MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
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
1yr ago
Sure, but now assume the big dog illegally occupies the little dogs territory, what's the little dog supposed to do? Slink off without without fighting back?
Would you give the same advice to Ukrainians currently fighting against Russian invasion? Russia being the big dog, it would be improper for the little dog Ukraine to bite back; they should just give up their country to the bigger invader.
The entire justification of Palestinian violence is that Israel is illegally occupying their land, which is true by pretty much any standard except “land belongs to whoever is strongest enough to hold on to it” but if that's your philosophy, you'd better support the Russian annexation of Crimea too.
MartianNight
6mo 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
10mo ago
I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.
MartianNight
1yr ago
So put your cards on the table. Ukraine should concede Crimea to Russia, yes? It's unreasonable of Ukraine to insist on restoration of their original borders when Russia has historical ties to Crimea as well has having effective control over it for more than 6 years at this point. So by your own logic, it's Ukraine's fault that they're at war with Russia, because they don't want to negotiate peace by sacrificing their territory to the invader, which is an unreasonably inflexible position for a country that is being invaded. Did I understand your position correctly?
But for sake of argument, let's assume Palestina is willing to compromise. Do you think Israel would accept the original 1947 borders assigned by the UN? Or the 1949 green line which assigned the Golan heights, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank to Palestina? I think there is no chance they would. This makes it obvious that Israel is just as guilty, if not more so, of obstructing a peaceful solution.
MartianNight
2d ago
That women get a "free pass" from violent conflict is basic common sense, a conclusion reached by any society that isn't actively suicidal.
In those societies, men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them.
It's the modern notion that men are obligated to protect women, but women owe men nothing in return, that seems like a rough deal for men.
MartianNight
1mo ago
He is talking about the women, elderly and wounded among Israeli citizens being held hostage by Hamas, right? Or so I hope?
Because if he is talking about Palestinian civilians, that's absolutely insane. The women and children living in the Gaza strip live there. Why should Hamas kick them out of their own country, just to make it easier for Israel to massacre the remaining adult male Palestinians (regardless of Hamas affiliation) without looking like the bad guy?
Even talking about hostages it seems like a frankly insane demand to make: “Hey, we want to murder all of you, but if we kill a few hostages in the process, that would make us look like the bad guys. Crazy, right? So can you do us a big favor and release your hostages so we can go ahead and kill you all without any repercussions? Thanks, Hamas! ... Oh, you refuse? How unreasonable of you!”
MartianNight
1yr ago
I think Ukraine has a much better chance at regaining their full sovereignty through military force than Palestine does
Sure, but that's mostly because the U.S. and the West heavily support Ukraine, while sanctioning Russia. If the U.S. and the West heavily supported Palestine and sanctioned Israel, Palestine would stand a much better chance of repelling the Israeli invaders too.
You realize this is kind of circular reasoning right? “We support whichever side has a chance to win” combined with “whichever side we support probably wins” means you can choose which side to support almost arbitrarily.
6 years is a lot less than 60 years.
Sure, but the attitude has been unchanged for the past 30 years or more. How many of the people condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine are on record stating that “I don't think Russia should have annexed Crimea but if they hold onto it for another 24 years they are allowed to keep it”? That certainly doesn't seem to be Zelenskyy's position, but I also don't hear Zelenskyy criticizing Israel for using effectively the same strategy in Palestine. It's self-interested hypocrisy.
The current war started from Russia pushing far further than Crimea, not by Ukraine refusing to acknowledge Russia's sovereignty over Crimea.
And Israel is literally raiding Nablus as we speak, a city deep within internationally recognized Palestinian territory. How is that any different?
Palestine went to war with Israel to try to expand their borders, and Palestine lost; there are consequences for losing wars like that.
Not to rehash the entire history of Israel, but there were no Israeli borders when Zionists declared a Jewish state in the middle of a predominantly Arab area. The surrounding Arab countries (Palestine did not exist as a nation when Israel was founded) didn't take kindly to that and invaded. Yes, they lost, but again: this is basically the same argument of “might makes right”. And to repeat my position: if that's your view, then you cannot moralize about Russia occupying Crimea or Donbas.
