[aksemmi]

i think its bad actually if parents get to decide how to shape the human genotype in accordance with social norms and productivity expectations

[aksemmi]

mitigated only to the extent that genetics just is not actually as powerful as eugenicists believe it to be

[aksemmi]

tho tbh part of me is a bit confused at the existential terms this whole thing is sometimes framed in: ranchers after all persist and prosper in argentina and brazil where the fly was never eradicated, rigth? i dont know much about its infection patterns in south america. ranchers are happily murdering and raping cows and chopping down the rainforest and stealing land from indigineous people in brazil to this day. its not like the wellbeing of the cows matter to them. really it seems to me like, probably means they will be marginally less profitable, but they wont even lose money with the bailouts the state will inevitably give them

[aksemmi]

tumblr ate a longer but rambly post i wrote about this but uh. screwworm: obviously horrific, not a good thing, brutally kills animals. but it is morbidly transfixing watching various kinds of usamerican ranchers, their political allies, and various different kind of ~carnist realists who are not otherwise marginally aligned with them react to this. its all very... apocalyptic in a thematic rather than impact sense? a scourge of nightmares upon other nightmares, not a good thing even in collapse, just a scourge revealing all sorts of malice and insanity that it feeds off, invited as a stray casualty of trying to give african children HIV. yuck

[mysharona1987]

[lynati]

If the trash pickup people stop doing their job for two weeks you'd be throwing a fucking tantrum. Same for the janitors who keep your office spaces and bathrooms clean. (And that's before the various illnesses start to spread all over your city from the build up of pathogens.)

The people responsible keeping our spaces clean (and thus, mostly disease-free) should both be paid more AND thanked more.

[madgastronomer]

Thank a sanitation worker for their service.

[aksemmi]

IIRC trash collectors in the united states have a crazy high risk of workplace death because in places where the trucks cant pick up the cans, jumping on and off means going out in and out of traffic a bunch

[phaeton-flier]

"what if sex selective abortion leads to an heavy imbalance of genders?" Change the underlying social misogyny that causes that, instead of forcing women to have carry babies they don't want!

[phaeton-flier]

People are aware that "those stupid slut should've kept her legs closed, she should have the baby as punishment" is a bad thing, but often forget that forced birth as punishment is bad for bad things too

[aksemmi]

"dont have a child if it matters so much to you what they come out as that youd get a sex selective abortion" is not the same thing as "you have to have a child you don't want" there is no forced birth as punishment here

[dungeonmastersconsortium]

"I don't have a choice, I'm just following orders"

Have you considered smoking one (1) joint?

[dogposts]

wake up wake up wake up wake up let's play

[aksemmi]

ngl i think its disgusting when MLs try and paint any iranian or iranian refugee who dared criticize the authoritarian and patriarchal government while in western view as some kind of propagandist for imperialism or the war

[aksemmi]

this post is a speculative response to a niche issue of moral philosophy that comes up around nonhuman-animal-rights. i am not a negative utilitarian, and i do not generally believe it is good or obligatory to wipe out wild animals on the basis that nature contains a lot of death and misery it is sometimes asserted that there is a contradiction between believing this, and opposing animal slaughter. this is called the logic of the larder: the argument goes, if killing animals for their flesh or other products is why they are brought into the world, and you don't believe existence in a fucked up world is worse than nonexistence, then the rape and murder supposedly benefits the animals here. there is an easy answer to refute this line of thought, which isn't very interesting. well, and a complicated answer. but there is i think also a slightly harder variant, that i want to give a response to. the easy answer is, well, actually existing animal agriculture is worse than nature. actually existing animal ag is, of course, almost entirely factory farming, which has nightmarish conditions (especially for birds and pigs), high pre slaughter mortality, and very young ages of slaughter. tbc, p much all animal products (excluding wild-caught "seafood" i suppose) is from factory farming. so someone could say, well, this is below some life worth living threshold and nature isnt with some degree of "plausibility". i disagree with this background view of population ethics, and the general concept of lives worth living, there are other ways of conceptualizing the harm done here, but for now this is an answer and its easiest to present this way rn i think (the complicated answer, something i have not looked into much, is just the above but trying to ask what kind of species comparisons we should make, how to weigh different species, and what the effects of animal agriculture are on wild animal populations) so, things get slightly harder. the thought experiment troll says, hold on, what if it wasn't so bad, would you still be opposed to animal agriculture? what if there was a farm that raised animals for slaughter, calibrated to be about as bad as the equivalent in nature only. now, i want to be clear, the uncle's humane farms we will have to invoke in this section are hypothetical, they don't exist. more than even just being not factory farms, they also do not slaughter animals at a young age, instead being something more like what age their wild equivalents would typically die at. this is not an economically feasible model in the real world and doesn't exist. but what if? on what basis might one oppose such a scheme, without falling into the wild extinction trap?

