vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
I mean, the the logistics of this fantasy scenario are hard to imagine. Is a genie just snapping their fingers here, or do we actually have to think about the logistics of how a society could sustainably keep Culture A with Economic System B, given some starting point close to contemporary American politics?
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.
The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?
I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Jumping up and down on the “defect” button is not the kind of humanity I appreciate.
How is this more defect button than Trump pardoning the Blackwater massacerers? I think killing 14 civillians is bad, and I don't want private security firms representing America to do that on the world stage. I definitely don't want the world to get the message, "we'll accept any level of misconduct, and the perpetrators won't even face a tiny amount of justice."
I don't think Joe Biden should have lied about pardoning his son, and if Joe himself was personally involved in corrupt dealings, I want all of that information set before the American people. However, I don't think the mere act of pardoning his son is a bad thing. It is only bad if Joe Biden was personally involved in corrupt dealings, and is now pardoning his son so that Joe's connections are never made public.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
As president of the United States, JB's duty is to uphold said institutions. As a leader, he's meant to set a moral example for other citizens. Perhaps following his example is most prudent in the present day, but I wouldn't call it moral by any means.
Do presidents try to be moral exemplars any more? I can't think of a president in my lifetime who I've looked up to as a true paragon of morality. Most of them haven't been openly and brazenly corrupt either (at least not in ways that are illegal in the US), but I can't recall thinking even once, "Gee, so-and-so is just the most morally upright and saintly human being I've ever seen. I'm truly glad such a virtuous person represents America to the world."
The Renaisance Humanists might have believed that virtue confers the moral legitimacy to be a ruler, but I feel like modern representative democracies haven't believed that in practice for a long time.
I would build out the model as something like: If there is a genuinely good woke video game with solid mechanics and few competitors, most anti-woke people will still buy them.
I think most slop isn't bought by non-woke normies, let alone wokies themselves. The question is whether "it's woke" is being advanced as the whole reason for the game's marketability, or is just a big part of the story.
Though arguable, video games are already one of the most gender egalitarian artistic mediums. Plenty of strategy games like XCOM make no distinction between male units or female units, and there's plenty of Amazonian protagonists in the medium.
While Japan is an entertainment superpower, and mostly doesn't make woke games, I don't think it's that strange that people want non-woke stuff from American studios. It's not like telling people that India is making a bunch of awesome action movies that aren't woke will suddenly make them feel good about the fact that Star Wars has a Mary Sue as the main character. (Though seriously, people should check out some good South Indian movies like RRR, Karnan or Baahubali. Some of my favorite movies of recent vintage, and very trad.)
vorpa-glavo
9d ago
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs?
I think the problem with any endeavor like this is that you end up with the "Christian music sucks" effect. You're hiring from a smaller talent pool, and so the works that get created are going to be, on average, of worse quality, and if a work gets too preachy it can be a turn off to some people.
Just as I'm sure there's not many non-Christians earnestly watching "God's not Dead", I assume that most non-anti-woke people wouldn't line up for an explicity anti-woke game.
vorpa-glavo
9d ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.
Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.
Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
I just think the picture is at a bad angle. In this picture, Aloy looks fine. She's not a supermodel or anything, but she looks like a woman.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the object level discussion of Aloy, but I think her having peach fuzz is a defensible choice. In our world, there are products to remove such hair. But Aloy is living in a post-apocalyptic world in 3040, isn't she? It's not hard to believe at all that grooming habits have changed, and women with peach fuzz just leave it as is.
Honestly, this kind of thing is something that takes me out of a lot of media. While we know that the Romans were big about hair removal, we also know plenty of ancient societies that weren't, and it's always strange to see "cave man" media where the women look like they stepped out of a modern Instagram photo, with shaved legs and armpits. I think a lot of creators across time have been cowards, unwilling to contend with the fact that humans are all, men and women, hairy apes.
While I think this is true to an extent, I have also noticed the people just seem to be defensive when they meet someone who doesn't engage in the same "vices" as them. I don't drink alcohol, and I'm not pushy about it. But I've had several encounters where someone offers me a drink, I politely decline, and then the tone of the interaction completely changes. I think there's something about seeing someone who is "pure" that makes some people act a little crazy in the moment, though I've never understood it - especially since I try very hard not to be santimonious about my temperance.
It has happend to me often enough that I've always wondered if half of the "pushy vegan" stories aren't just ordinary vegans who get read as "pushy" because of the emotions a person goes through meeting such a person. (My theory for the other half is that I think highly scrupulous people are probably neurodivergent in some way, and are more likely to be vegan/etc. Neurodivergent people aren't always known for their social graces, so I think those people might be clumsily pushy vegans as a result.)
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
No, for. My position is that freedom sometimes makes people worse off, but in the vast majority of such cases we should still let people be free and have the bad outcome.
To tie it back to the trans issue. I would be okay with the government banning kids from transitioning, but against the government preventing adults from transitioning - even if reliable information emerged that medical transition lead to worse outcomes than the alternative. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves, allowed to cut off their breasts, and be prepared to face all consequences of it.
This is also why I favor tattoos and piercing being legal, even if I personally dislike them and suspect they have long term effects on employability and life outcomes.
In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.
As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.
I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.
I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)
I doubt very much that she would be consoled if said male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm not a rapist!"
As an aside, you reminded me of a lecture I once listened to about the brilliance of Odysseus' first words to Nausicaa after washing up on the beach naked.