If the Mormons declared Utah a Mormon state and drove out all the non-Mormons, would you think it strange if the U.S. sent in troops to take back the land? And if the Mormons somehow managed to defeat the U.S. military (let's say, with help from Mexico and Canada) and captured Colorado, Arizona and Idaho in a counter-offensive, are they now justified in keeping that land because there must be consequences for losing a war?
I'm just asking for some consistency here; I feel like most of the arguments people use in favor of Israel illegally occupying Palestine wouldn't fly if it was any other country invading and occupying any other country, and especially not for Russia illegally occupying Ukraine. I still haven't heard an argument how the situation is fundamentally different.
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
1yr ago
Has anyone ever done any research on the success of these kind of dating docs? My guess would be that if you're male, it's mostly pointless, since you're just outing yourself as a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, which is a huge turn-off to women, while if you're a woman then you can get away with it since the pool of men who this sort of thing appeals to is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of women fishing in this pool, so the only limiting factor is whether the woman is willing to lower her standards to the point that she will accept the vaguely-autistic sort of man that this appeals to.
(I was going to link to Richard M. Stallman's Personal Ad as an early example of a male “dating doc”: it has been online since 2003. But in 2022 it was updated with “I am in a long-term relationship now and not looking for another”! So apparently this strategy can work for someone like Stallman, even if you have to wait nearly 20 years.)
MartianNight
10mo ago
In your example, a woman isn't defined by identifying as a woman, but rather by wanting others to hold the door open to them, so there is no recursion.
But wait! We already have a definition of “woman” which refers to the approximately 50% of humans that are of the sex that is able to give birth to children. That has practically nothing to do with holding doors open, so it's confusing to use the same word for both. We should use a different word for people who want the door to be held open for them, let's say “dorble”. Now people can identify as dorbles to signify they want to have the door held open for them, without confusing what a woman is.
A person with a penis and no uterus can be a dorble but not a woman. Would that satisfy you? The reason people don't like genderism is that it conflates desire to be treated as a woman with quality of actually being a woman. I can understand some people want to be a woman (I've thought about it many times myself) but I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman. If transwomen only desired to be known as dorbles rather than women they'd get a lot less pushback.
And I define an "unhappy person" as anyone who feels he is unhappy. Would you claim that that is endlessly discursive?
If the only definition of “unhappy person” is “person who identifies as unhappy” then yes, it would be a circular definition. But you already said “feels” and not “identifies”, which implies they must actually feel a certain way. Happiness is hard to define objectively, but it involves a certain feeling of contentment. It's clear that if you are clinically depressed you cannot cure yourself by simply identifying as a happy person. So there does seem to be some intrinsic quality to happiness beyond mere self-identification. And of course, a person who feels happy cannot be unhappy, but actually feeling happy is different from claiming that you feel happy.
From the other side, there are lots of teenagers on Tiktok who whine about how they suffer from anxiety and depression and Tourettes and ADHD and autism and narcolepsy and... and... and.... are you saying all these kids are actually suffering from depression and anxiety disorder etc. in the clinical sense just because they identify as such? Or do you agree that for a lot of these people what they claim to experience is different from what they actually experience? I think transgenderism is similar: a lot of the people who claim they feel like the opposite sex don't actually feel that way.
MartianNight
1yr ago
We support Israel for other reasons. Similarly for Ukraine.
It would be nice to hear those reasons rather than the usual “of course invading another country is bad!” which is clearly not an issue when it concerns Israel, so it cannot be the true reason for opposing Russia. (That's assuming a lot of the Ukraine supporters are also Israel supporters.)
I think time changes things.
I don't disagree; at some point it's better to bury the hatchet.
But Israel is unique in that it's probably the only country in the world that has been flagrantly violating international law virtually non-stop since its inception. It's one thing to forgive someone who mistreated you 60 years ago, but quite something else to forgive someone that has been mistreating you continuously for the past 60 years and shows no willingness to do better in the future.
What are your opinions about what should be US policy regarding Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia?
