#eilooxara rants

[eilooxara]

It's actually really simple is the thing

Case 1: "You don't have to [thing society expects you to do]": Good and often important message

Case 2: "You don't have to [thing society punishes you for doing]": This is society threatening said punishment

Case 3: "It's so sad/gross/etc when people [thing society expects you to do]": Not oppression per se but you are being kind of a dick about it

Case 4: "It's so sad/gross/etc when people [thing society punishes you for doing]": You are society and you're doing the punishing right now

And then. Here's the obvious but apparently elusive fact. Society punishes trans women for being feminine, and for not being feminine enough. For every element of transition that we do, and every element that we don't do.

So when you're taking about transition options, you're never in case 1 or even case 3.

[eilooxara]

It bugs (lol) me when people act like all terminology HAS to break along taxonomical lines or whatever other categorization system they like

It's EXACTLY the same thing as if I, with a physics background, insist that "work" exclusively means "force applied over distance" but everyone agrees we're being obnoxious when we do that

Scientists didn't invent the word "bug"! Or "berry"! Make up your own term! We did it with "quark" and everyone liked that one. Imagine if we'd called them "crumbs" or something and then were like "ah but technically that small piece of bread is not subatomic so it's not REALLY a crumb"

[eilooxara]

Why do medical organizations lie about who they're giving advice to

I found a thing about what age one should start getting mammograms that said "this advice applies to cisgender women and anyone assigned female at birth"

But like

(Setting aside the bit where apparently nobody knows that trans women have breasts or thinks medical research about us should happen)

I kinda think it does not in fact apply to. Say. People who already got a mastectomy

Why not just say "this applies to people with breasts" or if they really want to emphasize that they didn't study any trans people "this applies to cisgender women with breasts"

[eilooxara]

I can't fucking stand [REDACTED]

Big Popular Blog with some decent, if a bit basic, advice on certain subjects, and a huge fucking "let me teach you about everything, young ones" attitude, and is massively, dangerously wrong about at least some subjects (which implies a willingness to speak on subjects they're uninformed about as if they have actual knowledge)

Like. Here's my real advice for You People Out There (whoever you may be): if someone has good advice about job interviews, financial planning, and computer stuff, they almost certainly know less than nothing about epidemiology, scientific research, epistemology, ethics, relationship counseling, or any other subject. This applies to whatever the items on the "genuinely knows about this" list may be, but I have found that people with specific narrow expertise seem to believe they know a lot about everything. Programming, for example, or psychology. One of them is physics! A thing I myself, tumblr user Eilooxara, have a degree in! So watch out! Maybe I'm one of those dumbass physicists who thinks she knows everything about everything and "don't listen to people who don't know what they're talking about" is actually BAD advice(!)

Seriously though. Like. There's a hard limit on the number of things a person can be well informed about based on how long it takes to learn things to a degree that one can call well informed, and no human has time for that many of them, so if a person speaks on MANY subjects, they are not an expert in, at least, most of them

And it's ok to speak about things you're not an expert in but you gotta not pretend to be one when you aren't. I often expound on subjects outside my relatively narrow area of expertise but I do not format it as life advice

If you want some introductory level info about a huge variety of crafts that I think are fun to do, I'm your girl. If you want detailed info on my specific subfield of a subfield of mechanical design engineering, there's no one better. I have several other subjects in which my relatively surface level knowledge vastly exceeds that of your typical zero-knowledge person who still feels like they can give advice on the subject for some reason

And that's just me, as an example, and you shouldn't take what I say as truth unless it's about whether split-lock washers are worth a damn (they're not), but more importantly you shouldn't take what some fucko says as truth either, especially if they're saying something you want to be true

[eilooxara]

Like. It is a fairly easily confirmed fact that somewhere between "many" and "all" people absorb ideas, prejudices, value judgments, and opinions, especially bigotry, from other people (as opposed to, idk, making it up on their own). And this sticks much more if it's about a marginalized group that is widely considered bad by society at large. And much more if it's coming from a peer than from someone the person can see as Other.

