vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I think it was around the time Lukas did his ‘why you should steal a woman’s photo to impersonate one online’ thread.
Could you please link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.
This is a fair question, and the same basic point was raised by /u/meduka. I agree that one storm is not conclusive. We will need to see the long run trends before my pronouncement is rigorously defensible.
Your other questions are ones I do not currently have an answer for. I am trying to see what data is available on this topic.
E: At a minimum, the following [...] Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.
I don't fully endorse what Rebekah Jones of Mesoscale News said in the full piece I linked. I just thought that the part I quoted did a better job than I could have laying things out, and I didn't see the point in reinventing the wheel.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.
I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.
Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.
Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.
I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.
All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.
I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.
EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:
Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.
“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”
In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.
As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.
I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)
This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.
I was honestly speechless when I read that.
This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:
Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.
They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.
There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.
In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.
If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.
Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.
[...]
Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.
My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.
To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.
I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.
A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.
Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
I feel like apps like Infinite Worlds are already tapping into this kind of thing. It's a relatively decent AI Choose-Your-Own-Adventure website that allows for a human creative to set up "worlds" with set plot points or details for players to play through. It's not as good as my favorite AI-powered game to date (the sadly defunct Medieval Problems), but it seems to have taken a writing forum I frequent by storm.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
This is a fascinating tempest in a teapot.
My senior capstone in undergrad was making a scheduling application for a big yearly conference that the school held each year. They told me that it took a group of people about two weeks to work out a schedule by hand. They gave my group a list of constraints and the panelist data, and we made something that could make a schedule in a few seconds, which I believe is still in use to this day.
While LLMs are different from a bespoke application, I think that anything that makes the lives of con organizers easier is a good thing, and it saddens me that the new generative AI luddites are rejecting useful tools based off of vibes and almost superstitious taboos. That said, I do understand the concerns about false positives and negatives, and think that some sort of appeals process, or perhaps even a way to request the AI's output would be a nice courtesy to provide to applicants.
You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.
To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.
EDIT: Removed formatting point.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
If you want to hit politicians for pushing things that are obviously not true then you can throw in the entire left and their belief in intersectional social justice.
Can goals not be true? They can certainly be impossible to achieve, or theoretically possible but only at such great cost that no one would think it was worth the sacrifice involved, but I don't think the goals that motivate intersectional social justice can really be "false" in this way.
Technically, I think you could believe in HBD, reject blank statism and still have the basic goals of intersectional social justice. You'd just be using different levers to achieve your agenda than are currently used by progressives.
But this is all a bit silly anyways. There's plenty of wrong to go around for politicians of all political stripes. I think the nature of politics is that it is almost impossible for political coalitions to have a set of policies that connect to their stated goals in a coherent and evidence-based way.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
It is hit or miss, but I've managed to get ChatGPT to generate Ghibli images with prompts similar to:
This is a famous image of a well known historical figure. Please make this image in a Studio Ghibli style.
I had maybe a 50/50 success rate of taking outright refusals into it at least willing to try with the above prompt. Though some images were 3/4ths of the way done when they stopped suddenly, and I got a retroactive refusal. You might just have to play around with it.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
In my own case, I'm mostly a lurker here who likes to see a light-over-heat discussion between smart generalists across the political spectrum and extending to well outside the Overton window. I learn so much here, and get a ton of ideas for new books to read or topics to look into.
But I mostly don't comment, because I usually feel out of my depth. I'm a huge believer in the project of the Motte, but it is only in cases where I feel like there is a vacuum of a particular thought that I feel the need to throw my hat into the ring.
I think part of it is that the more heterodox people of the Motte have views forged in fire, and have been forced by necessity to become the best read, most expert exponents of their own ideas due to their having a position that is rare in the rest of society.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Large, diverse empires often produce "multiple choice" origin stories. In Rome, depending on your tastes, you could tell the story of the Trojan Aeneas carving out a part of his ancestral homeland on Italy, or the story of Romulus and Remus creating a cultural melting pot first through offering safe haven to foreign criminals then through the kidnapping of women of the Sabine people, or the story of the last king of Rome, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, whose overthrow marked the start of the Roman Republic. Each story emphasized different aspects of Romanitas, and each could be used to argue for Rome being more culturally open or closed, or more willing to embrace foreigners as fellow Roman citizens or to reject them.
