FtttG
User ID: 1175
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies.
I discussed this here and here. Virtually all the trans women I've met in my life either have perfectly conventional male interests, or interests common to that subset of men who are nerdy and/or autistic. I genuinely can't recall ever meeting a trans woman who was heavily interested in knitting, crochet, astrology or murder podcasts. I've met more gay men interested in one or more of these things than trans women.
Persecution does not need to be baseless.
In common parlance, persecution is understood to mean being harassed etc. for no good reason. Per Wiktionary:
To pursue in a manner to do harm or cruelty to; especially, because of the victim's race, sexual identity, or adherence to a particular belief.
If there's a nationwide manhunt for a convicted murderer who escaped from prison, no one says that the murderer is being "persecuted", even though the people hunting for him obviously want to do harm to him (in the form of arresting him and returning him to prison).
The paper quoted in the original post says "This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination" and then the response that you are here defending is calling it "fantasy discrimination". And yet, you proceed to say yourself, "This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against."
"To discriminate" simply means "to tell two different things apart" e.g. a discriminating taste in fashion. In common parlance, it's often used to mean "unfairly discriminated against". I presume the paper was using the word "discrimination" in the latter sense of the term, but perhaps @crushedoranges was arguing that, while certain trans people may have been discriminated against, they have not been unjustly discriminated against as they claim. (To illustrate: if you don't get picked for a basketball team because you're short and unfit, in a very real sense you have been discriminated against — but outside of the Harrison Bergeron universe, few would argue that you have been unjustly discriminated against.)
In my experience, trans activists tend to characterise a lot of perfectly banal behaviours as "transphobic", such as describing trans women as "biologically male" or similar. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a trans-identifed male reported that he was stopping his transition because of "discrimination" on the part of his family members, but if you were to dig into this "discrimination", you would find that it amounted to the person's family members saying something along the lines of "I love you and I am deeply sympathetic to your situation, but it's a simple statement of fact that, given your physiognomy, you are unlikely to ever convincingly pass as female, and if you medically transition you will probably regret it a few years down the line". This is "discrimination" in the sense that it's true that tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed men have a much harder time passing as female than men with none of these characteristics; but I don't consider it unjust discrimination, any more than not picking the short unfit person to play on your basketball team.
FtttG
6d ago
This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however."
This goes right back to Marx and "false consciousness" i.e. working-class people already support communism, they've just been tricked by the bourgeoisie into thinking they don't.
FtttG
6d ago
News from Ireland: Trans woman to bring High Court challenge after State doesn't recognise her as child's birth mother.
A UK TRANS WOMAN, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother.
The woman – who has Irish citizenship while her wife does not – submits that if she has to claim to be the “father” of the child as part of the application, it would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on her person, gender identity and legal status.
I despair.
FtttG
6d ago
One of the more facile arguments made by trans activists is that lots of banal things cis people do all the time technically fall under the domain of "gender-affirming": building muscle mass, getting hair transplants, whatever. The cost of a single penectomy or vaginoplasty would probably cover a lifetime's gym membership and a return trip to Turkey.
The reason it's a facile argument is because the reason I do strength training is because I want to be stronger, more attractive and to make sad head voice quiet, not because I want to more "fully embody my masculine gender identity" or whatever. But it's not like I'd object if my gym membership was subsidised by the taxpayer. I could even imagine a hypothetical world in which such a policy represented a public saving in the long run, if paying for people's gym memberships made them more likely to exercise and in turn less likely to suffer from cardiac disease and obesity-related illnesses. Maybe the lower BMIs, improved muscle tones and higher sex drives that would result from a higher proportion of the population exercising regularly would even improve fertility rates. But my gym membership costs me less than €40 a month, which according to ChatGPT is pretty typical: I find it hard to imagine the monetary expense is a leading factor in why so many people are sedentary.
It's funny to imagine a world in which @WandererintheWilderness's nonsensical policy is put into practice and used to pay for penectomies, phalloplasties and gym memberships. Improving the inclusive genetic fitness of one large demographic while sterilising another, under the exact same policy.
FtttG
6d ago
it can hardly be simultaneously true, as right-wingers typically believe, that trans women naturally evoke revulsion, and that any adverse social consequences that they experience are imaginary.
I don't think all the adverse social consequences trans women experience are imaginary. No doubt they attract a lot of funny looks, as does anyone who deliberately dresses in an unusual way (e.g. goths with loads of facial piercings and/or tattoos). But when trans activists complain about a genocide of trans people which is either imminent or currently ongoing — yes, that is imaginary.
Impossible to talk about this without spoilers.
