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An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
Because normal people object to being called something other than normal? Trans people having so much support in the media skews how truly abnormal almost everyone thinks they are. Its a bizarre scene whenever a trans person enters any not-LGBTQ (on and on) place and starts trying to fit in. So they often don't even try, they just start being bizzare and demanding respect. Some FTM people can moderately pass as really weak looking soyboys. But they seem much less even a part of the project. Those are mostly very depressed people who's depression continues so brazenly through transition they are lucky to ever see people as they can often not exit their abode. Contrasted with the never passing loud MTFs that so often represent the movement, and well, the abnormality is so stark that calling something that is not that anything but normal is simply a bizarre turn of vocabulary.
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
Does pedophilia get the benefits of this expansion? What if you get the kids to consent to it?
Do you think encouraging children to engage in recreational use of heroin or methamphetamines is a good idea? If not, why not? Wouldn't this just be allowing them the freedom to make their own decisions about their own brain chemistry?
Like, I understand that dropping the pedo card is generally considered bad form. But you're the one saying letting people do what they want expands without limit. I don't think you actually mean that, because there are some very obvious limits I don't think you will, now at least, actually endorse! But you are emphatically saying those limits don't exist, so it seems necessary to point them out explicity.
So which is it? Do you actually recognize that some decisions, even personal decisions, should be restricted, or are you committed to "anything goes"?
The conservative position is that people are not, in fact, infinitely malleable, and pretending they are, or allowing them to pretend they are, can have serious consequences both for those people and for society as a whole. We can point to a long serious of fairly heinous consequences over the course of history to back this idea up.
[EDIT] - Would it be fair to say that you see gratification of one's desires as a terminal good? Would it also be fair to say that, excepting desires that clearly harm another, you don't believe there's such a thing as a bad desire?
I think there are better conservative positions, like- "we're not ready for this- yet. And won't be in our lifetimes so give up on it."
The conservative position that humans are not infinitely malleable is... either intended in the context of our lifetimes or just ridiculously shortsighted. We evolved from single celled organisms and we'll do it again.
Social progress is the ongoing process of distilling the baby out of the bathwater. Separating good from evil, and adopting the good while negating and subverting the evil.
I'm not saying everything should be permitted now. Far from it.
"Which technological advancements will make pedophilia viable?"
Well. Better systems to make sure they never fuck actual children.
Deepfaking technology.
Android technology.
Viability timeline estimation - 100 years
Will they ever be allowed to fuck actual children?
"Which technological advancements will make adults having intercourse with children viable?"
Very difficult to say. The costs are too high to explore...
the costs... are too high... to explore...
Absurdly predictive theory of child development and trauma formation.
Much better trauma treatment in cases where things go wrong, to the point that there are no known cases of even illegal violent rape that leave residual trauma after a week.
Enough supervision that every instance can be monitored even as it becomes socially normalized.
Viability timeline estimation - 1000 years or post singularity equivalent.
...
Will there even be human children in 1000 years or will pedophilia just mean intercourse with day old AI forks? Is sexting a fresh LLM instance pedophilia? Nah. Nah the concept just falls apart at that point. It's like asking ChatGPT whether its a man or a woman.
[EDIT] regarding your edit.
I think desires can be conditionally bad, but not innately bad. But this is usually a moot point. We live in conditions after all.
Having a strong, debilitating desire to be a squid as a 16th century peasant is not very useful, and you should work towards mitigating that until it is not debilitating and accept that you are probably going to be a human your whole life. Though- it would be fine to also accept that you still have the desire, if you can channel it to something tangible. Maybe that peasant becomes a famous squid painter. Maybe he just makes his family just a little richer through hard work so that maybe his children can follow their dreams one day.
It would be more accurate to say- my desire is to see humanity moving with the intention of shifting conditions so that more and more desires are supported, and fewer and fewer desires are bad.
It's less about the gratification of desires and more about them not being frustrated as they unspool into acts of creation that give birth to intense and unique existences and experiences.
There is a sort of desire that becomes a religion. A driving need. A purpose. I don't know how many people have even experienced what I'm talking about. It's difficult to describe because thinking about it is placing me in an intense state of... blissful thirst for new sensations. I need to go.
What evidence can you offer that you in particular or Social Progressivism generally has any fixed definition of "good" or "evil", "baby" or "bathwater"? If, as seems obvious to me, you have no such fixed definition, what do these statements even mean?
Why not? How do we adjudicate which changes can be permitted now and which later?
You're reducing the problem to one of logistics. But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future. Why should I believe that Social Progress will confine itself to thoroughly tested and engineered solutions when it has never done so before?
And this ignores the question of whether it really is just a question of logistics. What if they really, really want to fuck kids, for real, and are not satisfied with your simulacra? In that eventuality, on what basis do you deny their deeply-held, arguably-innate desires? What if they promise to only fuck the kids they clone and grow themselves?
How do you even know their desires are wrong? On what basis? Because "studies show"?
Based on what, your opinion? People like me tell you that [$thing] has a cost too high to explore, and you laugh us off and explore the fuck out of it anyway, and then expect your own pronouncements to be treated as holy writ? Progressives disagreed with your opinion in the past, and actively encouraged and enabled pedophilia through the power of the state, because they knew better and "studies showed". Do you have some radical new insight that they somehow missed the last go-round?
