ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.
The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.
Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:
- There is now unmet demand for a female-only social medium.
- Skynet is an unrepentant bigot.
She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.
But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.
Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".
The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.
/r/stupidpol is abuzz with news of both NordStream pipelines being damaged, in what mainstream sources openly speculate to be an attack:
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tagesspiegel.de (google translated)
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welt.de (google translated)
Massive drop in pressure – Nord Stream 2 pipeline apparently partially destroyed
There was an incident on the Russian Baltic Sea pipeline, as confirmed by the Danish shipping authority. The operator Gascade speaks of a sharp drop in pressure in the tube. An accident is considered unlikely. The timing of the accident suggests sabotage.
Stupidpol being stupidpol, blames it all on the west (either the US or UK)... but it feels like the kind of have a point? Russian performance in the war doesn't exactly scream competence, so it would be surprising, if they pulled something like this off, so deep in NATOs turf.
When we were discussing the coming winter, some people were saying "the European gas storage is filled up, it'll be fine", but isn't the gas storage more like a buffer, designed to take advantage of the decreased demand over the summer, to even out the increased demand in winter, working on the assumption that there will still be a constant supply of gas coming in? Does this change the calculus at all?
Gentlemen, it is with deep regret that I must urge you to consider dropping Elon...
Okay, okay... so I can't pretend I was ever much of a fan of his, and given my past comments about him here, some might even consider me biased against him. I am, however, very much a fan of the ethos he represents. "Move fast and break things", regulations stifling innovation, anti-credentialism., etc., etc. are all ideas close to my heart, and this is precisely why I'm worried Elon going down in flames would irreparably damage the reputation of the entire techo-libertarian ethos, and why I'd like to persuade fellow weird nerds to give the guy a skeptical look.
I always felt there was a bit of a motte and bailey with the arguments for Elon's greatness. The bailey being that he has/will revolutionize anything he touches, that he will take us to Mars, where we will be chauffeured around by self-driving electric cars via a network of vacuum-tunnels. The motte is something to the effect of "look at how much his companies are worth", and I have the impression that it's integrity heavily depends on some parts of the bailey being true, or there's no reason to value anything he does at it's current levels. Going from good to bad:
His takeover went a lot better than I expected. I fully expected him to face the full wrath of the Powers That Be for opening it up, and while he did face an advertiser boycott, and does still occasionally censor dissidents, the truth is Twitter is a much more open space than it used to be, and a lot more stable than any of the haters or hopeful skeptics could have predicted. Were it not for the boycott, what he did might have even been a formula to turn it into moneymaker, but as it stands it seems to be stuck at a decent and stable state. That would have been fine, but Elon's issue is he had to go into substantial debt to buy it, so he does need it to be a moneymaker. This is probably where all the ideas like login walls, and limiting previously open APIs came from. While this comes off to me as "greedy" / "needs this stuff to generate money", there's one thing that comes off as "no longer able to maintain the project", and it's the sudden appearance of porn bots. It seems that nobody likes having them around. Old Twitter, for all it's faults, was able to keep a lid on them, but nowadays they roam freely, so it does feel like it's a sign of weakness.
SpaceX
A fundamental problem for SpaceX is that there just isn't all that much demand for space. The entire space launch market on Earth can gross you $4.28 billion. So even if he monopolized the entire industry, he won't exactly be paying for those Twitter loans this way anytime soon. His solution was to grow the market - to come up with services he can sell that depend on high-volume low-cost launches, like Starlink or Point-to-Point.
At a glance, Starlink seems at least plausible, but I think it will be a struggle to make any kind of profit from it. Between launches being expensive, the sheer amount of satellites required, their 5-year lifespan ensuring the costs will be recurring, and fees for Earth-side ISPs, I doubt they're anywhere near the break-even point. Elon seems to agree. Starship is supposed to be the cure for all their ills, but anything reliable seems years away, even in an optimistic scenario.
Point-to-Point is dead on arrival. The idea here is that if you get rapid reusability right, you can outperform long-haul flights by making several trips in the time it would take a plane to make one. If they get their rockets to stop rapidly disassembling, then we can start talking about reusing them fast enough to make a roundtrip on the same day. While they might be able to crack the former at some point (again, years away IMO) the latter is unrealistic, given that even with Falcon 9, the shortest reuse time they managed to achieve was 21 days. And this is without going into details like how much would the ticket have to cost, for the idea to make any sort of sense, or which city would want to have a starport anywhere near it.
I don't know if they were hoping to make any significant amount of money from government contracts, but if they were, it's not looking good for them either. The Artemis mission is an utter clown show right from the drawing board (the whole speech is pretty great, if you have time to kill). I'm prepared to lay a significant portion of the blame for that on NASA itself, and their autistic levels of obsession with reusability, but I don't think it's NASA's fault that the current mission architecture requires something to the tune of a dozen launches, in order to get one rocket to the moon. The... suboptimal... architecture in itself might not have been that much of an issue for SpaceX. The contracts are signed, so as long as they could deliver, they'd get their money, but they can't seem to deliver. There's already a big slip up with the schedule, and no sign of getting close major milestones like ship-to-ship refuelling. On top that, they have actual competition. A date that could mark the turning of the tide for SpaceX is 29 September 2024, that's when Blue Origin is set to go to Mars. As far as I understand, the mission is deemed high-risk, so it might very well end the same way as SpaceX' Starship launches, but if they get it right (on the first attempt, no less), while Starship can't even get to orbit, that might trigger a cascade of "wait, what have you guys been doing all these years?" from investors and NASA administrators.
This goes more into the realm of Vibe Analysis, but an interesting thing to look at is Elon's "Starship Update" presentations (2018, 2022, 2024). The first one goes great for him, he is largely able to sell his vision of building a self-sustaining city on Mars. The press asks him a few skeptical-ish questions about the details, but he's allowed to brush them off ("Boil-off? Pfft, that's easy!"), and is taken seriously, even as he's making wild promises/predictions (orbital flight within 6 months, manned flight within a year). The second one is largely a repeat of the first and the reception is still warm, but by the third the vibe changes completely.
