FtttG
User ID: 1175
One of my last AAQCs was about how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument". As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.
When someone's speculating about how different future societies might be to our own, before accusing them of wishful thinking, just think about how bizarre our society would seem to someone from five hundred years ago. I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere. Or, as a comic recently shared in these parts wittily put it, "ME GO TOO FAR!"
FtttG
3mo ago
I agree with @WandererintheWilderness. Speculation about future technologies is in a separate category from religious beliefs.
FtttG
3mo ago
Work continues on the "polish" draft of my NaNoWriMo project. I'm indebted to @jake for providing feedback on the second draft, both in terms of the big-picture stuff (character motivations, stress-testing the plausibility of the basic premise and subsequent plot developments) and incredibly attentive copy-editing on the level of individual words and sentences.
FtttG
4mo ago
It sounds like your acquaintance is using "specifically" when they mean to say "intentionally". There are few things more irritating than people using long words in an effort to sound educated, and compromising the effort by using the wrong ones. I find it even more embarrassing than using the correct word but mispronouncing it because you've only seen it written down - "get a load of this guy, he's literate!"
Claims that those Jews actually did stab Germany in the back with rioting, that they actually were breaking Germans with their banking stuff and their horrible lending schemes
I think it's intrinsically suspicious when Holocaust deniers trying to make their case immediately lead off with "here's why the Jews would have deserved the Holocaust if it happened... which it didn't FYI."
Weirdly enough, they bear a familial resemblance to those progressives confidently asserting that Palestinians have a right to engage in armed resistance against their oppressors - but coincidentally, 100% of the Israeli civilians killed on 07/10/23 were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal directive, and any footage clearly depicting Hamas squaddies murdering Israeli civilians is obviously AI-generated.
FtttG
4mo ago
I have a collection of the Father Brown stories and read the first one, "The Blue Cross", during the week. It was pretty good.
Planning to read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang tomorrow.
beciase there isn't any meaningful religious beliefs to trans idealogy.
In my opinion, the belief that "everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex, knowable only to themselves and which can never be questioned by an outside observer" is an unfalsifiable dualist belief, functionally indistinguishable from the belief in an immaterial soul.
His messy life, beliefs and actions are incoherent and hard to understand just like most psychotic crazy people are.
Yes, exactly. Which flatly contradicts your previous ironclad confidence that it was his participation in Nazi fora specifically which drove him to violence. But I'm glad we now agree on this point.
And I'll keep saying it about other groups, like trans people now. People don't deserve blame for things they don't do, and they don't deserve blame for happening to share group/geographical area/etc with someone who commits violence. Especially because of the Chinese robber fallacy, but even without it.
I agree with you: people shouldn't be blamed for things they didn't do. They certainly shouldn't experience guilt-by-association just because they belong to the same immutable identity category as someone else who did a bad thing. (Although I'm not persuaded that being trans meets the "immutable" criterion.) Absolutely no argument here. I have friends and acquaintances who are trans, and I don't want to see them being stigmatised just because some people who happen to identify the same way they do committed horrific crimes halfway across the planet.
The point I was trying to make in my previous comment wasn't that "being trans should be treated as a red flag for potential violent behaviour" but rather that "radical trans rhetoric may be a potentially concerning memeplex". I don't think it's controversial to assert that people are more likely to commit violence in the name of certain memeplexes than others. If you're looking at a neo-Nazi skinhead and a dude whose entire degree of political engagement boils down to "legalise weed 4/20", you don't get any prizes for guessing which of the two is more likely to go out and beat up a Pakistani teenager minding his own business. Most Muslims are peaceful people, and yet the number of suicide bombers per capita is vastly higher among Muslims than among, say, Buddhists. We could debate until the cows come home why this is: are violent people attracted to ideologies/memeplexes/communities in which violence is encouraged? Most religious people tend to follow the same religion as at least one of their parents, so when a religious person commits an act of violence, it's impossible for us to control for whether it was the religion that "caused" them to do it, or if they had a genetic predisposition towards violence. But in spite of this, nobody thinks it's controversial to assert that certain memeplexes/ideologies/communities are more closely associated with violence than others. If you had a teenaged son and he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront, that would be cause for concern in a way it wouldn't if he started spending a lot of time on a D&D forum. This is true in spite of the fact that I am fairly confident that the overwhelming majority of people who post on Stormfront have never committed a violent crime.
The whole point of my previous comment was that the question "is the radical trans memeplex a potential red flag for violence, in the same way that certain other memeplexes are?" is a question which is worth investigating. I'm emphatically not asserting that it is. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son starts spending a lot of time in trans communities, that's exactly as concerning as it would be if he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son came out as trans, you should be concerned about him potentially committing a violent act in the near future, in the same way you would if he started hanging around with skinheads.
