PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
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User ID: 890
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
35m ago
Yes, trans people have a lot of trouble dating and are the left-coded version of incels. For transwomen, most are disgusted by them and society sees them as stealing valor. For transmen, they have the typical difficulties. I think the quagmire of being unwanted nicely explains the resentment that incels and (some) trans people feel about all this. This is opposed to the other, Just World narrative where (e.g. Incel's) moral failings cause dating problems.
What is interesting to me, and I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, is that so many trans women start off looking like nerdy and loser guys -- these guys seem like they would be vulnerable to becoming incel in the first place. Likewise, a lot of nonbinary girls start off with an unattractive face shape and are probably fat.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
46m ago
If genitals were the actual thing that "attractive" meant, then this thought experiment would be incoherent. If genitals were the actual thing you meant by "attractive," then "imagine a very attractive young woman" would cause you to visualize a scene where the woman has taken off her clothes for you to inspect her.
My thought experiment is perfectly coherent to you, because you intuitively treat "attractive" as what the woke call gender expression: makeup, face shape, personality, stuff like that.
Of course, realizing that you can be attracted to trans people is alarming and offensive, which is I guess what causes all this kind of reaction.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1hr ago
Ok, and who gets to decide what is on the allowed list?
Oh, woke people do of course.
Sure, if "attracted to trans people" includes "unknowingly attracted to trans people." But so what? What's your point here?
The point is an illustration of what the words "attracted to" and "preference" actually mean in practice.
- We don't make sexual orientations out of preferences (or woke people don't)
- We are attracted to gender expression
- Genitals are like college degrees, not gender expression.
By "sexual attraction," I am not including unknowing sexual attraction.
Hopefully you're starting to understand the woke argument? If you have to say "By X I am not including certain kinds of X" then there's a problem here.
I suspect that because of this, many Leftists would label me a "transphobe" and imply (or state) that there is something wrong with me.
I think they would say you are not actually attracted to femininity at all! The core gender-ideologist claim is that Caitlyn Jenner is in the same bucket as Angelina Jolie, and they call that bucket femininity. They wouldn't quite say "you are attracted to genitals" because genitals are not a kind of gender expression. (I want to re-iterate that 'attracted to college degrees' is incoherent, but 'preference for college degrees' is not.)
Finally, they'll darkly hint that you seem to view women as bodies attached to a hole, or something.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
9hr ago
The believer in woke gender ideology would just tell you that the sting of your analogy is precisely that robots and apes are not people. Which by the way, makes your analogy dehumanizing and problematic, etc.
Furthermore, my guess is you are being "sex-essentialist" and focusing on the person's genitals. As I explained, having a genital preference is fine, but is not a sexual orientation. This means the analogy's conclusion should not be "you are robosexual" but rather "you can be attracted to a robot." A nitpick, I know.
If I understand, you are saying the raw social power that caused wokeness (it certainly wasn't any mechanisms to detect or restrain bad ideas) is anti-TERF because the powers that be personally gain somehow? Are the trans sex pests running the universities?
I definitely agree the TERF intersex intersect squabble is a fight between women, and I certainly think its a little funny (because I hate women). Your last comment -- you're saying TERF gynosupremists wouldn't even let transphobic men come to their aid? It seems unlikely to me. What does this look like, all the NYT columnists and writers being women nowadays, or something else...?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
11hr ago
I don't personally know any TERFs. All my woke friends, all their woke friends, all say bad things about TERFs. I don't think my woke friends (who are male and female, of course) are betraying the revolution for personal gain? It's just the oppression totem pole.
"Women at fault" is called "internalized patriarchy" or something, right?
I don't get the sense at all that trans activism is a frustrated men's rights movement. Maybe I'm just in a bubble with all my woke friends?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
11hr ago
"Gay ideology" isn't the best name for it, since Feminist values are also anti-natal. Yours is a standard reply, that wokeness will fail because it is low fertility. It isn't so. It doesn't need to breed adherents, it can just convert them. This is trivial if you control education and state. Even if wokeness manages to marginalize high-fertility sub-groups (Amish, Mormons, etc.), they can still import infinite migrants.
