thegayrabbi
1yr ago
I don't particularly love most trans activism, and I'm deeply troubled by a lot of the medical interventionism on the youth.
However, there is a sense that certain factions or cultures of conservative men (of varying races and ethnicities) have created defensive silos of culture against the encroachment of gender non-conforming men. These places could be certain gyms, certain sales teams, certain blue collar unions, or certain bars. The shared sentiment is that there's enough spaces for gay or trans people (these men can't tell the difference) and so they need to batten down the hatches and keep their exclusionary spaces free from the taint of homo (no pun intended).
I think that there's a good proportion of younger straight men who are very into this, a la the andrew tate fans, and there's another group of younger straight men who are completely over it, and don't want to engage in long or endless discussions of masculinity and how important it is to pick a side.
If i were to entertain the idea of corporate advertisement as culture war, I'd say the point of this ad might be to demonstrate how hateful conservatives actually are against gay and trans people, no matter how much they pretend its about protecting children and women's sports. The liberals could be seen as responding to this "it's just about protecting children and women" rhetoric by saying "okay, here's a drag queen in her proper place, advertising beer in a funny commercial, joking about not knowing what March madness is"
Then the conservative men start literally shooting cases of beer, and it becomes apparent that it's not really about protecting women and children, it's about establishing cultural silos of hatred towards gay and trans people.
It's a good tactic for uniting the gay and trans factions that have started to schism lately. At the risk of being snide, I think the QT BIPOCS realize the white gay tops aren't coming to the club if they keep calling them "the nazis of the LGBT community" for going to the gym. Also that white wealthy gay men are the ones with the social capital and mental fortitude to penetrate these conservative cultural silos.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
I see another clear difference between these two situations in regards to the child's experience. If a mother gives her baby up for adoption, for whatever reason, the child must accept that his or her mother was not in a position to raise them, and find solace in the fact that another family was. This is just a sad fact of life that is part of the child's experience.
However, in the case of surrogacy, the child must understand that its parents wanted the position of sole parenthood so much that they compensated the child's actual birth mother in order to make her go away forever. And that is a weird twisted possessive experience that the child is left with in relation to its family that it will be growing up with.
So the child is trapped trying to establish normal familial relations with someone who saw it more as a possession than another human being who has a right to a relationship with a mother. And this is especially the case for gay male couples, who have unilaterally decided that their child can and will be happy enough to grow up without a mother just because they want to feel more normal and like they haven't lost out on any important American suburban experiences by embracing their gay lifestyle.
This is similar for lesbian couples, but not quite, given the number of men who seem happy to donate their sperm for a little bit of cash and don't seem bothered by the idea that they have children out there who they'll never know or care for. That is more analogous to the adoption where the child just understands that their father wasn't interested, but they do have parents who are.
The act of gestating a child and giving birth almost always, if not completely always, changes a woman's body forever, and is traumatic, and takes a lifelong toll, which is supposedly compensated for by a lifelong benefit of having a child to care for. I don't see how any one-time payment can be equivalent. I would be interested in hearing from a surrogate who really felt like it was.
My apologies for mixing up all the pronouns when referring to the child.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Study whatever you want, but pursue as many networking opportunities as possible. Apply for internships in your field during the summers. Don't take rejection personally, but accept it gracefully. Find good reasons to go to your professors' office hours, like if you're having trouble finding internships. Prioritize homework and reading for class. Pursue productive social activities. Only drink on weekends, and only beer. Don't smoke marijuana ever. Shower and do your laundry frequently. Compliment people's strengths and be polite about their weaknesses.
If you do all that you'll be successful in any field. Pick something where you will enjoy doing those things.
Source: When I did those things I succeeded, when I didn't, I failed.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
It's actually not as easy to be selectively closeted as you seem to think. People ask you questions about your life, and you are then given the options to either refuse to answer, in which case you are unfriendly, lie, in which case you are untrustworthy, or tell the truth, in which case you are provocative.
You have no claim to blue collar professions nor the right to establish them as safe spaces for gay hatred.
I have a fourth option, which is to advocate against your arbitrary definition of deviancy, which conveniently includes being gay, but not premarital sex, drinking, swearing, and hostility towards gay and trans people.
