vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support. I condemn the killing of civilians by Hamas last weekend, but then I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period), mostly from air-launched explosions. I see people talking about supporting "the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response", which so far includes blowing up a Palestinian house full of civilians with no warning, killing those inside, blowing up marketplaces and mosques, and attacking the Jabalia refugee camp.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) is on strike as of May 2nd, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down. While most of their demands deal with the way pay and compensation in the streaming era is structured, on the second page towards the bottom is:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
- WGA PROPOSAL: Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.
- AMPTP OFFER: Rejected our proposal. Countered by offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.
I think this is an interesting first salvo in the fight over AI in creative professions. While this is just where both parties are starting for strike negotiations, and either could shift towards a compromise, I still can't help but see a hint that AMPTP isn't super interested in foregoing the use of AI in the future.
In 2007, when the WGA went on strike for 3 months, it had a huge effect on television at the time. There was a shift to unscripted programming, like reality television, and some shows with completed scripts that had been on the back burner got fast tracked to production. Part of me doubts that generative AI is really at the point where this could happen, but it would be fascinating if the AMPTP companies didn't just use traditional scabs during this strike, but supplemented them with generative AI in some way. Maybe instead of a shift to reality television, we'll look back on this as the first time AI became a significant factor in the production of scripted television and movies. Imagine seeing a "prompt engineer" credit at the end of every show you watch in the future.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Contra Innuendo Studios On "Didoing"
Today, another video from Innuendo Studios in their "Alt-Right Playbook" series just dropped, and it describes a move in an argument where Person A will propose a small gesture that they assert will make things better for some group, and Person B counters by essentially agreeing that society is unfair around the issue being discussed, but that it is such a minor problem that it is not worth addressing. Innuendo Studios' preferred word for this move by Person B is "Didoing" (after the Dido song Thank You which features the lyrics "[...] it's not so bad"), but he also points out that some people have called this issue "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness", which I prefer as a name for this, since it doesn't rely on knowledge of a song from 1998 to explain.
According to Innuendo Studios, Person B's hidden premise is that "it is okay for things to be unfair, within a certain tolerance." That "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."
My own politics lean towards social democracy, and aside from some anti-woke skepticism, I am far from "alt-right." But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Innuendo Studios initially frames the discussion around content warnings, so let's start there. I want to set aside, for a moment, the question of whether content warnings are actually successful at addressing some alleged unfairness in society. Let's grant for the sake of argument that they are 100% successful at addressing the issue of people with PTSD or anxiety attacks having their conditions activated as a result of media they are consuming.
That still doesn't answer at what level society should be trying to deal with this issue. As I see it, there are four basic levels a coordination problem can be solved in society:
- The government (AKA the use of organized force)
- Social norms (AKA the use of organized social ostracism)
- Private organizations
- Individual actions
Now I believe the question becomes, assuming that content warnings work, at what level should we try to solve the problem that they solve?
None of these options are without downsides. If we create a new government bureaucracy to do this, how do we stop it from trying to seize new power or misusing the power it was given? If we enshrine a new social norm, are we prepared to accept the ostracism of people from polite society for its violation? If a private organization tries to solve the problem, how can its limited reach be solved so the maximum number of people possible enjoy the benefits of the solution? And doubly so for individual actions.
We already live in a world where there are a ton of voluntary systems for content ratings, from the MPA film rating system to the United States pay television content advisory system to the ESRB. All of these systems are being done by private industry, and don't have the force of law.
We also have successful examples of crowd-sourcing trigger warnings with sites like Does The Dog Die.
I don't think it would be unreasonable for a person to think that this level of dealing with the problem is more or less acceptable. We haven't delivered a perfect solution to all people, but we've achieved reasonably good coverage at a tolerably low cost to society in terms of money and resources invested. Sure, some people might find this incomplete resolution unsatisfying, or on the other side believe that even the level we're currently investing in it is too high.
