People like to talk about AI in healthcare as an exception where AI is actually useful. Well, AI in healthcare can wait if current AI is just going to destroy the environment and thereby ruin public health. First, do no harm. And the current unregulated state of, and overuse of AI will make it inbreed and regurgitate biases so badly. And don't even try to use AI for system-wide data sorting, inter-computer communication or any other agentic vibe coding bullshit. We don't need a fully automated HIPAA violator. AI is like a disease. You have to keep it in self-contained test tubes to evaluate it. Not let it roam free through your whole lab.
Why would potential benefits of AI in healthcare even matter if the government is cutting science funding, shutting down mRNA research, destroying USAID, slashing medicaid.
Alphafold can only be as good as the protein crystallography data supporting it. And production of more original data will be slowed down with all these science cuts. I've grown tired of "AI in healthcare" being used as a Trojan horse.
Do you ever notice having annoying one-way paths in your memory. Like A makes you think of B easily, but for some reason once you've thought of B, it's so hard to remember A again. It's an internal thought-terminating cliche. Is this normal? It's such a pain to deal with. You know you've forgotten something but can't walk through the door the wrong way. You rack through your brain trying to recall what sorts of things keep leading to this thought-terminating cliche but its no use. The contrast between how easily you recalled B, but can't recall A again is so horrifying. Is there proper psychological terminology for this? It reminds me of antimemes from that SCP foundation book, There Is No Antimemetics Division.
I can't remember a specific example at the moment, because, you know. If I thought of an example of one-way memory paths, I'd also remember the concept of one-way memory paths. But I can't think of an example with just the prompt. I don't have a go-to memorized example! So I guess this is my example now.
Refuting the arguments of people saying misandry doesn't exist.
Claim: That's just gender roles/ sexism/ toxic masculinity. So misandry doesn't exist.
Response: Misandry is a part of sexism. Gender roles and toxic masculinity are built on ideas of what men should be and shouldn't be. The ideas of what they shouldn't be are the misandry part.
Toxic masculinity's ideas of stoic attitude are built on the premise that men's feelings don't matter. Purity culture tells men
There specific aspects of sexism, gender roles and toxic masculinity that put down men, which deserve a word to describe it. It's a unique dimension of sexism that can't be ignored. Even if certain statement about men are perpetuated by other toxic men who try to frame it as the natural order and not really something you should feel ashamed about, I can't help but feel shamed and dehumanized. It carries the seeds of self-hatred for men. It's hateful to me, and it's on account of me being a man. "Misandry" is a useful word for this.
Claim: Men have the power and misogyny is rampant, so misandry doesn't exist.
Response: Sexist attitudes can be misandrist at the same time as being in service of misogyny and patriarchy. When religious fundies scare me about how inherently sinful and lustful I am, it doesn't stop being misandry just because that narrative is also used for misogynistic purposes by telling girls/women that they need to control how they dress to protect men from temptation. I may not know how it feels to be a girl being told that, but I don't need to win some oppression olympics to know it emotionally hurt me too and drove me into self-hatred.
This whole thing reminds me of that "Racism is prejudice plus power" bullshit. To which I got the same response.
People can take turns holding power.
There are multiple kinds of power that can act in parallel from opposing sides. Emotional power, Financial power, Social power, Legal power, etc.
Power depends on context. (For example, someone has the social power in one group of people but not in others. Or they have the emotional power in one type of conversation but not others because people have their emotional vulnerabilities and trauma in different places.)
You can be an asshole without having institutional power behind your back. Don't be a grassroots asshole.
Also the military draft and infant circumcision are institutional systems of violence against men. Schedule-use male birth control is kept from men because doctors don't take men's mental health or personal concern for their wife's health seriously in judging the comparison between drug benefits and side effects. I've heard stuff about family court bias but I can't really say if it's proportional. I've personally seen more instances of family courts siding with terrible fathers in order to avoid looking prejudiced toward men. So I don't know about that. I don't know if we're good enough at measuring what's going on there.
Claim: Misandry is just a trauma response from dealing with other men in the past.
Response: If I call someone misandrist, it's because they make sweeping generalizations of all men. When people making sweeping generalizations, they should be called out on it no matter the reason. There are ways to voice frustration toward patriarchy, toward things that men are more likely to be allowed to do, that doesn't throw all men under the bus. Use some "I feel" statements. Or say "In the past when I was in X situation, this happened." Or learn the statistics and use words like "statistically" or "disproportionately" appropriately.
