Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Can you link me the comment you think I haven't read? I re-checked your comment but it doesn't seem to give any definition for what a woman is.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, it does that, but in medical settings it confuses the fuck out of exactly the uneducated and ESL people who most need to hear about eg annual pap smears. If you say, “Everyone with a cervix should get one!” that’s very precise, but a shocking number of people won’t realize it applies to them. If you say, “Women should get one!” you catch more cancers early.
Sure, if our terminology does not serve our purpose we should adjust our terminology so that it does, but the magnitude of the impact of the concerns expressed here are not clear to me.
For most purposes and in all but the most rarefied settings, “woman” does just fine. It’s not a dog at anyone who isn’t a central example of the category - it’s really not. You don’t see women who’ve had hysterectomies freaking out that we’re erasing their existence by referring to “women” rather than “menstruators.”
It's not that it's a "dog" at anyone, necessarily, it's just that it is underspecified. In the same way there are some people who are ESL or uneducated who may not realize they have a cervix there are people who need pap smears who do not think of themselves as "women." Now, I think the people who have a cervix but aren't women are probably more likely to understand they should still get pap smears than people lacking in education or who are ESL but it's a similar kind of concern.
And frankly it’s dehumanizing to be referred to by my uterus or its functions. You can disrespect 50% of the population or .6%. Take your pick.
I am skeptical anything like all women agree with you. I can't speak to the concern directly but I'm a cis man and don't think of a term like "people with prostates" as disrespectful at all.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The problem is that sexual categorization, like all categorization, is primarily functional. We define categories to serve some purpose. The boundaries we should draw are ones that should serve the function we want the category to serve. Sex categories serve different functions in different contexts and so it should be no surprise that people draw the boundaries in different places. Similarly this is why there is no One Ultimate Definition of sex categories that everyone finds sufficient for the purposes they want to put the category too. Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
To take your own comment, the criteria for what makes one "female" (in a biological sense of producing certain gametes) and what makes one "female" (in a sense of what linguistic term it is appropriate to use to refer to them) can be different! There's no reason these things have to be united, unless we want them to be for some reason.
To take a less politically charged example consider the humble Tomato. Botanically Tomatos are fruits (the seed bearing structure of a flowering plant) but culinarily (and sometimes legally) they are a vegetable. So, is a Tomato "really" a fruit? Or "really" a vegetable? You can pick one definition and call it the "real" definition but there's a reason people developed the alternate characterization and just arbitrarily declaring one the "real" one doesn't resolve the functional purpose achieved by the alternative categorization.
Frankly, this is one more reason I'm generally in favor of trans inclusive language. It replaces language with lossy or ambiguous referents with ones that are much closer to the relevant facts in the world in the appropriate contexts.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
As another comment points out, the available scientific evidence suggests multicellularity evolved independently multiple times. I would be pretty surprised if this wasn't the case for single cellular life as well.
That aside, I'm happy to say my prior is that inorganic matter becoming organic matter via natural processes is more probable than natural processes spontaneously forming a jet engine.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I largely agree. I guess I was thinking of opposing him in the sense he had a viable path to victory. I agree the potential to play spoiler is much higher.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
1. How viable is Dr. West as a third-party candidate?
As viable as any other third party candidate, which is to say not at all. Like, what is the group of people that (1) West appeals to more than Trump or Biden and (2) constitutes a majority of voters in sufficient states to win those states and the election? I submit there is no such constituency.
2. Are viral speeches still the greatest arm in an Outsider Politician's arsenal?
Probably? I suspect one of the biggest issues for Outsider Politicians is a lack of name recognition. Those Outsider Politicians that have been the most successful are those (like Perot and Trump) that had the most name recognition from before their candidacy. Viral speeches are one way for candidates to get their names out there.
3. Will this campaign introduce trepidation in the academic veneration of Black Americans?
Wat. The Ivy League has trained a hell of a lot more than two detractors of their "party-ideology!" Including several actual Presidents who were arguably opposed to their ideology. Why would Cornell West running for President (winning or not) change anything?
4. What new ideological platforms will be introduced to navigate the thorny task of denigrating a formerly sacred opponent?
