Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor.
I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."
Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.
One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children
I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.
and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies
That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.
Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups?
It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."
Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists”
Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.
and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.
This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
I agree that we should bring back "cad" as a condemnatory term.
This whole case makes me see nothing but bad faith on all sides. Lefties want women to be able to retroactively retract consent for sex that days, months, or years later they decided they didn't like. Righties don't want men to be held responsible ever for wanting to get their dicks wet, not even to the degree that we might say "Tut tut" and socially shun him. Or I guess we can do that but if and only if we also agree that women are property.
( * Not all lefties, not all righties. Just the ones who seem to have very strong feelings about whether it's okay to criticize either Neil Gaiman's life choices or his ex-lovers'.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
Man, that post is a blackpilled take completely divorced from reality.
Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published. Sure, very few women have ever actually read it, but even fewer men have - that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)
It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha. Horseshoe theory strikes again, I guess. Something something Hlynka?
The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives. But the tonal and thematic differences between stories like 50 Shades (or John Norman's Gor series, which has some female fans as well though it's mostly aimed at men) and The Handmaid's Tale are pretty dramatic. I haven't seen the TV show, but no part of the book makes it sexy or appealing even to men who like the idea of dominating women or women who like the idea of a domineering man. The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists. I can't say I can speak for Afghani women but let's say I have grave doubts about Dread Jim's belief that those women and ISIS brides are actually living in sexually satisfied bliss being literally owned by men who treat them as chattel. The women who are really into Christian Gray imagine a billionaire giving them his undivided attention and care - the point of the fantasy is that even if he's rough and controlling, he only has eyes for plain little ol' her, and they have super-hot sex, but then she's allowed to continue living her life as the cherished object of a rich man who's actually devoted to her happiness, not a religious fanatic who will beat her if she lets another man see her elbow.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Trump could EO himself a billion dollars and as long as he stops immigration, deports all the migrants here and stops all funding for the foreign wars / foreign aide I'd still vote for him.
Well, hell, I'd at least think about voting for him if I thought he could or would carry out some of his grand promises. Every politician promises he will deliver incredible things, and if you vote for him and say "I don't care if he steals a billion dollar as long as he does all the things he promised to do" you are being taken for a rube.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?
I think you are being a little unfair here. I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval. Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged. And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends. Sure, TikTok was full of people screaming in dismay that the shooter missed, but do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?
I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
On the flip side, the enthusiasm for Harris is genuinely hard to understand. I accept that the firmware update worked as intended and people really mean it, but it is genuinely puzzling to me what they're seeing that they're excited about. The answer is apparently as simple as the fact that she's 60 and lucid rather than 80 and comatose, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't really get me to understanding excitement.
From what I have seen, in my very blue bubble, it's 90% the euphoria of believing you were doomed and suddenly realizing you have a good chance of winning. Immediately after the attempted assassination of Trump, the mood among Democrats was bleak indeed. Pretty much everyone believed the election was basically Trump's to lose, and Biden gave little reason to hope.
The DNC had no real mechanism to force Biden to withdraw, and I was pretty convinced he would never do so voluntarily. Even if he did, I thought they would have to have an emergency primary, with the unappetizing choice of Harris (who until five minutes ago was considered an even worse candidate than Biden) or equally bad prospects like Gavin Newsom.
That the Democrats actually pulled off (1) getting Biden to withdraw, (2) instituting Harris in his place as a fate accompli, and (3) making it seem like a smooth transition, was actually a pretty impressive bit of political maneuvering. Republicans spent a little while trying to generate crocodile tears about the undemocratic nature of the process, but not only did this not stick, but the whole thing basically pushed Trump's post-shooting boost right out of the news cycle.
Now it's increasingly looking like Harris's race to lose. All the stuff being thrown at her and Walz look like cheap shots that aren't landing. Of course the Democrats are ecstatic. I was personally convinced Trump was going to win, and now if I had to place money, I'd bet on Harris. I think she will have to screw up hugely, or Trump will have to pull a hat trick of the type that is not really his forte, for her to lose. Any October surprises or sudden catastrophes will only help her.
