Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
No bio...
User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
15hr ago
This isn't possible. Specifically the word "ever". An industrial civilization with 1940s tech can make a nuke. "Ever" is a very long time.
Unless by 'they' one means 'the mullahs' regime'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
15hr ago
"I am a worm and no man" is not what the Strong [...] say of themselves
That might depend on the definition of 'worm'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
15hr ago
But I expect most people aren't so uncomfortable as to really desire that, and certainly the most rational amongst us realize that the cost of such a step would be insanely high, and the risk of something worse replacing it is real and serious.
That is addressed in the next sentence.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
1d ago
Apparently the bridge in question wasn't quite finished.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
1d ago
communism is dead
Not that certain capitalists are doing their part to keep it that way.... 🐸☕
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
1d ago
Prior to Tubal-Cain.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d 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.
-
'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'.)
-
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.
-
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
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
I asked for "rough" numbers. Please provide them.
Somewhere between 5% and 95%.
Current so-called "anti-racist" (to use your misleading phrase) policies cause DEFINITE harm, as opposed to speculative harm.
But the harm is, so far, smaller. Yes, it has the potential to get worse, which is why some of the wokists' policy proposals are so reckless.
would you agree that a high standard of proof is necessary before concluding (for purposes of policy) that black underperformance is the result of white misbehavior?
Depends on whether you mean 'misbehaviour by some white people, who may or may not even still be alive' or 'misbehaviour by the most recent white people to interact with the black people in question'.
As another poster requested, please illustrate your claim with three specific news stories.
Skokie, Ill., 1977: Municipal authorities prohibit neo-nazis from marching; the closest thing they get to anyone siding with them is the ACLU filing court cases arguing that their opinions, while terrible, cannot technically be made illegal per the 1st Amendment.
Charlottesville, Va., 2017: Far-right mob marches while espousing white-nationalist conspiracy theorieshypotheses; half the frelling country makes excuses for them.
Palm Beach, Fla., 2022: Former U. S. President, and leading candidate for his party in the next election, has dinner with known white supremacist; still gets elected two years later.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
And what is their policy towards Mr/Ms "I Just Hope Both Teams Have Fun!"?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
I'd say it's more Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the [Prairie]), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery)
That was the mainstream position prior to circa 1960; Western white people Could Do No Wrong, and everyone else was seen as half-beast. Then people realised that that view wasn't entirely accurate, assumed¹ that the opposite of a false claim must be the truth², and adopted the position that people of colour Could Do No Wrong, and white people were half-demon.
The truth of the matter is that cultures both in and out of the 'western' cluster have done both good and bad things.
"There are very few black or white hats in history; most are in the charcoal or slate range." --A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All
¹...and do you know what happens when you ass u me?
²"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken." --E. Yudkowsky
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
If you want to prevent your kids from being crazy wokescolds, don't take politics too seriously. Horseshoe theory: the opposite of the wokescold isn't the religious conservative, that's just a switch in valence. The opposite of the wokescold is the normie who shrugs and just kind of gets on with their life and ignores everything else going on around them.
So teach them to grill?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
Could the 'them' be Nature, which has beset us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys, struck down half of our children from the dawn of time until two centuries ago, and, if Charles Murray's observations are accurate, is an unrepentant racist to boot?
Human efforts to bring Nature to heel: arrogant hubris, or the Moral Equivalent of War?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
In the UK, mainstream-approved protestors allied with the US "No Kings" "movement" [...] despite the irony of them having a King
It was my understanding that said demonstrations in countries with constitutional monarchies used the phrasing "No Tyrants". (Note that the plenary powers Mr Trump is claiming go well beyond those of the British Crown.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
At that time, the Red-In-Name-Only¹ Peking Clique seemed to be lying in the opposite direction, concealing the true extent of the disaster to maintain the image of infallibility to which they felt entitled.
¹Does anyone have any examples of something that's red on the outside and brown on the inside?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
Why? Is there some sort of limited resource of charity, and me making that argument first means I have taken from the resource of charity, leaving my opponents less charity to spare, or something? Or does me making the argument mean it's okay for that argument to be applied to everything, including my argument? Why does it matter who said what first?
Because it is relevant to the question of "When, if ever, is it appropriate to claim or imply that someone's position is motivated by sexual deviancy?".
If the answer is "Never.", then a lot of apologies are owed by many people on the anti-trans side, starting with Ray Blanchard.
If the answer is "When they actually are engaging in such." then we have the follow-up question: "How do we define what constitutes that category?".