The idea that gay hatred in blue collar professions is justified because of a fear of sexual harassment is silly. I am sure straight men sexually harass each other, and gay men, far more than gay men might sexually harass straight men. Your ability to dismiss the fear of harassment that gay men experience while at the same time demanding gay men deal with constant "low level" hostility is evidence I am correct and you are not.
I would guess you simply just sympathize more with a straight man who experiences the presence of a gay man as intrinsically sexual harassment, whereas you see low level hostility towards gay men as justified because you think gay men are deviants.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Bud light is a beer, not a religion or political party. I think that's my point, that people who are aligned along political, religious, or politico-religious lines try to establish non-political and non-religious entities like a beer brand as off limits to their political or religious opponents.
The comparison between making one commercial for bud light with a trans woman celebrity and putting a statue of George Bush on the largest mosque in Portland is kind of silly to me. They're not similar.
Corporate brands aren't anyone's territory other than their boards' or shareholders'.
I think it looks like a triumphalist blue flag to you because you experience trans and gay inclusion as a loss. This situation reminds gay and trans people that their existence, without accounting political speech, is experienced as political speech, whereas the opposite is not true. A conservative man can go to a pride parade, just like in the blog post you linked, and not be threatened. To experience hostility and attention, he needs to do something political, like wear a police uniform, or hold a TERFy sign.
You can say both sides are doing the same thing, retiring conformance in certain spaces, but the degree to which the conformance required invades someone's identity is different. That's what's being demonstrated. We have all seen conservative speakers accosted on college campuses or shoved at pride events, but these people were trying to be as deliberately offensive as possible. This is the other side, where conservatives are literally shooting cases of beer in effigy because a trans woman took a bubble bath with a bud light.
To you it looks like a sly tactic in a culture war. To me it's a reminder that people like you might see my existence as a tactic first and a personality second. There's a degree to which you think a republican drinking bud light in a garage is more authentic than a trans woman drinking one in a bubble bath.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
This website is named for the motte and bailey fallacy, right? I believe that's relevant to this discussion, where you started by expressing anger that a beer company picked a trans woman for one commercial and expressing glee at the violent and angry responses from conservatives, and now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.
My original point stands. The bud light ad with Dylan Mulvaney and the response to it demonstrate to gay and trans people that conservatives require to be allowed to exclude them, with violence if possible. It's a smart way to demonstrate that conservatives don't care about women and children as much as they just hate gender nonconforming men and women. They have gone from seeking out gay and trans people to victimize, to creating silos in which they feel justified in victimizing any gay or trans people who dare to enter, but the urge to react to gay and trans people with violence is unchanged.
Conservatives were making headway with their concern for trans children and women's sports, but they took the bait and started shooting cases of beer because a trans woman drank a bud light.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
A gay bar is not equivalent exchange for being unwelcome at your nearest health centers, entire professions, or the most well paying department at your corporation.
Are you saying that straight men have more to fear in regards to harassment from gay men than gay men have to fear from straight men? Because I think that's demonstrably false based on the history of gay men being beaten, sometimes to death, by groups of straight men, and the opposite never occurring at all.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
To me it looks like the woman acting as s surrogate here gets a lot of social support and validation from being a surrogate. However, so do many prostitutes, and so would people paid to donate a lobe of their liver or a kidney. I think it should be the same thing. You can have sex for free, you can donate an organ, and you should be able to donate the act of surrogacy, but you shouldn't be able to do any of these things as a paid service because that's bad for society. And yes, for me that does include pornography where the actors are paid to have sex with each other on camera. Commercial pornography is causing a lot of problems. Labor laws (no pun intended) exist to prevent the rich from exploiting the working class beyond what is tolerable or humane, and requires society to create non-exploitive forms of work to continue functioning.
If your OCF wakes up in the middle of the night to pee, will they have to walk into your room while you're sleeping to use the bathroom and possibly wake you up? Because I would not enjoy doing that.
The rest of the considerations rely mostly on local social culture, so they could be fine or they could be onerous.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Is the rapid advancement in Machine Learning good or bad for society?
