So when I see a whole bunch of dwarves living in a rock together, and then a token black dwarf is highlighted by camera, this throws off the believability of story
I feel the same way about seeing model-thin women throw around male stunt actors who would crush them. It's obviously nonsense on if you have even a basic understanding of biology but it represents the priorities of the existing society/creative class (female equality, validating America's immigrant makeup)
I've taken a sort of blase "every society has its utterly unrealistic myths". More importantly: most Americans seem to accept this manifestly unrealistic take (and some apparently have come to actually believe it tracks reality). In fact: I would be the misogynist for insisting the girlboss utterly lose (which she should).
Of course, I'm probably not consistently sanguine on this and most people likely aren't either, especially as the nature of the myth changes.
Tanista
1yr ago
But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.
My understanding is that both historically and today that is how it's treated in the place the term originated: race.
If you looked white, married white then it came out you were not white (by the standards of Jim Crow) you would be seen as having done something fraudulent and having violated anti-miscegenation laws.
If you looked black and acted black, even appearing to be sincere like Dolezal, today but you weren't black you still get excoriated for faking it.
Being a man or being a woman isn’t about what clothes you wear or how long your hair is. They’re biological categories.
The clothes and hair are signals that one is feminine, not the actual measure of someone being a woman.
As far as I know, the sex/gender “distinction” was invented wholesale in very recent history for overt political purposes. I reject that there is such a distinction.
Yes. The trans ideology proceeds by a double redefinition. The obvious is that males can be women and vice versa. That one is acknowledged as a change.
But, below that, they essentially are brazenly redefining how people even see the categories in order to perform this change. That's where this sex/gender distinction comes in. All of a sudden we hear how "woman" isn't sexed but gendered (so obviously anyone who claims the right gender can be a woman!)
But here they act as if it is obvious and naturally true, not a contingent belief.
It clearly isn't. To this day I am asked on job sites for my "gender" and the options are "male"/"female".
To this day I see signs for the female washroom that are marked with skirts. Until recently nobody thought this meant a man in a kilt was welcome.
Tanista
1yr ago
The demand is that we are treating non-passing trans persons as if they were passing, ie. cis-[the opposite sex]. They are obviously not passing, otherwise the demand would make no sense. And that is what is being seen as a demand to lie.
Both of them could be said to be lies.
If you have an essentialist definition of woman (something based on, for example, gamete size or the sort of body geared towards producing large gametes if it was healthy) it is not a lie to treat someone passing as a woman if you don't know they aren't. Once you do know, it would be a lie (just as it would be a lie to treat a black-passing Indian as a black American).
The difference is that, in the second case of the non-passing trans person, there is no chance of even an honest mistake. It must all be lies.
Steelman of the pro-trans argument: Woman is defined as someone who would prefer to be an adult human female, regardless of what they actually are. They're passing as a woman if they can pretend to be an adult human female so well that they're indistinguishable from a regular adult human female to the casual observer.
Except even this doesn't work for current mainstream trans activism since "passing" is seen as an undue burden to demand - this is the entire basis for self-ID (if the standard is passing or surgery most transpeople would fail) and the shift to the dualism of the gender identity view where everyone has an inbuilt non-contestable understanding of their soul gender.
As a steelman it would be politically intolerable to actual trans activists. Which is Why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot be Solved
There's simply no definition that includes both women (in the traditional sense) and every transperson who wants to identify as a woman.
Tanista
1yr ago
Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling.
Not just being bad at telling, the entire gender ideology's concept of gender identity as a purely inbuilt phenomenon that no one can gainsay is making being able to tell irrelevant by stating that what you can tell doesn't actually represent someone's "real" gender.
And it was also interesting how something in my subconscious picked up that something was awry.
Obviously evopsych gets a bad rap for being a set of just-so stories (and my conduct now doesn't help) but I am not surprised by the idea that men may have an interest (and thus a capacity) in figuring out who is legitimately a member of the opposite sex.
