MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
4mo ago
(not really because... well you know)
Speak plainly please.
only Christianity is targeted. Would Atheists ever put up depictions of Muhammad (peace be upon him)?
That's just not true. Maybe in America, where Muslims make up a tiny minority of the population, but in Europe Islam is often criticized and even ridiculed, mostly by atheists. What did you think caused the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan, the attack on the Swedish embassy in Iraq, the 2023 terrorist attacks in Belgium, Türkiye soft-blocking Sweden's ascension to NATO, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.?
That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox
Yes, but he's still the smallest of the five people, smaller even than the only other female. The point is: most transmen aren't that masculine, even not the ones hand-picked by trans-advocates, not to mention obvious women like Elliot Page.
Anyway, I didn't want to get caught up in discussing individual cases. I'll grant you that some well-passing transmen exist, but I think they're the minority. My argument more broadly is:
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The average transman doesn't truly pass a man, and the average transwoman doesn't truly pass as a woman (arguably less so). So the argument that swapping transmen and transwomen is worse for women because now they suddenly share the bathroom with many more male-looking people isn't true: at best you're replacing male-looking men with male-looking women, which is sort of a wash.
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But the more important argument is that regardless of visual passing, transmen are much less likely to harrass or assault women than transwomen are. That's why it's better for ciswomen to share the bathroom with transmen than with transwomen.
I don't think enumerating exceptions to the rule invalidates this argument.
How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow?
I often wonder if people raising this question are disingenous. It's phrased as if the idea of sex-segregated spaces is a crazy far-out utopian idea, like universal basic income. In reality, all bathrooms in approximately the entire world worked like this throughout the entire 20th century, using the same mechanisms used to enforce most norms: through a mix of social contral and legal consequences.
Did you see the video of the Wi Spa where a male pervert enters the women-only section of the spa, so one of the women there goes to complain, and the employee at the desk can't do anything about it because in California it's illegal to kick male creeps out of women's spaces, and the only male patron who weighs in on the matter says "How can we know if the fully grown man with a penis isn't a woman?"
In the 90s, this scenario literally would not have happened. If a convicted sex offender entered a woman-only nude space with his dick out, all women present would scream at the top of their lungs for the pervert to get out. Employees would rush in to demand that the offender leave. Men would gather angrily at the door, ready to help escort the man out of the building, but careful enough not to trespass themselves. If necessary, the police would be called to take the man into custody.
Moreover, everyone knew that this is what happened to men who violated this social norm. That's why this type of crime was actually relatively rare.
Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?
No, of course. But first, I don't see how putting transwomen in women's bathrooms solves this problem, since a woman that is willing to pepperspray a masculine looking woman will obviously do the same thing to your average non-passing transwoman.
Second, I think some of this paranoia is actually fueled by genderism. In the past, if you saw a masculine-looking person entering the women's bathroom, you'd assume it was just a masculine-looking woman, because who else would someone use the woman's bathroom? Today, you can no longer assume that because males entering women's spaces is stunning and brave, actually. This puts gender nonconforming women under suspicion in a way they wouldn't be in a society that strictly enforces sex-segregated spaces.
Third and finally, let me explain how this sort of situation should be handled. If you're a woman who sees a man enter the woman's room, you first say “Excuse me sir, this is the woman's bathroom?” In 90% of the cases, he will look shocked and say “Oh, my mistake! I must have entered the wrong door” and leave. If it's actually a woman, then she'll say “Excuse me, but I am a woman!” In the case of someone like Rain Dove you can tell from her voice that she is speaking the truth, so you say “Oh, my mistake!” and that's the end of it. Now imagine you don't believe her because the "woman" is actually Karen White wearing a bad wig who couldn't pass for female in his wildest dreams.
Then you escalate the situation by finding a person responsible for the space, e.g. a security card in a public mall, the bartender, the office manager, etc.. You tell them there is a man in the woman's bathroom. They join you and ask the perpetrator to identify themselves. If they refuse, they are again asked to leave, and if they refuse, the cops are called.
All of this depends on government-issued ID to accurately label a person's biological sex. In the current world, all western countries have removed this label. This should be reverted. My (actually serious!) proposal is to list biological sex and socially desired sex separately, so we can still be polite by addressing transwomen as Ms So-and-so while separating them from women where sex matters.