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
I enjoy trying to answer this question because the political discourse around it is too new to have widely accepted answers disseminated by the two American political parties being used to signify affiliation like many questions. However, any discussion of whether something is good or bad for society belongs in a Culture War threat because, even here on The Motte, most people will try to reduce every discussion to one along clear conservative/liberal lines because most people here are salty conservatives who were kicked out of reddit by liberals one way or another.
Now on to the question: Maybe the best way to discover if Machine learning is good or bad for society is to say what makes it essentially different from previous computing? The key difference in Machine Learning is that it changes computing from a process where you tell the computer what to do with data, and turns it into a process where you just tell the computer what you want it to be able to do. before machine learning, you would tell the computer specifically how to scan an image and decide if it is a picture of a dog. Whether the computer was good at identifying pictures of dogs relied on how good your instructions were. With machine learning, you give the computer millions of pictures of dogs and tell it to figure out how to determine if there's a dog in a picture.
So what can be essentialized from that difference? Well before Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers still had to be clever enough to use them to manipulate data properly, but with Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers can now simply specify a goal and get what they want. It seems therefore that Machine Learning will work as a tool for those with more capital to find ways to gain more capital. It will allow people with the money to create companies that can enhance the ability to make decisions purely based on profit potential, and remove the human element even more from the equation.
How about a few examples:
Recently a machine learning model was approved by the FDA to be used to identify cavities on X-rays. Eventually your dental insurance company will require a machine learning model to read your X-rays and report that you need a procedure in order for them to cover treatment from your dentist. The justification will be that the Machine Learning model is more accurate. It probably will be more accurate. Dentists will require subscriptions to a Machine Learning model to accept insurance, and perhaps dental treatment will become more expensive, but maybe not. It's hard to say for sure if this will be a bad or a good thing.
Machine learning models are getting very good at writing human text. This is currently reducing the value of human writers at a quick pace. Presumably with more advanced models, it will replace commercial human writing all together. Every current limitation of the leading natural language models will be removed in time, and they will become objectively superior to human writers. This also might be a good thing, or a bad thing. It's hard to say.
I think it's actually very hard to predict if Machine Learning will be good or bad for society. Certain industries might be disrupted, but the long term effects are hard to predict.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Iran is not a compelling example for me. In fact, I find it to be the opposite of a compelling example. It is interesting to know that about Iran, however, so thank you for sharing.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Nowadays many people feel a pressure to use time off from work to do something fun or leisurely. For some people, and I'm expecting this is particularly common to people who like this website, it can be helpful to accept that something fun might be something that other people consider work, like learning a new skill. Is there anything that you wish you knew how to do that you could start learning via YouTube tutorials? For me it was finally learning to code python.
I spent years trying to maximize my fun through various ways, but more recently trying to maximize my learning and challenging my brain has actually made me feel like I'm having a lot more fun on a day-to-day basis then when I was cramming as many leisure activities into one day as possible.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
You're continuing to demonstrate my point. A conservative has to display specific political speech in liberal spaces to have his presence politicized. However, gay and trans people just need to display their personal identities to have their presence politicized.
They're not equivalent. Conservatives engage in hatred based on identity, and liberals engage in hatred based on beliefs.
This ad campaign is just a reminder that conservatives still view being trans or gay as a political choice first, and a personal characteristic second.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
I've just started seriously studying machine learning, and I think the languages models are just the tip of the iceberg, and most of the powerful modern AI is hidden behind NDAs and less noticeable technologies. Many things quietly occurred without too many people noticing, for example:
Google tagged everyone's photos in Google photos with their contents. I have Google randomly displaying photos on my home screen when it's plugged in, and it knows not to show anything NSFW, and generally picks interesting photos. Google knows exactly what's in my thousands of photos.
Social media moderation also perfected AI filtering of NSFW content to any degree of precision the platform wants.
