Corvos
19hr ago
You don't think the two were somewhat related? I don't mean the trolling argument you mention, more that like Joe Biden's habit of sniffing women it was a case where applying woke principles became clearly problematic from woke's own perspective (utilitarian in the case of Biden, moral in the case of the BBs) in ways that couldn't be blamed on the Right, and produced a measurable reduction in enthusiasm from woke activists.
Either we are talking about different things, or your disgust is stronger than many. Are you okay with a chaste yuri manga that depicts two middle school girls kissing? Or are you talking about depictions of raping a baby?
(Sorry to get sordid, but one sort of has to given the context. Another reason why these discussions get increasingly difficult when they have real stakes.)
You also just have to deal with the fact that not everyone wants to bite your bullets. I have read said yuri manga, and think OP's trailer looked fine, and I don't feel bad about this and have no intention of going to jail for it. I am therefore incentivised to a) dismiss any arguments of this kind in any other field knowing that one day you will try to come for me, and b) look very very carefully for any of your behaviours that could be used to divert the mob. (I don't mean that as a threat, obviously, I'm discussing the general case.) Are you sure that a critical number of your countrymen aren’t concerned with you (hypothetically) playing a game where you can murder prostitutes? That you post here, in this known den of sluggishly schizophrenic incel right-wing racists?
In practice everyone kind of understands that pursuing these kinds of cases with vigour gets really nasty really quickly which is why we still have a broadly-permissive society. I would strongly encourage you to read this post about how Australia's laws unintentionally drove one of our posters to attempting suicide. This stuff has real consequences.
I'm not familiar with countries that ban possession of ivory, although its sale is often illegal.
You're usually banned from importing it, even when it belongs to you, which is sort of a compromise. There are nasty cases of hundred-year-old pianos being destroyed by having the ivory hacked off the keys, things like that.
I mean, surely people always knew that those people were slavers? It's not exactly a secret what they were up to.
There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.
there's other arguments that apply to fiction.
There are, but they're very far off "you are literally watching with pleasure a terrible thing being done to a real person that actually happened". And consequently their force is hugely diminished. Masturbating to George Floyd being suffocated to death is not the same as reading a KKK fantasy novel, even one in which equally lurid things happen.
The argument that "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material" has been trotted out many times and tends to come off very badly. DnD didn't make people satanists, nor did Doom. Grand Theft Auto did not product a wave of, well, grand theft auto. Porn is blamed for lots of nasty new sexual behaviours - mostly choking - but the direct evidential link seems weak and not in the direction that is given (it's a girl-desired thing not a guy-desired thing).
Likewise "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution" generally doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're willing to lock many, many people into a mental home and you're confident that your definition of 'disgusting' is widely shared and not going to come back to bite you.
In practice, many people privately consider these arguments hackneyed and their force has been dropping through the last century. There will always be crusaders and busybodies but equally there's a reason why governments generally avoid going on loud crusades against immoral private sexual acts that aren't actually crimes. Such crusades aren't popular and the government knows half its MPs will become collateral damage.
Corvos
1d ago
It's pretty normal to ban distribution or possession to prevent production - look at ivory.
Also, it's pretty normal to treat something produced by serious enough harm to be somewhat tainted by that harm. Interest in the Benin Bronzes declined considerably as it became known that they were essentially made by the worst slavers in Africa, we don't particularly like dealing with the outputs of Nazi 'research' labs (such as they were), etc. etc. That by itself isn't usually considered enough to merit a ban by itself, but e.g. consumption of actual torture porn or gore stuff is both rare and heavily frowned upon even when that doesn't affect production.
Neither argument applies to fiction, though.
Toilets are organised by SEX, as reified by multiple legal rulings. If you would like toilets to be organised by GENDER, then argue for it.
You're allowed to pretend you're a different SEX, but we'll sometimes still treat you as your birth SEX because that is what is relevant, that is what people care about, and that is the biological reality. It is different from not being allowed to pretend you're a different sex because that's disgusting and you're disturbed.
