BANNED USER: antagonism, personal attacks
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MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
Banned by: @Amadan
To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles?
This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?
(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.
Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)
For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?
This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?
The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.
MartianNight
2yr ago
Statement 1 is debatable but not because 2 + 2 ≠ 4, so it's pointless to argue that point. A few of the deficiencies:
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“Illegal war of aggression” is begging the question.
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“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?
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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.
MartianNight
1yr ago
by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins.
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
MartianNight
11mo ago
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's useful because it separates the innate sexual attraction from acting on that attraction.
A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children.
I think the word “want” is being used in a very vague way here. A pedophile is sexually attracted to children, but might not consciously want to fuck them.
Compare with a heterosexual man who has a crush on his neighbor, but he knows she is married, and since he considers having sex with married women beyond the pale, he won't pursue her. Does he want to fuck her? On some theoretical level yes, but on a more practical level no. What if instead of being married she is underage, and he ignores her for that reason? Same thing, as far as I'm concerned.
In the real world, there is a lot of difference between cravings and conscious desires. A recovering alcoholic might crave a drink, but simultaneously want to avoid drinking. It's not helpful to simplify that to “alcoholics want to drink” — it's much more complicated than that.
They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.
I don't think pedophilia can be cured, but it can be managed, just like alcoholism can be managed.
But even if it were true that alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, sociopaths and narcissists are utterly untreatable. What bearing does that have on whether they should be allowed to participate in the Olympics?
MartianNight
2yr 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
2yr 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
2mo ago
Links to:
- The supreme court judgment (full judgment, press summary)
- Gender Recognition Act 2004
- Equality Act 2010
(Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?)
On a more meta-level, this feels like legislation from the bench. From my understanding, the 2004 GRA updated the legal definition of "man" and "woman". The Equality Act was passed in 2010. Presumably, parliament was aware of changed definition when they passed the Equality Act. If they meant "biological woman", not "legal woman", they should have specified that.
I think that's a fair criticism, but I think there are at least three strong points arguing against your interpretation, which are also mentioned in the judgment:
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The Equality Act 2010 was meant to replace the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Sex Discrimination Regulations 1999, which predate the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and obviously intended to use the biological definition. There is no evidence to suggest the lawmakers intended to change the definition of man and women.
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The Gender Recognition Act creates a distinction between legal sex and biological sex; it does not abolish biological sex (how could it?). Interpreting the EA as referencing biological sex is not inconsistent with the GRA, especially since this is the most common interpretation. You could argue that if the EA wanted sex to be interpreted as legal sex, it should have defined this explicitly, and since it doesn't, it could be reasonably assumed to default to biological sex.
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The EA only refers to “pregnant women” and never “pregnant men”. This implies the word "woman" refers to biological sex, because it would be unthinkable for a law to exclude biologically female legal men (trans men) from protection of discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.
I admit I'm biased because I oppose genderism in most of its forms, but I think the judgment is defensible.
MartianNight
1yr 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
2yr ago
I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.
MartianNight
2yr 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
1yr ago
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
MartianNight
1yr 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
1yr 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
5d ago
The project was pretty much under the radar until the ADL issued a statement last week. Now this might develop into a big story.
Ah yes, the organization that openly supports the establishment of a Jewish ethnostate on stolen land is deeply concerned about the theoretic possibility of “whites only enclaves” on privately purchased land in the US. I literally cannot imagine a group in America that has less of a leg to stand on to voice this concern than the Zionist hawks of the ADL.
MartianNight
2yr 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.
MartianNight
1yr ago
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
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
2yr 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
It's really obvious when you're not a native English speaker. In most languages the word for (biological) “sex” doesn't mean fucking, the same word for sex is used for grammatical gender, and there isn't a word for “gender” (these languages are now importing “gender” as a loanword to refer to the foreign concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, which has absolutely no basis in the native language).
Similar with the idea that male and female refer to sex while man and woman are something else (which genderists are walking back now that that battle has been won). In most Germanic languages the words male and female are literally man-like and woman-like with no implicit distinction between sex and gender identity.
MartianNight
2yr 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
2yr 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
3mo ago
This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.
You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.
So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.
MartianNight
2yr 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.
1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
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