To be clear, I absolutely agree there is nothing about Kamala Harris personally to inspire excitement. She's a political nothing (like most VPs, to be fair). But the fact that she's basically a generic Democrat with nothing terrible in her closets (as far as we know) and will be the first (POC) woman president is enough to make Blue tribe giddy at the prospect of the Revenge of Hillary Clinton.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
It's not illegitimate for a candidate to withdraw. Was he pressured? No doubt. But who actually disagrees that, even if the polls weren't bad, he's not fit to be President for another four years?
I just don't believe anyone is honestly upset at any alleged violation of democratic norms. Notably, I don't see many Democrats complaining about this turn of events. I see Trump supporters mad that the Democrats found an "out."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14d ago
You have repeatedly heard from men (I will add myself to that pool) who can tell you from their observed experience that this is not true, that most guys around them don't have insurmountable problems either dating or getting laid, and that those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.
Frankly, I believe my lying eyes more than I believe a collection of blackpill-curated stats from places like the Institute for Family Studies.
I'm sorry you are having such a struggle, and honestly, the dating landscape does look kind of awful right now (speaking as a guy who was pretty awkward and had a number of other strikes against me in my youth) and I am glad I'm not on the market. But the blackpill is not going to do you any favors. Even if your pessimistic assumptions are true, you ask, "Now what?" Now go out there and get in the game and stop making excuses, that's what. No one is going to hand you pussy or a relationship, and if you have to work harder at it than grandpa, well, every era has its challenges. You probably don't want to deal with the other things grandpa had to deal with.
No, the game is not rigged against you. No, there are not zero acceptable single women in your city. No, the solution is not to contrive reasons why women should not have agency to choose.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
Thank you for the response. Apologies if I don't cover every response (a lengthy quote-and-respond chain can get very lengthy), but let me address a few points where I think we either disagree or you misunderstood my objections.
I think a lot of people are more open-minded than you think.
I will take your word and your lived experience for it on this, but my own impression is that (a) most trans women think they pass much better than they do (because most people are polite and aren't going to go out of their way to tell you they know you're trans), and (b) most people are open minded, but you probably think "Accepts my identification and agrees with me when I talk about trans rights means they really think I'm a woman." You might be disappointed if you knew what everyone really thinks. I don't really know, any more than you do, how many people who say TWAW really, truly believe it - neither of us can read minds or hearts. But my own suspicion is that it's less than would admit it.
About trans women athletes: I haven't studied the issue enough to produce statistics, and trans women are sufficiently rare that there probably aren't conclusive statistics yet. We all know the high profile cases like Rachel McKinnon and Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard, et al - the cases of mediocre male athletes who suddenly blow away their competition after transitioning are pretty numerous at this point. The response from trans rights activists is always similar to yours: "Trans women don't win every competition they enter!" And what seems to me like a lot of handwaving to deny that having a male-sized, male-muscled body with testosterone (even if reduced post-transition) is a major advantage in pretty much every athletic competition. I mean, if 10 years from now we have solid evidence that trans women do not, on average, perform at a higher level than women of similar age and experience, that would be interesting, but I have to say from the small sample sizes we can see now, I am very skeptical. Certainly every time I see a trans woman standing next to women in a rugby or a boxing match, I cannot understand how anyone can claim there isn't an obvious problem there.
Look at the other direction of transition: If someone is taking testosterone, and performs in the male athletic range, do you really want to keep them in the women's league just because they were born with a uterus?
I think as a matter of legality, it would have all go the same way, one way or the other: either trans women compete with women and trans men compete with men, or everyone competes with their birth/biological sex.
I am not aware of any trans men who after taking testosterone have become competitive in a men's sport. Are you?
