MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
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
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
3mo 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
9d 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
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
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”.
This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:
When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth.
They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.
The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.
What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).
Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Also “decimated” in the meaning of “largely destroyed” rather than “reduced in size somewhat” (by 10%, literally).
Let me highlight this part:
Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games.
I recently bought the remastered edition of Beyond Good and Evil, and the launcher doesn't allow me to play the game without creating a stupid Ubisoft account. Why the fuck would I need to create a Ubisoft account to play the single-player game I already bought and paid full price for? (Incidentally, I bought this game three times: once on PC, once the updated version on XBOX 360, and then again the remastered version.)
To be clear, this is a 100% offline exclusively single-player game with no online components whatsoever! There is absolutely no need for online accounts!
The only way to circumvent this asinine garbage was to put the console in offline mode, which is a hassle. And the only reason that works at all is that Microsoft put its foot down and didn't let hell-tier companies like Ubisoft block their games from running offline. Fucking Microsoft is the hero in this story! Let that sink in. MICROSOFT! I cannot emphasize this enough. How the hell do you fuck up so badly as a gaming company that a longtime gamer like me thanks Microsoft for not letting you ruin the gaming experience even worse for your paying customers?
This fucking shit make me hate Ubisoft with a fiery passion. A company that fucks its customers over this badly doesn't deserve to survive. I wish they went bankrupt yesterday, just to discourage this bullshit.
MartianNight
7mo ago
The problem with this logic is that it doesn't generalize. If you allow males into women's spaces so long as they pass well enough, who is going to be the judge of who passes well enough? What rule would you propose that allows Sarah McBride in but keeps Jessica Yaniv out?
You can have a “don't ask, don't tell” policy, which is mostly how things worked before the year 2000, but once the cat is out of the bag, you have to revert to some objective rule about who is or isn't allowed.
The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.
I don't think that's the entire point. The point is also to keep men out of women's shelters and prisons, men out of women's sports and dressing rooms, and men out of women's spaces in general.
If Republicans cannot even keep men out of women's bathrooms in Washington DC, how can they expect to accomplish any of those other tasks? So even if the McBride issue is itself not important because McBride is likely harmless (with which I tend to agree), the case is important because it is at the fulcrum of a broader issue.
MartianNight
7mo ago
They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy
Bizarre and patently false claim.
All evidence suggests trans-identified males have the same level of criminality as other males, i.e., much higher than females and much higher than 3 year old boys (the main source is a paper by Dhejne et al, though generally gender activists taboo this kind of research for showing undesirable results).
And besides, over 90% of trans-identified males opt to keep their penis and testicles. So unlike their female counterparts, trans males are almost always physically intact. They are very much capable of raping women and have done so on many occasions.
MartianNight
11mo ago
It's a bit style over substance in my opinion, but it's probably the most decapitated heads and fake blood during any Olympics opening ceremony to date.
MartianNight
3mo ago
If I put on my conspiracy hat, I would say that this is exactly what you would expect from a group that wants to get rid of certain politicians without making it look like their actions are politically motivated: throw a few of their allies under the bus too, to make it look like the actions are politically neutral, while knowing full well that the impact on your enemies is much more severe than on your allies.
This gives your actions the veneer of neutrality while still achieving your political aims.
MartianNight
8mo ago
If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.
MartianNight
11mo ago
The IOC claims she isn’t intersex.
No, that's the infuriating part. The IOC never clearly stated that they believe Khelif isn't intersex. (When an official accidentally said “this isn't a case of a DSD” the IOC published a rectification on Twitter stating that the official had meant “transgender” instead, tacitly admitting it might very well be a case of a DSD.)
The IOC intentionally abolished sex tests, because they worked too well: they identified some AFAB XY athletes, and the IOC didn't want to be the bad guy that has to tell male “women” with 5-ARD that their bodies are not female enough to be eligible for women's sports.
If the IOC had any integrity, they would say clearly: “We decided to include intersex males in the women's sports competition, so whether the IBA's assessment that Khelif is an intersex male is correct, is irrelevant.”
But they don't do that. They vaguely imply that the IBA is wrong, refuse to do any testing on their own, and let people take their sides in the culture war. It's infuriating cowardice. The IOC needs to decide whether or not XY-males with 5-ARD are allowed to compete. If so, they should say clearly that they don't care if Khelif is biologically male. If not, they should propose meaningful measures to keep males like Khelif out.
MartianNight
6d ago
Amadan, you are a fucking hypocrite and you're a disgrace of a mod. You constantly spread Zionist propaganda while pretending to be politically neutral.
You intentionally conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and deride criticism of Zionism as “Joo-posting”, an intrinsically dismissive term, as if the people who have some concerns about the genocide-in-all-but-name that is being perpetrated by Israel in the middle east are just cuckoo-bananas.