But I am saying that there is a particular strain of trans activism which, to an outside observer, looks really scary and seems to actively revel in the glorification of violence, particularly gearing up with assault rifles and attacking unbelievers (and specifically, unbelieving female people). In the past three years, we've seen two acts of indiscriminate Columbine-style violence committed by perpetrators who may well have been active in this community, along with a crime spree committed by people (the Zizians) who were certainly active within it. The law of parsimony demands that we investigate whether or not these perpetrators' participation in these radical communities may have contributed to their decision to commit these horrendous crimes, in the same way it would if there were three unrelated crimes committed over the course of three years by, say, the members of a new religious community. I don't think it's good enough to just throw our hands up in defeat and say "whatever, there will always be mentally ill people and these things are impossible to predict". That, to me, amounts to putting one's head in the sand, intentionally overlooking potentially relevant patterns just because they make us uncomfortable.
As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").
I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.
Your link doesn't work.
We know what radicalized them and it wasn't trans related rhetoric, it was online psuedo religious terrorist slop.
I like the implication that the belief that everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex and knowable only to themselves isn't pseudo-religious. I will also point out that the shooter's uploads to YouTube seem to point to a mish-mash of conflicting motives. Put simply, por que no los dos? Why does the fact that the shooter was active on Nazi fora automatically exculpate the trans community? Why am I required to believe that the Nazi fora was what done the radicalisation, and participating in online trans communities was incidental? Why exactly is that the null hypothesis?
Isn't it possible that this profoundly disturbed young man may have been driven over the edge as a consequence of participating in multiple scary online communities in which violence is glamorised and encouraged? Perhaps if you participated in one community which was full of sentiments like "the Great Replacement is underway, we must make preemptive strikes against our ZOG oppressors" and also participated in a moderate community of peaceful trans people saying things like "violence is never the answer, peaceful protest and civil disobedience are the way forward", it might come out in the wash and you decide not to do anything stupid.
But if you spend half your time in an online community in which everyone's talking about the Great Replacement, and the other half in an online community in which everyone's saying that Trump is going to round up all the trans people and put them in concentration camps - it would be hardly surprising if you ended up with tunnel vision, convinced that violence is the only way out. (Horseshoe theory strikes again: "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" are the kinds of sentiments which would sound equally at home in the mouths of a neo-Nazi and a Free Palestine dickhead wearing a keffiyeh.)
but we would expect to see way more if there is, not .0001% (and that's the highest of estimates) of the population doing them
Why, exactly, would we expect to see that? I very much doubt that as many as 1% of devout Muslims have been involved in a terrorist attack, yet surely no one disputes that radical Islam is a pressing matter. Ever since Elliot Rodger eleven years ago I've heard a nonstop deluge of handwringing about incel terror attacks, but Wikipedia (who are clearly trying to make the concept sound as scary as possible) can only dredge up 12 incidents over the course of 40 years, one every three years. Meanwhile, we've now had three consecutive years in which there's been at least one violent crime spree by a trans person (or group of trans people) in which they explicitly cited their trans identity as a motivating factor in the crime. Granted, maybe we're in a modus ponens/modus tollens scenario where you think that too much attention is also being paid to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But if you believe that either of these is a real issue, it follows that the question of whether trans radicalisation is a real issue is worth investigating.
There's also the obvious "better an ounce of prevention than a pound of cure" angle. Sure, maybe radical trans rhetoric hasn't yet caused a comparable number of violent deaths per capita when compared to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But that doesn't mean that it won't. If a particular community is displaying obvious red flags for radicalisation or cult-like behaviour, surely it's better to proactively get ahead of the problem rather than sitting on our hands waiting for the members of that community to do something really heinous?
FtttG
4mo ago
Girlfriend read the second draft and rated it either 6.5 or 7 out of 10. I took @jake up on his kind offer to read the second draft, which he's in the middle of as we speak. I'm using both of their feedback to compose a "polish" draft.
Last night I read Ted Chiang's short story/novelette "Liking What You See: A Documentary", whose premise is the invention of a reversible brain procedure which induces a condition called "calliagnosia" (or "calli" for short), which renders the subject unable to identify beauty in other people's faces. They are still able to identify faces and recognise familiar ones: they just have no special attraction to beautiful faces nor any special revulsion towards ugly faces or people with facial deformities, and are hence immune to the "halo effect". This invention is hailed as a powerful means of combatting "lookism", unwarranted societal discrimination against ugly people.