The fact that (a) we don't see a lot of trans men trying to join men's teams and it hasn't been an issue because (b) any trans men in a men's league would be crushed and everyone knows it, is evidence of my point, that biologically, you are still going to compete with the body you were (mostly) born with.
About locker rooms: look, I agree that in theory, if we had a more open culture around nudity, maybe this would be less of an issue, but my problem is not that I think teenage girls will be traumatized by seeing a penis. (Nowadays, they've probably seen one about five minutes after they first got a smartphone.) My problem is explicitly the bad actors who want to show their penis to women in a locker room, knowing that it will make women uncomfortable. They are, to put it bluntly, exhibitionists if not worse, and saying "Well, if we were all just more comfortable about nudity" is missing the point. Again, I know these trans women are a minority, but I have read enough stories to know they aren't singular incidents either; there is a very small but very aggressive minority of trans women who really seem to get their jollies by making women (and girls) feel uncomfortable in female spaces. Whether it's because they think this is some sort of sitting-at-the-lunch-counter stand for trans civil rights, or just garden variety harassment and exhibitionism, it is definitely doing nothing to convince me they are acting in good faith. And I can't say I am impressed by an argument like this:
You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?
Dude (I say with tongue somewhat in cheek), as a penis-haver (past and/or present), you know damn well that we don't "show off our penises" at the urinals. You have to kind of go out of your way to see another guy's junk in the bathroom, unless he's waving it around.
Which is also unfortunately the pattern I have heard from these penis-in-the-women's-locker-room stories. Men and women will both walk around naked in the locker room, but generally speaking, they don't like... display themselves, or go so far as to stand in front of another person giving them a belligerent full-frontal display. How often have you seen that, honestly? If someone walked up to you buck naked in the locker room and just stood there trying to engage you in conversation from an arm's length away while letting it all hang out and no effort to cover anything up, would you not consider that... strange? Especially if they are a stranger? Come on now.
I simply don't get the idea that women are UNIQUELY scandalized by penises, but guys should all be totally okay with it.
I mean, leaving aside the whole sexual assault survivor thing (some women probably genuinely are freaked out by seeing a penis in what is supposed to be a woman's space), I can say I was at a convention recently that decided (because everyone there is super-woke) that all the bathrooms would be "agender." Most people, of course, still used the "men's" and "women's" rooms as appropriate for their equipment, but while I was standing at the urinal, one woman (who I happen to know is one of those super-woke people and probably calls herself non-binary or something) walked out of a stall and past me. And you know what? I felt uncomfortable. Not threatened or anything, just -- neither of the bathrooms were crowded, so she decided to use the men's room to make a point. And it annoyed me.
Aww c'mon, that's heat, not light.
Well... I will cop to being a little snarky there, but honestly, Admiral Rachel Levine really does strike me as someone who is cosplaying a fetish. Maybe she really, truly does identify as a woman and has always felt female, but I am pretty skeptical, because her entire presentation is that of a man who knows she looks like a man and wants everyone to know it and dares you to say something about it.
As for Rowling and Imane Khalifa, I honestly don't know enough about Khalifa's status to pass judgment. To my knowledge, Rowling didn't say she was trans, she said she was a man. Which may or may not be true, either biologically or legally. I have defended Rowling in the past because I think a lot of the attacks on her are made in bad faith, but I think Khalifa's case is, at the very least, complicated and she probably spent the first part of her life believing she's a girl, which makes me less hasty to call her a man myself and I wish Rowling had reserved judgment as well. But I'm not a famous billionaire who's made this my personal cause (nor been subjected to attacks over it for years). I think someone who is (most likely) an intersex person with chromosomal abnormalities who grew up as a girl is a pretty edge case and a distraction from central trans issues.
I think this really depends on where we are in the world. There's plenty of countries that make my existence illegal, so I think overall trans people are in a lot more danger than you are. If you meet me on my home turf, I've probably got some ability to make things awkward for you, but I really doubt I could get you fired or cancelled or anything.