The funny thing is: I used to see this raised as a good thing in psychology. Paul Bloom cited research in Just Babies that showed that you could confuse the mind out of racial categorizations but not sexual or age based ones. His reasoning? Race wasn't a fundamental distinguisher (we distinguish outgroups and race is one way to do it, but we didn't really rub shoulders with members of different races regularly until recently) but sex and age were, if a being wanted to reproduce.
Now it makes me worried because of what it implies about how unrealistic this push to ignore sex is.
Tanista
1yr ago
I think it does make sense.
It does make some sense, which is why normies/naive gender philosophers are so often convinced by it.
Just as today it makes sense to divide "noble" as a social class from "noble" as a moral state. Doesn't mean that, in the Bronze Age or prehistory, they didn't actually "buy their own supply"
The problem is that gender ideologies act like the absolute divide they've invented in academia (since the 50s) actually represents the historical and common view of terms. It simply hasn't. In reality we blur the lines all of the time (which is why the conceptual simplicity of the sex/gender divide is so attractive).
To this day the line is blurred. You can see artifacts of it all over the place where "ladies'", "women" and "female"' are used interchangeably.
In order to sell their naked change of the definition of "woman" to include transpeople they first insist on the sex/gender distinction. But activists act like this is just obvious, not a redefinition in and of itself.
( From India) at least first gen
I think you're probably right but this caveat undercuts your point and its broad applicability.
The minorities that immigrated for economic reasons are, obviously, concerned about material realities.
The generations that come from them, that know no other home and are more tied to the cultural issues of their home and their issues around identity.
For example: /r/hapas on reddit is made up of children of Asian migrants struggling with identity and the sexual market, not the immigrants themselves. And, trust me, they're highly concerned about how they're portrayed by their new society and its media.
The race most critical of black Americans I've encountered were Africans from Africa.
IME it's a love-hate thing. People on the continent like American media since it's their main chance to see black faces in prestige products. I saw a lot of Jamaican music too, presumably for similar reasons (though that seems to have been fading out with this generation)
But African migrants to America can be - and this has been noted by black Americans - hostile. First off: this likely involves having faced racial stereotypes from black Americans themselves
But, more importantly, they have to defend a separate identity against a highly assimilationist black culture* - which, due to seeing race the important element of "being black", is especially open to devouring African migrants' children - and hatred and disdain always helps there.
* Which they consider to have serious problems, not least due to sharing many assumptions with the white assimilationist liberal culture and having extra maladaptive cultural patterns on top of that.
Yeah, but that would be the same kind of pointless academising of concepts we think gender philosophers are guilty of.
I suppose the difference is that I don't see the "standard" definition as pointless in the same way I see the gender philosophy definition as pointless (i.e. incoherent, leading to harmful real world outcomes with limited gain while ousting a simple and useful system).
I deliberately wrote it out in that stilted way to avoid standard gender ideologist criticisms ("well, what if she's infertile??"). A habit forged in the culture war.
Most people who do have an essentialist mentality wouldn't be as circumspect (they would likely default to "a certain body" or, if raised in a more scientific society, "estrogen" or "adult human female") which is why a lot of the tactics of trans activists work on them (e.g. just trying to force a random layman to draw the exact line where someone stops being a male, pointing out intersex counter-examples) in a form of philosophical shock-and-awe. I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference tbh but it can stump a person in the moment.
Hence I avoid it.
But I don't think it changes my belief in an essentialist definition or that I think most people have essentialist instincts and naive beliefs.
Tanista
1yr ago
And that entire idea is just another societal construct.
There are action movies that have more ridiculous things than more grounded fantasy movies and what's fantastical about fantasy obviously varies by society (many societies find magic far less fantastical than Westerners do, and total female equality more fantastical)
On the gripping hand, we've had some pretty big fan revolts recently
"Fan revolts" don't change anything. It's just the same cycle - fans complain -> fans are called racist or sexist -> creators of woke content play the victim-> both sides retreat to their silos.
