vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The amount of justification going on to protect the fuckwits on the school board is amazing. Victim-blaming the girl, blaming everyone except the activist group that exerted pressure on the school board to introduce such policies.
Don't project opinions onto me. I already said that the school acted in an irresponsible way. I agree that schools with better policies would not have had a second or third victim after this.
I don't really blame the girl for what happened. Obviously, the moment she ended their relationship, the assailant should have accepted it with grace and left her alone. However, I also don't think it is advisable for teenage girls to have sex with guys in school bathrooms, and while "he might take it badly when you end things" isn't the first item on my list of reasons why, it could certainly serve as one pragmatic reason why.
Hey, it was Trans Day of Remembrance recently when the list of "look at all the trans people who got murdered!" is regularly produced. By your logic, it was all their own fault for being murdered, yes? I mean, if a lot of them were sex workers or had fuck buddies, yeah? "Arranging meetings with long-term sexual partners" is their own fault!
Again, you assume too much of me. I don't victim blame, but I do accept pragmatically (not morally) that trans sex workers being at higher risk of being murdered is not the same thing as trans people in general being at higher risk of being murdered. I would prefer no one get murdered, period. But if people in risky professions get murdered, it is probably a sign that we should arrange society in such a way that either people don't feel compelled to go into those risky professions, or we limit the harm as far as possible of people entering those risky professions.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
But back then so was "homosexual" and some of the latter were also the former or just them saw them as fellows-in-oppression.
Sure, but it's not that surprising is it?
If society tells you being a gay man is the most horrible, disgusting moral failing a person can have, and then you happen to be gay and you become conscious of the fact that it's not actually all that strange or uncommon, I think one is going to be more likely to also question the rest of society's opinions on sexual matters.
I still think it was probably the case that the vast majority of gay men were not trying to "turn children gay", though a lifetime of repression might lead to a desperate man to sexually abuse minors at the margins. That seems to be at least some of what is happening with priest scandals in the Catholic church (the other elements of course being the position of respect occupied by a priest, and the church's desire to sweep things under the rug, rather than expose them to the light of the sun.)
There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy.
Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.
We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.
I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.
I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.
We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.
I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.
In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.
I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.
All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)
This is just silly. If you're saying you wouldn't look down on the other side for getting down in the mud with their opponents that's one thing, but I think setting things up so that if Side A suppresses even a single voter-relevant news story, then that gives Side B full moral license to claim actual election fraud without evidence or to make up conspiracy theories, then I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Modern Greeks are actually descended from ancient Greeks and so you promoted here nationalist propaganda against various ethnic groups.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on this point. It doesn't fundamentally undermine my position that nations are artificial.
So in a very real sense we can see that the the nations you primarilly focused upon which were european nations are fake. Not whether all ethnic groups are fake. But much more so the real issue in regards to influential organizations that pretend indigenous europeans are not indigenous.
I considered including a few paragraphs on things like Hindutva in India, and the erosion of diverse languages and cultural groups in Indonesia, but I didn't think it was necessary.
My basic opinion is that humans are social primates with hardware designed for groups of ~150 individuals. Using this hardware, we've managed to create social technologies that allow for greater numbers to be part of organized wholes: religions, nations, etc. Really, it's remarkable that we've been able to create social technologies that allow millions or billions of humans to work together. Whatever else you might say about the current capitalist world order - its ability to coordinate the actions of billions of humans is truly remarkable.
Nations being a social technology does mean that they're "fake" - we did have to invent them. I don't deny the existence of "clans" or "extended families", but I do think once you've reached a certain size it is only ideology and centralization of power that allows us to conceptualize such things as "Han", "Yamato", "French" or "Mexican."
htps://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/137944?context=8#context
Yourself have said in regards to a mod race swapping from non white to white:
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
So you are willing to think a sinister motive for race swapping in general when it is from non white to white but not for the opposite.
There is no contradiction between what I said there, and what I am saying now. I was then and am now in favor of people making and using mods for video games of any kind.
My post there was descriptive, not prescriptive. I was saying that media habits that become public are subject to public scrutiny. This is undoubtedly true. I said nothing about myself attributing "sinister motives" to other people either way. People's private "vices" are their own business.
Even if there were unabashedly white supremacist mods being made, they don't seem to have lead to any real world harm, and so I don't see a need to prioritize them as an issue.
