ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
What's this? A Culture War Christmas Truce?
WPATH Files
Hey guys have you heard about the WPATH Files? Well, you did, they were already brought up earlier this week, but unlike our resident doomers, I think they're worthy of a top level thread.
No, this isn't about the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment (although Genevieve Gluck is striking the iron while it's hot). Long story short someone on the inside of WPATH contancted Micheal Schelenberger and released some of their internal discussions. So what's all the hubbub about? At a cursory glance might even look like the WPATH members are urging additional caution. Well, let's take a step back.
To avoid going full-Putin, I'll start at Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage. A lot of the arguments presented in the book aren't new, but it's a convenient compilation - transition is serious shit with huge health implications, kids don't know what they hell they're talking about and shouldn't be taken at face value with regards to such a serious decision, past research shows most of would-be trans youth desist after puberty, new research indicates there might be a social contagion component to the recent increase in trans kids, puberty blockers themselves might be pushing kids further down the trans rabbit hole, etc., therefore we should hit the breaks on the whole thing.
A lot of the counter-arguments are also conveniently compiled in critical reviews of the book, or critical responses to positive reviews, for instance:
Within medicine, gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse youth is not controversial, outside of a few fringe groups like The American College of Pediatricians (an anti-LGBTQ group that is not to be confused with The American Academy of Pediatrics). There is broad consensus from The American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and The World Professional Association for Transgender Health that gender-affirming medical care is appropriate for transgender youth so long as clinicians follow guidelines set forth by these major medical organizations (e.g., The Endocrine Society Guidelines).
(...)
Furthermore, those studies were of very young prepubertal children. Under the current medical consensus, gender-affirming medical interventions are not offered to prepubertal youth. They are only offered after youth have reached adolescence. Once youth reach adolescence, it’s rare for transgender youth to later decide they are cisgender.
(...)
She notes that only 1.9 percent of adolescents who started pubertal suppression in a large study in The Netherlands did not proceed to gender-affirming hormones (i.e., estrogen or testosterone). This is not because pubertal suppression made them identify more strongly as transgender. Rather, it is a result of the strict guidelines followed in the Netherlands before an adolescent is considered eligible for pubertal suppression: six months of attending a specialized gender clinic and undergoing rigorous assessment.
(...)
Though Shrier is quick to provide anecdotes from teenagers like "Riley" and stories from estranged parents as evidence, she is relatively less interested in the peer-reviewed scientific research that shows the benefits of gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents. I've listed several in the references for those interested in reading more.
The message is clear: We know what we're doing. We have strict standards that filter out those that might not benefit from transition. We have scientific consensus and studies, all you have is speculation and anecdotes. It is the departure from this deadpan, "we know what we're doing" discourse, delivered with iron confidence that I commented on earlier this year, and which is a useful lens to look at the WPATH Files through, given that it's one of the explicitly named organizations responsible for setting these supposedly strict standards.
Part of the Files is a video of the "Identity Evolution Workshop" held on Zoom by the WPATH, a significant portion of it is devoted to the question of informed consent:
Dianne Berg: Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on all of the importance that comes up with the informed consent.
I often see people who, because there's such a backlog of therapists to do some of the mental health therapeutic support, I often see people who have already engaged in some sort of, and this is again with youth, some sort of medical intervention. And so one of the things I do is sitting with the youth and their parents and I say "so tell me more about what you know about that medical intervention", and kind of like what Dan was saying, children and young adolescents... we wouldn't really expect them... It's kind of out of their developmental range sometimes, to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. And so I think I, I try to do whatever I can to help them understand, as best I can. But what really disturbs me is when the parents can't tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. And so I think informed consent has to happen very differently for parents.
(these are slightly edited for the removal of awkward speech patterns)
So there's a few ways to look at it charitably. One that comes to mind is "they aren't talking about issues with the current state of gender affirming care, they're describing the sort of problems a clinician will run into, and how to handle them". The problem with that is that they themselves would disagree with that interpretation:
Dianne Berg: I worked in an intersex, or disorders of sex development clinic for a number of years as the psychologist. And I would come in to the session with the parents and usually these were very young kids. (...) and the pediatric endocrinologist came out and said "yeah, they totally get it, they're on board, I don't have any concerns about their understanding". I would go in and I would say "okay, so tell me what you learned from him", and they'd just be like, "we have no idea what he was talking about." Because they, they feel deferential.
(...) And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically.
