vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.
If you organically learned that the only media your coworker had consumed in the last year was hardcore mermaid hentai, then that might color your opinion of your coworker, even if you were totally okay with harcore mermaid hentai. Similarly, if you learned your female coworker only consumed reality television, trashy romance novels and fan fiction for series she had never read or watched, you might not look at her the same way afterwards.
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.
It is a similar logic that leads me to oppose laws that mandate reporting to parents when a child expresses the possibility they have an LGBT identity. The foremost concern is the health and well being of the child in question and how disclosure of that information will impact them.
I don't know about legal mandates, but I feel like there should be a strong societal presumption in favor of telling a parent what's going on with their child, especially something massive like using new pronouns and nicknames while at school.
To me, it just seems like such a strange and unsustainable status quo to try and maintain. Are we really trying to keep major aspects of kids' lives secret from their parents, just so we can deceive the parents until they turn 18 and are able to fend for themselves? I can understand the idea of putting the needs of the child above those of the parents, but I don't get how we arrive at this as the most natural solution to the problem of, "If we tell the parents that their kid identifies as trans, the parent might freak out and do something drastic that isn't in the best interest of the child."
In fact, I think that "tearing the band-aid off" and just telling parents about trans children is the "safer" option for LGBT people on the whole. Anti-LGBT parents who might abandon or abuse their LGBT children are a tough problem to solve by government mandate, but I think a mildly anti-LGBT parent is much more likely to have a massive overreaction if they come in 6 months into their child's social transition, which has all happened behind their backs, than they would have if a teacher had reached out to them and said, "Hey, John goes by Jenny now, and prefers she/her, I thought you ought to know."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".
This is a very strange thing to say, because whatever else "wokeism" might be, it's not relativist. Wokeism has a very strong, dogmatic view of the world, and judges everyone and everything by its exacting standards. There's a reason people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are cancelled by woke puritans - they judge these complicated men by modern, woke standards and find them wanting.
I mean, as much as the stereotype is that wokeism treats Islam with kiddie gloves, or is happy to excuse anti-woke practices if they come from a minority culture or religious group, I actually think that's only a practical constraint for coalition building. If the woke have their way, then the only permissible forms of Islam will be those that have been reformed from the inside to be woke-friendly, and every indigenous culture will be turned into a hollow shell of their former selves that woke totally-not-colonialist propaganda forces them to be.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think an underlying issue is that for all that people try to propound the sex/gender distinction, I think pop gender theory is actually pretty bad about maintaining a strict distinction in all instances.
There's a proliferation of redundant terminology in modern English. For example:
-
Man, manly, masculine, male, virile, masc
-
Woman, womanly, feminine, female, femme
All of these words, to a first approximation are synonyms or derivations of the first word in their set (or that word in another language.) Sure, someone can try to carefully maintain that "masc" refers to ones clothing style and presentation, while "male" refers to your assigned sex at birth, and "man" refers to your social role. But I think the reality is that these all sort of blur together, and combined with the instinct to be nice to trans people, we end up in a place where a transwoman is a woman, a female, femme-presenting, etc. in a lot of people's vocabulary.
Recently, I put forward the word "signalment" as a word to refer to all of the medically relevant information about a person, including their assigned sex at birth, and their history of hormones and surgeries. I have no illusions that this will catch on. I've also considered solutions like "mating type", "gametic sex" or "chromosomal sex" - I think all of them could have their purposes, but I think at a basic level a lot of people just don't want to have a widely known method of referring to this idea.
I've even seen rants on Tumblr complaining about the fact that her cishet cousin had asked if someone was "assigned male or female at birth" - since she realized that now that this terminology had spread to normies, they were going to use it as a polite way of asking what sex a person "really was."
I think there will always be ways to try and refer to the trait transwomen and cismen have in common that differs with transmen and ciswomen, but it might just become a strange euphemism treadmill, where a word that would refer to the difference starts to just refer to the trans individuals in that category as well. The only phrases I think will remain immune are words like "sperm" and "ovum/egg" which will leave us in the weird, clinical space of referring to "individuals who naturally produce sperm" or something of that nature - functional, but very clunky.