If the answer to that question is "Anything disapproved of by the Community." then you have the obvious failure mode that, many times, the community is wrong; e. g., inter-racial marriage in pre-1967 Virginia.
There's more to it than just a woman wanting to not to expose herself to men. Even if there were enough private changing rooms for everyone, there are still safety concerns with allowing men in women's locker rooms just feet away from where women are changing. The safest and most practical way to alleviate those safety concerns is to have gender-segregated spaces.
Again, that doesn't protect against issues with same-gender dyads, which can still have substantial disparities in strength.
The "trans women", because they look like men.
And the trans men don't?
It's impractical to know everyone personally enough such that one feels comfortable using a locker room, and it's not necessary to do so when the locker room is gender-segregated.
So it isn't possible for someone to be inappropriate towards someone of the same gender?
So are you against showing your ID to enter establishments that serve alcohol, then? That's confirming private information about your body (your age) in order to use a public facility.
Age isn't typically considered a 'body' matter.
Also, in what sense can gender be considered "private" when people can tell just by looking at you? That's like declaring hair color to be private. Age has a better claim to being private, since I've never seen anyone who was able to reliably and accurately tell exactly how old a stranger is without pre-existing knowledge, merely give estimates and ranges.
You can't always tell, any more than you can always tell when someone is wearing a wig.
There are plenty of trans people whom you don't know are trans, and there are cis people who have been mistaken for trans.
There's a difference between having rules and enforcing them. With gender segregation, there is a strong, bright line against a man entering the women's locker room. If he does so, it's immediately obvious to everyone that he's violated the rules and should be forced out if he doesn't realize his mistake and walk out immediately. Meanwhile, if we can't enforce gender segregation, it's much trickier to deal with rules violators. They can always claim plausible deniability that they're not actually taking photos or watching people, and if the offender is a man it's exponentially harder for a woman to confront him to remove him from the space.
This seems analogous to the man who dropped his keys in the bushes and is searching for them under the streetlight because it is easier to see. You have made it easier to tell if someone is violating policy, at the cost of the policy being further away from what you are trying to accomplish.
It is rarer for men to harass other men, or women to harass other women, but it does happen, and one needs to have a policy in place for that contingency; once one does so, one can apply the same responses to cross-gender harassment.
it's much trickier to deal with rules violators
And it's also much trickier to deal with murderers when you can't beat up the most likely suspect until he confesses that his entire family are rabbits, but sometimes we must choose between what is right and what is easy.
Just because there are 0.001% of cases where this isn't true, that must mean I can't tell the difference between women and trans-identifying men?
I can tell the difference between a door and a fake door, but there was one time I was in a deceitful maze and tried to open a door only to find it was fake. That means I must simply be unable to tell the difference between doors and fake doors.
It's a lot more than 0.001%; again see previous re toupees.
...many people avoid mentioning [Kiwi Farms] at all....
And most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd.
Are you saying that gender-critical people are aligning themselves with neo-Nazis?
I'm just saying that we've been down this road before, and Noticing a distinct lack of 'gender-critical people' responding to certain alarmingly-familiar rhetoric with unequivocal statements that, while they would prefer to have women's spaces that do not allow natal-anatomy!men, it is not worth the risk of trans people being sent to death camps.
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?
'Other people's bodies in general', in that instance, was referring to your claim that "Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex.", and referring to whatever biological characteristics are downstream of hormone levels, which in the absence of artificial administration are produced in the genitals, specifically in the gonads.
However, for the sake of argument, we will consider your example.
Noticing that Alice has dark hair and Bob has light hair: ✅
Telling Alice that, because she was born with blonde hair, she will never be anything other than a blonde, and excluding her from a brunettes-only space: ❌
Moreover, the nature of male/female differences justify gender segregation, while white/black differences do not justify racial segregation.
One, you are begging the question.
Two, there were many in the middle of the past century who asserted otherwise, with every bit as much confidence as you.
I also note that black-designated facilities were almost universally in poorer condition than white ones, while there's no reason to think that men's facilities are any worse than women's facilities
...other than the part about a trans woman, in using the men's room, having to announce her biological characteristics to everyone in the area, including some who consider her existence to be a personal affront.
There seems to be an assumption here that "trans women" look and act just like a woman in every other regard besides having a penis, which is simply not true. "Trans women" overwhelmingly look and act like men.
The trans women whom you know to be trans.
And from this assumption that "trans women" pass, you seem to be imagining a Karen who sits at the door of every locker room, asking everyone who enters if they have a penis.
That's usually how it ends up.
