Tanista
21d ago
Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?
Shit, that is a good point.
Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs?
I was using the generic you in the example. It was less about you holding the beliefs yourself, I disagreed on how much charity you were granting.
Like, I didn't assume that you personally were for bullying Rebecca Tuvel or any unfortunate who asked about transracials...
If you tell me you believe in fluxberries and can define it and therefore I should do what you want but:
- You cannot provide a coherent definition of fluxberries when pressed even a little. In fact, the definition changes before our eyes when it suits you
- You actively try to bully, discredit or destroy people who demand a coherent definition or raise questions about why this a slightly different colored berry is not, in fact, a "fluxberry"
- You explicitly admit that you cannot define a previously concrete and less controversial term like "berries"
I have to wonder to what degree you believe you think you can justify belief in fluxberries - certainly you seem to believe in a distinct way to how you believe in say...policemen, or fish.
I don't see how OP's original point about the reluctance to square this doesn't apply:
My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
Like, we know for a fact that some already do this with "woman", that one is not even debatable because Kentaji Brown did it in front of Congress - and all the same problems apply there. I'm supposed to grant extra charity on "trans child"?
In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with.
Yes, and what is that quality?
The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty
Frequently? So not always? So what else can we use to judge if a kid is "trans"? Dysphoria is hugely problematic (given kids desist) but at least concrete.
If we grant that there is an innate quality that we can easily distinguish, there is no problem. The point is that nailing this down in some definitive way seems to be difficult
Just as, if we accept that there is a trans-inclusive category called "women", there is no fundamental problem. Yet some random Daily Wire dad who dresses like an actuary has driven left-wingers into a frenzy trying to get an answer to this basic question.
This is a microcosm of this whole debate. All of this sounds good in the abstract. Once you start discussing it you not only get tough questions from traditionalists, but even feminists who ask how the markers of this innate quality are not regressive (it often boils down to stereotypes).
Tanista
4d ago
(even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik)
I still don't understand why this is some impossibility. Is it really that huge a technical issue or does British policy just move at a glacial pace?
I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different
You're doing it again. I'm obviously aware. But I also said some other things like:
And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)
And:
In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category -especially if no superior alternative has been put forward
You cannot simply ignore explicit statements that show my underlying assumptions and then claim that my position is incomplete or simply failing to capture some points others care about (in the same manner you ignored elements of OP's post to better call his position circular) because it looks so without the underlying arguments. I know their position. I disagree and have provided reasons why.
I've made my position clear: it's not just what I care about, I find the alternate definitions less useful (in terms of the things we already know societies use sex-gender for like...sports and segregation - anyone can come up with "florgs" as an answer to "what is a woman" but non-private definitions obviously involve the inter-subjective) and even incoherent - and this belief is helped along by the fact that you never seem to offer this allegedly "meaningfully objective definition" that solves the problems I've raised about trans and its associated definitions like gender and woman.
You're not giving me news by saying people care about other things when they define things. I know, I don't care. I simply think it leads to problems and incoherence. I am not unaware that someone could define "life" as including the "joy of living" - nor would I consider it a productive conversation if someone ignored all of the reasons I gave for thinking this to remind me that people can come up with subjective definitions.
and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is",
You haven't actually given us this "meaningfully objective definition", or any definition. I provided you with my definition of my terms and why I don't think some alternatives work. You mainly seem to want to knock down or critique definitions raised.
Which I admit is probably more fun but I don't see the point in playing this asymmetric game.
However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others.
Under the biology-based definition, this is meaningless. Taking from societies I know: a girl doesn't get out of wearing a hijab after puberty because her sports-playing makes her more of a boy than a girl.
I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.
Not really. Because the gender ideology is hiding the ball here: they created this dualist version of "gender" stripped from sex, and then take every deviation (which is inevitable once you remove the backstop) as proof of their thesis.
Many traditional views and the biology-based view simply don't run into the most excruciating version of this problem that gender ideologues insist problematizes the categories enough to justify their radical changes. "Woman" is both a sex and gendered term, both normative and descriptive, and the sex element is the sina qua non under this view. A woman can act unladylike, but she's still a woman due to her biology. You remove this and then it's much easier (intuitively) to argue that woman is arbitrary or infinitely extensible.