Every large marketing company or department has started to calculate someone called a "lifetime customer value" using machine learning to discovery and target the groups of customers predicted to spend the most over a lifetime. New marketing interventions will be measured for effectiveness in influencing consumer behavior. Eventually ad campaigns could be individualized and AI generated to a shocking degree, without even seeming personalized, because we don't look at each other's phones. It's possible in the future no one will ever see the same ad twice, or even be able to tell the difference between an AI generated advertisement and human generated content. The difference might even cease to be semantically intelligible. If it's trivial for an AI to generate an excellent exercise video with a small mention of a wellness product, is that an ad or a helpful wellness video?
What happens when AI can generate a new marvel movie just for you, subtly based on your consumer preferences and sense of humor? The experience of everyone seeing the same movie could disappear the same way the experience of everyone watching something like the seinfeld series finale at the same time did.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
To give you a quick hit, bad for society is when your therapist can mention surrogacy as a legal way out of your poverty.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
I see IVF as different because the child isn't denied a mother and the child's mother still gives birth to them, even if she's not the genetic mother. I'm not that worried about the perversion of nature, sacred or not.
I would not apply the same standard to women who use sperm banks or have absentee fathers. I don't see why you would think i would.
Giving up an egg or giving up sperm so a woman can gestate and give birth to a baby she will parent is not similar to being paid to go through the entire birth process and then leave forever.
Other users have made an excellent point as well, which is that every argument you can make for surrogacy can be made for legalizing selling your kidney, or a lobe of your liver, and kidneys aren't sentient, and your liver will eventually grow back. I'd appreciate if you could explain if you think people should be allowed to sell a kidney or a lobe of their liver if you think a woman should be able to rent out her womb.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Speaking totally off the cuff, here are some thoughts about why banning tik tok has such wide consensus:
- A clear line between users and non users. Full disclosure: I refuse to download tik tok onto my phone, and therefore the only tik toks i see are the ones popular enough to make it onto other platforms. On the other hand, when i talk to people who use tik tok, that often appears to be the only, or primary, platform that they use for online interaction.
This leads to:
- A negative impression of tik tok's effects on its users and culture in general. From the non user perspective, tik tok pushes antisocial public behavior, both in terms of public antics and disengagement from social situations. I think there's definitely a bit of maliciousness in banning tik tok where the non users want to confiscate it from the people they perceive as allowing it to ruin society.
But i also thing a strong factor is:
- The obviousness of tik tok's product placement. I haven't actually heard anyone else remark on this as I have the above ideas, but for a very long time I have been put off by tik tok's constant marketing and product placement as "the place where everything important is happening" on the radio , on my favorite television shows, and every major website. I also feel like I've noticed that tik tok has no end of eloquent defenders available to push carefully focus-grouped talking points in its defense. For a while it was "tik tok just shows you what you want to see, my feed is just cooking videos" when people objected to the sexual exploitation of minors on the platform. When talk of regulating it emerged, it pivoted to "we need a law against all social media companies invasion of privacy!" And now it's "this bill is worse than the Patriot act and will put you in prison for using a VPN".
I think when you don't use it, it looks like a deliberate hypnotic assault on American society and feels like a platform thats designed to completely supplant the rest of the internet and capture and waste the attention of its users. Americans will embrace whatever tools they can to get rid of it, because its an app from a foreign adversary of America designed to weaken the next generation. The more you look into it, the more apparent that becomes.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
The difference is not meaningless. If you would murder someone from another tribe regardless of their personal beliefs, then you're murdering based on identity. If you would murder someone from your own tribe based on their beliefs, you're murdering based on belief. The existence of green doesnt mean blue and yellow aren't different.
The trend is obvious. Liberals will frequently eat their own based on failures of belief regardless of identity, like with Al Franken. Conservatives will frequently support their own based on identity and regardless of belief, like Donald Trump and his history of cheating on his wife with a porn star.
Liberals will support someone like the current Pope, intrinsically conservative in identity, for expressing more liberal beliefs on gay people than previous Popes. Conservatives will shoot a case of their favorite beer, or applaud such a shooting, because they made one commercial with a trans woman. The trans woman doesn't express political views in the commercial, in fact, she actually says "whatever team you love, I love too" but conservatives hate her based on her identity.
Regarding this:
So these hypothetical conservatives consider gays/transgender types to be repugnant because they perceive them as making an incorrect political choice, not because they perceive it to be an immutable characteristic? This seems to undermine the argument you made in the very line above.
