MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
10mo ago
First, I don't think it's true that if the races were swapped the right would be defending the men. Right-wingers like pregnant women and don't like selfish gangs of young men. In general, I think the left hates white people way more than the right hates black people. So you would not necessarily see a reversal of attitudes, but rather loud condemnation from the left (how dare those white privileged male privileged devils harass a proud woman of color?), and at best a muted response from the right.
Second, practically speaking, even if right-wingers would condemn the black woman in the hypothetical gender-swapped version, there is absolutely no chance in hell that right-wingers would be able to get a crying pregnant black female nurse suspended from her job for being bullied by a group of abusive white guys, and that's double true in New York City. Let me know if you disagree but I think this is such a blatantly obvious truth that it doesn't really require more elaboration.
First, an obligatory comment that dropping bare links as top-level comments in the Culture War topic is a faux-pas, boo you, mods will probably scold you a bit for this.
Second, and rather low-effort, I can't get over how utterly obnoxious most writing for the New Yorker is. I assume everyone here appreciates detailed, long-form commentary, and the New Yorker superficially provides that, but the thing is that making an article long and wordy doesn't make it good. Scott Alexander's posts are long but what makes them good is that he uses this length to cover a lot of ground. New Yorker articles, including this one, often feel like someone took a mildly interesting anecdote and prompted an AI with “pad this short draft out to 10x the length it needs to be, while making the author sound like a pretentious twat that has no greater joy in life than smelling their own farts”.
Case in point, what the fuck is up with paragraphs like this:
I spoke with a trans person in their early thirties who told me that the number of available labels at first made them pause. “Those are the labels that exist, but they exist almost like a step ahead of where I exist,” they said. “I’ve gotten closer to those labels based on the connections that I’ve made, but I wasn’t in a place to know them ahead of time.” The language of identity does not always precede experience, they continued. Over time, “you figure out what language you need to speak in order to be seen.”
What the fuck is this supposed to convey? What's the information content of this entire paragraph? This is just fucking garbage writing that was included because the author is a pathetic handmaiden that had to include some trans POV to get her article published.
And not to mention the final paragraph:
The people who craft anti-trans legislation and laws to control sexuality see lives that are different than theirs as a threat to their own integrity. Imagine what that must be like, to not be able to think about change, and the possibilities it might offer.
What the fucking hell has any of this to do with a dating app for pretentious fartknockers?
Okay, let me try to balance out the pot shots with some commentary on the meat of the article. What I gathered from the article, Feeld is a hookup app for pretentious assholes who disguise their base horniness with pompous terms like “ethical nonmonogamist”, and you pledge allegiance to the woke by hating on straight white males, as is tradition.
With that in mind, look at the author (who, by the name, I assume is female, though given the wokeness of it all and the fact that their name is ”Emily” might well be a female-presenting transgender), and their experience on the app:
Feeld, unlike most other dating apps, quantifies the interest its users receive with a number that Kirova assured me is real. In the two years I’ve been on the app, more than eleven thousand people have liked my profile, whose only proscriptive has been “no liars.” I’ve never felt as much license to dismiss male entitlement as I have on Feeld. If a man casually insults my appearance; if he pressures me to meet after I’ve said that I’m busy; if he treats me like a food-delivery service, ready to serve him when he’s in the mood; if he imposes rote pornographic fantasies on me without any curiosity or charm; if he indicates that he’ll try to negotiate his way out of using condoms; if he is coy or unforthcoming in a way that makes me suspicious; if he has no sense of humor or isn’t kind—I disconnect without hesitation or regret. There is no reason to tolerate any dehumanizing or insulting behavior.
Summary: woman puts minimal effort in her dating profile, receives thousands of likes anyway (mostly from horny straight white males, who are to be despised), and quickly dismisses the majority of messages from men. This somehow makes Feeld special, but isn't this the absolute standard norm on every dating/hookup app ever?
I’ve gone back to the standard dating apps a couple times, but none offered the same ease of connection. I kept experiencing a suffocating gender dynamic: regardless of the kind of person I am, I was somehow forced into the role of a desperate pursuer trying to win the affection of the elusive and “emotionally unavailable” male, a dynamic that was confusing to see revived in a moment when I was experiencing as much sexual agency as I’d ever had in my life.