the answer to this i think, is one about cooperation, or lack of such, or spite. even if a farm is only "as bad as" nature, its a system under agentic control, an agent that can be negotiated with, unlike nature. a farmer here could in theory, if this farm is increasing the amount of animals in the world, instead simply provide an equivalent amount of resources to facilitate cow existence. now, yes, they will Not Just, but i think its within the realm of possibility enough that it makes sense as a pole in a negotiating position. this means its possible, in a decision theory way, to say we are opposed to this as a cudgel against the bad actor, or to refuse to cooperate with them. another way to look at part of this that might sometimes apply, insofar as it might make sense for cows to intentionally not reproduce to avoid cooperating with their children's future murder, imagine if humans had been abducted by aliens offering a similar scenario, then that logic suggests opposing the whole thing existing here. this is sort of a cringily basic answer but i do think following roughly this direction escapes even uncle's imaginary humane larder logic anyways post inspired by @nunuisancenewt asking me about this again, im sorry thats its a p boring and unelaborated answer also im more than a bit sleep deprived atm thus the rambliness

[aksemmi]

there seems to be something very weird going on, to me, when other people discuss philosophy of mind or such relative to my own intuitions/experience, tho not in a way which seems to bring any kind of obvious conclusion from it - ive recently seen a discussion of "feeling love" as a characteristic feature of consciousness. now, i feel love, but what i mean by this is i experience being in love, which is... well not a feeling, or, its not a qualia, the way pain or red are qualia. rather, its like, some mix of preferences, beliefs, emergent patterns of thoughts, desires, etc. it may also be a "mood", or a meta-mood, where things shift in certain ways in certain contexts. but to me there is no love qualia. i can introspect and get a return "love", but this seems downstream of observation rather than something i can infer innately just by running a check. now, arguably, i can only experience all this because i have, well, subjective experience, which maybe we can equate to consciousness?, but in a sense this seems like not the level love exists on, if consciousness is like experience, then the experience of love is no more rooted in consciousness than say the experience of tumblr is - its intuitive to me that pain is, well, pain, something to avoid, not because of the particular qualia/sensation of pain itself but because of the panicked desire to avoid and get out of it that comes with it. this makes sense considering ie humans with mutations who feel pain but do not avoid it. i just read a post where someone's central motive in identifying consciousness is about the sensation of pain, and how to avoid it, but it didnt seem to stop and consider if the qualia of pain can be separated from the desire to avoid it. it spent the whole time talking about how bad pain feels, in a blog otherwise very careful about disambiguating around philosophy of mind. but while i feel pain and react to it as one might expect, abstractly it seems clear to me that the feeling itself isnt really whats morally relevant as something to avoid causing others, that that is rooted more in the avoidance response? - i was reading a post talking about consciousness as access to self, ie the ability to make queries and get returns, basically mental self awareness or reflection etc., and specifically the ability to check how one came to recent conclusions at any time. but to me this seems a bit like, well not something i cant do, but not the norm, and often something hard. i often dont have much ability to tell why i thought something, without essentially guessing (some of this, loosely, does seem pointed at something like me interpreting consciousness as awareness itself/qualia vs as like, reflective thought, but perhaps ironically thinking about ie the love example also makes more me sympathetic to the idea that actually an entity doesnt need qualia or awareness to be ~someone anyways! tho its not clear such an entity is theoretically possible, as causation could flow the other way)

[aksemmi]

as far as i can tell the UK is like, just exceptionally dysfunctional in bizarro-land ways, and racists keep wanting to section off little curated pieces of this where someone involved had brown skin, to sell usamericans more racism

[aksemmi]

that and sometimes its "someone said they were trying to not be racist as a deflection of scrutiny after the fact for why things went wrong, so this must be because of political correctness gone mad"

[aksemmi]

as far as i can tell the UK is like, just exceptionally dysfunctional in bizarro-land ways, and racists keep wanting to section off little curated pieces of this where someone involved had brown skin, to sell usamericans more racism

[aksemmi]

not a pacifist but its still p funny to me that i have seen the idea of nonviolent action on this site explicitly dismissed in favor of the sort of thing to which "blowing up a pipeline" was by name cited as a synechdoche. blowing up a pipeline being, well, a nonviolent action

