gemmaem
8mo ago
But his posts and blog comments very much did encourage racism. This is not a close call, whether Hanania says it himself or not.
gemmaem
11mo ago
I see that Team "My outgroup is cartoonishly stupid/evil and has no useful motivations or genuine concerns that I might need to take into account" continues to be very popular around here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
One could, but the government is not a university system, so this is a hypothetical Sam Brinton rather than a real one.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thanks to @gattsuru for important context. Given that I've made such a fuss about defining what was actually said, I should probably also give a response on the subject! Apologies if it's not quite what you were looking for, however.
I don't personally like this, as a general definition of transphobia. One response I've seen to the complaint that we're "not allowed to distinguish between trans women and other women" is that of course you can make that distinction. There's even an adjective for it: trans women. This is ... fair, but in my view it entails certain things. One of these is that people should be allowed to decide that they are not romantically or sexually attracted to trans women as a class, if that's really how they feel. This is a really personal topic, and asking people to rearrange their innermost feelings is a much stronger request than just asking them to rearrange their language and/or manners. Give people some space, and if they're not going out of their way to be hurtful to you, then don't threaten them on a subject that's as personal as this.
With that said, I don't think your particular complaint has much weight, here. If "there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb," then a person could simply respond that, well, feminine phenotypes are really important to me, and if I meet a trans woman who reaches my standards on that point, then, sure, I might be open to dating her if other aspects were in alignment, hooray, congratulations to me on my non-transphobia, problem solved.
I will also say that, on a subreddit, it's highly likely that the subject of "Would you date a trans woman?" doesn't come up in the practical sense. People aren't actually meeting partners there. Instead, the subject is much more likely to only be mentioned in conjunction with statements that are transphobic like "trans women are ugly" or "trans women are likely to be predatory." I can see this being a useful place to draw the line, for discussion purposes. I still don't think it's a good rule, because it will bleed out into situations that do involve actual dating, and that's not good for respecting people's preferences. But I can understand why, on a subreddit, the immediate concerns of the community might lead people to draw lines that are optimized for the specific online context.
gemmaem
1yr ago
If there are existing rules posts by subreddit mods that say this, then OP should have posted one of them! Then calling it a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit" would not have been a lie, and we could have had this conversation on a sound, truthful basis.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, note below that I'm not trying to outlaw reasoned explanations of why a given act is abusive or likely to prepare someone to be abused. We can still discuss why porn is inappropriate for 5 year olds.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Your first quote sounds like it is saying "children sometimes access porn and use it for sex education." I don't read it as saying that children should access porn and use it for sex education.
Your second quote is about "media literacy" in the context of teaching people who already have access to porn to be more critical of it.
gemmaem
1yr ago
This is one of half a dozen comments in this thread where the boring but absolutely correct answer is "One of these things meets the legal standard for defamation and the other, transparently and obviously, does not."
gemmaem
1yr ago
Depends on the wording of the law. From what @ymeshkout was saying above I surmise that this law specifies that it's only "fraud" if you know you're not eligible and vote anyway.
gemmaem
1yr ago
The onus is on the winner to prove they won fair and square...
What sort of proof would you suggest? You're asking the winner of every election -- regardless of party -- to prove that voter fraud didn't happen. So, for example, what should Donald Trump have had to do after the 2016 election to justify taking power?
We are all, to some extent, entitled to draw upon the cultural richness of the entire world.
There are caveats, here. If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends. And in general, especially if you're drawing on people less well known than you, I think there is a moral duty to give credit to the people you are drawing from. Both of these caveats are based on my view of the morality of the situation and you are entitled to reject them if you choose.
There is also the caveat that if the thing you are using is more recent, then it may be subject to copyright or trademark law.
Beyond that, though, I think it's good to use each other's stories. In the specific case of Ariel, I think (a) pretty much everyone is entitled to Hans Christian Andersen's work at this point, and, (b) Disney get to do what they want with their own IP, although I'm unimpressed by the cash-grabbing aspects of their recent spate of live-action remakes.
Disney is, at the very least, legally entitled to the work that they pay people to produce. They may not be morally entitled to do whatever they want with it, however. I, for one, would certainly hope that they would feel some duty to respect their employees' creative work, and would be open to arguments that cash-grabbing remakes fail in this duty.