But it is a rewriting of history to act like this is the universal definition. It is, in fact, very contentious. They created the problem by first assuming that gender is totally distinct from sex and then solve it with an even more imperfect definition than the one we have.
In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category - especially if no superior alternative has been put forward. On that point:
This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition.
And what is this meaningful definition?
I have given you my definition of "woman" and we've plumbed the benefits and downsides. Seems to me that we have to first define "trans" before we can actually settle whether this is a more coherent position than the activist status quo?
But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion.
I don't see the circularity. And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)
So, until we actually define "trans" are we really having a fair fight?
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome.
Less gruesome for whom?
These people are already happy to kill and rape civilians and turn their own people into unwilling martyrs while benefiting from the restraints on their opponents.
Tanista
21d ago
So would you say that Asian women's exogamy rates say more about how much it sucks to be an Asian man rather than them just being able to find white mates (as the stereotypes insist)?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the same dynamic with similar numbers (AA women also date out twice as much)
Tanista
24d ago
As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."
Can I translate this as "in an anti-HBD West, people don't cite arguments specific to HBD in their immigration policy"?
Tanista
24d ago
I don't think it's going to be good (because many normal people have their own spiteful ideas) but if we ever hit this hypothetical (re)acceptance of this theory, it won't be DR Twitter accounts running the show.
YMMV by region I suppose.
"man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"
The answer to this is that this argument proves too much. If we go by the pre-trans, biology-based definition based on biology and the type of gamete a body is geared towards producing, there are edge cases - but it's the intersex (it's telling how the intersex and language associated with them , "assigned sex at birth" , have been appropriated by trans activists) - but this small minority doesn't render the category meaningless or most biology-based categories - as a start - have to go.
With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases
Going by the biology-based definition it's easy to see how intersex are an edge case (which doesn't vitiate the category). It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition - it's not based on dysphoria since some deny that (and lack of comfort with your body doesn't change your sex in any case), not based on intersex-style biological ambiguity since most trans are not intersex, you don't need any brain scans to fit your claimed gender so it's not based on that, you don't need to transition - and then what of women who're non-conforming? Where do they fall? It's similar to the "Trans-Inclusion Problem" and "woman":
Every proposal so far has failed to draw the boundaries of womanhood in a way acceptable to the Ameliorative Inquirists, since not all those who identify as women count as women on these proposals, and some who count as women on these proposals don’t identify as women.
You complain about the inherent fuzziness of the biology-based definition of "man" and "woman" but you run a worse issue with "transpeople". You cannot say "transpeople are the edge case" when defining trans in the first place in a concrete way is a problem.
Oh, wow, look: we've basically circled back to OP's original complaint. Like I said: compact not circular.
Tanista
24d ago
OP does go on to say:
Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.
This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.
I probably was harsh, and RenOS rightly accused me of venting my frustration here.
But I don't think my OP implied it was just malice. There are many reasons (few of which I respect) for this behavior on the part of the actual left-wing liberals who're now disillusioned.
Tanista
9d ago
I've seen that said but I can't actually find her stating it in response to Obama's light pressure.
She was asked to resign before the 2014 midterms , I doubt she was defending not doing so by saying she'd wait for the allegedly inevitable next Democratic president. I think the above take might have been cope after they lost the Senate and it was clear the GOP wouldn't confirm anyone.
I think people like her honestly just don't want to retire and the rest is just posthoc rationalization. Look at people like Feinstein.
Tanista
10d ago
I am pretty sure that the school is for the underclass/lower class. In those cases, yes, in order for people to get along even to the point that they stop disrupting the learning process you practically have to beat the tribalism out of them.
Yeah, I went to a "multicultural" school mainly made up of the children of middle-to-upper-middle class people from across the globe. Russians, Chinese, Nigerians.
