ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.
I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.
I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.
I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.
HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I know that there is a tendency for some topics, in some weeks, to dominate, but I fail to understand this critique.
I'm frequently impressed with the depth, breadth and back and forth of some of the discussion I've seen here. Even on familiar topics, some of the ideas are frame breaking enough they lead me to question some unexamined prior.
Even the HBD and white nationalism stuff has merit in uncovering widely held views and pointing to the critique of liberalism moment we are in.
Also, as a majority single issue focus poster, it's called culture war and I resent people telling me to move on just because they have reached their peace. I'm sure you have issues that stir you and there's a gate-keepy flavour with pointing out topics that are 'overdone' that triggers me back to days of college, where no-one at parties wanted to talk philosophy with me...
I recognise some stuff gets repeated and may feel overdone, but it's easy to minimise main threads. I think even in frequently posted issues, there can be new levels of analysis/synthesis that evolve over time.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
But if you make all the low IQ people slaves again, most of them would be white men.
Is that really what white supremacy is arguing for these days?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.
Agreed, the second part of what you talk about is what I am referring to by a culture bound syndrome, but there's also explicit manifestations that if not exactly characteristic of cults, are cult like. It's a modern social construction/transhuman cult perhaps. Religious belief is another relevant paradigm. I feel like we're arguing in the margins.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
This reads like hagiography to me. I'm not Australian but I've visited a few times and engages with Australians abroad and I couldn't help noticing how racist some people were. "Don't get me started on the Lebos", "Abos are just paint sniffers etc". Mind you this was from a second generation Indian migrant so perhaps assimilation in Australia is to become racist?
Perhaps in Australia racism is at a casual and non-consequential level and that's healthier than a deeper racism of other countries who have a pretence of non-racism.
Or might you be in a liberal well-off bubble where people are genuinely getting on fine racially - ignoring the ugly racism that to me seemed to occur fairly regularly throughout my travels...?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
In some ways trans, at least in adults, is peripheral - an increasing number of trans, or for that matter lesbian, gays, intersex people share the feeling something is awry.
Rareness doesn't exonerate wrongness. And the enabling environment and other ideas (pregnant people, pride months for LGBT though actually mainly T these days) are ubiquitous, or haven't you noticed?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
As I've said elsewhere, I think phrases like 'anti-trans camp' are low-resolution and actually serve as a subtle ad-hominen.
To lay out my beliefs on the matter, I think we need a much deeper frame to understand this issue. For me the very phrase 'trans-person', while it can serve as a descriptor, or an identity, is actually fundamentally question-begging. I don't see empirical evidence proving a fundamental category of trans person, beyond the self defined identity. I see different groups within trans that potentially have little to do with each other, including autogynephiles, dysphoric youth, gender non-conforming people, gay people and people with a mixture of mental variation including autism, obsessive people and those with other comorbidities such as trauma, anxiety and depression. And I see evidence of social contagion.
Which is not to say there are not well adjusted trans people who are content, and I am personally willing to meet them as they wish to be met, but in my opinion, phrases like anti-trans, while they might describe a certain demographic, are also fundamentally misleading, and are potentially deliberately reducing the resolution of the issues.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
What is the interesting stuff?
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
Yes and why people can't see this strange to me. One day about 'born in the wrong body', another day queer theory transgression. But the reality model doesn't allow both, either gender identity is an essential attribute or it's something that you can choose, that changes, you can't have both. So many contradictions, sex and gender norms need to be thrown off, yet it's sex appearance and gender stereotypes that define the desire for, and results of, transition. You can't pathologise it, yet you treat it with powerful medical interventions. Trans people are unsafe while violence towards woman occurs at womans rights events. And of course, the persistent motte and bailey. It's about all this other stuff except when people point out the flaws and then it's just extreme gender dysphoria (with no other possible solution).
But why don't more people voice their distaste with this incoherent babble? I can think of the following groups:
**General apathy.
I appreciate this stance, it's where I sit on a number of other important issues such as the environment.
**Both sides
It's too complicated to understand and is just another culture war issue so the truth is somewhere halfway between but I can't be bothered finding out where it sits.
**Progress junkies
I must have socially liberal progress, even if I have push it out to some trans-human utopia. I don't care about the details. Trans woman are woman!
**Resigned
Yes it's nonsense but it's just the way the world is moving. Nothing stands still.
**Eugenicists
Well less people can't hurt the environment really. If some people want to opt-out of reproduction all the power to them.