Well, the final report of the Cass Review just dropped. It's getting coverage in mainstream publications like the BBC. Surprising no one who paid attention to the interim report, it concludes that there is insufficient evidence in the realm of trans healthcare for children:
Cass told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that clinicians had been worried about having "no guidance, no evidence, no training".
She said "we don't have good evidence" that puberty blockers are safe to use to "arrest puberty", adding that what started out as a clinical trial had been expanded to a wider group of young people before the results of that trial were available.
"It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that's been a particular problem that we haven't had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are," she said.
Critics are already jumping on the fact that the report used the GRADE approach to categorize evidence, which only allows randomized control studies to be classified as "high quality of evidence" and which can drop non-blinded studies one level in assessed quality, thus preventing many non-blinded studies from qualifying as high quality evidence. (Bold is edit added later. See ArjinFerman's response below, and my response - original GRADE standards can be found here.) The critics point out that double-blinded randomized control studies just aren't possible in some areas of medicine. For a simple example, if the intervention is something like "cosmetic breast augmentation", then there's logically no sensible control group - since there's no placebo that can make people believe they got bigger breasts when they didn't. (It's worth pointing out that this criticism of GRADE isn't unique to trans activists. The Wikipedia page for GRADE mentions it is criticized in general when it comes to slowly progressing diseases like atherosclerosis, where observational studies are easier to perform than RCTs.)
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
Understanding intended benefits and risks of puberty blockers
[...]
There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
My own opinion is that I can partially agree with Cass that I want to see higher quality studies around trans healthcare for children in general, but I think that her methodology (using GRADE) is of the sort that will always say we "don't have enough high quality studies", and so her arguments don't have legs to stand on. A problem I see a lot in studies is using some "industry standard" for investigating a topic, and coming to a result of some kind, but failing to justify why the "industry standard" was the best thing to use here. In a better version of the Cass Review, I would have liked to see a few paragraphs justifying the use of GRADE, and explaining why they used this standard and not some other standard.
I mean, isn't that a thing good scientific reports in general do at all steps of the process? Think of what a critic would claim about your model and methodology, and then explain why your model or methodology is the best one to use in this particular instance. Show that your findings are robust even if you used some slightly different model or methodology, and explain what conditions are necessary for your model or methodology to fail. A quick search through the Cass Review shows that it doesn't seem to have done this. It just used GRADE, didn't really justify the decision, and didn't discuss alternatives or why its arguments are robust under alternative assumptions about the data.
It's a bit circular to arbitrarily use a standard that will say, "there are basically no high quality studies in this medical field" no matter what, and then to conclude in your recommendations to the government, "We need more high quality studies before we do anything more in this medical field!"
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I generally agree with the AI CP has no victims line of thought. I think you see the same basic issue when it comes to writing fictional stories about unsavory topics as well.
I think it's a bit silly when you see erotica sites with stories about high school girls who happen to be exactly 18 years old. It feels like a strange purification ritual that has to be performed at the start of a story. Like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. "You're about to read a story about a sexy young teenager, but don't worry - she's actually 18, so you have a fig leaf of plausible deniability!"
I don't think fictional stories about underage sex should be illegal, or impossible to host on appropriate sites, no matter how unsavory they may be. I'm honestly amazed that some countries punish those kinds of stories, and I'm saddened at the increasingly puritan regime that credit cards companies and sites like Amazon are creating around non-standard porn categories recently. First they came for the mind control erotica fetishists, and all that...
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Again as with Twitter, I think WOTC have the absolute right to decide who uses their IP via license and contract agreements, if they want to stop everyone left wing, right wing or whatever then that is up to them (and their bottom line). Note you can put whatever opinions you want in games or have them, you just can't do so with their license and IP and that should be their choice to control (or not).
I agree with you in principle, but I think one of the issues here is that the FAQ for the original OGL website heavily implied, and several higher ups working for WotC at the time of its original release outright stated that the original OGL is an irrevocable license. Many of the companies that have relied on the OGL for 23 years (some of which consisting of employees who were working for WotC at the time), believe that WotC cannot legally revoke the OGL 1.0a, but few of them have the money to actually fight a protracted court battle and prove it.