All discussions are going to end up like this in the end, whether we're talking about whether the government should have programs to pay for eye glasses for people, or whether we're talking about whether we should force private companies to build handicapped spaces in parking lots.
If we have a list of societal interventions we're considering implementing, I think it is obvious that you should do the ones that have the highest impact with the lowest cost of societal resources to implement. It doesn't mean that the problems that you don't focus on aren't problems, but they might be small enough problems that you don't actually need any larger coordination to solve the problem.
I think it would be worth prioritizing relatively cheap interventions like eyeglasses, which can have huge positive impacts on people depending on the level of impairment they started with, over more untractable problems that tend to be the focus of woke bellyaching.
No matter how you try to solve a problem in society, there will always be trade offs. You're always compromising between bigger interventions in Area A and Area B since every resource that matters is finite, and I think most people find it acceptable to leave many small problems unsolved. We're okay with saying, "suck it up, everyone has to deal with some level of unfairness, and the current status quo already solves most of the most important issues you have to deal with." Or alternatively, "The status quo is indeed unacceptable, but we should focus on solving big, important issues X, Y and Z, and we won't be getting to your tiny issues any time soon, if ever."
There has to be a Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, whether you're "alt-right" or not. Most of the argument is about where the line should be drawn.
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.
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
30d ago
I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.
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
1mo ago
While I agree materialism was rare in the past, there are still groups like the ancient Greek Atomists (such as the school of Epicurus) and the Charvaka school in India that believed in it. I'm more familiar with the Epicurean philosophy, but they are remarkably similar to contemporary materialists in their beliefs (except with a strange insistence on a "swerve" in atoms that is supposedly the foundation of a form of free will.) That said, Epicurus didn't deny the existence of the gods - he just asserted that they were made of atoms and didn't intervene in human affairs.
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
And if you believe in angels or demons or spiritual beings of that kind, why do you think that they wouldn't work in fundamentally similar ways to how we do? Maybe they wouldn't have bodies and brains exactly like ours, but if angels can "see", then surely their sight would rely on "spiritual atoms" bouncing off of their "spiritual eyes"? Otherwise, I'm curious what you think would be happening when an angel sees something? How do they come to a knowledge of what is happening in their surroundings, if not in a fundamentally pseudo-materialist way?
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
I'd have to answer the same way as a man. If the question was, "In which historical epoch would you like to take a month long vacation?", I have a lot of options I would pick, but that question is a bit like "In which third world country would you like to live?" except worse, because I wouldn't even be able to leverage the favorable currency exchange rate I enjoy as an American, and I wouldn't have any access to modern conveniences.
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!"
It has been a while since I've read John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I've been ruminating on his conception of property in that book. He says:
Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Basically, whenever you mix your labor with something out of nature, it becomes yours.
This conception was highly influential on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and it is easy to see the advantages of such a conception of private property for a brand new country. Sweeping aside the thorny issue of native Americans, if you have a vast wilderness of unclaimed territory, the idea of allowing citizens to go out, form a homestead somewhere and to recognize their claim on the land feels very intuitive and "fair."
Unfortunately, such an idealized conception of property ownership didn't actually exist in practice. Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow explores some of the things that happened in Appalachia over the history of the United States. Just within this microcosm, we see the way things often played out in practice, and it was far from the Lockean ideal.
It was not unusual for some rich landowner to lay claim to a bunch of land he had never even seen or set foot upon, and then to just sit on the claim without ever doing anything with it. Then squatters would move in, and make homes and farms on the land, before being discovered and kicked out.
It seems to me, if we take John Locke's account of property as our model, the squatters had a better moral claim to owning that land than the de jure owners in many cases. And yet again and again, we see governments recognizing the claims of absentee landlords over those of the people who had worked and improved the lands with their own two hands.
In many ways, property and its justification are core to establishing that society is "fair." So it is troubling to note a discrepancy this big between theory and practice so early in the country's history, at the very foundation of property ownership claims, poisoning everything downstream from them.
