Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1yr ago
I think this is mostly explicable by the extremely strong link between being trans and being autistic https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/
Autistic people are disproportionately likely to become coders and disproportionately likely to become trans.
Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.
A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.
There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.
*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.
If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.
One of the most vacuous debates I ever got into on Facebook (before I realised that debating with anyone on Facebook is almost invariably a complete waste of time) was when a friend-of-a-friend who lived in the UK shared a post on their* Facebook profile with a list of people that Pride is "for". The list included trans women, disabled people, Muslims etc. (Note that this post didn't say "LGBT Muslims" were welcome at Pride, which would certainly be commendable - just "Muslims".) Bankers and police officers, by contrast, were explicitly demarcated as persona non grata.
I pointed out, fairly politely in my view, that it seemed weird to say that Pride is "for" a particular group when half of that group think that homosexuality should be illegal - not merely societally condemned, but a criminal offense. If the point of Pride is to celebrate LGBT people, why would you make a point of inviting a specific group, a majority of which think LGBT people are sinners and should be punished for their crimes? There was certainly no concomitant effort to invite homophobic Christians.
I was immediately dogpiled, with numerous white non-Muslim Brits simply denying the claim outright and insisting that the poll on which I was basing my assertion must be faulty and have poor methodology and actually Allah is queer and so on. In unrelated contexts I've seen plenty of mental gymnastics about how homophobia wasn't a thing in the Middle East until after white Europeans got there, and actually men in the Middle East hundreds of years ago used to rape little boys in addition to little girls, so how could they possibly be homophobic?
God, the lengths some people will go to in order to quell their cognitive dissonance. It was only then that I realised that Pride was no longer about "gender and sexual minorities" at all, but a general celebration of wokeness as a concept. Funny how mission drift sneaks up on you.
*Funny the amount of people who only "realise" they're "non-binary" immediately upon starting in art school.
In 2016 I kept reiterating that the alleged parallels between Trump and Hitler seemed like incredibly weak sauce to me, whereas Berlusconi (not a dictator - that's part of my point) seemed like a much more obvious referent.
But most Americans don't know who Berlusconi is, so. TV Tropes calls this small reference pools - much as Mozart and Beethoven are the only classical composers whose names Joe Sixpack can be assumed to recognise, Hitler is the only historical dictator meeting that description (maybe Stalin, at a push. Mussolini? Forget it.). So if you want to criticise a politician by way of comparison to a historical dictator, and you want that comparison to be legible to a mass audience, you're going to see a lot of square-Trump-in-round-Hitlers until the average person becomes a lot more historically literate.
Folamh3
3mo ago
I wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
Folamh3
10mo ago
The figurative use of the term "cuck" is essentially just a dysphemism for calling someone a "doormat". The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it, but go along with it due to a lack of backbone and an inability to establish boundaries for themselves. This obviously generalises (no one was fooled that "bike cuck" really didn't mind his bike getting stolen).
Accuse me of weakmanning or nutpicking or whatever if you please, but I've personally witnessed more than my fair share of trans people (or trans activists) making blatantly pseudoscientific assertions, like trans women claiming they experience something analogous to menstruation, or that there have been biologically male people who became pregnant, or that sex is a "spectrum". Likewise, the widespread and baseless assertion that biological males have no inherent advantage over biological females in sporting events (an assertion which implicitly undergirds any apology for trans women being permitted to compete in female sporting events) is a pseudoscientific claim, comparable in degree to a stepfather asserting a familial resemblance between himself and his adoptive child.
Or (even more relevant to the metaphor at hand) consider the case of the Guardian journalist who did not want to be listed as his child's mother on the child's birth cert, and brought a (thankfully unsuccessful) case to the High Court on this basis. What exactly could be more unscientific than a trans man claiming not to be the mother of the child who was conceived and gestated in his womb for nine months? Quoting Wikipedia: "McConnell announced his second pregnancy in August 2021, with plans to give birth in Sweden in order to be listed as the child's father, rather than mother, on their birth certificate."
As I said, referring to a stepfather as a father is a polite social fiction which no one objects to using in most situations. If a girl was attending a father-daughter-themed event and she had to choose between inviting the loving stepfather who's present in her life and the deadbeat glorified sperm donor who fathered her, I would have no objection to her inviting the former; in fact, I'd actively recommend it.
