Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4hr 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.
5hr 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.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
5hr ago
Ok and...? My opponent making the same style of argument as I am does not make my opponent correct or refute my argument.
No, but your having made that style of argument first does put you on thinner ground when you claim that your opponent, in making that argument, is behaving inappropriately.
I notice that your examples have the sexes match, implying that it's acceptable to accommodate women who don't want to change in front of men. So you think that it's okay to have sex-segregated spaces.
So do you think sex-segregated spaces shouldn't exist at all then?
If I were designing society from the ground up, there would not be gender-segregated spaces. A man preferring not to expose himself to women and a woman preferring not to expose herself to men would be accommodated by the same means as a man preferring not to expose himself to other men and a woman preferring not to expose herself to other women.
The examples I gave had the sexes/genders match because I was alluding to precedents from outside the 'what policies ought we have towards trans individuals' issue.
You seem to think that "trans women" are just women who happen to not be born a woman, like a woman who has dyed her hair color. In reality, "trans women" are men.
Saying "You think P. In reality, ¬P." does not prove ¬P.
Why do you doubt trans-identifying women wouldn't be allowed in a women's facility?
DuckDuckGo results for 'trans man'
DuckDuckGo results for 'trans woman'
Which of these do you think would raise more eyebrows using the ladies' room?
First off, the number of strangers is going to be limited by geographic area.
Hence 'potentially'.
Over the course of a year, I would estimate the number of strangers for a particular locker room to be orders of magnitude lower, maybe in the range of thousands.
Which is still too many people to know personally (last time I checked, the upper bound was estimated at approximately 150.)
Second off, yes, it's still an intimate space. It's a space with the social norm of respecting other people's privacy.
Yes! I am in favour of respecting people's privacy! That is why I do not condone requiring people to publicly declare or confirm private information about their bodies in order to use public facilities.
In particular, most of them prohibit photo-taking and video-recording, and if one were to just loiter and not do their business of changing but just sat there and watched, they would arouse suspicion from others.
And this would still apply even if everyone involved is the same sex/gender by every possible definition.
But you can still tell that they're women, and not trans-identifying men.
I'm sure there's some trans people who aren't perverts, but they aren't doing anything to reduce that impression when they don't disavow and shame the "cotton ceiling" activists. I don't see Chinese robbers holding conferences on how good it is to rob places and then getting zero pushback from other Chinese people.
And has Ms 'I want a locker room without people born with male bodies, and am willing to settle for 20% of the total' disavowed and shamed Mr 'round up all the [anti-trans epithet redacted] and dispose of them'?
(That famous picture of the Nazis burning books of which they disapproved? Those included the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which had promoted the rights of LGBTQI+ individuals during the 1920s.)
Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex.
those parts, and other people's bodies in general, are none of your business.
Note the bolded part.
Which things, exactly, are trans people not allowed to do? They can still use changing areas, they just have to use the one that corresponds with their birth sex (which is the same thing a non-trans person has to do).
"Which things, exactly, are black people not allowed to do? They can still use the bus, they just have to sit in the part that corresponds with their race (which is the same thing a white person has to do)."
Didn't fly then, won't fly now.
You seriously think it's just as appropriate (if not more so) to levy an accusation of sexual deviance to females who don't want to undress in front of men, than the men who want females to undress in front of them?
I think it is more appropriate to levy an accusation of sexual deviance at a cis-woman who pursues her desire not to undress in front of natal-biology!men not by petitioning for one-person curtained changing booths but by prying into other people's bodies, than at a trans-woman who wants to change clothes without declaring to everyone in line-of-sight that she was born with male parts.
Is this hypothetical person an actual problem that needs to be addressed? Because I'm struggling to think of anyone who would fit the description.
It is a reductio ad absurdum, also known as 'high-energy ethics'.
Most people just want to know what sex someone was born as.
"And people in hell want ice water."
By this extremely high standard, if I'm a bouncer and I see a man stumbling around, yelling something about "the Jews in the clouds" and he wants to gain entry into my club, I can't declare him forbidden from my club based on an educated guess about his medical history (that he is possibly schizophrenic and mentally ill). Do you think that policy makes sense?
That is why I said 'unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason'. It helps to read the entire sentence.
WRT your hypothetical, there are two critical differences:
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P(anti-social behaviour|schizophrenic and ranting about alleged Jewish conspiracies) >> P(anti-social behaviour|biologically male).
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It is reasonable to not let him in solely because of the anti-Semitic ranting, even if he isn't schizophrenic, and has documentation from a dozen psychiatrists attesting to this.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
7hr ago
[the set of people who are overwhelmingly likely to be pro-trans] ... blood libelling me for being part of the murder gender
I do not condone that, either. An individual ought to be judged by their own actions, not by the actions of an arbitrarily-defined group of people who are of a similar demographic.
