rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
3d ago
What's stopping a blue collar working guy from also starting an OnlyFans and advertising to a gay/bi audience? Being straight can be a plus and play to the "turn him gay" fantasy too, or you can just lie the same way female OnlyFans models pretend to be interested in their subscribers. And male instagram models can also get invited to Dubai for highly paid sex work.
rae
3d ago
I think you're looking for role models in entirely the wrong industries. The only reason we scrutinise the character of entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres, PewDiePie or Will Smith is because their job is to be liked and their worth is almost entirely parasocial, and if they fail to appear "wholesome heckin' good human beings", they fail at their job.
But if someone actually significantly contributes to humanity, then them having an unimpeachable moral character is pretty unimportant. If Norman Borlaug cheated on his wife, it wouldn't detract from the fact that he saved over a billion lives from starvation, and if someone who looked to him as inspiration would still go into agricultural science. But if you want to emulate Ellen DeGeneres, well, what's there to be inspired by when the personality is the product? Musicians and actors at least have a separate output, but it's rare that they become celebrities purely on the basis on technical talent.
I personally think it's a societal failure that people look to YouTube streamers as people to emulate as opposed to scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. It feels cheap to call a guy who talks while playing video games in the comfort of his own home a hero, or even a semi-hero, when there's doctors risking life and limb to save lives in literal war zones. And if you want someone to emulate just because they have a good personality, look to people around you that you know personally, not celebrities of whom you know nothing about except their media image and some rumours.
rae
4d ago
I know it's not directly the point but I'm equally baffled by your views as you would be (I suspect) of mine.
AI will be an expensive nothinburger
What makes you say that? AI has already ruined education, flooded the Internet with even more low-effort content from images, text, video to music, and even caused new kinds of psychosis. Oh and it's changed a lot of the nature of software engineering (causing a crisis in the junior dev market), data analysis (NLP is pretty much solved), and general automation of tasks. That's without going into computer vision, speech-to-text, etc. To not see that would require you to be, I don't know, a rural farmer in an African country or something.
But I occasionally see people with the same opinion as you, and we don't actually live in completely different realities. Or do we? Is it just impossible not to be in a bubble and capture only an easily biased sliver of reality? How do you avoid that and stay objective? I can just bluntly say your facts are wrong and mine are right, but I feel like that's missing the point.
rae
4d ago
How is Tim Pool a centrist? He might have been one back in 2019, but now he’s pro-Trump, pro-Israel, anti-Ukraine and has right-wing guests on his podcast. Even Fox News calls him right-wing.
rae
6d ago
You're talking about Canada, not the US, which has had much stronger economic growth compared to nearly every other developed country, and yet the economic vibes don't reflect that.
rae
6d ago
I agree that the Meaning Crisis is real for many young people, but that doesn't explain the Vibecession. Young people aren't complaining about being awash in material wealth with no direction in their lives, they're complaining that the economy is doing poorly and getting worse, that they have no opportunity to advance, that they earn less money than their parents and grand-parents, that housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.
rae
8d ago
I’m getting a bit confused by your point so let me try and clarify what I meant:
A lot of the debate around being trans - e.g. are trans women truly women? Do people have an “inner gender identity”? Doesn’t change the reality which is that some people are distressed by having the characteristics of their natal sex and being perceived as a man/a woman, and want to transition with the goal of reducing that dysphoria. Some succeed in that they are eventually perceived as the opposite sex in most social situations and significantly reduce their dysphoria.
You can argue that alternative treatments should be researched instead, that medical transition is now insufficiently gatekept, that there is bias in research with regards to outcome, or even that it should be banned because it will lead to more harm overall.
But debates like “a woman is an adult who produces large gametes, so trans women aren’t women” versus “no, a woman is anybody who identifies as one”, would have no bearing on the above, and even if you thoroughly debunked the second collection of viewpoints, it wouldn’t matter to the practical reality of treating gender dysphoria.
rae
8d ago
I’m very confused as to how you made the leap to those other claims. If you’re at all familiar with progressive views on being trans, they literally say you don’t need dysphoria to be trans, and they are firmly opposed to transmedicalism, favouring an identity affirmation based approach.
@ArjinFreeman has it right, I think you’re the one conflating my views when I’m only arguing for point 1.
rae
9d ago
One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling). Unfortunately few people bother investigating these due to political factors - many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure", and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.
rae
9d ago
It's a valid response from society to say 'No you cannot be Trans' and plausible that on the aggregate that aggressively tamping down on the issue is better than leaving a plethora of individuals stuck in weird individual culdesacs of human expression that ultimately produce more sadness than happiness.
The Middle East does that, and I don't think their approach produces more happiness than sadness.
rae
10d ago
I think you might strawmanning their replies yourself. The intended message is probably something like
- Intersex people show that the gender binary is not inviolable - someone can have XY chromosomes but appear completely female externally
- It costs nothing to be polite and use trans people’s preferred pronouns, and not doing so, or making their lives more difficult, is pointlessly rude and mean spirited
- If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you
Although it is X/Twitter, so it is possible you got the replies you wrote verbatim. But I would still encourage you to consider their arguments more charitably, otherwise they might just dismiss you what you wrote after a single one paragraph.
rae
10d ago
Being a transsexual is not treatable by crossdressing and requires hormonal replacement therapy at a minimum, and usually surgery. If you look at that 1966 book I linked, the author brought up a treatment plan where the patient would take hormones but otherwise dress and appear as their natal sex.