And misandry is not just from individual women. It's from other men. It's from religion. It's from the government. It's in the way many people talk regardless of past experience.
Claim: X is just homophobia, anti-neurodiversity or racism. It's not misandry.
Response: You got to understand intersectionality. Misandry and other prejudices combine, compound and inform each other in unique ways.
I can't talk about religious homophobia toward myself without also talking about the way men in general are shamed for their sexuality. I'm bi and I can say that I was made to feel shame for both attractions, even if the shame was to different degrees and had some differences. If I were lesbian, I don't think I'd have the same fear of castration and feeling of deserving castration put into me.
I can't talk about neurodiversity prejudice without talking about being framed as just a nasty, rude, loser, trouble-making boy who needs to unlearn boyish ways.
You can't ask me to give an incomplete story that leaves out misandry. I'm not going to be an incomplete person to satisfy your simplistic narrative.
I don't understand people who say that rape is not sex, because drowning is not swimming.
Sex is short for sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse as a word is analogous to the state of being in water. I'm sorry there's not a special word for good, consensual, thriving, relatively safe sex, that would be analogous to swimming. And my other problem with the analogy is that it makes it sound like it's a problem with the person drowning, for not being able to swim, instead of a problem with the waters flooding without warning and pulling them down.
And another thing. I don't understand us saying that children can't be raped because rape implies the ability to otherwise consent. Well if the tsunami comes and babies are swept away, they suddenly aren't drowning because they never had the ability to swim in the first place. Replacing every instance of "child rape" with "sexual assault of a minor" makes it sound so much softer. It lessens the immediate mental image from forceful sex to something like strangers in trenchcoats flashing people indiscriminately in public. Makes it sound like just an inconvenience or a funny story. We're afraid to admit we live in a cruel culture and country where children are raped by those in power, who then get away with it.
Obligatory George Carlin Clip.
America is not run by child rapists. It's run by people whom online activists claim participated in the sexual assault of a minor.
I used to be so good at rationalizing in religious speak so I could meet my Mormon family members where they are but it’s been long enough since I left the church now that when someone says stupid shit like “I just think if people transition they will have such a hard time when they are resurrected as their ‘actual’ gender and realize they were wrong” all I want to say is “well that’s not real, so….”
Of the appearance of Spiritual and Resurrected Bodies
I've heard Mormons say before that ghosts/angels can choose whether to appear old or young to people who knew them in life so that the person could recognize them better. So you could appear young to your living spouse. Appear middle-aged to your children. Or appear old to your grandkids.
I've heard that angels have white hair, and I've also heard stories about ghosts/angels with their natural hair, at whatever age they choose to appear. So Mormons I know reconcile the contradiction by saying angels choose their hair color based on how someone expects them to appear according to their understanding of angels or of the deceased person.
If angels can appear as any age having any hair color they want, then I see no reason they can't appear as the gender they want. And if a spiritual body can shapeshift, then I see no reason a perfect resurrected body can't shapeshift too. There cannot be a single perfect state because what's perfect depends on the circumstance. Perfection is adaptability. So a perfect body must be adaptable.
Jesus's resurrected body had nails wounds in his hands, so that the apostles would recognize him as the real thing, and not some doppelganger come to fool them. And I doubt Jesus would want to have nail wounds in his hands forever, like in case Jesus wanted to hold water in his hands, or do any crafts or carpentry that might be annoying if something you held kept slipping thought that hole in your hand.
In the mainstream church, we also got the story of the miracle of Brigham Young looking like Joseph Smith in order to signal to people that he was the right successor for the church.
Of intersex people and bodies
From another angle you could point out how intersex people exist, so you can't believe gender is binary, eternal, spiritual and appointed by God, but also determined by sex-assigned-at-birth, by how some doctor labeled a temporal physical state. There are so many intersex conditions mixing up genes, chromosomes, gonads, genital ducts, external genitals, hormones, hormone responsivity, secondary sex characteristics, etc. And there is still so much to learn about the intersex conditions. There are conditions and cases with unaccounted-for genes or causes. There could be more attributes correlated with sex, yet to be discovered, that will also turn out to have notable exceptions.
