FarmReadyElephants
No bio...
User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
4mo 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
4mo 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.
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.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
The reason why Open Borders is controversial in the existing system is that migrants (or their children) are given an equal share in governance - a scarce resource currently owned by the existing population. It's not clear why the existing population should give equal shares in governance to the children of new arrivals. I expect free movement of people across borders would be more popular if this were not the case.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Having loyalties to multiple states are a special case of rival loyalties. Of course any politician is expected to be loyal to his family and his God.
FarmReadyElephants
27d ago
But at the end of the day, it's very hard to actually pull myself out of a strictly material belief system, too, I guess.
Phenomenology makes more sense to me than materialism. It was the phenomenological lens of Jordan Peterson that first spoke to me from a Christian perspective. I was already a Buddhist and I was used to navigating existence from a standpoint of phenomenological empiricism.
As a phenomenological empiricist, I could say that states of consciousness matter, and things that I do could predictably alter my consciousness. I could try different kinds of meditation or take a face-melting dose of mushrooms and reliably change my experience of existence.
The alternative to phenomenology is some kind of materialism. But materialism usually leads to some kind of nihilism. If matter is more real than consciousness, then the things that intuitively matter to humans are really meaningless. Love is just chemicals, beauty is just electric signals in your brain. It is the worldview of Neil DeGrasse Tysonism, and I don't find it particularly appealing.
Ultimately I decided on faith to not be a nihilist. I decided that love matters, beauty matters, and the people I love matter. I decided it was good to act in the world to bring about more good. And it seemed to me that phenomenology was an intellectually rigorous philosophical framework to act from, since consciousness is prior to any physical model of the world.
From there, Christianity was not so far away.
FarmReadyElephants
27d ago
It's intricately woven into mystical Christianity. When we say "God is Love", the trinity shows us an icon of what love is - perfect union that paradoxically does not obliterate distinction. It is the perfect balance between dualism and monism that is the fundamental pattern of reality
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
I've always wondered who were the psychos poisoning their own lawns in order to prevent beautiful flowers from growing
FarmReadyElephants
4mo 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
26d ago
We have a little one, and thankfully the Godparents and other people around church have been willing to watch him for a bit. It helps give us a break.
Getting the kids baptized is a chance to form an alliance with an older couple or another family at church. It may make things easier
FarmReadyElephants
8mo ago
Nate's whole schtick is having a fixed model that he pre-commits to ahead of time. He wants to avoid as much judgement calls as he can. It gives the air of scientific objectivity. You can follow someone else that makes judgment calls as the race progresses, but will they be more accurate over time?
One way to rank forecasters would be by assigning them an error score for each prediction miss, weighted by an superlinear factor of the odds miss (say, (100%-prediction)^2). So Nate would get a small penalty for winding up at 51% for Kamala before the election compared to someone that guessed 90% for Kamala. Who would have the best score over multiple cycles?
FarmReadyElephants
18d ago
There seems to be a large cohort of fairly far-left educated millennial voters that frankly scare me a bit. Call it the Reddit generation. It's the same group that powered Bernie Sanders into stardom. They have the politics of university campus but they are larger than in the past due to the expansion of college education and they keep ideological coherence longer into adulthood due to reinforcement over social media.
We rely on older voters to notice when their policies are going off the rails and elect center-left liberals to clean up their messes. But boomers are a scarce resource and overall it seems like the ideological mix of the American voter is heading in a bad direction, with Mamdani as the latest symptom. The more ideological voters seem to be indifferent to how their policies affect their city or economy. Politics is a badge of righteousness rather than a tool for governance.
FarmReadyElephants
2mo ago
Christ is risen, my friend!
FarmReadyElephants
16d ago
The Trump name will be enough to get them instantly top 2 in any statewide primary. They wouldn’t need too much talent to have a political career if they want it, though capturing the Presidency is a difficult feat
As a Desantis supporter, I was disappointed by the power of the Trump name with your typical chud Republican. But nevertheless it exists
FarmReadyElephants
4mo 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
4mo 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?
FarmReadyElephants
18d ago
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
The mind of AAPs are completely alien to me, so who knows? Maybe one of them is hot and bothered by roleplaying Grigori Perelman.
I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman). Human culture has no end of oddities.
FarmReadyElephants
26d ago
I think what holds back Orthodoxy spreading in the West is the ethnic churches.
Is this based on your own experience? Because I received a warm and personal welcome in Orthodoxy, despite the presence of ethnic diasporas.
FarmReadyElephants
30d ago
Thing is, you don’t have the option to flake out on a child when they no longer suit you
FarmReadyElephants
4mo 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
4mo 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
10mo ago
Historically, after its conversion to Christianity, the Eastern Roman Empire became less likely to execute high status people guilty of crimes against the state and more likely to use exile, disfigurement, or imprisonment in a monastery. The reasoning was that this was a merciful punishment, since it gave the guilty time to repent of their sins.
FarmReadyElephants
4mo 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?
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.
Anyone who gives birth on our soil, after no matter how short a period and with no matter how temporary a status, gives birth to a US citizen. Surely, justice demands there must be some quantity of sweat expended over some period of time before we recognize a deep tie of kinship and mutual responsibility?
More options
Context Copy link