Do share what angle you’ll be going for if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you will have much headway with the people you’re arguing with (I assume highly educated, compassionate people with a progressive bent, perhaps in the rationalist sphere or STEM), from what you’ve shared so far. Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.
rae
10d ago
I hope you look into the trans medical perspective as opposed to just debunking the modern progressive viewpoints.
Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person. No one who has profound distress at having breasts and can’t bare to look at themselves in the mirror will cancel their top surgery (or stop wearing a binder, or go abroad if you made the surgery illegal locally) after a convincing philosophical argument about the definition of “woman”.
Like others mentioned, Zack M. Davis has written tens of thousands of words on the subject from a rationalist point of view, and it’s clearly a desperate coping mechanism for a psychiatric condition/neurological problem that he’s unwilling to have properly treated.
For some medical deep dives, I like Dr Power’s subreddit and its wiki for a bleeding edge take, and this classic from 1966 which shows the medical necessity of treating transsexuals from a time before there was any “gender ideology”.
rae
19d ago
From what I can tell, the dissident right’s interest in Christianity seems entirely based on the vibes of it being “based and trad” rather than actually being interested in the teachings of Christ. What Christian values do they actual have? The movement is centred on vice signaling, aka the “based ritual”, displaying abhorrent opinions, possibly ironically, to shock and troll the libs, their few female members are highly sexualised (see their embrace of Sydney Sweeney), and they are certainly more concerned with a white identity than a Christian one.
rae
19d ago
Maybe it’s because I’m on the autistic spectrum, but pre-puberty I had a mostly equal split of male and female friends and never once did the subject of “liking” boys or girls come up in conversation. I remember parents making insinuations about it, but that’s it.
I believe you and thanks for the counter input, but this is such a vastly different way of thinking than any other man I’ve ever talked to. I have never encountered any situation that would lead me to believe that this goal is equally shared among men as it is among women.
Not sure what kind of men you’re talking to, but plenty of men fantasise about winning the lottery, or making it big with cryptocurrency/investment/gambling, and living in luxury without having to work for the rest of their lives.
What man doesn’t want money for nothing and their chicks for free?
rae
1mo ago
The effective retirement age gap between men and women is very small (~1 year) in the developed world, and in France it seems that it's actually women who retire 1 year later than men. Legally speaking it's equal between the sexes in nearly every single developed country, but when it was lower in the past for women, the most sensible explanation I read was that since the norm was single-income households and women tended to marry younger, they timed it so when the husband retired, they would both get their pension at the same time.
rae
1mo ago
In a fair fight, I have approximately 0.1% chance of losing a fight to the average street harasser in an objective way.
What’s the likelihood that it will be a fair fight though?
I am a bit confused by your mental model here where you think normal men confronting homeless creepers is not a thing because they fear to lose the fight.
I’ll admit I’ve never lived in a city where I’ve encountered the kind of aggressive, mental ill homeless mentioned here. Maybe that population is sufficiently malnourished that you can easily beat them with little effort, but the street harassment I’ve seen has mostly been from young men who looked in normal physical shape, often in groups.
Its not a thing for me. Its not a thing for my brother or anyone else who was on the wrestling team at our high school.
Well we come from different backgrounds I suppose, my high school did not have a wrestling team and the men I know are middle class guys working office jobs who have never been in a real physical fight.
rae
1mo ago
How can we bemoan the loss of honor, while this thread is full of criticism of honor cultures and the violence they lead to?
Because honor cultures are objectively awful. The states where honor culture dominates, like the Middle East, tend to be poor, violent and oppressive places to live. I personally have no desire to live in a society where men are quick to resort to physical violence when their feel their honor threatened, and I'm happy blood feuds, honor killings, and even schoolyard fights are no longer accepted or commonplace.
The reason why "respectable" men don't beat up street harassers isn't just because of the legal risk, but because you might very well end up losing. Even if you're in peak physical condition and a trained martial artist, what if the vagrant pulls a knife? What if you win this time, but he comes back with 5 of his buddies? What's the point of risking potentially a life-changing, even fatal injury, because of what, a comment? The risk of escalation is too great compared to just walking on, ignoring the catcall, or just sticking to more middle-class areas.
It used to be well understood that a bum or a vagrant or a drunk catcalling your wife or girlfriend or daughter or sister was ample justification for you, as a man of honor, to smack him good and hard. Bums and vagrants and drunks learned to keep their mouths shut. Now they feel no need to restrain themselves, no citizen is going to risk a felony arrest, becoming a felon over it. Or a civil lawsuit that will drain their bank account.
And what if a woman is walking alone? Needing a male chaperone seems like social regression, it's a good thing that women don't need to rely on an individual man for protection. I'd much rather have a well-trained police force and justice/health system that is allowed to do its job.
rae
1mo ago
I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live? They must have been dying left and right from unlucky punches. That doesn't seem to be the case, it's an almost unattested to phenomenon before modernity.
