dovetailing
No bio...
User ID: 2225
dovetailing
2yr ago
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
dovetailing
7mo ago
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7mo ago
Sure, but the "uses women's bathroom" behavior doesn't add any additional strangeness on top of the "made permanent changes to body and lifestyle" part.
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7mo ago
Maybe we're talking past each other but the thing I think is unlikely --- conditional on his making permanent changes to his body --- is that the whole thing is just acting out a fetish. Most people with fetishes don't make permanent changes to their bodies or try to constantly act on them in public, and the ones who do are generally disturbed and disregulated enough that they'll get themselves into trouble with undeniably inappropriate behavior pretty quickly.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
dovetailing
10mo ago
Maybe this is just local conditions but in my (heavily convert) Orthodox parish a supermajority of people have converted as couples or families, and I've not noticed anything like the conditions you are describing among those who are/were single. If anything it's been the single young women who have been most desperate to get married -- which they are succeeding at. (Though I wouldn't read as much into that part, the sample size is pretty small.)
'redneck English'
I was about to ask you a question under the impression that you meant the dialect(s) spoken in Appalachia, and then remembered that you live in Texas, not in my neck of the woods. Rednecks are everywhere!
Anyway I mostly agree with you. Dialectal variation in American English is shockingly small, certainly compared to e.g. the variation in Great Britain. Aside from maybe AA(V)E, which does seem to have some unusual grammatical constructions, pretty much all varieties of American English are easily mutually intelligible if you are willing to try. (For what it's worth, though I grew up in Appalachian Virginia, my parents are highly educated transplants. My brain seems to produce exclusively SAE even though I have no trouble understanding the Appalachian dialect/accent.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
Thank you for the kind words and the mention (I wouldn't have seen this otherwise). I'm sorry you are going through such a tough time. Feel free to PM me again if you ever want to talk.
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1yr ago
Is this about divorce (the relevant difference here is not actually moral but ontological; the official Catholic line being that divorce is impossible)? About economia in general? Something else? I don't think there are any major differences in moral teaching, so this has got to be about how the teaching is applied, but that comparison doesn't seem to come out with Catholicism-as-actually-practiced (as opposed to in theory) being notably stricter.
So I am kind of confused by this and would like you to elaborate.
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1yr ago
LOL. I regret that I have but one upvote to give for this comment.
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1yr ago
I recommend staying off of social media and away from any other places where people argue about things you care about in ways that you have a bad reaction to. Change your passwords, log out, delete your browser history if you have to. Yes, there are ways to try to deal with it (I think dark is giving good advice) but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
dovetailing
2yr ago
Lawrence's book has a "terminology and definitions" section
You are absolutely right and I should have referred to that first. My bad.
May I ask why not?
Because many of these people are doing things (cross-dressing, usually) which are already seen as shameful, with no pretense of being forced to; plus, doing feminine things is only socially shameful for men, but the desire in question is to be/become a woman. But I've gotten some firsthand pushback on this so probably I was typical-minding here.
dovetailing
2yr ago
I don't understand this. In my mind, the entire point of the forced feminization fantasy is avoiding the shame in wanting it rather than it being itself shameful, while you seem to be claiming the opposite?
I am either slightly confused or expressed myself confusingly (or both). I'll get back to you if I think of a better way of explaining what I meant.
dovetailing
7mo ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
dovetailing
7mo ago
I checked out that archival link to 4chan. I have to say, there definitely is a heavy selection effect going on there, but at least it's a different one than the the other places I've looked.
I find 4chan slang and culture to be extremely offputting, but a certain subset of the population there at least has the "brutally honest" thing going. (Or maybe they're being hyperbolic or making shit up for fun. Hard to tell sometimes...)
dovetailing
10mo ago
Yeah, I don't say anything online that I wouldn't be willing to own. But I've been (slightly) concerned with two possible scenarios:
- I'm applying for a job in the future, employer searches [my other username], turns up that I've been willing to state non-current-year-PC opinions about homosexuality/trans/abortion/etc., and that acts as a marginal push away from them actually hiring me. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: I'm not likely to be desperate and if an employer can't tolerate that, then I probably don't want to work for them anyway.)