Whether you expand the definition of "religion" or discard the word altogether for the more neutral-sounding "ideology" is inconsequential. The "harmful meme" is the distinction, that isolated demand that treats paranormal entities differently than run-of-the-mill moral instruction.
Your "problem" with Yarvin doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying if the elite do have defined morals, then they won't rule like an oligarchy? what does it mean to "rule like an oligarchy?" Your distinction between state and society also doesn't make sense to me -- can you clarify more?
In any case, the rest of Yarvin's ideas (Formalism) are not relevant. That "Belief in Religion" post is more of a companion essay to his longer stuff, just focusing on the theocratic aspects of wokeness under a different name -- we call it something different 20 years ago.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
13hr ago
I'm looking forward to Star Wars Zero Company, which should come out later this year. People are thinking its like XCOM. Some in the know have compared it to Mass Effect, which would also please me, since I like RPGs too. Still, what I want the most is tactical complexity and turn-based squad combat. Unfortunately like most modern star wars games, I predict it will be trivially easy.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14hr ago
This is overly-wordy ("concrete example, carefully") for a simple topic that has been discussed to death in the Culture War Threads. Here is some additional reading for you, in case you are new to these parts:
- Scott Alexander (Gay Rites are Civil Rites)
- Moldbug (Belief in Religion Considered Harmful)
There are probably others too, but these are the first that came to mind.
You say vague things like "pro-trans" but it is better to stick to specific claims and policies. You mention a particular kind of framework called "gender ideology" but of course it's not clear what that framework specifically entails. For the first, I will talk about dating expectations since you mention it; for the second, I will give arguments that actual woke people seem to give.
In another reply, you bring up the superstraight TikTok trend. Here is something you missed: Woke gender ideologists are still relatively libertarian from a love perspective. They would not require a lesbian to suck any particular girl dick, or for anyone to date any particular trans person. The same non-entitlement arguments used on resentful incels apply to resentful trans people.
The key is understanding sexual orientation and gender expression. The only valid sexual orientations are those based on a certain allowed list of things: personality (pansexual), gender expression (hetero-, homo-), maybe some other aspects, whatever. This means "attracted only to people with college degrees" is not a sexual orientation. The reason is that "having a college degree" is not an aspect of gender expression. This is also why "attracted only to people with tattoos" or "attracted only to people with certain genitals" is not a sexual orientation.
College degrees, tattoos, and genitals -- these things are mere preference. (Flashback to Amy Coney Barret's verbal blunder!) So you can be attracted to someone and later lose interest once you find out they don't have a college degree or whatever.
One intuition pump for you is (assuming you are a normal straight guy): imagine a very attractive young woman, and then imagine learning later she has a penis. You probably don't want anything to do with her anymore. That's fine! But it is proof you can be attracted to trans people.
The woke way for a transphobe (or undercover-racist) to date: "Yes, I'm attracted to trans (or black) girls." And then just don't actually date any of them.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
9d ago
The question is not really open. Incels have status-anxiety, which is why they do not happily visit prostitutes. Relatedly, incels are commonly known as weird loners without any friends, which is also related to status.
A lot (though not all) of people see relationships as status markers, and incels especially so. This is why their obsession with looksmatches, hypergamy, entitlement, etc. They do not really want to have a happy relationship with another person, they just want a plus one to the company potluck.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
13d ago
No; I mean the low-stakes perceived misogyny -- boomer-tier wife jokes -- of "she's not here right now" might work on a male server. Of course you don't want to be menacing or gay to the male server.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
Perhaps it would work on a male server
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
24d ago
It's rare to see this kind of media coverage used against Democrats right? So what does this case mean? It's probably not a sign of Democratic moderation per se. If the authors really are Jewish it seems this is part of the re-alignment whereby (Zionist) Jews are becoming Republican? If so, we might expect to see more media and education power defect to the Right.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
25d ago
The common talking point about low-trust and high-trust society is a high-truster saying, "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" and a low-truster replying, "Of course everything is a fight to the death." Another fun fact: didn't people used to just walk around armed (whether with guns or with swords)? They still insulted each other right?
