FarmReadyElephants
No bio...
User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
13hr ago
Edgy sacred-values trolling plays a lot differently in communities where nobody has kids than the opposite. Most of the people harshly opposed to Aella online aren't the same people living in her Berkeley circles
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
Sexual nihilism is considered harmful. There's a reason why the rationalist community has a very low TFR - I wouldn't be surprised if it were as low as 0.1.
There was a rationalist adjacent group in a certain city that banned Aella from their events, and I remember her complaining about it a few years ago. But that subgroup had a TFR of closer to 2.0. They didn't want someone throwing sex parties, being an open prostitute, and debating whether-or-not pedophilia was really that bad around their kids. She felt hurt, her friends felt the need to defend her, but its an unavoidable side-effect of basic social hygiene.
Sex is an incredibly powerful psychological force. People kill for sex, people die for sex, people throw away their careers for sex, they lose a fortune for sex, the commit crimes for sex, they bully people for sex. Jeff Bezos pissed away ~$40 billion to upgrade his lay. The best we've been able to do is cage that energy and channel it for pro-social and pro-civilizational ends.
People like Aella are smart enough to reason through the second and third order consequences of their actions. They just don't. Probably because they are directly benefiting from lighting civilization on fire. Cool. The rest of us don't have to put up with it.
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
And I thought The Motte could only by riled up this much by transwomen.
In some ways, Aella seems like a trans-transwoman — her sexuality and content is more typical of transwomen than of women. The rationalist community has a pretty high transwoman/woman ratio, so its predictable that the few women who are around have more masculine traits and interests.
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
This isn't to say she's a bad person or should be mocked or bullied, just that you should take her opinions on sex and romance with a grain of salt.
She is smart enough to know that the lifestyle she advocates is bad for most people and bad for the groups that she is a part of. They do more harm than good at the individual and communal level. And she still pushes them because she makes a living in the attention economy.
I guess being a selfish antisocial grifter doesn't make one a "bad person" on its own, but it's certainly not a good start.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
I've always wondered who were the psychos poisoning their own lawns in order to prevent beautiful flowers from growing
FarmReadyElephants
10d ago
I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings.
I definitely wanted to be a girl in some capacity as a child. But that's a desire, not an identity. I didn't "feel like a girl". That would be an incorrect interpretation of the feeling. I agree, someone of one sex cannot have any idea of what it feels like to be the other one.
How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.
After more than a decade of masturbating to exclusively trans-porn, I did sometimes experience a "phantom vulva" sensation while masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets. But the power of repeated fantasy is probably enough to do the job on its own for a number of people. Autosuggestion is a hell of a drug.
Personally, I view the trans phenomenon as more of a disorder of desire than identity. The dominant social script confuses desire for identity
Nowadays I don't even masturbate. I just have sex with my wife and I never get any sensations or desires anywhere in the ballpark of this.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Christ is risen, my friend!
FarmReadyElephants
2mo ago
I was under the impression that we do have a identification system for citizens. My newborn has to get a SS# to be added to my health insurance
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Russia's strategy up until the 2014 revolution was not expanding their borders (although Kiev was Russia from 1686 to 1991!), but in exercising soft power and diplomacy in Ukraine. They lost the soft war, so had to settle for a hard one.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Try to beat our Iraq kill ratio
Is this true? I would think the genetic distance between two Europeans to be smaller than that between a European and an SS African. The last common ancestor between any two Europeans is much more recent than between a European and a Sub-saharan African (something like 1,000 years ago vs 80,000 years ago).
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
We'll see how long Congress lets him hold the line. I'm optimistic that there's still enough fresh bravado in the Republican coalition to hold out for long enough to allow Trump's pressure to work.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election
Trump had high unfavorables and was hammered by the media. I think it's reasonable that a normal Republican (Ted or Jed) could have won after 8 years of Obama, though ultimately with a different voter coalition
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Interesting, thank you. That does give the President some short term discretionary leverage. But looking out on a longer timeline, Congress has the power to write spending bills that the President cannot stop
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
This looks like it fits in with Trump's strategy to increase executive power by refusing to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, like how he shut down USAID. This is still a legal gambit on Trump's part, and it's not clear that he will get away with it.
If he does hold back aid for even a short period of time, the media response will be withering. Zelensky is popular. Does he have enough time before the midterms to weather the storm and pressure Zelensky to come to the table?
People have commented that Zelensky's casual attire and his debating Trump and Vance in front of the media seems disrespectful or challenging to Trump. That's because it is. Contrary to Trump's claim that he has no cards, he does have a card - his popularity in Western media and the US congress. Trump has a thin margin in Congress and foreign policy is an area where a few Republicans are likely to peel off in support of popular wars.
Zelensky is betting that he is more powerful than Trump where it matters. If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky, then it is Zelensky, not Trump, that controls American Ukraine policy. The press conference and its fallout serves as a test of strength where Zelensky challenges Trump and then gauges the results to see if his assumptions are correct.
That still doesn't give Zelensky a path to achieving any maximalist war objective. But it does give him a path to retaining the status quo of indefinite American material support, which seems good enough to him for the moment. Trump may be the elected President of the United States, he may be taller, better dressed, and more objectively correct about the best path forward. But in an open democracy it is popularity that matters - not any of those other things. And the contest pits Trump against America's most beloved political celebrity of the last three years.
