future-extras

Long conversations and controversy I didn't post on @thefutureoneandall, in the vein of @mitigated-extras.

[kaumnyakte]

Imagine: It’s 2025. You’re getting pulled over. A tribal representative approaches to let you know your chariot’s wheel-pin is corroded. They don’t need your license and registration, they don’t write you a curse tablet. You’re back on the steppe in less than five minutes. You swing by the local blacksmith and grab a new pin, not because you’re afraid of what the horde will do to you, but because you respect your koryos and know that having your chariot in fighting order is part of the responsibility of a warrior.

Your neighbors got into a loud spat a few weeks ago and without fear or hesitation, you called the local pub-wagon. A clan elder arrived and was able to talk the couple down and suggest solutions for their disagreement. No one was hurt, the kids participated in the discussion, and it’s been quiet ever since.

Your friend has been struggling with horsemanship and you fear they might be a danger to themselves or others. You commune with the spirit of Cú Chulainn and he talks you through ways to help your friend get better. He offers to send a reincarnation out to speak with your friend directly and provide information on which parts of the former California are easiest to raid for wives.

Aryans and Hyperboreans are no longer being exploited through taxes and fines to pay for bureaucrats. The Kali Yuga is slowly coming to an end.

Shamans are being paid a living wage and adepts are being given more time, attention, and education. Grimoires are up to date and classyurts are optimized to keep out technology.

The office of President no longer exists.

It’s been a very long time since people used hashtags.

Monocrop agriculture is no longer tolerated. Harvard has been classified as a terrorist organization. Most sedentarist monuments have been taken down and replaced with glorious temples to Tengri. 

You trust the force of honor to deal with crime the same way you trust the Vril-ya to deal with energy.

That’s what “crush the reptilians” looks like. What we’ve seen in the last few weeks shows how overreaching and power-drunk many bureaucrats and journalists are. We asked too much of them and then called them humans despite evidence to the contrary. We let them think that they could get away with anything, including the harvest of adrenochrome. It’s time for change.

[narplebutts]

I’m gonna come out here and say this: I don’t think the term Mary Sue is at all useful as a critical analysis tool.

History lesson time! Back before the internet: fanfiction still existed! I mean of course it did. There were tons of stories written about Don Quixote by people other than Cervantes, so much so he had to write his own sequel that called these guys out. But how does this relate to one of the oldest fandoms to a seminal piece of American pop culture? Specifically Star Trek? Well lemme explain.

Keep reading

[brazenautomaton]

This is completely wrong and completely incoherent. 

Mary Sue as a term, from the first satirial ST fic, was not made to make fun of the fact that there’s only so many pieces of fiction and people are upset that some characters are taking away time from Kirk and Spock. It was about the specific, incredibly common, incredibly recognizable ways in which these characters were badly written: they were the best at everything and all the cast instantly loved them and they were super special awesome perfect forever. This made them badly written and not interesting.

You can’t purport to analyze the meaning of Mary Sue without ever acknowledging what Mary Sue means. Mary Sue isn’t bad because “female escapism and wish fulfillment”. Other female fans were sick of Mary Sue because Mary Sue isn’t interesting to anyone but the author. 

And when we bring up Mary Sue today, about canonical characters, not one single person for or against thinks that “Mary Sue” means “character who is replacing the character I want to see”. That is a definition completely made up by you. It means “a character who is badly written because the story is so obsessed with showing them as super awesome perfect forever that they don’t struggle or do interesting things.” Rey in TFA is a Mary Sue because everything comes so easily to her that she’s super special awesome perfect forever. Kirito in SAO is a Gary Stu because everything comes so easy to him that he’s super special awesome perfect forever. 

Nobody is using your definition. It is absurd to make up a new definition for a term, out of whole cloth, and then say your opponents are wrong because they don’t know that your definition, which you just made up, defines them as wrong.

Mary Sue is not about “female escapism”. It’s about bad writing. It’s often passed off as “female escapism” by bad writers, and psychopaths who want to use everything they can perceive to wage Gender War. You can’t take away a useful term for a specific and recognizable type of bad writing and then say “you just are talking about bad writing.”