If anything "fan revolts" have been folded into the PR machine of these shows. Notice how these divisive or outright bad shows always have articles coming out talking about "racist backlash" even before the show is released? It happened with the Sequel Trilogy, it happened with Kenobi, and now it's happening with Rings of Power. Before you even have a chance to enjoy the show for yourself some actor is whining about how awful it was that strangers were mean online, don't you feel bad?
At this point I legitimately think that companies that made mediocre products pray for some "racist backlash" (usually large fan backlash that they nutpick racists from) because it causes a certain sort of middle class left viewer to instinctively side with the product.
Tanista
1yr ago
I don't think it as any more complex than Amazon simply throwing money at a franchise which is universally known so that it is very likely to draw a large viewership and then producing some generic uninspired series which postures as part of the universally known franchise while pandering to whatever Amazon thinks is the current zeitgeist.
Yeah, there's functionally no difference with the Wheel of Time scenario. Or what happened to Percy Jackson. Or what happened to Dark Tower. Or Dragonball: Evolution...
It's simply a matter of magnitude: Tolkien is the most well-known fantasy author (except maybe JKR) and so doing it to his works correspondingly draws more attention
Tanista
1yr ago
I also find it a bit funny because two of their most popular series recently, Reacher and The Terminal List, were extremely successful acting as straightforward adaptations of their source material with all the problematic themes and messaging included.
I watched Reacher and I don't recall much "problematic" about it except in the sense that a huge white man in a mostly white small town was running around solving crimes.
Even then the show threw some "woke" stuff in by talking about how that town treated black inhabitants.
I mean, Reacher goes around on a vigilante rampage beating up on criminals of various stripes
Meh, vigilantism is kind of a weird grey area where you can reason from first principles that "wokes" would be set against it but they aren't, necessarily. Super hero movies are hugely popular, including ones like Batman who are more grounded vigilantes with all of the problems that entails.
Vengeance and violence are also allegedly not progressive values but they sell well and with little controversy.
I think by current standards Reacher himself represents many aspects of so-called 'toxic masculinity.' Doesn't talk about his feelings much, solves problems through application of brute force (precisely targeted, though), and demonstrates active contempt for authority figures or, indeed, anyone who tries to reign in his behavior. Oh, he also gets to rescue some damsels in distress at the end there.
He doesn't talk about his feelings but there're flashbacks that humanize him.
As for brute force: Reacher in the show (and the Tom Cruise movie) uses brute force the way Batman does; after he uses his other advantages of wealth and atypical intelligence to find the Acceptable Target.
In terms of sexual dynamics...not really much there either. Reacher doesn't stick around to raise a family with one woman he does have a sexual relationship with but there's functionally no acrimony and romance doesn't even seem to be that important to the plot of the show.
I'm not saying that no individual "woke" person could take offense - I've seen criticisms of A Quiet Place for allegedly lionizing rural, red state values, whatever that means - but I'm also not surprised that this hasn't boiled up into something more.
Its not like it actively seeks to trangress current year norms, just doesn't pay them any respect, either.
Sure, it's not really "woke" I guess but it's also not anti-woke or "problematic" such that it would be one of the juicier targets.
So the Canadian Green Party had a meltdown over "misgendering". . No good deed goes unpunished in the land of fringe party circular firing squads; their attempt to be inclusive by having pronouns (but mistakenly picking the wrong ones) has become a firestorm.
It all started at a Sept. 3 media event in Vancouver kicking off the party’s leadership contest. In a Zoom appearance, Interim Leader Amita Kuttner was identified using a caption bearing the pronouns “she/elle.”
Of course, there is the standard "it made me feel unsafe" stuff. All of the leadership came together to harshly criticize this and the President - a volunteer- resigned cause she felt scapegoated, regardless of the apology.
The statement from the leadership candidates:
“The September 3 incident was but the latest in a number of similar behavioural patterns that Dr. Kuttner has faced throughout their tenure,” it read.
I'm sort of bemused how they frame this as some sort of pattern of racism, like calling a black person a slur or making jokes about women coders (they even use the term "harassment" at one point)
When the reality is that this person has deliberately chosen an atypical set of pronouns that will naturally cut against how most people over 5 have learned to use those things and so will naturally get misgendered sometimes.