It is bothersome that you dodged in your support of race swapping the issue of discrimination, and how race swapping involves a heavy dose of a choice to discriminate against whites for blacks.
Anti-identitarianism can be seen as the genuine and not motte and bailey, only if it promoted to begin with in a manner that disrespects the progressive sacred cows too
I apologize if I've misread you, but I don't think you've understood where I'm coming from. My entry point into this topic is much more tied up in my aesthetic philosophy than any pro- or anti-identitarian sentiment.
I didn't omit discrimination in my argument because it somehow escaped my notice as a possible motivation for race swapping. I omitted it because it is completely immaterial to my reasons for supporting the creation of new artistic expression inspired by what has come before.
I'm fully in favor of roasting progressive sacred cows as well, if that is something someone wants to do. Nothing I said implied I wasn't, and I have consistently maintained that I would be in support of things like white Othello or white John Henry when pressed.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
I don't think I argued anywhere that the best tie breaker for money categorization is morphology.
Different categories have different kinds of resemblance binding them together.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.
In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")
Oh is this why you have been conflating reality and illusions and willfully blurring the distinctions?
I haven't been doing that. I've been arguing something more along the lines of The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for Categories.
I make a sharp distinction between categories that more-or-less cut reality at the joints (like "dog", "male", "water") and man-made categories (like "science fiction", "pop music", "president", "American", "goth", etc.) Like you, I don't believe that I have a redneg identity. I'm fully on board with calling all man-made categories "illusions" or "folklore" if you want. What I have objected to in your presentation of your position is the fact that you seem to believe that redneg identity is different from other man-made categories or illusions. I don't actually think it's all that special - it's just more salient because of the modern political climate.
You brought up religion, and that is a good example of what I mean. I'm an atheist. I don't really have a "religious identity" as an atheist - I know that I don't believe in God, but it's much less of a "thing" than being a Christian or Jew would be, because those two identities involve positive beliefs, social groups, traditions, etc. However, I've evolved from being the New Atheist I once was, and have grown to have a much greater appreciation of the power of religion to act as a social glue to hold communities together. Books like "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" and the concept of metis and signalling have helped me to appreciate the role that religion can have in a life, and how useful it can be to maintaining order and trust in society.
If you re-read what I have written throughout this thread, I think you will find that I've never said that man-made categories are "real" - I've always used words like "useful", "important", etc. And I do believe that they can be those things in certain circumstances. I have nowhere conflated real and non-real things, nor have I blurred distinctions between the real and the socially useful.
Maybe redneg identity isn't useful to you. In the same way a Jewish identity isn't useful to me because I'm not ethnically or religiously Jewish. But it would be silly to say that just because Judaism is made up (as I believe all religions are), that it's not an important part of many Jewish people's lives, and hasn't helped them stay together as a community for more than 3000 years. So too, I don't think we can discount that redneg identity is important to a number of snart people - I have seen first hand the community and joy in the snart community, and in the same way I can "justify" religious mutilation like circumcision through the lens of it being a form of expensive signalling, I think I can "justify" snart medical treatments in part as something that might help a person belong to the queer community (even apart from the possibility that it might alleviate psychological discomfort in some snart people.)
The problem I had with you calling redneg a "religion" is that I think that by that standard almost every man-made social category is a "religion." Sure, not every social group demands that you believe impossible absurdities, but plenty of them ask you to believe social facts that aren't part of material reality, like "there is a country called America, and its borders end here" or "100 cents equals a dollar" - facts that we made up, and which could have been otherwise if history had taken a different turn. India made up the concept of a caste system, Britain made up the idea of the British royal family, etc., etc. I think the main difference between you and I, is that I think these kinds of social fictions are extremely common, and "redneg ideology" isn't even a particularly strange or unusual example. The belief that "I was born a man, but I'm actually a namow" is no more absurd to me than "I have no biological relationship to this child, but I want to take care of them and be treated as their parent in all circumstances - please call me their 'adoptive father' or just 'father' for short."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I alluded to all of your Hebrew Bible references when I said:
There are certainly Old Testament references forbidding the use of castrated animals in sacrifices, preventing castrated sons of Aaron from serving as priests, and castrated Jews from entering the temple
but while all of those frame castration as ritually unclean, none of that outright comes out and says that castration is forbidden. I understand that Jewish commentary and oral tradition have interpreted these as a prohibition on castration, but none of that matters in a Christian context, which is where /u/sliders1234 was coming from. Castration also doesn't feature in the 7 Noahide Laws, as far as I can tell, Jewish law has nothing at all to say about Gentiles castrating other Gentiles.
