Celestial-body-NOS
🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate.
2yr ago
Utilitarianism is based on false premises and is a terrible basis for a system of morality.
Utilitarianism is the worst form of moral system, except for all the others that have been tried.
Society has to pick and choose whose safety to prioritize in this instance
Prioritise the safety of whoever is in more danger.
it should come down hard on the side that's doing what its supposed to do.
And where will you stand when the leopards eat your face? When someone bigger and stronger than you decides that something about your life, that contravenes no legal code in the jurisdiction, is 'not doing what you are supposed to do', and that he is entitled to suppress it by force?
Consider Thomas More:
And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – Man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
A transwoman, in existing publicly while appearing as the gender opposite that associated with her genitals at birth, has broken no law of Man (at least in North America or Western Europe); do not cut down Man's laws against assault, lest you call up that which you cannot put down.
Celestial-body-NOS
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2yr ago
Even if the Aitchbeedee hypothesis is true, that does not make black people's condition hopeless; nor does it justify slavery or Jim Crow laws.
It means that nature herself is racist, and reparations are owed in the form of IQ-increasing genetic engineering disproportionally paid for by white people and East Asians.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1mo ago
Re "We need him for the football team", I would like to state at this time that the same phenomenon is not unheard of with white perpetrators.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
You can say, as a matter of principle, that no ethnostate should exist.
The problem is that it practically seems to end up as "Israel in particular should dissolve itself first". People find that suspicious.
I believe that Israel might very well be the only justified ethno-state; every invocation of '109 countries' by certain political tendencies only serves to strengthen that conviction.
Celestial-body-NOS
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5mo ago
to keep our honor clean
That ship sailed, and was turned away, in 1939. Unitedstatesian acts in defence of Israel can be justified many ways, but one of them is to restore that honour.
(Also, Iran supported the Houthis, and the Houthis touched our boats.)
Celestial-body-NOS
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6mo ago
the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely."
There are those who would favour deporting some people (those who have individually done Very Bad Things), but believe that it should be done by a different agency with a less bloodthirsty institutional culture.
Prior to 2003, deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants were handled by the same agency processing documented/legal immigrants; this may have resulted in fewer xenophobes and more Lawful Neutrals.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
If the alleged gang members had been treated more humanely (e. g. at or above the Geneva-Convention standards for POWs, long-term plan for their release following the dismantlement of the gangs), one would have been able to make the argument that the Salvadoran Government's actions were justified.
The actual conditions to which the alleged gang members have been subjected would not have been justified even had they been convicted beyond any doubt in regular trials, and were definitely not justified given the looser standards of evidence allowed.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
Would Putin accept any settlement short of "I get some of what I want now, and come back for the rest later."?
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9mo ago
He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception
Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state.
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
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3mo ago
But is Mr Wara objecting to his group being treated as equal when he thinks it entitled to superiority, or is he objecting to his group being treated as inferior when it deserves equality?
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3mo ago
So there'd be a lot less nastiness in the world if we didn't make a habit of regularly putting anyone in a position where they 'feel powerless'? "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.", indeed.
Celestial-body-NOS
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5mo ago
'Late' can also mean 'recent' or 'current'; viz. the War of Southern Treason being called 'the late unpleasantness'.
...there are a million 'bad decisions' a guy can make in a bar that will 100% get him beat up....
...society ... mostly treats barfights over dumb shit as plus-or-minus [consensual]....
Yes, I am aware that there are many ways in which our society falls short of perfection.
If Adam and Bob get into a bar fight, with Adam being the first to escalate to physical attack, then Adam not being charged with assault does not mean that Bob was not wronged, any more than a lack of response to Charles stealing David's bicycle means that the bicycle in question was Charles' property all along.
(Although I could see the case for dismissing charges against Adam if Bob had referred to Adam's ethnic group as 'cockroaches', or called Adam's disabled relative a 'useless eater' or a 'life unworthy of living', or accused Adam of some grave act of moral turpitude such as sexual assault against an infant; but anything short of that....)
if the aggressor is too hard to ignore
...which includes any instance in which the aggressor is substantially stronger, or arranges to have a half-dozen friends when the victim is alone. (If it is two people of approximately equal strength inflicting approximately equal damage on each other, one could make the case for limiting the societal response to a sternly-worded "Don't. Do. It. Again.".)
maybe you meant to say 'protecting women from extralegal violence?'