The other issue is that many creators used the OGL as an open license, even when they were making their own material and just wanted it to be available for 3rd Party Publishers to use. Several games that have nothing to do with D&D will be affected by this, including the OpenD6 gaming line (descended from Star Wars D6 and Ghostbusters RPG), which unfortunately had its original creators go bankrupt, and which might not exist in a form where they could easily relicense their product to keep the OpenD6 community able to remix and share their creations as intended.
It also greatly complicates the position of OSR products, inspired by old school version of D&D. Granted, there are already a few OSR games that are compatible with old school D&D, and which are under Creative Commons licenses, like Knave, and Basic Fantasy Roleplaying has been frantically scrubbing all OGL material from their books, and will be re-releasing a 4th edition under a Creative Commons license, so while there will be a hiccup, it does seem like the OSR space will be able to weather this change. Still, it's a pain in the neck to have good portions of the D&D-based gaming space scrambling to change their products just to avoid a lawsuit.
US copyright law is clear that game mechanics can't be copyrighted, but the exact limits of where "game mechanics" end and "creative expression" begin has never been tested in the RPG space. The OGL was the magic feather that made large portions of the publishing space work, especially after how litigious TSR had been when it was the owner of D&D. In terms of the overall health for D&D-like fantasy role-playing, WotC may or may not be able to actually de-authorize the OGL 1.0a (time will tell), but if they are successful it will be a huge blow for the creativity within that publishing space, and a huge change in the status quo for major parts of the industry.
Pathfinder 1E is a good substitute for 3.5
Unfortunately, Pathfinder 1e uses the OGL 1.0a, which is being de-authorized by WotC, and so its continued legality will be up in the air. WotC has claimed that they won't go after previously published products, but considering the whole current OGL controversy is them doing something they promised they wouldn't do 23 years ago, it's hard to see what's stopping them from sending cease and desist letters to every Pathfinder 1e SRD site, every OSR company that uses the OGL, etc., and blowing up a good portion of the RPG space if they want to.
Pathfinder 2e is supposedly safe, and will be re-licensed under the ORC license soon so that 3rd party publishers can publish adventures for it.
Sadly, Vaush seems to be repeating a lot of arguments I've seen around Tumblr and Twitter about AI art.
He brings up the tired talking point of there being some sort of labor rights issue with feeding a bunch of artists' works into an AI and "stealing" their art in the process. No such labor rights issue exists. If someone is saying this, they fundamentally do not understand what the AI algorithms are doing. Don't get me wrong, there could be other issues with AI art, and we could decide as a society that putting human-generated content into an AI is corrosive to society for other reasons and pass laws limiting that if we wanted to - that's certainly a conversation we could have as a society, but I don't know why people are starting out with a wrong-headed argument right off the bat.
He is also in the "art is a form of communication" camp, which I think tends to be the biggest divide I see in a lot of these debates. Unfortunately, the intellectual groundwork has already been laid for "death of the author" analysis, where the question asked is not "what was the author trying to communicate?", but "what meaning can I as a reader/listener/viewer of an art piece craft from it?"
Borges wrote the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in 1939, which played with the idea of someone authoring a word-for-word identical rendition of Don Quixote today. In some of the most amusing passages, the exact same paragraph is quoted but given a different analysis based on whether Pierre Menard or Miguel de Cervantes was the author.
I've long been enchanted by the idea of taking a bunch of random books, pretending that they were all written by the same author and then trying to figure out what we can guess about the life of the author based on their literary output. What kind of author would write Winnie the Pooh, Starship Troopers, Call of Cthulhu, Foucault's Pendulum and the Acts of the Apostles? This is an endlessly fun literary exercise that will probably remain fun even after most of the content on our feed is AI generated.
(We've already seen joking stabs at this idea, with people claiming that Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter or programmed Minecraft, because they take issue with the original creator.)
I do like art, and I agree it often has communicative value. But "communication" might not even be that far off. AI text generation is also advancing at a considerable rate, even if it might be a while before we see a successor to GPT 3 that can write a whole novel from scratch. Maybe modern AI art is a babbling mishmash of parroted human communication, but in the future we might be able to make pieces that have genuine intentionality behind them even without full AGI. (This also ignores the current arguments about human prompt-makers and curators adding an element of intentionality to AI art.)