Again, assuming that this person is a cis-female that is not absolutely horrendous-looking, what dating app were they on that they can't get 100 messages from desperate males within an hour of signing up with a single bad photo of themselves? It all seems like total bullshit to me.
I wonder how much people get paid to write this kind of garbage, and who's paying them. I doubt they're doing it for free.
MartianNight
1yr ago
Kind of low effort for this forum, but I watched a news clip on twitter where CNN interviews Natalee Bingham, a friend of one of the victims, commenting on the suspect claiming to be nonbinary, saying: “That's really really offen[sive] especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a nonbinary person, because in no way, shape or form could they appear as a woman the next day, it's really offensive to even hear that, that they're playing that role."
I was just blown away by the hypocrisy. According to standard leftist rhetoric, a person's gender self-identification is sacrosanct, denying someone's chosen gender identity is transphobic, and the the idea that someone might identify as transgender or nonbinary for personal gain is rightwing fearmongering and something that never happens. Never mind the fact that Bingham based her judgment solely on how the suspect looks in his mugshots (while Bingham herself looks and sounds “transgender” at best); I thought making people's gender recognition dependent on well they “pass” was another faux pas to the LGTBQ+ community.
I want to avoid making this all “boo outgroup”; I know that Bingham doesn't speak for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and maybe others disagree with her views. Still, it's baffling to hear her say so casually the same things that would get a cishet male or radfem woman cancelled. I can somewhat respect the leftist view that self-identification is always valid, even if I personally disagree with it, but if the real rule is more along the lines of “we can question other people's gender identity but you can't”, then I have even less respect for the people pushing this ideology.
MartianNight
10mo ago
In isolation I would agree with you but a lot of the criticism came from the sort of people who say stuff like “you can't call the cops on black criminals because the police might shoot them [and if they do, that's on you for not wanting to be victimized]”, clearly implying that ultimate consequences are on the consciousness of the instigator. If we are consistent and apply that same logic here, then the black men are at least partially responsible for the harmful results of the video they chose to share online (despite knowing they were in the wrong!)
Take for example this article (from a “journalist” that cannot group sentences into paragraphs):
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but she escalated it in a way that could have caused harm to those young Black men, and we cannot lose sight of that.
And:
The situation could have easily been resolved, but Sarah Jane Comrie chose a different tactic.
She chose to do a thing a lot of white women before her have done — a thing that has caused the deaths of so many Black people — and that is why everyone is upset.
That is why her actions are being labeled racist.
That is why she is being called out.
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but those black men escalated it in a way that has caused harm to this pregnant woman. This situation could have easily been resolved, but the men chose a different tactic. They chose to do a thing a lot of black people before them have done — a thing that has caused so many white people to get fired from their jobs — and that's why everyone is upset. That's why they are being called out.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I'm not accusing you of fabricating anything. I'm just saying I find your conclusion baffling, according to the facts as you present them.
MartianNight
2mo ago
Rather, students are expected to be able to discuss their values using a common language.
This common language will surely include terms like toxic masculinity, white privilege, and heteronormativity, but certainly not black violence, female privilege or Jewish in-group bias. So it will be strictly of the form “<negative adjective> <disfavored group>”, where the disfavored groups are exactly those hated by the radical left (only Jews are iffy here, depending on how radical they intent to go). And then students are free to express their personal values but required to use only terms that imply that cisgender straight white males suck.
MartianNight
11mo 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
1mo ago
What you're seeing is the government making efforts to get it so that software for the government is written in memory safe languages.
This is definitely not true. Have you read the report (pdf) or even just the abstract? From the introduction:
This report speaks directly to the technical community, including technology manufacturers and academic researchers, illustrating two ways their actions can make significant improvements to the Nation’s cybersecurity posture.
Nowhere is the scope limited to purveyors of software to the US government.
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
1mo ago
Can you please just summarize the whole thing for people who aren't in the know and aren't motivated to watch a 15 minute video?