I think a toy example will help illustrate why this is such a big deal for the modern United States:
Imagine there's an island that has 10 heterosexual couples on it. This island is abundant in natural resources, and it has the following features:
- If 20 people work the land, it can produce a luxurious lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If 14 people work the land, it can produce a good (but not great) lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If four people work together, it is possible to trap two people in a 10 foot by 10 foot area of the island effectively forever.
Now, as we come into the island, 9 of the couples have come together and formed a gang. They claim that because their gang was the first to walk the circumference of the island, they have the best claim to owning the island and they will enforce their property claim against the 10th couple. They do not want the last couple collecting resources on the part of the island that had informally been "theirs" up until a few days ago, in which they had spent years building shelters and tools to improve their hunting and gathering.
The gang is going to imprison the couple in a 10'x10' part of the island unless they agree to recognize their ownership claim. Furthermore, while they're prepared to enjoy a merely good lifestyle for the rest of their lives, they tell the unfortunate couple that after they agree to the gang's ownership claim the gang would be willing to rent "their" part of the island back to them, as long as that couple gives them all a tribute that will take them down to a meager lifestyle, and take the gang up to a decadent lifestyle.
Left with no other choice, the unfortunate couple agrees to recognize the gang's ownership claim, and starts paying tribute.
Is the society on the island described above fair or just? I think most people's intuitions would be that it is not.
Now, imagine that several generations have passed. The islanders have expanded out onto several other islands, but the extra resources from the first island have resulted in a very uneven society. The descendants of the original gang own everything, and the descendants of the original unfortunate couple have never owned anything. They rent wherever they go, despite barely enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just? Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?
As I see it, there are three distinct phases when it comes to thinking about property rights:
- The initial distribution of property at the establishment of a country.
- The inheritance of property up towards the present.
- The free exchange of property among people of the present generation.
It seems to me like a lot of people are happy to start at step 3 and call it a day when it comes to how they conceptualize property, and its just distribution through society. A worker who is forced to sell their labor in order to make money to purchase the necessities of life is not being exploited no matter how little they're getting paid, and no matter what happened in steps 1 and 2 to get them to the place where they needed to sell their labor in the first place.
For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.
First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.
In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
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
30d ago
I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?
This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.
Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.
I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.
Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."
That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Exactly! And that's why it's way past time that John Henry be depicted as a trans pan differently abled bi-racial Latinx!
Oh, but John Henry is different? Why?
You seem to assume something I don't agree with. Sure, bring on every variant of John Henry under the sun! Give me a white Black Panther, or an Asian Othello - nothing is forbidden in storytelling. I have experienced multiple versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, and I would imagine if you asked a person 100 years ago about a version where he's a little person, they would have thought it strange, and yet I loved Peter Dinklage's portrayal of the character in the musical.
John Henry is not an exception to what I say. Even sacred figures like Buddha can sometimes wander across cultures and become a Catholic saint.
Changes need to be organic, not "how many boxes off the DEI bingo card can we tick?".
I'm curious what you think the process is for a change to be "organic".
Do you also think Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer, which recasts the orcs as the good guys, is inorganic?
Do you think the decision of Marvel's writers to take the originally red-haired Thor and turn him into a blonde character is "organic"?
Do you think that the manuscript traditions of the Mahabharata where the lower caste character of Karna is made more powerful is "organic"?
To me, there is no "organic" or "inorganic" retelling of a tale. There is only the storyteller's art, and what you make of the material you are given. If I was retelling the Greek myths, there are parts I would embellish and polish and things I would omit and they all feel perfectly natural situated in the particular time and place I am in. Saying any of the changes I would make are "inorganic" is to assume there's some way I "should" be telling the story, which I reject.
We were talking about just Philadelphia.
I agree, but I think it is worth taking a step back and asking at the meta level why we were talking about just Philadelphia.
A newspaper report saying, "Some people think it's suspicious that 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia went 100% to Obama" doesn't just come from nowhere.
