sleep and some eggs and coffee. What looked like a powerful rhetorical weapon to attack the trans movement finds itself a little impotent.
What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.
If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.
5434a
3mo ago
That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.
It's not that it's simple, it's that it's simplistic. It's intellectual garbage. Accepting it sincerely is corrosive to the very meaning it seeks to assume. It naively installs a back door to womanhood at the cost of collapsing the entire structure. What good is saying you are a woman if being a woman holds no more meaning than a kid saying that he is a t-rex? Should we alert the local zoo that we've discovered a living dinosaur? Why not?
5434a
7mo ago
Since my first exposure to it via /tumblrinaction more than a decade ago it's been TRA's persistence in presenting contradictory, circular and otherwise faulty reasoning as their basis for justification that frustrates me more than any idea of a man in a dress winning a sports match against women and then using the same changing room after the contest, or similar object level conflicts.
I'd be just as vexed if people made serious arguments that magic is real and that if you ruminate on it long enough your wish to learn magic can come true by forcing everyone to call your school Hogwarts, changing your name to Harry Potter and cutting a lightning scar into your head. Legislating for Hogwarts accreditation and arguing whether Griffindors are allowed in Hufflepuff dormitories is redundant.
What's crazy is that rather than getting laughed off the internet the tumblrites successfully coerced the real world into entertaining their fantasy by little more than using the threat of being shamed for intolerance on social media.
5434a
2mo ago
What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.
Re the second point, it's been shown over and over and over that if someone likes someone they'll let them get away with vastly worse behaviour than splitting the bill. I think it's spoofed status signalling. Those women like to be seen on social media as so in demand that they can reject any man who doesn't cater to them.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was exactly the women who have previously failed to reject the worse behaviour who feel the need to make these counter signals.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
5434a
8mo ago
Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.
No one's is. I think the intercontinental, intergenerational (intersectional? a dirty word around here) scale of the internet makes comparisons nearly useless while also allowing almost any reasonably credible explanation to find enough support to pass as "true".
"You could meet someone at work" say 1000 people who work at bars in LA.
"I can't meet anyone at work" say 1000 guys who work in provincial warehouses.
"You can meet people at parties" say 1000 people who like to go clubbing in NY.
"I don't go to parties" say 1000 guys who like programming.
"You can meet people through friends and family, or at church" say 1000 Mormons in SLC.
"I was raised by 4chan and social workers after my dad abandoned my alcoholic mum and the only people who go to church are old or weird" say 1000 guys from the underclass.
"You can meet young, fun, attractive women online" say 1000 20somethings who live across the street from a middle tier university.
"Apps are full of divorcees and single mums" say 1000 40somethings who live in low turnover commuter towns.
Then a statistician comes along, shoves them all into one box and finds that 50% of people find someone at work/at parties/at church/online/etc.
It's like the blind men and the elephant. They're all true but without the full context people are talking past each other. This thread itself is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
On the other hand the internet is the only place where we can discuss this at length because workmates, party goers, friends, family, parishioners and statisticians alike are neither keen nor useful for sitting around IRL bemoaning one's dating woes at length, and maybe even less for proclaiming one's dating success. "Hello boss/barkeep/buddy/cousin/sir/professor, care to share some fully generalisable insight into why some people are struggling with dating? Not me though, I'm swimming in pussy. High five!"
Choose ten separate and unaccompanied strangers and then actively confirm which ones aren't single. As a trans woman you might have an intuition how different your approach and the results would be asking as a man or as a woman.
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