This just solidifies in my mind that this entire thing will generally breed confusion and then conflict. That may even the point.
Of course, the political opportunism immediately follows:
Amidst all this, Kuttner launched a fundraiser last Wednesday intending to spite Jonathan Kay, an editor with Quillette and occasional National Post columnist. Kay had tweeted that the misgendering controversy sounded “exactly like satire,” prompting Kuttner to ask supporters to donate $68,000 to counter Kay’s “hate.”
As of press time, the fundraiser has pulled in $226.69, $10 of which was donated by Kay himself.
The President laments not only not being able to get anything done to the hysterical claims of harm but it being used to basically marginalize and remove her and other party figures:
Despite my best efforts to take us forward and find solutions, I am constantly distracted by claims of harm. I have spent much time trying to work beyond naming, blaming and shaming, and have called for restorative processes – yet these things continue to evade me because I find resistance to change.
Claims of harm have been weaponized in political attempts to remove people from the party. That is the truth of it. Federal Council was told that I caused harm to the interim- Leader. There was no evidence presented. I was excluded from Executive Council meetings that were organized without my knowledge. Briefly I was subjected to much harm and disrespect, and in the interest of the GPC I chose to not make this public to avoid harm or disrepute from coming to the GPC. This is evident in all our recorded meetings.
Reminds me of that article recently about how charities and organizations can't get work done with woke employees who are constantly attacking each other.
TBH, the Green Party - despite what some people want it to be - is an utter mess and small party nonsense like this isn't surprising.
The problem is that it's unclear it'll stay small party nonsense. The problem is not just this norm being spread, but that it is being enforced by both hate speech and discrimination law (probably why "safety" and "harassment"* have been so emphasized)
* BTW: I recall Jordan Peterson argued that we would end up in a place where misgendering would lead to these sorts of claims. He was told it would never happen because it was about continued misgendering. To that I say: that's bad enough + this case doesn't bode well for that position. It was a single incident, there was an immediate apology and it still became a huge fracas. Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility hasn't struck yet, but it's looming.
but I've always had the feeling that if there's any big psychological pain point I have (for example, I am really squeamish about injuries or gore) it is my own responsibility to deal with it rather than want other people to change to accommodate me.
TBH I'm not even against the claim that we should accommodate people somewhat.
What I do utterly reject is this weird mix of anti-collectivist collectivism where we demand that people cater to our every whim in the name of social harmony and, instead of recognizing that society is a give and take and that you don't get to unilaterally control your own identity let alone how people refer to you, we ground these demands in first ludicrous claims of human rights and then exaggerated claims of risk of death and danger.
It's created a perfect machine for teaching narcissism:
-
Tell people they have the right to control other people's speech even when they are not there, leading to endless rumination on how others see them.
-
Tell them that refusal to do so is either malicious or poses a threat to their safety or dignity as humans.
-
Enjoy the resulting narcissistic rage when someone, anywhere doesn't play along.
IIRC trans people are actually at risk of comorbidities like narcissism, so this isn't totally surprising. What's interesting is that it has now become a self-perpetuating ideology even for those who do not have those personality disorders so this problem can spread far past the .5% of the populace with these issues (as with the general issue of being "trans" itself)
Tanista
1yr ago
I used to really dislike him but I've come to sympathize with the Jordan Peterson position of "we can talk if it's the two pronouns and you legitimately make an effort but using anything else is actively supporting a radical ideological regime that naturally slides into farce".
All of the confusion of gender identity as this dualist force and "not being a boy or girl" and such are encouraged by these neo-pronouns so why should I go along? By using them I'd be helping along the very silliness I fundamentally disagree with.
TBH I'm becoming skeptical of even changing those two pronouns, since that is how this whole mess got started.