I live in the US so that's where I am talking about, not someplace where you could be killed for being trans or gay. I can't say I find it reassuring that you basically say "Well, I probably couldn't actually threaten you" but it seems like you would if you could.
"Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in the previous 6 months were highest for female inmates (212 per 1,000), more than four times higher than male rates (43 per 1,000)." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/
If someone wants to be put in with the more dangerous group, I'm not really clear what the controversy is?
Okay, I skimmed this paper - can't say I read it in detail, but it sure doesn't make it easy to separate out sexual victimization by staff compared to sexual vicitimization by other inmates. Let's say that women do prey on other women in prison at a higher rate than men prey on other men. I can think of a number of explanations besides "Actually, women are the more dangerous group," but it definitely doesn't suggest that a trans woman being put in a woman's prison is in more danger from the other female inmates than she is to them. Especially if said trans woman used to be a violent rapist and has undergone no physical transition. Yeah, I saw that Orange is the New Black episode where Laverne Cox gets jumped by a bunch of other women. Let's say I was not persuaded of its verisimilitude.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
What if only men would legally allowed to make some type of a decision, and their wives would be only allowed to argue against them and threaten with divorce (a no-fault divirce at that, as abortion of a child the father wants alive isn't, according to (my understanding of values of) democrats, grounds-for-divorce), would democrats call such decisions as anything other than solely his own?
Yes. It's harder to think of an example of a decision that "only a man can make," for reasons of biology, but one that comes to mind is getting a vasectomy. A man can absolutely get a vasectomy without his partner's approval or knowledge, but a lot of women would consider doing so without consulting her (especially if she wants children) to be a deal-breaker. And it would be a dick (heh) move to do that without talking to your partner.
More generally, making any kind of huge financial or life decision ("I am going to quit my job," "I just bought a new Cybertruck," etc.) is the sort of thing you can legally do but most people would agree is a shitty thing to do unilaterally. And those sorts of decisions are mostly made by men.
Or suffrage: woman talking to her husband about her political ideals wasn't illegal, but because she wasn't issued a ballot, feminist consider the husbands vote as representative solely of his values and the woman disempoweted.
Most people probably understood that a wife was probably going to have some influence on her husband, but it was also understood that a husband could and would vote however he wanted without consulting his wife.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
I think he was actually closer to the mark there. You can see the hypocrisy when someone like KulakRevolt, for example, is calling for all of England to be burned down over the Rotherham gangs, as if he doesn't hold promiscuous fatherless girls from the lower classes in utter contempt himself. When all your grievances are formulated around tribal affiliations, you can argue that it's okay when we do it and bad when they do it, but you can't argue that you genuinely care about young girls being mistreated, and that sort of gives the game away when you're trying to convince people they should be outraged at rape and grooming when your actual objective is to stir hatred against your alien outgroup.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.
I don't think it has "always been" like this.
I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.
But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.
The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.
This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).
So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.
I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:
liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.
This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?
Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.
I don't think you have a set point that demands you eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. I think you have a habit of eating that much, and if you stopped doing it, yes, you would feel like you are "starving" until either you give in, or your body adjusts to a lower intake.
I am not speaking hypothetically. I am a former fat person.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
I'm not sure what about this reply made you think I would want to get you fired/cancelled. Could you elaborate? I already said I was against siccing HR on people who used the wrong pronouns for me at work, so that seems like a pretty big disconnect
Sorry, I misunderstood that part about "I could make things uncomfortable for you." But as I said, I would not intentionally misgender you. I wouldn't tell you "I believe trans women are men" (even if it wouldn't bring HR down on me). I would, however, assume you have a certain set of beliefs and attitudes that make it very risky to draw attention to oneself as potentially not trans-affirming. I realize this might be unfair, but that's how things work nowadays.