The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.
I don't think there are sources that can show this. Not in the current world where:
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Transwomen are a tiny majority, so even if they are significantly more likely to misbehave in bathrooms, you would need a lot of data to show that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (actually it is, but only to a small degree, hard to get to p<0.05 that way). And that's before accounting for confounders. If a creepy male starts using the women's room and women stop going there, does that show he's not causing any problems?
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You can't use crime statistics because the police is not even allowed to accurately register the biological sex of trans offenders, so while we could collect this information in a systematic way, gender activists ensure this doesn't happen (you might wonder why gender activists oppose this if they believe the results would be favorable to their cause?)
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Academia is heavily politicized and genderism is one of those topics you are not allowed to objectively research. As a result, we cannot use academic sources to prove or disprove anything.
In short, I don't think you've seen compelling evidence that disproves the claim that transwomen are more dangerous to women than women (and transmen) are. I think you've seen a paper that said something like "we compared the number of reported incidents in inclusive bathrooms at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, populated entirely by highly-paid academics who value their jobs, with the numbers from the non-inclusive bathrooms at a Texas truck stop, and we didn't control for the myriad confounding variables that make that comparison meaningless, but we are going to conclude anyway that The Science™ shows inclusive bathrooms benefit women".
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the actual source you are thinking of. I'm sure I can poke one or more holes in it along the above lines.
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repetitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most common arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
It would save me a lot of time but I'm not sure if it would actually change anyone's mind.
MartianNight
3mo ago
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women
Let me stop you right there. It was never about male-looking people. It was always about males. It just so happens that being male-looking is a pretty good proxy for being male in the real world (despite what the trans lobby wants you to think).
The rationale is that many more males abuse women and girls than females do. Therefore, women and girls are safer in the presence of other females then they are in the presence of males. If you disagree with this fairly obvious statistic, what do you think women-only spaces are for?
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
Moving away from anecdotes, I think it's important to realize that for every masculine-looking trans-identified female, there are probably three trans-identified males that are absolutely deranged, like Karen White, Darren Merager, or Michael Pentillä. Would I rather have women share a bathroom with a female porn star, or with a male serial killer and unrepentant rapist of women and young girls, you ask? Wow, what a dilemma you put in front of me! I just don't know how to choose!
No seriously, obviously it's the female porn star. If it were up to me, I'd put a hundred Buck Angels in women's bathrooms before I'd let a single Michael Pentillä in. It seems the obvious choice, if you want to optimize for women's safety rather than maximizing the euphoria of rapist serial killers. Was that really supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
MartianNight
1mo ago
we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations
But then I have to press you: what exactly is this ratio, and how is it computed? How can I calculate it for various subspecies and for humans in order to verify independently that indeed, native Scandinavians and Aboriginal Australians are more closely related than any pair of subspecies of Chimpanzee?
And I have to point out that “subspecies” is a social construct too, in that the definition of subspecies is determined by biologists, who could very well define it as “subspecies are any subpopulations that have greater genetic differences than any two human subpopulations”. It doesn't tell you how to calculate genetic similarly, but it's clear that, by definition, there cannot be subspecies of Homo Sapiens, so problem solved. But of course that creates two problems:
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That's hardly carving reality at the joints: it's plausible that there are relevant distinctions that are more fine-grained than you allow. If there really is no significant difference between human subpopulations, you have to show that from first principle, not simply assert it by definition.
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Is this standard really being consistently applied? Again, think about the Chimpanzee subspecies. Are they really more differentiated than some human races? If biologists aren't using their own definition to determine subspecies in the first place, then appealing to the definition to assert there are no subspecies within the human race is meaningless.
MartianNight
11mo ago
First, I don't think it's true that if the races were swapped the right would be defending the men. Right-wingers like pregnant women and don't like selfish gangs of young men. In general, I think the left hates white people way more than the right hates black people. So you would not necessarily see a reversal of attitudes, but rather loud condemnation from the left (how dare those white privileged male privileged devils harass a proud woman of color?), and at best a muted response from the right.