I think with the legal concept of derivative works, they're clearly in the wrong. I also don't agree with modern copyright law on derivative works.
I'm fine with a regime where, say, "Star Wars" is a trademark, and where the specific, fixed form of the movies and books is intellectual property of Lucas Films or Disney or whoever. But I believe very strongly that someone who writes a 500 page book with Han Solo should be legally able to profit from their creation. The world doesn't benefit at all if a 500 page Star Wars fan fiction, becomes a 501 page work where all references to Star Wars IP have been scrubbed, and one page of boilerplate has been added trying to establish who San Holo our completely unique main character is.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Yeah, I hate this kind of reaching. It's what leads Pathfinder and WotC to replace "race" with "ancestry" and "species."
The ancient Greeks likes to make up tribes of far off people like the amazons, the centaurs, the cynocephali, the Laestrygonians - and while they probably did reflect anxienties and bigotries by the Greeks against people in the world, I think this kind of imagination is an important part of human storytelling. Sure, the real secret of these non-human races is that they're all humans, but emphasizing one aspect or another of humanity.
But they still let us tell interesting stories about broad ideologies. Doctor Who wouldn't be the same without omnicidal Daleks, or assimilationist Cybermen. Those two alien species aren't "really" non-human aliens. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is not trying to do genuinely speculative "what if there was an alien species that differed from humanity in major way X", but instead presenting an allegorical reflection of humanity to criticize some tendency in humanity. It's like Black Mirror - several of the episodes are just our world, but with aspect X taken to some crazy extreme to make the faults of our current system more striking.
It's silly to pretend that the goblins in Harry Potter are or always were anti-Semitic. The best argument you could say on this front is that folkloric goblins might have some atavistic anit-Semitic traits, which Rowling unthinkingly reproduced. That doesn't mean that any story where the goblins rise up against oppressive wizard kind is automatically anti-Semitic.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Secondly, I believe that for some reason Dungeons and Dragons is just more fun for casuals than other games like Pathfinder are.
I mean, Pathfinder is D&D. Pathfinder 1e is just a heavily house ruled version of D&D 3.5e.
I definitely think part of D&D 5e's success has been its relative simplicity, and accessibility compared to past versions of D&D. I'm playing 5e with a former English major, and when we tried to switch to Pathfinder 1e, the increased complexity during character creation was enough to get him to ask the group to just do a 5e campaign.
I have one friend who is a masseuse, who loved the concept of D&D but found the rules overwhelming. She's interested in doing micro-RPG one shots, but feels like she could never do D&D again.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I can touch fiat currency, and exchange goods with it, but race is immaterial inasmuch as one's own self-perception is the extent of its "reality" in this day and age where merit-based treatment is the norm.
You can touch the object we call "dollar bills" or "coins", but the idea that these things hold value is an "illusion" or "folklore" as you put it. Do you consider the idea of fiat currency to be a religion? You seem to have it out for redneg in particular, when, as you say in your post, there are a number of things on my list you consider "all in one's mind", yet you don't seem to consider these "religions" the same way you do "redneg."
I'm also impervious to some of those things in the list, social hierarchies which too fall under the "it is all in your mind, bro" bucket unless of course the authority is real (president of the country, for instance).
I would argue you're not thinking very clearly about this. What you call "real authority" of a president is on just as shaky a ground as redneg. I think there are pragmatic arguments why having a president is useful, and there are descriptive statements one can make about what will likely happen if a president gives a particular person an order, but the idea that either of these means that a president has something that could be called "real authority" is a bit separate. Don't confuse your oughts and your is'es - a president is just a collective illusion, but that doesn't mean that a president isn't very important to everyday life or worth factoring into your decision making process.
My overall point is that many collective illusions are absolutely central to how people think about their lives and navigate the world. They might not be "real", but I would contend that they are often (not always) useful abstractions.
Most of the culture war over transgenderism hinges upon the definition of "women".