The U.S. should support Ukraine to defend against the Russian invasion, and stop supporting Israel until they withdraw within their internationally recognized borders. Opposing one invader and supporting another is a morally bankrupt strategy (I know, it's unreasonable to expect moral principle from any government, but you asked for my opinion, so I gave it to you).
MartianNight
10mo 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.
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
1mo ago
Palestinians don't just want peace, they also want independence. We both know that if Palestinians turned Jew-loving overnight, released their hostages and laid down their arms, what happens next is not that Israel withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather that Israel will conquer the entire country (as Netanyahu has already said he intends to), and Palestinians will live under Jewish rule forever.
All armed conflicts can be resolved peacefully if one side is willing to give up all of their claims. But would you suggest this in any other conflict? Should the Ukrainians hand their country to Putin for the sake of peace, at the cost of their freedom? Should Taiwan give their country to the CCP? Should America have accepted British rule instead of establishing their independence?
And let's be clear: the source of the conflict has nothing to do with whether Palestinians love or hate Jews. The inhabitants of all surrounding countries hate the Jews just as much as the Palestinians do, but Israel is not occupying them, because Israel does not want their land.
The reason Israel is occupying territories like Jerusalem and the West Bank is that the Jews consider those part of their God-given holy land. It doesn't matter whether the citizens living in that land love or hate the Jews; the Jews want to conquer that land either way.
MartianNight
10mo ago
But that is not how I defined a woman. I said, "Suppose I had a rule that says that men must open doors for women." That rule requires men to open doors for all women, regardless of whether they want the door opened for them or not.
If being a dorble is defined only as identifying as such, and the only consequence of that identification is that non-dorbles must open doors for you, then yes, I think people would identify as dorbles only based on whether they want doors to be held open (or whether they don't want to open doors for others, of course). After all, what else could feeling like a dorble mean? If identifying as a dorble comes with no duties or privileges, it's meaningless.
What is your dorble identity anyway? How did you determine it if not by thinking about doors being held open?
So no matter how you squirm, you have defined dorble as "someone who prefers to have doors held open for them, rather than hold doors open for others", because someone of the opposite preference wouldn't identify as a dorble!
It's the same with genderism. Transwomen want to be seen as women because women are viewed and treated differently in society. What's the point of identifying as a woman if nobody treats you like one?
I am extremely skeptical that that is the reason that a dedication to logical consistency is the reason that they don't like genderism.
It's not "logical consistency", it's the erasure of biological sex as a real thing and the root cause of women's oppression.
"I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman." No transgernder person makes that claim, because it is impossible by definition
Oh sweet summer child! I agree it's a logical contradiction, but the whole trans movement is illogical. Go read/watch some interviews with Caster Semenya and find me a single instance where she will admit to being male. It's all "everyone is different, I just happen to have high testosterone", which makes me want to scream: you have high testosterone because you are male, or rather: you don't have high testosterone levels, they are perfectly normal for a male. But again, go find me one interview where this biologically male transwoman admits to being male and/or trans. I'll wait.
Then when you can't find it, please retract your statement and admit that I was right that some transwomen refuse to admit they are not ciswomen. (It's not only Semenya, by the way, but it's a high-profile example.) This is the erasure of biological sex I was talking about.
It would be perfectly fine with me if we used "dorble", but that is not really germane to the underlying issue. because we already have a different term for people who feel that they are women, yet are not born as a member the sex able to bear children: It is "transwoman"!
Except that we also already have a word that means "adult human female" and it's "woman". So instead of relabeling "woman" to "ciswoman" why don't we keep "woman" (sex based) and "dorble" (identity based) and invent a new term for the superset, let's say "worbles"? That seems much less confusing: Caster Semenya is a dorble and a worble but not a woman.
Of course, the conflation of terms is very much intentional. By saying "transwomen are women" trans-activists intend to claim privileges are conferred to ciswomen on the basis of biological sex.
Or if you really want to use the term "woman" to include both males and females, how would you feel if, as a one-time concession, we replaced the words "woman" and "man" with "female" and "male" in all laws and rules written before 2010 we would replace man and woman with male and female? Men's bathrooms would be male bathrooms, women's sports would be female sports, women's prison wards would be female wards, your passport would contain your biological sex again (maybe next to your chosen gender identity), and so on. In this framework I would recognize that I'm male but I wouldn't identify as a man or a woman since the term is meaningless to me.