Think this is simple. Trans people go to hell unless they repent. It’s not something in gods image but a perversion.
What particular kind of soteriology do you subscribe to here? Do you believe any Christian goes to hell for any unrepented-for sins, or do you just think that being openly trans is a mortal sin that destines one for Hell if one does not repent (as opposed to a venial sin that does not)?
I'm curious how you think being created in God's image relates to sex. What does it mean for a female human to be made in the image of a masculine God? I know that the Holy Spirit is grammatically feminine in Hebrew (though neuter in Greek), and there are a few feminine metaphors for God peppered throughout the Bible, but isn't God usually a "He"?
God didn’t create half men half women.
Sure, but isn't it a Christian belief that many of the natural "evils" of the world are a result of original sin, without being themselves sinful? Just because there was no cancer in Eden, doesn't mean that a person getting cancer is sinful.
Why you do you think that medically and socially transitioning as a trans person is more like theft than cancer?
And how do you square all of this with the many references to eunuchs and their place in society in the Old and New Testament? It seems like it is fully possible for a eunuch to be a faithful follower of Christ, and wouldn't trans people arguably belong to that category?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.
I feel like that example is only useless because Ancient Rome doesn't exist anymore. It's very relevant to American women who might travel to the Middle East how females are treated in those societies. The bigger problem is that, since most people never get the opportunity to travel, they never get the chance to see how people are categorically treated in different cultures. It's information they can only gather second hand.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
If someone obviously trans goes into the wrong bathroom, question them, and maybe Benny Butch can suck it up and deal with it because everyone else’s right to be normal comes before your right to be weird.
Does deputizing everyone to become informal bathroom police really make anyone safer? This just seems like a further realization of Freddie deBoer's Planet of Cops - another instance of the dictatorless dystopia where people are the wardens of their own prisons.
I don't think a lot of people will find your solution to butch women very satisfying either. And besides butch women, there's going to be the issue of naturally "masculine"-looking women. In your model the butch women are choosing to be "weird" and thus asking for it, but what about the unusually tall women, the ones with naturally square jaws, the ones with hirsutism? Those women aren't choosing to be weird, and they almost certainly outnumber transwomen by a significant margin. Do you really think that this is the best of all possible systems for keeping cis women safe, if it involves throwing a lot of innocent ciswoman victims under the bus, and telling them to just "suck it up" because they were cursed to look unconventional?
If Caitlyn Jenner gets away with using the wrong bathroom, oh well, worse things have happened, but if ‘she’ shows ‘her’ penis off in the woman’s locker room that’s a much bigger deal that can be dealt with when the women report it.
Why can't we just strengthen anti-harassment laws, and create institutional commitments to enforcing policies that keep women safe without trading off against other things?
I'm not aware of an epidemic of trans people harassing women in bathrooms. Even the much celebrated Loudon school case doesn't really suggest a trans exclusionist approach. The girl and boy were long-time sexual partners, and they had arranged to meet in the school bathroom for hook ups on several occasions. On the day of the incident, they had arranged to meet up again, but this time the girl wanted to cut things off, the boy didn't take kindly to her rejection and raped her. "Raped by a trans person I invited to meet with me in the bathroom, to tell them our bathroom hook ups are off" is hardly the typical example of what people fear when they imagine a trans woman invading women's spaces.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Admittedly, that line makes more sense in a permissive regime with medical transition for minors than the example set of a settlement I put together. Trans girls would possibly still dominate high school athletics after medical transition, but it would be a much closer competition, and it at least wouldn't be dangerous.
The main thing I wanted to highlight was that a negotiated settlement could treat each hot button issue separately. There's no need to for a maximally inclusive approach, if we have good reasons for splitting things up differently.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The trans camp wants full social acknowledgement of their described reality, even the phrase "merely for being trans" falls apart if you don't agree that this is a thing someone can really be. It concedes the entire frame of the condition being a real thing, and any formulation that doesn't concede this would be unacceptable to the trans camp.
You don't need to make it with reference to the condition - but to the legal status of being an adoptive man/woman.