I would put it a different way. Because the history of feminism has been to erode men's only spaces (see female sports reporters fighting to be let into men's locker rooms, the erosion of old boys clubs, etc.), there are basically no men's spaces left to fight over with any cultural cache or legitimacy.
Virtually no man feels physically unsafe if a trans man is using the same restroom as him, and there otherwise aren't any widespread "men's safe spaces" in society for trans men to invade.
The reason people are fighting over "what is a woman?" is two-fold: 1) women's safe spaces and women's spaces in general actually exist in society, and 2) the reason they exist is because there are physical size and strength differences between men and women that matter in a number of circumstances. Figuring out how to deal with biological males who want to enter women's safe spaces, or other women's spaces is a genuine conflict between two opposing sets of rights (or claims to harm or risk) that must be resolved to somebody's dissatisfaction.
What I suspect happens with those people who identify as "trans" is that somehow (either indirectly via hormonal changes or via social proof and feelings of not belonging) they start to "feel" like, say, a woman despite being a male.
I don't think being trans is any one thing. I'm one of the more vocally pro-trans people on the Motte, but even I'll admit that the breakdown of trans and non-binary people today probably includes a small minority of non-culture bound trans people who would be trans no matter what society they lived in, and a large number of people who are only "trans" or "non-binary" because of the social environment they grew up in.
My main point of departure is being socially liberal enough that I think adults should be able to make risky medical decisions about their own bodies, and that in the face of ambiguous or bad evidence for childhood transition it's still probably better to let a combination of parents, kid and doctor decide how they want to deal with a child who wants to live as the opposite sex. Trans maximalists might call even my fairly liberal position "transphobic", but I view it as a fairly middle of the road position to say, "I think people should generally have enough freedom to make even bad decisions that might make their lives worse."
The first two episodes of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling dropped, and I've got to say, I'm a bit disappointed. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but Megan Phelps-Roper seems to be saving the "juicy" stuff about J.K. Rowling's statements about gender and sex for later episodes. Instead, the first episode is basically the biography of J.K. Rowling that I'm sure everyone has heard a thousand times by now - though with a special emphasis on her status as an abuse survivor, and the second episode focuses on the Evangelical Christian backlash against Harry Potter as it was being released.
This does make the podcast more comprehensive, and allows Phelps-Roper, who is an ex-member of the Westboro Baptist Church, to leverage her knowledge of Conservative Christianity to fill out her subject, but aside from the implicit message that she seems to be developing that Evangelical Christian censorship and Woke Progressive censorship are two sides of the same coin (hardly a novel take), I didn't really feel like I needed a retread of the Evangelical Christian backlash to Harry Potter, which I lived through and was very conscious of thanks to my coming up in New Atheism over the relevant time period. (And it goes without saying that the Rowling biography was a waste of time as someone who went to several midnight releases for the Potter books and movies over the years.)
Notably, trans video essayist Natalie Wynn (better known by her Youtube handle ContraPoints) tweeted recently that she has been interviewed for the project, and felt that Phelps-Roper had misrepresented the nature of the podcast before the interview. Wynn believes that Phelps-Roper's status as an ex-bigot makes it easier for her to empathize with bigots, and forces her to believe deeply in their ability to reform, but the result is that her worldview is overly simplistic - leading her to believe that trans activists are just as bad as the transphobes they argue with.
It's hard to say if Wynn's criticisms are 100% correct yet. I will be very interested to see how Phelps-Roper frames that interview (if it ends up being included at all.) The best hint of the eventual direction of the podcast so far, seems to be a statement in the second episode about censorship efforts surrounding Huckleberry Finn, where it was first criticized by racist bigots for showing the races mixing, and later criticized for anti-racist progressives for depicting black people in a negative light.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
merely sex negative, extreme, or reacting to trauma from cis-males.
Although, to be fair, don't those apply pretty well to Rowling? In the essay in which she clarified her position, it was clear that most of her "transmisogyny" was really "misandry" applied with a wider brush.
I've certainly compared her views with sex-negative second wave feminists in the past.