No, when I said 'people' I meant 'human beings.' The principle¹ that Alex should not be obligated to follow the demands of Bob the Random Nobody merely because Bob happens to be stronger than Alex does not depend on Alex's gender.
¹A principle originally dating back to at least the Bronze Age, even if inconsistently applied.
To bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, so that the strong shall not harm the weak."
-- Code of Hammurabi.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
do you really think there’s going to be another Holocaust? ... Jews will be safe in the west for the foreseeable future ....
In 1900, would anyone have thought the Shoah would have been started by Germany?
If you brought someone forward from that era, told them that there would be a persecution and mass murder of Jews on an un-precedented scale, and asked them to guess what country it would come from, I suspect most people' first guess would be Russia, possibly followed by France.
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.
I am suspicious of any hypothesis which allows people to think their cruellest instincts justifiable.
Celestial-body-NOS
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2yr ago
"It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just discarding certain people who happen to be a net loss to us."
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2mo ago
By then Trump will no longer be president and it will be someone else's problem.
Hopefully, someone who knows more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery!
Celestial-body-NOS
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3mo ago
Yes; Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and H. sapiens sapiens.
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4mo ago
I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them
the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks
One of these things is not like the other....
Celestial-body-NOS
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4mo ago
Ok, so then this goes straight back to my pedophilia example. If I can't even condemn pedophilia because it's "disapproved of by the Community" and the community can sometimes be wrong, then, what, are we supposed to play cultural relativism and pretend that every standard across every society in all of history is just as valid as any other? (After all, the ancient Greeks really loved pederasty.) I don't accept that.
No, we condemn or tolerate things on the basis of whether or not they harm other people.
This is an extremely naive view to take.
It is not 'naïve' to disagree with you.
There's a reason I said that it's exponentially harder for a woman to remove an unwanted man from her space. A woman is unlikely to want to confront a man; she likely fears his almost-certainly superior strength.... It's much easier for a woman to tell off another woman if the latter is being creepy or weird than for a woman to tell off a man.
The same applies to a 99th-%ile-size cis-man harassing a 1st-%ile-size cis-man. Should we have facilities divided by size as well as gender?
Well if your only exposure to trans-identifying women is through online pictures, then sure, they do pass more easily than trans-identifying men. If you actually look at them in real life, though, not so much.
I used online pictures because Markdown does not have a 'link to Real Life' formatting option. The one trans-woman I have knowingly met in person did not appear to be obviously male.
I disagree, see my response to the toupee fallacy.
Your response was, anti-quote, "...making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman."
Making a dugout canoe is much easier than making a Falcon-9 rocket; does that mean that anyone who thinks that they are connecting to this forum via Starlink is delusional?
Really? The policy is further away from what I'm trying to accomplish? How so? Because compared to your proposal of abolishing gender segregation, the policy would result in exponentially less incidents of sexual harassment.
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'Exponential' does not mean 'big change'; it means that, given equidistant a, b, and c, c / b = b / a, as opposed to a linear relation in which c - b = b - a; if you only have a and b, the difference between 'linear' and 'exponential' becomes meaningless. (Also, it's 'fewer', not 'less'.)
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The 'proposal of abolishing gender segregation' was if I were designing society from the ground up. Going forward from the society we have now, acceptable options from my view would include any compromise in which passing trans individuals are not compelled to out themselves, less-than-passing trans individuals are not compelled to confirm any suspicions held by bystanders, and neither are required to affirm the anti-trans worldview, in order to participate in public life to the same degree as cis individuals.
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If what you are trying to accomplish is a reduction in harassment, a policy of 'Do not harass others' is closer to your goal than a policy of 'Do not use the cross-gender facility', in much the same way as a policy of 'Do not commit murder' is closer to the goal of reducing murders than a policy of 'Do not possess any scary-looking device'.
Are you seriously claiming that gender segregation is just like administering extrajudicial violence to a suspect before even convicting him at trial?
No, I am not claiming that one is just like the other; I am claiming that the difference is a matter of degree.
In both cases, one has a justifiable purpose, and is tempted to take a shortcut that will make accomplishing that purpose easier at the cost of adverse effects on a small number of innocent people.
(But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din
List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within
They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.)
Silence doesn't mean disavowal, it usually just means lack of knowledge.
And how many trans people are familiar with the cotton-ceilingers?
You seem to have switched standards. Literally in the preceding paragraph, you said "most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd", implying that silence is disavowal. Now here, you notice silence from gender-critical people, and interpret that as... endorsement of sending trans people to death camps?
