rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
9hr ago
It didn’t feel like school was very helpful for the short autistic guys I knew either though. Or for the tall autistic guys. High school is probably the worst environment to learn how to flirt (after your workplace), you’re stuck with the same people year after year, and any cringey attempt at practicing your ability to flirt risks becoming gossip that the whole school learns about.
According to my Indian friends, it’s self teaching all the way down. The professors read off PowerPoint slides because they’d rather be doing research, and the students skip class to watch YouTube videos from random Indians explaining the course material (among other things).
Although the Indians I know are software engineers who left India, so it might not be like that at all the colleges.
rae
19hr ago
How are the additional subjects assessed? Is it “you must have done 200h of humanities”, or additional end-of-year exams?
My question is mainly, why don’t the coaching centres become accredited schools where you fly through the government mandated curriculum in like the first hour of the day, then spend the rest of the day on the important tutoring? If there’s lax schools where they don’t even measure attendance that well, wouldn’t a combined coaching centre + high school be possible and an immense success?
I think that’s kind of the US model of the prep school, and similar to the one I attended. On many occasions a teacher would sigh, say “this is for the official curriculum”, we’d fly through it in 15min, then they’d teach the actual insanely difficult material we cared about. As long as we passed the (very easy) annual official tests and bought the official textbooks, the teachers had more than enough leeway.
Homeschooling is legal only after the age of 14, and how many parents do you think have the time for that here?
It doesn’t have to be administered by the parent, my thought was that you could have the same tutor you’d be paying for coaching at the start of the day, then you just need basic supervision to ensure they’re studying and not playing on their phones.
rae
22hr ago
Wait a minute… if the standards for actual schools are so lax as to make them effectively pointless, and parents are spending enormous sums on tutors and exam coaching, why not have a private school where the curriculum is just exam coaching in the first place? Or just “home school”, i.e. tutor the child during schooling hours instead of wasting their whole day?
Seems like home schooling and alternative schools are legal in India already, so why bother with the whole charade?
rae
1d ago
Education, at least in STEM fields, was one of the few areas where the Soviet system arguably outcompeted the American one though. They went from a society of illiterate farmers to dominating in Math olympiads, chess, getting most of the early milestones in the space race, and had more women in STEM than probably a lot of the West has today. Quite impressive given the degree to which their economy was crippled by central planning and ideological suppression.
rae
1d ago
It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.
The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.
If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?
rae
3d ago
I’m surprised Moldbug is your example of someone posting good, well-informed opinions online. I didn’t get the impression that his takes were any better informed than Musk’s, just because he uses pompous flowery prose instead of juvenile sex jokes and doge memes does not make the underlying ideas more rigorous.
rae
3d ago
Rae came in here purely to vent his spleen in a way that was unproductive and frankly a real dick move. I didn't bother to get into it with him because there's no point arguing with someone that angry about the topic that they will go out of their way to shit on someone else's beliefs, but it was a really crappy thing to post.
I’m not angry about it, just confused! I can’t wrap my head around believing in Christianity in that way, although I do find it fascinating as a topic of discussion.
I actually love the trope of God as some sort of cosmic horror like in this excellent short film and to me it makes a lot more sense than any other interpretation.
I don’t understand how the idea that God is benevolent and all powerful became more popular than there being a malevolent or indifferent God out there. Watching someone struggle with the problem of evil is strange to me because you can easily resolve it by saying God is evil/doesn’t care, and nothing really changes about Christianity’s metaphysics. The Bible says God is good but of course it would, that’s from God’s/his prophets’ POV, they’re going to justify their own actions the same way anyone committing evil acts would.
rae
3d ago
I would continue to reply but the rest of your post shows you aren't interested in actually discussing this, just insulting someone you disagree with.
I’m sorry it came across as insulting, that wasn’t my intention. You’re obviously a very moral, compassionate person who’s experienced a lot of pain, and I’m glad that you’re able to find community because that’s the most important thing in life.
@Amadan put it in much nicer and more coherent way, and I suppose there’s just no way for me to understand your perspective. You seem to be aware of the contradictions, of the problem of evil, of the injustice of eternal damnation, so you do all this work to find an interpretation of Christianity that doesn’t make God to be evil. But why? Why not reject Christianity in favour of something like Gnosticism or Zoroastrianism or just personal spirituality, or say the Bible is the imperfect work of man and that God is best known through personal revelation?
rae
3d ago
I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?
If you are relying on your moral intuitions anyway, why even go with the Christian God and have to go through these tortured interpretations to bend the Bible to your moral values? The Biblical God is obviously a wrathful, evil deity who is responsible for the pain and suffering of billions upon billions of humans and engages in cosmic blackmail to get you to love and worship him.
