Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Source? I was under the impression that they're actually less likely to be the victims of any crime, although it is a pretty small sample size to draw any significant conclusions either way.
My understanding (sorry no source) is that this is largely due to a greatly disproportionate number of MtF transgender people working in the sex industry.
Pigeon
coo coo
11mo ago
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards.
”Rawr.”
How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it. Take practically the entire isekai/isegye genre in light novels and manga; I am under the impression that popadantsy had similar elements to it as well.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?
It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I had always understood “appeal to authority” as one of the “softer” fallacies, where it doesn’t sink the argument but you better make sure that it (and the authority) actually checks out.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
love of manly stuff like…fan fiction
Wait what? In my perception this was always a girly thing.
And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.
I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.
Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...
This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.
This has been morphed to something like:
A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.
It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).
(Consider:
A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).
If I did not make it clear.)
That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Bored DMV-esque Employee: Name?
Puyi: Yaozhi
Employee: Former occupation?
Puyi: Uhhh Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom of China
Employee: Haha no seriously though
I mean, this is close enough to real life. In his first day as a street sweeper he got lost:
A man can simply say "I'm sorry you feel that way" and walk away (doing this as a woman is socially impossible)
This would incur pretty serious social sanction in my *own social environment.
but the reality is that the women I'm talking about deploy tears much less frequently on men than women
This I can believe, for a multitude of reasons, though I myself don’t have a good gauge of how much women cry towards each sex.
Edit:a word
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
This reminds me of some comments by Nathan Sivin when investigating the differences between the scientific culture of Europe, the Middle East, and China, from his The Rise of Early Modern Science:
One aspect was that there does not seem to have been a systematic connection between all the sciences in the minds of the [Chinese] who did them. They were not integrated under the dominion of philosophy, as schools and universities integrated them in Europe and Islam. They had sciences but no science, no single conception or word for the overarching sum of all of them.
…
The astronomer in the court computing calendars to be issued in the emperor’s name, the doctor curing sick people in whatever part of society he was born into, the alchemist pursuing archaic secrets in mountain haunts of legendary teachers, had no reason to relate their arts to each other.
(A good example of this that I recall is the Chinese acceptance - or lack thereof - of a spherical Earth. Even while Chinese sailors and astronomers were doing calculations under the assumption of a spherical earth, the literati were still debating amongst themselves well into the second millenium about exactly how the Earth was flat.)
In much the same way, I don’t see why people can’t compartmentalise different streams of thought that are sufficiently remote in relation (at least, in their experience) in ways that would be contradictory if you tried to put them together. They’re thoughts that don’t collide, conflicts that don’t even rise to the level of cognitive dissonance. Each separate mode of thinking - political, personal, professional, hobbyist, whatnot - need not have bearing on each other, and each can have something more robust than mere dispositions based on internalized norms yet not rise to the level of universal belief.
What would you call “beliefs” that aren’t just internalization of norms and have genuine thought put into them, yet are, in the mind, local in character?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Putting aside that this is obviously a snark against extreme sinophilic (honestly, PRC-philic) history rewriting, this is actually an interesting question that has spawned an entire discipline of historical study. Not really as simple as “lol we better than you”.
(The Great Divergence debate has since expanded to include other polities and regions of the world, but IIRC for decades the majority of ink was spilled on Euro-Chinese comparisons.)
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
What I’ve observed online, women really, really hate other women that put women down in regards to their weight/appearance.
Surely this is contingent on the environment. I think plenty of women diss other women for being fat and ugly (usually behind their back, but sometimes not). Just depends on what gains social cachet in their immediate circle.
Toilet paper is absolutely barbaric. Like seriously, what quirk of history made it so that wiping your ass with paper of all things is taken for granted? How does anyone keep their ass remotely clean?? At this point, the modern Western fetish of eating ass is probably the largest health hazard I can think of hahaha. That's the first thing I'm going to get when I find a place of my own, mark my words.
Blame the Chinese!
"They (the Chinese) are not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper."
-Some unimpressed Arab trader sometime in the 9th century
On the other hand.
Any thoughts on the really nice Japanese bidets? I miss them after having a taste of absolute asshole luxury.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before
This far overstates the case (and makes the extraordinary Meiji restoration even more incredible). We usually put the end of the Iron Age with the start of historiography, and Japan has had a tradition of organized states and written records for a good long while at that point.
Japan was also no stranger to gunpowder. the late Warring States period leading to the Tokugawa shogunate saw extensive and innovative use of guns; both the Ming and the Japanese under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, when fighting over Korea at the end of the 16th century, were well-armed with muskets, and both sides had understanding of tactics like volley fire.
That American gunboats far outstripped anything the Japanese had seen previously doesn’t mean they didn’t know what a gun was, just a recognition that their military technology is some two centuries dated.
I agree with the broader gist of this, but a few things to pick on.
Broad swathes of the job market are largely closed to women. Now I don't mean literally closed, in fact most job classes actively discriminate in favour of women and judge them more leniently for poor performance. What I mean is for the 80% of women who will one day become mothers, many jobs are simply impossible to juggle with that: Virtually every job worked outdoors, finance and law, construction, academia, etc. Not to mention that some of these professions make a woman less attractive a mate to a man because men don't value women for their incomes, but prize femininity and future capacity to have children and fit them into their lives.
I'm not sure that's true of law and academia, with some caveats.