He's an older male addressing a young girl, and he can't say something like, "Don't worry, I won't rape you," since that will just make her more worried by bringing the possibility out in the open. So instead he says, "I beseech thee, O queen,—a goddess art thou, or art thou mortal? If thou art a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, do I liken thee most nearly in comeliness and in stature and in form."
This immediately does a few things:
- It puts him in a subservient position, as he is speaking respectfully to a superior.
- Comparing her to a goddess is a compliment, but comparing her to Artemis, a virgin goddess with stories of punishing men who try to see her naked, puts Nausicaa more at ease without having to say that he won't rape her directly.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
My preferred standard is based on legal status, not mere identification. That's what stops your "just long enough self-ID" hypothetical scenario.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Fair enough, my mental model was not that trans women are perfect little angels who never do anything wrong ever. (Though investigating one of your second link's cases at random showed that the assailant, Hannah Tubbs, hadn't transitioned until after the assault. So it's not exactly a central case of what I argue for - which is legal sex seggregation, not self-ID or biological sex.)
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing. The problem seems to be more a function of having a semi-private space, than anything involving society leaving specific openings. I would be against turning every bathroom into a Panopticon, even if it would make people safer, and I would be against banning fathers from using changing tables in the women's restroom if they need to. Why would I be against trans women in women's bathrooms?
I don't think it nudges women's safety much in either direction.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Why do you think we even have "man" and "woman" as a legal category? I never got the impression they're a permission to perform masculinity / femininity the way a driver's license is a permission to drive, or an arbitrary badge of honor like knighthood in the UK.
I think we do it for similar reasons to why we track whether people are married, whether they've adopted a child, etc. Because it gives the otherwise blind goverment a way to see what's happening with its citizens.
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously. The best case I've seen people come up with is that one high school bathroom assault, and that involved a couple who had met up for consensual trysts several times in the same bathroom. To put it bluntly, no woman who is afraid of this sort of thing seriously fears that it will be someone they knowingly meet up with for sex that will assault them when they change their mind and say "no" this time.
I'm about as okay with trans women using the women's restroom, as I am with fathers using the women's restroom to change their baby's diaper when there is only a changing table in the women's bathroom. Both cases involve biological men in women's restrooms, and both have plausible ways they could be abused (men using realistic baby dolls, or men cross-dressing), but I don't think any of that kind of thinking is necessary. If women are vulnerable in restrooms, then men will use whatever attack vector society leaves open. On the marigin, I don't think anti-trans bathroom bills make women safer.
And besides, the object level question in this case is "should congresswoman Sarah McBride be allowed to use the women's restroom?", and I think it is reasonable to answer, "She should have the same right that an XY androgen-insensitve cis woman should have to use the restroom, based on the government's tracking of her as a woman." Certainly, I don't think anyone's fears that Sarah McBride would sexually assault someone in the bathroom are super justified.
This argument worked great.... right up until the point that the issue gained more prominence and people got a good look at what trans men actually look like, rather than when they're photographed or filmed from flattering angles and favorable lighting. The majority look like manlets, have a funny voice, and distinctly feminine mannerisms, they might pass as a gay man on a good day.
To your question - unironically yes, even with non-zero amount of transmen passing convincingly IRL, I think fewer women would end up uncomfortable with trans men in women's bathroom, than with trans women in women's bathrooms. Especially when everyone is aware the law only allows females to use them, and a male would be penalized for trying to slip in, if caught.
I just don't see it. We're talking about the kind of hysterical women who would answer "bear" to the infamous "Would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods?" I think even a manlet would trigger such women. Or do you think their answers would change if the questions was changed to, "Would you rather meet a 5' 4'' man or a bear in the woods?"
I think there is also the problem that there are far more "mannish" biological women than there are either trans men or trans women. I don't pretend to have any way to independently verify it, but this is an example of a story about a butch lesbian getting negative confrontations from her use of the women's toilet. I'm not sure how policing bathrooms in this way doesn't end up harming "ugly" women and non-gender conforming women, which seems to go against the stated goal of helping women.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
- Bathroom 1: For men, trans women, trans men, and any iffy dykes who freak the chicks out.
- Bathroom 2: For feminine women
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
vorpa-glavo
19d ago
While their language could have been more clear, I read OP as using "stupid" as a gloss for "without college degree." Obviously there are the kinds of people Taleb calls "intellectuals yet idiots", but I don't think that's who OP had in mind.
vorpa-glavo
25d ago
I mean, they are capable of "solving" novel problems not in their initial data. The problems just have to have the same "shape" as problems already in their training data.
And certain kinds of "language" type problems can be solved purely on the basis of the LLM's "knowledge" of English. Those problems aren't necessarily super hard for a human to do, but could save time on tasks like that.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I mean, Homer rambled.
Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Could someone point me to good resources to better familiarize myself with the facts around the Israel Palestine conflict?
What are the best arguments on the side of those who are pro- and anti-Israel?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation.
Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?
"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."
Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.
But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?
Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?
But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?
I'm not talking about STEM. I'm talking about all of college and technical/trade schools.
If the people want to resist your lawful efforts to change the culture, how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree? Like, how do you actually put the genie back in the bottle here?
How do you stop people from creating samizdat, and passing down trades within their familes and a dozen other things that people who remember the old regime will want to do?
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