Second, practically speaking, even if right-wingers would condemn the black woman in the hypothetical gender-swapped version, there is absolutely no chance in hell that right-wingers would be able to get a crying pregnant black female nurse suspended from her job for being bullied by a group of abusive white guys, and that's double true in New York City. Let me know if you disagree but I think this is such a blatantly obvious truth that it doesn't really require more elaboration.
First, an obligatory comment that dropping bare links as top-level comments in the Culture War topic is a faux-pas, boo you, mods will probably scold you a bit for this.
Second, and rather low-effort, I can't get over how utterly obnoxious most writing for the New Yorker is. I assume everyone here appreciates detailed, long-form commentary, and the New Yorker superficially provides that, but the thing is that making an article long and wordy doesn't make it good. Scott Alexander's posts are long but what makes them good is that he uses this length to cover a lot of ground. New Yorker articles, including this one, often feel like someone took a mildly interesting anecdote and prompted an AI with “pad this short draft out to 10x the length it needs to be, while making the author sound like a pretentious twat that has no greater joy in life than smelling their own farts”.
Case in point, what the fuck is up with paragraphs like this:
I spoke with a trans person in their early thirties who told me that the number of available labels at first made them pause. “Those are the labels that exist, but they exist almost like a step ahead of where I exist,” they said. “I’ve gotten closer to those labels based on the connections that I’ve made, but I wasn’t in a place to know them ahead of time.” The language of identity does not always precede experience, they continued. Over time, “you figure out what language you need to speak in order to be seen.”
What the fuck is this supposed to convey? What's the information content of this entire paragraph? This is just fucking garbage writing that was included because the author is a pathetic handmaiden that had to include some trans POV to get her article published.
And not to mention the final paragraph:
The people who craft anti-trans legislation and laws to control sexuality see lives that are different than theirs as a threat to their own integrity. Imagine what that must be like, to not be able to think about change, and the possibilities it might offer.
What the fucking hell has any of this to do with a dating app for pretentious fartknockers?
Okay, let me try to balance out the pot shots with some commentary on the meat of the article. What I gathered from the article, Feeld is a hookup app for pretentious assholes who disguise their base horniness with pompous terms like “ethical nonmonogamist”, and you pledge allegiance to the woke by hating on straight white males, as is tradition.
With that in mind, look at the author (who, by the name, I assume is female, though given the wokeness of it all and the fact that their name is ”Emily” might well be a female-presenting transgender), and their experience on the app:
Feeld, unlike most other dating apps, quantifies the interest its users receive with a number that Kirova assured me is real. In the two years I’ve been on the app, more than eleven thousand people have liked my profile, whose only proscriptive has been “no liars.” I’ve never felt as much license to dismiss male entitlement as I have on Feeld. If a man casually insults my appearance; if he pressures me to meet after I’ve said that I’m busy; if he treats me like a food-delivery service, ready to serve him when he’s in the mood; if he imposes rote pornographic fantasies on me without any curiosity or charm; if he indicates that he’ll try to negotiate his way out of using condoms; if he is coy or unforthcoming in a way that makes me suspicious; if he has no sense of humor or isn’t kind—I disconnect without hesitation or regret. There is no reason to tolerate any dehumanizing or insulting behavior.
Summary: woman puts minimal effort in her dating profile, receives thousands of likes anyway (mostly from horny straight white males, who are to be despised), and quickly dismisses the majority of messages from men. This somehow makes Feeld special, but isn't this the absolute standard norm on every dating/hookup app ever?
I’ve gone back to the standard dating apps a couple times, but none offered the same ease of connection. I kept experiencing a suffocating gender dynamic: regardless of the kind of person I am, I was somehow forced into the role of a desperate pursuer trying to win the affection of the elusive and “emotionally unavailable” male, a dynamic that was confusing to see revived in a moment when I was experiencing as much sexual agency as I’d ever had in my life.
Again, assuming that this person is a cis-female that is not absolutely horrendous-looking, what dating app were they on that they can't get 100 messages from desperate males within an hour of signing up with a single bad photo of themselves? It all seems like total bullshit to me.
I wonder how much people get paid to write this kind of garbage, and who's paying them. I doubt they're doing it for free.