One of the reasons for this state of affairs that they brought up is a simple lack of resources - "backlog of therapists", "20 minute medical appointments" - which is consistent with info that got out of the Tavistock or through whistleblowers like Jaime Reed. The other way to look at it is @gattsuru's "urging additional caution", which they are indeed doing throughout various excerpts of the Files, but if additional caution needs to be urged, because patients, or even their parents, don't understand what they're signing up for, that paints a very different picture than the one that Jack Turban painted in his review. This is a lot less "we know what we're doing" and a lot more "this is all new, and we're still figuring it out", the difference is portrayed in this analogy:
I don't know if other people do, but I really struggle with it, because I kind of want the kids that I work with, whether they're 9 to 13 and looking at puberty suppression or hormones in some ways to be a little pediatric endocrinologist. Like I want them to understand it at that level in an age appropriate way. And I struggle with that on one level because, well, when a kid takes diabetic medication, do they have to understand?
The reason for the discrepancy in the level of understanding that is expected, is acutally later explained by Jamison Green:
Jamison Green: They may be able to get their hormones prescribed through their primary care provider who doesn't really know necessarily everything about trans care. They're basically trying to be supportive and, you know, our health care system leaves us in the lurch all the time. I agree that we don't necessarily need to be able to have... If you have a known condition, like diabetes, you don't have to understand every nuance about what the insulin is going to do to you, in order to give informed consent, because there's so much experience with that. But in this field, this is all new, this is all contentious, and that's where we run into problems, because everyone's afraid.
And I know for a fact, people, even adults, even well educated, older adults, accessing care for the first time, sit down with the person who's going to prescribe their hormones, and they look at an informed consent form that says your hormones are going to do this, this, and this. They don't take any of that in yet because they're so scared that they're not going to get what they need. They're just.. "so show me where to sign".
The issue brought up in the second part of the quote, that patients might not want to read, talk about, or ask questions about their treatment because they're afraid this will result in them not getting it, is brought up later in the conversation, but this is where things go from bad to worse:
Dianne Berg: At least with the kid that I worked with, where we kind of got to, was not wanting to talk about things, because they were at that kind of [non-binary] place. But also that they really thought that if they said anything about this, and really delved into it, it would mean that their options for any of that medical transition that they had always thought they were going to do, would be off the table. And so they were like, I can't, I don't want to explore that the non-binary shift, because if I explore that, that means that I'm never going to be able to get estrogen, and it was kind of like having some education around - no, it doesn't mean that. What it means is we are trying to meet your embodiment goals.
(...)
It's a growing edge for me, so I certainly don't want to misspeak, but my understanding and what I'm trying to kind of incorporate in my clinical practice is, in some ways, moving away from what is your identity and therefore because you have this identity, you're going to want to do these particular medical interventions to change your body. Not having it be as identity driven, because I think that's been the historical basis of how things have operated.
(...)
At least I have had many clients tell me "I did not tell you the truth about a lot of things about my sexuality, because I figured if I told you that, you would gatekeep and assume it was a fetish" , or, you know, some of the terms that we no longer are using. And so I think there is a huge historical context to sexuality being seen as a way that creates barriers to access to care. And I think it's very important that we acknowledge that historical context, and that we work against that historical context, by talking more about positive sexuality and pleasure and that that they can go together and that it's okay, and not create barriers to care, because people have that belief that that's what we're going to do.
Ok, simply put: you can't tell me how you have it all figured out, how you have strict standards that filter out people who might change their mind later, and how rare it is for trans youth to change their identity, and how all the concerns raised are invalid precisely because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".
This already got quite long, and I already got one or two other angles to approach this topic from, so I think this will become a series*. My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment. There is, of course, room for those within medicine, psychiatry and/or psychology, but rule #1 of ethical experimantation is that you tell people they're participating in an experiment. You don't tell them things like "would you rather have a happy daughter, or a dead son", you don't dismiss critics because you don't like their politics, and you don't try to push through bizarre social reforms on the back of The Science that just isn't there.
As always, time will tell if my conclusion is correct, I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased, and it's only natural for someone biased in the other way to come to a different conclusion, especially that a lot of people in these WPATH Files comments and transcripts come off as quite sympathetic. But before signing off, I'll allow myself a bit of speculation: this is either the tip of the iceberg, and/or WPATH members themselves think the organization is no longer credible, as WPATH membership dropped from 4119 to 1590 from January 2023 to 2024. This is after the Files were announced, but way before they were released, but it's hard not to get a "fleeing a sinking ship" impression from it, and in fact such a sudden departure of so many members might even be the cause of the Files being leaked (out of many disgruntled people, some decided to leak stuff), and the effect is yet to come.