At best, he is callously indifferent and neglectful, at worst, he watches with glee with every child that dies in agony of a cancer he purposefully created. While a father cries holding his daughter’s lifeless hand, God sentences her soul to an eternity of hellfire without a second thought, because he can forgive anything, except not giving him the worship and adulation he desperately craves.
The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with.
They are the worshippers of a narcissistic, genocidal cosmic horror from the Bronze Age, at least they have the gall to admit that one should live in fear of the monster, rather than pretend it loves us while it spares only the ones it deems sufficiently servile, torturing or annihilating everyone else.
rae
3d ago
The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end.
Not sure how it worked where you lived, but in most EU countries the parliament had to pass a law to give the executive branch emergency powers to respond to the crisis.
must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition
Yes, isn’t that what happened? At least where I lived, all emergency powers had a built-in expiration date and a vote had to be passed every few months throughout the pandemic in order to extend them.
If you live in an authoritarian country where the executive branch can enact a state of emergency with 0 accountability and have it persist without requiring any votes, that’s another problem entirely. In functional democracies, suspension of civil liberties was not done without significant scrutiny and legislation.
rae
4d ago
This worldview is incomprehensible to me. Do you believe the government should never enact any restrictions as a response to an emergency? If you’re a principled libertarian, I suppose it’s self-consistent, but the majority of people aren’t. Temporarily closing non essential businesses, social distancing and vaccination orders are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny, there were similar responses during the Spanish flu (minus vaccines which weren’t as developed).
There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?
if you are a man who finds Buck Angel hot you are probably not all that straight
Well, happy that we can at least agree on that :p
But I’ve seen enough examples of non passing, pre-T trans guys insisting that their boyfriend is gay for being with them and I think they’re being genuine. Likewise in reverse with gender-criticals.
But that still wouldn't make Buck Angel a man.
Not according to your definition sure, but I think it’s quite useful to separate “male” from “man” (or “dude” or “guy”). A trans man is female, but can be a man, a boyfriend, a husband, referred to as “that dude over there”, because those aren’t scientific terms or claims about their chromosomes. Otherwise it’s kinda like insisting you’ll never see your friends’ adoptive parents as their mum and dad no matter the circumstances, because mother and father should be used purely for the biological parents. It just turns into a semantic debate, and debating whether a trans guy is a man becomes as stupid as arguing whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around. What are we actually debating here?
rae
5d ago
Now would you actually defend someone who is facing a cancel mob for expressing trans-critical views?
Are cancel mobs still a thing on the left in America? I thought the balance of power had shifted.
But in any case, I’ve never known anybody to face a cancel mob (I don’t think it’s really a thing where I live, and there’s stronger employment laws than in the states) so it’s hard to say how brave I would be. I suppose it depends on the situation, like I’ve personally defended a friend who was accused of transphobia at work, and if we were at a rationalist conference or whatnot I would come to your defence if you got a lot of flack for saying the same kind of things you just posted, even if I disagreed with what you said.
It is mostly the first two. I realize "I can't override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy" is not a rational basis on its own to deny someone's identity, but it is certainly a rational basis to... not react to you the way I would to a woman, whether that be socially, sexually, in terms of threat perception, etc. And saying that I should because my brain does not get to overrule your self-identification is basically demanding that I ignore my instincts and evolutionary hardwiring and defer to something I have only your word for.
See this is why I don’t like the modern trans movement, because somehow they’ve convinced everyone that being trans is all about how you “identify” as, and that people should treat you based entirely on your self-ID.
If you’ve only been around that kind of trans people, I get why you have a negative impression and a hard time going beyond “I’ll respect your pronouns but won’t think of you mentally as the opposite sex”. But for some of us, the goal is to get treated and seen as the opposite sex by actually passing, not by asking other people to overrule their instincts or whatnot based on a pronoun badge.
Not everyone can pass of course, and I get the focus on respecting people’s pronouns because that’s an easy intervention doesn’t cost much and works for all trans people, and the idea of trying to normalise being a non passing trans person in a gendered space, because it’s unfair that some trans people get lucky with their appearance and some don’t.
And if you clock me easily and can’t shake off the feeling of “male”, that’s fine. I’d much prefer you admit it instead of treating me as a woman in an overly performative way while not actually believing it (as many in the woke camp do).
Yes. Yes, she is. Even if she passes. Does it matter, if 99% of the people she meets never know she's not a man? Probably not to her. But she's still a female.
Sure, I don’t disagree. But if you have someone that looks like a hairy bearded man with a penis, both the pro-trans woke camp and the trans critical side are saying it’s somehow possible for a straight man to be attracted to them, either because the hairy bearded man is a trans woman and trans women are women, or because they’re a trans man and straight men are into biological female.
