aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth
Can you link to this? I might have missed a subthread but this does not comport to my memory of this particular scandal.
aqouta
11mo ago
The pro-trans camp will say that trans representation in women's sports is important because [grand matters of fairness and justice in our society];
Allow me to rephrase this as fairly as you have represented my position. The pro-trans camp tries very hard not to actually think of the ground truth of what transgenderism means. If they do the farce of trying to hold in their head that gender is both a social construct and also an innate characteristic will cause painful cognitive dissonance. So when a topic, like sports, comes up that noticing the physical reality of trans people comes up they just obfuscate and point to the applause lights of "We're doing something important to blah blah blah past injustice, blah blah blah equality blah blah blah representation". It doesn't matter even a little bit to them that the ground truth of what they're arguing for is impossible to justify. That including trans women in women's sports defeats the entire purpose of the division. It is not about women's sports at all to you, it is about dissolving the category and you do not care about the costs.
[giving fewer nice things to mtf trans] (a goal that is easily painted as vindictive or outright Voldemortian).
It is my opinion that there is literally no such thing as an MTF trans person. It is a made up category that will not exist in two decades. It is incoherent to reason about giving or taking things away from people who share a common memetic delusion. You and your allies have created this suffering you are attempting remedy.
aqouta
1mo ago
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
aqouta
1mo ago
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
aqouta
11mo ago
But to point out that basically, you're not complaining that it's bad for the strong to dominate the weak. You're just complaining that the current social order doesn't put you among the strong.
I think this leans in the right direction from the previous poster but perhaps too far. They think that they already are "the strong" it's just for some peculiar political eddy the weak are given limited local situations where they can exercise a limited kind of crude power. It's difficult to model homeless schitzos as actually powerful rather than circumstantially able to exercise power because the State doesn't equally enforce the rules on everyone.
aqouta
4mo ago
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
Could you put even a little effort into not straw manning the opposing viewpoint?
aqouta
5mo ago
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
aqouta
8mo ago
Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
aqouta
11mo ago
Saying MtF trans people don’t exist is a bizarre viewpoint - what do you call the obviously real number of people who are born male, have gender dysphoria, and are transitioning to have the characteristics of females by taking hormones and going through surgery? Those people clearly exist, and MtF is an apt descriptor, as they are going from male to female - in some cases successfully enough to pass, in some cases not. The “MtF” term is useful to distinguish between MtFs and FtMs - I don’t see any commonly used alternative words that avoid confusion (many times I’ve had to explain to people the direction of transitioning of people I know - e.g. X used to be a girl and now is a boy).
There is no epistemicly coherent method to differentiate between the experience of being a man who actually has the internal experience of a woman and being a man who mistakenly believes they have the internal experience of a woman but in fact has typical male internal experiences. The difference between the two interpretations of experience is purely memetic, as one of these interpretations leads to pathology it is a harmful meme. Taking hormones and mimicking the opposite sex is a behavior and esthetic decision and has no bearing on the person's sex. Just their presentation.
Also trans people have existed since recorded history, there’s ancient Sumerians trans priestesses called Gala, the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and kathoeys (aka Thai ladyboys) are not a recent western phenomenon.
These are other memes and are nothing like actually transitioning from one sex to the other. In every one of these cultures this is a third state, usually of weaker men who could not provide being used by the other men rather than being simply killed.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
aqouta
10mo ago
Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
aqouta
10mo ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
aqouta
4mo ago
Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler?
I mean there is a smuggled premise that animals have something like moral equivalence to humans. It's a kind of hack of empathy and personification that we don't like admitting that animals just don't have moral equivalence. It's the same instinct that makes you cringe when a doll's head is ripped off. Hitler was killing people who have moral equivalence to humans, the argument is much simpler.
I definitely agree, and I am also baffled sometimes that more of the smart types with those opinions don't just start hitting the gym. Healthy body, healthy mind and being muscular has all sorts of advantages with practically no drawback besides a couple hours a week during which you can get your motte posting in.
I found that graph very funny. "Sensuality" listed as a fetish stunned me for a second.
There is apparently a continuum of tabooness from white to Asian to black...
Responding to a late response from last week's culture War.
I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.
I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.
The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when the care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.
It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.
I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.
I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?
aqouta
4mo ago
Is it possible anyone could actually believe that anyone would go through the extreme risk and effort to abduct a child and transport them for 4 figures? It doesn't even pass the smell test.
aqouta
13d ago
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not necessary that we have a huge disagreement, althogh I think there is something we disagree on with the underlying phenomenon.
But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material.