Every engineer / techie probably had the experience of working with a sales / marketing guy BSing the client, promising impossible things in order to make a sale. What is perhaps less common is having the marketing guy trying to BS the very techies responsible for delivering on the fantastical ideas being sold, but I've had that experience as well, and Musks latest presentation reminds me of it. Exciting announcements of imminent success are met with a wall of silence, but that's the reaction you're always going to get, when you're trying to hype up a crowd that knows exactly how far away they are from reaching any of these goals.
SpaceX being private, I can't tell what their financial are, but unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat (and possible even if they manage it), I think they're toast.
Tesla
In theory that should be the strongest company, since they have actual factories, producing actual cars sold to actual people... but that's never the argument used to support their value it's always about great innovations that are just around the corner:
- Cybertruck!
- Tesla Semi (it beats diesel, NOW!)
- Revolutionary new batteries!
- Self-driving cars!
- Robo-taxis!
- Optimus!!!
Listen to the last few quarterly earnings calls, and it's always the same story. Any moment now they'll crack some great new thing, and it's gonna be bigger / faster / stronger than anything anyone has every done, "by orders of magnitude", but they never seem to have anything to report on that they actually cracked, and are ready to go with. Cybertruck is a meme by now. Semi, which was supposed to be shipped to the tune of 50K this year, looks like it will be lucky if it reaches 50. The revolution in batteries turned out to be a minor iterative improvement, if that. The way Elon is talking about self-driving is especially bewildering. He seems set on the idea of "photons in, controls out", and maybe I'm a simpleton, but I have no idea why you would kneecap your system by deliberately cutting it off from other sources of data. I'd literally have an easier time believing they're close to cracking it, if he completely glossed over the implementation. And as far as I can tell Optimus is a manually controlled puppet, that they can't find a practical use for, by their own admission.
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out. I think it's the hype that will do them in, and I don't think they can even pull off a "let's get back to the basics" and just make good cars anymore, because of the insane valuation their hype has gotten them. And again, they have actual competition now. Feel free to make the case that they make the best cars, but even if that's true, I don't think that's going to help them much, when other companies make good enough cars that are more affordable.
It won't be long now...
As always in Vibe Analysis, timing is tricky, but something's in the air. Between Tesla's top brass cashing out, and deciding this is a great moment to spend more time with their family, construction projects being halted, people getting fired, public opinion turning against Elon, and everything depending on a rabbit (possibly multiple rabbits) being pulled out of a hat, it feels like things are hanging on by a thread. If investors pull out, I don't think either of his companies has strong enough fundamentals to survive.
I would love to be proven wrong. If Elon delivers, all that happens to me is that I look a bit silly for shitposting on the Internet (and will also have to pay for some outstanding bets about Starship going to orbit), but on the plus side, I'll be driven around by robo-taxis, as I watch a livestream from the latest moon landing. If he doesn't, we're up for a massive collapse of wealth, call-off for our return to the moon, and the cratering of the credibility of the entire techno-libertarian memeplex.
The idea of in-group policing was commonly disputed on our site / subreddit, the idea being that no movement or subculture is a monolith, so you can't blame people for the excesses of their group. I happen to disagree, I think it's extremely important to call out the excesses of your in-group, so if you happen to be an Elon fan, please try taking a skeptical look at the guy's endeavors. If nothing else, if you conclude he still comes out on top after a more skeptical analysis, you'll get the chance to hone your arguments.
Are puberty blockers chemical castration?
A follow-up to the discussion with @netstack
This was originally a deep-chain reply, but after a few spergy, reddit-tier replies on my end, and @netstack's saintly curiosity, the conversation resulted in a decent-quality argument, that I'd like to get more eyes on and see I missed any obvious objections.
I mistakenly thought that when states chemically castrate sex offenders, they use the progestogens, but when oncologists chemically castrate cancer patients, they use the GnRH drugs. Then the fact that gender clinics recommend GnRH would suggest their protocols are more like cancer treatment than criminal justice.
As @Fruck pointed out, this isn’t the case if Lupron was used for judicial castration in Australia. I’ll assume he’s correct, and I share his frustration proving it. This was the best I could find. It says that CPA, another progestogen, is the only currently approved option, but cites studies on Lupron and a couple others. Obviously, they saw some use in criminal justice.
I did some extra digging as well. The wiki for Lupron links to the paper "Reforming (purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses to Sexual Offending", and while it's about triptorelin instead of Lupron, it's another GnRH. In any case a systematic review of the use of GnRH on sexual offenders (sci-hub) should hopefully settle the matter.
As a side note this paper makes me think the difference between GnRH's and DMPA's is that the former have (or promised to have) fewer side effects, not that they work on a fundamentally different principle (and while we're on the subject, let me just say I'm rather bemused at all the handwringing in all these papers about the side effects of these drugs on convicted sex offenders, when I compare them to the dismissal of any such concerns around giving the same drugs to children).
“Political leverage” was just a joke about the stereotypical eunuch. In poor taste, perhaps.
No, it just completely went over my head, lol.
I doubt that I can find credible sources for long-term reversibility, since I assume it’s permanent at some point. Maybe 2-3 years, since that’s what the oncology websites cite when they feel defensive about gender politics. I’m not trying to push a political line.
This is a fun one. From what I understand chemical castration is meant to be reversible. This is what the wiki for chemical castration says right on the top, and I saw, but failed to bookmark, a paper that made that claim about DMPA's specifically, but that seems to be the general consensus on chemical castration:
Medical considerations are also important, and contemporary doctors should be knowledgeable of these issues. First, chemical castration is no longer effective after it is discontinued;
So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.
Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "non-central" argument, you can argue that something that's reversible doesn't quite have that quality of having one's balls cut off that you'd expect from a term like "castration". It is also true you're going to have a hard time finding sources about the reversibility of puberty blockers, since dr. Cass' team looked, and all they can say is:
No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender-related outcomes, psychological and psychosocial health, cognitive development or fertility. Bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.
