aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
aqouta
4mo ago
How would you prove that someone is in the wrong for assigning moral equivalence to chickens?
I wouldn't, it's none of my business what weird other people value unless they make it my business by attempting to impose their beliefs on me.
And supposing you value humans more due to our intelligence
Intelligence is an important but not the only reason I place moral weight on human life.
does that mean it is more ethical to make unintelligent humans suffer than intelligent ones
Marginally yes. And yes, as I know where you intend to go with this if you find a human with pig level intelligence then I'd barely consider them human and my opposition to their subjugation would primarily be aesthetic. A disgust of the type that causes me to oppose incest or bestialities that have been philosophically spherical cowed to cause no harm.
If instead you go the route of saying “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at humans because I am speciesist, but all other animals are fair game,” can’t someone else arbitrarily tighten that circle further and say “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at whites because I am racist, but all other humans and animals are fair game”?
People already do that with race and I oppose it. The arguments over what moral line we draw is a live debate and I don't find this line of reasoning any more convincing from vegans trying to get me to include nonhumans than from racists trying to get me to exclude Laotians or whomever.
Is there an argument that both allows you to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food, without also allowing someone else to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food?
I presume you meant one of these to say humans. And yes, the argument is that humans are not morally fungible with animals. Not one chicken, not ten chickens, not infinity chickens.
aqouta
10mo ago
So strong disagreement. Exploration is far more important to an immortal society than exploitation. You have forever to figure out what you like most. So you SHOULD try out being a giant spider. Trying out everything should be normalized.
The metaphor is becoming unwieldy and much hinges on precisely what is meant by turning yourself into a spider. If it's not just cosmetics then it isn't clear to me a human consciousness can run on enlarged spider architecture. If it can't then there are many reason one might not want to try out being a giant spider as it is likely to be a one way trip. And if it can, and we're able then it seems certain we'd be technologically advanced enough for you to run your exploration in virtual worlds and need not burden normal society with any downside of your experimentation. If you see any difference between doing this exploration in total isolation vs doing it when others need to validate it then you've found the objection. People do not want to be coerced into validating everything for many reasons such as doing so reduces the value of their validation to zero.
aqouta
11mo ago
We've touched on it before but if it's a endocrine disorder and a simple and effective way to correct that disorder is found what are your thoughts on correction vs transition? I understand that it, as with all conditions that effect one's self conception, is touchy but I'm not actually sure how you'd answer it.
aqouta
2mo ago
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
aqouta
5mo ago
There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.
aqouta
11mo ago
But the fact that it is on the parents to control what and with whom their children and adolescents spend their time on is a highly successful vehicle for mass producing extremely sheltered and dysfunctional soys (for the lack of a better term - autists works too, if you prefer). These undersocialized products of isolated plots are everywhere, and they are often the primary cause of a lot of problems facing the society at large.
Some problems perhaps, but as for violent crimes and abuse... Do you care to hazard a guess what the nature of the upbringing of our very worse has been? I've lived downtown for quite a while now. I make an effort to know my neighbors and find roots but it really is quite easier when the breadth of possible neighbors is constrained to a density more comparable to our ancestral environment. There is a kind of anonymity that comes with dense living, 95% or more of the people who pass by my home are not people I recognize and would not stop what they're doing to share an anecdote.
I'll confess this isn't the critique of the middle class I was expecting for all the invective there just doesn't seem much there that isn't already contained in a scene or two of fight club or office space. That all these middle class people are dead inside is a trick of the light and your ego, a kind of faint hope that all these other people must be wrong, not you, your interesting life with the ever rotating, really in a constant state of disintegrating, group of friends dumping booze soaked trauma on each other must be giving you something that the squares can never have. Or else what was the point?
aqouta
3d ago
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
Surely the play is to give her a portion of her offspring's income, no?
aqouta
4mo ago
You're the one including the premise in your argument, it's on you to prove this, not me to prove the negative.
aqouta
10mo ago
And in their eyes sensible people should look at the reason why the unfairness happens
And they're obviously and trivially wrong about the source of the unfairness.
aqouta
1mo ago
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.
I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. 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. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.
I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.
aqouta
2mo ago
No worries about a ping, it's good to have another context to continue from.
I think @RandomRanger drawing some conclusions from HBD that make sense if you add some other values like that society's purpose is to do something like maximize capabilities that I don't really hold, or at least don't strongly hold. You'll see they don't even mention race, this is just the Idiocracy argument.
It does seem like our heavy investments in educational interventions could at least be better spent even going to improve the lives to those they're trying to uplift if we were a little more realistic and separated out the most gifted students with impoverished backgrounds for tracks and gave the less talents of all races something like a comfortable life. It doesn't strike me as particularly compassionate to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to teach less gifted students subjects that they aren't capable of. In fact that seems quite humiliating, it makes the failing more personal if we assume that they're capable but some personal failing is causing them to fall short. Those resources could go towards making sure they have adequate housing and that their neighborhoods are safe. There is no reason our less gifted can't lead dignified lives. I suspect that because of HBD those living dignified but not demanding lives will differ in racial proportions to those living impactful lives. I think it will probably have different proportions of red heads and heights as well for much the same reason.
As for @Capital_Room's longer post, I find it pretty unconvincing. Yes, I know that those people are obsessed with disparate outcomes. No, I don't think that this is reasonable justification for racial discrimination. It's just the argument for Harrison Bergeron given without candor.
