guesswho
2yr ago
You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation.
Well, yes, you can.
If someone hands me a keyboard, I have no idea how the mechanics and electronics of the keyboard works, but I can demonstrate that the sounds produced correlate to the keys being pressed, and predict that there is some physical internal mechanism that produces this effect.
I don't get to say 'must be magic' just because I don't yet have a fully detailed physical model of the internal workings, that's not how Occam's Razor works.
guesswho
2yr ago
Or that it requires at least a printing press and efficient enough farming that you can support an idle intellectual class.
guesswho
2yr ago
But McCarthyism won!
'Communist' is still an insult in like 90% of American contexts and none are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, capitalist realism is so pervasive that it's treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than an ideology, and the US is still explicitly hostile towards communist and formerly-communist regimes around the world to this day!
It's hard to imagine McCarthyism succeeding much more strongly than it actually has. The fact that he's remembered as a jerk in some textbooks is pretty immaterial.
guesswho
2yr ago
You would think so, but didn't we just watch this happen to straight white men, and Europeans more generally, with basically no effective pushback?
No, we didn't.
First of all, the clause of my sentence that read 'people who have spent a long hard time and earning it' wasn't just for show, I do think that inherited privilege which has existed for centuries without justification is treated differently by society than hard-won rights where the people who fought for them are still alive and speaking to us today.
Second, what you're describing was neither fast nor without pushback. I'm not a historian, but the curtailing of the privileges of straight white men plausibly started with the abolitionist movement and the idea that maybe they shouldn't be allowed to own people as property. The pushback to that involved a civil war, and it's been hundreds of years of violence, cultural and political strife, and making the conflict over this question basically the central pillar of our entire political divide for generations in order to reach the point we're at today.
guesswho
2yr ago
People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness.
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the fight is over what's the best cure.
I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today.
Unless you have a different data set or a different operational definition you want to offer, I think you're just empirically wrong about this. You may be in a filter bubble that brings you every egregious example of this it can find and nothing else, but on the numbers minorities are still underrepresented relative to gen pop in almost every entertainment arena.
unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination.
Equivocating between 'proof' and 'evidence' here.
Since there's no such thing as 100% probability, the meaning of 'proof' is always vague and needs to be operationally defined to be meaningful.
And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).
I mean what do you actually think your side 'winning' looks like?
People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
Or just 'everyone thinks the leftists of that period in history were being kind of histrionic and weird and that the right from that period in history were less bad than everyone thought, and that's what history books say, but everything else about society is mostly the same'?
Because the latter is certainly possible, sure, but I wouldn't call it SJ's 'losing'. If everything they wanted to change about society stays changed but the future thinks that 'feminist fail compilation' videos are funny, then ok, that's an acceptable cost.
Sen. McCarthy is depicted as a villain today, but he won. 'Communist' is still an insult in 90% of American contexts, and capitalist realism is treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than being a philosophy or ideology at all. Something like that could easily happen to the SJ/woke movement, and that's about what it would look like.
But if you think we're going to roll back the actual changes to society, most of that means taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction. Frankly I don't find it likely that we'll move in that direction while we're still a liberal democracy, and if we're not then there's more important changes going on to worry about.
guesswho
2yr ago
I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but it kind of feels like it's ignoring how culture happens in a way that's hard to describe.
Like, yeah, Hanukah wasn't previously a major Jewish Holiday? And now it is.
How do we know it's a major Jewish holiday? Because of how much people talk about it and celebrate it and make a big deal about it and etc. Because of how much Hannukah paraphenilia is sold in stores.
The exact same way we know that Christmas is a major Christian holiday. Because Christians treat it as such.
It's not like Christmas has been what it is in modern America since 0AD. The date wasn't even known as Jesus's birthday until they made that up in the 200s. The holiday is descended from winter solstice festivals. In the 900s it was just celebrated by reading a special liturgy, and had nowhere near the importance of Easter or Good Friday. Gifts weren't exchanged until the latter half of the 19th century, most of what we recognize as the cultural event of 'Christmas' is a capitalist invention over the past century.