This is kind of what I'm trying to examine. We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief. trivially if you were separated from humans at birth and never encountered someone of the opposite sex then I don't think you could develop a belief that you should be categorized on a binary you couldn't know exists. I do think that people exposed to no pro-trans material can still develop something that kind or sort of looks like trans because gender is a salient category and identity formation has some failure modes. I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
Corn/maize naturally developed through evolution in nature and this development tells us something about the corn we've bred/engineered to be giant and calorie dense. But it can't explain everything about our modern corn or our corn syrup products. They're something new of our creation and have tons of down stream implications that may end up being very harmful to society. It might be totally natural for identity formation to go awry sometimes and leave someone in a strange maize level trans predicament. But now that we have the meme we're seeing the corn syrupification of gender nonconforming identities, purified and mass produced.
aqouta
1mo ago
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist? True or false HBD is an empirical observation. Race essentialism is a political orientation.
To bring in your Marxist example HBD isn't the belief in the proletariat siezing the means of production. It's the recognizition that compound interest causes capital to accumulate. A brute fact about the world recognized by anyone interested in the truth that can be put towards propaganda about the virtues of building businesses and endowments for your children or propaganda about how you need to kill the capitalists while you still can before they own everything.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
aqouta
13d ago
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I pushed back in that way because you didn't engage with the mechanism explanation I put forward. I was trying to describe a mechanism that would apply to both the environment with and without trans messaging. I describe how it could come about naturally here:
In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
and you accused me of not describing that instead opting for putting everything under a low resolution "spontaneity" bucket. So I assumed you have some kind of weird philosophical attachment to spontaneity or did not read my post. I considered the weird philosophical attachment to it the more charitable read.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
Bringing HBD in will probably just confuse stuff. I fully admit that people can be born with different characteristics. One of those characteristics could even be predisposition to hardening identities in a trans-like way. But I'm talking about the identity formation itself.
I don't think people have fully built mental skylines from the moment of birth that they then explore like one would an ancient ruin to find buried truth. I think identities are the structures we build on the inbuilt landscape. Someone who loves the Dallas Cowboys and has Dallas Cowboys supporter as a major part of their identity probably had a kind of mental landscape with territory ripe for structures like football fan that in a different time and culture or even just if different life situations occurred could have hosted different identity structures. Certainly one could imagine if the fan was born in New York rather than Dallas at least the team would probably have been different.
People go around building things in their identity skyline in response to environmental factors, not directly consciously. Embarrassingly as a young kid for some reason I had built something like a "picky eater" identity structure. I identified with my picky eating, most likely in response to my parents trying to get me to eat something I for some fickle reason didn't want to eat. This identity seemed useful to me at the time, like a crude shack one might build hastily in minecraft as night falls. I've since dismantled it for good reason but I remember how hard it was to part with, how it was reinforced by others affirming it, even if doing so exasperatedly.
I think I could have built the trans structure in my head if things had gone differently. That's kind of what fascinates me about this subject and what I have a hard time getting across. I think my latent identity landscape was ripe for it. If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me. In a no longer trans naive world where we have people surveying every young mind looking for places to construct that identity and handing out blue prints and construction advice. I don't think it's good to discriminate against people who have built the trans identity structure, but I do think it's a bad idea to encourage others to build it. It seems like a bad use of that identity space.
aqouta
5mo ago
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
aqouta
9mo ago
People into crypto because the tech allows for new types of transactions are not confused about why adoption isn't higher. But it's also not because scammers use it as the most convenient way to do irreversible transactions, there are plenty of other options for this and it's probably not even the most common method losing out to things like gift cards because the kyc process on buying crypto with fiat is usually too onerous for the standard scam. And most scams in fraud not through these cold call approaches is still done with good old greenbacks and people trust those quite a bit.
No, crypto's limits to adoption as a day to day currency have to do mostly with friction, complexity and uncertainty.
aqouta
10mo ago
It's the pushing it to be "normalized" Normal has a purpose. It's the guardrails of society. It's very clear to most of us that while it's fine for people to be abnormal it is clearly a bad choice for most people. When you push to "normalize" abnormal stuff you are actually probably harming a lot of people.
I just think everyone deserves support
"Support" is doing a lot of lifting here. Should we not execute people who want to turn themselves into spiders? sure. Should we let them eat children because that's what spiders of their size would do? absolutely not. And I think a lot of people reasonable draw the line at "Anything that is going to impose a neg negative cost on society"
outside of a few truly principled libertarian types
I tire of this parenthetical being deployed to avoid grappling with legitimate calls to defend liberty. Yes, it's clearly not the prime value for some of the bigger ideological movements today. But it's deployed because it still carries weight and its call should be answered regardless of what slime blows the horn.
This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
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