Ok. I'm legitimately confused as to what your point here is then. Obviously, it's not acceptable for someone to go up to a complete stranger and ask verbatim "what's in your pants?"
My point is that you are not entitled to information about other people's private medical history, beyond or to a greater reliability than you can gain by observing, even if knowing it would give you an advantage.
You wrote down four "very"s in a row. I assumed that meant the reason had to be extremely rare or held to a very high bar. I thought that "I think he's schizophrenic" would be a good reason, but I wouldn't consider it a "very, very, very, very good reason" because it's an educated guess and I could be totally wrong about it.
Ok, forget the anti-Semitic ranting then. I only included that to establish that he was schizophrenic, since many schizophrenics do tend to veer into expressing bigoted sentiments despite not actually holding such sentiments deep in their hearts (such as Kanye West).
'He is schizophrenic' is not a good enough reason by itself. Past or current anti-social conduct resulting from schizophrenia can be.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
The only regulation should be to make sure civilian chemical weapon and ammunition stockpiles are being mantained with best safety practices.
The current 'best practises' for chemical weapons in NATO militaries is not to have them at all. (They aren't even that useful.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
you can restrict everyone, but you can't restrict only certain groups
Because in the latter case, especially when said groups are a disjoint set with the people making the decisions, the relative weights of the costs and benefits get distorted.
In some circumstances, costs to the groups subject to restrictions are even perceived by the deciders as a benefit.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess.
We had evidence from the Diamond Princess pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being less dangerous.
We also had evidence from Wuhan pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being more dangerous.
At the time, how do you determine which of these is the anomalous result?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
9d ago
We kinda need other people to live.
Randall Munroe (xkcd) touched on this in 2014, in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, responding to Sarah Ewart's question "If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t the common cold be wiped out?".
The conclusion was that it would cause trillions of dollars in economic damage, and wouldn't be effective due to people with compromised immune systems acting as reservoirs.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
12d ago
Could've gone with the Rickover classic:
He is dead now. I trust God will treat him as he merits.
I can't find any reference to that anywhere; DuckDuckGo returns no results, the Wikiquote page for Admiral Hyman Rickover does not list such a quote either by or about him, and Wikipedia redirects 'Rickover' to the Admiral's page without any disambiguation page for others of the same name. Are you referring to the Admiral or someone else, and was the quote said by or about them?
Gives a fig leaf to the rudeness.
"I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are."
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
12d ago
So you deliberately destroy the economy so that nobody gets anything above bare survival?
No. I said that I am against degrowth.
either have absolutely nothing available to fight over, or so many resources that everyone can have everything they want and still have enough left
I am aiming for the latter. I apologise if that wasn't clear.
Integration sort of worked in the 1960s because it was part of the American golden age in which everyone could reasonably expect that a modicum of effort would allow them to own a house and a car and their kids could go to an affordable college and land a white collar job. In 2026, that’s no longer the case, homes are out of reach for most people, secure jobs are hard to get even as college becomes virtually unaffordable for most people.
That's the problem we need to solve.
The thesis of the linked monograph is, roughly paraphrased, is "Don't smash the machine, take it over!"; the machine being large-scale industrial production, which Mr Phillips desires be managed via the ballot box.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
12d ago
In the sense that ANY factual claim about the world has a "non-zero probability."
Correct. 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities.
So that I can understand your position, please tell me roughly what probability you assign to the following claims:
I am not certain of the exact number, but I believe that Charles Murray and Ibram Kendi are both more confident than is warranted.
And, if I understand you correctly, even the mere possibility of harm is cause to implement a high standard of proof, right?
It increases the standard of proof, to a degree proportional to both the likelihood and severity.
Also, does the same reasoning apply to policies which (1) assume that black underperformance are the result of societal discrimination; and (2) definitely (not possibly,but definitely) cause significant harm to white people?
The same kind of reasoning applies, but not to the same degree. No anti-racist government policy yet implemented in the West has caused as much harm to white people as Jim Crow caused to black people. (Some policies of private entities might qualify.)
Last, can I take it you are abandoning your claim that the norms against racial discrimination established during the Civil Rights Era are eroding at an alarming rate?
No.
If not, what's your evidence for this claim?
My evidence is that I have watched the bloody news for the past quarter-century!
At the turn of the millennium, explicit racism was treated as figuratively radioactive by both sides, and even those who considered people of colour inherently suspicious and 'other' still had to cloak their bigotry in innocent-seeming platitudes; everyone at least paid lip service to the notion that people ought to be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
Apparently we're not doing phrasing anymore...?
More options
Context Copy link