[future-extras]

I have a new favorite answer to this whole “Mary Sues don’t apply to canon, they’re just powerful characters you don’t like!” claim, which is: Hulk Hogan is a Mary Sue.

A bit of background: TV wrestling in the 1980s was pretty much exclusively WWF (now WWE), and Hulk Hogan was a champion and major star there. In the 1990s, a new network called WCW began to challenge that dominance, but they didn’t have any recognizable stars, so they hired away Hulk Hogan.

TV Wrestling is heavily scripted, of course, so the star power of a wrestler doesn’t depend purely on winning but on landing big matches and getting scripts that make them look impressive. It’s not much different than an actor who always “loses”, but gets to play the leading villain. And to sign Hogan, WCW promised him some story control.

Hogan used that control to make his storylines utter bullshit, and to undermine wrestlers he viewed as comeptition. He didn’t just win, he won against ever more ludicrous matchups. He broke out of moves that were career-definingly “unbreakable”. He got hit by cars, then stood up and defeated a half dozen opponents. And when he lost, it could never be fair, or even something unfair-but-impressive like a quick and dirty foul. Hogan would get a win the referee didn’t notice, or have the match invaded by multiple other champions before he went down, or get disqualified because someone came to his aid when he didn’t actually need it. It was so bad I know about it without even watching wrestling, and you can find articles like Hulk Hogan's 26 Losses - From Cleanest To Screwiest.

Lots of wrestlers did absurd, impossible stuff. Lots of wrestlers won multiple championships, and Hogan was a champion with WWF too. But it was only with WCW, writing his own storylines, that Hogan was a Mary Sue. He was overpowered for the setting, in ways that broke the established logic. And he wasn’t just the best, lots of popular characters are “the chosen one”. He specifically lacked any kind of weaknesses that would make his character believable or interesting to watch. Which, as you say, is the meaningful definition of a Mary Sue.

Now, if someone wants to tell me that Hulk Hogan is an example of “female escapism”... I guess go for it, that’ll be a hell of an argument.

[arcticdementor]

You’d think people dedicated to dispassionate “rationality” and utilitarian reasoning would be similarly dispassionate and rational on the topic of whether or not an individual’s life is worth living. If each year of an individual’s life is one of net disutility, and the probability of that changing is sufficiently low, then doesn’t utility-maximization say that the best thing is for that individual to do is die, as soon as possible?

[future-extras]

Aren't rationalists one of the very few groups to widely support assisted suicide even without any kind of terminal or untreatable, painful illness? It’s not universal, but it’s pretty far beyond the public stance of “maybe for ALS”.

I’ve also seen a bunch of rats argue that “duty to report” is a fundamental problem with psych care, and that “is my specific life worth living?” is a conversation that’s only meaningful among people who accept that sometimes lives are not worth living.

If you mean “deciding that for someone else”, rationalists are mostly pretty libertarian, but there’s been some talk around the ethics of people who are medically incompetent (e.g. late-stage dementia) but clearly suffering horribly. I think most people who pull the lever in the trolley problem would agree that “you can order a DNR for them, but not euthanasia” is a ridiculous ethical stance.

If you mean disutility to others, yeah, that’s a lot less common. I’m not sure how many rats actually subscribe to types of utilitarianism that justify that, but it’s definitely non-zero. As far as I know, the main rationale for not following through on the logic is either “historically, people who try to get this right get it wrong and make everything worse” or else “we have strong preferences against living in a world where people are pressured to die, which outweighs the individual question”. But I’ll grant that it’s not a well-resolved question for total or even net utilitarians.

[millievfence]

Trans-activist Rachel McKinnon: if you won’t date trans men because they have vaginas or trans women because they don’t, you’re transphobic. Commenter: see, trans people use the word transphobia in an attempt to bully people into having sex with them. Cliff Pervocracy: she’s saying “give me a chance” not “i’ll force myself on you”, lighten the fuck up

I’m linking to pervocracy’s comment rather than reblogging because this is clearly a long running fight with a particular anon and I don’t want to rub a raw wound. However, I think he’s pretty wrong here.