Among the handful of male Asian-American writers whose work I've read (Tony Tulathimutte, Adrian Tomine), sexual frustration and romantic rejection are recurrent themes. At the outset of the story, I was expecting it to be Chiang's mask-off moment where he permits himself an opportunity to air his grievances about being discriminated against for something outside of his capacity to change. But of course I'd underestimated him, and this story is just as rigorous and even-handed as anything else in his oeuvre. In the story, at least a dozen characters offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the technology, and it's to Chiang's credit that absolutely none of them come off like strawmen or stock characters being held up for our derision. It's also subtly prescient for 2002, describing a mobile phone on which you can make video calls and apply effects to your face to make it look like you're wearing makeup - he predicted Snapchat filters! Thought-provoking stuff, although not quite as good as some of my favourites (especially "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate").
FtttG
4mo ago
[immediately does a Ctrl-F on his NaNoWriMo project looking for errant "themselves"]
FtttG
4mo ago
I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.
Lmao thanks for the heads-up, I'm never going to watch this shit.
FtttG
4mo ago
Of course it's understandable, and also why it's no coincidence that the demographic now most likely to come out as "trans men" is the same demographic which a generation ago would have been most likely to be diagnosed with anorexia. In many regards, the practical end result is identical.
School shooters are narcissistic megalomaniacs who crave, more than anything, personal infamy. They notice that there are few crimes in our society seen as more heinous than murdering children (made particularly evident by the ghoulish amount of attention the most recent school shooting received). They conclude that murdering a bunch of children is the easiest way to achieve personal infamy. They look to places where large numbers of children congregate, and unsurprisingly find that schools meet this description. The nearest school is probably the one they are currently attending, or the one they attended (if they are a recent graduate or still live in the town they grew up). I'm not sure anything more needs to be explained beyond that.
On the TV Tropes page for the movie JFK, it's noted that one reason a lot of people didn't accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission was because they simply couldn't fathom the idea of a frustrated, unemployable, socially awkward loser murdering someone for no better reason than wanting to be famous for something, even something heinous. "Modern audiences, however, more than a generation after the Columbine massacre when such self-aggrandizing slayings have become almost mundane, might be more accepting that Oswald could indeed have acted alone." (Incidentally, there's something uniquely chilling about that phrase "self-aggrandizing slayings".) If Lee Harvey Oswald was around today, he would've been a school shooter: if all you're after is fame for yourself, it's much easier to gun down a bunch of minimally protected developing youths than a politician with a Secret Service detail. It also says something about how heinous a crime murdering children is that, for doing so, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are almost as famous as the man who committed the only one of the two successful assassinations of a POTUS in the twentieth century. Innumerable books analysing their psychology? Check, check. An Oscar-winning movie about their exploits? Check (bonus points for going out of its way to attempt to whitewash and exculpate Oswald), check (and there are several other movies about both which didn't win Oscars). A video game about them? Check, check.
FtttG
4mo ago
I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".
Over the past two decades and change, a great deal of energy and public resources have been invested into trying to prevent young people (especially young male people) from being sucked into internet echo chambers and radicalised into violence by the content they find therein. Government bodies such as the UK's Prevent were set up for this explicit purpose. These efforts have mostly been focused on the potential for violent radicalisation by three distinct ideologies/communities: radical Islam, far-right white nationalism/neo-Nazism, and incel/blackpill*. The latter, in particular, is considered such a pressing societal issue that the prime minister of the UK wants every secondary school student to watch a miniseries (which, tellingly, he erroneously referred to as a "documentary") about a white teenager who gets radicalised by incel communities and stabs a female classmate to death - in spite of the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single case of a UK citizen or resident murdering someone because of the incel worldview.
Spend enough time looking at trans activism and you can't fail to notice how much of the messaging carries a distinctly aggressive bent which revels in the glorification of violence. Trans activists routinely call on their supporters to assault, punch** or decapitate TERFs ("TERF" here meaning not "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" but "anyone who doesn't unquestioningly validate trans people's claimed identities", a category which doubtless included most of the worshippers in that church). There's a literal "holiday" called the "Trans Day of Vengeance". There are subreddits which encourage trans people to take up arms against their oppressors. (I mean seriously, look at this shit.) The impression I get is that, among the alphabet people, the trans community is really something of an outlier in this regard: if there's a parallel movement of gay men urging each other to take up arms to fight back against their homophobic oppressors, I'm not aware of it.
A few years ago, progressives had a term for this: stochastic terrorism. The idea is, if you flood information pathways with enough messaging which covertly encourages people to commit violence ("dog whistles" optional), sooner or later a dangerously unhinged person will encounter it, take it to heart, and attack the people you want to see attacked. But because it's impossible to predict where and when such a person will strike, you have enough plausible deniability to escape accusations of incitement to violence. Well, just so.