[aksemmi]

im not a pacifist but i have some amount of romantic attachment to the vision of pacifism involved in ie, the ALF. not violence, but standing in the way of violence by dismantling whatever is built to carry it out, by walking in and freeing anyone who has been caged, by sneaking through cracks in the night to find any physical avenue to be In The Way

[liskantope]

IMO the framing over "pronouns" as a discourse is very misleading, because it seems like it ends up being treated as exceptionally an argument over language itself, or category boundaries one thing is like, well, if we have a situation where someone is saying something false in a way connected to malice and attacks on someone, theres a lot of ways to respond to this. some of these ways look like responding with personal hostility, others might look like some form of deplatforming or removing someone from an organization, etc. - but i dont think misgendering is atypical here. it seems like treating this as "exceptionally" a case of fights about belief and language is just not true, and really this is not fundamentally unlike other arguments where someone might claim they are being silenced or asked to express things they do not believe, the same could happen if someone wanted to express a belief that homosexuality was a sin or a threat to children or whatever, or that women shouldnt be working, etc. also, when i say trans X are X, this is not an empty assertion of category boundaries or language. however hard gender is to define in precise words, i would say i am expressing material facts about the world, ones which transphobes would frequently disagree with, and are relevant to what i mean when i say trans X are X and why i believe it. idk if im saying this all well rn but to me, it seems like the endless debate over language as if language was the main field of the underlying debate just seems like a bad frame to me, a kind of red herring. one it seems even a lot of nominally pro trans arguments have been kind of backed into going along with, but i dont like this!

I have a hard time fully digesting your thesis here, so I can't give a full response, but I am generally in sympathy with the idea that the actual substance of the trans theater of the culture wars is not about language and that it's unfortunate that it's gotten so bogged down in a linguistic battleground. Then again, part of the reason why it's gotten so bogged down in language is that language plays something closer to a front-and-center role in our culture-wide struggle around gender identity than it has in almost any other cultural struggle that I'm aware of other than (outside of the Anglosphere) battles which are themselves over the potential extinction of a language (this is not to deny that most social struggles have involved somewhat of a linguistic battleground of course).

i dont think misgendering is atypical here. it seems like treating this as "exceptionally" a case of fights about belief and language is just not true, and really this is not fundamentally unlike other arguments where someone might claim they are being silenced or asked to express things they do not believe, the same could happen if someone wanted to express a belief that homosexuality was a sin or a threat to children or whatever, or that women shouldnt be working, etc.

I vaguely suspect you're conflating an object level with a meta level here.

In every debate over social beliefs/policy, there's potential for a meta-level battle over who is allowed to voice their opinions where and whether their being allowed a platform to voice them is itself oppressing some group or whether instead silencing them is an unfair form of oppression, etc. The trans part of the culture war is different from most* in that one of the major object-level topics of dispute is which gendered nouns/pronouns to use when referring to someone. (You clearly wish this weren't such a major topic of dispute so that we could focus on discussing the more substantial and concrete rights like being having access to certain kinds of medical care or women's spaces, etc., and I'm inclined to agree with you, but that is clearly not the reality.)

*Not all! Some culture wars involve disagreements over hate speech or use of slurs, for instance.

[aksemmi]

there is a very large inferential gap here i think but im gonna try and gesture at what i mean i think. i wrote this while mildly delirious and im not super sure i endorse it, but here we go, put under a readmore for length and like, frank and very mildly outside-viewish descriptions of transphobia

i think the linguistic aspect, pronouns and such, the idea of wanting certain terms to be used that came up in posts i was thinking of when responding here, is better thought of as a meta level dispute than an object level one. that is, the reason this is under contention, is not a fully free floating preference for terminology here, rather, its about what is being expressed by the use of gendered terminology. in this sense, i do not think its fundamentally a different kind of fight than ie, about the acceptability of homosexuality, the linguistic angle seems like a red herring

so, what is expressed by gendering someone? well obviously, people will make different claims of varying degrees of plausibility as to how they might define a gender, but well, i dont think i have a verbal definition of man or woman (or nonbinariness beyond negation of the former two), but i would say, gender is a real attribute someone can have which is not unrelated to all sorts of things we can say about them, and predictions we can make about them, and that trans people are not exceptions to this. that is gendering someone is a meaningful descriptive, not just normative(?), claim. this can include like, anything from how they act, to what they are like as people, to what their bodies are like, to how other people and social structures treat them, to what established social role in society they occupy, to what sort of things they might wish to do in relation to their gender, to what their appearance is, to like, yes, what their psychological relationship is to gender identity.

