domain:mgautreau.substack.com
FtttG
2m ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
HereAndGone
7m ago
But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".
This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.
That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15m ago
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
FtttG
15m ago
Gazan civilians are being killed at close to a 30:1 ratio
Do you mean that for every Hamas combatant killed in the current conflict, the IDF also kills thirty civilians? No estimate of the death toll I've seen has been that pessimistic, not even those literally published by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
HereAndGone
15m ago
No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.
Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".
HereAndGone
17m ago
I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁
FtttG
19m ago
it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids
It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
HereAndGone
20m ago
The irony being that it was men who did much of the work on Tarot and other systems, such as de Gébelin (who is the one responsible for popularising the idea that the Tarot was mystic secret Egyptian wisdom).
As you say, then it got picked up as witchy-woo vibes and that is where the current interest is - women like astrology, divination and the likes.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
23m ago
This is fair, my comment was a bit of a snipe.
I just don't want to see this rhetoric on any side.
FtttG
32m ago
I remember reading an article (can't find it now) in which a trans man had recently started taking testosterone and was driving to a session of his trans support group, when another driver cut him off in traffic, which so enraged him that he found himself experiencing the worst episode of road rage he'd ever have had in his life: heart racing, temples pounding, furiously cursing, to the point that he had to pull over his car to calm himself down. He'd never felt anything like it. Upon arriving at the trans support group, he described this experience and how unlike any previous road rage episode it was, whereupon the older members of the group smiled knowingly and explained that he'd gotten "boy angry" for the first time.
Male aggression is qualitatively different from female: like most stereotypes, the male urge to punch holes in walls or break things when you feel angry or frustrated has a large basis in fact, and seems comparatively rarer among women. It must be very alarming to experience this all of a sudden without the benefit of a years-long puberty in which to acclimate oneself to it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
33m ago
If Mamdani gets in and starts implementing his platform, his proposals will probably get on the table basically all around the Western world, or at least the large/capital cities.
I'm not yet convinced.
But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.
It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.
Corvos
46m ago
Fortune-telling is stupid-coded. Side effect of the millennial emphasis on science and downstream emphasis on atheism.
For a long time, even if you said ‘I tell fortunes but I don’t take it seriously’ people would assume that you are just trying to hide your embarrassing beliefs. Same with conspiracy theories - ‘I’m just asking questions’ often codes as ‘let me rant at you for hours, and don’t criticise my theories because they’re (not) only for fun’.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
53m ago
Thanks for the more detailed explanation. Yeah I remember reading some about this in my World Religions class way back in the day. Also, the book Christ the Eternal Dao goes into some of this proto-Christian theory which I find quite interesting.
@AlexanderTurok great writeup here!
Also side note, I appreciate your refreshingly different viewpoints on here. Don't let the haters get you down.
I've come to a similar conclusion regarding many statements along the lines of "you can't fight fate/genetics/the system/[phenomenon]". Much like "randomness" among young people, i.e., the belief that they will enjoy positive outcomes independently of their actions or lack thereof, many people, and especially older people, will excuse their refusal to change their habits by appealing to some greater force that supposedly nullifies any potential efforts on their part. "You can't know that behavior X will have outcome Y!", they say. "You could make an effort to X and then Y might still foil your plans!". And sure, sometimes that's object-level correct. It seems advisable to be able to gauge somewhat to what an extent and at what cost you can influence your outcomes. But many people employ this seemingly analytical language in a completely binary fashion terminating in non-arguments that are thinly-veiled excuses to indulge in bad behavior.
Examples:
- "I'm too old to quit smoking, we all die in the end anyways, and besides many smokers reach a ripe old age."
- "Yeah, I could eat less to be less fat, but CICO is an oversimplification. Also, muh metabolism."
- "I have to let my child do whatever it likes, children turn out well enough regardless of what parents do."
- "I'll go exercise tomorrow, but right now I need to binge netflix. (x365)"
- "Just don't write unit tests, those take too long and we've never had trouble without them in the past."
- "I'm not going to speak to a stranger, they might be a predator!"
- "I won't talk to my boss about my salary, those misogynists won't pay me more anyways."
All of those statements ignore any realistic expected value in favor of just keeping on trucking as usual, by pointing at some supposed mechanism that confounds any attempts to impose one's will upon the world.
If this were a free market, people would be able to sign marriage agreements that don't lie within the specific boundaries set by the State, and in particular have vastly different conditions for divorce.