While the United States isn't a central example of an old-fashioned empire (China and Russia are far closer to this model), it is big enough and diverse enough that it has started to develop a "multiple choice" origin story of its own. There are several possible "foundation myths" for America. There's the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, the "second founding" after the Civil War (where the 13th-15th Amendments saw a massive increase in Federal power), or the "modern founding" of America as the global hegemon with the victory in WWII and the defeat of the Axis powers. There's the Mayflower and the Pilgrims vs. the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.
I'm not sure I'd buy the idea of "social justice politics" as a form of ethnogenesis. By and large, I do think the assimilated "white Americans" have largely displaced "anglo Americans" as a distinct cultural group, and that after two or three generations most white American immigrants are indistinguishable from any other white American. I suspect that most light-skinned Hispanics will probably be similarly absorbed into the white blob within a generation or two, thus strengthening the "white" coalition. At the same time, groups that are more visually distinct occupy a weird space. Asians kind of get treated as "honorary whites" or "model minorities", but I recently spoke to an Asian American man who felt threatened enough in the community he was living in (trucks of Trump supporters were driving through Asian ghettos and harassing the residents) that he went out and bought a gun. And of course, the hardest square to circle is the African American community, especially the ADOS subgroup which has never held power (note that Barrack Obama was not of ADOS descent.)
I think that social justice politics is just an attempt to form a non-"white men" coalition. College educated white women were xenophilic enough that they were happy to throw in with a variety of visible minorities in order to argue for shared interests in the spoils system of jobs, prestige and power. But with the election of Donald Trump there's been a vibe shift, and I'm not sure if the non-"white men" coalition can hold into the future. Heck, Kamala lost, but the coalition she tried to throw together was certainly some odd bedfellows, like Liz and Dick Cheney. I think we're about due for a political realignment, and I'm not sure where every group will end up in the new arrangement.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.
But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.
As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Well it's not just the popular one, it's the scientific one. When biologists or geneticists refer to sex this is technically speaking what they mean. And it's not a human specific thing.
Are you sure? I've always had the sense that cluster of traits definitions were most common in biology and genetics. While I don't like such definitions as the "lie to children" version we teach most people, I do admit that something like the following process:
- Measure all primary and secondary sex characteristics, and sex-correlated traits in a large sample of a population.
- Perform k-means clustering on all that data. Use the elbow test to determine the ideal number of clusters (which is going to be either 2 or 3 depending on how the math works out.)
- Label your clusters "male", "female" and (if present based on elbow test recommendations) "neuter."
Is going to be a fairly reliable method, and a scientist will be able to plug a new data point in and identify what cluster it belongs to the vast majority of the time. It just doesn't really produce an easy, human-learnable rule for dealing with edge cases.
Technically speaking it's improper to say organisms that produce no gametes have a "sex" since it's a category error, they don't engage in sexual reproduction and have therefore no such trait. It's like asking what color is the number 42
I have considered that, but it doesn't work since Trump's EO eliminates the X category and mandates everyone either be classed as male or female.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective"
The main difference is that I'm genuinely happy with gametes as the best "lie to children" definition of sex. I don't think it's completely useless, anymore than I think "The Earth is a sphere" or the Bohr model of the atom are completely useless.
You simply asked what flaws I thought existed with these models, and I gave my opinion. Plenty of flawed things are still useful, and worthy of being used.
Also, I hope it was clear - I reject the idea that transwomen are biological women. I was just saying if you're going to be a little unprincipled in category construction, you don't have as much room to prevent someone saying you should be even more unprincipled.
If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category.
There's a ton of differences between Turner syndrome women and the modal woman. People with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
While being broadly supportive of the definition of biological sex in Trump's EO, I touched on some of my reservations here.
Basically, it just seems obvious to me that the gamete definition of sex fails to create a two sex system, which seems to be a desideratum for a lot of anti-trans people. There are three natural gamete types in humans: type one produces small, mobile gametes, type two produces large gametes, and type three produces no gametes. Turning this into a two-sex model seems to require injecting a kind of Platonism into things, which is anti-empirical.