Christmas became 'important' for various reasons at various times, which is exactly what happened to Hannukah. Now they're both important and people treat them as such appropriately.
guesswho
2yr ago
Since the 'extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, as you say, then if a person espouses a consent-only sexual ethic, then the whole bit is just irrelevant for the question of pedophilia!
... right, this whole 'tennis' thing you've got going is entirely irrelevant to the question of pedophilia, that's my point.
I think maybe this will be clearer:
Sex, including pedophilia, is governed by consent-only ethics. Children can't consent, and adults rightly protect them from sex. The parent (or society) is a better-informed proxy who can correctly make that decision on their behalf.
But with transition, society and the parent are not better-informed and cannot reliably make a better decision than the child.
Thus, consent-based ethics are incoherent for this question, since they don't lead to any change in recommended course of action. That's why we fall back to other ethical values for this question, such as self-determination.
The point here is that, as I understand you, you're saying that the implication from the transition argument is that children can make decisions for themselves, therefore children are capable of consent, therefore they should be able to consent to sex.
What I'm saying is that this line of logic does not follow. Children can make decisions for themselves, but they can't consent, not in the way we mean when we talk about sexual consent.
Someone who is held at gunpoint by a rapist still makes a decision about whether to allow rape to happen or to fight back and probably die. The decision to allow it to happen is not consent, even though a decision was made; 'decision' and 'consent' are not synonyms, in this case.
But despite not being able to give meaningful consent, children still get to make all kinds of decisions for themselves every day. There are only a few cases where we regularly invoke meaningful consent to override them, those cases are the exception rather than the rule. Sex is one of them, most major medical procedures are another, and the author is arguing that transition shouldn't be in that category.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why do you think they didn't look into it? My memory of the time was detailed debunkings of every individual claim being widespread all over the place.
Admittedly they may have been more widespread in my progish filter bubble, maybe the opposing side never saw them.
Also, your link only says that advertisers won't be able to say future elections are going to be rigged, afaict. Where are you getting that users won't be able to talk about it?
guesswho
2yr ago
Note that this is not any sort of theoretical argument about a child's ability to consent. So we're right back to my last comment. Can we insert, immediately before this sentence, that you are disavowing a consent-only sexual ethic,
Again, you're ignoring half of what I said here to make it sound like that's the only standard I'm using in both cases.
The argument isn't that the author is saying children can consent to transition, and therefore they should be able to consent to sex.
The argument is that consent isn't a meaningful framework for the question of transition, the author is using a different metric related to the 'sliding doors' metaphor and the intuition that parents and society aren't going to make a better choice than the child would anyways.
The author is not applying consent-only ethics to transition, which doesn't preclude them from applying it to sex and saying children can't consent to sex.
The 'it's extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, it's explaining why the 'sliding doors' metaphor doesn't apply to pedophilia the way it applies to transition (in the author's formulation).
guesswho
2yr ago
Or schizotypal personality disorder, and I agree, that's why I said 'look up symptoms and see if you want to see someone' rather than 'go see someone'.
Anyway, yes, I knew I would probably be doubted, but it's a sincere sentiment.
Is that sentiment downstream of the fact that they appear to be far far into my outgroup and maybe their writing is actually sensible and full of references and context and assumptions I don't understand, rather than actually being disjointed and telegraphic as it appears to me? That's very possible, which is why I told them to use their own judgement.
guesswho
2yr ago
Ok, if we're ready to move on from whether my replies to other commenters were charitable and into the actual issue, that's great for me.
So I think that you are (not maliciously) misrepresenting the author's stance, using the following rhetorical shift:
This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis
Here, you are making it sound like the author is using the metaphor of competitive swimming to say that choosing a gender identity is trivial and non-sacred, in the way that some progressives say that sex is trivial and non-sacred, and therefore can be governed by consent-only ethics.
But I don't think this is correct, on two accounts.
First of all, the 'sex is just about consent' mindset certainly co-occurs with people thinking sex is trivial and not a big deal, but that's not the justification for consent-only sexual ethics. Consent-only sexual ethics is inherently a libertarian stance: People should be able to make horrible decisions that hurt themselves, so long as they are uncoerced and don't hurt anyone else.
