Folamh3
User ID: 1175
My ex was a bespectacled 5' Chinese girl. We used to joke that if we had boys, best-case scenario they'd be just as tall as me and just as attractive as her; worst-case scenario, they'd be myopic, ginger Asian midgets. Can you imagine the bullying you'd get as a boy who's short, ginger and Asian?
Folamh3
9d ago
Woah, what happened to the formatting there?
I wanted to put in a horizontal line to separate the body of the post from the footnotes. If you neglect to put a paragraph break between the preceding paragraph and the four hyphens, it treats the entire paragraph as a header.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
I don't see how placing a hairdryer in your car violates Primum non nocere.
It amazes me to think that I once found Scott's argument in "the categories were made for man" persuasive. Rationalists are all about defining words in ways which "cleave reality at the joints", and yet Scott apparently thinks that "anyone who claims membership in this category" is a better definition of "woman" than "adult human female".
do indeed appear to improve after taking them
Well, some and some. From my understanding, having read Jesse Singal's deep dives into this issue, the evidence base is a lot more mixed than trans activists would have us believe.
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
If you have examples of cases of bodily integrity disorder being treated with amputation prior to the modern trans activist movement, I would love to see them. Or perhaps I should say - what gives me pause is not that amputations for sufferers of bodily integrity disorder are being carried out, but that they're being carried out using precisely the same reasoning that "gender-affirming care" providers use to justify removing breasts and penises.
Folamh3
22d ago
I think it's possible to write a great story when you don't feel emotionally invested in it, and equally possible to write a terrible story in spite of feeling very emotionally invested in it.
Folamh3
27d ago
Trembling Mad calls this gerrymandering power. When comparing Germany and Poland, Germany is stronger, ergo Germany's the bad guy - boooo! When comparing Germany and the USA, the USA is stronger, ergo Germany's the good guy - yaaaaay! It entirely depends on how close you zoom in.
I think this illustrates that "sympathising with the underdog" is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to take in assessing which of two more parties has the moral high ground - once we've established that the weaker party is morally superior, that incentivises bad actors to contrive a narrative in which they're the weak victimised party, Goodhart's law-style. But even in cases where everyone pretty much agrees on which of two parties is strongest and weakest - well, it's still possible to be both strong and morally upstanding, or weak and morally degenerate. Common, even.
Folamh3
15d ago
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview
I heard he was MeToo'd awhile back, did anything come of that?
Folamh3
27d ago
Heck, if you look at ratios of civilian casualties -- as I've seen some argue makes Israel's actions unjustified -- America had almost none (generally counted as a few thousand if you include territories and civilian ship crews). The British claim 70,000. More civilians than that died in the Battle of Berlin alone, and Allied bombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the nuclear weapons.
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers.
To quote myself:
Freddie deBoer confuses me on this point, because he was once writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict and stated “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
But he has also argued repeatedly that "punching up" and "punching down" is a meaningless framework through which to look at humour, interpersonal relationships or anything else.
If I'm reading this correctly, he means that in a conflict between a weaker party ("egg") and a stronger party ("high, solid wall"), he will always take the side of the weaker party, even if they're wrong and the stronger party is right. Which logically implies that, were Hamas ever to gain the upper hand, Freddie would immediately start supporting Israel. It likewise implies that he ought to have supported the Axis powers in the second world war.
which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with
As someone who expended a lot of words taking a public figure to task over his perceived hypocrisy/cognitive dissonance on the trans issue, it will not surprise you that I found this post very absorbing. It's so weird how this specific issue seems to break so many people's brains, even (especially?) people who built their reputations on being no-nonsense straight-shooters who don't care whose toes they step on in pursuit of Truth. As soon as the word "gender" is mentioned, they look at their feet and start mumbling about "why do you care anyway it doesn't affect you".
Zack hypothesises that the overrepresentation of trans women in the rat-adjacent sphere is Rationalism's shield against accusations of being insufficiently progressive - if they were to start saying things that run the risk of driving trans women away, the accusations would be substantially harder to defend against. I must admit this sounds grimly plausible to me, but it doesn't explain why Freddie deBoer has the same reaction to this issue.
Folamh3
24d ago
I worked as a cyclist for Deliveroo for three months. By the end of it I knew practically every back alley in the city centre, and would just glance at the address on the app, not needing to consult Google Maps to find my way. I don't know what the equivalent food delivery service is in your city, but a lot of these services are pretty chill about letting you pick your own hours. Even if you worked one shift a week you'd probably see a big improvement in your navigation skills.
Folamh3
22d ago
What a triumph The Prestige is.
That and Memento are probably the only films of his I'd put in the W column without major qualifications.
The Axis powers were not the weaker party in WW2. They invaded and defeated various countries that were weaker than them.
It can simultaneously be true that Germany is stronger than Poland and that the USA is stronger than Germany.
I replied to you prior to your edit - I'm just about as aggressively anti-communist and anti-Soviet as they come.
Folamh3
22d ago
Last of Us,God of War + GOW Ragnarok, Warcraft 3, Witcher 3, Sekiro
Can't comment, not having played any of them for the reasons outlined in the last paragraph. Pretty much everyone tells me that Last of Us is great, annoying that it still hasn't received a PC port.
Folamh3
29d ago
I mean, the leg amputated in the 1990s I quoted above.
Sorry, I missed that.
I'm not claiming it has no relationship to trans activism, just that "The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured" isn't a justified conclusion from this particular amputation and a single paper connecting BID to transgender people.
Fair point.
"Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand". Didn't realise that @roystgnr linked to this article in their comment, making my link redundant.
I live in Ireland and still get my fair share of slagging. A few years ago I could hardly leave the house without someone pointing at me and saying "hey look lads, Ed Sheeran's on tour!" but that dropped off after I lost weight.
Folamh3
21d ago
And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?
Why not? There are lots of stories which I understand perfectly well but which leave me cold.
Folamh3
22d ago
let me know if anything actually happens
Folamh3
29d ago
I will caution you that if you buy a hard copy of Lost Girls, do not read it on the bus. People will assume that you're reading child pornography, and with good reason.
Folamh3
22d ago
To be fair, he could well have changed his mind in the intervening two years.
I don't know why you can't just take their word for it. In any other profession, when someone says "I got into this line of work because I'm good at it and it pays well", we generally take that at face value (surely no one believes that every doctor went to medical school because they "want to help people" - the ones volunteering for MSF, sure, but not a dermatologist in the Hamptons). Why, as a culture, are we married to this romantic ideal of the tortured artist, slitting his wrists over the typewriter in pursuit of his muse? Why do I have to believe that the artist sacrificed something of himself in order to produce his masterwork? My opinion of how entertaining a film Dirty Harry is isn't changed by the knowledge that Don Siegel only directed it for the money, and I don't see that my opinion should have changed.
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