At the very least, there should be strong differentiation between a transwoman and a woman in text and reporting. It wouldn't be so bad for them to use the "wrong" pronouns if reporting didn't sometimes seem to use this to obscure cases where sex clearly matters (e.g. who just committed that sex crime? A male or a female? I think it matters when we're collecting numbers )
Since "ask" here is a euphemism for "demand", it certainly is. It allows the most "sensitive" person to control the content of the conversation.
This is exactly what happened with "trigger warnings".
The scientific evidence for their value has been undermined but they still served the role of enshrining the ability of any "victim" or crybully to control everyone's speech.
In spherical cow-land you can imagine these content warnings not spilling over into actual discouragement and suppression (like say...MPA age ratings).
In reality the impulse to censorship seems strong, the slippery slope is real so best to nip it in the bud.
Tanista
1yr ago
And of course the idea that we must all cater to "victims" and "oppressed people" even if the demands and implications are absurd. This element is particularly important here cause, otherwise, the individual will of people who don't want to bother to do this stuff (or even the collective will of the groups that don't want to lose privileges like women with women-only spaces) would have nipped this in the bud.
This was one thing with stable "victim" groups. Now that we have utterly synthetic victim groups that anyone can claim at anytime...
Tanista
1yr ago
I agree, this fanbaiting was adopted by big studios at least since Ghostbusters 2016 with all female cast.
The media is run by trolls explores the media's role in this, and explicitly uses Ghostbusters 2016 as the turning point.
as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.
But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.
In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against.
It points out a particularly diabolical element: the media actually seems to amplify some of these claims in order to use them as fodder for their articles about racist fans.
None of this is to say that racist Star Wars fans do not exist. They do; the question is whether they are emboldened, even incentivised, by this continued, bizarre symbiosis with an outrage-driven media that relies on them for content. Consider one of the top citations in these stories, a YouTube video titled “Obi-Wan Series Is Going To Be AWFUL Because It’s Hiding Behind Diversity AGAIN!”, apparently made in response to Ingram’s 22 May comments in the Independent. The video is objectively offensive (the word “darkies” appears in the thumbnail), and the creator, an account named MechaRandom42, seems to specialise in intentionally inflammatory content with an anti-woke bent. But it is content that people mostly don’t watch: within the past month, she has posted multiple videos per week, most of which have paltry view counts in the 1,000-2,000 range.
The official Obi Wan Kenobi trailer posted a month ago by Disney has been viewed 11 million times. The “hiding behind diversity” video, on the other hand, has 13,000 views — the bulk of which came after journalists started citing it in their coverage of the controversy.
Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.
Yes, absolutely! People really, really want more LotR.
I would put it, more accurately, as people wanting more Tolkien.
We can't talk about his corpus like it was a one-and-done thing with LOTR. It is a huge, deep thing that can be mined for years by more respectful and talented writers.
RoP has the Lord of the Rings tag for obvious marketing and rights reasons but it doesn't involve the series proper. It is its own part of the universe (which Amazon only has limited access to) like say...how there's multiple different books and sagas within the Dune or the Shannara world..
One wouldn't say "do we need more Dune?" if someone decided to adapt Children of Dune, as if the source material has been squeezed dry and now the writers are just making things up. (Though one might say: "I don't think Children of Dune is adaptable)
Further, they'll act as though the race-swap is de-facto normal and expected and the person questioning it is the one who must justify themselves.
A very annoying progressive tactic I now see everywhere I would like to know the genesis of. Is there a handbook somewhere teaching people this stuff?
You see it in trans discourse too: "why do you care so much about people's genitals?" Laughably hypocritical given the activists' fixations.
It doesn't have to. We don't tend to create such complicated structures to only alleviate status concerns, AFAICT
The status concerns are especially trenchant because they're tied to serious economic concerns, like spending 20 years in a marriage and then not being able to support yourself. If that economic element was removed (e.g. everyone had enough money through a very generous UBI or parental program) I think the relevant importance of the status loss would change
The reason Western societies have infrastructure for alimony and child support is that the economic considerations are seen as so important as to mandate it, not cause women/men lost status (if anything they've made it easier for them to lose status via no-fault divorce)
More options
Context Copy link