I do not think that changing a white character to a black one in the course of those remakes is in any way outrageous, however, and it is certainly not more outrageous than the existence of the remake in the first place.
gemmaem
8mo ago
gemmaem
8mo ago
I’m intrigued that you conflate “HBD believer” with “believer in coercive eugenics.” Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread defining that term in very telling ways.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Obviously I can't speak for @Doubletree1, but the answers to your questions seem fairly obvious. The correlative cause, when it comes to spreading disease, is (a) having a lot of sex with a lot of different people and/or (b) having sex with people who are part of a community that has a lot of sex with a lot of different people (even if your own behaviour doesn't fall within that category).
The former is a "pickup truck" level of causality: homosexuality is correlated with promiscuity which is correlated with disease transmission. The latter may not be, in that men who have sex with men form a somewhat more dangerous community to have sex with even if you are, yourself, quite careful.
Since I would not have had reason to think this distinction through without @Doubletree1's comment, I think it's fair to say that they have made a useful contribution to the discussion and should not be getting downvoted. Perhaps you were already thinking in terms of (b)? If so, I guess I can understand why you wouldn't see the point of their analogy. Still, I appreciated it.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Is there some reason why you think he's not actually squeamish? I'm not familiar with him as a writer.
gemmaem
8mo ago
It's always worth being accurate about the problem. "Person calls for genocide, and when questioned about it says 'yes, we really mean genocide' and the NYT defends them" is different to "People sing a song about killing another race of people, and when questioned say they are remembering the bad old days of their oppression and do not mean it literally, and the NYT frames the story in a way that deflects condemnation."
When discussing racism on this forum, I always have to be precise about exactly what happened and what did not. Sometimes this is bullshit (e.g. these quibbles about the exact definition of "ethnic cleansing.") However, the general principle of precision over outrage is a good one, and I am certainly not going to lower my standards just because white people are the target in this instance.
as long as stuff like this can be published in broad daylight, I see no reason why what he posted should result in any consequences.
Would this still be true, for you, if he didn't even disavow it? Would you use statements with overtly denied meanings or non-explicit rhetoric with uncertain but potentially disturbing implications as an excuse for allowing overtly harmful explicit policy proposals?
gemmaem
8mo ago
Interesting! I was reasoning by analogy with "driving a pickup truck is correlated with being male and rural which is correlated with worse life expectancy." In that situation, all else being equal, the pickup truck itself is not a concern. Similarly, if it were just a matter of personal promiscuity and the community effects weren't salient, then homosexuality itself would not be a concern.
gemmaem
1yr ago
gemmaem
1yr ago
Okay, fine, I read it. I really am doing my best, here, to see what you are trying to refer to. I think the only statement that seems like it might be saying something of that nature is this one:
As Buckingham notes, contemporary ‘mainstream’ media literacy education ‘seeks to begin with ... students ... existing tastes and pleasures, rather than assuming that these are merely invalid or “ideological”’ (2008, 14). While sexuality education targeting adults (particularly same-sex-attracted men) currently takes this approach to pornography, education targeting heterosexual young people does not.
This then leads into the concluding paragraphs, which you quoted above, and which are suggesting directions for "[f]uture research (and practical inquiry) into pornography and/as sex education." I think the strongest interpretation I could make of this would be something like "maybe porn literacy classes for young people should start with (and accept) their existing porn tastes instead of trying to prescribe the correct ideological responses."
From what I can see, however, the article is not actually proposing that the rules around not being allowed to show porn to young people should be changed.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I probably wouldn't apply "cultural appropriation" to either of those things. As I understand it, a kimono is not sacred and has no strong restrictions on when it can be worn, and people should go ahead and wear one if they want to. I'm less sanguine about "Redskins" but that's because the term is sometimes considered offensive, not because of appropriation. Different issue entirely.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I'm really glad you commented, because I think you're right. There shouldn't be a specific thing that "we fight against" here, unless it's heat over light and the difficulty of finding places to usefully talk with people you disagree with.
I see why you would say this, but even with your edits you're still wrong. Your interpretation of why the mods do what they do should not be used as a basis for trying to define what "we fight against" here. One of the major things that "we" want is a diverse group of posters. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another. Don't claim it for anyone.
Edit: In particular, note that your reasoning here implies that the move from reddit means that we now all have values that mean we would fight against people who support "race swapping in .. remakes." Do you not want this to be a place where you can exchange views on equal terms with people who disagree with you on that issue, for example?
gemmaem
10mo ago
Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”
This is comparing apples to oranges. Studies showing high levels of desistance often include children who are "subthreshold" for diagnosis. By contrast, children who actually go on puberty blockers are subject to stronger constraints on access.
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