WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
I am not saying Libby's actions were doxxing, or even that they were particularly blameworthy (though I do think they were dickish, a much lesser charge). I am saying that "the information was publicly available" doesn't prove it wasn't doxxing.
If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition?
Well, for a start, they might think it feels good, and/or makes them attractive. You may be interested in parts of this Ozy post, though it's not making this argument:
I inject testosterone once a week. I have the changes everyone admits: my voice deepens, my chest hair thickens, my face grows a beard. But I also become stronger and more athletic (…) I stop crying at movies. My sexuality becomes more insistent and ever-present. (…) These observations are commonplace among trans people. Everyone knows that testosterone makes you more athletic and that hormones change your sexuality and your emotions. (…) I feel more like myself when my system runs on testosterone rather than estrogen — a phenomenon that is harder to explain if you don’t know how pervasive its effects are.
Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.
As such:
This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women
This feels like a strawman. My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways. They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate. Compare furries, who don't need to pretend that their aesthetic is completely unrelated to dogs to acknowledge that they have little in common with real dogs, and generally don't want to be exactly like real dogs anyway.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
and has only publicly available information
I don't find this compelling. A vast majority of behavior that falls under "doxxing" involves the collation and signal-boosting of information that is technically 'publicly available' to a motivated sleuth, but not widely distributed. The most familiar example round these parts would be Scott's real name, which was always trivial to find through the Internet Archive if you knew to look for it. That wasn't a good reason for the NYT to publicize it against his express wishes, and I think the same goes here.
(Of course, that only proves Libby's behavior was either knowingly dickish, or irresponsible. There's still a leap from that to arguing it's so beyond the pale that it's worth barring her from fulfilling her duties as an elected representative. But as a matter of common decency, all else being equal, Libby should apologize.)
The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part.
But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.
To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.
(not falsified, however).
Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics.
I'm not saying they do. I'm saying that, when arguing that the concept is intuitively correct, they appeal to the tautological inability to do impossible things - to actually rewrite physical reality - and then act like that should generalize to the full theological concept of telos. I think this is rhetorically disingenuous.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
This is a good summary, but speaking as a transhumanist and progressive my objections to teleology are - obviously - more complicated than "simply thinking it's unfair".
Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.
I fail to see how "If you'd been meant to wear dresses and be referred to using the phonemes /ʃi/, you'd have ovaries" is different from "if God had wished for Man to fly, He'd have given him wings". Only the hopelessly insane would today argue that flying a plane is immoral due to not extending from Homo sapiens's innate qualities. Why should transgender be any different?
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual? The archetypal Muslim terrorist is you actual religious zealot who's trying to do God's work, maybe bring about the End of Days in the bargain while he's at it - motivated by his absolute confidence in the rightness of his cause, and not caring whatsoever about his own fate or his people's. This isn't to say there isn't also an Arabian racial-supremacist movement, but it and Islamism seem like uneasy fellow travelers at best.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust (…) the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.
These strike me as different claims. Wokeness as originally defined was really more about the second one. The moral truth that inequality is unjust was taken for granted from the start; it needn't be "awakened" to. Woke in the original sense was very much about "awakening" to the pervasive-systemic-oppression theory of why inequality of outcomes arises. The two different claims can be believed independently. And more importantly, believing both still doesn't inherently require you to be in favor of censorship/cancel culture.
I think at this point "woke" in colloquial Internetese long ago ceased to have anything to do with the original meaning, and means something more like "leftist Political Correctness thought-policing" whether it's about racial equality or anything else. This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
I don't really follow what the woman you met being obtuse has to do with anything. Surely, if there's a nation-wide strike and she wasn't part of it, she's by definition not representative of the average Starbucks employee?
WandererintheWilderness
2mo ago
Having a moral instinct ≠ being reliably bound by it at all times. Indeed, the most common manifestation of the moral instinct is feeling guilty after doing something that one knew, deep down, to be wrong. (Case in point, I think a majority of mass murderers in human history had a conscience, it was just drowned out by other concerns and they did the wrong thing anyway.)