But there are situations in which we must defer to a child's biological father rather than their stepfather. For instance - supposing a child lapses into a coma due to an undetermined cause, which may be genetic in nature. The doctor will obviously want to take a family history to identify potentially relevant genetic factors. The stepfather's medical history is completely irrelevant here - the only medical histories which are relevant are those of the child's biological parents. If the stepfather got angry and defensive when the doctor informed him of this, and insisted that he was the child's father and hence that the doctor should take his medical history - well, I wouldn't think the doctors are the "jerks" in this situation. I also wouldn't think the stepfather necessarily had the child's best interests at heart.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Clarkson is a funnyman first and a (political?) commentator a distant second. He sincerely dislikes Markle, but he's exaggerating the intensity of his antipathy for comic effect.
The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Given that the new series of True Detective stars Jodie Foster, it's probably worth pointing out that, thirty years ago, she won her second Oscar playing an FBI agent-in-training, in a film which was both acclaimed by critics and awards bodies (still the most recent film to win the Big Five at the Oscars) and a huge commercial smash ($270m against a $19m budget). For added diversity points, at various points in the film Foster's character is assisted by a fellow agent-in-training, a black woman.
This makes the "you only hate season 4 because you can't stand to see strong female detectives" defense even harder to take seriously. No one* had a problem with a thriller revolving around a strong white female detective (and her black female partner) 30 years ago. You'll have a hard time persuading me that the average prestige TV audience member in 2024 is more misogynistic (and racist) than the average Anglophone cinemagoer in 1991. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's a point that needs to be argued for and can't be taken for granted.
*Except feminists and trans activists.
I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would.
Last year I watched the movie Cruising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(film)) from 1980 (well worth a watch if you haven't seen it, it's stylish, thrilling and unpredictable). The film concerns a serial killer active in New York's gay community, so to track him down Al Pacino goes undercover, spending night after night in leather bars and inhaling poppers. The scale of the perversion he witnesses (e.g. looking on with barely concealed revulsion as a man, lying supine on a table in the middle of a club, gets fisted by another man while a captive audience watches) affects him psychologically and makes it impossible for him to perform with his girlfriend.
I was telling my brother about the movie and he said "I reckon there are a lot of very mainstream progressive types who really believe that gay men and gay couples are no different than straight men and straight couples aside from the objects of their attraction, and if they knew the kind of sexual behaviour which was seen as completely normal in the gay community, they'd be horrified."
The film was criticised as homophobic both during production and upon release, to the point that gay activists tracked down where the location shooting was taking place and blew air horns nearby so that the audio would be unusable. Watching the film, I honestly wasn't sure why it inspired such ire. I don't think it's homophobic to correctly observe (as Cruising does) that promiscuity, casual sex and chemsex are extremely normalised in the gay community. Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
Folamh3
6mo ago
The first time I heard about the alleged mismatch between Wikipedia's operating expenses and how much they raise every year was here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer, but I don't know how relevant it still is.
Counterpoints:
- Dr. James Cantor, one of the most prominent sex researchers in North America, believes that LGBTQ+ should include the P: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENcjI5zX0AAIERW.jpg
- Dr Jacob Breslow was a senior figure in Mermaids, the highly influential charity for trans children in the UK, until he was outed as a pro-paedophilia advocate who has spoken in favour of paedophilia at conferences
- Peter Tatchell, one of the most famous and influential gay rights activists in the Anglosphere, supports lowering the age of consent to 14 and has waxed lyrical on more than one occasion about sexual relationships between young boys and grown men
- The usual laundry list of "trans women" arrested and/or convicted for possessing child pornography or abusing young children (e.g. https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/06/23/former-new-hampshire-state-rep-charged-with-child-pornography/, https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/coventry-activist-aimee-challenor-removed-20255359)
- The general refusal of LGBT activists anywhere to consider rowing back on the self-ID standard for women's prisons, despite clear, unambiguous evidence that the policy is being widely abused by convicted child rapists
You can be "amused" by this all you like. Beyond a certain point, acting as if people concerned about the pro-paedophilia contingent of LGBTQ+ activism are just tilting at windmills strikes me as gaslighting.