But when gender care providers themselves tell me that "puberty blockers are reversible (asterisk)", the asterisk being you can't stay on them too long, or that if you start them too early you're never going to have an orgasm, when celebrity cases like Jazz Jennings say they don't regret going on blockers, but the downside was "there wasn't enough tissue to work with when it came to the surgery" (and also don't know what an orgasm is), when the industry comes up with procedures like sigmoid vaginoplasties or zero depth vaginoplasties to either hack around or throw up their hands about the issue, can we say that there are good reasons to suspect some of the changes may be irreversible? What is even supposed to be the mechanism for reversibility? For a fully developed adult it's just a question of restoring testosterone levels and sperm counts, but for a child that never went through puberty we're basically hoping their body will catch up with development as if nothing ever happened.
Yeah, I know that as far as evidence goes, this doesn't rise to the standard of a proper well-designed study, but like I said in the other comment, the gender industry isn't particularly transparent about results they don't like. I understand wanting to remain agnostic on the reversibility question, but if you grant that these concerns are reasonable, it seems like puberty blockers are an at least as, and may possibly turn out to be more of, a central example of chemical castration, than chemical castration itself.
Hi guys! Have you heard about the Eunuch Archive?
The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community. Originally a part of the Body Modification E-Zine (with the tagline "the fetish is reality"), since the late 90's they've been hosting erotic fiction by and for people with a kink for being castrated.
Can't say I read a lot of these stories, but going through the titles there seems to be a some amount of "wife gets back at husband", or "help, I've been sold into sex slavery". One theme that stood out was the idea of castration being normalized in the future. For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?", describing the procedure, and praising it's health benefits. The punchline comes at the end (keep in mind the story was written in 2002):
CONCLUSION
The answer to the title "orchiectomy: is it right for you?" is obviously "yes." Most males would benefit dramatically from this minor surgical procedure, adding years to their life expectance and producing a much higher quality of life. Loving parents should seriously consider giving the gift of a bilateral orchiectomy to their sons. They will be grateful that you care enough to do so.
READER'S DIGEST, August 2017, pages 37 - 43.
There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:
PLEASE NOTICE! The behaviors depicted in these stories, but not the stories themselves, are likely in real life to be illegal. The stories describe activities that may be considered by society to be abusive, harmful, unacceptable or undesirable. The authors neither advocate, condone nor engage in any such real life illegal behavior. These stories, as is all fiction, are fantasy and not reality. The collectors and authors do recognize the difference between the two. If YOU do not, please seek professional psychiatric care at once.
The summary for one states:
The boys finally meet Eric. The castration laws become more strict, and more boys are castrated.
Although fantasy taking place in an alternative Universe, this story is about minors that are sexually mutilated and contains descriptions of said minors having sex with an adult. If it's not something you want to read, please leave.
Yikes... you can't say they didn't warn you.
Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH?
WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health. It is often cited in academic literature, and invites the world's top experts in the field to write the standards of care for transgender people.
Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.
Well, I suppose I can't criticize what people do off the clock. Ok, so maybe their academic research was actually still on the clock, but isn't the whole point of academia to explore and document all, even the weirdest corners of society? If they can combine their work with their hobby, all I can say is: good for them!
As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH's latest Standard of Care?
As mentioned above the SOC is a set of guidelines developed by the WPATH with the goal to "provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways to achieve lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, and to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment".
This latest version has been the subject of some controversy. For example, the previous version contained "suggested minimum ages" for a number of procedures, like:
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14+ years old for cross-sex hormones
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15+ years old for double mastectomies
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16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery
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17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling
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18+ years old for phalloplasty.
In the latest version the only one that remains is the limit on phalloplasty. In another controversial decision, they decided that children can move straight to cross-sex hormones – they will no longer be requested to start with a suppression of puberty. Perhaps most controversially, the latest Standards of Care now includes an entire chapter on eunuchs, and proposes a new "eunuch-identity":
In this chapter we describe the relationship between eunuch-identified people and other transgender and gender-diverse people and present best practices specific to serving the needs of people who embrace a eunuch identity.
...
For the purpose of the Standards of Care, we define eunuch as an individual assigned male at birth whose testicles have been surgically removed or rendered non-functional, and who identifies as a eunuch.
Well, I suppose it could be a coincidence. I mean just because they suddenly came up with a eunuch-identity, doesn't mean they got it from the regulars of the fetish webs-...
While there is a 4000-year history of eunuchs in society, the greatest wealth of information about contemporary eunuch-identified people is found within the large on-line peer-support community that congregates on sites such as the Eunuch Archive (www.eunuch.org) which was established in 1998.
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Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚
What ancient Internet history can tell us about the rise of the Woke Right
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of the Woke Right! We've discussed it before ourselves, opinion range from "it's an op" to "there might be something to it", but one way or the other, a decent chunk of the anti-woke coalition it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Recently Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan and had a conversation with Dave Smith about, among other things, the responsibility of influencers with huge platforms to the public. Smith and Rogan took the familiar position of "muh marketplace of ideas", while Murray believes that people with so much influence should be a bit more selective, because exposing the public to bad ideas will lead to some part of the audience uncritically adopting them.
The conversation made huge waves and sparked a massive discussion, articles by Konstantin Kisin, tweet storms by James Lindsay, follow up conversation between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and Lindsay, and more recently between Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. In short, though not all of them might put it in the same terms, some on the anti-woke side fear that following Trump's victory the right "got it's mojo back" and now some of it's more extreme ideas are entering the mainstream discourse, so the centrist liberals want to prevent the "pendulum swinging back"...
...and all I can think is "I've seen it all before"...
First as a farce...