MartianNight
11mo ago
In isolation I would agree with you but a lot of the criticism came from the sort of people who say stuff like “you can't call the cops on black criminals because the police might shoot them [and if they do, that's on you for not wanting to be victimized]”, clearly implying that ultimate consequences are on the consciousness of the instigator. If we are consistent and apply that same logic here, then the black men are at least partially responsible for the harmful results of the video they chose to share online (despite knowing they were in the wrong!)
Take for example this article (from a “journalist” that cannot group sentences into paragraphs):
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but she escalated it in a way that could have caused harm to those young Black men, and we cannot lose sight of that.
And:
The situation could have easily been resolved, but Sarah Jane Comrie chose a different tactic.
She chose to do a thing a lot of white women before her have done — a thing that has caused the deaths of so many Black people — and that is why everyone is upset.
That is why her actions are being labeled racist.
That is why she is being called out.
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but those black men escalated it in a way that has caused harm to this pregnant woman. This situation could have easily been resolved, but the men chose a different tactic. They chose to do a thing a lot of black people before them have done — a thing that has caused so many white people to get fired from their jobs — and that's why everyone is upset. That's why they are being called out.
MartianNight
1yr ago
The truth is that females just don't care about computer programming at all. Yes, there are some female engineers at woke companies like Facebook and Google, but none of them do software development in their free time: working as a software engineer is just an easy way to make a lot of money to them (which is easy for them because the hiring policy greatly benefits them, and they are practically immune from being fired). Consequently, all open source software is developed by males, and anyone presenting as a woman is actually a trans-identifying male, especially the people who are into a super-niche field that women wouldn't give a fuck about because it won't help them get a job, like developing game console emulators and stuff like that.
It's not about discrimination either. It costs you nothing to create a github account, or to sign up for a competitive programming contest. But females will absolutely refuse to do any of that stuff. So yes: all the CS-related blogs are written by males. I'm not even being facetious: there is not a single worthwhile CS blog written by a biological female. If the above comments sound sexist to you, please prove me wrong by citing counter-examples.
MartianNight
4mo ago
Nice writeup. Unfortunately not a lot of discussion yet so let me add some random comments:
And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Depends on what you call “novel”. A lot of the problems are based on well-known algorithms like path finding, Josephus problems, etc. And there is quite a bit of repetition of concepts between years as well. So I think LLMs and humans alike benefit from being having the previous problems in their data set.
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
It's probably the same reason why ChatGPT does so poorly at writing longform fiction. It has no idea how to construct an overarching narrative because the planning, rewriting and editing necessary is invisible to ChatGPT; it only sees the finished output.
I think coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) will be able to fill this gap by observing how humans actually develop code.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
True, and I agree with your subjective assessment that the problems aren't any harder this year, but I'd add also that the leaderboard is not really representative of the overall participant base. People on the leaderboard are the top 1% of all solvers (let alone participants), and they have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, a problem that requires dynamic programming is easy for them (but hard for most casual programmers), while the top 1% still need more time on problems that require lots of of careful reading, convoluted input parsing, tricky edge cases, etc.
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
MartianNight
5mo ago
These results aren't terribly surprising
I disagree. The enormous victory of Wilders far-right PVV was completely unexpected. A week ago he was not even in the top 3. One day before the election only one poll suggested PVV was tied with VVD for the lead. Now he has a projected 12 seat lead over the labour/green party in second place (37 vs 25, or a 50% lead!) with VVD demoted to third place (24 seats). This is was quite unexpected based on polls and unprecedented for the party itself.
It also has a huge effect on possible coalitions. In my comment two weeks ago I didn't even talk about PVV because I expected them to be ruled out. Now, it seems like including PVV is unavoidable.
In terms of coalition building, it's worth mentioning that there is huge discrepancy between representation in the house (after these elections) and in the senate, partially because Omtzigt's new NSC party has no seats in the senate yet. This means any majority in the house will likely not have a majority in the senate. While technically the government only needs majority support in the house, not having majority support in the senate it is problematic for parties that want to pass radical reforms, since they can't count on automatic support in the senate.
The challenge for Wilders now is not just to form a government, but to actually deliver on his promises. He has gained a lot of popular support with populist rhetoric, and even if not all of it was taken seriously by his voters (like his "head rag tax" which would require Muslim women to purchase a license to wear a head scarf in public), it's clear that voters expect some radical changes from him. If he doesn't manage to move the needle then it seems likely he will lose support from the voters who counted on him to make a real change (the comparison with Donald Trump seems apt).