Some may call this transmedicalist or appropriating intersex experiences, but who's to say that there aren't at least some transgender people whose dyshporia and euphoria are caused by a neurological secondary sex characteristic, which may or may not be correlated to other (inter)sex traits. If you don't get physically tested, you may never know. And even if you do get tested, there may some extra physical ambiguity that hasn't been discovered yet by science. That's not to say to say there definitely must be some physical medical explanation to someone's transgender identity, only that there could be such factors contributing to it, in some trans people.
In cases of ambiguity, the traditional Mormons claim that God or nature made a mistake, imperfection or personal challenge for someone. So who's to say it didn't make an imperfection or challenge crossing all the way from gender to opposite sex. And we can't be sure that ambiguities don't exist in any particular person in the first place. In cases of ambiguity they won't be able to agree with each other on what factors are most important in determining sex. And anything they settle on would lead to absurd conclusions like telling someone with AIS that they're a man, despite looking like and living as a woman their whole life. (AIS can cause someone to be XY, have testes, have high androgens, have no uterus, but also their body doesn't react to the androgens and they have external female genitals, female secondary sex characteristics like breasts, high voice, etc. and cause them to be assigned female at birth and live their whole life as female.)
Intersex people expose conflicting definitions of cis and trans. There's the AGAB definitions where "cis" is identifying with sex-assigned-at-birth, and trans means not identifying with sex-assigned-at-birth. There's a more social definitions where "cis" means identifying with gender you were raised as, and "trans" means not identifying with gender you were raised as. And there's the physicalist definitions where "cis" means identifying with biological sex or physical sex characteristics and "trans" means not identifying with biological sex or physical sex characteristics.
Intersex people who identify with their sex-assigned-at-birth may be labeled "cis" by the AGAB, "cis" by social definition but "trans" by physicalist definition. (This person may use the term ipsogender to label this complex experience, for not being entirely cis or trans.)
Intersex people who were forced to live as one binary gender, but ultimately are non-binary may be "trans" by AGAB definition, "trans" by social definition, "cis" by physicalist definition.
Intersex people who were forced to live as one binary gender, but ultimately identify as the opposite gender may be "trans" by AGAB definition, "trans" by social definition, "trans" by physicalist definition. (This person may use the term ultergender to level this complex experience, for not being entirely cis or trans.)
Intersex people born in a place that can label intersex babies with a third sex (represented by the letter "I" or "X"), who later identify with gender they were raised as, may be "trans" by AGAB definition, "cis" by social definition, "trans" by physicalist definition.
An intersex person raised as a "theybie" but ultimately aligns with their binary AGAB, may be "cis" by AGAB definition, "trans" by social definition, "trans" by physicalist definition.
If we can accept ipsogender people, then why not ultergender. And if we could accept ultergender's experiences as valid, then why not binary transgender people's experiences as valid, or why can't we anticipate that trans people could have an undiagnosed intersex condition making them "technically ultergender", so we ought to refrain from making judgement just in case.
So how could any of us know what God intended a person's gender to be?! Why can't we just leave a person to their own personal revelation? It's their gender. Why shouldn't they be the best judge of it? Why can't we just let people live their best mortal life here and let them sort things out in the next life, between themselves and God.
Don't say: Mormons aren't Christians. (Mormons still follow the New Testament and view the Book of Mormon as supplementing it, being another Testament of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon Jesus scenes repeat a lot from the Sermon on the Mount. It's true that Mormons don't believe the Bible as it survives is inerrant but so do a lot of other Christians.)
Instead say: Mormons often fail to follow the teachings of Jesus, just like a lot of Christians do. They'll focus on hate instead of love. They'll ignore what Jesus said about caring for the poor and vulnerable.
Don't say: Jesus and Lucifer being brothers is blasphemous. (This doesn't matter. Everyone is spiritual siblings in Mormon Doctrine. Common origin says nothing about morality.)
Instead say: Mormonism fails to solve the Problem of Evil. They bring up how Lucifer's temptation is necessary for God's plan but can't justify why Lucifer is punished for it, or why Lucifer is complicate in going along with it. Mormons say that Jesus's plan is agency and unsure return to God's presence, as opposed to Lucifer's plan of no agency and guaranteed return to God's presence. But the Mormon church often doesn't respect your agency and can exhibit the controlling behaviors you were taught to associate with Satan. And it's weird to call it Jesus's plan if it was the plan of all the Gods before ours. Were the separate plans even a real choice?
Don't say: Mormonism is a cult. (This is loaded language that makes people defensive. If you need to bring out the BITE model every time to explain to people what you mean, then just explain the toxic controlling behaviors in the church that you would plug into your BITE model.)