Let me take you back to the year of our lord 2017. It wasn't that long ago, and yet the vibe of the time was so different it almost feels like it was all a dream. Back then the way to make money on big SocMeds was to clown on Social Justice, so everybody and their dog had to have a cartoon character Youtube channel deboonking Buzzfeed. The situation was so dire for SJs that any video trying to put their position forward would yield and endless stream of critical responses which, to add insult to injury, would end up filling the recommended feed of the original pro-SJ video. Trump has also just entered office for the first time, so in that atmosphere it felt like anti-woke liberalism is unstoppable. And then a few things happened:
- The Killroy Conference
With so much online hype in the air, a person going by the name "BasedMama" decided to take the anti-SJW phenomenon to the next level, and host an IRL event. I still unironically think this was a great idea, even now the Dissident Right regularly talks about the importance of real-world organising, and with a guest list consisting of massive influencers from Tim Pool to Sargon of Akkad, the event had the potential to be a huge success. I can't point to anything specific now, but I distinctly remember the SJWs genuinely unnerved by the prospect of it taking place...
...but luckily for them it crashed and burned at an astonishing pace. First, the invited guests started complaining about demands to sign NDA's and non-compete contracts. The smaller ones went along with it, but the bigger ones, many no strangers to the conference circuit, said they're having none of it. Tim Pool publically dropped out with a video to his fans, explaining why he's not going to be at the event. The organizers' attempts at damage control only exasperated the backlash, causing even more guests to drop out. It even turned out that the guest list announced during the crowdfunding campaign was a "fake it 'till you make it" thing and some of the big names never actually signed on.
More relevant to what I want to discuss here: the whole event was marketed as a "free speech" conference, so naturally it attracted the attention of "witches": HBDers, Alt-Righters, and others with ideas rejected by polite society, and as it turned out, by the organizers themselves, who were on record expressing sympathy for the ideas of Social Justice, just thought that their current iteration went too far. That's all perfectly valid as far as I'm concerned, no one is entitled to a slot at a conference, but the usual way to handle this sort of issue is to say "you're welcome to come, but golly gee, we ran out of time/space to host any more speakers/panels", but BasedMama et. al. decided to handle it in the worst possible way: announce the witches will have their panels to get the crowdfunding / ticket money of their audiences, and only then say "oopsie, we ran out of slots". What's worse, people quickly joined the dots and realized that it's only people with a specific kind of views that there seems to be no time for. The "free speech" event was quickly seen for a sham, and all except for the most diehard supporters dropped out. An event that could have plausibly attracted thousands ended up get 20-40 attendants, from what I recall.
- KrautAndTea's crusade against the Alt-Right
Back in the online world the youtuber KrautAndTea decided it's time to balance out his usual dunking on feminists and Muslim-immigration-enjoyers with dunking on the more extreme elements on the right. He started accusing various B-List youtubers of being cryptonazis, of trying to lure people in with relatively inoffensive critiques of society, and then radicalizing them into the Alt-Right. Also, with videos like "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics (and Maths)" and "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics and Physiology", he decided to take on the Big Kahuna - HBD, or what was then going by as Race Realism.
What he did not take into account, however, was the possibility that the academic establishment sold him a bill of goods, and the actual science is much more on the HBDers' side than he expected... Various Alt-Right youtubers like Alt-Hype and JF Gariepy proceeded to take turns taking the piss out of him, and pointing out each and every way he was wrong. The familiar dynamic of critical responses appearing, and becoming more popular than the original "deboonking" video was now unleashed on Kraut. It did not go well for him. He ended up crashing out, got caught red-handed coordinating to flag Alt-Right videos, and coming up with some convoluted Discord schemes to humiliate his opponents. Long story short, he ended up having to take a hiatus from the internet, and to rebrand upon comeback.
- The Candid Saga
Back before anyone really heard of influencer marketing, an amazing new app took the internet by storm - Candid, an online forum promising to host uncensored anonymous conversations. All your favorite youtubers were shilling it. It was the Raid, Shadow Legends of online forums... until it was all taken down by a single autistic NEET...
A youtuber going by HarmfulOpinions decided to take a deeper look at the app, and quickly found out that rather than being uncensored, Candid's moderation was powered by a woke AI. What is now accepted as a fact of life was enough to spark a massive controversy back then, not only against the company, but against the influencers that failed to do their due diligence before shilling a product. The CEO's attempts at damage control were hilariously inept, and only resulted in the hole being dug deeper, but more to the point, starved for cash in the wake of the Adpocalypse, the anti-SJW influencers decided to circle the wagons around Candid. Some realized they backed the wrong horse, and exited gracefully, but others tried using their superior numbers (both in terms of videos and their reach) to discredit HarmfulOpinions and paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
This too did not go well. Candid collapsed as a company, and the influencers involved in shilling it to the bitter end took a massive hit to their credibility.
If you want a glimpse into the past as I saw it, you can watch Mister Metokur's Tales of Trout, and the archive of Harmful Opinions' Candid series. I don't know if I actually recommend them unless you really have nothing better to do. I used to find them hilarious, but they just don't land the same way anymore. I will say they are interesting as a time capsule, and Harmful's videos in particular feels like a sign of things to come - scammy Indian CEO's, AI training to surveil and censor dissidents, conspiracy theories that are, in hindsight, naive to not believe in - that series has it all!
There was more to the story than these 3 events, of course, but those are the broad strokes of what I remember. The end result was pretty much a total collapse of the Youtube anti-SJW sphere, and gave rise to another trend called "Internet Bloodsports", aiming to center authenticity and direct confrontations over fake politeness and highschool Mean Girls games, but ended in whoring yourself out for superchats and brandishing firearms on the streets of Florida, while singing what might as well have been Kanye's latest hit.
More importantly, it was followed by the rise of BreadTube and nearly a decade of darkness, as far as internet discourse is concerned.
...then as a tragedy?
Now, it may seem like I'm putting all the blame on the left-liberal faction of the anti-woke / anti-SJW sphere, and as much as I have issues with them, I want to give them their due. Kraut was right about cryptonazis luring people in with more inoffensive stuff. We regularly see it happen right here on the Motte, with that dude that keeps nuking his accounts, so Douglas' Murray's "be careful what you're watering" argument is not wrong.