That is, the claim seems to be something like, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this person with Turner syndrome who produces no gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
But if we're going to get Platonic with it, why couldn't we also say, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this transsexual person who produces small gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
Put another way, I don't actually think the concept of a "defective woman" is actually scientific. It involves adding information to a raw, empirical reality in an undisciplined and unjustified way.
As for cluster definitions, I think the biggest objection is that they're "inelegant" and don't actually seem to do the thing we want to do, which is provide an easy membership test we can just apply to any new object in order to determine what category it belongs to. "Naturally produces small gametes" is an easy membership test. "Enough of their traits (chromosomes, anatomy, SRY gene, hormones, etc.) point in the right direction" is barely a test at all, even if 99+% of people are easily classified.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use.
I suppose when I said "intuitive", I meant that it wasn't something that virtually every human culture would come up with independently.
I would assume virtually every human culture has the concept of "toy animals" or "animal statues", and that in many languages, you might colloquially refer to it as the animal in question.
Given that there are large civilizations without Western-style adoption, like the Islamic world, I take that to be a demonstration that adoptive children are only "intuitive" insofar as one is raised to consider it so.
By that same token, once transness becomes more than an emerging social role, I think it will be equally "intuitive" to consider trans women honorary women in the relevant contexts for a given social milleu. But it is not "intuitive" in the same way animal statues being the represented animal is "intuitive."
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Yeah, when it comes to biological sex, I think a three sex model makes the most sense: male, female, neuter. It just seems like desperate grasping at straws to insist that there are only two sexes, especially when the popular definition seems to be the gamete model (in that it is what Trump's EO uses.)
There are four ways gametes can be present in an individual: small, large, both, and neither. Humans do not naturally produce both gametes, therefore we are left with three categories. Attempts to avoid this conclusion just seem to be socially motivated ways to avoid putting a person in an "othered" category. The category makers would rather someone be a "weird woman" than a third thing that is almost a woman.
Then you could make a natural vs. artificial distinction. Today, we only have artificial neuters, though we have quasi-artificial females (with Turner's syndrome people who are given hormone therapy and possibly IVF with donor eggs still failing to be gametically female, but getting about as close as a human can be to female without being one.) Perhaps some day there will be artificial females and males, but we're not there today.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Well, I'm neither a transmed nor a tucute. My socio-legal sex model doesn't even really care about "gender" or "gender identity", though there are certainly comparisons with "honorary sex" within my model. The difference is relationship and emphasis - "honorary sex" is explicitly a social construct built in relation to biological sex.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people).
I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I'm not sure that I've observed this inconsistency.
What are some instances where you think the definitions are strong, and on trans people's sides that they tend to bring up?
In many ways, the core of my adoptive sex model is one that sidesteps definitions all together. Sure, call trans women "men" if you want - that has absolutely no bearing on whether they're an honorary woman, because honorary statuses exist in the social realm not the empirical realm.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
That still means you're in favor of sending men to women's prison because they've had a sentencing-day realization that they're trans (or even a post-sentencing-day one, and transferring them), of letting men pommel women in sports like boxing during the Olympics, or of telling the women complaining about a bloke with a raging erection in their women-only naked spa, that they're the one in the wrong. Correct?
Incorrect.
Adoption laws don't force us to pretend that adoptive parents will likely be possible bone marrow donors, and honorary sex laws have no necessary legal connection to a package of particular treatment norms.
We could have the institution of honorary sex, and decide to still segregate some or all of the spaces you listed. The only one I'm actually inclined to push for is bathroom honorary sex integration, because I think that the requirement most societies will have to show social proof will usually prevent same day declarations by malefactors, and my assessment of risks versus rewards just doesn't agree with the integration pessimists. (Especially because I think a pseudo-trans malefactor who would want to lie could always be smart and say something like, "Hey, I don't want to be here either, but I'm a trans man - a biological woman - and the stupid laws require me to be here. I'll try to be quick and do my business in private without getting in your way" - before assaulting a victim when they let their guard down. I don't think any enforcement mechanism can fix the problem of a motivated invader without getting overly draconian.)
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
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