guesswho
2yr ago
Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.
Seems like a fully general argument against, for instance, freedom of speech? I can certainly find plenty of people who would honestly say that they find whatever you want to talk about to be disgusting, you could do the same for me.
But, more generally: I think there's a higher-level game-theoretic value to discouraging utility monsters.
'People shouldn't get slapped' is a pretty fair restriction. Slapping can cause real physical damage; direct physical pain from bodily assault is very universal negative utility that's very hard for people to ignore or overcome, and we wouldn't want them to generally lose that negative association anyway; and most importantly, a slap is specifically directed and targeted at a singular individual, giving that individual broader rights to object to it.
But if someone says 'I am disgusted by things I see in my environment, I have a right to demand they stop' then that's a pretty different thing. First of all because those are passive things not targeted at the individual, which they can avoid if they don't like them, and that have value to other people which they are trying to destroy. And second because while disgust is a universal human experience, the targets of disgust are not universal, and it's very likely the person in question could retrain away from that disgust if they wanted to (much more easily than someone could train to not feel pain when slapped).
Allowing someone's disgust at seeing something to be a moral imperative towards everyone else creates a perverse incentive for everyone to become as disgusted as possible at everything they oppose on any grounds. Not only is that a hugely dangerous weapon to hand people, it favors the creation of a society in which everyone is unhappy all the time because they have to be performatively disgusted by everything they oppose. Which also shifts all discussions and attempts to actually solve problems away from reason and towards emotional assaults.
So, basically: don't feed the utility monsters.
(and since I have some ability to predict the future: yes, this is an argument that can be deployed to validate rejecting trans people, I think that's a valid form of argument but not a strong one because of the different circumstances esp. around how targeted the request are)
guesswho
2yr ago
The rule (set by the sovereign) in New York is that you pretend the homeless are annoying but harmless and deserving of nothing but help, right up until they put a knife in your kidneys or shove you onto the tracks.
How many times does that actually happen a year, how many times would some 'hero' kill out of fear that it might be about to happen if we glorified and legally exonerated such vigilantism?
There's no moral calculus which concludes 'yay for more preventative lethal vigilantism against the homeless' that doesn't innately rely on valuing those lives less than the lives of everyone else.
guesswho
2yr ago
When was the last time you bought a magazine?
For me, it was probably the late 90s.
You don't need elaborate culture war theories for why a magazine is going out of business in 2024, you need an elaborate theory for why they didn't go out of business 15 years ago.
Also, re:marketing to 'red bloodied males' with a swimsuit issue... there's just too much access to better alternatives, from porn to anime tiddies and everywhere in between. This was never going to be a sustainable business model.
guesswho
2yr ago
I've ridden a lot of subways and never seen a schizophrenic attack anyone, so I'm going to be reluctant to agree that I have some Ivory-tower blindspot in my own knowledge of the subject. Be loud and annoying and smelly, sure, but that's not the same thing, especially when we're talking about justifications for killing them.
I would agree that I have a blindspot to some type of worldview where that is a default assumption about how the world works, where there's a belief that deadly attacks on subways happen all the time and it's a huge failing that the government hasn't stopped them and every citizen needs to be armed and ready to deploy deadly force against them at all times. Or whatever your actually position here is, for being the only concrete example you give you really don't spend much time outlining it.
But I really do believe that worldview is just factually wrong, my personal experiences and those of other people I know who ride the subway seem to confirm it, I'm not aware of any stats that contradict it and if they were shockingly strong I would sort of expect to know it.
Which brings us back to the point that it seems like you're making two different claims here, 1. that liberals are blind to the ways that non-liberals view and think about the world, in ways that lead to communication breakdowns and strife, and 2. that liberals are blind to portions of empirical reality that they can't/won't acknowledge.
1 is trivially true, and I would say fully bi-directional; it's just a description of what the culture war is, more or less, or even just what tribalism is more generally.
2 requires actual examples to back it up, and I don't buy it from the only one you give.
guesswho
2yr ago
First of all, they cannot, they can get a different surgery with some similarities. Medical board would not approve what this escort did as gender-affirming care.
Second of all, this was not intended as gender affirming care, see again 'not allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy'.
guesswho
2yr ago
That's why this is an online photoshopping-images fetish rather than a real-world actually-doing-things fetish (like a lot of internet fetishes), and it makes the news every time someone is actually crazy to try something in real life once every decade or so.
Same with cannibalism and other extreme stuff, you hear a single story once a decade and everyone wants to act like it's the tip of the iceberg, but no, it's really just that one insane dude plus a bunch of fanfiction online.
guesswho
2yr ago
That's like saying that a murderer is just impersonating a corrections officer because the death penalty exists.
