rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
17hr ago
If by masculinity you mean brutish chest thumping violence, the cage that forces men to suppress their emotions, the entitlement to women’s bodies, the urge to dominate, conquer, kill and plunder, or to have no worth except as a tool in service to others, then yes I am against.
If by masculinity you mean the bonds of brotherhood, athleticism and physical prowess, the courage to stand up for what is right, bravery in the face of danger to you and your loved ones, the need to do achievements for the good of all, to explore and discover and innovate beyond what is known, then yes I am for it.
This is my stand and I will not compromise from it.
In all seriousness, I feel like masculinity is too broad a term. Society wouldn’t be improved by the masculinity of drug cartels, gang violence or warlords. But is being a scientist, an inventor, or an engineer masculine? What does that word mean apart from “has traits typically associated with men”?
So yeah, good masculinity is good, bad masculinity is bad. Maybe due to my own gender identity or whatnot, but I believe that everyone, man or woman, should strive to have the positive traits of masculinity and femininity both, and avoid their negative traits. Mix and match however you want. Everyone benefits by learning to be courageous, athletic, independent, yet kind, nurturing and empathetic.
rae
1d ago
Not sure that was an upgrade, overall.
Banning smartphones in schools is looking like a very good idea to be honest.
What are your testosterone levels?
Around 1 nmol/L or 29 ng/dL, but that’s not a problem let’s say :p
rae
1d ago
It's only recently as we have become extremely feminized as a society that it stopped.
Is that a bad thing? Society being more feminised has led to a drastic reduction in everyday violence. I’m glad there was no serious physical bullying when I went to high school, judging by older generations and media depictions, it was rampant and traumatic.
Not sure I can explain it to an autistic person, but it's basically something like - you're fighting for status but in a fun way?
I must be too autistic because that doesn’t seem fun to me. The last thing I’d want to do with my friends is fight for status, but hierarchies and rankings and competitive games have always made been a source of stress and I wouldn’t want to introduce that in what’s supposed to be my relaxing wind down time.
rae
1d ago
Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.
What proportion of men do you think are comfortable with this kind of bonding, and how do you detect if someone is going to be receptive to it? Is it perhaps less common among people on the autistic spectrum?
Personally I rarely experienced the kind of teasing you mentioned, and never in a group setting. If someone called me a retard because I did something stupid, I would just feel bad, and I’d try to appease or avoid the person somehow. My thought is that it’s related to autism making it difficult not to take sentences literally.
The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved.
But what’s the point in insulting the other person? Why not just stick to supporting them in the first place?
rae
1d ago
From the gay (and bi) men I know there’s not really a strict separation between tops and bottoms, most are vers and many will change their preferences over time, and I’ve rarely met stereotypically feminine gay men the way I’ve met stereotypically masculine lesbians.
Maybe it’s because most of the fems end up as trans women these days, so the gay male population ends up consisting of guys who are at least mildly comfortable with their masculinity (even if it’s limited to working out and growing a beard).
rae
1d ago
Still, looks nothing like Black Widow, obviously.
I think that’s the crux of the issue. If Marvel had been casting women who look like this instead of Scarlett Johansson, this thread probably wouldn’t have been made. When they think of a female athlete, most people in this thread are imagining a 5’3 petite woman with maybe a little bit of muscle, not Sarah Scheurich.
rae
1d ago
Across a variety of sports? Have you actually seen elite female athletes? Katy Ledecky is 6 feet, 159 pounds (183cm/72kg) and her 1500m freestyle record beats the male world record from 1973. There’s a similar pattern across most sports where current female athletes outperform the top males from 50-100 years ago.
While puberty starts earlier these days, I highly doubt there’s many 10 year old 6 foot tall supermen running around beating the top male athletes of the mid 20th century.
rae
3d ago
What kind of heartless man wouldn’t want to spend as much time as possible doing “dumb kid stuff” with their own child? Or calls it “dumb kid stuff” in the first place?
rae
3d ago
Is that correct?
What? No. That’s a bizarre conclusion.
What led me to these beliefs is -- basically -- that I have studied the issues very carefully and discovered that (1) the argument that man's activities are primarily responsible for recent climate changes does not stand up to scrutiny; and (2) the argument for CAGW does not stand up to scrutiny.
Why do they not stand up to scrutiny?
I’m not a climatologist. I just go by the fact that over 99% of them agree on human-caused climate change. I believe this the same way I believe cigarette smoking causes cancer, that the moon landing wasn’t a hoax, or that eating junk food is bad for you long term. It would be a massive waste of time for me to do my own research on the hundreds of topics and the likelihood that I’d be wrong (due to lack of specialty or time to spend on each) is far too high.
rae
3d ago
This seems to paint a good summary but I’m not an expert in the subject.
Your position is that climate change is happening, but that it’s not caused by humans and not a cause for concern? What lead you to this belief?
Especially the latter one. Natural rapid global warming, whatever the cause, still leads to rising sea levels, flooding of coastal areas, warming of the oceans, extreme weather events (hurricanes, droughts, etc. which can be devastating especially to less prosperous nations).
