promethea.incorporated

Okay so prop 8 was kind of dick move but nothing to fire a guy over, but could we discuss the Actually Problematic things Eich has done, like javascript? It has too many semicolons and curlybrackets so I now I’m procrastinating learning javascript by learning lisp and julia instead and while this is definitely intriguing (lisp has this certain fascinating purity, and julia just seems incredibly awesome) it isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now

1 month ago · tagged #shitposting #baby leet · 9 notes · .permalink

five short poems about “what if people call themselves toasters now”

sinesalvatorem:

serinemolecule:

slatestarscratchpad:

pervocracy:

slatestarscratchpad:

pervocracy:

[Snip]

I think I find the “toaster” objection much stronger than you do. To me it goes something like this (content warning: arguing about transgender):

A: Please let me into the men’s bathroom

B: But you’re not a man, you have a uterus and two X chromosomes and stuff.

A: But I self-identify as a man. That makes me a man.

B: No. If you self-identified as a toaster, that wouldn’t make you a toaster.

A: No, this concept can be divided into at least two axes: a physical axis based on chromosomes, genitalia, et cetera, and a social axis based on social role and self-identification. So because I self-identify as a man, I’m actually a man.

B: Hold on. Even granting your system, I think the word “man” should be used to refer to the physical axis, not the social axis. This is how we’ve used it for thousands of years and how most people understand the concept. I am happy to say you are a real woman who prefers to socially identify as a man, and to adjust the way I socially interact with you accordingly.

A: No, the real axis is the social role one. You should say I am a real man who happens to have female-typical chromosomes and genitalia, and then if you ever need to interact with my genitals you can adjust that accordingly.

B: I am pretty sure the real axis should be the physical one. Suppose you identified as a toaster. I would rather call you a human who happens to socially identify as a toaster, rather than a toaster that happens to have a human-typical body.

A: And I am saying I disagree with that. I would prefer you call such a person “really a toaster” but add if necessary that they have a human-typical body.

B: But I think that misunderstands language’s role as a system of categorization. We have lots of reasons to want to distinguish between humans and toasters. If we define humans who identify as toasters as toasters, almost everything we want to think or talk about will use the categorization system [(humans and trans-toasters) vs. (cis-toasters)], and not the categorization system [(humans) vs. (trans-toasters and cis-toasters)]. For example, (humans and trans-toasters) can walk upright, talk, do math, write books, and should be legally obligated to pay taxes. (cis-toasters) can make toast and should be legal to smash with hammers if you so desire. The category toasters (meaning trans-toasters and cis-toasters) is totally useless. Because of this, every time we want to communicate useful information about toasters, we have to say “cis-toasters”, and every time we want to communicate useful information about humans we have to say “assigned-humans-at-birth”. I don’t know if there would be any reason at all to ever use the category “toasters” without the qualifier “cis”. So it sounds like all we are doing is replacing two perfectly clear words, “humans” and “toasters”, with two longer and more awkward words, “cis-toasters” and “assigned-humans-at-birth”, plus adding the possibility of accidentally saying “toasters” at the wrong time and so offending a bunch of people and maybe getting doxxed and fired.

But I don’t think even this would work. This isn’t satisfying our hypothetical person’s desire to identify as a toaster, it’s routing around it mercilessly. We’re replacing every instance of words that could possibly make the trans-toaster sound like an cis-toaster with a different, unambiguous word - essentially rewriting the dictionary to turn the word “toaster” into “cis-toaster” without admitting any philosophical implications. If the person were to stick to their guns at all, they would then demand to be identified as a cis-toaster, the word which means what “toaster” means now. They’d probably even say that they had terrible dysphoria if you didn’t do it, and that you were literally ruining their life. So what are you going to do? Keep coming up with ever more complicated linguistic circumlocutions like cis-cis-cis-toasters? Or lose the ability to meaningfully talk about humans as distinct from toasters at all?

A: I agree language is a system of useful categorization. But the thing we actually want to categorize people as, when we talk about gender, is social. Nobody except a doctor cares what genitals you have. But many people may want to interact with you socially. And even in a purely physical sense, many trans people are biologically more similar to their gender of identification (thanks to hormones, surgery, etc) than their gender assigned at birth.