A doctor wouldn't be able to get the proper paperwork for this situation because it's not a medically approved procedure in this context, any more than doctors are allowed to give people chemotherapy for a hangnail. A doctor would have been convicted of the same exact crime.
guesswho
2yr ago
It's not a generic term, socially conservative people who are both anti-feminist and anti-trans just get called bigots or w/e.
TERF is specifically for people like JK who consider themselves feminists and enlist in 'protect the women' arguments into their anti-trans rhetoric.
guesswho
2yr ago
He appointed a conservative Justice when a seat opened up, which is what literally anyone with an R next to their name would have done at the time.
He's been a lot softer on the pro-life message than some of his competitors, it's pretty reasonable to predict he's not the option that would deliver the most on that front.
Of course if your decision metric is 'giving loyalty for past favors' instead of 'doing the thing that will accomplish your goals in the future' then yeah that makes sense.
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean, if they're paying attention: The win was from Mitch McConnell stealing a seat from Obama. Literally any warm body with an R next to their name would have produced the same or better results for the pro-lifers during Trump's term, that's just when the last seat needed happened to open up.
guesswho
2yr ago
If that was their motivation they wouldn't vote for Trump a second time, they already got their judges and Trump has expressed much milder and more reserved pro-life sentiments than many of his contemporaries on the primary ballot.
guesswho
2yr ago
(by pointing out that sports divisions, which use the terms "men" and "women", are about biology.)
Right, saying that 'Mens team' means 'Males team' is the conflation.
The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
Yes that is literally the thing that my entire initial comment was doing.
guesswho
2yr ago
I do not claim that they will obviously have similar performance.
I claim that the other side's reasoning is deeply flawed, and we're actually at a state of ignorance about relative performance.
I claim that there's a simple empirical metric that we can use to determine fairness, that's easy to measure and calculate, and we can use that to answer the question just as soon as anyone bothers to measure it.
I claim that absent any current evidence or valid logic to expect unfairness, we should default towards liberty and freedom and granting rights for now.
guesswho
2yr ago
And you are the one playing rhetorical games conflating 'male' and 'man' with regards to that.
The entire trans debate is about language and classification. Everything is always going to end up being an arbitrary semantic game, if you don't agree ahead of time on some empirical metric to use to settle the issue. That's why I'm advancing one.
And I don't say they should be allowed to play women's sports because they're women, I've said repeatedly that we should default to a policy of maximum liberty and freedom until we find compelling evidence of a conflicting interest. That's a bog-standard libertarian argument that you are ignoring.
guesswho
2yr ago
Your claim is that transition is such a procedure. If that's true, we should expect the test to show no comparative advantage.
Again, no, that wasn't my argument.
One of several points in my argument was that HRT should be expected to lower performance, but I didn't claim that it magically makes relative rankings in athletic leagues exactly the same. I specifically called out limb length as a thing that doesn't get reversed. And even if it magically reversed everything perfectly, a different number of men vs women play sports,.so the relative ranking would still be different.
But those several points weren't in a causal chain with each other, they were each a directional factor that should make us expect trans women athletes to have worse performance than men athletes.
The point about a 500x smaller population leading to less extreme outliers is the biggest factor, and doesn't interact with this argument.
guesswho
2yr ago
Ok, so you're among the group that wants to pass a law they actively want people to break.
I thought that was an insane position no one would ever take, especially given how may libertarian-oriented sentiments we normally get when things like speech or guns or etc. come up.
But I guess that's a really common position, we want to pass a law that we want most trans people to break most of the time.
Seems insane to me. I will never agree to that being a good idea, even if I agreed with the rest of the logic behind the motivation.
guesswho
2yr ago
Olympics have allowed trans athletes for 20 years. This isn't that new, and it wouldn't take a huge amount of data to do a t-test.
That said, sure, if your position is that we don't have enough data to demonstrate an actual competitive advantage and are just guessing, my response is that guessing is not a good enough reason to restrict people's actions and liberties on something like this. Not unless you have a really good reason for you guesses that makes you incredibly confident, and I've just made an argument for why people's reasons for thinking they have a good guess are miles wrong.
As you demonstrate once again:
What odds would you place against "Natal males who at least went partially through puberty have an advantage over natal females who underwent normal puberty all other factors(diet, training regimen, genetic twins) held equal"?
This is not the question at hand, as I've spent thousands of words explaining.
guesswho
2yr ago
I straightforwardly disagree. Maybe 'everyone' here wants that, but that's not at all how the politicians behind these laws talk about them.
But either way, I say again: you shouldn't be passing laws that criminalize hue swaths of actions you want to be legal.
If your goal really is just about the small subset of trans women who don't pass, find some narrower way to enforce that. If it's too inconvenient to be worth the effort, then it's not worth the effort.