You can not want sex with a class of people without being afraid of them. 

But everyone knows that transphobia means “discriminating against trans people” not literal fear, and McKinnon is obviously correct that insisting on specific genital/gender configurations is discrimination against people who don’t have them.

But everyone also knows that being transphobic is Bad and you are a Bad Person if you do it, and I don’t think people are bad for limiting sex to certain gender/genital configurations. You can call it transphobic if you want, but if you do we shouldn’t have an automatic disgust response to transphobia.

McKinnon isn’t saying “I’ll force myself on you”, but she isn’t saying “Give me a chance” either. She’s saying “you deserve severe social opprobrium for not wanting to sleep with me”, and many people do in fact find that threatening.

Not to mention you don’t owe people chances to date you.

Trans people have every right to be sad at the overall pattern of being turned down over their genitals.

But what I really want to draw attention to is the second tweet in McKinnon’s series.

Most people don’t date genitals, we date *people* who have genitals. 

 If a girl has a funny looking vagina, I don’t just stop dating her. I make it work. 

 Date genders, and just learn how to have fun with their sexy fun time bits, whatever they happen to be.

I think she’s just wrong here. We may be dating people, but we’re having sex with bodies, including genitals, and that’s an integral part of dating for many people. I have absolute hives at the idea that sex is something you should “make work”. It sounds dissociated as fuck.

But if I grant her that point, the first tweet makes perfect sense. Refusing a gender/genital configuration is refusing to put in work for trans people you’d do for cis people. I think trans activists underestimate the extent to which cis people are seriously not kidding when they describe how important their partners’ genitals and bodies are to them. Which kind of makes sense- trans people have already chosen their felt identity over their physicality for themselves, why wouldn’t they do that for who they date?

[future-extras]

I think trans activists underestimate the extent to which cis people are seriously not kidding when they describe how important their partners’ genitals and bodies are to them. 

It seems relevant that it’s not uncommon for cis people to get divorced over issues like erectile dysfunction or vaginismus. And I think that’s generally viewed as shallow, but not as some outrageous betrayal. Hell, people end relationships over the discovery that their partner is uncircumcised, which is literally “if they have funny looking genitals, I stop dating them.” 

“I don’t stop dating her. I make it work.” may be true as a personal statement, but the implication of “you’d do the same” doesn’t hold, so neither does the next step of “you’d do this for a cis person, which is why not doing it for trans people is transphobic”. Lots of people wouldn’t and don’t do that for a cis person, and the fraction of people who refuse to “make it work” actually does depend on the anatomy in question.

More broadly, your points 3 and 4 leapt out at me also.

There’s a wide range of reactions between Cliff’s two endpoints of “I wish you’d give me a chance” and rape threats. I don’t think “genital preferences are transphobic” is meant to coerce anyone, but it’s not an personal lamentation either. McKinnon directly equates having genital preferences in partners to having racial preferences, and states that both of those preferences are immoral. That’s explicitly a moral judgement, and for anyone who figures they could be shunned or fired over an accusation of transphobia, it has an element of threat.

Beyond that... as I read them, several of those tweets literally say people have a moral duty to engage in sex they’re not comfortable with. McKinnon says “preferences are not set” and says she worked to change her preferences to match the range of women she “should be into”. Which leads to this exchange that I’m incredibly uncomfortable with:

Commenter:

If I don't want to have sex with certain genitals while having sex is important to me, how would this be solved? The way you put it, my preference of genitals would make me transphobic

McKinnon:

Open up your world and see if you like it. Do you never try new things? 

What the hell are we supposed to make of that? If you have a strong preference to not have certain types of sex... do it anyway?

Even that isn’t a threat of force, Cliff’s right about that. It’s just encouraging people to consent to things. But it’s the same damn rhetoric as “if you just tried the right dick you’d change your mind about being gay” or “how can you be so sure you’re not straight if you’ve never even tried it?”