I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric, but it seems a reasonable assumption given the extremely online bent of many of his declarations (seriously, would "I'm the Woker Baby/Why So Queerious" even mean anything to someone who doesn't spend at least four hours of every day staring at a screen?). Every trans mass shooter to date has explicitly couched their crimes in political identitarian terms.
Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand. I'm not even being funny, but one of the core tenets of gender ideology ("anyone who doesn't see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you") seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism and megalomania common to all school shooters (likewise a secondary tenet, "any lesbian who doesn't want to fuck you is a hateful bigot"). There's the even more obvious point that female people taking testosterone causes increased aggression which might make FtMs more prone to violence.
*Also worth mentioning that, if participating in incel communities is a red flag for violent radicalisation, many trans people fit the bill by default. At this point I find the existence of an incel-to-trans pipeline flat out impossible to deny (something a handful of posters on /r/MTF are self-aware enough to recognise). Spend some time in that sub, take a shot every time you see a post which boils down to "why won't cis lesbians fuck me even though I identify as a woman?" and you'll have alcohol poisoning before the day is out (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Incel and MtF online spaces are alike in that they largely consist of male people who are attracted to female people complaining about being sexually frustrated. See also the rivers of digital ink spilled about the so-called "cotton ceiling".
**This one was actually said by a man who's spent more than half of his life in prison for assorted violent crimes, including false imprisonment, torture and attempted murder. Suffice it to say that, when he encouraged people to assault others, I do not believe he was speaking figuratively or engaging in harmless hyperbole.
You may be familiar with Graham Linehan, an Irish TV writer best known for co-creating Ireland's single most beloved sitcom Father Ted and also for creating two other well-regarded sitcoms, Black Books and The IT Crowd. In recent years he's pivoted away from TV towards political activism and has become well-known for his aggressive opposition to transactivism, about which his ceaseless pontifications on Twitter earned him a ban (which was reversed following the Musk buyout). By his own admission his obsessive dedication to this cause has cost him professional opportunities, his marriage, and left him financially destitute. I believe his gender-critical Substack is now his primary source of income.
On Monday he returned to the UK from the states to find five armed police officers waiting for him over three tweets he'd posted to X in April. He understandably found the experience so stressful that he was taken to hospital because of his elevated blood pressure. Certain of the officers who interviewed him alluded to the ongoing Sandie Peggie* case in what struck him as sympathetic terms, suggesting they thought they were wasting their time by arresting him.
For two of the offending tweets, no reasonable person could argue that any kind of criminal offense had been committed: the first depicts a photo of a trans protest which he describes as "a photo you can smell", while the second consists of Linehan asserting he hates trans activists because they're homophobic and misogynistic. For the third, one could in theory argue that it constitutes incitement to violence:
But let's be honest: trans activists using Twitter to urge their allies to assault TERFs (however broadly defined) is as common as dirt. Have any of them been arrested for so doing? Have they fuck. Funnily enough, even various Labour figures (such as health secretary Wes Streeting) are acknowledging they went too far in this instance, as has the Met Police chief.
From the Irish perspective, I find the hypocrisy appalling. The Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap were charged in the UK for, among other things, urging attendees to their gigs to go out and "murder their local MP". Just about everyone I've spoken to thinks this was an outrageous infringement on their freedom of expression and a sign of how hostile the UK has become to same: after all, no reasonable person could interpret their statement as intended literally. But all of the people who were up in arms about Kneecap's being charged with a criminal offense are crowing over Linehan's arrest and calling him a "drama queen" for complaining about his elevated blood pressure. Look at this thread over on /r/ireland, for which the comments were initially set to "approved users only" owing to "far-right brigading" (read: don't interrupt the circlejerk) and have since been locked.
I'm reminded of something I saw in response to the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes ad. If people keep abusing the "Nazi" epithet to the point that being attracted to slim, pretty blondes with big tits makes one a "Nazi", eventually people are just going to shrug their shoulders and say "guess I'm a Nazi so". By the same token, if objecting to the presence of male sex pests** in women's changing rooms, or thinking that someone shouldn't be arrested for expressing gender-critical opinions makes one "far-right" - eventually I'll simply have no choice but to say that's what I am.
*A nurse in Scotland nurse who objected to the presence of a trans-identified male doctor in the female changing rooms of the hospital where she worked, for which she was subjected to an 18-month internal investigation.
**I'm emphatically not asserting that all trans women/trans-identified males are sex pests, but I don't think it's open to debate anymore that short-sighted self-ID legislation enables sex pests.
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