Ok, so what about kleptomania or pedophilia
A kleptomaniac forbidden from pilfering my personal possessions and a paedophile forbidden from soliciting my five-year old daughter are not being forbidden from things other people are allowed to do, they are being forbidden from things that are forbidden to everyone else.
I'm not interested in the pretense that it isn't a sexual deviance. It pretty clearly is, on its face in fact
And what is your definition of 'sexual deviance'? To me, 'it harms people' is a necessary qualification for membership in that category. If one has a 'frowned upon by the local curtain-twitchers' definition, then two men in a lifelong monogamous relationship would have been considered 'sexually deviant' in the 1950s, and a man devoted to his wife and not interested in relations with other men would have been considered 'sexually deviant' in Classical Athens. If one has a 'goes against the Natural Law' definition, we don't have access to a set of tablets on which the True Natural Law is inscribed, and Natural-Law arguments tend to turn into just-so stories about why the Natural Law forbids exactly and only the things that the local curtain-twitchers don't like.
Which is why the motte of the anti-trans argument centers around "they are completely unwilling to accommodate for anyone else"
And what accommodation are they not making that they ought to make?
If it is 'allowing people who do not believe that Trans-Women Are Women to continue in their employment', per the initial incident pushing J. K. Rowling towards public TERFism, then you might have a point.
If it is 'they insist that society apply the same rules to trans-woman as cis-women, the same way the Civil Rights marches insisted that black people be allowed everything white people were allowed, and wouldn't/won't let the majority have a little discrimination as a treat', then I do not believe that it is reasonable to expect them to accommodate, just as, if Alice wants Bob to stop bullying her, and Bob wants to continue bullying Alice, Miss Take is completely out of line if she expects Alice to compromise.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
1d ago
In any event, I take it that in your view, it's reasonable for society to refuse to acknowledge truths solely because doing so might possibly result in harm. Is that correct? And this applies universally, not just in connection with policymaking. Correct?
Not quite, and less so after this conversation.
In the academic, theoretical, seek-the-truth-though-the-heavens-fall, separated from policy implications realm, one is justified in applying scepticism equally to any and all claims, and maintaining an estimate of their probability greater than 0% percent and less than 100%.
Thus, in this realm, I assign non-zero probability to the hypotheses that Black underperformance is caused by:
- Ongoing discrimination by white people
- Lack of resources due to past discrimination by white people
- Cultural factors caused by past discrimination by white people (seeing everything one has worked hard to build burned down by an angry mob, as in Tulsa and Rosewood, is not exactly conducive to a culture of bootstrappyness)
- Genetic factors, constituting discrimination by Nature
- Something else I haven't thought of.
I also assign 100%-minus-a-tiny-bit probability to the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer, and 0%-plus-a-tiny-bit probability to the hypothesis that the observed correlation is caused by Alien Space Bats aiming trans-dimensional gamma beams at the lungs of anyone they see practising that particular vice.
On the other hand, in the realm of public policy and practical implications on the lives of human beings, it becomes necessary to consider how much harm a hypothesis might cause, and hold some hypotheses to a higher standard of proof on that basis. Thus the genetic hypothesis of racial gaps demands a very high standard of proof to be let in the door of the legislative building, because there are many people who are still sore that the Damyankees came into the south and imposed at bayonet-point their cultural values, such as checks notes requiring them to pay the people picking their crops, and have been taking it out on Black people ever since. In a timeline where the most conservative states have an Overton Window centred on Scott Alexander, such a hypothesis would be less dangerous, and could potentially be safely acknowledged in the legislatures at a lower standard.
(If the genetic hypothesis were confirmed to the same confidence as the 'sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you' hypothesis, I would favour redirecting the money currently spent on sensitivity training into researching methods of increasing IQ.)
black underperformance is primarily the result of past discrimination by non-blacks
Not necessarily; if the genetic hypothesis is true, then, while Black underperformance is the result of discrimination, no human beings of any race are to blame; furthermore, if you anthropomorphise Nature as a Black woman, as in this Apple advert....
(When I saw that advert, I wanted to see someone call security, then cut to the interrogation room on NCIS, Leroy Jethro Gibbs comes in, slams down that picture of a botfly larva emerging from a child's eye, and asks her what she has to say for herself.)
Oh my God, I can't tell the difference – they're exactly as sexually deviant as each other!
I am not equating the sides in sexual deviance, so much as pointing out that accusations of sexual deviance were not first levied by the pro-trans faction.
Getting changed in front of a male person makes me uncomfortable and I don't think I should be expected to do it.
I believe that a cis-woman uncomfortable changing in front of a trans-woman deserves the same accommodations as a white woman uncomfortable changing in front of a black woman, or an Englishman uncomfortable changing in front of an Irishman; namely, it is reasonable to ask for one-person changing areas to avoid having to change in front of anyone one doesn't know; it is not, in my opinion, any more reasonable to demand a 'cis-women only' facility (or an 'officially people born with female parts only facility', but I doubt trans-men will be welcomed) than it is to demand a 'whites only' or a 'no dogs or Irish' facility.