I suppose you can insist on calling this honor culture and legalistic culture, but i think now we're just arguing over meaningless words.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
25d ago
"Violent Sikhs are just modern UK soldiers" is a hot take, but if he is getting convicted, isn't that evidence against the entire idea? And what you're left with is just inflammatory rhetoric?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
27d ago
I didn't have in mind any kind of service exploits when I said "hacking the client." Of course companies can ban you from their services, for essentially any reason.
I only had in mind white-hat "preserving a retired product," but I think its kind of silly to think the community or the market is entitled to that. Of course, the relevant punishment here is getting sued, not getting banned.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
27d ago
If a software license wants to say "you cannot hack the client, ever" then who is the law to prevent that? In general, we allow all sorts of things in software licenses.
To my knowledge, courts only enforce IP law against "hacking the client" projects whenever the companies can prove they're being financially harmed. Most of the time it means they have some version of the service up already. I suppose there might be cases where a very edgy fan fiction tarnishes the brand's IP, but presumably the company does believe there is financial damage in this case.
Well there is one other case, which maybe is the real discussion: if the fan-made project is making money, companies will go after it to get a piece of the pie. I think that's fair. If a company wants to stop service for their online game, I don't think it means the IP should become public domain. For example, the service might be unprofitable after merely 1 year. The company should still be able to expect royalties, for example. Or, be able to veto a fan-made service, even if it is profitable in the market.
I say this as someone who has played MMOs, as someone who is sad many have changed or shut down, and as someone who follows various emulator projects (And am sympathetic to the community).
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
30d ago
One of the pushbacks people will give is that DiCaprio's dating young women is a kind of moral failure. Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
It could be for a similar reason to the rise of indie studios in Videogames? Arguably corporatizing these "art forms" leads to a lot of optimization that audiences eventually burn out from. Indie creators do interesting and artful things.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
If we are talking about adultery laws and "absurdly cruel victimless crime sex," what does that have to do with laws against young men having sex?
Like, based on the original example of an older female teacher, it seems completely off-topic. What do you mean?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
I really hope this doesn't turn into a trend. Arresting people for social media posts is Yookay Behavior (am I saying it right?)
if you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.
Let's talk about color! No, not artistic color theory. I mean an obligatory link to the relevant: what Color are your bits?. Interestingly, the author has added a short preamble that mentions generative AI! Albeit mostly from a copyright perspective, which was one of the original reasons for thinking about Bit Color.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
In the red/blue button debate, people sometimes argue that blue-pushers only say they push blue, but would actually push red if the experiment were carried out.
From this perspective, the blue/red debate is a misunderstanding:
- Red-pushers are answering the thought-experiment literally based on the perceived coordination point
- Blue-pushers are engaging in rhetoric, in an attempt to set the coordination point
Could Newcombe's problem just be a misunderstanding?
- Two-boxers are answering the thought-experiment literally based on what they would do
- One-boxers are engaging in rhetoric, precommitting to be the kind of person who wins the game
I think there is an empathy gap where you don't know what woke people think. they would consider you, not the "pedophile," to be the bad guy in this scenario, if your enhancements made the girl look like an adult.
(obviously, some consider any 30 year straight guy wrong for liking girls 18, for reasons unrelated to trans issues, which muddies the waters, but...)
To turn it around on you, suppose you took an adult woman and did something to her to make her look 12 or whatever. Turns out woke people think its pedophilic to be attracted to that!
So, hopefully I am getting across the point that to woke people, "attracted to" really means that initial gut feeling about the outside characteristics, it doesn't refer to preferences and important dealbreakers.
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