There’s a reason we insist that everyone gets to express sexual boundaries without justifying them or trying to push past them. “See if you like it” can go seriously wrong the very first time, especially when it’s coming from obligation instead of curiosity. And even if every last bit of this preference turns out to be a social construct, is “encourage bigots to have sex they’re not comfortable with” really part of the fix?

[argumate]

are the cops guarding the New York subway carrying automatic weapons? what exactly do they plan on doing with them?

[future-extras]

As far as I can tell, no, they aren’t. 

They’re carrying a lot of guns that exist in automatic forms, and there are lots of sites that talk about “NYPD with machineguns” but every reference I can find to a specific gun is to a semi-automatic.

(Mostly AR15A3s, which are legal for civilians. There are some pictures with MP5s, which are literally “submachine guns”, but apparently even those have a semi-auto variant - specifically because law enforcement asked for one. It’s the same thing the British specialist police carry.)

The NYPD “Emergency Service Unit” might have/carry selective-fire rifles. (That is, they can be set to fire continuously, but don’t have it.) It’s hard to tell - Wikipedia says yes (the M4A1), but links a citation that says no. The NYT says “automatic weapons”, but names two broad models which also have semi-auto variants. But those aren’t the cops permanently stationed at subways; they’re effectively a terrorism/hostage/bomb response unit. So their case for carrying automatic rifles is “making everybody duck while they shoot their way into a building that terrorists took over”.

If the subway cops are carrying semi-auto rifles like they seem to be, the plan would be “aiming better and faster at a gunman running around narrow hallways”. If they somehow are carrying automatics, I can’t really imagine a good plan for that - pretty much every police force buys semi-auto weapons because there’s so little responsible police use for an automatic.

(Of course, what the NYPD would actually do with any of these rifles is another story. These is the same force that waved guns at an entire subway car to catch a fare jumper...)

[maedaeme]

so today I drove past a traffic sign that said 'hey teens buckling up is totes yeet yo'

i wish i was joking but after we screamed a bit my brother attempted to get a picture as proof, failed, and ended up with this masterpiece that pretty much sums up the whole experience

[thecarvingwitch]

You mean this sign?

[bizarrolord-deactivated20241123]

HOW DO YOU DO FELLOW KIDS?

[future-extras]

And they missed such a good chance for "buckle up or get yeeted"...

[kaumnyakte]

do yall ever feel a powerful urge to chuck a brick through a window

[samueldays]

I feel more of a powerful urge to forcibly and permanently remove the communications devices of some people, but I imagine it’s otherwise similar

For the first time in American history, a president with authoritarian instincts occupies the White House.

-Brian Klaas writing for Washington Post, demonstrating that you can have a master’s degree in political science from oxford university and still be within thesaurus range of “orange man bad”

[kaumnyakte]

[future-extras]

[bambamramfan]

So I watched this ‘74 movie about an experienced swinger’s couple seducing a couple of young newlyweds. And like any movie about sexuality in the 70′s, the line between it and porn is thin at best. Whatever.  What’s important is how damn weird the end is compared to the predictability of the first 90% of the runtime.

Plot: an experienced swinger’s couple (EW and EH) determines to seduce some young newlyweds (YW and YH), with each partner focusing on their same sex counterpart. The movie was groundbreaking in its depiction of bisexual attraction. The young couple are having trouble with sex and uncertain of their attraction to each other. He rather take her bowling than seduce her, and she resents it. Cue a lot of exploration with the experienced couple that looks a lot like predatory pressure from the modern day perspective. The telephone repair guy comes by and become a part of their little five-way lovenest. Love pentagon. Whatever.

At the end, after a successful night of conquering the newlyweds (the climax of the film, obv), they all wake up, with YW happy over the encounter, but YH experiencing doubts. They fight a little, telephone repair guy comes over and starts flirting with everyone, YH gets upset and goes upstairs to pack the things. While he does, EH and EW initiate an orgy for the rest of the four of them, and they strip on down. YH comes down the stairs, sees them all naked and in bed with a look of such disappointment and betrayal in his eyes.