Instead say: Mormonism is a high demand religion with a toxic purity culture, and secretive rituals that many members don't know details about until they're participating in them. They have a consistent pattern of violating the principles of informed consent.
Don't say: Mormons practice polygamy. It's disgusting. (Loses nuance about denominations, time period and time vs eternity sealings. And it undermines those who practice ethical non-monogamy. Only has appeal to base emotions.)
Instead say: Mormon polygamy has an unjustifiable polygyny/polyandry double-standard. Mortal polygamy may have banned in the mainstream church, but it persists in eternal sealings. This double standard continues to imply that women have less control over their partnering in heaven, and that women only get power through their husband.
Don't say: Mormons blaspheme God by saying there are multiple Gods and that they could become Gods themselves. (Mormons only worship one God, even if they acknowledge the existence of many. And being able to grow to become like your parents seems natural. A heaven with no progress would be boring.)
Instead say: Mormons believe in a secret ritual called the second anointing where mortal humans can already believe they deserve Godhood and that they can do no wrong in this life to lose this privilege. This can lead to arrogant leadership who refuse to recognize their wrong-doing and repent.
Don't say: Mormons wear magic underwear. (Pointlessly offensive and derisive.)
Instead say: The Mormon church is very controlling about member's clothing and it extends to their underwear. Mormonism gives itself a monopoly on people's underwear, so you have limited options, which is especially bad if the underwear is uncomfortable or contributing to health problems. It also contributes to creepy encounters with people checking what underwear you're wearing. And things said about the power of the underwear to protect your chastity contributes to rape culture where people are asked "what was she wearing?".
I'm so sick of the way that people talk about men in many left-leaning, ex-religious, and queer spaces.
I've decided that if I'm going to constantly worry about and put up with seeing people venting their trauma in ways that make men into a monolith, they should worry about hearing my trauma too.
I'm sick of hearing women and pick-me men who only talk about purity cultures in terms of its harmful effects on women while putting men down for not being effected by it or for supposedly benefiting from it. Or if they do talk about the harmful effects on men, it's ultimately a segway into talking about how hurt men, hurt women. Like our pain is just instrumental to womens' pain and doesn't matter enough on its own. It's so condescending. Or they just throw gay men a bone for feeling shame for sexual attraction to men, as if men aren't also made to feel shame for sexual attraction to women, or shame for just being a sexual being in general, throwing bi and straight men under the bus and missing key components of shame that affect gay, bi and straight men alike.
As if men aren't constantly told by religion that they deserve to have their offensive body parts cut off. As if men aren't told their lust is so powerful, that they need to constantly be on guard and afraid of themselves or else they'll go to hell or accidentally suddenly rape someone. As if men aren't told that it's within God's will to cut off parts of their genitals to make them feel less. As if men aren't told that they need to sell their body to the capitalist machine to fulfill their divine purpose. As if men aren't constantly told they need to strong enough to protect and provide for a whole family on their own.
As if bodily shame didn't make me afraid to shower because I didn't want to see my own body or "be tempted" anymore. As if sexual ignorance didn't make me scared that I was hurting myself in some way, bleeding white. As if I wasn't made to feel like a fraud pretending to be good person, ultimately deserving to go to hell. As if I wasn't already given an understanding from the moment I learned proper sexual anatomy that my parents, doctors and religion had the right to cut me how they saw fit. As if we didn't live in a society where we castrate male sex offenders and joke about it. As if I wasn't taught that any sexual exploration outside marriage would put me on a slippery slope to becoming an uncontrollable sex pest.
I'm sick of hearing some smartasses saying purity culture needs to focus less on women's appearance and instead focus more on making men scared of getting their dick lopped off, as if that wasn't already also happening. Fuck you!
I made my own almost line-by-line commentary on "Think like they book say" by Saul Williams. Kind of ironic considering the song warns you about obsessing over one piece of writing. But I think that thinking deeply with aid from my own experience and other knowledge is the point.
Reading Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament on Sefaria has made me appreciate line by line commentaries of scripture, songs and stuff again. The website Genius frickin sucks. There shouldn't be one universal commentary. Everyone should get to write their own commentary which is differentiated as such.
More scary internet talk. Can't let people talk about the problems in the church online without shame and pressure of a congregation judging you.
The church talks a lot about philosophies of men. But the church has no alternative philosophy. Their works are self-contradictory and based on circular reasoning without a foundation. The church's doctrine and philosophy is a tangled mess.