Don't criminalize things you have no problem with just for the sake of convenience.
guesswho
2yr ago
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It's possible, but my understanding is that the homelessness is highly correlated with housing prices between cities in a way that's hard to square with that assumption, and that homelessness rates responds to changes in housing prices too quickly for anything like that to be a plausible mechanism. Not an expert though, feel free ot research it more and report back.
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Maybe, but a lot of the money and political capital that gets spent on 'homelessness' as an issue end up going to support the working/sane homeless. Take them out of the equation, maybe we find that the drugged out crazies are actually a really small population that we could help pretty cheaply. It at least resolves the confound between the groups and lets us work on the problem more directly.
guesswho
2yr ago
An athlete who was on average 2170th against men and on average 2050th against women, is demonstrating they have a competitive advantage when competing against women than against men.
I am confused. Assuming men are better than women at these sports, wouldn't any woman competing against men rank lower than they rank against women?
IE, doesn't your test for 'unfairness' produce a positive result for literally any person you use it on?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
But limiting your argument to only looking at winners is trying to look at the best possible version of our position.
I talk about winners because the other side is predicting that men have such a huge advantage they should always win, and because they bring up examples of teh 2 or 3 trans women that won big competitions. My argument itself is not limited to winners.
If there's any statistical relationship where trans women are consistently out-performing their cis peers, whether that means coming in first or third or twentieth, that would be evidence of an advantage.
If the hypothetical data was that trans women are coming in 20th 50% more often than they should assuming a random distribution, then we might have to have a discussion about how much that's actually warping things in a way that ruins the sport for anyone, and if it's actually worth restricting rights over it.
But for a statistical relationship much stronger than that, it wouldn't have to be just winning all the time, I'll accept a lot fo things.
I just haven't seen anything, so far.
If someone juices and comes 3rd, that is still a problem even if it doesn't change the winning statistics.
Well, it's a problem because juicing is bad for your health and we don't want to create a pressure to force everyone to do it.
It's not a problem when someone, like, trains really hard and improves to third, or has proper nutrition and improves to third, or whatever. That's normal.
The problem with juicing isn't 'did some thing and got a good outcome', the problem is the thing being harmful and us not wanting to incentivize it.
Doesn't apply here.
But it's also a possible problem if they go from 2000th, to 60th.
And here I just disagree. If no one is being hurt, it's not immoral.
guesswho
2yr ago
I remember the people who said 'Gay men aren't missing any rights, we both have the same right to marry a woman' back when gay marriage was on the docket. It wasn't convincing then, either.
Of course, we're in early days on this question, too. I expect a lot less variance and a lot more knowledge in another 10 years, and a lot more in another 50. I'm just looking at history on these types of fights and saying 'lets hedge towards giving the people the rights they want so long as we don't see any clear harm in doing so'.
Anyway. My post was full of proposed mechanisms that are directional, towards trans athletes being worse than cis male athletes. The 'uncertainty' is about whether all those negative factors on trans women bring their performance down to match cis women, or not. Not uncertainty about whether their performance is moving away from teh cis male mean, or in which direction.
guesswho
2yr ago
If not, what did you mean by that?
So it's totally fine if you have a different position than the one I was responding to, it just means that my comment naturally wouldn't be a coherent reply to your position since it was responding to a different one.
The position I was responding to, as I understand OP to hold it, was: If trans women are allowed in women's restrooms, that will normalize malelooking people being in women's restrooms. That will make is easier for cis men who are perverts to fake their way into women's restrooms for nefarious purposes.
My point in bringing up Buck Angel is, if that is your model of the danger at play here, then Buck Angel using the women's room is an equally large problem. That would also normalize male-looking people going into the women's restroom in exactly the same way.
So, if your position is that the problem is male-looking people in women's restroom, bathroom bills do not actually solve that problem. They probably make it worse.
guesswho
2yr ago
So there are police outside bathrooms stopping people and saying "Yes, I know you look like a man but you have to use the women's room"?
Alright, lets clarify here.
I'm saying these laws would oblige male-looking people like Buck Angel to use the women's restroom, which would normalize male-looking people going into women's restrooms, teh precise thing people are claiming these laws are intended to fix.
It sounds like you're saying this won't be a problem because you expect male-looking trans men to break the law and go to the mens room anyway. Please stop me if I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting you.
Are you saying that you want and expect the laws as written to be broken routinely, would be upset if most people the laws applied to were not breaking them most of the time, but still want the laws passed?
Because like, yeah, it's true that marijuana laws are broken all the time, and police only bother to enforce them when they want to punish some citizen for a different reason. That doesn't make them good laws, that makes them terrible affronts to our civil liberties and freedom.
Laws should not work like that.
Depending on how you are framing the contract, I think the remedies are supposed to be things like exit rights, voting, and revolution.
None of which are perfect, to be sure.
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