I’ve also seen enough crowds being manipulated that I can even understand his sudden turn towards trusting the experts, especially if you keep the previous argument in mind. The antidote to bad speech might be more speech, and sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but if there are crypto-authoritarians on the loose, who have no qualms about presenting themselves dishonestly, they might be able to win the crowd over long enough to take political control, and shut off all opposition. This is essentially what the woke left did, and it’s what some are afraid the woke right might pull off as well.
The problem is that the entire legitimacy of liberalism rests on the free exchange of ideas. This is especially true for the anti-woke ones, as they spent the last 8 years fending off accusation of Nazism themselves, and begging for a seat at the table. If they want to shut off the secretive and the dishonest that’s fair enough (though I will have question about Murray's quiet mumbling when his support for a new war in Iran was brought up), but they have an obligation to directly confront the open and the honest, even if they find their views disgusting.
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on. I’ve said it before - it’s perfectly natural for liberals to attack me with all their vigor, because I oppose their fundamental values. It would be sad and disappointing if this didn’t illicit the kind of visceral reaction they are showing. However, I do mind being called “woke right” if it’s just a way to shut me out of a conversation, by slapping a scary label on me.
Actually, forget about me minding anything, the argument I’m trying to make here is that it will be a disaster for the liberals, if they keep trying to win by gatekeeping. It will be like training an AI on it's own output. A reasonable concern about about the pendulum swinging too far back, will end in declaring that wanting the economy to serve the people is fascist, finding racism in ham sandwitches, and deranged theories about angel summoners. And if you position yourself as an expert and spend all this time complaining about all these clowns hiding behind comedy when confronted on their takes about serious issues, maybe come up with a better argument then "people love talking about Paul Wolfowitz because his name starts with a nasty animal, and he's Jewish".
I reversed Marx' famous quip, because it's all fun and games when the story involves cartoon avatars, and characters with names like BasedMama and KrautAndTea, but when I see Conservative Inc. playing the same "you are wrong, and dumb for believing this" game that Kraut did, the same "we're for free speech, but you shouldn't be given such a big platform" game that Killroy did, and the same whisper networks that would try to psy-op you into believing someone's an insane conspiracy theorist now coordinating to make "Woke Right" a thing, I don't really feel like laughing. I've seen how the story involving a bunch of online autists ends, so when I see these dynamics play out on the scale of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, I get a bit nervous.
Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?
(1/2)
Last week @2rafa posted her comment about WEF conspiracy theories, concluding that the WEF is a mundane organization, pushing mostly boring neoliberal status quo stuff, to the extent they push anything at all. This post isn't necessarily a direct response to that thesis, but might be an interesting contrast to it.
I am a proud Deranged Conspiracy Theorist. It's a relatively new state of affairs for me, but some time ago I've tried the tinfoil hat on, and it seems to fit. This means when the WEF is in session, I browse their livestreams and videos, and if something catches my eye, I watch the whole thing. So when I saw the video titled Beyond the Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQI+ Rights, I knew I had to watch it.
It's a discussion panel featuring a diverse cast of LGBT (well, L and G as far as I can tell) speakers from around the world. We have
• Ben Fajzullin, an Australian journalist currently working for the German Deutsche Welle
• Fahd Jamaleddine, a “global shaper” from Lebanon
• Sarah Kate Ellis from GLAAD
• Tirana Hassan from Human Rights Watch
• Sharon Marcil from the Boston Consulting Group
This is in no particular order, to the extent there are themes in this discussion, they're rotated through the conversation, so going over it chronologically doesn't make a lot of sense.
The goal of the panel is to discuss success stories of the LGBT(QI+) community, and best practices on how to implement “this type of thinking”. They start off by bringing up how last year there were still 80 countries with sodomy laws on the books, and now we're down to 70. A reasonable point to start, if there's a steelman case for the global elites coordinating to push LGBT acceptance and gender theory, that would be it.
Would I have no objection if this was where the whole thing ended? I'm not sure, maybe @DaseIndustriesLtd made singletons sound too scary for me, maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and the idea of the Prime Directive ended up influencing me a bit too much, or maybe I just have an irrational fear of my elites betraying me for membership in a global club? Hard to say. During the Q&A someone in the audience brings up an example and example from the other side:
we can trace directly the sources the resourcing for homophobia in Ghana straight line to the U.S churches
I don't want to be Americanized by Evangelicals any more than I want to be Americanized by Progressives, so I find it just as wrong as Davos-aligned orgs going around the world and spreading their ideas. The only way I could hold my nose, and tolerate it, is if one side was clearly winning, and this was the only way of preserving some viewpoint diversity.
Either way, while the goal ending sodomy laws is something I agree with, Davos panels on how to accomplish that make me uncomfortable.
Singapore is one of the most recent examples that [has] decriminalized [being gay]. It's taking the legislation off the books but at the same time Singapore fortified the rules around same-sex marriage and so you know it's not always a win; and they did that because they were playing to the more conservative base which was agreeing to decriminalization.
This is still on the mundane side, because I also agree with gay marriage, but it raises red flags when you compare it to the western culture war. Many people already had their suspicions, but the pretty explicit “we'll get you next time” that the Singaporeans get to hear if they're paying attention, raises some interesting questions about the seamless transition from gay marriage to trans issues in the west, and about taking any future assurances about social reforms in good faith. Other then that, coming back to the point about singletons, even though I'm personally for gay marriage, different definitions of marriage are one of the central examples of what I think different cultures should be allowed to experiment with.
Later they make a point that this isn't something limited to the non-developed countries:
Marriage equality laws, all of these issues, are actually becoming signs of modernity. They are becoming signs of democracies and countries which respect rights for everyone, but we're seeing also that this has become a new battleground, and in particular this isn't something that happens in certain parts of the world and not others. Even in Europe we see Hungary and Poland who have really been using LGBT rights as a battleground, essentially to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society, and the government using it to put themselves up as some sort of hero of protector of family values.