it is in this sort of sense that misgendering can be incorrect, that its making a false statement about someone. i dont think my disagreement with transphobes is purely something where i think we should draw lines, i think transphobes are wrong about trans people. one way they are wrong is in having, well, a fairly incoherent attempt to define gender (generally claimed to be about biology, but really more like a permanant metaphysical tag they imagine which is quite detached from it), but also they are wrong in other ways along the lines i mentioned, they imagine things about trans people that are not true. maybe the easiest thing here to point to is how transphobes seem frequently ignorant of how hrt works, but there are a lot of things here - consider how common it is to ie attribute predatory attitudes to trans women that are said to be characteristically male, or how people make up false theories of gender "etiology" like autogynephilia or social contagion/ROGD stuff, or how they seem to want to deny examples of trans woman being treated like women by patriarchy, or even just wanting to maximally exaggeratedly insist someone looks unlike their gender, etc. but at a smaller more individual scale, theres really a lot here but its hard to express, it seems transphobes want to consistently claim trans people are unlike their gender, in any given way, and they are often wrong about this! so like, ok honestly im not sure this is the best way to describe things or really all the phenomenon. but this often means, transphobes are wrong about trans people, in difficult to elaborate but real ways, and this is relevant to what they are expressing when they misgender someone.

(some may argue there is also more here in terms of like, intersex neurology or even metaphysics, and i have sympathies in that direction, but for our purposes i think we can treat these as hypotheses of additional features of gender rather than its definition which is probably? in line with my views on those possibilities myself)

so, theres another thing that can be expressed here, which is political or assertive, its saying "yes we are going to treat this person as [gender]" this is the second thing that seems relevant here. it is, obviously, also an important one. and can include like, references to real actions someone plans to take or think should happen. this is another way it matters. this is i think most obvious looking at transphobes - its clear that misgendering is often done with deliberate effort and with spite.

but things can i think go a bit off the rails here, when focused exclusively on the idea of assertions of inclusion or exclusion. what i mean by that is, looking at this part, especially when emphasizing social roles or identity in the prior, there is a tendency to end up treating gender solely as a category that is quite free floating, even from any particular consequence of action. this tendency is very strong among like, well meaning cis liberals, and is related to the whole implicit "transness is a delusion im humoring" attitude some of the more obnoxious stuff in that direction can sometimes fall into. or see also "using AFAB and AMAB so as to include trans people, but then using that to say stuff which is just transphobic false assertion of alignment with assigned gender". and a lot of "debate" gets, i think, warped around this direction.

and i think from there, its quite easy to end treating the whole thing as about language or pronouns, instead of treating language or pronouns as expressions of something. this ends up plaguing a lot of how people talk about transness imo!

but i think the first thing, and the second if you stay grounded… these are not "about language", i think they are not qualitatively different from other kinds of arguments that may be had. its not, i think, a particular feature of them that they are about asking for particular language, because the language is meta - its an expression of the real underlying dispute, and the reason the language most matters is because it may a) express claims that may be true or false or b) an intent or sentiment which can be benevolent or malicious

[mousidy]

we're abolishing gender! in the future people will just be referred to as AMAB or AFAB, no need for gender at all! 😀

[mousidy]

this is a progressive stance, you see, because AMAB and AFAB are different words from "man" and "woman." we're leaving such outdated concepts behind!

[mousidy]

no no no it's not "misgendering you." it doesn't refer to your gender, it refers to the sex you were assigned. that way we don't need gender anymore! you can just throw that old thing away

[mousidy]

now there's only two categories: AMABS and AFABS! so much simpler! what? no I didn't say there's only two genders. these aren't genders they're categories. this is progress we're making progress

[mousidy]

you want to change your assignment? because of what, your gender? no you don't need one of those, I said to get rid of it

[aksemmi]

its sort of hard to explain that my feelings on data centers are, approximately, that i am sympathetic enough to some mix of concern about local habitat destruction, exploitation of the global south for minerals, and usage as infrastructure for surveillance state and other police/military tasks that... i can't say that i definitely dont think it makes sense to try and stop data centers - but also that they dont actually stand out as exceptionally bad to me, i think people are wildly exaggerating in a sort of moral panic and have their priorities whacked, and my sympathy for opposition is really like a low priority v much non exceptional instance of way broader concern

[aksemmi]

"ok look i can sympathize with generalized anti growth but i really dont think you have prioritized things v well if you are more concerned by a data center than, say, a highway expansion, let alone any kind of fossil fuel infrastructure, let alone any given slaughterhouse or feedlot or pig/chicken farm"