sun
2yr ago
"Why do 0.001% of men want to wear skirts?" is not a question which anyone has been required to consider until modernity, and for such rounding errors and answer of "idiopathic madness" seems satisfactory.
It is only slightly less modern than trans ideology to consistently think of men and women as something that is immutable from birth. The expression "a real man" would not exist if a penised-and-testiculed fertile male's manhood could not be in question.
sun
2yr ago
Why then is your answer different for "your lordship" and for trans pronouns?
I don't believe in nobility. I do believe in classifying people according to their gender presentation.
sun
2yr ago
If this was 1970 and someone wanted to be called xe/xim, or even if a man wanted to be called "she", you'd know that they're trolling because it's so frowned upon that nobody would want to do that for real.
Sure, yeah, we assume sincerity now because they made it sincere. Just as we assume sincerity about claims such as "maybe people from other countries are real people too" or "there shouldn't be an unelected king".
Also imagine that even then, the connotation of "your lordship" is still what it is now.
Are the connotations of "he" and "she" now what they were before? Anyway, sure, if we assume that society developed in a way that changed my mind about "your lordship", then my mind about "your lordship" is changed. So?..
sun
2yr ago
There is, of course, a lot of dreck on the web because it's so low-cost. But there's also the occasional gem that is not tainted by worldly concerns such as "having to appease a publisher".
sun
2yr ago
I'm placing the cutoff at whatever is an actual honorific, or implies actual deeds (such as "mother"). You may think "he" or "she" confers privilege all you want.
Of course, there are ways to persuade me to call someone "Mommy" without them having birthed anyone.
sun
2yr ago
I would ask why the same principles don't apply to gender, something that we can probably all agree is far more fundamental to human nature, and less changeable, than being a king.
The concept of nobility has a baked-in assumption that they're better than you in some way. No such thing with the concept of being a different gender.
I'm fine calling people a different pronoun than what I would've assumed, because I do not believe they're asking for it to literally lord it over me.
sun
2yr ago
Historical precedent is that there is such a thing as gender, in the definition of "social role strongly defined by sex yet not entirely contingent on it". Sure, modern progressives wouldn't want Ancient Greece's gender roles, but once we've established that such a thing exists the rest is just haggling over the price.
There's no historical precedent for the divine.
sun
2yr ago
I've seen a (possibly) female profile on a horny subreddit, and in her profile there's a vent post about how she feels worthless because everyone only values her for sex. My sister in Christ, how am I supposed to value you for anything else when all you present (on this profile, at least) are cybersex offers!? At least suggest something, anything else to talk about! Sorry, "being a human person I don't know" is not interesting enough. There are 8 billion people offering that.
sun
2yr ago
Knowing reoccuring ideas and patterns and when to apply them is a part of intelligence in my books.
How did you manage to go through school without even being made to read a book once? What did you learn basic literacy with?
To actually answer the question: something others haven't mentioned is that text is the lowest-cost medium of expression. If you have a good idea, but don't have the time/skills/capital/popularity/marketability to express it in a documentary or a graphical novel or a catchy Youtube video, you will write it down. Thus, reading allows you to reach not only those good ideas who were had by good clip makers, but the rest of good ideas as well.
To illustrate: good books are often written alone, perhaps with an editor or two poring them over as far as I'm aware. In contrast, a good movie today is a crowd of actors, technicians, directors, screenwriters and at least a small boatload of money to pay them all.
As ZorbaTHut mentioned, reading is how you find good shit like Unsong or Pale that's probably not going to hit the screens in the author's lifetime.
sun
2yr ago
After appreciating Mikhail Elizarov's songs I decided to check out his books, starting with Librarian.
sun
2yr ago
You're fixating a lot on the supposed feminineness and infantilization of hospital euthanasia. Would you prefer for a grim-faced man in a suit to take you out behind the shed with a pistol shot to the brainstem?
sun
2yr ago
There are many medications and so on that are limited to certain groups of individuals.
I don't think literally requiring a loicense to buy sugar is where I want society to go.
sun
2yr ago
Those who proclaim "live free or die" should really decide which one they are, because at this moment most of them are neither dead nor free, not in the "you are only free when you can choose anything, not just anything that conveniently aligned with what the state is fine with you doing" meaning.
Otherwise what is this, a quantum superposition "until observed by the state" or something?
sun
2yr ago
Suicide isn't difficult
Neither is basic bodybuilding/fitness, and yet many people fail to do it even when they express a desire to be fit. Concluding, by some "revealed preference" sophistry, that they don't "actually" want to be fit is stupid in my very humble opinion. They want to be fit. They simply don't have the willpower to follow through. Those are different things.
sun
2yr ago
I don't see how it is relevant to their belief in HBD. I'm arguing that if they were HBDers, that would be just another axis to create an arbitrary hard cutoff point at.
sun
2yr ago
Why is it so hard to accept that if physical ability is unequally distributed and can be quantified, that the same applies to cognitive ability too.
Much of our moral foundation is built on the idea of free will and people being responsible for their actions. That goes out of the window if we truly accept that cognitive faculties, thus thoughts, thus decisions are quantifiable and come from the gene.
sun
2yr ago
It's a mistake to view Russian politics through the binary lens of Dems and Reps in the first place. However, the official position of the state is culturally to the right of the West, and that of most dissidents is to the left of the state. Of course, there are also the "50 Putins" types, particularly visible today, who are pissed that Ukraine isn't nuclear ashes/barren wasteland within Russian borders yet.
Crucially, support for the state was supposed to be rare on chans.
sun
2yr ago
Basically everyone I see talking about HBD feels the same. The first position is a strawman.
My experience dealing with actual HR people feels like they do, actually, throw away all the applications from groups they perceive to be unlikely to be capable.
sun
2yr ago
What about them? If you're asking whether they were right-entried or not - I'm not involved enough and they're too ironic to say from the outside. I don't recall anything blatant like "femboy fascism" though.
sun
2yr ago
as you go on to describe procreation as "pitiful and disgusting", something to be "settled for".
What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way.
The plain meaning of the words is that it's pitiful and disgusting to invoke procreation as the central example of immortality. That is all. If you want me to elaborate on why - settling for such copes goes against everything that drove us out of caves and into civilizations. Might as well have not invented writing in fear that we be distracted from oral culture as the actual way of passing information down. Might as well have not invented agriculture and medicine, lest we be distracted from the actual salvation of hunting-gathering and Just Not Getting Sick, Bro. (I am aware that some people regret agriculture and medicine.) My "but" regarding creating new lives is that it's not immortality. It's not "salvation". Even Christianity had the decency to promise more than "well your children will live on and in the end they're something something your essence".
I don't really see how you can hold throwing in some bay area rationalist shibboleths (invoked clearly as a reduction to absurd) against me, given this place's history.
sun
2yr ago
I recall visiting a Russian chan-slash-web-culture wiki recently and seeing the Russian-Ukrainian war covered almost exclusively from a hard pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian stance. That's in a space which I recall as rather irreverent to the powers that be.
Yes.
I'm taking statements about one's social role and status as something that was apparently really fucking important back in the day.
No, they probably didn't believe that specific thing, I already said the gender role climate wasn't what it's like today. It did exist, though. I'm confident that when someone said "man" in the era I'm talking about (hell, such societies still exist), they meant not "adult human male" but "human male who met all the social criteria to be called a man, optionally past puberty". The rest is haggling over the price.
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