Ironically, it seems like some of Wilders economically left-wing plans (e.g., lowering the age of retirement, abolishing the deductible on health care insurance) are actually more feasible in that they have broader support and don't contravene national and international law. It would be deeply ironic if a “far right” politician ends up implementing these left-wing policies, when the more moderate VVD probably wouldn't.
From a culture war perspective, it's amusing to see how poorly the left is taking the loss. The main stream media report on the event with a tone that suggests the election results are incredibly disappointing, rather than a legitimate expression of the people's will that is to be celebrated.
In Utrecht (the 4th largest city with a mostly left-leaning population) Antifa organized protests against the election results. First of all, protesting election results seems quite undemocratic. It's easy to compare this to the January 6th protests that the American left condemned, but in this case, protesters aren't even claiming the results are invalid, just that the results are bad, because people voted for the wrong guy. I don't want to overemphasize the scale of these projects though; it seems like only a few thousand people showed up. Still, people protesting election results is not common in the Netherlands.
It's also interesting that those protesters are shouting pro-Palestine slogans. It makes sense since Wilders is a staunch Israel supporter, which fits well with his anti-Islam stance, though he didn't campaign on this topic at all. It's kind of crazy to me that the far-right is now considered to be aligned with Israel, while the far-left opposes Israel, while a few decades ago “far right” was virtually synonymous with “antisemite” and therefore anti-Israel. We live in strange times.
MartianNight
7mo ago
You've conveniently left out the 1 word that could exonerate Bowman. The relevant text is this:
Whoever corruptly [..] obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so [..]
So the law does not apply to Bowman if he can make a convincing case it was an innocent mistake (which is of course exactly what he is now claiming). It makes sense that the law is qualified this way, otherwise a janitor accidentally triggering the fire alarm could go to jail for 20 years.
MartianNight
11mo ago
I'm not accusing you of fabricating anything. I'm just saying I find your conclusion baffling, according to the facts as you present them.
MartianNight
4mo ago
Day 8 is a bit of a bad example, the general solution is the chinese remainder problem which isn't much harder anyway.
Have you tried to solve the general problem yourself? It's absolutely much harder than the version contestants had to solve.
First, the Chinese remainder theorem is genuinely a lot harder than simply calculating the least common multiple. Second, the problem statement allows much more complicated input than that. For example, the problem statement allows loops with multiple end states; I don't even know how you'd deal with that efficiently, I doubt you know on the top off your head, and I certainly wouldn't fault ChatGPT for not knowing it either.
If you post your code I can probably come up with a test case that breaks it.
How could other humans learn how to construct those solutions? They read the same textbooks that are in the training set of ChatGPT (a miniscule fraction of them) and they understand their contents.
No, that's absolutely not how humans learn to code. Or at least it's not how I learned or anyone I know that's good at solving AoC style problems learned to solve them. Reading textbooks is the absolute minimum time investment. The majority of time is spent thinking about the problem, writing code, noticing it doesn't work, trying to find a flaw by reading through it, stepping through the execution with a debugger, or maybe adding printf() statements to get insight in the internal state, and so on.
It's a very interactive process. But the intermediate code, with all the printf() statements for debugging, isn't something that usually gets committed. That's why ChatGPT doesn't know to debug code that way. It has never even seen someone do this. It might have heard about printf() debugging from Wikipedia but it has never done it itself, or if it did (because of user requests), it keeps no memory of it.
You can also look at this as a question of whether ChatGPT Plus is worth it in general: it did better than straight API calls but I spent 2$ of API calls vs 20$ for plus, it isn't 10 times better.
I don't think this comparison makes sense. You're treating it as a comparison of efficiency: as if Model A is solving problems at a rate of X/day and Model B at a rate of 2X/day, so Model B is only twice as valuable as Model A. But that's not what's happening: Model B is solving problems that apparently Model A cannot solve at all. If Einstein can prove only 1% more theorems than the average physics major, does that mean he should be paid only 1% more?