I know some of you may be sick of "wow, look at this cool thing AI can do, how eerie is that?" posts, but I can't help but be blown away by some of the applications of this technology.
I play in a band, and we upload our music to streaming platforms using a company called DistroKid. When you're uploading music, they strongly encourage you to submit the lyrics for the song at the same time for SEO reasons (and so that the lyrics will appear onscreen if someone shares the song on Instagram). It's a little textbox where you paste your lyrics in, then you're done.
I went to upload a song today, and found that they've added a new feature. After uploading the audio file, you can get an AI to try to transcribe the lyrics rather than typing them out manually.
It nailed it. The song is 215 words long, and the AI only made about 6 mistakes i.e. 97% accuracy. For reference, this is a noisy post-hardcore song with layers of shoegazey guitars, feedback and pounding drums. What's more, it achieved this 97% accuracy in a matter of seconds, maybe 5% of the total runtime of the song itself.
A few years ago I used a voice transcription service called Happy Scribe, which achieved comparable levels of accuracy - but only for plain speech recorded in a quiet environment with no background ambiance. If you record speech without a directional mic in an environment with a lot of background noise (e.g. a café), Happy Scribe was pretty much useless and I had to transcribe everything the old-fashioned way.
But now AI can transcribe words near-perfectly from lyrics with a musical accompaniment? That's insanity. I can't imagine how anyone will be able to find work as a transcriber for any major language a year from now.
Folamh3
1mo ago
A British man named Dave McConnell was arrested, charged and convicted for misgendering someone, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Please don't move the goalposts and say "well his conviction was overturned, you're tilting at windmills". The process may not have been the punishment in McConnell's case, but it was certainly punishing.
Folamh3
1mo ago
the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater
Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.
Folamh3
11mo ago
One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this.
Because they're justifiably terrified of being ostracised and/or losing their livelihoods.
Tennessee-based player Jennifer Castro, who competes in the [disc golf] Amateur Masters Women 40+ category, says that “I personally know of women who refuse to sign up for events if a transgender is playing, not because we hate them but because we feel we have zero chance, so what is the point of wasting our money on registration fees?”
In late August, Castro became so exasperated by the [Professional Disc Golf Association]’s permissive stance that she mounted a sort of sting operation, presenting herself anonymously to the organization as a transgender woman seeking to compete in a female category. After Castro’s inquiry was routed to the PDGA’s medical committee, outgoing board member (and five-time Women’s Open World Champion) Elaine King wrote back with the following advice:
If you meet the criteria to play in gender-based divisions then you can register with the PDGA as “F” or “female.” You are under no obligation to discuss your personal information with anyone. No one may challenge your eligibility to play in a female division unless they can provide evidence that you may not meet the requirements. Note that a player’s appearance is NOT a basis for any challenge … Some transgender women have voluntarily elected to provide proof of their eligibility to the Medical Committee in confidence. In doing so, any potential question about their eligibility to play in that division could be quickly settled. However this is purely voluntary and not required.
In the days since, Castro has gone on a very public Facebook campaign, citing King’s message as evidence that, except in cases where a player who’s already listed as male seeks to change status to female, “transgenders don’t need to submit anything upfront. [The PDGA] is just taking their word that they meet the criteria medically.”
At a recent Nashville tournament, Castro reports, her sponsor, a small local company called Momentary Bliss discs, politely suggested that she take a less “hostile” approach with her anti-PGDA commentary. Castro refused, and the partnership was ended.
According to one source I spoke with, several board members are sympathetic with the complaints of women who want male bodies excluded from protected female categories. But they also feel reluctant to act unless their stance is publicly supported by a critical mass of high-profile players. For their part, on the other hand, many top players reportedly don’t feel they can provide that public support until the board signals clearly that plain talk about male and female biology won’t be denounced as transphobic.
It’s a collective-action problem, in other words. According to Jane and Mary, about 80 percent of the women on tour oppose the inclusion of male-bodied players in female divisions (a figure that’s admittedly impossible for me to confirm). But no one in this majority group wants to be among the first to come forward, for fear of being labelled a bigot—thereby allowing the other 20 percent to hold sway.