There won't be any because it won't be necessary. The likelihood that West gathers the requisite support that doing anything to oppose him is necessary is remote. They'll just ignore him like basically every other third party candidate.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I would be very interested to see your evidence that abiogenesis happened exactly once!
I observe that jet engines are vastly less likely to occur in nature than life is. What is the counter evidence, that they are similarly likely to occur?
ETA:
To be clearer. I have a simple observation that there are vastly more and varied forms of life in existence than jet engines. Consider two explanations for this phenomenon.
(1) Jet engines and life are both equally (or similarly) likely to be produced by naturalistic processes but a supernatural process has intervened to create life but not jet engines.
(2) It is vastly more likely for naturalistic processes to produce life than jet engines.
What is the reason, the evidence, for believing (1) over (2)?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
You seem to think the jet engine is vastly less likely, so apparently you think there is evidence that bears on this question. What is that evidence?
Observation? I can look around me and see life in a variety of forms. Great and small, simple and complex. All of them apparently formed from naturalistic processes. Yet never once have I, or anyone, seen a jet engine formed by anything other than the labor of people to build one.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Do you think the seeming improbability of the origin of life is evidence for theism?
No.
Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what?
Based on our understanding of how fighter jets are made? Fighter jets require millions of parts made in very specific ways out of very specific materials and then assembled in very complex ways, that generally do not occur in nature. Like, what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a jet engine? I'm supposed to believe it's just as likely a jet engine arises from natural processes as a proto-bacteria arising from inorganic matter? What is the evidence these two things are of similar likelihood?
Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?
Because we understand the principles involved in constructing a fighter jet (Newtonian Mechanics, mostly) much better than we understand the principles underlying the jump from inorganic matter to organic matter. The way science doesn't work is that if we understand how to make something that has probability p of arising in nature we necessarily understand how to make everything that has probability greater than p of arising in nature.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Should only those things exist which are "necessary" to exist?
Seems that you can be gay, bi or trans and it’s more than accepted - there’s a huge increase in kids claiming lgbt status so if there’s stigma it’s not apparent anymore.
Surely there is great regional variation in the truth of this statement, as @raggedy_anthem points out below.
At what point does it make sense to call a moratorium for social movements that have lost their purpose?
Can you be more specific? What kind of action does calling for this moratorium entail? What does such a moratorium actually look like?
What are the “victory conditions” for what homophobia is considered no longer a major issue?
There is probably not any one answer for this. Different people will think of homophobia as having been solved based on different criteria.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is hard for me to understand how posting about Pride could fall afoul of such a rule given that Pride, as both celebration and flag, pre-date 1988.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The first amendment applied to the restrictions the government put on broadcasters, yes. Not to the restrictions broadcasters put on what they aired. Symmetrically the first amendment would apply to any government regulation of social media, but not a social media companies policies that users must follow.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This is an important point. Even if the law is unconstitutional courts are not going to raise that issue themselves, someone is going to have to argue it. If everyone charged under the law has pleaded guilty no adjudication about the law's constitutionality has actually occurred.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system.
I don't think they are "unambiguously the public square" at all. For the obvious difference the historical public square was, well, public in that it was operated by a government and open to all. Twitter, Facebook, and similar online platforms are very much private. They have a big long list of things you have to agree to in order to use them and are definitely not operated by the government. Maybe they are the best way to disseminate a message to a mass audience, but that was true of television and radio in their time without them becoming the "public square."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I feel compelled to note that the "another lawyer" (Steven Schwartz) was the listed notary on Peter LoDuca's initial affadavit wherein he attached the fraudulent cases in question. This document also appears to have been substantially generated by ChatGPT, given that it gives an impossible date (January 25th) for the notarization. Really undermines Schwartz's claim that he did all the ChatGPT stuff and LoDuca didn't know about any of it.
The thought that people put this much trust in ChatGPT is extremely disturbing to me. It's not Google! It's not even Wikipedia! It's probabilistic text generation! Not an oracle! This is insanity!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Where does this presumptions originate?
I am not sure, but I know it exists. So much so that when I went to a hobbyist class on barrel aged beer the instructor went out of his way to emphasize to us how the best brewers he had known were women (which was extremely awkward). It was pretty clear to me that none of us had any particular bias against women brewers but he expected us to have such a bias.