B: I think you’re totally wrong about what we actually want to categorize people by. The vast majority of the population is either heterosexual or homosexual. Those people care a lot about compatible genitals, especially if they want to reproduce some day. Let’s face it, the most important thing about gender is who is or isn’t a potential relationship partner for whom. I don’t care whether you’re aggressive and love sports, or whether you’re domestic and love knitting. In fact, even if I did, your system would fail. There are many people who identify as a gender but do not follow that gender’s roles - for example, transwomen who are butch lesbians. If you wanted to use gender to communicate something about a person’s social interaction style or interests or something, that would be a totally different proposal than the one you’re making. The one you’re making is that people should be able to choose it through self-identification regardless of their chromosomes, or their body type and hormones, or the social roles they most often take. And none of this even comes close to applying to toasters. As soon as one person in the world declares themselves to be a toaster, we open a whole new can of worms.

A: I think you are misunderstanding language’s contextual nature. If there was only one person in the world who wanted to identify as a toaster, we could generally refer to cis-toasters as “toaster”, and only refer to toasters in a self-identification sense when that person was in the room, or we were talking about them, or something.

B: But this is why I always bring up that only like 0.3% of the population identify as trans. By your theory, we should be able to talk about “woman” to mean “cis-woman” unless we are in some context obviously related to specific trans people. But in fact I have heard people protest the existence of “Women’s Health Centers” to mean “gynaecology / obstetrics centers”, because they note that some people with vaginas and uteruses are men, plus some women have penises and don’t need those centers at all. Surely you’ve been on Tumblr and noticed conversations about gender constantly getting derailed by people objecting no, men don’t have male privilege, some men and some women have male privilege and other men and other women don’t, depending on what they were assigned at birth and how they pass and so on. Your theory that people are good enough at linguistic context to effortlessly code-shift is completely false. What’s more, it will be torpedoed by direct enemy action. I predict that as soon as one person anywhere in the world identifies as a toaster, anybody who makes the statement “toasters are appliances”, even in a neutral context, even far away from that one person, will get yelled at by social justice people, doxxed, and fired from their job.

A: And I think your prediction is wrong. I’m sure there’s already someone somewhere who so identifies, and I haven’t seen any firings yet.

B: That’s just because the activists are too busy getting other people fired for other things. As soon as those issues go away, they’ll be able to focus on the toaster people. In fact, I would accuse them of hypocrisy if they didn’t. What, do they have some standard like “You must be greater than 0.29% of the population in order for us to insist everyone switch the way they use language because of you”? Even that wouldn’t work, because they still insist on the trans thing in countries that are lower than 0.29% trans.

A: I think there is a big difference between the number of people who identify as transgender - probably in the millions worldwide - and the number of people who identify as transtoaster - probably less than a dozen. A quantitative difference that large is as good as a qualitative difference.

B: What about otherkin? I bet there are thousands of people who identify as foxes. But having to replace our term fox with “cis-fox” seems just as silly as having to replace “toaster” with “cis-toaster”. What’s more, I think if we start providing incentives, these things will change a lot. Trans-women are put in women’s prisons? If I committed a crime, I think I’d much rather be in a woman’s prison than a men’s prison, given what I’ve heard about the sorts of people in the latter. If anyone identifies as a trans-fox or a trans-toaster, eventually they’re going to start demanding some kind of rights - the right to live in national parks, the right to not pay taxes - and at that point either we’re going to have to say “Sorry, guys, you’re not really foxes and toasters”, or a heck of a lot more people are going to want to identify as such.

A: Tell me honestly. If we let trans people use the bathrooms they want, do you really think that fifty years from now the government will be tying itself into knots trying to figure out whether trans-foxes should be allowed to live in national parks, and we’ll have people identifying not just as toasters but as cis-cis-cis-toasters?

B: Honestly, no. I expect people to be shameless hypocrites. All the same people who get enraged when a dentist hunts a lion but see nothing wrong with millions of cows being tortured in factory farms for their entire lives - these people will arrange for anyone who doesn’t support transgender people to be doxxed and fired, and for anyone who does support trans-toaster people to be doxxed and fired, and the horrible unprincipled monkey politics that are our society will keep ticking along regardless. Probably a few people - both idealistic leftists and idealistic conservatives - will notice the contradiction from one direction or the other, speak up about it out of genuine concern with truth and justice, and be doxxed and fired in their turn. If another equally thorny problem comes up, it will be also be settled by whoever is able to doxx and fire people the most people, and we can only hope that the process continues to produce moral progress regardless.