Additionally, there's the opening of the film in which a squad of white LA police officers viciously beat up a group of Mexicans in their prison cell, which was directly based on a real event and which has obvious parallels to the beating of Rodney King.
FtttG
7d ago
A good article highlighting the deficiencies identified in the BBC's coverage of the war in Gaza. Choice quotes:
The Telegraph has since reported that BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections in two years to its coverage of Israel and Gaza - that’s two per week. [emphasis mine]
One issue that was already well known involves BBC Arabic using journalists who had made viciously antisemitic comments... In one example, Samer Alzaenen, who had suggested that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”, was used 244 times by BBC Arabic between November 2023 and April 2025. He was “consistently introduced as a journalist”, according to the report, as was Ahmed Alagha, who appeared 522 times on the BBC during a similar time period despite having called Jews “devils” and saying Israelis are less than human. When these cases were reported in the media, the BBC disingenuously called them “eyewitnesses”. But normally the same eyewitnesses don’t appear on TV over 500 times in less than two years.
The BBC News homepage has a series of news tabs in the red strip at the top that begins with Home News and In Depth, and then the first specific news topic is ‘Israel Gaza War’ - before Ukraine, UK, World, Business, Politics or anything else. Needless to say, the war and famine in Sudan, on a scale far worse than Gaza, doesn’t get a tab of its own at all.
FtttG
7d ago
If all you're doing is going by your gut, you shouldn't pretend otherwise. An "irrational prior" is indistinguishable from a "gut feeling", but it's draped in the language of dispassionate, disinterested analysis.
FtttG
7d ago
Ahhh. That's actually a valid point! "Literally" as in "there are no hidden steps I'm eliding, that's all there is to it". Damn. I've been wrong all these years, it's an entirely valid usage of the word as originally defined.
FtttG
7d ago
I think the typical way Millennials and Gen Z signal uncertainty in their declarative statements is by dropping punctuation entirely ("Trump is a Nazi." sounds a lot more definitive than "trump is a nazi"), peppering them with Internet initialisms (likewise "trump is literally a nazi lol, but w/e idk") or textual recreations of uptalking ("umm, did you miss that trump is literally a nazi??"). I agree that this a phenomenon more closely associated with women and gay men than with other demographics. But in my experience, I haven't really encountered young people using ellipses in this context so far as I remember: with only a handful of exceptions I can recall, they're always used by people significantly older than me.
FtttG
7d ago
You know, I haven't even seen that movie, and yet that clip popped into my head when I was writing the comment.
If done about a specific individual, I think "emotional blackmail by proxy" would be a more accurate designation. "Distributed emotional blackmail" sounds more like "you need to do X for $Community, because think of how it'll hurt the feelings of the members of $Community if you don't".
I don't know if this has been mentioned in any of these discussions about AI-generated art, but on the off-chance it hasn't, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and just about every other non-Harry Potter book you loved as a child), predicted the use of generative AI to compose fiction. In 1953 (probably a few years earlier, in fact).
I highly encourage you to read the linked short story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator": like most of Dahl's numerous stories for adults it's wickedly funny and creepily unsettling. A short synopsis: a talented mechanical inventor named Knipe harbours frustrated literary ambitions, and after yet another rejection from a publisher, he has an epiphany in which he realises that the rules of grammar governing the English language are almost mathematical in their strictness — hence, it should be trivial to design a machine which, once assigned some input parameters, can "compute" a passage of text in much the same way that a calculator computes a mathematical formula or equation. As a tremendous act of revenge against the publishing industry, Knipe sets to work building the machine and presents it to his boss, Mr. Bohlen, who is initially sceptical but eventually converted when literary magazines buy the short stories (attributed to pen names) produced by the machine. Knipe later sets about modifying the machine so that it can compose novels in addition to stories.
The most ingenious touch, I thought, was the end of the story, when the narrator explains that Knipe and Bohlen eventually expanded their operation to buy the rights to use real authors' names and likenesses, attaching them to books composed by machine.
But on the whole, it was a satisfactory beginning. This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
People often talk about how AI-generated art is soulless and lacking the creative spark necessary for authentic human emotion. I won't pass comment on whether this is the case. If someone hasn't yet been moved to tears by an AI-generated passage of text or piece of music, I have little doubt that such a thing will happen before the end of the decade. "So what? People have been moved to tears by Twilight."
Fair enough. But my question is this. Right now, you can get an AI to generate a sample of Taylor Swift's voice which, to anyone who isn't a professional musician or trained sound engineer, sounds indistinguishable from the real thing. As the technology improves and with access to more and better training data (say, exclusive access to Swift's own master recordings, archive of unreleased songs, and isolated vocal takes), even sound engineers are likely to be taken in. The technology to generate musical instrumentals is likewise getting better every day.