There are incidents around 5e that happened, like the Zak S playtesting kerfuffle. Long story short, Zak S is a male porn star, who runs a blog called Dnd With Porn Stars and has published a few products. He helped playtest 5e D&D, and was credited as one of many big name play testers. Then information about his abusive treatment of a romantic partner came out (along with sundry other shitty behavior), and he began to use dozens of sock puppet accounts to try and defend himself on Reddit and various RPG forums. In the end, he ended up removed from the 5e playtest credits, and several subreddits decided that any mention of Zak or his products was forbidden.
I think it's a shame nobody can talk about his products anymore on Reddit, because Zak was a genius in the OSR space, and Vornheim and A Red and Pleasant Land were without exaggeration, some of my favorite RPG products of all time. But I grudgingly understand why they did it - Zak is very thin-skinned, and anything that mentioned him in a less than positive light had a huge chance of breaking out into a flame war with a few Zak S sock puppets taking part.
I doubt this is the only thing that inspired WotC's new policy though. I think a few legacy RPG companies like Judges Guild and new TSR have ended up in the hands of purported racists, and there are always historical incidents like the third-party Book of Erotic Fantasy, which WotC prevented from being published with the d20 trademark after they realized the controversy it would probably glean.
On a side note, this is also tying into my experience of becoming quietly convinced that the inability of society to 'reign in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.
Depending on the specific object-level claims being made, I might agree with parts of this, but I'm going to push back slightly here.
I think there are a lot of ways that the sexual revolution screwed over both men and women.
Whatever other issues the paternalistic approach to women had in the past, it almost certainly limited the number of vectors of attack from men. If all coed college parties have chaperones, then the risk of a woman being raped on a college campus is almost certainly lower than the modern anarchy of college party culture. This is not to suggest that chaperoning was always successful at protecting the people involved, but my intuition is that when society put more of the burden on men to protect women from other men, women were safer in a number of contexts than they are now. Now, we give women all of the legal freedom of men, but they still take on most of the risks of sex and are thus more vulnerable than they were before.
There are no solutions, only trade offs.
I am sure there were trade offs we made when we decided that society should have the shape that it does today. Porn is freely made and shared online, porn-adjacent professions like Twitch pool streamers exist in "kid-friendly" spaces, and even though fewer people are having sex, the general attitude is a permissive one. All of these things come with trade offs for men and women. Men slowly learn the lesson to never give money to begging women - basically, reality slowly burns the simp out of them, but there are new foolish young men born every minute. Women learn that they have value in society and on the dating market, but that the value is of a very limited and proscribed sort.
However, I don't necessarily think that the trade offs we have made are more bad than good. Society certainly looks different than it did in the more paternalistic, puritan past. Rich people are more shielded from the consequences of sexual license and hedonism than the poor - as it has always been. But I think we should seriously consider whether making people more miserable in exchange for freedom is worth it. Certainly, a strict utilitarian might say "we crunched the numbers and traditionalism is the better overall system", but not everyone is a strict utilitarian and if we value human flourishing more than simple pleasure it might be the case that our system empowers more people to flourish, even as it factually causes more suffering than other ways of arranging society that make different trade-offs on the freedom-risk spectrum.
IMO the salient thing which defines stealing isn't that it's zero-sum, it's that you're taking something which doesn't belong to you. So it doesn't matter that you are just copying bits, it's still stealing.
But are your moral intuitions completely in line with the law on all points of what things can be "owned" as intellectual property?
As a simple example, clothing designs can't be copyrighted in most of the world because clothing is considered utilitarian.
If I make a knock-off dress, that's completely legal. Do you consider me to be morally as bad as a person who has pirated a movie? Do you think the law should be changed to punish people who copy clothing designs as well?
Or what about board games? Game mechanics and rules are not copyrightable.
It is perfectly legal for me to make a clone of Monopoly, as long as I use my own names, art, presentation of the rules, etc. for everything. Do you think if I make such a clone that I'm "stealing" something not currently covered by law from Hasbro?