A: I admit that would be unfortunate, but is it as unfortunate as people being forced to suffer from gender dysphoria for their entire lives?

B: No, but I don’t want to do that either! I think there are ways to solve this which would also solve the potential future problems in a slightly more principled way. For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis. Then it will be very obvious that a trans-man is a “real man” but not a “real male”, or vice versa. Pronouns are a problem specific to this issue that can be recast to refer to the social role. Then for future toaster-related issues we could just append trans- or -identified, eg “this person is a trans-toaster” or “this person is toaster-identified”, and leave the words “toaster” and “real toaster” (if you must) to refer to physical toasters. That would help solve the linguistics. We could decide all legal questions on a utilitarian basis. If there were millions of trans-foxes suffering intense species dysphoria for not being able to live in national parks, and they were able to convince the government that they wouldn’t damage the parks in any way, and nobody expected it to lead to so many new trans-fox-identifications that it screwed up the park system, then sure, let them be in national parks. Since this will never happen, this is an easy concession for me to make. And if it does happen, I can still be pretty satisfied with the result.

—

In my opinion anything stronger than this (ie saying that transwomen are “really women” and ”really female” and that any attempt to connect them to maleness at all is just objectively wrong ignorant misgendering - is in fact vulnerable to something like the toaster objection. If you disagree I would like to hear your reasoning.

I’m not saying that everyone making the toaster objection has thought about it as deeply as (A). But I also don’t think everybody objecting to the toaster joke has thought of it as deeply as (B), and maybe if they actually engaged with the argument and took it seriously, it would lead them in that direction. In my experience the only thing that has ever helped me get more sophisticated about anything is taking people I disagree with seriously (steelmanning if necessary, because lots of people who disagree with me are idiots) and adjusting my beliefs in order to survive their challenges.

I have some nitpicks here.

A big flaw of the toaster analogy is that humans and toasters have significantly more differences than men and women. This is what makes the “cis-toaster and trans-toaster” category seem ridiculous, since “making toast” makes the “cis-toaster”/”trans-toaster” distinction much more important.

For humans, though, “men” (a category including “cismen” and “transmen”) and “women” (a category including “ciswomen” and “transwomen”) are the best categorizations in pretty much every context outside of medicine and sometimes sex.

The general idea of “biological sex” isn’t a particularly useful categorization, and is kind of ambiguous anyway. Do you mean hormone system? Genitals? Chromosomes? In situations where these don’t match up with identified gender (i.e. for trans people), these categories often don’t match up with each other, either. Unlike with toasters, where the distinction is pretty clear.

For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis.

Minor note on terminology: I think consensus is for male/female to also be the social role.

After all, as pointed out earlier, “biological sex” isn’t a meaningful categorization. Depending on why you’re bringing up biological sex, you might use terms like “male-bodied”/”female-bodied”, “people with [genitals]”, “assigned [sex] at birth”, or “[sex] hormone system”, but there’s no need to reserve the words “male” and “female” for a concept of biological sex that doesn’t really exist.

For instance, you might say “He doesn’t want to have sex with people with male genitals” or “People with Y chromosomes are more prone to a colorblindness” but there’s no reason to say “people who are biologically male” because 1. in what context would you prefer this to something more specific? and 2. does this category include people with female genitals and breasts but went through puberty with a male hormone system? It doesn’t seem useful terminology.

Okay, my minor note ended up being kind of long but I did say I was nitpicking today.

Another reason why I support colonising man/woman and male/female and all the other pre-existing ambiguous binaries, and claiming them for the social axis:

These are the terms people are already using in everyday life and use by default. Thus, unless they specifically need to talk about something beyond the scope of these words, they’ll continue to use them.

I am going to experience acute discomfort every time someone uses language to categorise me with cis-men. Sometimes this is going to be important but, whenever it isn’t necessary, I don’t want it to happen.

If someone needs to talk about the set of people with certain chromosomes, or certain hormone balances, or certain genitals - they can do that. I support them having words to talk about this, and not having those words swallowed up by the social axis.

But those words have to be intentional, such that people only use them in the limited set of cases where they’re actually the best words. This is the way to minimise suffering.