The assumption in the advertising is that men like beer more than women, or at the very least consume much more of it. Frankly it seems like a pretty solid assumption from my lived experience with much more parsimonious explanations than that the advertising companies(who have inexplicably decided to stop psyoping us for some implied pro-social motivation) psyoped us all into having these different preferences.
I don't understand where "psyop" is coming from as an explanation. One simple explanation (that I think is true) is the gender makeup of who is running beer advertising has changed over the intervening decades and men and women have different ideas about what will get people to buy beer. This also assumes that men and women's relative preferences towards beer are not shaped, in part, by these advertising campaigns. You don't exactly see tons of women's products advertised by unrelated sexy women!
Prior to seeing this ad was there even such a meme that it takes a manly person to brew a beer for men?
I am not plugged into the domestic light beer scene at all but... maybe? Where I grew up there was definitely a general perception that women weren't competent or capable at traditionally male dominated activities.
It's a perenial classic to have a big busted feminine lady bring beer to men, would you really predict that an ad in the 90s of a big busted woman brewing the beer for the men first wouldn't do gangbuster?
I mean, are there any such ads? If such an ad would do gangbusters I am skeptical that the first context it would be thought of in is this conversation we're having.
Would it really occur to the men that it's emasculating that a woman brewed their beer?
My contention is not that such men would find it emasculating, merely that they would doubt a woman's competence as a brewer and so have a bias against any beer they had brewed.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure. One way I think it can be wrong is that reinforces harmful notions of masculinity by connecting perceived success as a man (attractive women will sleep with you) with consuming a particular product (their beer). I think this is common in a lot of marketing that uses sex or sexuality to sell some other product but isn't present in transactions about sex more directly.
The other argument might be that it is wrong to make these images when they are commercial. What I can't get is a reason why commercial images are worse than non-commercial ones.
The reason these images are bad in a commercial context is the implication that the individuals so depicted will sleep with you, or be more into you, or that you will be more successful at attracting the kind of individual so depicted as a result of consuming the product in question. Not obvious to me how a similar principal could be at work in non-commercial contexts.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The point of emphasizing women's historical role in brewing is to rebut an (implied) presumption that it's something women can't do or are unsuited to doing. It's about the activity. The location is not really important (as you note). I don't see anything in the ad that implies that women's participation in this activity is (or ought to be) limited to the location it was historically done in, quite the opposite. So the OPs inference seemed strange when the content of the ad seemed quite opposed to their point.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?
I don't really understand what this paragraph has to do with the advertisement. It seems like the implication is supposed to be "it was bad for beer companies to use sexualized images of women to sell beer" -> "it's wrong for women to post sexualized images of themselves" but it's not clear to me that the second statement follows this first. It seems to me there are lots of ways the first statement could be true without the second statement being true.
Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.
I don't understand how this can be a takeaway from this advertisement. Literally every scene involving a woman is outside the home. The advertisement depicts women involved in several parts of the brewing process, every one of which is outside their home. "Stay in the kitchen by.... making fertilizer to grow hops to brew beer for our giant corporation!" Just, what?
Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey
I don't understand how the existence of Weihenstephan Abbey demonstrates that women weren't the primary brewers historically. Especially when the advertisement mentions brewing that predates this abbey pretty substantially.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Two things.
First I think your analysis conflates disputes that will be resolved by exercises of power (persuasive or coercive) with disputes about who is more powerful. When people argue about misgendering or the use of slurs in certain contexts it's not because of some perceived power differential, it's a genuine dispute over how it's appropriate to use words. When people object to using "Nigger" in even the "mention" sense it is generally because they think it is inappropriate when used that way. Similarly when people defend its use they think it is because using it in the context is appropriate or valuable. This is a dispute that might be settled by exercises of power but the dispute is not centrally about who is more powerful.
Second I think the emergence of a Cymbeline is impossible due to the distributed nature of the groups involved in Culture War disputes. The reason Cymbeline can credibly capitulate Britain to Rome is that the Britons, as his subjects, are obliged to follow his wishes on the matter. There is no similar entity or institution (or set of entities or institutions) in our modern distributed politics.