Please pick a consistent standard by which people should disavow the more extremist parts of their faction.
I am attempting to apply the same standard to your side that you apply to mine.
"Most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd" was a response to your statement about people avoiding mention of the New Zealand Agriculture Webbed Site.
A consistent 'silence = disavowal' standard would support your statement, but would undermine claims of relevance of the more extreme pro-trans voices.
A consistent 'silence = approval' standard would mean that you can blame the trans activists for their more insane allies, but you will then be blamed for the eliminationist attitudes on your side.
A position of 'silence = disavowal when it's the right wing and calls for LGBTQFHTAGN+ to be [insert Deadly Euphemism]; silence = endorsement when it's the left wing and calls for the deadnames of mid-career-transitioned celebrities to be memory-holed' means that I'm not the one who's being inconsistent.
I'm confused why you seem to keep tracing things back to genitals and gonads. I don't care about people's anatomy, I care about what gender they are. I don't need to think about genitals in order to look at someone and recognize what their gender is.
And the dispute at hand is what gender certain people are; thus I am attempting to replace the symbol with the substance.
To point to a category that includes Taylor Swift and Elliot Page, and excludes Breakfastnook Cowcatcher and Caitlyn Jenner, I can either refer to 'karyotype=XX' or 'parts at birth=ovaries'. The former runs into the issue that, sometimes, someone with one set of chromosomes will develop the organs usually produced by the other chromosomes; the hormones, and all other biological features, will follow, and the individual will not know that anything unusual has happened unless they have their DNA tested, which is not a universal procedure.
Do you genuinely, honestly think that switching genders is as easy as switching hair color?
I wasn't the one who brought up hair colour. You asked, anti-quote, "So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?". I was merely applying my principles to your example.
This is a fully general counterargument against asserting any claim with any confidence, ever.
No, it is a caution against asserting that "My claim is different from that one because it just is!" while ignoring that, from outside, they look veeeery similar.
A "trans woman" is already announcing his biological characteristics to everyone in the area by simply existing
Then why do so many cis-women get accused of being men in disguise?
Please point me to literally any case where this has happened. Actually, point to at least three, since you said "usually". I've never seen it happen.
Dani Davis, Lake City, Florida, 2025.
Jay Rose, Las Vegas, 2023.
Aimee Toms, Danbury, Connecticut, 2016.
Jasmine Adams, Staten Island, New York, 2023. (Not even in a women-only space!)
Kalaya Morton, Tucson, Arizona, 2025.
Ok. I think this is a noble principle, and it is also a quite banal one that I don't think anyone would disagree with. But it's also just kind of not really relevant here. None of my arguments require knowledge of private medical history.
If Alice is a trans-woman who looks more feminine than 20% of cis-women, the only reason that 'Alice was born with XY chromosomes and everything downstream thereof' isn't considered 'private medical history' is to support the house of cards that is our narrow concept of gender roles, some of which are younger than some members of the U. S. Congress.
That we don't have the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo CRA/ADA). Which seems like a pretty radical proposal for how society should work.
That 'right' ought to have gone out the window in the 2010s when a supermarket floated the idea of using Big Data (the predecessor of AI) to identify which customers were on a fixed budget and make their experience deliberately unpleasant so as to drive them away and focus on people to whom they could upsell.
Celestial-body-NOS
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7mo ago
Some of those protesters may be operating under an 'ingroup good outgroup bad' mindset, but there is an ethically consistent schema fitting both of their beliefs.
The following exchange occurred regarding the recent ... unpleasantness ... in Venezuela:
Anonymous:
Getting mixed messages here about state sovereignty from the “borders shouldn’t exist” crowd
argumate:
Delta Force should be able to go wherever they like in the world as long as they don’t shoot anyone when they get there 😤
The same could be applied to 'ICE out of our neighborhood' protests; "They are welcome to live here, visit here, buy from shops here, apply for jobs here, but not come in and haul away our neighbours who were minding their own business."
Celestial-body-NOS
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9mo ago
Women are a potent political force but an incompetent military/policing one
But will it stay that way, if a disproportionally male faction wages war against a disporportionally female faction, seeking to reduce them to a state of subjugation?
"God made men, and God made women, but Samuel Colt made them equal."
Celestial-body-NOS
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1yr ago
the classes of people he thinks are responsible
Turbulent priests?
I'm still hoping that Lord Dampnut and the Deep State take each other down, and make room for something between Bernie Sanders and Scott Alexander....
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