Don't get me wrong. I understand your position to a degree, but I find it highly suspicious when a moral position is identical with the law. How do you morally deal with situations like the UK granting perpetual copyright on Peter Pan, because the copyright is owned by a hospital? Do you think I'm stealing, if I download the original Peter Pan stories from Project Gutenberg in the United States, even though there's someone, somewhere in the world with a claim to ownership over that intellectual property? What about if I make my own original Peter Pan stories, since he's public domain here? If it's morally okay for me to download the original Peter Pan stories or make Peter Pan fan ficiton in the United States despite the perpetual UK copyright, is it okay to pirate copies of other works in countries that aren't party to the Berne Copyright convention?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Isn't "Guns, Germs and Steel" actually incredibly controversial?
I've never quite agreed with the critiques, and I believe Jared Diamond's book is broadly plausible, but I recall a number of anthropologists and historians criticizing it for going beyond what it could responsibly claim.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
So you would support hormones and surgeries for transgenderism caused by social contagion? That sounds interesting, could you flesh that out?
I'm not sure I have anything profound to say here. To use a non-trans example, I suspect the desire for tattoos and certain forms of cosmetic surgery are plausibly a result of "social contagion", and I still don't see much point in the State being wielded as a weapon to stop people from doing these things, even acknowledging that some percentage of people who seek out either of these will regret it.
The first results I found on Google claim that 65% of women regret getting plastic surgery, and 78% of people with tattoos regret at least one of them. I can speculate a number of reasons a person could regret a surgery or tattoo. Perhaps it was a botch job, perhaps people who are dissatisfied enough with their looks to want cosmetic surgery or a tattoo are also likely to be self-critical enough to never be satisfied with how they look. Perhaps they become conscious of lost job opportunities, or loss of status and respect in their social circles. The potential reasons are endless, and I'm sure the articles I linked go into many other reasons for this regret.
Basically, I'm not a paternalist. I think giving people the freedom to figure out what their version of the good life looks like, inevitably creates the freedom to ruin their own life as well. There are lots of ways people can ruin their own lives: Sometimes it looks like taking up smoking, sometimes it looks like becoming obese, sometimes it looks like obeying your parents when they order you not to go out of State to the great college you got a full ride scholarship to, sometimes it looks like being so stubbornly independent that you refuse to ask your family for help even though they would happily solve several of your problems in an instant. Etc., etc.
Obviously, this is easiest to apply to adults. Certainly, I don't think any trans adult with the money for it should be denied the ability to seek out surgeries and treatments available to cis people. If we give cis men over 35 the ability to get put on testosterone, why not trans men? If we let cis women get boob jobs, why not trans women?
More caution is obviously called for when it comes to minors. There's a lot of concerns with regards to unknowns, and the elephant in the room is that going through only the puberty of their identified sex is probably the best guarantee of a "normal" life living as the opposite sex. Ideally, I'd like parents, doctors and the child to weigh all options, be presented with all possible information, and to unanimously agree on a course of action for a trans child.
If being trans is mostly social contagion, I would like that to be widely known and to be weighed when making these decisions. The social contagion hypothesis doesn't mean that the desire to transition can easily be brainwashed away, or that we have reliable ways to make the socially contaminated people happy once they've gotten the idea they're trans into their head.
Even when it comes to tattooing, I'm sure there are kids raised by tattoo-averse parents, who are told all their life that they'll be disowned if they ever get a tattoo, who wait until they're financially independent and of the age of majority and get a tattoo anyways. In fact, I know such people exist, because my sister is one of them. Having graduated college - paid for by my parents, she now has several tattoos, much to my dad's displeasure.
I'm sure there's a non-zero regret rate for transitioning. Many people who transition will regret it, or will regret at least some of the procedures they seek out. Some will require additional surgeries to correct those regretted surgeries. Perhaps it would be good to nudge people away from bad outcomes, and to somewhat gatekeep transition, to limit the amount of people who regret it. But in the end, I think the strength of our society has been in allowing people enough freedom for good outcomes, while accepting the bad ones as acceptable loses. Sometimes, the family black sheep really will be happier with a tattoo and piercings, and sometimes the weird girl who always felt pushed around her entire life really will be happier living in the role of a man. I don't presume to know ahead of time which outcome a person will have.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
- The University girl wannabe iron man.