Conservatives would like to pretend they are hating people for their beliefs, rather than their immutable characteristics, so they recast immutable characteristics as political beliefs so they can justify their identity based hatred.
This is evident in one of the other replies to me that claims that blue collar hostility towards gay men is justified because gay men are intrinsically likely to sexually harass straight men. The poster linked an identity, being gay, with an inevitanle political action, sexual harassment, to justify the hatred of gay men.
They're smart enough to pretend that it's just harmful beliefs and actions from gay and trans people that they object to, like drag shows for children, surgery for children, and men in women's sports.
This commercial cleverly displays that this is just a facade designed to persuade moderate liberals such as myself that they are looking for any compelling reason to attack gay and trans people because their hatred is based on identity.
This whole website is based on the idea that it's better to object on ideological rather than tribal lines, even if tribalism is powerful. Conservatives are clearly the side of power through tribalism, and liberals are clearly the side of power through persuasive ideology.
The other two posters here are arguing with me. Because they think I'm gay and they think that is deviancy, or morally inferior. Maybe you are too. I'm arguing with them because I disagree with their comments. I don't hate them based on perceived identity.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Have you ever written this out so comprehensively before? I find it can be really transformative to externalize things like this. I bet your dad never wrote anything so introspective and self aware. I bet you've changed a little just from writing this comment.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless.
No, this is not my core argument. My core argument is that this advertisement is a smart unifying tactic for liberals because it demonstrates how much conservatives hate gay and trans people during a time when conservatives have been making political headway by pretending their anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric is really about protecting women and children.
You don't actually know which "side" I'm on. You seem to be making assumptions about it. I feel no need to argue about which side is morally superior, because that's reductive, personal, and, as far as I can tell, directly not what this site is for.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
You could try going to more presentations, either in person or online, where you think the presenter might trigger this reaction in you. In a presentation, you're not usually in a position to act on this mood and you're not likely to say something dismissive and make someone feel bad. Then try to consciously observe how you feel these emotions, have this reactionary judgment response, and then also observe how a few minutes later the response might disappear as you return to the present moment. The more you can observe that these emotional reactions are temporary, and more about your and your past than the person in front of you, the more you can ignore them and let them come and go without affecting the rest of your behavior.
You might even make a worksheet where your mark the time of the reaction, make a note of your feelings, and then later mark the time when the feelings have faded. This can help keep you in an observational mode.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Maybe they'll show you ads for competitors, or content you enjoy with subtle product placement, like a cute dog with oreos in the background.
Did you try using the search function in the Google photos app?
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Let's discuss the difference between a personal identity and a political belief then. A personal identity is about how you try to relate to other people. A political belief is about how you think the state should use it's claim to legitimate violence in order to enforce its law. So if you're just being trans, you're existing a personal identity. If you're saying trans people shouldn't be allowed to use women's bathrooms according to the law, you're engaging in a political belief.
All trans people have a similar identity, but they can have a very wide range of political beliefs.
Conservatives do not share any particular identity, but possibly they might share some political beliefs. Honestly, they don't really seem to share any political beliefs, but that's a different discussion. Regardless, conservatives are conservative because of one or more political beliefs they hold, not their identities.
I don't feel the need to respond to your other questions because they address claims I didn't make and opinions I did not state.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
I'm not transgender, and I never said I was.
Here's a question that I have about that handmaid's tale maternity photo shoot that you linked. Is this gay couple going to include that woman in the child's life as the child's mother? If not, is this weird picture going to be something that the child gets to look at in their lonely moments wondering who the woman was who gave birth to them, and what it would have been like to have her as a mother? Did this couple think any of these things at all themselves?
My biggest problem with surrogacy, as I stated in another comment, is that the child is left being forced to embrace parents who paid their biological mother and gestating mother to go away forever so that they could assume a full parental role.
It seems like that child is sort of compelled from birth to ignore the psychological and emotional implications of having two male parents who paid their mom to go away because they wanted to feel normal. That's why it's not the same as adoption, because the new family that you're supposed to embrace did not contractually obligate your biological parents to give you up.
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