guesswho
2yr ago
We were talking about the modern trans rights movement, not progresivism.
If we allow that type of goalpost switch, we could trace the roots of christianity back to the establishment of Judaism.
guesswho
2yr ago
???
Regional court cases about people wanting to change their sex (or just change their name to one common for the other gender) didn't start to get won until the mid-70s, and most federal agencies didn't update their policies to officially allow these changes until the 2010s.
Unless your point is the trite 'gay men and straight men had the same rights in the 1980s, they were both free to marry women' thing.
guesswho
2yr ago
The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role.
Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.
And by me.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience.
I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.
But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.
You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.
But we are psychic.
I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.
Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.
These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.
guesswho
2yr ago
Which rights are people missing?
I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.
Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean people were worshipping him in the cradle, or at least following portents and omens to find him and give him gifts and etc.
I'd call worshipping Christ 'Christianity'.
guesswho
2yr ago
'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.
This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.
There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.
Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.
guesswho
2yr ago
Well, Hamas does that stuff. Hamas is not that popular among Palestinian civilians, and there are plenty of other peaceful orgs pushing their cause.
guesswho
2yr ago
Re: aliens, I guess it would depend on whether they're dissecting people and judging internal organ structures, or looking at them as they interact with society and judging based on that.
An alien that only looked at physical traits and no social interactions would think that money is just meaningless scraps of fabric and that it must not be very important to human society. Such an alien doesn't actually have much insight to offer on human society and culture and isn't really a useful arbiter of anything in a thought experiment on those things.
And yeah I think an alien looking at social interactions would classify most post-transition trans people as their chosen gender, there's a lot more signifiers in agreement with that conclusion than against it.
guesswho
2yr ago
... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.
The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?
Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think that was supposed to be in his mid 30s, so, pretty close? A biblical scholar might have more info.
guesswho
2yr ago
Their use may well be illegal, but copyright law is a lot more complicated than 'they can't use Starbucks IP without permission'.
Copyright law is in general meant to prevent customer confusion (eg preventing people from believing knockoffs are authentic). Since it seems like a lot of people were confused here, it may well be copyright violation; although I don't know whether confusing political protestors about what a brand says, rather than confusing customers about what a brand is selling, is a central covered case. Maybe it is.
guesswho
2yr ago
I thought it was very explicitly 'leave your families and follow me' at that point?
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean yeah old things have more track record than new things?
That said, trans ideology has gotten me a lot of good youtube content and podcasts in only about 15 years, at that age Christianity hadn't produced much more than a single carpenter in Galilee.
I'd say trans ideology has a lead in the Time Trial rules. Of course it has a long way to go.
(and, more seriously, lots of non-Christian places have had adaptive behaviors and institutions, so attributing those things to Christianity just because they happened in Christian nations is a nontrivial claim)
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't think this is a fair comparison.
One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).
Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.
The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.
guesswho
2yr ago
I guess the steelman would be 'here we are, talking about how much they care about Israel/Palestine and the lengths they'll go to to express those feelings. That's pretty much what they wanted people to do.'
Basically, the point of protest and civil disobedience and rioting and etc. is rarely to hurt the specific proximal people you are immediately hurting with your actions. The point is to leverage that hurting into attention and publicity and public discussion of the things you care about, and to recruit everyone hearing about your actions to help you create a sense of pressure on those in power to do something about it.
Basically, 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.
(Note I don't personally think this is a good justification, but it's the best steelman I can think of)
guesswho
2yr ago
Again, I agree this is a sensible type of strategy in general, I just think Trump has had too much of a lead for it to actually change the outcome of the Republican primary.
And if you try it and fail then you've potentially hurt your chances in the General by not activating your own base.
It's a strategic calculation with trade-offs. I think the strategic choice their making has better chances than the one you're proposing, but of course I could be wrong.
guesswho
2yr ago
Well, I do think that almost all people are inherently consequentialists, and that people who claim to be deontologists or virtue ethicists or surrendering their moral judgement to the guidance of a higher power or etc. are for the most part basically just being dishonest or failing at introspection.
But this may just be me drawing weird boundaries around term definitions.
To me, if you claim to be a virtue ethicist but you wouldn't follow a virtue into an action that had really bad consequentialist outcomes, then your morality isn't really based on virtues, it's based on consequences and you're just using virtues as a hueristic towards that end.
Same for deontology or religion, if you are making a conscious effort to bend those things towards good consequentialist outcomes, or occasioanlly breaking from them in order to achieve good consequentialist outcomes instead, then you're just a consequentialist who likes to frame your innate consequentialist morality in terms of an externalized locus of control.
But, maybe that's unfair to those philosophies, or proves too much about consequentialism. It's true that I have a concept that non-consequentialists would act innately alien in a lot of ways, doing seems that seem insane given the consequences, because they do not consider consequences to be part of their judgement criteria in the first place. But maybe I should be accepting a more humanistic version of these philosophies that aligns with the ways human nature naturally cares about outcomes, without lumping them all under consequentialism for that reason.
guesswho
2yr ago
I can see the sense in that narrative, but I don't think it quite lines up with the reality of the modern Republican party.
Maybe Democrats could have socially engineered Republican's loyalties by continuing to ignore Trump and acting really scared of Desnatis, but that's giving them a lot of credit to be able to control their opponent's actions. I doubt it would have worked.
guesswho
2yr ago
Some of the rest of us also like to think we are in it for the well-being of everyone, too, you know!
Then I would call you a utilitarian, by my own definitions of the term. Which is admittedly very broad.
I basically separate it into the motives underlying someone's moral reasoning, rather than adherence to a specific decision procedure. If you're trying to follow some set of rules no matter what, you're a deontologist; if you're trying to do the right thing because it's right, you're a virtue ethicist; if you're trying to do whatever helps people the most, you're a utilitarian.
guesswho
2yr ago
That seems really unlikely to me, it implicitly assumes that whether or not your current child survives has no impact on whether you have another child.
Every system has a carrying capacity, I don't think mosquito nets change the carrying capacity by that much, they just get there with fewer intervening deaths.
guesswho
2yr ago
Nuclear was the most feasible solution between about 50 and 10 years ago, but other power sources genuinely have gone through massive technological improvements since then and are viable competitors in many areas.
No doubt nuclear should be a part of the overall green energy portfolio and it shores up a lot gaps in the other methods. But it's no longer the simple 'just use nuclear for everything, duh' situation that was true for a while there.
... I just gave a whole explanation about how we share our experiences with each other by talking about them and explaining them to each other, and your question is whether I understand the experiences of something that can't talk?
I sort of feel like you are firing off pre-cached arguments on this topic without closely reading or engaging with my actual arguments.
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