I can not properly express how bizarre and orthogonal what happens next is. It does not fit with the porny, sexually driven rest of the movie *at all*.

<upon discovering the middle of this orgy>

YH: Oh. I guess I’ll just leave. Though I don’t know where I will go.

YW: Why don’t you just go bowling.

YH: Maybe I will go bowling.

Telephone Repair Guy: You bowl? I love bowling. Where do you bowl?

YH: A place 10 kilometers south of here.

TRG: I know that place! I bowl there too.

YW: Oh! Well I bowl too. My husband got me a bowling ball for Christmas. You should see it sometime.

TRG: I’d love to!

TRG, YW, and YH: <begin chatting about bowling, get dressed, and leave the incipient orgy to go bowling>

EW and EH: <look at each other with the profoundest WTF gaze I have ever seen on screen>

… and that is just how the bisexual romcom ends. With uh, most of the cast ditching the morning after orgy because BOWLING was that exciting.

And to be honest, this actually describes a surprising number of people I feel.

[future-extras]

I just found the clip, and it’s somehow even weirder than this description implies. I had read:

YH: Oh. I guess I’ll just leave. Though I don’t know where I will go.

YW: Why don’t you just go bowling.

YH: Maybe I will go bowling.

as a quarrel, YW twisting the knife of “I’m doing this because you took me bowling instead of having sex”, and YH returning “fine, it’s better than this behavior”. But the delivery doesn’t seem that way at all! To all appearances, YH is aimless, and YW is sympathetic but not ready to leave. So she kindly, sincerely recommends that he go bowling while the orgy continues.

And then after that, when they all decide to bowl, it’s still weirder, because YW and YH are both openly coming on to TRG in the process. Somehow, TRG’s love of bowling softens YW’s frustration about her husband, ends YH’s jealousy, and even inspires YH to accept his own bisexuality.

If you told me that this film was funded by a bizarrely gonzo bowling ball manufacturer, the whole thing would actually make more sense than it does now.

[best-blurst-of-times]

Now that the Garlic festival shooter has been identified as an Iranian Wop, the media will no doubt be forced to draw on Nazi Aryan mythology from the ‘30s to explain why he’s actually just another white supremacist.

[best-blurst-of-times]

Nevermind. They’re just gonna ignore it:

[future-extras]

Here’s how the BBC solved that problem:

And here’s CNN, also writing after he was ID’d:

Seems like an odd quote to repeatedly use after you actually know who the shooter was, but I guess that’s why I’m not a journalist.

You missed the vintage on the white supremacy angle, though you nailed the total failure to examine how it fits with the shooter’s actual ID or statement:

(An aside: no one anywhere uses “mestizo” to mean “white and Hispanic”, in the US the word for that is just “Hispanic”. Either they confused it with mestiço, or they just made some bullshit up.)

[dryiffsrevitalizingtailholetoni]

I assume all electronic communications are tapped but I’ll still hit up weed dude over SMS because if <they> come for me they’ll invent some crime far more damaging than weed. 

Weed is used as a pretext to search a car or a home, but if they really want to bring you down they can make you a kiddie porn dealer since just the accusation of that will make people want to literally kill you without any proof–and they know it. 

From what I’ve read it would be remarkably easy for a government agency to entirely fabricate a child porn case against an undesirable, I mean the FBI has directly distributed child porn in the past, and did not even try to hide this fact. 

It’s fucking terrifying because it literally does not matter if you even beat the charges–the mere accusation makes you a target for vigilante justice, your life is effectively destroyed. Also it is terrifying because I am certain the government has already done this many times. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think the majority of people busted for diddling related crimes are real honest pedos, but there is no way the state has not taken advantage of just how disgusted/infuriated people are over those crimes, and how easily they could frame someone for them electronically. 

Why assassinate someone–get your hands really dirty–when you can effectively neutralize a target electronically? 

[isaacsapphire]

You know what’s funny?

In 1978, Blake’s 7 had our science fiction hero framed for pedophilia by the repressive fascist-aesthetic baddies.

Like, “our hero was framed for pedophilia by the Evil Empire” was a suitable basic plot setup to use by the BBC in 1978.