Oh, I found that super weird when I was growing up. Quite a few guys discovered I was not comfortable with that, and would go out of their way to make me uncomfortable. But no one seems to want to do anything about that. So... again, why is it okay to expect little boys to handle this, but grown women can't?
Sounds like bullying, and those guys were assholes, and in an ideal world it wouldn't happen, but in the real world kids have to put up with a lot of shit they shouldn't have to. We mostly expect kids to grow out of that behavior, and adults not to have to put up with it.
Presumably we should treat that person like a criminal? Sure, it's a hard problem, but so are the bad actors who want to show their penis to little boys. We still let gay people use the bathroom, though.
But the problem is we don't treat trans women who wave their penises around in locker rooms as criminals. Unless they're literally committing assault, someone who does that, even if very blatantly doing it as a display of dominance and exhibitionism, mostly can't be restricted in any way.
A man who goes out of his way to show his penis to a little boy in a locker room might not technically commit a crime, but ya know, people would know and recognize what is happening and definitely take action. Because he's a bad actor and we can identify bad actors. But we are not supposed to identify trans people as being bad actors even when it's pretty obvious that's what they are. The trans woman strutting around with her cock on full display in the women's locker room is doing it to make women uncomfortable, and women who have reported feeling uncomfortable have been told they have no grievance (or even been kicked out themselves).
This isn't comparable to inadvertently getting a glimpse of your neighbor's dick while standing at a trough urinal.
... okay? What's your point? People feel uncomfortable when I use the men's room, for exactly that reason. If my trans-masc friends show up in the women's room, it makes people SUPER uncomfortable. If it makes you uncomfortable, why do you want more of it?
I don't, and I think generally speaking people should be able to use the restroom they "identify" with, and yeah, that means maybe some people are uncomfortable seeing someone who doesn't clock as the "right" sex in their restroom. My point was that I think this woman was being a bad actor (in a very small way). I believe she wanted to make me and other men uncomfortable to make some sort of point. I could be uncharitable in my interpretation of the situation (there are other explanations - she genuinely identifies as male or non-binary, she didn't know which restroom she walked into and she really had to go, she thinks gender is stupid and genuinely thinks no one should care about that, etc.) but it made me think that was a tiny sample of what a woman would feel like if someone with a dick wanted to make sure she saw it in the women's room. I just didn't understand why she didn't use the women's room.
I mean, presumably we have methods for handling violent rapists in prison? I'm sure there's at least one lesbian violent rapist out there.
There is probably at least one. But come on, are you not seeing the same news reports I have? How many women getting assaulted/impregnated by a trans woman would be enough to make it a problem? (And yes, ideally there should be zero sexual assaults in prison regardless of sex, but I don't see why we should make an already bad situation even more exploitable by predators.)
If you're willing to bite the bullet and say "anyone with a vagina is female"... I mean, I could still quibble and debate, but I'd honestly consider you more of an ally than an enemy in today's political climate.
I would not agree that having vaginoplasty makes you female (I will still consider them a male who had surgery, sorry), but I would consider it enough of a commitment to living as a woman that women's prison would be more appropriate.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women.
I agree with your distinction between pedophile and child molester, but not with this equivalence. A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children. A heterosexual male is someone who wants to have sex with women. Having sex with children is by definition child molestation. Having sex with women is not by definition rape, unless you are Andrea Dworkin. So your theoretical ethical pedophile who never acts on his desires (I assume such exist, though I admit I'd be skeptical of any individual's claims that they never ever have or will) is still someone who fundamentally wants to molest a child.
Whether you can "rehabilitate" them depends on whether you believe that sexual attraction to children is something inherent in their sexuality (which would make it equivalent to a sexual orientation) or a dysfunction that will respond to psychological treatment. From what little I know of the literature, most psychologists are not optimistic about the potential to "cure" pedophiles. They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
I tried Reverend Insanity, and even allowing for a rough translation, the writing was crap.