TBH her actions are exactly the kind of response that's deserved by people on google's scale who use giant monolithic algorhythmic censorship without even the possibility of your petitions being seen by a human
No, people do not deserve to be shot because the algorithm doesn't favor every creator equally (never mind the fact that the people she shot at weren't responsible for the YouTube algorithms in the first place). That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.
This wasn't a case of a person being wronged unfairly by Google, as happened in the past with people who had their accounts inexplicably suspended. Aghdam's account was never banned, but her videos were suppressed by the algorithm because they were cringe and weirdly sexual (example 1, example 2). This is exactly the kind of content YouTube discourages, partially because filling the frontpage with thirst traps doesn't fit its image, and partially because big advertisers only pay for brand-safe content. If you don't want to play by the rules, you shouldn't be on Youtube.
Whatever algorithm is used for recommendations, it will never be possible for every creator to become popular. It's no different with musicians on SoundCloud or aspiring actors in Hollywood. Any algorithm will therefore have winners and losers (including “completely random” or “newest only” feeds). There's no justification for the losers to go on a killing spree because they couldn't succeed within the ecosystem as it exists.
MartianNight
1yr ago
First, let me say that I appreciate you commenting, since so many posters here are conservative and/or rightist, so it's nice to also hear from people with a different perspective. That being said, I'm still going to disagree with you, since that's kind of the point of this place.
It sounds like you are a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) to use Blanchard's typology, which means you are quite different from autogynephiles like Contrapoints. I don't think your experiences are typical of trans-identified males in general.
We gender people based on secondary sexual characteristics, not biological sex.
No, we use those secondary sexual characteristics to attempt to infer biological sex, much like how you might infer that the person wearing a police uniform and driving a police car is, in fact, a police officer.
It's certainly possible to pretend to be something you're not, with various levels of success. Military imposters are virtually universally scorned for their duplicity. The same is true for race-fakers like Rachel Dolezal. I would put sex-fakers in the same category and afford them little sympathy.
If you see someone who looks like Hunter Schafer or Emma Ellingsenyour brain will go "she" and you will have to correct yourself.
Again, it's definitely possible to fake your sex, the same way I might be able to convince people that I'm a police officer or a Nigerian Prince. But of course that doesn't really prove anything more than the fact that people can be fooled.
Honestly the focus on appearance over substance sounds like a motte-and-bailey argument: the motte is that some people are so good at faking their sex they are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, and the bailey is that anyone who identifies as a woman becomes one.
Personally I don't think that transgender people are particularly good at faking their sex. Natalie Wynn still strikes me as a male despite the enormous amount of effort she puts into passing. Other people are even less succesfull.
To that point, it's funny that you mentioned Buck Angel: I like him a lot, but he vaguely passes as a male only if you limit yourself to looking at his highly-edited photos. In real life he's a 60-year-old, squeaky-voiced, 5'8" manlet. The idea that he could successfully rob anyone who couldn't be robbed by a woman is preposterous. Never mind the fact that he's just too nice to do something like that: he is, despite his gender identification, still very much female at heart. It's really weird to me that genderists champion him as the obvious example of a woman-who-has-become-a-man when, if you dive below the surface, he is not a typical male at all.
So put your cards on the table. Do you think that recognizing someone as a woman is contingent on them passing as one? If so, do you agree that it is more than fair to call obvious men like Lia Thomas, Rachel Levine, Emilia Decaudin, Jessica Yaniv, Alok Vaid Menon, etc. men?
Or do you think, according to the common leftist talking point, that a woman is everyone who says they are, regardless of how poorly they pass? If you belief the latter, it seems irrelevant that some transwomen might pass relatively well.
MartianNight
1yr ago
Kind of low effort for this forum, but I watched a news clip on twitter where CNN interviews Natalee Bingham, a friend of one of the victims, commenting on the suspect claiming to be nonbinary, saying: “That's really really offen[sive] especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a nonbinary person, because in no way, shape or form could they appear as a woman the next day, it's really offensive to even hear that, that they're playing that role."
I was just blown away by the hypocrisy. According to standard leftist rhetoric, a person's gender self-identification is sacrosanct, denying someone's chosen gender identity is transphobic, and the the idea that someone might identify as transgender or nonbinary for personal gain is rightwing fearmongering and something that never happens. Never mind the fact that Bingham based her judgment solely on how the suspect looks in his mugshots (while Bingham herself looks and sounds “transgender” at best); I thought making people's gender recognition dependent on well they “pass” was another faux pas to the LGTBQ+ community.