The original poster, who is actually trans, is sane and recognises this fact and wants to discuss how we might live with it while minimally distressing trans people. I don't agree with him/her on everything but I appreciate his/her candour. You are unfortunately proving why it is not viable in the real world, because you refuse to be clear in your language, you constantly make weaselly efforts to misinterpret mine, and you act as if asking people to use the toilet three steps to the left is a terrible, sinful thing rather than a necessary compromise if people want to be treated as a different sex elsewhere.
Women are being forced to use men's toilets and men are being forced to use women's toilets
Women are being permitted to use women's toilets. Men are being permitted to use men's toilets. All fine and dandy.
Again, come on. You didn't just spring into existence in a Bay Area cuddle pile three years ago. You know perfectly well that using biological sex has been the norm for humanity since Adam lost a rib one day. You can talk like normal people if you try. If you would like to make an argument for using your stupid circular definitions then you can, although I've seen enough of those attempts to be pretty sure it won't go well. If you'd like to make a new word for gender-woman then you can. But stop wrinkling your brow every time people use 'women' and 'men' to mean precisely what they've always meant, or hostilely redefining them to make it sound like there's a problem when there just isn't one. After six years it no longer works.
even being banned from using public toilets completely
This has not happened and nobody has mooted making it happen. Even the ruling you cited, whilst not a good ruling, was saying that maybe bringing a bearded male-impersonator into a therapy group for people traumatised by males might sometimes be inappropriate. That was it. Frankly, I doubt it's ever going to be relevant since I've known a trans man and they were fooling nobody. But no, women should use women's toilets even though for relevant biological reasons people care about this less.
the question of trans men?
They're women who want to be (treated like) men. As with trans women, sometimes we can harmlessly and voluntarily indulge this desire, other times not.
The original poster was pointing out that saying, "look, we understand your desire to behave like / be considered as the opposite sex, and don't wish to give you shit over it or impede your daily life, but we both know that biologically this is not true and we need you to use the toilets associated with your biological sex" is considered just as TERFy as "y'all are freaks and perverts, take that dress off".
People are sensitive to the biological sex of the people in whose proximity they are expected to take their clothes off and make themselves vulnerable, especially when that space is by necessity closed off and unmonitored. Therefore, we require people to use the toilet (right there, free, easily accessible) associated with their own sex.
This sensitivity has been heightened by cases like Isla Bryson, the rapist turned trans lady, very blatantly discovering transness to get into female spaces, and heightened even more by the complete inability of many authorities and activists to even acknowledge this possibility, much less to make any plans to mitigate it.
You wade in going 'people are being BANNED' as if this is some terrible deprivation of liberty, and I genuinely don't know if you use this language because the actual requirements are so trivial and so uncontroversial that you need to punch it up a bit, or because you have worked yourself up so much about the issue that you unconsciously act as if trans people are being made to wait on the pavement until their bladders explode.
That ruling is bullshit caused by the UK government's inability to ever tell women no, and I do not support it in any way.
As for the rest, trans people are permitted to use the toilets concordant with their sex, as are we all. You know this is what I meant. You may disapprove of my invisible rider that this is a good thing, but saying that trans people are being banned from using the toilet is straight up 100% rubbish and you know it. If you would like to argue that forcing trans people to take two steps to the right and use the toilet associated with their sex is evil, please go ahead and do so.
Corvos
1d ago
They're banning trans people completely from using toilets or doing other sex-segregated activities
...unless they use the one given to them right there, same as everyone else.
It's like saying that you're banning me from using the toilet because I'm a compulsive germophobe and you refuse to have the bathroom extensively fumigated after each person goes in. The facilities are there for trans people, they're allowed to use them, they're throwing a massive tantrum at the way they're allowed to use them. That is not 'banning'.
Corvos
1d ago
Okay, I see your point better now. I partially disagree with your assertion - genuine expressions of pure racial hatred draw more than eye rolls in all but the most edgy communities.
I’m very far from woke but I’ve left group chats because they really were just nastiness about Jewish noses and things.