Yes this. We can either paste unnecessary pictures of salmon everywhere in our speech, or we can switch to language that is not only more precise and accurate for what we are trying to express, but also without the side effect of generating five disutilons every time the words are actually used.

Besides, what else am I supposed to use as the adjectival form of $gender, if not “fe/male”? I can’t think of anything, and I’m the one who wants to refactor the entire pronoun system in English.

So actually we would either need to generate new ways of speaking about more technical things that emerge from already existing concepts really easily, or get the public to adopt a completely made-up and unnatural way of speaking about really common things.

And yet they say that trans/feminists are the ones pushing people towards difficult and non-functional language…

1 month ago · 2,516 notes · source: pervocracy · .permalink

Allistic Social Skill #28

ilzolende:

sinesalvatorem:

allisticsocialskills:

conversations with allistics have a turn based mechanic, with a time limit on each turn after the allistics will become displeased. it is thus important that you give everyone else in a conversation opportunities to talk about your special interest as well

@ilzolende

give everyone else in a conversation opportunities to talk about your special interest as well

LOOOOL

Really, though, being incredibly blatant in your transitions between topics is nice. The “take turns doing a combination infodump/Q&A session” conversation mode can be fun.

1 month ago · tagged #it me · 266 notes · source: allisticsocialskills · .permalink

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

davidsevera:

collapsedsquid:

argumate:

collapsedsquid:

argumate:

@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.

Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!

I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.

In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order.  One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.

Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)

There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.

(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).

Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“

It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.

I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.

Libertes all the way.

My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.

My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me for estradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.

Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.

Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).

My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.

I like this idea.

However, I seriously doubt the average parent can afford to cover the appropriate cost for giving someone a severe chronic pain condition or genes that will kill them by 30, and if we don’t force them to buy insurance they probably won’t. (More generally, people are not likely to buy liability insurance unless they have to.)

And then, of course, there’s the incentive issue where if you don’t want the kid you inflicted the severe chronic pain condition on through neglect to sue you, you might want to convince them that they don’t want to do anything about it.

Yes, terrible outcomes would result because terrible outcomes always result, but if parents effectively have to have insurance to have legal protection (ArguProtect regular plan, as the platinum family plan would be way too expensive because only abusers and really principled assholes would buy the “children are property, do what you want” one instead of the “children have rights, don’t be evil” one, and thus compensation payments would be really predictably ultra-likely) and abused children can authorize the Dia Paying Group to collect millions from ArguProtect if the brainwashing fails; and if the culprits themselves don’t have the money then all the better because ArguProtect’s other customers would be incentivized to tell them to stop ruining their insurance premiums, it would reduce the problems. Even if only one in ten abused children can break out of the brainwashing and demand compensation, it would eradicate the abuse people aren’t willing to pay 10% of the compensation to continue doing.

And furthermore, this can’t really be done in a monopoly law system, because people won’t have the liability insurance as they very seldom need it, and it would soon degenerate into either PoliceMob kidnapping any parents who do anything that seems slightly risky, or PoliceMob giving tacit approval to all kinds of “children are property” bullshit when they don’t want to have too strict universal rules and therefore conclude that kidnapping children to dangerous and autonomy-violating boot camps against their will is totally ok (as I’ve understood, the US seems to have managed to kind of have *both* at the same time). Monopoly law is subject to enormous democratic pressures which means that people’s religious etc. objections to childrens’ rights are very effectively coordinated whereas Dia Paying Group could just say it doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s religion because someone’s consent and autonomy were violated and they need to pay for it no matter what.

And while I have been focusing on the business side, there would be nothing actually preventing people from having their security provider be something else; I’d expect communists to run their own grassroots democratic collectives sharing property and fulfilling many such functions on a non-commercial basis (but they would still be expected to fork over the cash or otherwise compensate the victims outside the collective, incentivizing people to keep tabs on each other’s nonconsensually risky behavior to avoid being held liable for them, thus enabling enforcement of prosocial mores without binding people to non-consensual communities which is a severe failure mode of traditional clan systems), charities doing pro bono or sliding-scale-priced security, etc.; it’s just that having a sound business logic/incentive structure is the core question altruism can easily operate on top of. I wouldn’t be surprised if eg. trade unions took on many of these duties*.