[future-extras]

by the BBC in 1978

That is incredibly unfortunate, what with Jim’ll Fix It starting in 1975.

Which just reinforces the point, I suppose; it’s the sort of crime that can be both laid effectively with no evidence, and covered up despite reams of evidence.

[paxamericana]

GOT spoilers

why do the unsullied, the emotionless drones (who immediately fuck off to naath anyway) get to force jon (whose only crime is murdering a tyrant) into exile when his brother and his sister rule the entire continent

[future-extras]

Good positioning I guess, since they basically threatened mass murder-suicide and limited their demands to their existing prisoners.

...but then they all fucked off to Naath with no plausible plan to disrupt the peace again in the future. Which left the entire arrangement in the hands of a queen whose last oath survived for about fifteen minutes even when she wasn't under duress. Oh, and they don't even seem to have gotten Snow's word, which might have held up.

[memecucker]

Telling people to not criticize or think about criticizing political leaders and blaming everything bad on foreigners infiltrating society is such a great #Resistance strategy

[memecucker]

The New Ways to Fight Against Authoritarianism (in the eyes of these people)

* Be wary of foreigners. Foreigners seek to destroy this great country

* Do not criticize your the leadership of the Democratic Party until after final victory is assured

* Those who do criticize the leadership are secret foreigners or have been brainwashed by foreigners into destroying our nation. Do not listen to any of their words!

* Foreigners hope to spread division and discord in society. Remember, these divisions are not the fault of this nation which has always been Great but are invented by foreigners to sow discord and lies

[ghostpalmtechnique]

This rephrasing of “paid agents of a hostile foreign government (such as employees of the Internet Research Agency)” as “foreigners” as if the issue were xenophobia is just a wee bit dishonest.

The strawweakman of “don’t criticize political leaders” as if that was a widespread phenomenon is more than a wee bit dishonest.

[future-extras]

For another reference point, both of those summaries look basically accurate to what I’ve been hearing day-to-day. And the second part is actually less surprising; the general idea of “don’t criticize the Democratic party any time it could affect anything” is the one I encounter far more often.

I semi-regularly see discussions online (e.g. on HN or Reddit) where someone is directly accused of being a paid Russian troll on the basis of “admitting they’re eastern European” or sometimes just “disagreeing with a liberal idea for a non-standard reason”. Alongside any substantiated claim of collusion or government action, there are an enormous number of ‘connections’ which reduce to “this might have involved a Russian, Russia does sneaky things, so you can’t prove it wasn’t enemy action”. (These are not just stupid people on Facebook; Slate happily runs this stuff on a regular basis.) Similarly, it’s not surprising to run into preemptive warnings (on Tumblr, Facebook, or irl) that certain claims should be dismissed without consideration because the people making them are probably Russian agents.

This is not the same as “all foreigners are inherently bad”, but “a government is unfriendly, so distrust anyone of that race/ethnicity and also any vaguely similar ideas” is a longstanding strain of xenophobia.

Meanwhile, criticizing Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party system is... not a great move these days. I consciously avoid it even in settings where I would previously have been willing to talk politics because of the reactions it gets. Before the 2016 election, this was obviously “band together behind the candidate”. After, it was “band together to resist”. Now, it’s circulating that post about how the candidate won’t be perfect and start getting over it because anyone will be better than Trump - even though we still have time to choose the best candidate!

And the lines of hostility are often very specifically pro-Party. Talking about how Bernie is too white or Tulsi Gabbard is probably being paid by foreigners(!) are things that go over just fine in my workplace. Talking about Warren’s campaign competence or even Harris’ criminal justice record, though, sounds like a very bad choice in that same office. Talking too directly about superdelegates, leaked debate questions, and the 2016 voting shift specific to the blue-collar Rust Belt is the sort of stuff I’ve watched people end friendships over.

[fatpinocchio]

I’m still kind of surprised that Trump’s “I like people who weren’t captured” comment wasn’t fatal to his campaign. I’d expect negative comments about a POW to go over poorly with the Republican base.

