vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
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")
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
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
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
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
That's only an argument against identification as a standard. It would still tend to leave transmedicalism on the table. If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?
That would just leave "identification only" as a courtesy of sorts. The same way that a kid whose parents just died, might have their aunt and uncle take care of them for a few weeks before all of the legal paperwork is taken care of.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth.
I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower, and mostly-indigenous ancestors from Mexico, and I work with a bunch of guys from India. Even if we acknowledge the "realities of biology and heredity", my intuition is that there's plenty of "good stock" from the rest of the world that we can import into the United States to our own and their benefit. Every culture has its elites, and even "backwards" cultures like Ireland have been able to overcome low IQ's and become functional societies with an influx of resources.
It's a big 'if', but if we were able to screen every immigrant for either high-IQ or high-Conscientiousness, and remove those with violent criminal histories, I wouldn't have any issue letting in massive numbers of people into the country, up to what we could safely educate into American culture and values. America would definitely change, but that would inevitably happen even with closed borders, and an America built of either the smartest or hardest working people in the world seems like one that I would be proud to pass on to my children, even if wasn't 100% identical to the America I grew up in.
vorpa-glavo
23d ago
I mean, sure, people are pragmatic and meta-pragmatic all the time. I don't really see the point of this anti-lab grown meat bill, since I think meat eating is so culturally dominant that it won't be wiped out within our life times just because lab grown meat becomes affordable and widely available. More likely, vegetarianism will remain a costly social signal of a minority of people until the diet becomes indistinguishable from meat eating in terms of price and flavor, and then when it is practically effortless a law might eventually pass that bans animal slaughter altogether.
It's going to be exactly what happened with slavery. Banning slavery when an entire regional economy depends on it is difficult to accomplish, and probably requires a war and imposition of force. Living in a world where everyone has 200 to 8000 energy slaves thanks to electricity and industrialization makes being anti-slavery very easy, basically without cost to the individual. I think I would be more likely to see the point of slavery if I had to fetch my own water, grow, prepare and cook my own food from scratch, clean my clothes by hand, wash my dishes by hand, etc.
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
Except we won't get them, and you know why as well as I do.
As big Hollywood movies, maybe not. But even I am sometimes surprised at what people are able to come up with.
Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson might have been super cringe, but I also think it was 100% sincere and "organic", even by your own standards. Some Gen Z artist saw Hamilton, and liked that depiction of Thomas Jefferson by a black actor in a play enough to take it one level further. That's just how people interact with media in this day and age.
Look at this list of Undertale AU's. All of that seems completely organic to me. Some people just like imagining their favorite video game characters in a cozy coffee shop, or as vampires, or whatever. This is only even scratching the surface - there are Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's with videos on Youtube that have thousands of views. It's a wild rabbit hole.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Is this really banana republic stuff? Libel, slander and fraud were all already legal limits on free speech.
I do agree with OP that 4900 possibly lost Democrat votes in NY is pretty unlikely to have had any real impact on the election, and that there should be a lot of room to exercise leniency for judges. But sending a strong message that election interference won't be tolerated seems like a reasonable enough thing for a democratic country that wants to maintain legitimacy.
Do you consider punishing any form of providing fake election information to be going to far? I'm not sure the "it was just a joke" defense really gets off the ground here.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
JK Rowling might be a perfect example of most of these people being the most informed about the reason why they're supposed to hate, but I bet none of them know what she's actually said. They just know that she's anti-trans. But they'll still see the next Fantastic Beasts movie and buy the next Harry Potter game.
I have been a little disappointed in the anti-Rowling hypocrisy I see. I remember one thing that rubbed me the wrong way a while back. I was at a Ren Faire, and one of the performers made a "You're a wizard, Harry" joke and immediately followed it up with something along the lines of "Don't worry folks, that's only time we'll mention that TERF shit."
Like, either own the fact that you're making a Harry Potter joke or don't make one at all. Making the joke, and then virtue signaling that you shouldn't have made it and won't make one again seems like trying to eat your cake and have it too.
I've actually read Rowling's essay and tweets, and while I disagree with much of what she says, I can at least understand the emotional place she's coming from as a victim of abuse at the hands of a man. I'm not thrilled about the effect she's having on the conversation about trans people in Britain, but I haven't made the decision to boycott her.
Practically, I couldn't really "boycott" her nowadays anyways. The first Fantastic Beasts movie didn't wow me and I never saw the others, and most of her post-Harry Potter wizarding lore (particular her American lore) has been underwhelming to me.
I think I'll just do a matching donation to a pro-trans charity if I ever buy any official Harry Potter merch going forward. (I already did this on a recent trip in London, where Google guided me to King's Cross station, and I decided to pop into the Platform 9 3/4 store because I had time to kill before the train arrived.)