But at the same time if you look into church history, you'll find prophets saying weird stuff, and they will be excused as being a product of their time. Then you hear about less literal interpretations of translation, like with the whole Book of Abraham and Horse stuff. So prophets are able to make mistakes, and their mind and experiences inform how they're able to get revelation. So everything that comes through prophets is filtered through philosophies of men. Scripture itself is understood as revelation mingled with philosophies of men. Because men must be told things in words they understand, or they need to be asking the right questions to obtain revelation in the first place, or they mistake cultural practices from the time as doctrine.
The church continues to scare us and make us confused about external philosophies and teachings, but they wouldn't be so confusing if we could just learn about them. Being confused and lost is a product of ignorance.
"Tossed to and fro by every wind and doctrine". That was exact phrase I was looking for in my commentary on the last talk to describe how the church can't clearly say what doctrine is.
The epistle of James tells me what I should expect from prophets' revelations. They should be full of good fruits.
James 3:17 KJV
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy
And Matthew 7:16-20 says by fruits that we shall know people.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
And Galatians 5:22-23 says what the fruits of the spirit are, which includes love/charity (agape).
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
One of the fruits is love and Paul says what love/charity (agape) is in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
I have seen the fruit of the current prophets be unloving. It cannot be wisdom from heaven. It cannot be from a good tree.
"Tossed to and fro by every wind and doctrine". That was exact phrase I was looking for in my commentary on the last talk to describe how the church can't clearly say what doctrine is.
It's great to emphasize diversity and loving people and having the church be a mosaic of patterns. But they're going to be vague and self-contradicting about what Jesus wants. It is notoriously hard to find out what's really doctrine in the Mormon church. And there's the back-and-forth praising and defending of policies, and saying that things were just policies so it doesn't matter that the church had a terrible policy in the past. When there's no clear present instruction, members go to past teachings, policies, and culture as precedent. There is no reliable way to tell the church's Right-wing White Western American culture apart from their teachings.
I've seen general authorities in the past 30 years both say it's against doctrine, and in-line with doctrine to use LGBT labels.
Many would continue to enforce missionary standards on themselves and their families under the reasoning that it's the higher path they're asked to follow on their mission. And they enforce all their arbitrary western cosmetic standards on others.
More glorification of abandoning bad cultural practices while being vague about what practices those are.
I don't like stories of whole kingdoms or families being converted. Just sounds like people are following the government or parents, and not everyone is deciding for themselves. They remind me of that disgusting story in the Bible with the king forcing all his people to be circumcised.
"Eternal purpose" in Mormonism, often means being in a heterosexual marriage and reproducing forever so that there is "no ends to Gods". Feels like homophobic dog whistle to me.
They won't let any of us just try something out. Every single inch of moving to the church is interpreted as proof of the church's truth. No room for ambiguity with testimony. They're really priming members to see every bit of ex-members continuing to interact with the faith in some way as proof of the church's truth and divinity.
Airports sure are scary and uncomfortable, especially now.
Japanese work ethic fetishization.
More objectification and infantilization of church members, turning us into property and children. He's comparing the church to airport employees and normalizing the church's mass surveillance and control over our lives. I think this goes back into the church trying to regulate everyone's thoughts and redirect every opposition to the bishop's office or stake president, so other everyday members don't have to hear difficult topics.
Saying we have tags of "child of God". This reminds me of all those times the church says our only label should be "Child of God" and condemns people for having queer labels. There was one church social media post relatively recently with a shirt tag saying "Child of God".
We have Evangelical Christian zionists trying to start a war to bring on the second coming, and you decide to call this a sign of the times? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not spectacular that prophecies about wars in the middle-east are being fulfilled when people are literally trying to fulfill the prophecy. Are you going to address how the church's right-wing pandering contributed to the election of Trump who wrecked the economy and started this war? Are we going to reverse that anytime soon in response to seeing all this war and economic turmoil?
Got nothing but prayer as an answer? Is the prayer supposed to be a meditation to calm down and think before we organize or do something?
By bad cultural practices are we talking about stuff like fgm and hazing rituals, or are we talking about queer people? Or something boring like coffee and tattoos.
If prophets are up to date with the times and can see the future, why do we say Brigham Young just had theories about black people? Why did it take time for prophets to learn that you can't cure homosexuality? Why did Russel Ballard say he didn't receive an answer about LGBT people in David Archuleta's biography?