There is no "steelman" for pedophilia
Depends what you're steelmanning. As usual, what's happened is a word referring to a genuinely bad thing has had its meaning tortured to make it into a useable weapon where it doesn't apply. Finding big eyes cute does not mean that you're going to go off and rape a baby, any more than asking a man with a dress to use the mens' loo means you're going to go and machine-gun the Hutus.
There's no virtuous principle or sympathetic situation that causes people to think "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white."
There doesn't need to be. There is no sex with kids in that trailer. Look at racism: there is no sympathetic principle that makes people think that beating an old black man to death because you hate looking at his dirty skin is okay either; people tire of 'racism' because that's very clearly not what's under discussion.
Corvos
2d ago
Look at Britain post-WW2. Look at Britain now.
I’d say that’s a yes. We should have done what the French did and told everybody else to shove it and built our own security architecture.
Corvos
2d ago
Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news
You are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The reason this news is still relevant / milkable is that precisely zip has been done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Where are the new migration guidelines? Where is the MacPherson report? Where is the anti-anti-racist training for the police?
The closest I’ve heard of it is some white paper that Mahmood is supposedly shopping about.
Corvos
3d ago
having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports
The case of rapist Isla Bryson, still referred to by Wikipedia as a 'woman', literally brought down the Scottish government because Nicola Sturgeon could not be made to admit the possibility that putting a man who was going to jail for raping women into a prison full of women might be inappropriate.
Corvos
3d ago
Israel’s enemies would certainly have been emboldened, but Israel’s friends would have been (and were) emboldened too. When you get right down to it, a fence is a fence. Oct 7th was an Israeli cock-up as much as it was a Hamas triumph and I honestly don’t think Israel had much to fear if they had just stopped sending their reservists home for the holidays.
Corvos
3d ago
Also it’s really hard to base your PR strategy on sympathy about that one time you got horribly genocided when your government keeps unveiling flags inscribed with “YAY GENOCIDE!”
Corvos
3d ago
They were doing fine, prior to Oct 7th. Hamas did what they did precisely because they were losing ground; Arab countries were normalising relations. What they should have done - and it's not perfect, and it would have been very hard - is put back up the fence, gritted their teeth, and carried on the way they were going.
Corvos
4d ago
In this particular case, because America's ally Israel's opinion differs from America's and it's mucking up American diplomacy.
People like you make me want to just kill every Palestinian and Iranian to prove a point we won because we can.
Yes, but people like you make me want to defect to China. Going full psycho is not just another move you can pull out of your repertoire like you're playing blackjack and deciding whether to hit or stay. When you are in protracted legal wrangling over a breach of patent costing 10m USD, the reason you don't just pull out a gun and waste the judge, plaintiff and opposing council isn't because it won't work, it's because making it clear that you are a psycho with no switches except 'kill' and 'don't kill' acts as a strong signal to everyone else that they need to drop everything and focus on killing you now.
Case in point: all of Israel's former allies now loathe them. To the extent that there is any support for Israel remaining, it is that senior politicians manage to temporarily squeeze it out whilst avoiding increasingly bipartisan pressure from all the up-and-coming politicians. Whatever the provocation, going straight to 'kill everyone' is not a good move unless you are obviously so desperate that there is no other choice. America is very clearly not in that position.
The US hasn't been at war with anyone since 1942, and 1979 was forty seven years ago. And... look, there is no possible way you would have accepted this reasoning if Iran had shot Donald Trump at a speech or had his secretary blow him up with a briefcase bomb in 2017. No way. Which to me just makes your reasoning look like, "America gets to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime as long as we don't like them and we didn't explicitly promise not to". That's not even perfidy. Perfidy implies the possibility of honour.
Corvos
4d ago
Except that yet again, the gap between “the US is vastly more powerful than its allies” and “US opinion is all that matters” is biting the US in the arse.
Corvos
5d ago
Trump pushes and sees if he gets pushback. I think the likelihood of taking by force was low - maybe 10% - but NATO sending troops moved it from 'yeah, could be easy, could be fun' to 'going to be a headache'.
Eyy, well done!
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