I actually have a Grand Unifying Theory of Modern Mary Sues, which comes down to two principles: 1) audiences don't want to be taken on the exact same journey twice, and 2) modern film executives are more likely to make a new entry with a female protagonist.
It is absolutely true that if you compare, say, the time it takes for Rey in Star Wars to reach certain milestones, she does better than either Luke or Anakin with far less training. However, I also think it is true that if the sequel trilogies had instead been a brand new franchise, the fast speed at which Rey learned force techniques wouldn't actually be much of an issue. So her first confirmation of the Jedi being real and not just stories happened today, and she mastered the Jedi Mind Trick in like an afternoon while chained up? That's not much of an issue if the sequels are all that exists. Maybe being a space wizard is really easy or something? And she beats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber fight with essentially no training? Well, he wanted to capture her not kill her, and he was heavily injured, yadda yadda.
I think Ironheart in this movie, as well as characters like Rey in Star Wars or Korra and Avatar, often have the real world background that audiences have already seen how high power scaling can go in the universe, and are eager to get back up there again. It happens with male protagonists as well. I believe Boruto has advanced faster in some regards than his dad Naruto, and Gohan reaches Super Saiyan as a child while his dad had to train his whole life to do it. It just happens in long-running franchises. Audiences don't want to wait 200 episodes for Boruto to naturally reach the same point as his dad.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Human species has two biological genders.
You translated this from Finnish - does the original use a Finnish equivalent of "genders" here? Is any clarification offered in the original scale what they mean here? I can imagine people answering differently with slightly altered forms of the question:
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The human species has two biological sexes.
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The human species has only two biological sexes.
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The human species has two genders.
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The human species has only two genders.
Even if the original Finnish uses the equivalent of "gender" as opposed to "sex" without clarification, then it ends up functioning as a measure of wokeness more by being a shibboleth test than by being a good measure of underlying attitudes. English in particular uses "gender" euphemistically for "sex" in a lot of contexts, and it's only a small group of initiated individuals who make a strong sex-gender distinction in the first place.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such.
I think the issue with that definition is that it is too weasely. There's too much room to maneuver and keep claiming a patriarchy.
Harmful to which men? Harmful to which women?
Does it matter if a society made rational trade-offs of one kind of harm against some benefit that outweighs the harm?
I think before the Industrial Age, having a division of labor made sense. With all of the developments after the Industrial Age we shrank the scope of the woman's societal role until it was almost nothing (cleaning clothes for a family of five took 20 hours before washing machines!), forcing them to adopt "men's" societal role.
Now there's effectively only one role in the larger society. Stay at home mothers frequently get involved in MLMs, because there's nothing to do for most of the day - laundry takes two hours, watching one kid isn't that stimulating and a person can only take so much TV.
I'm reminded of complaints I've seen from the manosphere talking about the "feminization" of our culture.
I think many people are basically agreed that the life the average person lives in our society is fundamentally unsatisfying. But I don't think "patriarchy" or "feminized culture" get to the core of the issue. We're social animals staring at screens of various sizes throughout the day. We're so prosperous that we don't depend on each other for our individual survival, so it becomes much harder to cultivate deep friendships. We have a service economy that forces a lot of people to do jobs that humans in the ancestral environment we evolved for would have hated too.
Humans weren't built for this, and it has nothing to do with whether our society is benefitting men or women more. Ideally, society would settle on a set of norms that benefit everyone so far as possible, but we're so rich and prosperous that we get whatever we want to satiate our petty impulses and desires and rarely get what we need for a deep and fulfilling life.
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
See, someone's got to tell the tale
Whether or not it turns out well
Maybe it will turn out this time
On the road to Hell
On the railroad line
It's a sad song
[...]
We're gonna sing it anyway
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
I'm sure you're not being entirely serious, but this is a silly thing to say. When Europe looks like this at the height of your power, I would say you're fair game for almost any European nation to have a take on. That's not to say that I think any one country has the monopoly on truth when it comes to opinions on Napoleon, but just because modern France and the French people are the inheritors of Napoleon's legacy, doesn't mean that they're the only or best ones to tell his story. It doesn't even mean that a French filmmaker would make a "better" or "more accurate" biopic.
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