Excellent write-up, I agree with much of it nearly exactly. Including liking but being perplexed by deBoer. It's like one of those What english sounds like to non-english speakers videos. The underlying tone and analytical thought is there but he somehow manages to sprinkle in some moral mutant level different values in so he ends up veering all over to places I wouldn't have gone.
aqouta
5mo ago
Wait, how'd we get to civil liberties? We're talking about decorations on public property. As far as I know there is no such liberty and demanding the walls be painted blank white would violate no actual rights.
aqouta
5mo ago
We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.
Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.
aqouta
5mo ago
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
aqouta
7mo ago
I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.
aqouta
8mo ago
It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.
aqouta
8mo ago
But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy.
Hold up, you're significantly changing the situation by making it a homosexual relationship. I can have children by marrying a very ugly woman, I cannot have children by marrying an unpleasant man.
aqouta
10mo ago
We've bumped into each other about this a few times but it's difficult to articulate the problem I have this this position, possibly because it sounds like a reasonable take but it is jarring unrelated to the actual question at issue. Trans people and the trans movement are not reasonable transhumanists that think it'd be neat if they could grow breasts/penises or satisfy whatever aesthetic/explorative impulse they have. These people are making actual claims based on a worldview that is very different to the one you've expressed here. You don't agree with the trans movement at all, to put it in another peculiar view you have, it's like if when debating whether a teleporter kills you or not there was a faction claiming that people who want to use teleporters are actually already at the destination not just that they'd be better off if they were able to get there.
aqouta
10mo ago
Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.
This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.
Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.
Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.
Gender segregate k-8 schooling, preferentially hire new mothers(ideally married) and expectant mothers as the girl's teachers and co-locate state sponsored daycare for faculty mothers with the girl schools. All mothers at the school are given significant amounts of breaks to be with their babies and infants during the day comingled among the students. The girl's schools have an elective period where the students can help care for the children with some kind of status attached to it. You want this to be paid well enough to be a very attractive option for young couples that would normally be right on the edge of two income households being viable. Don't skimp on the math and career useful subjects, this is not a sham school, it's just infused with high status instances of maternity while at the same time making motherhood look communal and safe rather than isolating and scary.
Fashion the boys school such that the boys start a year later and are put in a much more competitive upbringing, really go wild with the ability to tailor a school experience that helps young men excel and be prepared to take on responsibility. This part doesn't really matter as much, as long as they enter integrated highschool a little older than their female classmates.
Honestly I don't think this would cost you call that much and I think it would have the largest impact of anything realistic I can imagine.
aqouta
11mo ago
I'll split this into two parts and you can respond to both, either or neither as you please.
- In line with the OP's direction of thought and the abstractness of this kind of 'decentralized sanewashing'
If you're making a coherent argument or at least making a good faith attempt at a coherent argument I do think I owe you actual arguments in return and the follow section will contain those. That said it actually does matter that your faction has decisively lost the mainstream and that the people driving the movement call you 'scum' precisely because of some of the axioms your arguments rest on in order to remain coherent.
To reverse the tables at least on myself. I believe in the importance of gun rights because they are a ward against tyranny. I don't particularly find self defense reasoning all that compelling. If it turned out that my pro-gun position was an extreme minority that would not get its way if not for the self defense position, and the self defense position ends up being bogus then I think that should matter politically. The people making the wrong argument about self defense should rightfully be convinced against their position(again assuming it's wrong) and I should actually have to convince those people of my position as well. If I fail then I fail and the power wielded in my interest by my larger faction was never mine to wield at all. Now it might be the case that these other people, even if convinced against the self defense portions of gun control might fall back to my ward against the tyranny of the state position but if they frequently called people who believe my argument 'wardscum', because I wasn't in favor of policies that might aid in self defense but not have any impact as a ward against tyranny like more guns in schools, well that's evidence against the possibility.
Again, you may philosophically owe me an actual argument against my position but if, given everyone heard all the arguments, you have the votes and I don't then you win. If I only have the votes for reasons totally unrelated and unsupportable by my position then I've only gotten lucky and this should concern me because, if for no other reason, my luck could change.
If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans
The problem with this being a 'weak man' is that it's the majority opinion espoused both by practically every expert and every activist. While I may owe you an argument we both know the arguments that would defeat the majority of the movement and we both know that they're resistance to the arguments has nothing at all to do with them having a coherent and workable worldview. And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.
- Addressing your position on the trans issues
Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:
You believe, bolstered especially by your personal experience, that there is a condition similar to body integrity disorder centered on primary and secondary sex characteristics. You call this 'sexual dysphoria' and believe the best treatment is hormones and possibly surgery as analogous to a BID patient getting an offending arm amputated. It's a rare and unfortunate condition that we wish we could solve without these drastic actions but this is unfortunately the best we can do. We should all do our best to accommodate people, like yourself.
Further for historically contingent reasons there are many behaviors and practices that society "genders" with two categories which have traditionally people have been assigned to at birth by their sex. These behaviors are largely arbitrary, in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are. These barriers are silly and limiting. Society would be better to rid itself of them and treat everyone as they want to be treated.
I have problems with this position but I'd like you to correct/bolster it where wrong before I got off arguing against something you don't believe.
Not really related to any of the large system things but the
newfeature thing seems to have a problem. Every time a "More comments (x)" component is clicked it's adding an additionalnewto every already shown comment. See attached. This isn't a huge deal but pretty annoying for the weird people like me who copy any paste lots of comments into a text to speech reader and every comments in the thread starts with "nununununununununununununununu". Otherwise the TTS of the site is actually quite good./images/16883181101897547.webp
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