And do you think greenhouse gases don’t influence the climate at all, or that we’re not emitting enough to cause an impact?
rae
4d ago
There is no bailey, it’s all motte. There’s an extremely strong scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming and there’s no credible alternative explanation for the rise in temperature. The only thing that tracks the rapid temperature rise is human causes.
rae
4d ago
This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?
Personally, I believe rightwing populist movement started off with valid grievances. But this mentality of refusing to contradict your allies empowers extremists, grifters and manipulative sociopaths that distort your movement, make you deny reality more and more, until one day you’re fighting in the service of a monster that bears no resemblance to your original beliefs.
To me this is what’s happening to the right in America and the West in general. There is no rightwing ideology anymore. The “leaders” of the movement are abandoning all of its core principles and the only thing you’re left with is vibes, bonding with your allies in saying more and more grotesque untruths, and needing to beat the “other side” at all costs.
rae
4d ago
How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.
You’re committing the exact same sin of picking your worldview based on what’s fashionable to the red tribe. Why can’t you accept global warming and HBD at the same time? Be against third world immigration and for trans rights?
I’m surprised there was near bipartisan support for renewables in the first place. Solar panels and wind power always felt like a green/lefty thing while the right loved their oil and gas. Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.
Maybe it’s to do with the waning influence of libertarians and tech industry CEOs on the right? They had their moment to get the populists in power, then were discarded the moment they were no longer useful, and then the right could go back to disseminating pro-fossil fuel views to their audience and line the pockets of the oil and gas industry.
Who came up with the idea that having Europe be dependent on the US for geopolitical security was this generous gift that the US did out of the kindness of its heart, which somehow only benefited Europeans and that Americans got nothing out of?
Alienating your allies, threatening to invade them when they were already giving you everything you needed, cutting off their resources, having them see your primary geopolitical as a more trustworthy trading partner and having them refuse to come to your aid in your latest Middle Eastern regime change adventure that will totally work this time (pinky promise), those are genius 4D chess moves, yes.
To be honest, I think it’s more likely that the EU will double down on renewables as a result. There’s not enough oil in the North Sea for the whole continent, but there is plenty of wind and solar to drastically reduce demand.
rae
9d ago
men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them.
Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…
I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.
I agree. In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.
Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?
Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.
rae
9d ago
This is a very uncharitable response, c’mon, you know that. Sonnet 4.6 is a cheaper, much smaller model that was released 12 days after Opus 4.6, of course it’s going to be worse.
Bubbles are surprisingly strong. I’ve never met an open Trump supporter (or equivalent local rightwing party) in real life. All the young college educated straight white men I know are at least moderately leftwing, or at least heavily dislike rightwing populists. Supporting Trump would make you an instant social pariah, and make people wonder what went wrong with you.
Interesting. This kinda supports my hypothesis that people who say homosexuality is a choice tend to be bisexual - it literally is when you’re attracted to both sexes!
At least they’re honest about it not being very effective on exclusive homosexuals, but calling that working conversion therapy feels like a stretch. It’s like having a program that can supposedly convert vegans into carnivores, but it actually just makes people who already eat meat stop eating vegetables.
In the LGBT community it’s already a meme that most bisexuals end up marrying someone of the opposite sex, even in progressive social settings. Add even the slightly bit of social pressure and encouragement to focus on your heterosexual attraction, and pretty much any “conversion therapy” would work.
How did it work for you? Were you exclusively homosexual before, and are now 100% straight? Or did you reinforce an existing attraction to women?
It was, mostly, fairly standard therapy with some unusual homework exercises centered around a self conception as a man/woman designed by God for that role.
What kind of homework exercises? I hope you don’t mind me asking - the stereotypical media depiction of conversion therapy is “teenager gets sent to an abusive camp against his will, pretends that it works on him and then has a happy gay adult life”, so how it actually goes on is something I don’t think many people know of.
I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.
EDIT: is the Dutch book you’re referring to from Dr. Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg by any chance?
rae
9d ago
While I haven’t tried Cline, I know that Claude works best in Claude Code and Anthropic is trying its best (leaks aside) to have people locked into its ecosystem.
You won’t get a good picture of the capabilities of AI agents until you’ve tried the top models in a decent harness, unfortunately.
rae
9d ago
Gemini 3.1 Pro answered this question without issue, along with any variation (sink, bathtub, substituting the Titanic for an arbitrary cruise ship).
rae
9d ago
This was with the latest version of Claude Sonnet. We don't have access to the latest version of Opus, but I'm sure an AI-bro on here would insist that Opus would totally get this right. Regardless, it failed spectacularly at what would be an easy (but tedious) task for a mid-level developer and above (or a sufficiently talented junior).
I’m no AI bro, but Opus 4.6 is genuinely really good and I’m concerned about my skills atrophying because I’m becoming highly reliant on it.
How did you use it? It makes a big difference if you use /init in Claude Code, followed by /plan where you describe what you want, and give it the ability to compile/run/test the code in a feedback loop.
Are you aware that what you propose is literal nightmare fuel from dystopian fiction? Very few people would consider making 50% of the population property to be anything but pure evil. How would you convince anyone to want to live in a society like that, let alone defend it?
True! So testosterone supplementation would be a bit counter productive, like taking caffeine and a sleeping pill at once.
I guess I am curious as to what proportion of my lack of understanding of male bonding is due to neurodivergence vs being trans or whatnot, hence my earlier questions.
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