*) Hey mods, are we still doing the "Culture War goes into the Culture War Thread" thing? I would really rather have these as standalone posts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6mo ago
Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority.
All the other forms of feedback - getting ratiod, getting dragged in quote tweets by high-clout accounts, etc - are also basically just tyranny of the majority. The problem is that if, say, the BBC posts something absurdly wrong, and a swarm of users points it in the replies, many people won't bother reading the replies, and even when they do official institutions will have a clout-shield by virtue of being official institutions. The reason Community Notes is awesome is that that official box lets the opinion of the common people be put on par with the mainstream media, NGOs, factcheckers, etc. This is why Elon is never getting any brownie points for fighting misinformation on social media, even though he probably did the most to stop it out of all SocMeds - none of it was ever about misinformation, but about imposing the official opinions on the common people.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7mo ago
If there was an election today, the conservatives would almost certainly win
And do what, specifically?
We used to have a guy here (or back on reddit) singing praises of UK conservatives, and how Multicultural Torryism is going to show us the way to combat wokeness. The UK now routinely sics the cops on people for denying progressive orthodoxy. Establishment conservatives are playing on the same team as the progressives.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10mo 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.
It's not weird, we just need to abandon the idea that companies actions are exclusively market-driven.
Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives.
I haven't followed her that closely, but that description feels extremely off. Ages ago he (it was still before transitioning) had a conversation with the Distributist, and a few with Sargon, but since years her entire brand was talking to sockpuppets, and smuggly dismissing viewpoints she disagrees with. The idea she was actually responding to conservatives, let alone making serious arguments is bizarre to me.
Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here.
This is one of the issues she always brings up and never addresses properly. If you want to talk about limits of free speech, have at it, but you have to do q better job then "there are some limits to speech, therefore this instance of speech I don't like should be limited".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
In the most famous case, Schwab was alleged to have told the public that, in the future "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
...
Instead, the WEF posted a video on its Facebook page
If you're going to deboonk the embarrassing rightoid conspiracy theorists, who lack baseline critical thinking ability, can you at least look up Know Your Meme? I have no idea what you're talking about, I never heard anything about a sinister announcement. The first I heard of it was literally from the Facebook video, and it was embarrassing enough to the WEF all on it's own, that they ended up taking it down, as well as the original article.
Other examples are myriad, but include in many cases phrases about 'eating bugs' and 'living in pods'. The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs
Yes, us embarrassing conspiracy theorists absolutely did not look up things like Novel Food or Food 2030 research policies. We are guided like sheep by Mother Jones.
If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".
This, and the bit about pods just sounds like "it's not happening, and if it's happening it's a good thing".
The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing.
No. Business, and government leaders aren't spending millions on this conference for fun, and public figures around the world are not simultaneously chanting the same slogans like "Build Back Better" by coincidence.
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these.
I'm well aware, and that's not what I'm worried about at all.
I know a bunch of social workers, some of them a generation or so older than me, and I heard a few stories of how things used to run. Like nowadays there was actual work, and there was a bunch of bureaucratic stuff to deal with. Back in the day you had to type it all out on actual paper, mail it etc. Then everybody and their dog started using computers for everything, everything got digitized, hundreds of apps meant to automate the drudgery got deployed, you could instantly send documents via e-mail... do you want to take a wild guess in which of these eras people spent more time doing actual work than they did dealing with bureaucratic nonsense?
I worry the same will happen with AI. No, it will not "make us equal", it's a side-rant but I'm shocked anyone could even utter such a sentiment with a straight face. There are, and there have always been, entire institutions devoted to the task of ensuring this will never happen. What will happen is that you will need AI to even keep up. You will need an AI text generator to output sheer amount of text you will now be required to write in order to cover your ass, and you will need an AI summarizer to "read" the tonnes upon tonnes of paper that will be sent your way. The best part is that all of this will be centralized in the hands of a few companies, who's owners hang out at the same cocktail parties as various panopticon fetishists at the top of our society, who will dictate how exactly this AI needs to be lobotomized to only output goodthink. It will now be the perfect tool for them to "nudge" us, old geezers like you or me might remember a world where you needed to process information yourself, but children born in the new one will only ever know information summarized to them via AI.
I've mentioned this before, but this is what drives me up the wall with AI-optimists. I know it's hard to learn the lessons of history, but this doesn't even count as history. We literally just watched Big Tech bitch-slap the ever-loving hell out utopian tech-nerds like 5 minutes ago, and I'm now supposed to jump on the next bandwagon that is going to "make us equal"? Give me a break.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Tired: Feminists accidentally reinventing traditional marriage.