Women who want to protect their intimate spaces
Is it still an 'intimate space' if four billion strangers are potentially allowed to walk in willy-nilly?
Likewise, plenty of trans women just do look ridiculous. Maybe you think it's not polite to point it out, but I know you think it. Don't tell me you look at this person and think to yourself "wow, what a hot sexy lady! I would love to take a gander at those bizarre prosthetics she's wearing under her top!"
Plenty of cis-women look just as ridiculous.
many trans women barely even pretend to hide that their "identification" is just acting out a sexual fetish.
gross fetishists who are openly, proudly addicted to sissy hypno porn and hold conferences on how to "overcome the cotton ceiling".
Yes, there are trans people who are perverts, just as there are cardiologists who are murderers and Chinese people who are robbers. That does not make all trans individuals perverts.
If, as you imply, gender-critical people's obsession with trans people's genitals is borne of sexual deviance
It is not necessarily born of sexual deviance, but that does not change the fact that those parts, and other people's bodies in general, are none of your business. If Alice wants to know the precise dimensions of my private parts out of carnal desire, Bob wants to know for statistical purposes, and Carol wants to know because she thinks she can predict the future by the bodily measurements of a randomly selected person, I am equally entitled to tell all of them to bog off.
If someone is loudly parading their perversion around for all and sundry to see, it's not wrong for me to accurately characterise it as such.
I don't agree with your assertion that transness is a perversion.
Meanwhile, trans activists are demanding a) the right to expose their genitals to female people who have made it abundantly clear this behaviour makes them uncomfortable, and that b) female people get undressed in front of them, even if doing so makes them uncomfortable.
If Dana averts her eyes because she is uncomfortable seeing Erin's nether regions, or undresses behind a curtain because she is uncomfortable with Erin seeing hers, she has not acted wrongly toward Erin. If Dana demands that Erin not be permitted to use the same facilities, Erin is justified in complaining. This applies if Erin is a cis-woman, and it also applies if Erin is trans.
trans activists want a special dispensation to commit acts which would otherwise be considered indecent exposure or voyeurism.
No, they want to be allowed to do the same things as cis individuals are allowed to do.
we both know which of these two groups it's more appropriate to level the accusation of sexual deviance against.
No, we don't. I legitimately disagree with you.
I have re-read the linked posts and have not found anywhere where I have claimed that you refuse to tell us why you think you're entitled to know about the genitals of complete strangers
A transparent lie. You said:
The anti-trans faction, believing themselves entitled to know, and act on the knowledge of, the genital/gonadal configurations of strangers, then started referring to 'sex' instead of 'gender', 'males' instead of 'men', and 'females' instead of 'women'; thus allowing them to make the assertion that other people's genitalia are any of their business without being seen to make said assertion, and avoid anyone asking why they are concerned with other people's anatomy.
I said that before you explained your reasoning.
If you really, honest to goodness, think that I need to see someone's full medical history in order to accurately tell whether they are male or female, I really don't know how we're expected to proceed with this conversation. Are you blind? Are you composing these comments using text-to-speech?
In the hypothetical, I am referring to someone who wants to know things other than 'was this person born with male- or female- associated biology'. Philosophy Bear's concept of 'inadmissible knowledge' gives the example of someone whose father is a murderer.
As an aside: I pointed out to you last time that some other aspects of a person's medical history simply can be inferred just by looking at them. If you're obese, myopic or using a motorised wheelchair, it's meaningless to complain that your right to medical privacy has been violated when people notice this just from looking at you.
You can make educated guesses about someone's medical history by observation, but you are not entitled to know whether your guesses are correct; nor are you justified in declaring what is permitted to one to be forbidden to another based on it, unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason, well beyond the correlations associated with biological sex characteristics.
Maybe I'm terminally Quaker-brained, but I don't think it's generally right for what someone is and isn't allowed to do to vary based on accidents of birth.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
1d ago
Why then do you insist on using the extremely long-winded phrase "genitals and their sequelae" when the word "sex" would capture exactly the same distinction?
To replace the symbol with the substance, i. e., replace a disputed term with its definition.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
2d ago
Pretty soon all that fire and brimstone is gonna turn into your grandpa getting all het up about men wearing belts to church instead of braces; what barberism.
And some of them are even trimming their beards during services!
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
2d ago
always a dirty right-winger because agriculture
Apparently, true progressives photosynthesise....
or that choice of flag.