Both sound equally ridiculously to me, being gay/straight is obviously based on how the person looks, otherwise you could make a straight man get turned on watching bara hentai just by adding a footnote that the characters have XX chromosomes.
rae
6d ago
I’m not particularly into fine art but I love Bauhaus architecture and industrial design, especially when you consider how different it was to everything else at the time. It only looks plain because everyone else copied it.
rae
7d ago
I don't think it's really fair for you to equivocate between "if sent to prison, I don't think you should be housed in the female estate" with "you don't deserve to be protected from rape"
Sure but the female estate is greater protection without the needing to be on constant protection, which is generally considered a punishment. Otherwise why have female prisons at all, just put all of them in the same building and have the women confined to their cells 23h a day.
I'm sure you don't think a slim, petite cis gay man (that is, a twink) who gets sent to prison ought to be housed in the female estate
A petite cis gay man doesn’t have a female body that’s going to attract the same kind of attention as a passing post-op trans woman in a male estate. The risk for the latter is equivalent to a cis woman in the same situation, maybe with greater violence depending on the inmates attitudes or the belief that they can “get away” with more since a trans woman will attract less sympathy.
So I do feel sad that in your worldview, I don’t deserve the full extent of protection from rape and violence some other people do, because I wasn’t born the right kind of human. I hope I never get in trouble with the law or falsely accused of a violent crime, abused by a partner and need a DV shelter, become homeless, etc, and that I can maintain my nice comfortable middle-class existence.
Or… I can live in a country that has laws that I consider reasonable (and it does seem that most western countries consider bottom surgery sufficient for most of the above - even the Reform Party justice minister spoke in favour of not automatically housing trans women in male wings), surround myself with people for whom being trans isn’t a big deal (which is honestly a much bigger number than I thought), and just live my life with a bit less stress.
rae
7d ago
Sucks for someone like me who got beaten at arm wrestling by mildly athletic women even before transitioning, had female range grip strength even back then, and never tried to hit or slapped someone, like even when getting sexually assaulted I just froze and waited for it to be over. It doesn’t feel great to hear I don’t deserve being protected from rape because of the way I was born.
But on the hand, I recognise that I won enough at the birth lottery being middle class in a wealthy European country in the 21st century and that this is just me feeling slightly down at hypothetical scenarios that I am exceedingly unlikely to face.
rae
7d ago
Ironically people from socially conservative cultures are the least able to tell that someone is trans. I’ve posted about this here before, some male posters even said they were called “miss” by Middle Eastern men just for having long hair. It’s going to be easier to pass even if acceptance is decreased. Not sure that’s worth the cost due to the added risk if they found out, but eh.
It won't be all too long before the guy putting on a dress and demanding to be called a woman's name will be laughed out of the room again.
Good thing I wear jeans.
"Trans" can only survive as long as its practitioners are able to ensconce themselves in online echo bubbles where positive reinforcement is mandatory.
So how did trans people exist before the 90s? The few media portrayals weren’t exactly positive.
rae
8d ago
So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?
Transgender women could be housed with the female population only if they’ve had bottom surgery, otherwise they go into protective custody in the male wing. I believe that’s the law in many countries right now including the UK, and it seems quite reasonable to me. What would your objections be to that?
rae
8d ago
First let me obligatorily clear my throat and say I appreciate your willingness to participate here in what I know is a fairly hostile environment for you despite our rules.
Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.
See, even the moderate, normal, well behaved trans people will generally be reluctant to criticize the strident activists,.the cancel mobs, the social censure that falls on anyone who clears their throat and says maybe trans women shouldn't be put in women's prisons.
I’ve been happy to criticise them here I think, and I’m no different in real life.
If I were allowed to just admit "Look, I don't really think you're a woman and we can disagree about trans women in sports and JK Rowling, but I'll respect your pronouns and I honestly do want you to live your best life however you wish to," that would be fine.
I’m perfectly fine with you admitting that you don’t think I’m a woman. I might try to convince you that between “a woman is an adult female human that produces large gametes” and “a woman is anyone who says they are one”, there’s other definitions that have some usefulness.
Going back to this site’s rationalist roots, I feel like Big Yud’s classic post on bleggs and rubes applies here. Like what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman? Is it “for me, women refers to adult female humans, and you’re not in that category”, is it “I can’t override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy”, is it “I will not behave towards you the way I behave towards women because that goes against my beliefs”?
I feel like both the pro-trans and anti-trans camps are acting as if the debate is just about who gets to have the woman category and the man category, and then all the rest, prisons, sports, bathrooms, labelling sexual attraction, will magically get resolved.