And I think the passage below proves too much:
One in nine adult American women are either a teacher or nurse. Expand the top job titles to say 25 and that accounts for ~50% of total female employment. Women crowd into these fields partly because of innate biology, but also because these professions -- being dominated by women -- cater to women's fertility preferences. And what are these jobs like? Poorly paid drudgery for the most part.
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I thought nurses were paid quite well? They are, where I practice. Looking up American statistics, nursing pays 77k median and 82k average in the States; I would think this qualifies as pretty good.
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Look at top job titles for both sexes and you’ll find that most work is poorly paid drudgery. It is true that on the male side you get jobs like finance and engineering that are male dominated and are high status/remunerated well, but this is by and large not the majority of work for either sex. I would wager at least – likely significantly more than – 50% of men work as some sort of tradesperson, construction worker, retail, transport, factory working, security, or farming. This even excludes the poorly paid white collar drudgery that you could count administration and most of “tech work” in (For what it was worth, I did check the statistics with at least one Anglosphere country.) (I suppose you could quibble with how poorly paid e.g. tradespeople are, given the meme of 100+k cushy plumber jobs etc, but my understanding is that on average they don’t outearn teachers – and they get to wreck their bodies for it!)
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Conversely, looking at jobs that aren’t poorly paid drudgery, women don’t do that badly, especially given that the shift towards large-scale employment of women is only a few decades old. Younger doctors – as a complete cohort – are close to parity, women now outnumber men going to medical school, and female-dominated medical careers aren’t necessarily inferior in pay (and surgeons are predominantly male but also the life of a surgeon isn’t what most women or men want out of life); lawyers are at parity IIRC; accountants and auditors are now mostly women;…
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Considering the above, I think the effect of women clustering into fewer types of jobs is less pronounced than you posit. Sex gaps still exist, of course, but sex gaps in favour of women are in as many professions as sex gaps for men now, and on the whole the female-dominant professions look only somewhat worse compared to the male-dominant ones, and that only because senior management and engineering are still male-slanted. (Like, would you rather be a psychologist/a physiotherapist or a bus driver/a butcher?)
On the other hand, I think it’s fairly well that women tend to cluster around the lower-paid strata of each industry, even if the sex gap amongst both the highly-paid and the lowly-paid isn’t quite a yawning gulf. Even if lawyers are at parity (or over parity) at this point, I’m pretty sure partners are still mostly men; and despite relative parity in the lower ranks of academia more men than women attempt to go for professorship, even if the actual tenure-track population is surprisingly close to parity at this point (I think 44-56 or something?). I think that’s probably partial evidence for biological impulses lifestyle decisions having an impact on employment, amongside other factors such as the female workforce being much newer to the game than the male one.
*edit to clarify ambiguous sentence
Pigeon
coo coo
11mo ago
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate.
I thought it was perfectly clear. I would put the onus on the other party in this case on being unreasonably obtuse.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...
I’m not sure that’s true. Barely anyone even on the far-right defends Hitler.
On the other hand, it’s fairly common to find who excuse, or are apologetics for, the USSR and pre-Deng China — more often for Mao and Lenin, perhaps less often for Stalin, but surely still more than for Hitler!
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
I think this starts to raise questions when there's...
I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.
I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:
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Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or
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Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or
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Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.
Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
"World ends; women and minorities hit hardest."
It’s not even that much of a joke.
Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I assume that the "lovecraftian horror story" is trying to gesture at the idea/stereotype that women find a lot of meaning in their relationships, and that they would be horrified if they had to go down to the male-norm level of social acceptance and connectedness. That said, I agree that "lovecraftian horror story" is absolutely preposterous and absurd.
But surely the problem with women empathising about "the male experience with life in general" is that yes, both men and women pay taxes, get jobs, help their friends out...but - even if it is not as stark as the extent it is in dating, there is still a significant qualitative difference in treatment precisely in the "get jobs, help their friends out". Maybe even the "pay taxes" bit!
Like, the experience of a woman complaining about working overtime is often qualitatively different from the experience of a man complaining about the same. Or the experience of a woman getting scammed vs a man getting scammed. Or a woman asking for help with moving vs a man asking for help. Or a woman getting raped vs a man getting raped. Or reactions to women having their locker room talk (my god, some women talk about men like meat from a deli) versus men for the same. Or even simple courtesies by strangers like holding the door open for you. Or people complimenting women vs complimenting men. Or disparities in divorce, or how if a man and a woman - in a relationship or not - have an argument who looks more sympathetic at first glance (all else being equal), ...
(I also find that male friend groups tend to be kind of shit at social support, as well. I have no clue how to fix this.)
Anecdotally, I've actually had pretty good dating experiences in general (compared to most/all other men I know), and I've seen see the stark contrast in empathy more outside of dating than in it (e.g. in a job environment, in education, with acquaintences, ...).
It's that sort of general empathy deficit/invisibility and poorer social support, spread throughout the entirety of social life and interaction for men, that normie women don't tend to grok. That "20% advantage in generic social situations" is precisely what women find difficult to wrap their head around not having.
I’ll second the “excellent women programmers” thing; though I am not in tech, I am dating a woman who is as far as I can tell “good” at programming (graduated from Carnegie Mellon roughly in the middle of the CS cohort), and she tells me that there was at least one woman in her cohort who was brilliant enough that her professors described her entering industry as “a great loss to academia”.
That said, she also describes that women were an overwhelming minority, that the entry class was 50/50 M/F but very quickly all the women left, and she’s…well, not happy, but willing, to bang her head against a programming problem for ages without apparently making any progress. (She is quite neurotic, though, and had to really work through that during her undergrad.)
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