- I share something I wrote under [my other username] with some people I know in real life (mostly social conservatives), they decide to google [my other username] and find some personal or 'icky' stuff I've written about here, like about my past personal experiences with autogynephilia and related things, or my book review of Men Trapped in Men's Bodies, or something like that, and then there is social weirdness because they now think I'm a pervert or something. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: how likely are people to search like that anyway? As long as I don't literally link to my writing at TheMotte from something I post under [my other username], how likely are they to turn up the stuff here even if they do google me? And for that matter how likely is someone seeing what I've written likely to make things weird? I have no idea about any of these.)
dovetailing
11mo ago
You didn't ask me but I have some recs too.
- Oxygen Not Included (2019). Probably my favorite game of all time. Don't let the cutesy art fool you; under the survival / colony sim surface this is an incredibly addictive engineering sandbox game. Tame a volcano for a steady supply of aluminum! Build a geothermal plant powered by the magma in your planetoid's core! Construct a giant counterflow heat exchanger to boil crude oil into petroleum for your power generators... which produce water as a byproduct... which can be purified and fed into oil wells for more crude oil. Build little rockets to colonize other planetoids, and figure out logistics to ship resources around for your megaprojects. Exploit the hell out of the game's physics. Or, you know, just tame the magic critters that eat weird magic plants and grow shearable plastic scales. The expansions add a lot and are well worth the price.
- Anything from the (now defunct) Zachtronics. Engineering / automation / programming puzzle games of many flavors. My favorite is still probably their first title, SpaceChem (2011), despite its lack of polish, because of how insanely hard (and rewarding) some of the levels are. If you want something more forgiving, there's Opus Magnum (2017); for silly assembly programming fun there's TIS-100 (2015) and Shenzhen I/O (2016). I have heard good things about Exapunks (2018) but never got around to it because of the titles above and below.
- Obligatory Rimworld (2018). You probably know this one. Colony sim. It's good. I haven't played with the latest expansion though.
- Seconding Baba is You; best non-Zachtronics puzzle game I've played (and probably better than half of the Zachtronics ones too).
- Also Obligatory Terraria (2011 but somehow still getting free updates) If you played many years ago but not in the last few, it's worth trying it out again.
- Slay the Spire (2019), despite being way too popular, is also Actually Good, but it is even more Actually Addicting so I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
- Noita (2020) is a roguelike platformer spell programming sort of thing and I am so bad at it (mostly because I am bad at the roguelike platformer part). It has an enormous world full of zany secrets too.
- Understand (2020). Another puzzle game, but this one is like doing IQ test pattern finding questions. Except actually fun? If you like this sort of thing, you will love it; if you don't, then you will be incredibly bored but at least it's only 4 bucks.
dovetailing
11mo ago
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
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11mo ago
Maybe he wants to have abundance for all?
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11mo ago
hillbilly rather than redneck
I always understood that "redneck" was a general term referring to poor(er) rural, white, mostly southern Americans, including Appalachians south of Pennsylvania, which would generally (though not totally) encompass "hillbilly" -- a person living in rural Appalachia or the Ozarks -- rather than excluding it. ("Hillbilly" is also generally more derogatory -- or at least some people seem to think so; I definitely recall people trying to make a distinction between "rednecks" (themselves) who were, well, definitely Appalachian rednecks and probably hillbillies by most people's estimation, and the "hillbillies" who lived way out in the boonies.)
Is it common to interpret the terms as mutually exclusive, or am I misreading your sense here?
dovetailing
1yr ago
Roti Prata is delicious. Go to a hawker center get some.
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1yr ago
This was a great recommendation -- I'm enjoying it very much. It's like the game show version of a puzzle hunt.
Why aren't any American game shows even close to this good?
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1yr ago
I ordered an l-theanine supplement (green tea also has caffeine, I don't want to mix that in and I'm not a huge fan of the flavor anyway) on your advice; the palpitations and insomnia [edit: I think some of the insomnia is secondary to palpitations continuing way past the other effects] sucked (at least the serious jitters were only with the first dose). Would you recommend taking it with the Adderall or in the evening?
dovetailing
1yr ago
Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).
However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.
I'm not going to deny that such people exist --- there's apparently a fetish for everything --- but I've never seen evidence that this is an appreciable fraction of the population in question. Do you have any?
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