This position is held by plenty of people who think sex is consequential and dangerous and hurts people all the time; progressive prudery is a real faction, but it still tends to fall back on consent-only despite believing it to be an extremely fraught and dangerous topic.
Second, reading the rest of the article past your pull quote, where the author next talks for a long time about their own experiences with learning the confines of their racial identity and other identity formations, it seems to me that they are using 'competitive swimmer' as an example of a voluntarily-chosen identity and lifestyle. Rather than saying it's trivial and non-sacred like tennis.
They spend a lot of page space undermining the idea that an obvious and 'natural' gender binary exists and it exactly matches Western gender norms and every individual person in the world fits comfortably into that schema.
But Wertheimer here doesn't at all seem to me to be saying 'Children have the same right as adults to hurt themselves if they want to and the ability to consent to things, thus there's no reason not to let them make horrible decisions that will destroy their life and we should apply consent-only ethics to transition as well.'
If that were his point, it would be a much shorter article. There would be no reason to spend so long disambiguating the claim 'decisions about gender identity are hugely impactful and important' from the claim 'children will always do best if they let society determine their gender identity and expression for them'
This distinction is needed to undermine the claim 'this choice is too important to let children make for themselves, because they'll get it wrong.' The point of the competitive swimmer metaphor, the point of showing how gender is an ambiguous and amorphous concept, the point of talking about how socially-defined notions of racial identity are often harmful and arbitrary, is all to reinforce the sliding doors metaphor:
No one knows which of these paths is actually going to be best for the child in the long term. We can speculate endlessly about the road less traveled, but we can't actually know what that life would be like and whether it would be better than the one we have now.
Children thinking about transition can't possibly know that, and neither can their parents.
(nor can random internet commentators who have never met them, for that matter)
So, given that we're in sliding-doors world where we cannot know which identity will make for the best life long-term, there's not a strong reason not to let the child decide for themself. Meanwhile, there's huge benefit to letting the child decide for themself: it's innately valuable to have self-determination and liberty to determine your own course in life, you know more about your own situation than society and can make more nuanced and individualized adjustments than you could just accepting a huge default category, every chance you are given by others to set your own path is an inherent acknowledgement of your agency and dignity as a human, etc.
Whereas, there's no sliding-doors uncertainty when it comes to pedophilia. We're pretty damn sure that it's almost always very harmful, we have the data on that. This is a place where parents can be pretty confident in knowing the right answer, and if the child disagrees they're almost certainly wrong. And, furthermore, having sex with someone isn't an identity; the benefits of being allowed self-determination are much much smaller because it's not a part of your core identity, it's just an activity (a potentially very dangerous one!) that you can do or not do arbitrarily.
So none of the metaphors and consideration that author is building up about transition and identity really apply here.
guesswho
2yr ago
Are you ok?
Like, literally. I'm worried I'll get modded for asking this, but I have a background in psychology and the writing style here feels pretty schizotypal, it sounds like you're at the age where that commonly pops up, you might want to look up symptoms and decide whether you want to get checked out.
guesswho
2yr ago
You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?
Again, you may not have boiled it down to such a simplistic analogy, but the people I'm responding to did.
But:
Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex.
You are acknowledging that, while Wertheimer isn't putting forward a coherent narrative on why children can't consent to sex, they are still strictly against pedophilia based on harm-reduction principles.
Other people ran with your statement to say 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent, they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it'.
This latter stance is akin to my analogy, where they are looking at the lack of a consent-based (Contract-Theory based) reason to reject pedophilia and failing to find it, but not bothering to look at all the other reasons against it (harm).
guesswho
2yr ago
I dunno, I've never worked in a factory! Probably look at the website of any union of factory workers and they'll have a list of demands that make up a good start.
'Work less' is a perfectly fine answer, the division of profit between workers and capitalists is a variable ratio that's unusually high right now, every historical reason to expect that we could lower it by paying more money for less work without causing any problems.
But if you're rejecting that, there's still huge variance in how terrible a job is along other axes, things like how much autonomy and flexibility workers have, how they are treated by management, are they allowed to go to the bathroom, etc.