Also, mandatory liability insurance would probably improve even monopoly law IF said monopoly law is established on a strong principle of bodily autonomy. Insurance would make prison abolition (mostly; there would still be people who need to be segregated from potential victims but a very small amount) dramatically easier when the solution to “poor person violates your rights” could be “make the associates of the poor person pay sufficient compensation” instead of “kidnap the poor person because they can’t pay a sufficient compensation”. It would have the problems of determining what counts as valid insurance and it might degenerate into an overregulated bullshit system, but it would open new avenues for less-coercive behavioral control and more sensible management of risks (for example, a working-class single mother could leave her child in the car during a job interview without getting kidnapped, because her insurance provider would be more likely to understand the problems of poor people than the System as a whole is (because incentives; if insurance is oligopolized by big overregulated cronyist corporations it doesn’t work but if the market is actually functional people would be incentivized to cater to their customers’ needs and situations) and thus more sympathetic to the idea that sometimes people have only bad and worse options and punishing them for choosing bad over worse doesn’t make sense; of course in a proper system she should have access to eg. a childcare cooperative or another arrangement of mutual aid).

* In fact, trade unions are already an example of polycentric law functioning around us (although due to corporatist regulations, they may be monopolistic locally or industry-wide; for example in Finland there is no national minimum wage, but it’s instead negotiated bindingly for each industry separately) in the sphere of work. In essence, a trade union acts as its members’ Dia Paying Group for negotiating the specifics of employment contracts, and when unregulated, in a way that is very much like the ad hoc monkey-patching I’d expect a polycentric system to provide for other things as well.

For example, the employer argues that the workers should be paid $10 an hour and have their bathroom breaks controlled; the union argues that the wages should be $15 and bathroom breaks should be deregulated. The employer says going on strike is a contract violation, the union says that controlling bathroom breaks is a violation of what the contract is supposed to be. Then they negotiate what the contract actually means in this situation. Maybe they settle on $12 and no bathroom control, because the employer threatens to fire the workers and the workers threaten to tell everyone the employer is shitty and they should either be customers somewhere else or keep bothering the employer with customer feedback until a deal is reached. Maybe they settle a deal right away to avoid a protracted labor struggle, maybe they get into a protracted labor struggle. What’s known for sure is that the 19th century nastiness wouldn’t be repeated if PoliceMob doesn’t take sides and permit pinkertons to do nonconsensual violence to workers without getting in trouble for it.

Similarly, Dia Paying Group would argue that causing a severe chronic pain condition necessitates compensation regardless of intent, and ArguProtect’s rules would then determine whether the parent has to pay what they can afford or if it is pooled among all customers. Since causing a chronic pain condition is clearly a violation of a person’s rights, ArguProtect would have very little to stand on and would be incentivized to minimize the causings of chronic pain conditions.

On the other hand, if the child argued that their autonomy was violated by a vital vaccination at age 3, the case would probably be laughed out of arbitration because nobody wants to do business with someone who doesn’t let people be protected from dangerous diseases that expose innocent third parties to excessive risks (compensating the families of immunocompromised people who caught measles from some hipster’s brat isn’t cheap).

There would be the uncomfortable territory of evolving law on topics such as “is a person who was circumcised by their parents entitled to compensation just for that even if there were no complications”, and Dawn Defense might say “yes, anyone who wishes they hadn’t been circumcised should be paid”, Dia Paying Group might say “no, if the circumcision was based on sincere religious belief (as we have defined in our policies on page x…)”, and then they would just have to figure out the least unsatisfactory agreement with the knowledge that later decisions in a different context might be different. The problems of public opinion would still be there but at least they would be more limited in scope. If all situations where something is obviously not a violation of another person’s bodily autonomy, such as “driving while black” or “walking while trans” were immediately thrown out as completely frivolous, the opportunity for popularly-sanctioned oppression would be far smaller even though it couldn’t be eradicated altogether.

(And how would the system deal with boudary cases? Let’s say Adam writes a blog post Steve doesn’t like, so Steve begins stalking and harassing Adam, and ArguProtect says they won’t limit Steve’s freedom of expression. In that case, Dia Paying Group purchases the same plan Steve is using for their own very large employees, who then begin expressing themselves in Steve’s inbox, voicemail and doorstep, or if Steve doesn’t mind, they inform other customers of ArguProtect that unfortunately they would have to express themselves in obviously ArguProtect-approved ways to them if Steve won’t stop expressing himself to Adam. If ArguProtect is a bunch of weird assholes who all enjoy harassment in both directions, Dia Paying Group shouldn’t have excess difficulty in convincing Dawn Defense, BLM security etc. that ArguProtect should be scorned until they keep their harassment strictly internal-only.)