But this has been my experience with almost every progression fantasy/wuxia novel I've tried. I didn't like Cradle either. I think they're just not for me. But I don't understand how people aren't bothered by tedious exposition about Gu levels written in head-hopping inconsistent tense.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7mo ago
My personal social circle is unhappy and distressed and posting lots of doomer posts, but mostly sane. They think the world is going to suck with Trump in charge, but they aren't threatening to leave the country or start underground railroads or join the 4B movement.
Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Sorry for the heat
A rant about how much you hate your enemies and can't wait to see them get the rope is always going to be hard keep within the rules of discourse here, but all your "you" statements put this well over the line. The first part of your post was okay, but when you tell another poster that you want to see them, personally, suffer, that is too much heat.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
That was part of the religious rules, yes. Before the modern concept of martial "rape", a man was entitled to take his marital rights from his wife. Consent didn't enter into it; she gave consent when she agreed to marry him, and such was irrevocable.
Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Well, the problem is for SS, all Jews (modulo some tiny fringe who agree with him that yes indeed, we Jews are awful!) are evil.
It's rough! Ignatiev's beliefs are awful. But not Jewishly awful. Still, SS is more sympathetic than Ignatiev.
Eh. They both basically want to eliminate their outgroup. I suspect Ignatiev's agenda is probably not literally exterminationist, so fwiw I find him more sympathetic, but that's like choosing which woman on The View is more intelligent.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
20d ago
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
You know, without this passive-aggressive snidery, I would have just warned you and pointed out why we don't want people to rush to post "BREAKING NEWS" just to be the first person to post about it.
But since you clearly did it knowing the rules, and really did just want to be FIRST! Banned for three days, so this discussion will be happening without you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
Who's "us"?
I agree Scott got soft, but stability and family making you more mellow and less of a firebrand is an eternal cycle, it's how things are supposed to be. It's why Kulak in his incessant calls for violence never actually talks about building things, starting families, falling in love, having children. Men who have lives and families to care about don't want to burn down the world.
I think you are being a little naive here. Not disingenuous, but you are presenting something of a straw man. You're basically making the Marie Shear argument: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
Now to steelman this, I know what feminists would say is "Duh, we know anti-feminists don't think we're literally not human, we mean they don't treat us as people like themselves with agency and full equal rights." Which would be fair enough, but if you look around (even in a place like the Motte with no shortage of anti-feminists), you will find very few people who think women aren't "people." Yes, we do have a few posters who literally do think women are p-zombies or should be property, but they are a minority.
The people here who oppose feminism are mostly not tradcons who want to repeal the 19th (though there are some of those too). They are people who have grievances with feminism as it manifests today, particularly third wave or "intersectional" feminism. Such "currently-not-widely-adopted" feminist philosophies would be things like #BelieveWomen, which is a classic case of motte-and-bailey, the Motte being "take women's claims of being harassed or assaulted seriously and don't assume they're making it up," the bailey being "Believe any woman uncritically and never express doubt about a rape story," even if it doesn't pass the sniff test.
Intersectional feminism is what also brought us trans ideology, which got many previously feminist women terfed out. JK Rowling, unambiguously a committed feminist, is now called a fascist and worst by many modern feminists, simply because she doesn't agree that trans women are women.
I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility. The memes are kind of mean, but they also aren't... wrong. (I note that the linked article makes an earnest argument that "AKSHUALLY the problem is when men flirt and it's unreciprocated!" Which entirely misses the point.) I think of people like Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valente, who were vanguards of modern third wave feminism and are some of the most bad faith writers I've ever had the misfortune of once taking seriously. They are practically memes themselves, with zero self-awareness.
Saying "feminism is feminism" and you don't split it into "waves" is kind of like a Christian saying he doesn't split Christianity into denominations. Well, great, you can say "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship with God" all you want, but it is, in fact, a religion, and people ostracize, cancel, and even kill each other over denominational differences. I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences, but as JK Rowling would point out, they most certainly care about them even if you claim they don't exist.
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