Moreover, one wouldn't be forced at gunpoint to subsidize singles.
But this is not a free market.
Eetan
1hr ago
I find it weird people don't have those qualms about PTSD. But then again we refused to believe it was a thing for a long time.
There are still holdouts who refuse to believe. Not only cranks, but as esteemed HBDIQ rationalist adjacent people as Greg Cochran (his argument: "There was no PTSD in ancient Rome").
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
In the Blanchardian model, they would be homosexual transexuals (the FtM equivalent of the kathoey-hijra type) and not autoandrophiles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Normal tomboys want to date straight men. Autoandrophiles (such as exist) want to date gay men.
I admit I can't explain why "feminist" in the public imagination is sex-positive.
My pet theory from last month is that sex-positive feminists are highly psychologically atypical women who are almost as interested in casual sex as the modal man is, and who erroneously attribute their interest in casual sex as evidence as their having transcended the internalised misogyny (read: false consciousness) that their peers fell victim to.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
The glibertarian answer to the Riddle of the Flute Children is "Kill the man who asks who gets the flute." But that doesn't change the fact that someone gets the flute and others don't. If nobody is allowed to ask the question, we will get the default answer. And if the default answer is that the flute children fight among themselves then the flute will be broken as surely as it will be broken by the rival Grand High Flute Adjudicators in the Thirty Flutes' War.
Protection from organised predation is absolutely necessary for survival, and social insurance is mostly necessary. And neither can be practically provided by someone who lacks the powers of a Grand High Flute Adjudicator. If the State doesn't provide those things (or fails to do so effectively), other institutions will. And those institutions will coerce their members, and will seek to coerce nonmembers. And that coercive power will be fought over.
Now if we treat the flute metaphor as fact, the question has an easy default answer, that is revealing in the real world. Daddy decides which child gets the flute. "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a peace treaty between lineages. In the cis-Hajnal context where Daddy is the actual married biological father of actual minor children, it is one that works well.
But cis-Hajnal nuclear families are not the default, and "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a bad treaty if the flute children are productive adults with children of their own and Daddy is an increasingly senile paterfamilias who might not even be a blood relative. The human default is to look to extended family for protection against predation and for social insurance, and the normie way of thinking about other institutions that provide those things (including the State, the Mafia etc.) is as fictive extended families - hence Don Corleone's English-language title of "Godfather" and the often-accurate libertarian jibe against the Mummy Party and the Daddy Party. And in practice the people who find themselves inside those kind of extended family institutions are treated like naughty children whose flutes can be taken away if they backtalk Daddy. And so they work (and, more often than not, fight - Western civilisation's record at kicking the asses of fuzzy-wuzzies on the battlefield is even better than our record of delivering unimaginable universal material prosperity) like naughty children. The canonical book on this point is Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan
The Peace of God predates the Hajnal line, the Hajnal line predates the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Treaty of Westphalia predates SpaceX. This isn't an accident.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
Yeah (well, assuming he survives; I don't imagine corpses get into many fights), but if these people are all dead, or if the parties aren't recognisable due to e.g. much of the Democratic voter base being turned into charcoal by Dongfengs, or if mass AI brainwashing obviates normal politics, this is just blatantly the wrong question to ask.
FtttG
1hr ago
For years I was under the impression that the term "fuckboy" was the spear counterpart to "slut": a highly promiscuous man. Last year I was talking with a female friend of mine who was single at the time, and who'd recently had some sub-optimal experiences on dating apps which she was feeling bitter about. (Thankfully she's now in a serious relationship with a wonderful man who I like very much.) She linked this article to me, which explained that a "fuckboy" isn't just a slutty man, but rather a man who leads a woman to believe that he's interested in pursuing a serious committed relationship with her and essentially treats her as his girlfriend for the duration of their casual dating stage, only to abruptly drop her without warning as soon as he gets bored.
Fuckboys reel women in with what appears to be romance. They ask women on dates. They want to get to know women on an intimate emotional level. They want to be vulnerable, hold hands and kiss in public. And they definitely want to fuck. What they don't want is a relationship, which after all of the intimacy, romance, and of course fucking, leaves women confused as to what the hell they just experienced.
All, I could think was - man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some components of gender politics really are evergreen.
Eetan
1hr ago
One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).
The right lacks the Elite Human Capital(TM) necessary to take over these institutions, and it knows it. Scorched earth tactics - destroying positions you cannot hold to deny them to the enemy - is the second best solution.
True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
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