Wired: Greytribe galaxy-brain rationalists accidentally reinventing Army Boot Camp.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6mo ago
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money,
I'm the resident Musk-skeptic here who called him a fraud, and expects SpaceX and Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term. I don't think he's wrong here. The disproportion between the funding they're raising and the funding they need to run the site is massive and insane. I think someone back on Reddit mentioned it was literally running out of some guys closet for many years, until it became a Respectable Nonprofit, and they started looking for things to spend money on.
So while it doesn't literally cost no money, you can more or less round it down to it costing no money, and that's without attempting further optimizations like P2P hosting.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Nice rant and all, but I wish you waited until tomorrow with it, because I have no idea what your point is supposed to be.
And Jesus said:
"Do not give bread unto the poor, as life is a repeated game, and the poor will learn that optimal strategy is not to source their own bread"
Hilarious! Really stuck it to those hypocritical Christians. But it's been a while since I read the Bible, what was the actual quote from Jesus? "Do not give bread unto the poor, but do give them a handful of candy, as long as it doesn't cut into your strip-club budget. Oh, and don't forget to be extremely judgmental of people who disagree with you!"?
I'm not religious, I'm for the welfare state, I'm even for small random acts of kindness towards people on the margins of society, but I have no idea what your point is, and your worldview is bordering on parody for me.
Aww, you poor things, incapable of standing up in absolute terms, let's make a nice carveout for you so that you can say you tried.
This but unpatronisingly.
I'm far from an athlete, the only sports I do is for health, I never liked competing, and yet I find myself wanting to smack the living hell out fellow nerds who completely miss the point of sports. It is the least surprising thing in the universe, that the person saying the above is also a transhumanist.
In sports, the actual physical achievement is just the cherry on top, a certificate of accomplishment, a badge you can wear and show off, but which you only get for putting in the work, but the actual thing is about the work itself. It's about showing up for training every day, and persisting throughout all the failures. Virtually all benefits of sports, to the individual as well as society, come from the latter not the former, and it's blindingly obvious it should be encouraged in everyone, regardless of their level of achievement. But some people seem to be indeed blinded by it.
So I'm playing historian. Emphasis on "playing", since I'm just retracing the steps from other people's work. Still it's pretty fun to look up the primary sources, particularly when they're mysteriously missing from internet archives. A few weeks ago I posted a hypothetical about trying to explain the magnitude of current Culture War issues, to someone in the far future, here I'm going in the opposite direction. This article is a small sample of a larger episode of decently-sized Culture War. It happened recently enough, that it's pretty easy to find sources on it, but since it hasn't really been preserved in collective memory, it's hard to judge how big it was. Big enough for a cover article of Life magazine, I guess, but it has only a paragraph on Wikipedia (oh wait, here's a few more), and much like in my hypothetical I find the description oddly terse. At least someone on wiki seems to think Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin deserve to have their own pages, but for some reason no one got around to writing them.
It's pretty wild to read stuff from the 70's, it's like going into some sort of Mirror Universe. As someone very anti-woke, I'm tempted to see the half-postmodernist half-marxist ideas pushed by our elites as the root of all evil. If only we could move in a more rational direction, I often think, we could actually solve the problems that afflict our society. And then I look at how people used to talk about social problems 50 years ago, and the vibes I'm getting are basically rationalist, and I hate it. Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong? All of this run by the same NYT-Informational Complex that promotes wokeness nowadays. I'm slowly starting to come to the conclusion that all these ideological fights are pointless. Some people talk about pendulums swinging, I'm starting to see it as evil always finding a way to twist any idea to it's ends.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9mo ago
I can't speak for everybody, but from my perspective you're missing the point.
I'm not sneering at immigrants, not even ones who don't want to assimilate (possibly because I am one). We're all trying to make the best of the cards we're dealt.
I'm not sneering at assimilation. I love the idea, and even though I couldn't hack it myself, I think it's something everyone should strive for, and maybe that hosts should make an effort to make it smoother as well.
What I am sneering at is the idea that assimilation happens automatically. You just send a couple million people with a completely different culture somewhere, and they'll be absorbed by the blob, right? If not them, then surely their kids.
I am sneering at the idea that belonging to a nation is about nothing more than holding a passport, and that a country is little more that an administrative-economic zone. With that attitude, what does it even mean to assimilate?