If I imagine Joe the Reporter, trying to craft a story of this kind (perhaps even for noble reasons!), I have to wonder about adjacently possible worlds. Imagine the counterfactual world where the 2012 presidential election as a whole was a sufficiently fair election on the whole, with whatever meaning you assign to that idea. However, even in a fair election, just by random chance, we would expect there to be voting patterns that were "suspicious" for one reason or another.
Assuming Joe the Reporter's methodology isn't far off from:
- Open up a spread sheet of the US election by voting division and play around with the numbers, until he finds something that feels "suspicious" to his gut.
- Report about the most strikingly suspicious thing he finds.
Then I just think that if we weren't talking about Philadelphia having 59 voting divisions going 100% to Obama, we'd be talking about some other state or city or whatever that had "odd" voting patterns of some kind, even if it could well be completely innocent, and we just happened to end up in the world where a very unlikely happened by chance, because something had to happen.
I think a very similar thing happened with 2020, and the people who claim it's strange that some states were counting ballots and Republicans were in the lead as they counted the in person votes, but at some point in the night they counted the mail in votes and suddenly Democrats jumped to a decisive lead when all the votes were tallied. I admit this could be suspicious, but you have to realize that nobody pre-registered the opinion that Democrats would stuff the ballot on the back end by faking a bunch of mail in votes in the specific counties where that was the reporting pattern. I just have the intuition that if things had gone slightly differently and the mail in votes in those counties had somehow been counted before the in person ballots, then people wanting to call the election fake would have found some equally hard to explain thing halfway across the country that might have any number of innocent explanations.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yeah, I love Christmas, but even I'm tired of seeing it creep ever earlier in the year, swallowing up other holidays like Thanksgiving. I hate that I've had Thanksgiving dinner immediately followed by my mom and sister taking off for a "Black Friday" sale on Thursday that they went to in order to buy presents for Christmas. Frankly, Halloween seems like it is the only thing stopping Christmas from seeping even earlier into the year.
So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.
I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")
I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.
It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.
Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing.
I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.
But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.
I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
So angels and spiritual beings exist in essentially higher dimensions than ours…. But again I don’t think we have any concepts that can accurately explain. This is why mysticism and experiential understanding is so crucial for most religious practices.
Okay, but you didn't answer my question. Do you believe angels see? Or are angels blind in any meaningful sense of the word? (Perhaps they have other, completely non-analogous, ineffable senses of their own?)
I understand if you think my question is coming from an overly binary way of thinking, but I just think this is part of what unravels your entire project here. If angels have "senses" in the way we do, then those senses require an explanation of some kind. When a human being sees something, we can say it happens because light particles bounce off of objects and hit the human's eyes. You are asserting that angels can interact with the human sphere of experience, and are potentially the source of ESP. I'm open to the idea that both of those claims could be true.
However, when you remove angels and ESP from the realm of matter, I have difficulty understanding what exactly you are claiming. If angels are completely "immaterial" how do they interact with the world at all? How does a being that doesn't see, smell, hear, taste, or touch (since all of those rely on material processes as far as we know) interact with the material world at all? You say that angels might be the source of ESP, but how could an angel acquire information about, say, a squiggle on a card 50 miles away, if the card and the squiggle are all material objects that the angel should have no way of perceiving or interacting with?
If you're asserting that all material objects actually also exist and interact with the "spiritual" realm, and that there are spiritual analogues to all the traditional senses (spirit-sight, spirit-hearing, etc.) and that angels communicate with our astral bodies or whatever, then I would say that seems like an overly complicated theory. Why not just believe that angels are material beings made out of something like neutrinos or literal light that interact and communicate with us in the physical world?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yet now it is "The Holidays".
Don't Christians celebrate New Year's right around Christmas as well? I always assumed "the Holidays" started as a Christian thing and not an inclusive thing.
Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?
A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.
But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:
Produces only sperm
Produces only eggs
Produces neither sperm nor eggs.
Produces sperm and eggs.
The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.
But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.
Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.
Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.
I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.
But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.
If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.
But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.
But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."
Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.
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