Originally they name drop Poland and Hungary, so it might sound like they are focusing on marriage laws, but “using LGBT rights as a battleground to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society” is a fully generalized argument. Later on they describe the US in similar terms:
May I just say one thing on that, because that is a Battleground that we're facing in the United States right now. It's really tough, I'll be honest with you, they're putting it under parental rights. I'm a parent I'm married to a woman and I have two kids, so they're talking about some parental rights, and they're excluding us, and they're targeting us, and they're banning books at a rate that we've never seen before. They're conflating these conversations about bodily autonomy and trans youth, and it's a really tough moment right now in education in the United States. I'm absolutely sure it's being exported globally this kind of framework that they've come up with, that's been really effective over the past year. They're legislating against it as well.
This is Sarah Kate Ellis describing the state of the controversy in the US. Everything you've heard about trans women in sports, placement in prison based on self-ID, concerns about the standards for diagnosing dysphoria in kids, the reversibility of puberty blockers, and their side effects, minimal ages for surgeries, eunuch fetishists promoting their fetish via WPATH, schools hiding children transitioning from their parents, Drag Queen Story Hour, and putting Queer Theory in school material have been reduced to the above paragraph, and it's made clear these stances are being deliberately pushed back on.
Someone seeing the WEF as boring and benign should also meditate on how despite gathering people from all over the world, they somehow seem confident no one in the audience is going to give them any push-back. They're not worried an American might say “you've misrepresented everything that's been happening in our country”, let alone that someone from a more conservative part of the world might proudly assert their values.
And of course, the part where she says ***they*** are exporting their framework globally, as she's sitting at Davos, talking to an international audience of some of the most powerful people in the world, is just... *Chef's Kiss* (there will be more of those).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.
Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.
There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?
As JTarrou put it, man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy, so even though in my opinion Fukuyama is wrong to the point I don't understand how he was ever taken seriously, the outcome is not hard to predict.
In a less true-but-boring sense:
and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
How about a corporatist oligarchy using liberal democracy ceremonially the same way Brits use monarchy, exploiting AI/big data to ensure "Everything Within the State, Nothing Against the State, Nothing Outside the State"? It's more or less the official plan of western liberal democracies, and we're halfway there anyway.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2mo ago
That's not fair, he used to be a good writer that used to be able to show he properly understood the arguments he disagreed with.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
An update on the Twitter Censorship saga.
The original thread contained the following exchange:
And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?
That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.
Now, as much as I sympathize with the response, I have to admit it's rather high on copium. As we all know from our Internet Atheist days, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim, and how would confirming that the federal government did not contact Twitter directly to censor stories look like anyway? An Email saying "we totally were not asked to delete this by the federal government"? That would seem even more suspicious. No, I believe that it's unreasonable to expect your opponents to prove a negative, and sometimes you just have to admit when your theory comes up short on evidence.
Anyway, onto the update:
On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.
We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.
In it's own right this is also an interesting follow up to a thread from the old place about ex-CIA people getting new jobs at Facebook moderation, and how "extremely inflammatory and uncharitable" it was to claim they might care more about CIA than Facebook interests.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Can you recommend some kind of a summarized version of his argument, that does not misrepresent him? "Carefully argued" doesn't do much for me. It's not hard to argue for something carefully, and the result being something that should never have been taken seriously to begin with. Guns, Germs, and Steel would be a good example.
I read it many years ago, but this seems to be pretty good: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-End-of-History-and-the-Last-Man/plot-summary/
Thanks!
Note, that to me, "not to be taken seriously" implies that it can be summarily disregarded, whereas something that is carefully (and thoroughly, I should have included that as well) might be wrong, but cannot be dismissed, even if it wrong; it must be engaged with.
I disagree, this sort of approach is easily hackable by mining scholarly works for whatever data suits your idea and shaping it into a narrative that is trendy with the current zeitgeist, thus ensuring few people will be interested in challenging you to begin with, and the remainder is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude and obscurity of the material you've dug out.
Massive Theories of Nearly Everything belong in the same category as musing of your local pub philosopher until they withstand the test of time, and many challenges from opponents.
You might ask how are you supposed to challenge something without taking it seriously, but at least half of what I meant by "taking seriously" would be something more like "putting on a pedestal". When 4channers were freaking out about what's going on in Wuhan circa 2019, while all the experts were asleep, no one was taking them seriously. You could still engage with their arguments though.
but that does not seem to me to describe either Guns, Germs and Steel
Didn't it spend pages upon pages talking about how lucky Europeans were because they started off with caloric and easy to cultivate crops, and easily tamable animals, only for it to turn out that ancient European plants/animals were about as useful to humans as those anywhere else, and what the authors were comparing were products of generations of artificial selection to wild plants/animals?
Not going to estimate certainty, and I don't even have a specific prediction, just want to be on record saying: something's up with the trans front of the culture war, the vibes are shifting. Whereas I don't really see BLM / CRT / MeToo / other aspects of wokeness going anywhere (other than the volume being turned up or down), I have a strong feeling there's something unstable about the trans stuff. Will it lead to a collapse, and if so will it be this year? Don't know, just saying keep an eye on this space.
50% Buy a house.
Oh, a house! At first I thought you were planning on buying a horse. Well, good luck either way!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1mo ago
My favorite part of this is the anti-woke-right brigade suddenly deciding they don't like gay sexual degeneracy.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
A Times story about the arrival of high-speed internet in a remote Amazon tribe spiraled into its own cautionary tale on the dark side of the web.
Ok, which one of you chuds posted harmful misinformation?
During a weeklong visit, I saw how they used the internet to communicate between villages, chat with faraway loved ones and call for help in emergencies. Many Marubo also told me they were deeply concerned that the connection with the outside world would upend their culture, which they had preserved for generations by living deep in the forest. Some elders complained of teenagers glued to phones, group chats full of gossip and minors who watched pornography
As a result, the story we published June 2 was in part about the Marubo people’s introduction to the ills of the internet.