**Third wave feminists
Social engineering is coming for you, ah ha ha....
**Religious fanatics
All kneel for the sacred caste
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yes, happy to. I think 'trans' is an umbrella term that covers a lot of interrelated issues, so I also don't believe in the 'trans' adult as a distinct thing either. I think the best frame is that of a culture bound syndrome (Helen Joyce's position), as I've outlined previously.
https://www.themotte.org/post/587/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/120789?context=8#context
To inquires into trans means we need to differentiate the different component parts - applying a label trans child/trans adult is already question begging. It locks us into a particular metaphysical frame where it's very easy to assume, 'people are born like that'.
I don't preclude biological or genetic aspects or some mechanism like hormones in natal development on the brain for some portion of trans identification, but even then I don't jump to 'trans person' as a response but 'person who may find difficulties with the assumed gender roles and presentation that is normative for their sex', ie gender dysphoria and gender non-conforming. Mental illness is a broad, unhelpful term but there a host of psychological conditions that could impact someones social identity formation and self-concept that don't have any need for the creation of a 'trans person'. OCD, autism, body dysmorphia.
For children the assumption (by adults on the child's behalf) is even more egregious. Part of gender is obviously socially constructed and we learn in development language, customs around gender. To answer my earlier question, this means it is adults supplying the children with concepts and language to talk about gender. The current iteration of ideas in my view is clearly a social contagion drawing from all sorts of problematic and contingent elements such as queer theory and an ideological fervour from progressives.
While children learn early about sex categories our awareness of our sexed nature's and social identity doesn't really take off until early adolescence and in particular puberty. Society, through child development, is shaping ideas around gender expression and what it is to be a self. Why are we shaping it in such a way that we are allowing some children to take drugs with serious side-effects and surgeries as well as foregoing puberty without a strong evidence base, is shocking. For many children we are foreclosing the rite of passage to adulthood, surely limiting their integration as a social being.
It's because of activists, and a big blob of people that aren't treating this as a public health issue, so are complicit in unethical medical harms.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I think your last paragraphs sum it up for me, it would be a fascinating topic for me if you had visibility of scientists arguing science at the individual issue level, so that you could get a sense of the thing. Instead you have people many levels up with their understanding and particular biases and material is locked into that frame, which actually limits inquiry and learning.
The same goes for global warming, there is actually a real world phenomenon of global warming (to whatever degree, causes and impact that it is) and funnily enough reality doesn't care about what the left or right happens to think about the issue. But the debate is culture warred out - people tend to start with their politics and build out from there and so we don't really progressed, it gets frozen in time.
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
The idea that we all have special seeds within us that need to be expressed in the world is decadent romanticism. This belief system is one of the current failure modes of society because it fundamentally misunderstands what a self is. We participate in our ongoing development in embodied relation with the world and others.
In terms of human development it doesn't make sense to posit someone born into one family system and culture as if they were born into another.
This doesn't preclude development that honor's the child's unique characteristics and preferences to give them sovereignty and agency. Or for cultures to adapt and change.
Any parent with any sense knows that while they have a special unique child, they are also responsible for shaping that child's development while their brain is forming. This duty of development means a parent often needs to overrule the childs own view of the world, ie in limiting this or that food, technology, being wary of strangers, trying to advocate options that don't limit in education etc.
Unfortunately people, families and cultures come with a lot of baggage, but there is no utopian shortcut. Transhuman ideas and decadent romanticism have fed into the current trans contagion and are causing irreversible harms.
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
You don't see the cultural element of trans different from getting a knee arthroscopy? Which by the way were overdone for a period, perhaps still are, leading to increased risk of osteo-arthritis, showing the flaws of medical science. There's a long list of procedures that probably don't pass muster that are still routinely done. It takes time for standard wisdom to be overturned, think of the generations subjected to unnecessary tonsillectomies.
In fact in my experience GPs, while very good at studying aren't always particularly smart, and because of the nature of their role, high status with expectations to 'know' and 'heal', lose touch with the limits of their knowledge. They are not scientists and even medical researchers often have pretty low levels of stats knowledge relative to the state of the art. Medical specialists are generally better, but in this new phenomenon of trans, the self declared specialists are actually part of an activist intent, the science and research hasn't sufficiently developed and their isn't sufficient curiosity for an evidence-based system to develop. WPATH had a chapter on eunuchs as a gender identity, which speaks to this reality.