None of this shit was needed, because people mostly self-segregated and figured out a way to live within that* and teachers simply didn't tolerate shit, it's not like they couldn't find someone else to pay those extortionate tuition fees. My first assumption hearing this was this was a no-excuse school for the problem kids (I wonder if this is a "win" or not for Wax's model: the 'no-excuse' school still faced attempts to destroy it on grounds of difference, just as she claims income-integration schools do, yet it survived)
* Though maybe the next generation will lose the segregation aspect and have more conflict as a result...
Popular youth figures Andrew Tate and Sneako became Muslims and made it a part of their media personality, which frequently gets millions of unique views with the audience mostly impressionable young boys.
This is just grifters recognizing the market.
Lots of Muslims, even if many of them are in poorer countries and so are harder to monetize. Muslims also love to be reflected (who doesn't?) in the media they watch so they lovebomb the youtube channels of Westerners that touch on Islam even vaguely positively.
What you're seeing here is no different than when a reaction channel suddenly starts doing Bollywood videos.
If a genuine Muslim upheaval was undertook in the west it would require millions of people to learn Arabic, something which is almost more ridiculous to imagine then swarms of white men wearing thobes.
I can assure you that people get by fine without learning Arabic. I honestly wonder if even the "high effort" types fully learn it (a lot of people burn huge amounts of time on phonetic memorization more than anything - the most annoying educational gauntlet with the least value).
In essence, it works on Harry Potter rules for most people: you don't need to speak Latin to cast the spells. The most important thing is to know enough to be able to pray and perform the common rituals. That can be a relatively light load (especially if praying in groups).
This can honestly be useful: you don't need to learn theologically problematic things directly.
There is also a strong semblance within Islam to have the government and religious system be thoroughly connected with one another, and even among most religious believers that does not seem to be a desire they have, and among secular people that is literally something i feel they would go out and die to prevent.
That is a real problem.
There's also the Problem of Mohammed. A person who actually had to rule combined with prophetic infallibility, so he cannot simply be hollowed out and worn as a skin by secular cosmopolitans like Jesus (who is basically just some hippie in modern Westerners' view), nor can he be treated like the fallible rulers and sometimes prophets of the Jewish and Christian tradition.
But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
You could do this while admitting that rape is disproportionately carried out by Dark Triad types (especially when society has already been trying for decades to grab all of the low-hanging fruit of "normal men who just think this is okay") and not harangue Robin Hanson types as well. From what I recall from my early internet days when Jezebel was strong, feminists were insistent on rejecting this sort of point.
There's an element of class guilt that is also useful.
Also, if you believe rape is about power or some patriarchal ideology not sex, I suppose "teach men not to rape" sounds more appealing as an actual solution and not just a cynical messaging tactic.
Tanista
27d ago
The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.
Assuming that these are not rival empirical claims that can be investigated, yes.
What there is something hellishly dystopian about, is that the very same people who demand you fulfill your duties to the nation, are working tirelessly to abolish the very idea of there being a nation to start with.
Well, there is an argument that what's really being fought for here is not a nation but a federation. Ukraine gives the West/the EU something to rally around, and someone (the European nation most hostile to their vision) to rally against.
So, from the perspective of non-Ukrainians, it may not be incoherent. Ukraine's right to self-determination is important because they chose to join the great melding, and freedom is worth dying for.
The Ukrainians on the ground can fight for some specific, blood-and-soil concept of Ukraine if they want.
I don't think they explain it past that in the books. I guess the BG were gonna massage it later but the implication is that's how they would get some peace (or at least preserve one of the lines)
In the films they do say that Jessica was told to carry daughters but not explicitly that they were to be wed to Feyd (like many things, there's enough to project the book canon unto it but not enough to recreate it). It is explicitly said in Part One that Paul is a boy because Jessica wanted to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach early and was willing to risk Paul's life to do so.
Casts all of her behavior in a very different light.
Tanista
24d ago
If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...
That is the killer.
In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.
Well, assuming a Euro win, I'm sure there'll be votes. And, if people vote to become just one part of a Euro federation, who's to say it's a bad choice? They chose it, better than being Belarus.
I'm sure some Irish revolutionary who died wanting wanted a socialist state or some other vision of the country is dissatisfied in his grave. The people seem to be managing fine.
As lines go, not that bad.
Of course, that's assuming a Euro win.
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