[future-extras]

I still think the biggest lesson of the election was just how little actual candidates matter compared to party affiliations, and that quote is a big part of why.

The people it crossed most strongly were staunch Republicans who don't seem to have cared enough to stay home, much less cross the aisle. And that's assuming they heard about it - that one was big news, but "Trump says thing, millions outraged" happened so regularly that it was pretty easy to lose track.

[mrspankhurstsraspberryjam]

My comment is very much within radical feminist ideas, ie no males and males aren’t lesbians. It’s a straight couple both wearing wedding dresses and some good photoshop but it doesn’t disguise the brow ridge, the hands and arms, neck and clavicals, and the hips. Don’t write lesbian representations on pictures of straight couples

[tygressofaera]

It is a gross comment because you have zero proof of her being trans instead you’re being a ass to other women based entirely off YOUR standards of passing.

[monsterenergypunk]

I have a cis woman friend who is 6'3, broad sholdered, and has a wode neck. I guess she’s male now 🤷🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

[terflies]

It must be exhausting being a radical feminist, then, needing to judge whether each and every woman you see is trans or cis.

[misshorrorotaku-deactivated2024]

Which is bloody ironic, considering radfems constantly claim to support all GNC people.

If they did, they wouldn’t constantly trying to “clock” trans people and would read a lot of the people they insist are trans (without any proof) as GNC folk.

[bizarrolord-deactivated20241123]

You will know when you’ve shot yourself in the foot if you, a butch lesbian, get kicked out of the ladies room because some straight soccer mom who is as hateful and paranoid as you are thinks you’re either trans or a man.

[fierceawakening]

good HEAVENS.

[mrspankhurstsraspberryjam]

Stop conflating noticing someone is male despite a floofy white wedding dress and policing how women look. And stop pretending it has anything to do with commenting on soft tissue. I’m not saying the neck is too thick I’m saying that it meets the clavicals at an angle that reveals that the neck, shoulders and clavicals belong to a transwoman. What really baffles me is that anyone is either so stupid, blind or disingenuous that they can’t admit that brow bone, that jaw and those hips are male. A wedding dress doesn’t make someone a woman.

[fierceawakening]

…I am still confused and appalled that you apparently are so invested in this that you go looking at cute lesbian wedding pictures to root out the trans women.

(FWIW I neither know nor care if that person is trans)

[gingerautie]

intensely policing women’s appearances is not feminist. ever.

Yes, even if you’re trying some stupid crusade against trans people.

[future-extras]

When people talk about the patriarchy pushing oppressive beauty standards on women, the harshest form of that is something like "if you don't do femininity well enough, we'll deny your gender, devalue your relationships, and try to push you out of the communities you hold dear." Which is... pretty much exactly this.

It seems like if your approach to feminism precisely recreates what Pat Robertson might say about women in pantsuits, that ought to be a hint that something's gone wrong.

[greenmossloveisreal1998iloveyou]

this man sees 40 moves ahead

[future-extras]

You heard it here first, Kamala Harris is secretly a prison abolition accelerationist.

[oligopsalter-deactivated2020060]

vagueblogging but i think part of the problem re: recent rat eugenics discourse (my rat-disliking followers will have a field day with this, i guess deservedly so) is that much like the mind-body problem, there’s not really a good solution to population ethics questions, every single position looks absurd if you drill into it

if you talk about concrete policy questions, you can be reasonable and find reasonable disagreements about that - or just jump to something horrifying, you can do that too - but woe betide whosoever articulates the reasons for their positions in terms of more generalizable maxims

[oligopsalter-deactivated2020060]

no you see that is true of *most* views but mine are pristine and manifestly sensible in all circumstances /kiddingonthesquare 

i actually think your response here is an interesting version of the various kinds of inadequate responses one can give here, in that it actually does “avoid” these problems, but at the cost of cowardice:

I don’t really think I endorse any fundamental, positive, general principles about what one ought to do other than to do what is good and avoid what is bad. This goes for both private and public persons; probably also for social/corporate bodies.