Again, see any factory worker's union demands, not my area.
guesswho
2yr ago
No, progressives are not trying to make people feel more positively about rape.
So, listen: either you specify a type and context of conscription in which is is so exploitative and evil and that it is analogous to what happened to comfort women, in which case it is also an evil practice that should never be allowed, and once again the two things are not distinguished from each other.
Or you specify a type and context of conscription that's reasonable and ok in ways that make it unlikely what happened to comfort women, in which case it's a bad analogy that doesn't tell us anything.
We can play context games as much as we want, it doesn't change anything because the argument is fundamentally flawed. It's using the affective associations of the crimes and horrors committed against comfort women and trying to apply those to the notion of sex in general, which is a version of the Worst Argument in the World.
guesswho
2yr ago
However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.
Well, perhaps I should have added a meta-layer where people are recharacterizing you characterization.
People are using you characterization of the belief to make arguments of the form 'if you would play tennis with your sister, why wouldn't you have sex with your sister?!?!' which does not logically follow from the limited formulation you offer here about them being 'alike in one way, but seems to be where most of the conversation has gone now.
Again, I would just point out that 'closing off possible worlds' isn't the only factor used in moral reasoning, there are lots of other reasons to oppose something.
And it's not charitable to say (which I'm not quite accusing you of, but it's where the overall conversation is trending) that if someone wrote an article about a single moral consideration and didn't talk about any other ones, and that singular moral consideration on its own has nothing to say about pedophilia, that the author must be in favor of pedophilia/is being hypocritical if they denounce pedophilia.
That's just a weird place to go to, and the movement seems more related to culture war rhetoric than anything it would be normal to conclude form the article itself.
If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think pedophilia is bad because kids are not adults and adults should shield children from sin by showing them what is right and what is wrong and by keeping them away from situations in which they would not be able to make good decisions.
If God said that sex isn't actually sinful, that was a misunderstanding, or was obviated by the new covenant: Would you no longer have any objections to pedophilia, or would you still think it was bad for other reasons?
My guess is you would still have objections, those remaining objections are your real reason for being against it, and you share those reasons with the people you're interrogating.
But maybe I'm wrong, let me know.
(note, this goes back to Penn Jillette's line about atheism and morality - religious people ask him why, if he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't go around raping and murdering anyone he wants. His response is 'I've already raped and murdered as much as I want to, which is zero, and if the only thing holding you back from that is your belief in God then please stay away from my family.'
I don't think that is the only thing stopping religious people from doing horrible things, I think their rhetorical reason is God but their actual proximal reasons are more about preventing harm and respecting autonomy and being a good person and so forth, same as everyone else)
guesswho
2yr ago
We have been answering your question.
Your question for several iterations has been 'If progressives believe what OP says they believe, then they should also be fine with pedophilia, so why don't they just say they're fine with pedophilia?'
And the answer is, they don't believe what OP says they believe, so nothing following from that premise is material.
That's not dodging your question ,that's directly answering it.
guesswho
2yr ago
then the comfort girls in WWII would be no more victims than the conscripts.
guesswho
2yr ago
Empirically, Americans in general are not:
You cited a paragraph saying that courts have upheld it; courts have upheld various thing Americans in general are against, this is a non sequitur.
If sex work is work like any other work, can female inmates be compelled to perform it?
Depends what you mean by 'can' I guess.
Will it empirically happen? Nah, most Americans would be squicked out and there's literally no one pushing for it, do there's no way laws would get passed to allow it. Every politician who voted for that would be saying goodbye to their career and personal life. So no, it 'can't' happen by that metric.
Is it morally permissible? No, I just said that making inmates work is not morally permissible, that's the comment you're responding to.
Can someone on an internet forum invent a formalization which focuses on specific features of a situation and meanings of words such that they can draw some type of logical parallel between it and other things that happen such that they are framed as similar enough to maybe suggest they are equally 'allowed'? Sure, you are doing that right now, but big whoop. That's the type of rhetoric that's easy to construct for pretty much anything, and generally has very little influence on what happens in reality.
So different operational definition, then.
More options
Context Copy link