Again in this comment, you create a false dichotomy between “Jews and Jew-haters” as if you can be either in support of Israel, or you must hate the Jews, which is far from the truth. I have no issue whatsoever with the many Jews who live in my neighbourhood, nor with those Israelis who are content to remain within the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I do hate anyone who supports the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, whether they are Jewish or not. I make no secret of this. Any attempt to conflate that opposition to Zionism to “hating Jews” is obviously disingeneous.
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias), as if banning people for disagreeing with you wouldn't violate half a dozen stated rules. Your tolerance of anti-Zionists is only commendable if this is an explicit Zionist space which is founded on the principle of promoting Israels divine right to annex Palestinian land and carpet bomb Palestinian civilians. If that's not a founding principle, you don't get brownie points for tolerating people who are calling out the state of Israel on its gross violation of international law.
I wouldn't be writing this reply if you were just another random Zionist voicing his dumb opinions. In that case, I would just flip the bozo bit on you and ignore your stupid takes from now on. But the fact that you're an actual moderator makes that impossible. I would think moderators should be extra committed to following the rules of the Motte, including being kind, charitable, not antagonistic, avoiding weakmen, not being egregiously obnoxious—all standards you fail here.
It's essentially the 1994 video game Quarantine, if anyone remembers that.
MartianNight
8mo ago
Any art created using Photoshop was low status
I'm not a great art connaisseur, but it seems to me this is still the case? If I go to my local museum almost all work on display is created from real materials, and that includes modern and contemporary art.
You might say that musea favor physical art in general (you don't need to go outside to view digital art, after all), but they do still exhibit photos and even film snippets (e.g. on a projection screen), but these are invariably recorded in the real physical world, not purely digital creations. And especially with photos, photoshopping them seems to detract from their artistic value, not add to it.
There is also stuff like Damien Hirst's spot paintings most of which are just colored circles painted on a white canvas. You could almost auto-generate them. Hirst doesn't even paint them himself; he has nameless employees that do it for him. So the artistic merit of these paintings seems to be in the idea. Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?
I can only conclude that digital art still very much doesn't “count”, and I expect that AI-generated “art” (which in its current form is not very original) will remain similarly low-status.
I wrote a little more about that here. tl;dr: I think those are temporary aberrations that will not survive in the long run.
In the long run those men will have to justify themselves, but note that it will not require removing testicles. The idea that women cannot have penises and testicles and testosterone levels over 10 times the 99th percentile of cis-women is hateful bigotry spread by far-right domestic terrorists, after all. Instead, these proud transwomen must defend their gender identity in woke terms, with an oppression narrative, and of course plenty of political virtual signaling. A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.
MartianNight
10mo ago
That doesn't work, because the right to discriminate based on sex to protect women is grandfathered into law, while discrimination based on anything else is not, so if you declare your restroom uterus-only, then you will be sued for illegal discrimination based on medical status.
And if you didn't get sued, there would be no way to adjudicate cases, because you can hardly inspect each person personally, and the government isn't going to put uterus-possession on government issued ids as they used to do with biological sex.
And even if you somehow managed to overcome those challenges, everyone who has any power in society would agree that only bigoted nazi scum worse than a trillion Hitlers could even conceive of such a vile concept as a uterus-only restroom, which clearly have no purpose but to oppress poor innocent transwomen who just want to pee, so that absolutely no government or corporate institution would create them, nor would any private person who likes having a job, friends, family, or just being able to walk the street without angry antifa gang members throwing tomato sauce over their head.
The upshot is that approximately 0% of restrooms in the Western world will be uterus-only, so they might as well not exist for all practical purposes. If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Isn't Humbert on trial for murdering Quilty? Unless you take the unreliable narrator so far that the trial isn't real either.
In any case, Lolita in the end marries some other guy closer to her age (I forgot his name, if it's even mentioned).
MartianNight
11mo ago
framing Harris as a brave survivor of vicious and predatory grooming.
After all, Harris was a poor defenseless 30-year-old minor who couldn't be expected to stand up for herself.
More seriously though, the problem with this strategy is that the “groomer” in this case is a Black man and a Democrat. I'm sure the Democrats would have no problem accusing a white Republican of grooming Harris, but are they willing to throw a Black Democrat under the bus like that? Is Barack Obama going to declare “It could have been me soliciting sexual favors from women half my age in exchange for political favors?”
MartianNight
3mo ago
I'm not sure if you needed an account for that, but at least that was optional, and you didn't miss much if you ignored it.
What was dumb about it was that Ubisoft couldn't even be arsed to keep their site up and running, making that part of the game technically unfinishable in recent years, if it wasn't for fans reverse-engineering the encryption algorithm (luckily, they used a symmetric algorithm instead of something harder to crack). And of course, the fan-maintained websites are still up and running: https://darkroom.bgemyth.net/, because apparently fans can do what billion dollar multinational companies cannot.
MartianNight
7mo ago
OK. So how many members of the public must complain before she is deemed nonpassing? Is it like a percentage of a quorum? What percentage of what quorum? Is a single complaint sufficient? In that case, how is the rule different from banning transgenders entirely, just with the caveat that you won't face penalties if you don't get caught, which is essentially how all misdemeanors work?
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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