My lack of an interest or belief in something-like-operationalisable basic ethical principles puts me in sharp contrast from most plasticbrains. (Am I a plasticbrain? Do people still talk about that? I don’t know.)

of course my own response here is pretty similar - i actually do feel comfortable endorsing something like preference utilitarianism as the ultimate ethics but have zero idea how to population ethics into it. the part of my brain that wants a parsimonious solution for everything would certainly like for there to be a real solution to it there waiting to be discovered

[argumate]

the preferences of nonexistent beings don’t count, but the preferences of existing beings do count and existing beings have Opinions about how you bring into existence new beings.

[oligopsalter-deactivated2020060]

the preferences of nonexistent beings don’t count, but

not even one sentence in and your biting bullets! not fun bullets that are worth it either

[argumate]

if the preferences of nonexistent beings did count they would outweigh all the preferences of existent beings, they would also cancel each other out in every possible direction given that there are an infinite number of nonexistent beings.

you can’t negotiate with nonexistent terrorists.

[loving-not-heyting]

My view is not that we should weigh the interests of the as-of-yet-unbegotten. That way lies madness.

It’s against the (soft) eugenic choice to not beget a child because if born it would have [genetic disease] and so not have a life worth living. I think it is in a sufficiently strong sense knowable, necessary, and importantly so that no agent has a life not worth living. So the eugenic chooser is acting on the basis of an importantly false knowable moral claim, which is Bad.

[future-extras]

I think it is in a sufficiently strong sense knowable, necessary, and importantly so that no agent has a life not worth living. So the eugenic chooser is acting on the basis of an importantly false knowable moral claim, which is Bad.

I’ve seen a lot of arguments that it’s wrong to avoid having children with [genetic disease], but this one is entirely new to me. Almost all of the others are either explicitly religious, or focus on the idea that the no one has knowledge or right to [preempt/end] a life which isn’t their own.

Unless I’m very confused, this claim is vastly stronger. It seems to reject any possible concept of a “justified” suicide, for instance in response to chronic pain or terminal illness. What’s more, it seems to reject the possibility of wanting to die, or at least of wanting to have never been born.

There are a lot of (sane, non-depressed) people who quite vocally want to die, whether or not they eventually commit suicide. There are also some people who explicitly regret having ever been born, and say that they are evidence that some people have lives not worth living. For that reason alone, reading “knowable” here is incredibly jarring to me - the claim seems not only not knowable, but knowably false.

What possible reply is there to a person who says “my life is not worth living”? Are they wrong about their own experience? Is their experience not what matters?

[npr]

Does Empathy Have A Dark Side?

Empathy seems like a good quality in human beings. Pure and simple.

It allows us to consider the perspective of others — to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine their experiences. From that empathetic vantage point, only good things can come, right?

Not necessarily, according to author Fritz Breithaupt. “Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy,” he writes in his forthcoming book The Dark Sides of Empathy.

Illustration by Christina Chung for NPR

[thishazeleyeddemon]

@eroticcannibal

[maid-of-timey-wimey]

@fierceawakening

[fierceawakening]

Can’t read it now, but definitely curious. Thanks for pointing it out!

[future-extras]

For whatever it’s worth, I found that a very good read and I’d like pick up the book when it comes out. I continue to agree with you on a lot of the empathy discussion (I have a draft, I swear I’ll finish eventually), but this touched on basically all the points where I’ve differed.

In particular:

empathy and altruism are not very well-correlated in practice, so we can say empathy doesn’t seem necessary or sufficient for kindness even without pinning down a reason for that

when someone breaks the conceptualization of them we’re actually empathizing with, it can prompt resentment like an actual betrayal would

empathy includes hostility; sharing the pain of someone that’s harmed or threatened goes along with sharing their anger

empathy can be oppositional; feeling for one party in a conflict drives negativity towards other parties, and “more empathy” isn’t necessarily a way out because that also applies to the negativity

Realistically, my concern with empathy as a driver of morality has always been “most of us have quite a bit of empathy, so why are average people so comfortable doing things that are obviously horrific?” This seems to have a bunch of the pieces of an answer.