I am sneering at the idea of migration being an unmitigated good for everyone involved. Even in the best case scenario an emigrant is leaving something behind. The idea of plugging your own country's holes, be it skilled labor shortages or low birthrates, with people from other parts of the world strikes me as incredibly callous.
Finally, I'm sneering at the "hello fellow natives, have you considered that having children is bad?" -> "hello fellow natives, we are going through a population crisis, have you considered opening borders?" routine that our lizardmen elites are pulling.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.
How long do you have to warn people "don't do this or the same tactics will be used against you when the tide turns" before it's ok to make good on the warning?
If we lived in a normal world, yes, but we seem to be living in some absurdist "everyone pretends to not see the elephant in the room" comedy. The desired destination is "stop immigration, bring jobs back to America, cool it with the global empire that doesn't benefit people at home" and a bunch of cultural issues from "stop transing kids" to "stop teaching racism". Now, if the taxi driver came out and said that's an actually insane destination, we could have an actual conversation, but what we get instead is the conversation Truman Burbank would have had if he asked the taxi driver to take him somewhere outside of Pleasantville.
EDIT: changed the analogy to one that's more fitting.
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
4mo ago
Sadly, we do still get the drive-by progressive who considers everybody that disagrees with them to be a white nationalist.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
But surely I’m not the only one who finds it suspicious that the harasser / sex-seeker man in the story was never identified, am I?
Nah, not identifying the guy is the most decent thing she did in that entire kerfuffle. It was before cancel culture really took off, but the last thing we need is for the bloke to get cyberstalked by precursor me-tooers. What she described is hardly beyond the realm of possibilities in the context, and didn't even make the guy look bad, so I see no reason to doubt her.
In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias.
Huh? Maybe in the "it's not happening, and if it is, it's a good thing" sense. Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true). Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
To be fair, the guy in question seems to have a superhuman level of obsession with keeping his project alive, I don't think an average person could reproduce that.
Though speaking of optimism, he did mention plans to share his hard-won knowledge with the common folk.
We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.
I didn't really make up my mind how far back to turn the clock to, but I like the way you think.
If RETVRNING is not an option, I do have a general principle in mind on how to proceed, but I don't have a name for it. Techno-optimists often point out that this isn't the first time us Luddites have their gripes about machines making us dumb, and takin' ar jerbs, but here we are, and the world doesn't seem so horrible. Aside from the arguments that, in some ways, yes it is, I think technology should be developed in a way that helps us grow as people, rather than makes us succumb to naked consumerism. As you semi-correctly guessed I already have this issue with what IT promised vs what it delivered. Computers and the Internet disrupted how we do a lot of things, but they could have conceivably given us decentralization and climbing rates of technological literacy. We got the opposite on both fronts. The fact that we ended up with even more centralization is not even that surprising when you think about it, as the forces pushing towards it were on open display all this time, but what happened to tech-literacy came as a bit of shock to me. X-ers and Millenials probably all had the childhood experience of their parents buying a new device, and us being able to figure out how it works through mere trial and error, before our parents could find their way through the manual. For years I assumed the same will happen to me, but it just hasn't, and reportedly there are now kids who don't even know what a file is, because the way we design software is hiding the fundamentals of how computers work. On one hand that's a relief - it doesn't look like a young whippersnapper is about to take my jerb anytime soon - but it's also depressing. This, more then anything else, is what worries me the most about the advent of AI, and if anyone has any ideas how to avoid it, I'm all ears.
There was this old TNG episode about kids getting abducted from the Enterprise to live on a planet where all their needs are catered to by a planetary AI, so they can do art and stuff. Well, what I'm saying is: Both the Federation and Aldea has AI technology, but they choose to use it in different ways. Give me the 8 year olds of the Enterprise, who are forced to master basic calculus so they can grow up - and may Allah forgive me for using this phrase - as well rounded citizens, who actually can maintain the technology they depend on, over the children of Aldea, who for that matter don't even master art, they just have their thoughts and emotions translated into it by the AI.
The final thing that is driving me up the wall, is the utter state of the discourse. EAs, for all the talk of "alignment", never mention either of these issues because, as far as I can tell, they don't want the common people to have an understanding of AI, so they can have total control over it for themselves. As for E/Accs the closest thing I ever got to an acknowledgement of the problems with centralization and dumbing down was "Yeah that worries me too, but what can you do? Anyway, look - ChatGPT go brrr!". For that reason I'm inclined to just disconnect from technological society, and join the Amish.
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):
There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:
The summary for one states:
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:
14+ years old for cross-sex hormones
15+ years old for double mastectomies
16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery
17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling
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":
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-...
...
Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚
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