Then we can discuss whether female bathrooms should be changed to women's bathrooms, and so on. Do you think that would be acceptable to trans activists? Or do you agree it's likely they would fight tooth and nail to get male women recognized as "females" so they can claim all the female privileges by default?
I hire an alien to be the head of Women's Services at my university. [..]
To summarize, what you're arguing for here is to use different definitions of "woman" in different contexts. This is similar to my proposal of separating male/female from man/woman except you make the meaning of the word variable instead of using separate words.
I'm not philosophically opposed to this (many words have different meanings depending on context) but I would start from the assumption that "woman" means "female" and any case to include males would have to be made separately. So no males in women's sports or women's spa's just because those males self-identify as women.
Finally, we provide a safe space for "women" to contemplate the oppressions of the patriarchy. Because of the nature of that patriarchy, for the purposes of admission to that space, we define "woman" thusly: "a 'woman' is anyone who identifies as a woman."
This safe space of course already exists: it's every single college campus in America.
In this model, will there also be a safe space for females who want to contemplate their oppression at the hands of males, which is actually much more common than gender-based oppression? Or do they get banned, harassed and assaulted everywhere they go, as is the case for TERFs today?
Are females allowed to have female only spaces such as spas?
Are lesbian females allowed to have female-only dating apps?
Unless the answer is yes, you are just advocating for more oppression of the female sex.
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
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
According to Wikipedia there were 52 school shootings in the US in 2022 alone, and that's not even an outlier. Seems like if you could cut if down by 50% that would be pretty noticeable, though it would be tricky to prove a causal relationship.
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
6mo ago
You can also see the fire alarm in that image. It's bright red and says "FIRE".
The discussion isn't about whether or not he set off the fire alarm (he clearly did) but whether he did it with the intent to prevent/delay the vote on the funding bill happening in the nearby Capitol building. That's not so clear.
Maybe Bowman will eventually admit something along the lines of “I set off the fire alarm because I was in a rush to leave the building” which is pretty bad (and probably against some law or other) but it's an order of magnitude better than “I set off the fire alarm because I wanted to stop congress from voting on a bill”, which makes him guilty of a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison as a penalty.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where), that the motive could have been to buy time to actually read the bill. Which, honestly, is a great motive.
For Bowman this doesn't strike me as a great reason to risk 20 years imprisonment, which honestly makes me think it's more likely the “I was in a hurry to leave the building” excuse is genuine.
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.)
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
10mo ago
Before I respond to the content of this comment, have you found a place where Caster Semenya admits to being male, or do you take back your earlier claim that all transwomen recognize that they are male and therefore different from ciswomen?
Statement 1 is debatable but not because 2 + 2 ≠ 4, so it's pointless to argue that point. A few of the deficiencies:
“Illegal war of aggression” is begging the question.
“That makes you a Putin apologist” is a nonsequitur: a refusal to denounce someone's actions does not equal an endorsement of the perpetrator. Has your Muslim neighbor denounced Islamic terrorism recently? Does that make him an ISIS-apologist?
Finally, and most importantly, law in general and international law in particular is much less clearly defined and broadly agreed upon than simple arithmetic over the natural numbers. Even if you believe that
2 + 2 = 4isn't objectively true, it's undeniably more well-established than jus ad bellum.The point is that the fact that statement 1 is false doesn't make statement 2 any more (or less) true.
To give a different example, if I say “Waffles are better than pancakes, that's as clear as the sky is blue”, would you start arguing that the sky isn't always blue? Or would you agree that the two clauses here have no logical relation to each other, and to disagree with the first doesn't require you to argue against the second?
And yes, you could argue that sometimes the sky is black or red or that the color blue is ill-defined etc., but if I put a gun to your head and asked you “What color is the sky?” I'm sure you know exactly what word you need to utter to save your life. But if I asked you about waffles vs pancakes instead, the correct answer would be a lot less obvious, proving that the truth of these statements isn't equally clear.
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