Imagine I'm a trans person and I want to negotiate a Truce With The Transphobes. Two questions arise. First, who am I? What entity or institution can credibly claim to speak on behalf of trans people everywhere? Second, who am I negotiating with? What entity or institution can speak for all the anti-trans groups and organizations out there? International relations are a bad model for intra-national group relations because in international relations there are generally well defined entities that can credibly make commitments on behalf of their nation. Not so with Culture War groups! We often talk about groups as if they were agents, with wants and desires and engaging in actions, but it is important to remember this is an abstraction, a convenience, not reality.
As an aside I think this second thing is a powerful contributor to the degradation of political discussion. It leads us to unclear thinking or, at least, substantial inferential distance with the people we are conceiving of this way.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
For another angle on this problem: looking at GPUs isn't going to be good enough. Maybe consumer grade GPUs are the best widely available chip architecture we have for running AI today but there's no reason that has to always be the case. If AI is going to be as important for the future as Yud claims there is going to be immense pressure to develop custom chips that are more optimized for running AI. This is basically the progression that happened in Bitcoin mining.
You can't just track chips with a particular architecture because we can make new architectures! To do this effectively you'd need to track every chip fabrication facility in the world, examine every architecture of chip they make, and somehow figure out if that architecture was optimized for running some AI software. Even if this monitoring infrastructure were in place, what if some entity comes up with some clever and heretofore unseen software+hardware AI pair that's super efficient? Are we going to never allow any new chip architectures on the off chance they are optimized for running an AI in a way we can't detect?
For nuclear weapons we at least have the ability to identify the necessary inputs (uranium and means of enriching it). For AI, do we even have constraints on what it's software will look like? On how chips that are optimized for running it will be structured?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
To me, it just seems like such a strange and unsustainable status quo to try and maintain. Are we really trying to keep major aspects of kids' lives secret from their parents, just so we can deceive the parents until they turn 18 and are able to fend for themselves? I can understand the idea of putting the needs of the child above those of the parents, but I don't get how we arrive at this as the most natural solution to the problem of, "If we tell the parents that their kid identifies as trans, the parent might freak out and do something drastic that isn't in the best interest of the child."
I am confident the general phenomena of "student tells a trusted teacher information the student doesn't want their parents to know and the teacher keeps that confidence" is a phenomena as old as teachers and students. What information students confide changes over the time but I don't think this is a new phenomenon or status quo. I don't think this is the best solution to this problem. The best solution would be something like "there are no parents who would disown or abuse their children for being LGBT" but I have no idea how to bring about that solution! It seems like we've settled on this one as the best alternative, in terms of protecting children's wellbeing. If you have further alternatives I'm open to hearing them.
In fact, I think that "tearing the band-aid off" and just telling parents about trans children is the "safer" option for LGBT people on the whole. Anti-LGBT parents who might abandon or abuse their LGBT children are a tough problem to solve by government mandate, but I think a mildly anti-LGBT parent is much more likely to have a massive overreaction if they come in 6 months into their child's social transition, which has all happened behind their backs, than they would have if a teacher had reached out to them and said, "Hey, John goes by Jenny now, and prefers she/her, I thought you ought to know."
I guess I don't agree. Either that telling parents is more generally the "safer" option or that mildly anti-LGBT parents would be more outraged about their child's transition being hidden than more strongly anti-LGBT parents. When I look at the kinds of people going to school board meetings and whatever complaining about schools policies of keeping student information confidential my impression is they are pretty strongly anti-LGBT, not mildly.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The DR is in favor of racially homogeneous societies. There shouldn't be any racial minorities around to discriminate against in the first place, because they should be living somewhere else, among their own people where they can be governed by laws of their own making.
So, what are the implications of this for racial minorities that live in a society? Hard to see how one goes from a racially diverse society to a racially homogenous one in a way that does not entail the subordination of minority races.
For what it's worth, one of the leaders of the UK group Patriotic Alternative is a woman, and the National Justice Party's official platform summary says nothing about women. So they're not exactly frothing at the mouth to put women in chains or anything.
It's worth nothing. As long as there has been a movement for women's equality there have been women arguing for their own political and social subordination. The anti-suffragettes existed.
I mean, dropping an adjective always conveys less information than including it. "Woman" contains less information than "trans woman" but "man" also conveys less information than "tall man." The question is in what context the information conveyed by the adjective is useful. The "trans" adjective conveys useful information in some contexts and not others. Same for the trans inclusive language.
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