I want to avoid making this all “boo outgroup”; I know that Bingham doesn't speak for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and maybe others disagree with her views. Still, it's baffling to hear her say so casually the same things that would get a cishet male or radfem woman cancelled. I can somewhat respect the leftist view that self-identification is always valid, even if I personally disagree with it, but if the real rule is more along the lines of “we can question other people's gender identity but you can't”, then I have even less respect for the people pushing this ideology.
The claim “I didn’t realize a fire alarm would set off an alarm” is pretty weak.
That's not what he said. He said: “I was trying to get to a door. I thought the alarm would open the door, and I pulled the fire alarm to open the door by accident.”
That's also questionable (if you pulled the alarm because you thought that would open the door then you didn't do it by accident) but the point is: he doesn't deny intentionally triggering the fire alarm, but he claims his intent was to open the door, not to prevent the vote. And that seems at least possible. On twitter I saw this image of the location with a sign that reads:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
PUSH UNTIL ALARM SOUNDS (3 seconds)
DOOR WILL UNLOCK IN 30 SECONDS
(But note that in the still of Bowman pulling the alarm that sign seems to be missing! Which maybe explains why he pulled the fire alarm lever on the wall instead of pushing the exit bars as the instructions by the door suggest.)
This does make it sound like you can open the door by setting of the fire alarm (which also makes logical sense), though it's pretty clear you're only supposed to do that in case of an emergency. Maybe Bowman thought that the alarm would be local and he could just shut it off after opening the door, or maybe he knew the building would be evacuated but thought nobody would know he was the one that triggered the alarm. Either way, it doesn't show that he pulled the alarm in order to delay the vote happening at the Capitol.
The evidence against an intentional action is this:
- The building that was evacuated was the Canon Hill building across the street, not the Capitol building where the vote occurred. If he wanted to prevent a vote wouldn't it make more sense to pull the alarm in the Capitol building itself?
- The bill was passed with near-unanimous Democrat support, including from Bowman. Not to mention that Democrats have absolutely no interest in a government shutdown with a Democratic president in charge. Why would a Democratic congressman want to obstruct the voting on a bill he is in favor of?
MartianNight
10mo ago
Fortunately my real-life experience with transgender people has been reasonable too, and I don't think we would see as much pushback against genderism if all trans people were like that, but unfortunately there is a minority that isn't like that, and what's more, those are explicitly endorsed by trans activists, whose mantra is that "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". So I think it's fair to attack that idea by focusing on the people who don't particularly look or act like their desired gender and are basically ruining it for the rest.
The fundamental problem with allowing people to earn their gender stripes by performing gender roles, is that it requires accepting gender roles. Maybe people on The Motte do believe in gender roles (men must be strong and protect women and children, women must be pretty and nurture children), but feminists have historically rejected those. I think both views are defensible, but you can't have it both ways: if a woman who wears jeans and doesn't shave her legs isn't any less of a woman, why would a man who wears a skirt and shaves his legs become less of a man? What has Dylan Mulvaney done to earn the name "woman" besides dressing up and acting like a ridiculous gender stereotype, almost a parody of a woman?
Compare that with parenthood: being a biological parent does come with the expectation that you will nurture and care for your child. A deadbeat dad who impregnates a woman and then bails isn't much of a parent, neither is a mother who neglects her children. So stepparents can emulate the expected behavior and earn the recognition of being a parent, at least partly, but only because there are expectations that a parent is supposed to fulfill beyond the initial act of donating genetic material (for men) and giving birth (for women). If you define a parent as just the genetic donor (just like radical feminists define a woman as someone who just has female biology) then obviously you cannot work your way into parenthood.
But none of this really matters because trans activists don't even require trans people to behave in any particular way: "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". That's like saying "a mother is anyone who says they're a mother" but if you haven't given birth or taken care of any children in your life, you're obviously not a mother in any meaningful sense of the word. You can't discredit that argument by pointing to a group of stepmothers who take care of their stepchildren.