That way, you can capture anti-trans discrimination either on the basis of natal sex, or legal sex. If an employer wouldn't fire someone for wearing a dress if they were a natal woman, they can't fire them if they wear a dress and are a legal woman. Etc., etc.
No need to acknowledge or favor anyone's version of reality. The "objective" legal reality of a person's recorded status becomes the basis for the discrimination claim.
It's an unstable equilibrium, once the foot is in the door on this stuff it's only a matter of time before sympathetic enough case in sympathetic enough jurisdiction erodes all of these compromises, the question will be asked "well are they women or not" and if you're not able to say "no" then none of these guardrails will survive scrutiny and if you are then they won't be acceptable to the trans camp.
I maintain it's only unstable because it is new. If the legislators craft a good enough foundation, there will be very little room for worrying about corner cases.
There is a debate now because the trans side is trying to frame it as all or nothing, but we can deal with things on an issue-by-issue basis or kick the issue to private groups or individuals to decide for themselves how they want to deal with things.
I think if the Federal government sets an example with how public schools and government buildings will be handled, as well as protecting against (at least) employment and housing discrimination, then we can leave it to states or private individuals to decide whether to have more protections than that. California and other Blue States could protect more, and more conservative states could be more restrictive anywhere not already covered by the Federal level.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I'm not sure I agree that any amount of biting bullets is necessary for the "socially/legally adopted sex" model to function. All that's required is clearly spelled out legal/social policy about where adopted sex matters, and where it does not.
The state could decide important things that need to be decided like what locker room an adoptive woman uses, how anti-discrimination laws will be interpreted re:adoptive sex, or which sports teams they will play on at the high school level in public schools, and then everything else could be left to private organizations to sort out. So for independent sporting bodies for adult athletics, they could all decide on a sport-by-sport or organization-by-organization basis whether it makes sense to group by adoptive sex or natal sex.
The solution lets everyone use their judgement outside of a small group of top-down decisions that remove any confusion for any involved.
I think the bathroom issue is one where, as a practical matter, enforcing a trans bathroom ban is too difficult. It would be much easier to allow people to use the bathroom or locker room of their adoptive sex, and then just make stricter rules about harassment and unacceptable behaviors in bathrooms. With sufficiently strict and well-publicized enforcement, I think it's the best compromise between privacy, safety and accommodation.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Does anyone know any secular alternatives to mantra meditation besides Acem, Benson's Relaxation Response, the Respiratory One Method (ROM), or Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM)?
I recently attended a few Hare Krishna kirtans, and greatly enjoyed them, but as an atheist, I'm fairly convinced that what's happening is psychological not religious. I don't want to go too much deeper with ISKCON, and I was curious if there are any good generators for fake mantras consisting of nonsense words and syllables that work well for the dance-style mantra meditation they use? Or, barring that, repetitive songs consisting of nonsense words that could serve as the basis for such meditation?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Were it just "I'm so rich I can have the real Mona Lisa hanging on my wall", then he'd be no better than any of the rich assholes who buy great art and stick it in a vault because it's an investment that will appreciate over time until they can sell it on for a higher price than they paid for it.
While I agree that Miles Bron did value the Mona Lisa for sympathetic reasons, the ultimate reason it is destroyed is because of his own selfishness. He created the back-door to the Mona Lisa's security system just so he could look at it without glass, he put the Mona Lisa into a giant compound that was one accident away from going up in flames. What if he had the Glass Onion in normal operation mode with 50 people, and he decided to look at the Mona Lisa without glass just as a cook starts an oil fire in the kitchen? He put the Mona Lisa into an inherently risky situation in the first place, and it blew up in his face (literally) because of that.
While I do think there is something a bit dubious in destroying an important cultural artifact as an act of revenge against an otherwise untouchable murderer, I think the fact that the destruction is only possible because of said murderer's own selfishness and hubris is an important point.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Would you be willing to expand on your thoughts on the second one for me? I'm curious what you feel the evidence for your position is.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The Log Cabin Republicans were not representative of the gay community, because they were on board with the Republican Party platform.
I think I might have been mixing up the Log Cabin Republicans and The Lincoln Project in my head. It was some group that at some point here on the Motte, I saw someone say something to the effect of, "if you model them as Democrats trying to sabotage the the Republican party from the inside, you'll rarely be wrong about how they'll act in a particular situation."