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
The thing thing to note about gender identity theory is that it is actually a mish-mash of different ideas that are inconsistent with each other. There's the traditional transexual 'born in the wrong body' narrative (really conceived as a Cartesian soul), but increasingly layers of queer theory where sex/gender is a performance which you can transgress, in which people can create or choose their gender. This has seamlessly merged into the modern liberal idea of 'lifestyle option', where you can explore your gender, try out being another gender.
When you unpack all this you realise it's actually an incoherent mess. It's actually one of the biggest signs that this is a social contagion.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I don't have time for the back and forth research game, but why the conviction?
How did major international reviews find the evidence to be inconclusive and low quality but you state the opposite as fact?
Some studies that have been held up as gold standard such as the early Dutch puberty blockers studies have been shown to have major methodological flaws such as not accounting for the fact that people would transition in the pre/post survey instrument, thus rendering some of the items equivocal/unreliable. Recent studies have shown that even on its own merits it is inconclusive on showing improvement.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Much of the refugee migration was out of Iraq, Syria destruction so off the back of US war mongering and lingering cold war stuff. We shouldn't forget these root causes when we champion the next intervention.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Isn't this a contradiction? On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism. Instead you would seem to want Christians to behave as they did in the Crusades and fight back against the intrusion of those with a foreign religion.
But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.
ShariaHeap
2yr ago
It's valid in one sense I agree, but we're entering an era where it's increasingly misguided to try to 'sit this one out'. While it was fine to ignore discussions on the right tax rate or whether public transport should be subsidised, this issue is different. We are all adversely affected by the unhinged turn towards non-reality. In my view, the potential for corruption at not addressing this could take us all into the abyss. We need a shared reality for social cohesion - if we cavalierly dismiss it we are inviting all kinds of demons (admittedly a bit melodramatic but I think a sketch of this kind of argument can be plausibly made).
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I don't know what you've described as I haven't had first person experience of any of this stuff but is it fair to say your summary is 'shit is weird, I'd like it to be weirder'?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Perhaps if you outlaid it in a way that gave reassurance and pointed to what you agree with. Maybe occasionally allude to the tragedy and antisemitism. It's always presented in a way that it feels like Part 1 of a series where ultimately I'm going to be led to believe nobody was gassed at all. Start with your conclusion and present evidence and counter-evidence.
The construction is too heavily in your favour currently, as if I'm being given a tour of a communist country by the regime. Go left here, point to this building on the right, talk to this baker, ...
There's something of the motte and bailey about your comment. The motte 'trans people have always existed', if presented without qualifications, sweeps a lot of metaphysical assumptions under the rug that people are liable to take on, eg that it's some kind of fundamental human category, that people can be born in the wrong body etc.
The bailey is that trans are 'people with dysphoria who benefit from medical treatment so they feel more congruent with their bodies'.
I accept that their are people who experience gender dysphoria and that a proportion may be content with changing their sex appearance. But there are also people that experience dysphoria even after transition. The simple truth of the matter is we don't know the effectiveness of transition as a treatment in terms of long term follow up, especially for the recent cohort of people. In particular we don't have any evidence against a counter-factual such as alternative treatments.
Also it seems likely to me that the popular trans narratives of the motte are actually contributing to the dysphoria bailey.
Ed: well, that's embarrassing appears I have the motte and bailey the wrong way round...
There's not sufficient evidence to justify this anecdotal opinion and while you're welcome to have your opinion, especially about yourself, I'd suggest you think about how you don't have the counterfactual, even for yourself.
P.S. I would think the ethical bar and evidence standard would need to be very high for the puberty blockers, then HRT treatment for children when we know the majority of people who don't go through their natal puberty, will be infertile. Not to mention the problems with inability to orgasm. Can a child make that decision?
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.
He points to some true things and may quote worthwhile science in the manner of a broken clock being right twice a day, but he is just another grifter.
The better question is why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me. There are people who would lie down in traffic or give their first born to such heroes without having the ability to do the first-person epistemics needed to find out how true any of the claims are. It's hard to know why people are so gullible in certain directions, it's probably a cult thing.
The current social media environment incentivises this of course and COVID was peak grift. Don't get me wrong the establishment got a lot wrong, but that doesn't mean you just trust random people on the internet cause they have a suck it to the man attitude and a cosy supportive audience you can cult-out with. I'll inflame a few people here but Brett Weinstein and most of his COVID guests were also in this camp.
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