...Rather than go point by point, let me try to draw this together: you talk as though there is an obvious good and evil, an obvious moral standard of correctness. You reject my claim to possess such a standard out of hand, and then you presume that your preferred standard is simply, obviously correct and needs no further justification. You do this in apparent blissful ignorance of the heaps of skulls previously generated by exactly the attitude you're currently displaying.
You frame the concepts of drift-of-form and drift-of-values in the most anodyne ways possible, ignoring all the obvious, glaring pitfalls, as though it's all about body-shape and inside we're of course all be true-blue (Berkeley progressive circa 2023) Americans. What if I decide I don't like having a conscience? What if I want to bake hatred of [$group] into myself on a genetic level, so I can pass it on to my kids? What if I want to self-modify to reverse my empathy so that observed injustice gives me orgasmic pleasure? What if the giant spider morph wants to eat children? What if trans surgery doesn't actually help and is actually mutilation? What if marketing heroin to kids is super-profitable and highly effective? What if the definition of human shifts, and some former persons don't make the cut (60 million abortions and counting, government-sponsored ads for Euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure)? What if it turns out some sector of the population is, like, really harshing your vibe, man?
What if, in short, the line between good and evil really does run through every human heart, and solving hatred and malice and greed and the urge to predation is not just a matter of engineering everybody into a sim-pod?
...And of course, all this is done, ignoring the fact that right now we don't have the tech, and you're arguing in favor of the people who push the "start" button anyway.
And the idea that these mostly-fictional or literally unimaginable desires might be frustrated weighs on your moral thinking, such that you're willing to assist in the radical, arguably-coercive restructuring of a society built and largely peopled by individuals who have no idea what the fuck you're on about, but are not interested in what you're selling? Like, Progressives collectively make this pitch, I and people like me say, "fuck no", and you try to push us into the hopper anyway? That about the size of it?
Have you considered that maybe you just have a fetish for novelty?
Arguably coercive? My friend. We live in a society. It's always been coercive. You see progressives say that they want more diverse sets of people to be permitted to exist, and conservatives say they want to be allowed to force people to all fit a certain mold, and you call the former coercive?
Very well. It may well be. We live in a society until the day we are all so powerful that we no longer need to and can live in deep intergalactic space off the skin of our hydrogen collectors. But don't tell me the society crafted by our forefathers isn't just as coercive if not moreso.
Holy writ? No not by everyone. I expect combat. I expect culture war. I would prefer a peaceful unfolding. But I am here to change the world. Not to coddle it.
I don't expect- I think our world is built up from the tragedies of the violent birth of our species into a hostile world. Our precedents are the sacrifices we have made to keep ourselves alive. And even thinking about it costs energy. Costs scarce resources. Time spent arguing over whether it is time to remove Chesterton's fence is time not spent growing food. The legal system costs millions of dollars and the time of our best and brightest just to print and execute precedent at a grueling rate. I get that it's not cheap. I get that it has value that we have paid dearly for.
But- this is probably because I am an American born in the Live Free or Die state. But I expect people to not terminally value fences- to merely instrumentally value them. Even though I do understand- you can terminally value just about anything.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad. I want people to actually be interested in understanding why Chesterton's fence is there, and remain aware of when it can, or should be torn down. They don't have to be objectively correct. I don't expect all humans to have the same understanding of good and evil or the same predictions of the consequences of actions. I just want everyone to remain aware and humor the idea that there is a point at which we outgrow the fences we have erected for our safety. I want people to imagine when tearing it down would be viable, so that they can give one another firm expectations of what they have to build if they really need it torn down. If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
If we had been cooperating on this from the start with clear expectations then this culture war never would have happened.
Of course this is a fantasy. Our history didn't build us up as people who could have cooperated like that.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown. Are we simply looking at different skull piles here? I get that sometimes, when the weird grow in power, walking off the beaten path, the food stops getting made, and the skulls become myriad. I am told "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". And I agree, but I also contend- "Do not let the good be the enemy of the better."
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you. If you can erase your conscience without doing that- or want to die- go for it. That's not a threat. It's more... this all just seems so simple to me. We are all here. Just don't let go of the parts you want to keep and they'll stick around. Yes. It doesn't escape me that conservatives are doing the same thing- to a degree. I can appreciate that trans people may have pushed too deeply too quickly for systems to adapt. I can appreciate that where exactly I draw the line is somewhat arbitrary, that some people might not want to let go of the gender binary for reasons more terminal in addition to the pragmatic. But my concern is more the lack of interest some people have in letting the systems ever change to support more types of people. Some people don't seem to be looking for how the world can become better, they are only looking at how the world can become worse.
I have a fetish for novelty. Definitely. Novelty and intensity. Glory, expression, fire, intensity, fearlessness.
Ah, yes. perhaps I do expect other humans to at least taste a hint of why those things are good. Even if they weigh them against other values.
I think conservatives have a fetish for safety. I think many of them have very reasonable takes around safety and sustainability. But I think some of them have a fear-driven blindness to almost everything else that makes the universe wonderful. I think conservatives, as the leaders on caring about safety and sustainability- should have been the ones thinking about global warming. Not necessarily cutting emissions earlier- there were real economic tradeoffs there that merited consideration. But actually recognizing and thinking about the problem. But instead it was fully denied because of the implication that we might have to change the way we live our lives over it. Something has gone horribly wrong- when precedent is the thing blinding us to the safety it was built for. When safety is the thing stopping us from living the lives it was built to preserve.
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