As @FtttG said, those deaths are mostly from people falling and hitting their head on concrete after getting punched, so it makes sense it was more uncommon in pre-modern, more rural times.
But regardless, I think you're romanticising the past. Even if they couldn't easily slip and die from slipping on asphalt, our ancestors absolutely died left and right from stupid, violent deaths. Just look at the homicide rate over the last 750 years. Or further back, how 21% of men in Amazon hunter-gathered tribes died violent deaths.
Getting in a fight (outside of the well-regulated environment of combat sports, although even then some like boxing are needlessly dangerous), has absolutely no benefit and is associated with impulsive, low-IQ criminals, drug addicts and drunks for a reason. What do you get from escalating it to a violent fight that words couldn't express? And you have no guarantee, especially if it's a stranger, that your opponent won't suddenly pull a knife (or a gun) and kill you.
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation. So much of obnoxious behavior we see today is the result of its lack. Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
What obnoxious behavior do we see today that would be fixable by violence from random citizens? If you're talking about say, mental ill or drugged addicted homeless people roaming many western urban centers, if the government's solution is to let anybody punch them as opposed to putting them in mental hospitals or homeless shelters, that would be to me an abject failure of government and I would not feel the least bit safer. Vigilantism is never a good thing and is a sign the police and authorities are a failure.
rae
1mo ago
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
rae
1mo ago
I feel like the whole debate completely misses the point entirely. Political violence can mean anything from violently resisting laws, assassinating politicians, to murdering random civilians with opposing views.
When people say “just kill fascists”, is the latter one what they mean? Would they have considered morally acceptable to open fire on a train of Mussolini voters during Fascist Italy? To kill a random grandma for supporting Il Duce, even if she was retired, had no influence whatsoever and just believed it because that’s what most people did?
rae
2mo ago
I’ll keep this short because I’ve rambled about this enough on themotte in the past. As a younger gay man, I didn’t understand why the soft status game was so ungratifying. I could be Liberace with little to no effort on my part. But Liberace- and gay men like him- have little to no actual status among gay men. Even entirely destitute gay men aren’t charmed by the money of a rich man. Likewise, when you are the rich man, it is not gratifying to charm a man with your money. The average gay man may pay for sex once or twice in his twenties, or when he comes into money, but he’ll find that it doesn’t gratify the ego in any way that matters. It feels cheap, fake, and dishonest to wield power in this way. Only through hard power- and earning respect, love and status through hard power- can you feel good about yourself and your place among men.
I’m not a gay man but this seems utterly backwards to me. Liberace was the highest paid musician in the entire world, an immensely talented entertainer and genuinely skilled pianist. To achieve that level of status requires a massive amount of talent and effort and you’re saying it’s more gratifying and somehow harder to just be a generic handsome guy because… other gay men find you more fuckable?
For me, what you describe as “hard power” is the definition of cheap and ungratifying. You’re talking about the kind of “status” that a chimpanzee would understand. There is nothing deep about it, it doesn’t add any value to the world, and it’s not something you can build a foundation for a relationship on - whether that is a friendship, a professional connection, or a romantic relationship. I’d rather have a partner who’s a bit plain looking but smart, loving, ambitious and successful - once you’re 6 months into a relationship a chiseled jawline won’t compensate for the lack of deep meaningful conversations. When you’re old and grey, will your proudest achievement really be that you were hot in your twenties and thirties?
I am sure that, as a man, winning at hard status is gratifying, while winning at soft status feels dorky.
I am not sure of that at all.
But I want to know if women feel the same way or if the opposite is true. Do women feel more gratified being Ellen Degeneres or more gratified being Marilyn Monroe?
Marilyn Monroe had a tragic life, suffered from depression, alcoholism and probably committed suicide via drug overdose, while Ellen Degeneres is still alive at 67 with hundreds of millions of dollars and seemingly no real regret over having being a toxic bully of a boss.
I don’t know if the medication of MTF women can tone down this desire inside- perhaps it can, and perhaps that’s fine if you’re living it, but as an outsider to me it is sad.
I’m MTF and if anything I find it a relief to not have that testosterone driven competitive mentality. Explicit hierarchies always made me uncomfortable and the very concept of “ranking” people in status/attractiveness is something I find kinda icky.
rae
2mo ago
3-5% would be exclusively gay men, 37% would be the number that had any homosexual experience regardless of their orientation. It might actually have been more common in the past because there were more male-only spaces and since being gay was so taboo, there was paradoxically more leeway. Friends I know who went to single-sex schools reported a lot of “gay stuff” happening despite most participants being straight, with the motivation being hazing, power dynamics, sexual frustration due to lack of women, etc (see what goes on in prisons).
Engine efficiency was just incremental improvements, and then 90% of horses disappeared in 20 years.
Nearly all progress is based on small, incremental improvements. The first steam engines were toys, then they were only useful for pumping water out of coal mines, then for stationary factories, then trains, etc.
I think we've reached a point where AI is already materially transformative, and it's impossible to deny the speed of the progress that's happened since Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017.
More options
Context Copy link