But after publication, that angle took on a whole different dimension.
Over the past week, more than 100 websites around the world have published headlines that falsely claim the Marubo have become addicted to porn. Alongside those headlines, the sites published images of the Marubo people in their villages.
The New York Post was among the first, saying last week that the Marubo people was “hooked on porn.” Dozens quickly followed that take. TMZ’s headline was perhaps the most blunt: “TRIBE’S STARLINK HOOKUP RESULTS IN PORN ADDICTION!!!”
Ok, what am I missing? This is a paragraph from the original article:
After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography
There is no "some elders complained" here, it's a straightforward portrayal of the Marubo as a collective being afflicted with, among other things, minors watching porn. "Amazon tribe hooked on porn" is a decently accurate headline-length summary. Sure, shit got sensationalized, but that's a far cry from "falsely claim".
I've had a longstanding gripe with the NYT, Vox, and other supposedly higher-quality outlets, where they essentially prime their audience to read their content a certain way, while maintaining plausible deniability if anyone calls them out, but this is the first time I saw them go after someone for going with the intended reading.
What happened here, did the wrong people agree with them, so the story has to be called off?
Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it
Don't we already have wAIfu chatbot companies, with scores upon scores of paying customers that suddenly go on suicide watch, when their chatbot doesn't want to have virtual sex with them anymore?
Anyway, this is precisely the source of my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.
But I don't havy any good proposals on how to fix it either.
Do not get me started...
We have no less than 3 posters that broke out to a wider audience, I'm already quietly seething that none of them decided on their own to promote us on any of the platforms they have access to. But it's ok, they made it big on their own, not like they owe anything to us, or anything.
So then I'm seething even more that no one whosl's running the site decided to outright bribe them to promote us. With this amount of recgniziable names hailing from here, you could easily market the place as a dojo for Substack starlets. Yeah, yeah, so it would cost some money, give me your Paypal, and I'll be happy to chip in.
And then you realize that we don't have to stop at people who came from here. You can advertise at the scores upon scores of politics / debate youtubers and streamers. These dudes are still shilling Raid Shadow Legends tier shit for chump change. We already have "invite" functionality, so you can attribute registration to specific people, and literally pay them per new user.
Man, we're not even trying.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Gays destroyed the what now rule?
You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.
DADT was not a serious effort to root anyone gay out, it was a serious effort to keep them in. It's fair to say it was still unfair, too restrictive, and discriminatory, but it is extremely dishonest to claim that the goal was to get rid of gay people.
Even with this example in mind, it is pretty clear that progressives are explicitly destroying attempts to keep non-political spaces. Given that their protestations that they just want to be left alone quickly turned to bullying bakers, and promoting mastectomies for minors, it's fair to say their goal was never to keep anything apolitical.
Last year I made a prediction about 2023 marking some sort of turning point regarding the Trans issues. But how does one judge the accuracy of a prediction that boils down to "the vibes are shifting"? To attempt that, let me explain where I was coming from when I made it.
My first exposure to trans issues was on weird rat-adjecant Internet forums, Somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Either a trans person would join the forum and bring the subject up, or, interestingly, a cis regular would bring it up, and a trans-poster would appear, seemingly out of nowhere (and in retrospect it's somewhat scary how often it turned out to be Zinnia Jones, speicifically). They spoke with confidence, they knew the Science (and in those places we respected the Science), and could dispatch any argument coming their way like pros. Through it all I had many doubts - is it really wise to let minors make that decision? How exactly can puberty blockers be reversible? How do you even diagnose dysphoria? But that was just my stomach grumbling, and they had the Science, they seemed ubeatable.
Fast forward a few years, and a whole bunch of things have happened. The replication crisis cast doubt on the Science writ large, and critical look at some of the foundational research in Trans-Science turned up massive issues in that specific branch, detransitioners started showing up, massive shifts in the demographics of transitioners started making it's way to official statistics, not to mention an exponential increase in the raw amount as well. Instead of confidence, I started seeing trans activists genuinely flustered, not dumbfounded, but clearly things were happening that they weren't expecting, and didn't know what to make of yet. For my part I still felt uncertain, maybe some new information is going to come up that will contradict what flustered them? Maybe they'll dig out some detail the critics overlooked? Maybe they'll come up with a really good argument to address the issues raised? By the end of 2022 I felt like clicked through the dialogue tree several times over, with several different people, over a long enough period of time - if they could come up with something, they would already.
So what would a vibe shift look like?
Around that time I saw the documentary The Minds Of Men (it's quite rambly, very conspiracy-theory-y, but if those aren't deal breakers, and you have 3.5 hours to kill, it's well argued, and I recommend it), it is about MK-Ultra and psychosurgery, and it is in fact what inspired me to get that copy of Time Magazine as well as a bunch of historical documents I could dig out online. One recurring question I had when watching the documentary was “how the hell did I not hear about tthis”? It's not like I'm an expert, but this is the sort of stuff that felt like it should pop up along the way in my areas of interest. I heard about the Rosenhan experiment, I heard about the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, even the 30-50's era lobotomies, why not the late 60's to early 70's era of psychosurgery? Was it just not a big deal? Well, it was big enough to be covered in Time, it was big enough for a best-selling thriller based on the premise, and it's movie adaptation (I wasn't sure when I wrote the post originally, but the Terminal Man is indeed based on the case of Leonard Kille, sometimes referred to as Thomas R. by the media, who was treated in the clinic that was covered in that Time article), the documentary featured footage I also recall from edgy 90's grunge MTV videos, hell my mother remembered hearing about it at the time, through the Iron Curtain, no less!