In a world where Taylor Swift goes into business with OpenAI and grants them the right to use her name and likeness on musical releases generated by ChatGPT (or whatever dedicated music-generation software they use), do you really think you could tell the difference? Or what about AI-generated novels attributed to James Patterson, with his permission? I mean, it's only one step removed from using ghostwriters, something Patterson is open about doing. Of the novels published under the Tom Clancy banner, a majority were written by other writers, and a significant chunk of those published postmortem, meaning Clancy could not have been involved in their composition even in principle (not even giving them a cursory once-over before typesetting).
Better yet — how do we know this hasn't already happened? Taylor Swift's latest album is her most poorly-received release since 2017's Reputation, with neither the album nor any of the songs from it receiving Grammy nominations (the 68th edition of the Grammys will be the first time Swift hasn't been nominated for anything since 2017), and many reviews commenting on it sounding creatively exhausted, predictable and lacking novelty or dynamism. Isn't a solid, pleasant but unremarkable and creatively sterile album exactly what we'd expect from an album generated using Taylor Swift's previous albums as training data? When Swift is rehearsing for the next album tour, isn't it possible she'll be learning to sing the songs on the album for the first time?
I'm not yet concerned about artists being supplanted entirely by AI-generated artwork: I think an author or musician's name recognition is still a vital part of what makes their releases commercially successful (which is why the names of James Patterson, Stephen King, Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel are always in much larger text on the covers of their novels than the title). But the ending of "Great Automatic Grammatizator" sounds eerily plausible to me: a world in which an author writes and publishes one or two hit novels the traditional way, a major publisher takes notice, and gets the author to sign a contract granting the publisher exclusive rights to publish AI-generated books under the author's name, in perpetuity. There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it. Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.
Contrary to your claim that Cambridge recognises no distinction between the two terms, the page for "jealous" acknowledges a secondary meaning: "upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person". This secondary meaning is absent from the definition of "envious". This obviously implies that the page for "jealousy" is incomplete, as for consistency's sake it ought to include a secondary definition along the lines of "the state of feeling upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person".
FtttG
8d ago
The Merriam-Webster article you linked cites no sources for its claim that the two words have always been used interchangeably, but quotes multiple scholars who argued that the two terms are not synonymous.
FtttG
8d ago
Wikipedia claims that "jealousy" has always been distinct from "envy", and notes that the original root of the word is the biblical "zeal" which at the time meant "tolerating no unfaithfulness". Another claimed root is the word "gelus" which likewise meant "possessive and suspicious".
FtttG
8d ago
"Arguing in bad faith" means arguing dishonestly and using arguments you don't really believe, in which the goal is to frustrate or antagonise your interlocutor rather than engage in earnest truth-seeking.
Based on the way the phrase is used on social media, you could be forgiven for thinking it means "you believe something that I don't" or "you expressed a non-woke opinion".
FtttG
8d ago
An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.
If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.
FtttG
9d ago
When I was in college, I noticed a lot of people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much". That one seems to have fallen out of favour, thankfully.
FtttG
9d ago
If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?
DESCRIPTIVISTS, BEGONE
Many common expressions only make sense if "jealous" has a distinct meaning from "envious". "To guard sth jealously" — how can you "guard" something if someone else has it? Likewise "a jealous husband".
Well, the point I was making was that I think a positive side effect of such a policy might be that it encourages more people to become fit and healthy, which would pay down dividends in terms of public health expenditure and improved fertility rates. A policy which enables mentally ill people to chop perfectly healthy tissue and organs off of themselves at the taxpayers' expense (and then attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible several years down the line, likewise at the taxpayers' expense) does strike me as nonsensical, even if such a policy was sufficiently broadly-worded as to also include paying for members of the public to become more fit and healthy.
Put simply: would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gender-affirming care and detransition procedures at the taxpayers' expense (option 1)? No, I think that's silly and dumb, in much the same way as publicly subsidised boob jobs and lip fillers would be (in fact, much of the time we would be talking about literally the same procedures). Would I support such a policy if it also included publicly subsidised gym memberships (option 2)? Again, no, but it would be silly not to take advantage of it if it was already in place. Would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gym membership (perhaps under the use-it-or-lose-it model you describe)? Yes, I could be persuaded that such a policy passes a cost-benefit analysis, in a way I simply couldn't with option 1.
"The government will pay for you to chop off pieces of your own body, and will then pay for you to restore them years later after you've decided it was a bad idea" sounds like a conservative parody of wasteful public expenditure, analogous to a self-licking ice cream cone or paying people to dig holes in the ground then fill them up again. It would be exactly as nonsensical as paying people to get fit and healthy and also paying for them to sit on their couches eating ice cream.
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