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen.
I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:
- A private software company deciding to include a pronoun prompt.
- A private Hollywood movie studio deciding to include a trans character in their next movie.
- The Federal government making discriminating against trans people in housing, public accommodation, employment, and banking illegal.
- Companies doing the bare minimum to comply with Federal laws.
- Companies going above and beyond to comply with Federal laws.
- Your local hobby community having enough scolds to make it difficult to talk about trans people the way you think is most accurate.
I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.
If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Telling a person to kill themselves was an acceptable response to them not liking your favorite game back then.
Maybe in the circles you rolled in. I'll attest that my corners of the internet never had that norm, and I've been an active internet user since at least 2005.
I think the main difference is that I never really gravitated towards competitive multiplayer video games or the communities around them. My experience of video game-related communities was fun, innocent discussions on the Ushi no Tane forums for Harvest Moon, and not (as they seemed to be from my outsider perspective) the toxic cesspools of teenage boys with no adult supervision teaching each other to be more and more aggressive and bullying over the most pointless things imaginable.
I don't doubt the other part of your post is true - a lot of the sides in Gamer Gate are explained by different media bubbles that had emerged in the pre-2014 internet, but to pretend it was some universal experience is a big mistake.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
What would distinguish Marxist-like class analysis from non-Marxist-like class analysis in your view?
Displacing the discussion to another culture, let's take the example of casteism in India. What kind of arguments against "casteism" would you consider woke, and which ones would you consider non-woke? Are there time periods or particular practices where you would think arguments against "casteism" are more justified, and is there a world state in which you think you could say, "the field has finally been levelled enough once and for all, and caste is practically not an issue for people's life outcomes anymore and all interventions along caste lines should cease"?
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
I think some of the issue is that film as a medium is closer to a raw pretended reality than other storytelling mediums. In an opera, a young man might be portrayed by an adult woman, and in a Shakespearean play a woman might be played by a boy, but in a film we expect that the world being portrayed is fairly close to what is "actually happening" in the story, and when that expectation is challenged it might pull us out of the story.
But there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Musicals are an obvious example, where something completely unrealistic happens all the time. And some forms of Indian cinema might have breaks from reality that would be jarring to Western viewers, but completely natural within that cinema tradition.
That said, it's not hard to imagine an explanation like "fantasy world genetics are different from real world genetics" or something along those lines. That's obviously more of an issue for something like LotR, which is an imagined past for our world, but with enough epicycles you could pre-authorize any changes along these lines.
vorpa-glavo
8mo ago
All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.
Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."
Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?
Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category.
The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."
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.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The social convention of a large part of society is that gender identity is nonsense, and transition is impossible. They reject your approach, and you definitions, and by imposing it on them you are doing the "point deer make horse" thing.
I'm okay with people saying the "wrong" thing, or believing "wrongthink" - whatever that may entail from my own point of view, or from anyone's point of view, really. I think there are many domains where it is undesirable for the government to enforce uniform speech or metaphysical ideologies, and this is one of them. If that means that in the world I propose, trans people will be treated with respect and acceptance in some parts of some big cities, but be in an iffy situation elsewhere, then so be it.
Just as a racist hotel owner is free to call a black man the N-word as he hands the purchased hotel keys over, a gas station attendant will be free to use whatever slurs they want while they let a trans woman use the women's restroom. Or to simply "misgender" her. If we already have the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, then I see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people.
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system. Now, I'm definitely open to arguments that bathrooms would not be a part of this if we were building a society based on rational principles from the ground up, but when the precedence is already there as it is in our society I see no reason not to expand it.
I'm not sure who you thinking is fighting for the right to scream at strangers in supermarkets.
Surely you can't believe that the ecosystem of videos of "obviously trans woman does embarrassing and socially unacceptable things in public" is the totality of what exists online? I'm sure there are plenty of "red neck yells at butch cis woman for trying to use women's restroom" type videos as well. Neither side has a monopoly on embarrassing loud mouths.
And regardless of any of that, I think it's a form of "Chinese robber" fallacy. Most people (cis or trans, trans activist or anti-trans) are probably keeping their head down, and trying to use their best judgement with how to deal with any social situation they find themselves in. The government probably isn't the right tool to deal with breaches of social etiquette.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
- The government has credible intel that a terrorist attack is planned at a particular airport on a particular day.
- It is wartime, and the government is concerned about enemies entering the country, or traitors leaving the country to fight for the other side.
- The government of an island nation, like Australia, starts to hear reports about a new Black Death-like plague with a 40-60% mortality rate in Eurasia
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.
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