(By the way, I do think there is some gatekeeping for the word "mother" too. For example, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to hating on Hilaria Baldwin, and some of that is based on the accusation that she's lying about giving birth to some of her children.)
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's likely that I misunderstood something; I'm not very familiar with the various offerings. I was going by OP's own admission that they didn't pay for the top model and their version was only able to solve 7 (sub)problems vs 13(ish) for “Chat GPT Plus” which seemed to imply that the latter is a stronger problem solver.
It's just missing the bow-tie.
To be fair, it's hard for transmen to dress casually and distinguish themselves from women. Jeans? Slacks? T-shirts? Button-downs? Hoodies? Women wear all of these, even though the fit is typically a little different. Really the only part of a casual male outfit are the shoes, and good luck getting men to look at your shoes.
By comparison, transwomen can put on a spinny dress and programmer socks, and while they might not pass as a woman, at least it's clear they don't want to be identified as a man.
MartianNight
9mo ago
This will never be allowed.
Do you remember the guy who modded the Spider-Man game to change LGBTQ+ rainbow flags into American flags (the game is set in New York City) and got his account banned for homophobia for daring to touch the sacred pride flag? That's right: users who bought and paid for the video game are not allowed to change the flag in the game they play on their own computer!
Also, did you know there is another mod for the same game that changes all the American flags in the game into LGTBQ+ flags, and this is perfectly allowed?
Given that, why do you think your augmented reality glasses (courtesy of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or another ESG-compliant mega-corp) would allow you to remove the mandatory pride colors from the bench, you fucking bigot?
MartianNight
4mo ago
I will likely continue to provide updates here until the chips have fallen.
Keep in mind that the previous formation period lasted over nine months. There probably won't be exciting news every week.
MartianNight
10mo ago
This change is uniformly impacting everyone
This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.
I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).
I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.
MartianNight
11mo ago
I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.
For example, The Black Stallion Returns, the very unnecessary 1983 sequel to the beloved 1979 original, holds a 20% critic score but a 73% audience score. Why the discrepancy? Critics correctly pointed out that this film followed basically the same storyline as the previous movie yet it didn't improve upon it in any way, so there was no reason for this movie to be made. Audiences seemed to like it for exactly the same reason: they loved the original and this is more of the same so why shouldn't they like it too?
You can also see this effect in the ratings for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, the sequel to the Disney classic, which practically copies the storyline and cast of characters from the original. It has 17% critic and 45% audience approval, and although both scores are low, again the audience seems to be way more forgiving than the critics.
The same applies to the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast which is more popular with audiences (80%) than critics (71%), despite starring notable feminist Emma Watson. (This movie was only mildly controversial because they'd made LeFou explicitly gay, which probably boosted critic reviews, and lowered audience scores.)
I can totally believe that for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, the verified audience (i.e., the people who paid money to go see the movie) are more positive about it than the critics. It seems to follow the same pattern as other Disney remakes: not a lot of innovation, but the fans seem to eat it up anyway.
So I think your second possibility is closer to the truth: the people most upset about the race-swapping probably didn't even watch the movie.
In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.
Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%.
Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Based on this explanation, the kids were 100% in the wrong, and the nurse 100% in the right. They might not have been trying to steal her bike and make her pay the lost fee, but they were still entirely at fault for the whole interaction.
The entire point of public bikes is that anyone can reserve them. When the kids returned the bikes they no longer had a claim on them and the nurse had every right to try to rent one for her own use. That she was pregnant and came off a 12 hour shift doesn't even have anything to do with it: the boys had not rented any of the bikes, and did not want to rent any of them at this moment, which meant they had absolutely no justification for stopping the nurse from renting one.
This is a pitiful excuse. First, that's not her problem in the least. Second, this has an obvious solution: the final guy just waits until someone else returns another bike.
Even if you accepted that there were only X bikes and X+1 people needing to get home. Shouldn't one of the healthy able-bodied teenage boys walk home rather than the obviously heavily-pregnant nurse?
In conclusion, according to your version of the story, the boys were selfishly abusing the system. This is why we can't have nice things: assholes want to benefit from the system (free rides), but don't want to play by its rules (after a certain amount of time, you either start paying or return the bike so someone else can rent it).
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