So assuming psychosurgery was indeed a decently-sized issue, could it just disappear into the mists of history? I asked that very question and the consensus response seems to have been “yes, definitely!”. Your theory on that may differ from mine, but I ended coming to the conclusion that memory of such events needs to be actively maintained or it will fade. We remember things that are useful for people writing history books (or the ones who employ them) and forget the others, so while a similarly sized scandal like the Tuskagee experiment has a certain “Never Again” quality to it, others, like psychosurgery will fall by the wayside. And before you bring it up - no, this is not due to the affected demographics, which are largely the same. If you read the Time magazine article, you'll see doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin were planning to deploy psychosurgery as a cure against the race riots of the 60's.
Some might notice that the hypothetical I linked to in the recent paragraph is specifically about trans issues. Indeed, all these thoughts were bubbling in my head for over a year now, and I pretty much expect the hypothetical to become reality. What does a vibe shift look like? That. Was the prediction accurate? Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors. But it is perhaps the reactions of relative outsiders to the debate that are more indicative of the vibe shift and it:s mechanics:
If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?
Now I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, timing is exactly the thing that's going to be hard to get right in a prediction like this. It also might feel silly to make sweeping societal predictions off of changes in internet discourse, but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5mo ago
One distinction: homosexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) are different terms.
Fellas, is it gay to bang another dude?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
How about a law to preserve the substance of the Pico plurality decision, which is probably no longer good law, to prevent red schools from removing ideas they don't like, and blue states from doing the same?
That sounds like a horrible idea. I can see why blues would go along with it on the assumption it will hurt reds more, but why would anyone else agree to it?
The WPATH To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions
Things are starting to move fast in Genderland, or at least faster than I can cover them with while giving any sort of justice to the topic. I haven't even gone through the entire WPATH Files, when the Daily Caller (...News Foundation - an important distinction if you're searching for the source materials) released the WPATH Tapes. By spamming FOIAs they were able to get a hold of over 30 hours of video from the 2022 WPATH summit in Montreal. A lot of it is the same old same old that I brought while covering the Files (you can see the short clip playlist here) - there's a public face of gender specialists where the science is settled, you can either have a happy daughter or a dead son, puberty blockers are reversible, etc., etc... and a private face, where they discuss amongst each other the very same concerns they dismissed, when they were brought up by skeptics of Gender Affirming Care. What's new is that the raw amount of footage allowed me to confidently reach a conclusion about a question that's been bugging for a while - what is these people's deal? Are doctors trying to do what's best for their patients, or are they a bunch of ideologically captured fanatics, blind to the harm they are doing? The answer seems to simply be: yes.
I already remarked how a lot of these clinicians come off as quite sympathetic back when I covered the Files. When you listen to their talks you hear them openly expressing uncertainty about many aspects of Gender Affirming care, discussing the limits of their patients' (and their parents') understanding of some of the interventions, and the importance of bringing them up to speed, or you hear them bringing up known and potential side effects, and ways of mitigating them. With things like this, they almost come off as urging caution... the problem is that if you keep listening you get the distinct impression you're on a train with no breaks.
The Introduction to Trans Health talk is a good example of the good and the bad of that WPATH conference. It opens with a pull-at-your-heart-strings story, of Dr. Ren Massey's FTM transition and the struggle to find acceptance in society and from his parents. I ended up being quite moved by the story myself, and yet, in the fastest "Oh god, oh no, baby, what is you doing?" I have experienced to date, he drops this slide, where he proclaims everything from non-binaries to eunuchs is hecking valid.
I try to be honest about these things - I am biased, I pretty much already reached my conclusion on the subject, and it's going to be a hell of process to change my mind again, but no matter how certain I am of something there's always the possibility of being wrong. The thing is, "being wrong" to me means it turning out that people like Jack Turban were right, that gender dysphoria is a valid diagnosis, that doctors can reliably tell people who have it from people who don't, and they have treatments that are proven to alleviate their suffering.
Well, fuck me then, I guess. It turns out that the "medicalized narrative" may have been used in the past, but it's outdated now. Not all trans people have dysphoria, and not everyone wants to transition from one side of the binary to the other. The doctor's empashis needs to be on removing barriers, and on patient autonomy. Between several name drops of "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", as best as I can gather these folks are certified Queer Theorists, tirelessly working to deconstruct the idea that (cis)heterosexuality is normal. Sure, they'll take into account the consequences of gender treatments, and they'll try to make sure that patient's "transition goals" are within the realm of physical possibility, but there should be no other limits placed otherwise. It feels like they flipped the table. What I thought was a conversation about the state of medical science turns out to be a fight over who's worldview should prevail.
This seems to be the only explanation that can make sense out of the whole thing, and tie up the loose ends of the WPATH clinicians genuine concern for their patients, with wild off-the-wall stuff like the Eunuch Archive, or why they pull the knives out for Lisa Littman and the ROGD hypothesis or Blanchard's categorization of trans people, while remaining unbothered by Dianne Ehrensaft's gender angels and gender Tootsie Roll Pops.
Back when I covered the Eunuch Archive it was declared that I am a bad, bad boy, because in a forum with explicit rules about not booing the outgroup, I limited myself to providing evidence that child castration fetishists have an influential role in setting standards for transgender care, and are using it to promote their fetish, but refused to speculate on their motivation, and wouldn't declare them evil or insane. Other than it not mattering, and me not knowing, there was something unsatisfying about the two explanations that were offered. They were a too lucid to plead insanity, and haven't expressed a callous disregard for the well being of others, or a singular obsession with their own self-gratification, that people straight-forwardly associate with evil. What they do appear to be is completely ideologically captured. They view everything through the lens of Queer Theory and intersectionality, and are simply doing what is considered good in the light of that ideology, that this might involve affirming eunuchs, or transitioning schizophrenics doesn't phase them in the slightest.
All this seems to show the limits of analyzing motivations, and has implications on what it means to "boo the outgroup". That the road to hell is paved with good intentions is not a new lesson, but it seems that it's rarely understood as something more than "sometimes people get carried away trying to do good, and go too far", when some cases are probably better understood as "sometimes ideologies can make you commit obviously grievous harm, with a smile on your face". Perhaps the evil/insane dichotomy was the real Boo Outgroup all along?
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
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