Folamh3
1yr ago
This sort of reminds me of an article I read on Cracked years ago. It argued that male writers are terrified of writing a female character with meaningful flaws for fear of being accused of sexism or misogyny. So instead, they write female characters who are perfect in every way that matters. The end result is that the male characters are fully fleshed-out rounded characters (whom the audience actually likes and cares about, because they seem like real people), while the female characters are one-dimensional Mary Sues who can do no wrong (whom the audience despises, because perfect people are boring).
Folamh3
1yr ago
Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
Folamh3
1mo ago
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period.
If I really valued participating in a particular online community, I would eat a six-month ban, no problem. But I will absolutely stop participating in online communities if further participation is made conditional on grovelling to the jannies like this. There's a specific online community which I went on practically every day for the best part of a decade, and when they asked me to jump through this particular hoop I said fuck you, I'm out. I suspect I'm pretty close to the norm for the kind of person who participates in male-dominated online communities.
Folamh3
8mo ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
Admittedly our culture has moved on from this specific discourse, but in 2013-4 the "Nice Guy™" debate was all the rage. The essence of the debate was intelligent, gainfully employed but nerdy men complaining about being unsuccessful with women, sometimes for the claimed reason that they are "too nice" or "women don't go for nice guys". In some cases the claim was a bit hard to take seriously ("fuck u u dumb whore ur ugly anyway") but in other cases the lonely men in question gave every indication of being kind-hearted individuals who treated men and women alike with unshakeable respect and decency.
The stock retort from feminists in this era was "of course women go for nice guys. If they went for assholes they'd be all over you", an argument which still occasionally gets trotted out as recently as this year on this very site. Note what this framing implies: that if a man is romantically unsuccessful with women and has the temerity to feel even a little bit upset or frustrated by this, he must be a bad person i.e. exactly what the OP is talking about. This was a key tenet of internet/nerd feminism for years.
Folamh3
9mo ago
PM Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the press — I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?
Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
Folamh3
11mo ago
"Men commit suicide more" -> "Women attempt suicide more"
One of the reasons men are more likely to complete suicide attempts than women is that men tend to use more lethal methods like guns and hanging which tend to result in a disfigured corpse, whereas women tend to want to leave behind an open casket-worthy corpse and hence use methods like overdosing which tend not to disfigure the corpse. One of the hottest takes I've ever seen is a tweet in which a woman argued that the reason men are more likely to commit suicide is because, unlike women, they don't care about traumatising their loved ones by spattering blood and brains all over their kitchen.
That's right: men committing suicide more than women is proof that women are more empathetic.
Folamh3
11mo ago
The most widely memed shot in the ad showed a white man checking out a girl from behind and his black friend advising him not to do so. Maybe I'm being paranoid but I don't think the respective races were accidental. Don't make me break out FBI crime stats on which races commit more sexual assault per capita.
In 2022 there was a horrific case in Ireland where a young teacher in her twenties named Aisling Murphy was murdered by a complete stranger while out jogging. It dominated news headlines for weeks, and all the usual bromides made the rounds on Irish social media: demands to "stop victim blaming" (I don't recall seeing anyone, ever, suggesting that Murphy was in any way to blame for her murder); accusing all Irish men for being complicit in her death, either for making jokes about sexual assault, or for not calling out their male friends when they did so.
Then they arrested and charged a recent Slovakian immigrant with her murder, and the feminists got real quiet about it, of course.
A few months later, there was an even more horrific story in which a mother set her car on fire with her and her two young children inside: she survived, they didn't. This didn't get half the attention as the previous case. I couldn't help but wondering - why is it that I would be castigated if I said "if you're a mother and you've ever said 'ugh, my boys are driving me up the wall, I could just kill them', you're complicit in the deaths of these two children"? Oh no, it's really a mental health issue, actually the system failed her and she felt she had no choice but to attempt a murder-suicide, someone else should have noticed the warning signs beforehand. It's all so tiresome.
Edit: misremembered the perpetrator as Romanian, he was actually Slovakian. Misremembered the sexes of the two children. Amended.
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