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
2mo ago
If he steps down for health reasons, he proves his critics right, and I think he is just too proud to admit he is no longer fit for the job.
Also you have to wonder what drives career politicians like Joe Biden. He has spent most of his life in politics. The office of president is the culmination of his career. I think it's plausible that he would much rather die in office as the most powerful man in the world, than spend his final years comfortably in a beach house while being politically irrelevant.
MartianNight
10mo ago
Fortunately my real-life experience with transgender people has been reasonable too, and I don't think we would see as much pushback against genderism if all trans people were like that, but unfortunately there is a minority that isn't like that, and what's more, those are explicitly endorsed by trans activists, whose mantra is that "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". So I think it's fair to attack that idea by focusing on the people who don't particularly look or act like their desired gender and are basically ruining it for the rest.
The fundamental problem with allowing people to earn their gender stripes by performing gender roles, is that it requires accepting gender roles. Maybe people on The Motte do believe in gender roles (men must be strong and protect women and children, women must be pretty and nurture children), but feminists have historically rejected those. I think both views are defensible, but you can't have it both ways: if a woman who wears jeans and doesn't shave her legs isn't any less of a woman, why would a man who wears a skirt and shaves his legs become less of a man? What has Dylan Mulvaney done to earn the name "woman" besides dressing up and acting like a ridiculous gender stereotype, almost a parody of a woman?
Compare that with parenthood: being a biological parent does come with the expectation that you will nurture and care for your child. A deadbeat dad who impregnates a woman and then bails isn't much of a parent, neither is a mother who neglects her children. So stepparents can emulate the expected behavior and earn the recognition of being a parent, at least partly, but only because there are expectations that a parent is supposed to fulfill beyond the initial act of donating genetic material (for men) and giving birth (for women). If you define a parent as just the genetic donor (just like radical feminists define a woman as someone who just has female biology) then obviously you cannot work your way into parenthood.
But none of this really matters because trans activists don't even require trans people to behave in any particular way: "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". That's like saying "a mother is anyone who says they're a mother" but if you haven't given birth or taken care of any children in your life, you're obviously not a mother in any meaningful sense of the word. You can't discredit that argument by pointing to a group of stepmothers who take care of their stepchildren.
(By the way, I do think there is some gatekeeping for the word "mother" too. For example, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to hating on Hilaria Baldwin, and some of that is based on the accusation that she's lying about giving birth to some of her children.)
MartianNight
1mo ago
The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.
Remember Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
MartianNight
1yr ago
It was probably the same video as discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TimDillon/comments/vzuhtk/vaush_is_a_sociopath/
I'll transcribe (most) of it for sake of discussion:
Vaush is commenting on a video of a group of women talking their experience with sexual assault.
Vaush: “Do you think it speaks to the fact that we have a rape culture, when we put six women in a room to talk about #MeToo and they've all been raped and they all can barely choke out a coherent sentence. Do we think this perhaps maybe slightly speaks to the fact that there is a problem? [..] Almost every female friend I have has been the recipient of sexual assault or violence or rape or whatever at some point in their lives. It's such a common thing. 1 in 4 is probably understating it significantly. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for sexual assault on women over one's lifetime is as high as 1 in 3 or 1 in 2, we just don't know, because nobody fucking reports! Because reports aren't being taken seriously! That's what #MeToo is about.”
Woman on the video: “...but things impact you in bizarre ways. Because the perpetrator wasn't white, and because he was part of a certain religion...”
Vaush: “Wait. Are we being real?”
Woman: ”And the police were basically like, we can't, because of cultural differences, which I don't feel like is such a great...”
Vaush: “What? Bullshit! Are you fucking kidding me? Did she turn her fucking rape confession into how the rape-fugees fucking Ahmed and Mohammed raped her and the police were like, uh, we can't prosecute brown people. Bullshit! Bullshit!”
In his defense, he didn't say he thought the woman was lying, or that Muslims never rape white women, but he said that connecting her rape story to refugees/Muslims was “bullshit”. I do agree he is hypocritical, but that's because apparently he doesn't want people talking about rape at the hands of Muslim immigrants, even when it was allegedly grounds for the police to dismiss her report, but presumably he would have had no problem if she had described her abuser as a Catholic priest, or a native white man, or any other group that is deemed okay to hate, even if it's not relevant to the story.