It's no accident that Zelenksy looks like a character from a Marvel movie (strong resemblance to Hawkeye in particular). It is a persona designed to appeal to the American public. The President has a few explicit powers that a celebrity does not. But when it comes to swaying the US congress, it is an even battle ground - popularity vs. popularity, celebrity vs. celebrity. Zelensky thinks he can get 51 votes in the Senate and he's not going to sign any compromise agreement until he is reasonably sure he will lose.
I just can't take the 1938 analogies.
In Russia and Ukraine, you have two countries that are reproducing well below replacement. The men that are dying will not be replaced. Hitler's plan was to depopulate Eastern Europe through mass starvation and then fill it with Germans. Russia's TFR is 1.8. The comparison is incredibly silly.
Nothing in the last three years makes me think that Putin has the resources, manpower, or desire to roll over Europe.
Russia has a clear causus belli with America extending our military footprint into Ukraine. And they have given us decades of warning that they would treat it as such. Kiev was the site of the founding of the Russian people, and it was a part of the modern state of Russia from 1686 to 1991, longer than the USA has been a country. Crimea was its only warm water naval base, and had been so for centuries.
Russia is not Nazi Germany, or even the USSR for that matter. It's not some intransigent ideological foe. It's a self-interested country going out of its way to act as predictably as possible and we can negotiate with it to our mutual interest. The United States is entirely in the driver's seat in how our relationship unfolds.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
It's qualitatively different for women. They are much easier to identify and they are weaker per unit body mass. There is less ambiguity about whether or not you can win a physical contest against them. And there is a built in reason why men would WANT to risk a physical conflict with them.
My ex had lived in SF for a time. Like most SF women, she dressed in a way to hide her sexual desirability and tried as much as she could not to walk alone through the city. Unfortunately, she was somewhat good looking and you can't hide a pretty face.
Short kings are more vulnerable than guys with bodyguard physiognomy, sure. But vulnerability isn't as core a part of their experience as it is for women. For women, it runs deep. Culturally, genetically, biologically - hundreds of thousands of years of vulnerability. If you could read the biography of every one of her ancestors that passed on her mitochondria, you would read many stories of warbrides and rape. Every culture has stories about the greater vulnerability of women, because every culture has experienced it.
For a man, the worst that usually happens is that you die.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
The language issue makes it hard to argue for your daughters rights in the more substantive cases. When the powers that be tell your daughter to be nice, or that her request for different rooming is a civil rights violation, how can she argue her case if she can't say "I shouldn't be forced to room with a man."?
The language issue prejudices all other issues. Powerfully. That's the point - to shape people's perceptions. To argue more substantive issues without pushing back on language requires pages and pages of qualification and apology, which is the situation we have now.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
The experience of being weak, small, and vulnerable is a core piece of the female experience.
As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him. It was a visceral, memorable experience.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
It's not just words when your daughter is being asked to room with a transgirl on the field trip, and she doesn't feel comfortable around him and doesn't want to room with him. Or your daughter is made to compete against a transgirl. Or, god forbid, your daughter goes to prison and is required to room with a transwoman.
(Rationalists are seldom in this position because they have very low total fertility).
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
The Zizians as we probably know are a rationalist murder-cult, followers of Jack "Ziz" Lasota, a non-passing preop MtF transsexual, which is an identity shared by many of Jack's followers. Yudkowsky commented on it on X, and I noticed he used "she/her" pronouns for Jack.
This seems to be the dominant social norm in rationalist spaces. In my experience I have seen rationalist spaces completely capitulate to trans language norms, even using altered pronouns to refer to people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.
I'm rationalist adjacent myself. I don't go out of my way to refuse to use someone's altered pronouns. I certainly have used chosen pronouns for people that pass and seem to engage the community in good faith. But I have a hard time adopting chosen pronouns as a rule. It seems to me that a social norm of always using altered pronouns weakens the defense against bad-faith actors. I've gotten comments deleted on rationalist message boards for correctly gendering various people in the news who seemed to me to be bad actors.
The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know. It seems important for the justice system. It helps explain his behavior. And it seems important for communities that are pattern-matching to filter future bad actors.
While I've spent a lot of time in rationalist spaces, I've also absorbed a bit of Gender Critical ideology. I used to have strong AGP urges, describing myself as a "lesbian in a man's body". But in my mid 30s I figured out that having an auto-erotic fantasy at the center of my sex life was isolating and would keep me from having the kind of family life that I desired. I began to detox from TG pornography and erotica, treating it much as one would treat an addiction. Gender critical forums were helpful for puncturing the balloons of my fantasy and helping me understand how some could see my TG roleplaying as anti-social behavior.
Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.
I wonder if the rationalist default to fully embrace trans language norms reflects the fact that there aren't a lot of mothers and daughters in the rationalist space, while there are a lot of MtF transsexuals. Perhaps it is just easiest for a scene to adopt the norms which will cause the least social friction within the scene. There's not a lot of breast-feeding forums, girl's swim meets, or female dorms in the experience of people in the rationalist community where the presence of transwomen would create conflict.
But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle. Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
FarmReadyElephants
4mo ago
Just the narrow vote margin alone suggests 2020 was more likely to be stolen than 2024 (although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)
Thing is, you don’t have the option to flake out on a child when they no longer suit you
More options
Context Copy link