Is a man gay for being attracted to a trans woman? No, because trans women are women! Yes, because trans women are biologically male! Well, both of those answers are kinda stupid, and are the result of ideologies trying to force reality into man-made categories instead of trying to find the actual question.
Because if you define gay as “person with XY chromosomes attracted to another person with XY chromosomes”, it’s not necessarily wrong, but it might not be useful. You’re going to get into scenarios just as absurd as defining gay as “person who says they’re a man, attracted to a person that says they’re a man”, where you can be a man insisting he’s straight while enthusiastically sucking the dick of someone that looks just like a hairy bearded man because “Hey, she’s a pre-transition MtF and trans women are women!” or “Hey, she’s an adult female human, still a woman even if she got phalloplasty, top surgery, has been on testosterone for 20 years and is in the top 1st percentile of height for women!”
So whenever I am interacting with a trans person, besides having to suppress the occasional eye rolls at the inevitable water-testing declarations to claim ideological space (never met a trans person who didn't do this at least once), I have to be prepared for what happens if I am caught out.
Well, what does it mean for you to be caught out? Is it them flat out asking questions, like “do you think trans women belong in men’s prisons” or “what did you think of Lia Thomas?” and waiting expectantly for you to say the politically correct answer? That’s shitty behaviour and I’m sorry if that’s been your primary kind of interaction with trans people.
Maybe it’s a social circle difference, maybe it’s a European thing, but the trans people I know, myself included, don’t do this. In real life, I never introduce myself with my pronouns or whatever, I don’t talk about being trans, or related political issues, unless I’m explicitly asked. In a perfect world I wouldn’t even be trans, and I’m immensely grateful that I have many relationships where it just does not come up, ever.
rae
8d ago
Where we conveniently have no statistics or even informal obsevrations to back or contradtict your claims with.
You don’t notice the common theme here?
One of the issues being raised in this thread is that white middle class trans activists are claiming to be at risk of violence and murder when the stats show the victims are overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic and Middle Eastern. I don’t think you can deny the latter?
Or the whole "trans" fad, the entire social contagion and online trend, just dies out altogether, and the violence and discrimination go away with it.
And why would it die out? It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down, but short of a global catastrophe I don’t see why people would stop wanting to transition. It might even increase in popularity with future improvements in biomedical technology.
rae
9d ago
To the extent that this is my hobby horse, all I mean is that I sometimes discuss it on a pseudonymous internet forum and on my blog. Frankly, I think I have my priorities in order.
That’s fine, again it was genuine curiosity, not me trying to discredit you.
Why?
In my opinion, the increased attention, both positive and negative, has made things worse for trans people. I don’t want to have trans scissor statements in the media so that woke people can show their support, I don’t want pronouns in bio, I don’t want my medical condition to be in the spotlight and have it become politicised with everyone having to have a take on it. I want people who are indifferent, not allies who go out of their way to make me feel “accepted”.
rae
9d ago
In my defense, I’d have the same reaction to a westerner with no links to the topic regularly attending pro-Palestine marches or an Irish person attending BLM rallies.
But also, I personally want people to be less interested in trans issues, so it would be in my benefit to have you care less about this.
Caring about the people affected by an issue, even if it doesn't affect me personally? I thought we used to call that "empathy".
But your attention is limited and you have to pick your battles, so why this one? Effective altruist types will go by maximum impact/effort and end up donating 10% of their income to shrimp welfare, but most of us generally have to have a reason to care about a specific topic, and I think it’s important to look at why you’re invested in a specific cause.
Like if you’re an Irish person marching for BLM, it’s useful to realise whether you are actually doing it because you care about African Americans, or because it was the trendy thing to do.
rae
9d ago
Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"?
I don’t have a strong position this to be honest. As @hydroacetylene said below, many white western trans women probably fit the “basement dweller” archetype which significantly reduces the risk of murder. If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?
Again, I don’t know. I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before, so I’m more cautious. Maybe my risk of murder/general violence actually went down because I was completely oblivious before and the increased precautions I take counterbalance the increased risk. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.
It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?
It’s equally frustrating for me, perhaps more so, because this kind of activitism is doing more harm than good. It’s unfortunately a common theme in identity politics, same thing happened with white middle class feminists.
Maybe I’m a romantic but I find it a little sad if you don’t get the magical experience of a spark spontaneously forming between you and a classmate you’re sitting next to, doing what you can do group projects with them, and stumbling on a romance that way. Your first romantic experience should be one without practice, with butterflies in your stomach, awkwardly holding hands for the first time, leaning your head on their shoulder, both of you discovering everything for the first time together. You can’t get that with someone that’s just flirting practice, like you can’t pick the first person you fall in love with.
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