The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.
Oh no, that was just the first stage in the gender war. Progressives have moved on from "biological sex and gender identity are separate" (which at least allowed a definition of transgender as "someone whose gender identity differs from their biological sex") to "gender identity is biological sex".
As an example, take this Slate article from almost 7 years ago: What Is a “Male Body”?, which contains statements like:
[When] a transgender woman uses a women’s restroom there are still zero men — biological or otherwise — in that restroom.
Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?
Then she continues with this:
Some people assigned female at birth have more testosterone than others; some people are born with XXY or XO chromosomes instead of XX or XY chromosomes.
This is true, but all of those people are still medically classifiable as male or female. Women with high testosterone are still women: they have a female reproductive system (ovaries, uterus, vagina), and not a male reproductive system (prostate, penis, testes). People born with XXY-chromosomes are said to suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which is understood to affect exclusively males.
Conspicuously the author never claimed that they are affected by any of these genetic or chromosomal aberrations. Yet they go on to conclude:
I was assigned female at birth, but I have never had a female body.
Which again raises the question: in what way was their body not female? If they have XX-chromosomes, ovaries, uterus and a vagina, no SRY gene, no penis, no testes, no prostate, what divides them from the biological women who have the same physical characteristics?
So in short, no: progressives have not accepted that gender is not sex. Many now insist that gender is sex, but that sex has nothing to do with genetics or body parts. It's all in the mind. This is obviously ridiculous to any rational person, but here we are.
MartianNight
1yr ago
You underestimate the extent to which we're all living in America, and that's especially true of Western/Northern Europe.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Does this work? https://search.pullpush.io/
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
She doesn't have to hit the gym or dress better. She's already attractive in her demographic because of her sex and the fact that she's not ugly or obese.
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
This change is uniformly impacting everyone
This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.
I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).
I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.
MartianNight
1mo ago
I don't think simply being uncool equals punk, though. Punk is being counter-cultural plus being dramatic about it in a somewhat stylish way. Someone like Sam Hyde is punk, but your run-of-the-mill white guy isn't punk, he's just not considered fashionable by anyone.
MartianNight
9mo ago
This will never be allowed.
Do you remember the guy who modded the Spider-Man game to change LGBTQ+ rainbow flags into American flags (the game is set in New York City) and got his account banned for homophobia for daring to touch the sacred pride flag? That's right: users who bought and paid for the video game are not allowed to change the flag in the game they play on their own computer!
Also, did you know there is another mod for the same game that changes all the American flags in the game into LGTBQ+ flags, and this is perfectly allowed?
Given that, why do you think your augmented reality glasses (courtesy of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or another ESG-compliant mega-corp) would allow you to remove the mandatory pride colors from the bench, you fucking bigot?
Based on this explanation, the kids were 100% in the wrong, and the nurse 100% in the right. They might not have been trying to steal her bike and make her pay the lost fee, but they were still entirely at fault for the whole interaction.
The entire point of public bikes is that anyone can reserve them. When the kids returned the bikes they no longer had a claim on them and the nurse had every right to try to rent one for her own use. That she was pregnant and came off a 12 hour shift doesn't even have anything to do with it: the boys had not rented any of the bikes, and did not want to rent any of them at this moment, which meant they had absolutely no justification for stopping the nurse from renting one.
This is a pitiful excuse. First, that's not her problem in the least. Second, this has an obvious solution: the final guy just waits until someone else returns another bike.
Even if you accepted that there were only X bikes and X+1 people needing to get home. Shouldn't one of the healthy able-bodied teenage boys walk home rather than the obviously heavily-pregnant nurse?
In conclusion, according to your version of the story, the boys were selfishly abusing the system. This is why we can't have nice things: assholes want to benefit from the system (free rides), but don't want to play by its rules (after a certain amount of time, you either start paying or return the bike so someone else can rent it).
More options
Context Copy link