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
Perhaps. If God exists, it think it's more plausible for humans' moral instincts (telling them that mass murder is wrong) to have remained in tune with the truth of God and the Good, while Hebrew myths about a bloodthirsty, wrathful deity arose for the same reasons that a hundred similar ones did in many cultures; than for the moral instinct to be wrong, and those particular tales about a bloodthirsty deity happening to be correct.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
Therefore Scripture is wrong, as should be expected from texts written by flawed mortal men.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
Forgive the geekiness, but Sectumsempra is very pointedly a bit of obscure dark magic that a teenager had no business learning - the whole deal is that he finds it in what later turns out to be Snape's old diary, and uses it on Malfoy without knowing what it'll do. It wasn't something he was taught in defense class.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
No, because that kind of critic actually believes that Tolkien truly on purpose wrote a secret gay romance that he had to conceal because of the sensibilities of the age.
I don't think this is true. Some people occasionally believe that, but left-wing media criticism really likes Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author (albeit a really simplified version thereof). "Queering a text" is usually thought of as a deliberate creative exercise, akin to fanfiction. Certainly there's hardly anyone who thinks Kirk/Spock was intentional, but they find it no less delightful to watch TOS with shipping goggles on.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
I think this works with one straight man and two bisexual women, but might not work with the average straight women and two gay men. I think jealousy is much more likely if your partner is having other sex to which, by definition, you're not invited - sex the very thought of which might enrage you. If you're all bisexuals, and your other two partners are doing nothing together that they haven't also done with you in the mix - who's counting? But a straight woman with no interest in watching Boyfriend One sodomize Boyfriend Two might get upset if they're spending too much time together instead of on her.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
Oh, all sorts of configurations can work. But in your configuration the straight person might still feel jealous when one of the bisexuals is sleeping with the other instead of the straight one. The jealousy problem is however obliterated if everybody's screwing everybody.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
I think polyamory works best if everybody involved is bisexual, and therefore everyone in the polycule can loosely be dating everybody else.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
I actually think the thing about the selection is overstated. Most of the "apocryphal gospels" significantly postdate the four canonical ones; the process of eliminating them wasn't much more than "go back to the earliest available sources and discount the dodgy latter-day additions", without much consideration to their contents per se. (I'll grant you that John's Apocalypse being included, out of any number of visionary Gnostic-adjacent ravings, is a bit of a fluke.)
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.
Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.
And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
"The cruelty is the point" isn't typically used to describe people who believe cruelty is necessary to serve a greater good (eg as a deterrent) - nine times out of ten, the implication is that the target believes cruelty is desirable in itself. Ends vs means. Some people think we need to punish criminals "cruelly" to deter others, even if, in a perfect world, no one ought to suffer; other people think justice involves making criminals suffer as punishment, even on a desert island. "The cruelty is the point" is typically used to accuse the first kind of people of secretly being the second kind of people, but hiding behind more socially acceptable utilitarian justifications.
Not necessarily.
Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.
Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.
WandererintheWilderness
3mo ago
If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament
Hardly. I am perfectly willing to believe that a lot of Christians - and certainly a majority of early Christians - sincerely believe in the objective reality of their messiah and his miracles.
I was specifically talking about Catholics, since I was arguing with one. I grant that they don't seem to use the term "omnibenevolent". They do routinely say "God is good", though, in such a way as to imply we ought to look to God as a moral paragon and do what He says. 'By "God is Good" we just mean 'God is Actual'" doesn't pass the sniff test, as it seems to imply that Satan is a "good" Satan so long as he is able to tempt and torture, his hooves are duly cloven, he is able to strike terror into the hearts of men with the merest glance, etc. but you certainly don't see the Church teaching that "Satan is Good" (let alone implying that this is grounds to do what Satan says).
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