It's completely reasonable for gay people to say "we have nothing in common with those guys, except for our sexuality".
I agree that it is completely reasonable for gay people to say that.
Well, the problem is that they were. So not only there seem to be bad apples in the education system, the moderation of Big Tech platforms seems to be heavily influenced by some sort of pro-bad-apple club, making it even more important to point them out, in my opinion.
By all means point it out. I'm hardly a fan of the way many Big Tech platforms handle dissident speech.
I do also think there are different levels of "cancellation" and different amounts of blame groups that try to cancel as a result. If 5 people complain and your boss fires you for a dissident opinion expressed outside of work, then only 6 people should have the blame. If a million people on Twitter report your account, and Twitter moderation finally gets around to banning your account for a dissident opinion you expressed, then that is more reasonable to consider the responsibility of a larger group of people, and a system that enables their complaints to drown out people making points.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
About what we saw until the 2010's?
That's fascinating to me.
On one hand, I definitely think that things like prison sexuality, bacha bazi and ancient Greece prove the idea that sexual behavior is partially a product of societal conditioning and material conditions. But I don't know how much that implies actual differences in people's underlying dispositions towards sex. If the story society tells is one where homosexuality is a moral failing, does this make a bunch of closeted gay guys, does it cause would-be bisexuals to bury their feeling so deep that they never act on them? Or can it actually affect a person's sexuality at the margins?
If there's been an increase of self-identified LGB people over the last 40 years, I think it's probably best explained by increasing societal acceptance, and perhaps some malingering from people claiming to be "bi" for social credit. However, I admit I don't know what to think of the T side of things. I suspect that the existence of HRT and other medical interventions does make the options look more attractive, but it's hard to say what that means in practice. More people in the modern world also get boob jobs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people wouldn't have been getting boob jobs through out all of human history if they had been available. They just happened to not be medically possible, so people used different methods like corsets and weird dresses to artificially create more feminine figures.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Can you define what you consider the defining characteristics of modern leftist grooming?
How malleable do you think sexual orientation and feelings of social and bodily dysphoria around sex roles are in children? If we lived in a society where the concepts of gay people were generally unknown, and the idea of being trans wasn't common knowledge - about what percent of grown adults do you think would naturally and spontaneously be gay or trans?
Do you think the Left doesn't honestly believe their "closeted" model of the situation? (That is, that some percentage of the population will irreparably be gay or trans no matter what shape society takes, and any rise in numbers results from closeted members feeling more comfortable coming out, and not an increase in number due to malleable youth mistakenly identifying as one of these things?) Or do you just believe that it doesn't matter if they honestly belief in the "closeted" model, because they are wrong as a matter of fact, and their belief is just a useful myth that keeps them recruiting for their in-group?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
While I agree with you that blurring the lines to conflate all LGBT+ education efforts and the direct sexual abuse of minors is irresponsible, and likely to lead to violence if taken seriously by the wrong person, do we actually know that his motivation had anything to do with this?
As far as I know, the police haven't made public any information about his motive, so all we can do is speculate over the exact origin of his hate. Remember that the claimed motivation for the Pulse nightclub shooting was supposedly in retaliation for US airstrikes against Iraq and Syria, but the shooter, Omar Mateen, had supposedly contracted AIDs from a Latino man and frequented gay bars himself. It's not clear to me that the Pulse night club shooting can be read as a straightforward act of hate against LGBT people, versus a very messy personal drama spilling out into the rest of society. How likely is it that Aldrich's motives in the recent Colorado shooting won't be a straightforward hate crime either?
Doesn't your view have a basic chicken and egg problem?
If being gay requires sexual experiences with another man to solidify, then wouldn't there have to be some first gay man who has sex with a handful of boys? In which case, what man seduced the first gay man and made him gay?
Also, if I understand you correctly, you seem to believe people can be "sexually confused" as youths, and then if a "sexually confused" guy has sex with another guy it might solidify their sexuality and make them gay. But, doesn't that make what you're calling "sexual confusion" basically the same thing as "bisexuality" or "gay" with extra steps? Why do "sexually confused" guys want to have sex with men in the first place, prior to the experience that solidifies their orientation?
Do you also believe that people aren't straight if they don't learn it from society, and from experiences in their youth?
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