And it is... fucking obvious that people who have absorbed prejudice against themselves and other people with their own characteristics are worse off by far than people who have not done that. They are more prone to depression, self-harm, suicide, etc, for example, as well as probably a large number of less quantifiable problems

(people who absorb prejudice against those who are NOT like them perhaps gain social benefits via ingroup bias but that's beside the point of this post)

So it follows that hating on yourself for having a characteristic or being a member of some social category is directly causing other people like you to absorb this self-hatred, and that these people are directly harmed by that absorption.

This means that posting shit about hating yourself for being whatever-you-are, or desperately trying to avoid becoming whatever-it-is, is causing harm to people who see it

It does not matter if it's a vent or "only about me not anyone else" or whatever, you are obligated to keep that shit to yourself.

[eilooxara]

Hating womanhood because of misogyny isn't feminism, it's misogyny skinning feminism and wearing it as a coat

Like. That's literally blaming womanhood for the oppression of women.

[eilooxara]

Totally novel idea nobody's ever said before but I think perhaps there's something wrong with how teaching is done

(thought spurred by a post about people using genai in college etc)

Like the goal is to transfer knowledge into student and it's quite clear that the knowledge does not make it in there best when the student is incentivized to cram

The hardest class that I recall from grad school was continuum mechanics, which was mechanics of materials for when the materials are squishy enough that their characteristics change under load, and it was really interesting and very different from my other courses, and because I don't work with critical stresses in squishy things for work, I don't really remember any of it

I was cramming. I knew the material at the time and I don't anymore because that's how cramming works.

(sure it's been over a decade but still)

I think it would work better if cramming were disincentivized! I think it would work better if grades were not a factor, or were used for focusing on weaker topics until they're not weak anymore, or something like that

Like I'm not breaking new ground here, everyone knows this would be better for actual retention of knowledge, why are we still doing the other thing

This doesn't only apply to exams, it's also projects and papers and so on, the time constraints and grading systems work against actually knowing the material afterwards

[eilooxara]

Occasionally I see evidence demonstrating how fucked up people's thinking is *gestures* Out There

I'm in this very large discord server about gardening and this one guy keeps mulling over his personal life in the offtopic channel there and like. Whew the monogamous cishets are not ok. He's freaking the fuck out over being emotionally close with a married woman and also attracted to her, and I'm just like. PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO BE CLOSE??? Cheating is only wrong inasmuch as it's breaking a promise*, and a promise to never be emotionally close to anyone else is not an ok promise to have made or to hold someone to!

And because I am Compelled to speak up when righteousness requires it even when I know it won't do any good, I was like "I cannot fathom an ethical system by which you or she have done anything wrong"

And dude was just like "we [him and the woman] feel that it's wrong and therefore it is wrong" which is about the farthest from having an ethical stance as you can get because hoo boy people can feel any kind of way and I personally know folks who can become convinced they've done wrong by existing while being technically capable of doing something bad that they didn't and wouldn't actually do. It's just a bad definition. Sorry to the moral sentimentalists out there but maybe you guys should learn about what people's ridiculous moral senses tell them.

So anyway yeah I dropped it after that because while I'm obligated to say stuff sometimes I'm not obligated to get into a protracted ethical philosophy debate with a stranger on the internet who has no interest in ethical philosophy. Like if he'd been like "Whoa... I never thought of it that way" then I'd continue but I'm not going to bash my head against the wall

*I expect most people who care about this think of it as its own a priori sin but that doesn't make any sense because there's no mechanism of harm. If you take it as "hurt feelings = harm" then that's an outrageously bad basis for an ethical system because anyone can have any feelings about anything and it's trivially easy to come up with cases where that makes the world worse. And if your rubric is "disruption of established social structure = wrong" then I am hiding razor blades in your socks. The ONLY sense in which it's wrong that has any internal logic is that it's breaking a promise.

YES I recognize that I'm taking a quasi-Kantian categorical imperative as a default method by which to analyze how and whether a given thing is wrong, but like, it's the only functional option, consequentialism is bogus because it relies on the ability to perfectly predict outcomes (or if you bake in some compensation for uncertainty then you're just doing a categorical imperative but with extra steps) and quantify benefit/harm/goodness/badness (which is just kicking the can, that's the problem we came here to solve!). And virtue ethics and rights and duties and all that are... well they're only as good as your list of virtues and rights and duties and that just takes us to the same place. But "would a world where people do this action in situations like this be better or worse than one where they don't?" is a question I can actually ANSWER.