I'd like to see a story where one side has the politics of a certain Austrian painter wrapped in a soft pastel uwu aesthetic, while the other side has the aesthetics of the III. Reich and 1990's/2000's liberal politics. (In TVTropes terms, A Nazi by Any Other Name vs. Putting on the Reich.) Too many people, while they learned that the Nazis were bad, lack understanding of why, and treat it as an axiom; this is a house built on sand. Knowing that 'totalitarianism and racial narcissism are bad; the Nazis did those things; therefore the Nazis were bad' is the house built on rock.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
I will acknowledge that, due to the norms against racial discrimination established during and after the Civil Rights Movement, the danger is less now than it would have been in earlier decades; however, these norms are eroding at an alarming rate.
Explicit discrimination existed, and left Black people poorer than they otherwise would have been.
Jim Crow was far more harmful to Black people than any of the attempts to remedy it have been to others.
I can see the argument for a higher standard of evidence for blaming particular people or institutions for discrimination.
I have considered many potential explanations for the continuing poor outcomes among Black people, both orthodox and heretical; all of them seem to, ultimately, trace back to discrimination against them, although that discrimination is not always done by human beings.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
I'm really sick of you trying to make me (and other gender-critical people) sound ridiculous and/or perverted
And how do you think a trans-woman might feel, when people characterise her identity in such a manner?
imply that anyone who isn't maximally trans-affirming is a sexual deviant
The pro-trans side was not the first to use that particular tactic.
"Sex" is not reducible to genitals. Male bodies are not just female bodies which incidentally happen to have penises bolted on.
No, they also have testicles rather than ovaries; all other biological differences are downstream of the hormones produced by these organs, hence 'sequelae'. (definition)
FtttG thinks he's entitled to know about the genitals of complete strangers, but refuses to tell us why!!
I have re-read the linked posts and have not found anywhere where I have claimed that you refuse to tell us why you think you're entitled to know about the genitals of complete strangers; I am rejecting your claim that your reasons justify the intrusion on people's privacy.
If you walk into your manager's office and you're like "I want to see all my cow-orkers' complete medical charts, which will help me make Bayesian inferences on which ones are most likely to go postal, so I can shun them.", how amenable do you think your manager will be to your request?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
dingeroth
Sounds like a location in World of Warquest, or something of that kidney.
Do you really expect that conclusive proof of the inferiority of blacks RE: IQ and crime would lead to the reinstation of such or similar laws, as if society hadn't changed at all since then?
Society has changed, but it hasn't changed enough, and seems to be backsliding in some ways.
If there were a universally-(modulo-lizardman-constant)-acknowledged taboo against judging an individual by the actions of his/her/their demographic group, I would be a lot less worried. (cf. my discussion with @FtttG regarding discrimination on the basis of natal genitals and the sequelae thereof)
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
Ok, so in your view, societal recognition that blacks are less intelligent and more criminal would necessarily lead to the reinstatement of racial segregation in the South.
Do I understand you correctly?
No. It would not necessarily lead to such; however, defenders of Jim Crow often cited the alleged mental deficits and supposed inherent criminal tendencies of the Black population; thus, it is not as far from possibility as I would prefer.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
Germans were stereotyped as lazy bums interested only in eating and drinking.
...and intellectual pursuits.
"In the beginning, the good God gave to the French the dominion of the land, to the English the dominion of the seas, and to the Germans the dominion of the clouds." --Jean Paul Richter
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
Are you able to be a little more specific about how public policy would necessarily look if society believed that "Black people are less intelligent and more criminal"?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
Libya disarmed their nuclear program and then we promptly proceeded with regime change resulting in the public torture and execution of its leader.
There were eight years and a Ghaddhaffist massacre of dissidents between those events.
when you create a situation where it’s obvious that there’s not enough goodies to give the majority of people the good life
Maybe don't do that then? (This is why I find the leftist embrace of Gaianist degrowtherism to be less than logically coherent with their stated commitments to "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", and lean more toward Leigh Phillips Thought as a more effective route to the realisation of those principles.)
EDIT: I have realised that there is a grammatical ambiguity in my response. The 'that' which you ought not to do refers to 'create a situation where...', not to 'give the majority of people...'.
We apologise for the inconvenience.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
3d ago
Would you apply the same standards to the claim that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer?
No, because the consequences of getting it wrong are very different.
If a society believes that smoking causes cancer, and they are wrong, some people don't get to enjoy setting fire to foul-smelling leaves and covering their walls and furniture with discusting gunk.
If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
A job that shouldn't have been done; it would have been better if they had refused!
This is almost literally that meme from The Good Place!
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
virtually no Auth-Left or Lib-Left
And what am I? The two of clubs?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
I'm just saying that the differences we see between cultures are not hard-coded into our DNA.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
4d ago
...turn Japan into Afghanistan.
You mean the Sengoku jidai?
Admittedly it's not a perfect parallel, but it does go to show that countries can change rather dramatically.
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?
"I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are."
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