(And if ArguProtect wants to enforce its own informal “bathroom bill” by having its large employees creep in other people’s bahrooms just to impose its own sense of morality on the rest, others can simply ban ArguProtect employees and customers from their bathrooms.)

(In fact, diminishing people’s ability to coordinate meanness is kind of “the point” of libertarian policies, because people are probably doing way too much coordinated meanness. When it is combined with better protection against uncoordinated meanness as well, the result is expected to be a less mean society. And the exact nature of the coordinated meanness is important too; taking taxes to fund a basic income is way less mean than voting to ban $group for being offensive by simply existing.)

1 month ago · tagged #anarchist eulering #i don't know how well the practice would match the theory #but that's why it should be tested somewhere · 23 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

informal poll

amakthel:

warpedchyld:

shmeards:

“fuck boys get money” means:

a) Forget boys, accrue wealth instead

b) Have sex with boys and get money for it

c) Fuck Boys—ie, boys who fuck—are paid well

d) Argh!! Boys are paid well

e) Shoot, boys sure understand money

God bless punctuation and the English language

a

yes, a

(via metagorgon)

2 months ago · tagged #shitposting · 248,089 notes · source: shmeards · .permalink

2centjubilee:

@socialjusticemunchkin

And we wouldn’t need to worry about bathroom laws if the state had no right to intrude into bathrooms in the first place.

While technically true, decentralized oppression and nonsense about bathrooms can still exist without a state to sanction it – in fact, given the limited ability of the state to police every public bathroom, we can dismiss the laws as the ruse they are, a formal mask on the informal social anxiety about the subject.  And that is what is really at the heart of the matter.

Yes. My point exactly. Such decentralized oppression can’t exactly be addressed by the state, but the oppression of PoliceMob bullying trans women on top of that can be, by reducing the things it’s acceptable for PoliceMob to intrude to. We can’t have PoliceMob kidnap all the cissexists even if we wanted to, so removing the state’s ability to create these laws in one direction or the other would be a win for the “less oppression and bullying” side. Then we’d only have to deal with the cissexists, instead of cissexists + PoliceMob + cissexists again because they are butthurt about the state legalizing gay marriage and are looking for targets to take out their frustration on.

2 months ago · 3 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe:

@poshuman @neoliberalism-nightly @collapsedsquid

Regardless of how you feel about the specific issue of anti-discrimination laws, I get the sense that they were more about creating a cultural norm of “racism is bad m'kay,” in the same way that gay marriage and transgender restroom right are really just the legal battlefields we’ve chosen to fight culture wars on. I’m personally convinced that anti-discrimination laws are a reasonable infringement on liberty for the greater good, but if I’m honest the real reason I see them as a victory is for cultural reasons. I don’t know whether I like the trend of making laws into cultural proxy battlegrounds, but I’m sorta stumped about how else to go about fighting culture wars in a reasonably civilized way that everyone will see as legitimate and meaningful.

Well yes; if the state has previously worked to socially engineer a system that fucks over $group, it’s certainly understandable that social engineering might be used to try to reverse that.

But I really would prefer to reach an equilibrium where the state won’t try to regulate morality in any direction, as each incremental liberation nonetheless always leaves people outside it.

Sure, there might be gay marriage now, but we don’t have poly marriage; privatizing marriage would abolish these issues. (And wow it’s really fucked up that the word for “let’s not intrude onto these matters from outside” has turned to often mean “let’s hand this over for cronyist corporations to make a cash cow out of”. I feel kind of silly in having this realization right here right now but I guess it tells something about our society that we only have words for “the state” and “the state’s buddies”.)

Sure, binary trans people might have legal gender recognition, but enbies are screwed as usual; not having the state regulate gender in the first place would have made the question utterly immaterial in the first place.

And we wouldn’t need to worry about bathroom laws if the state had no right to intrude into bathrooms in the first place.

And hate crime laws are a joke when the same system that enforces them systematically engages in racially selective mass incarceration exceeding the Soviet Gulags in scope.

In a civilized system, we should see the culture wars engaged on a private level. Instead of the state setting bathroom policies for all from up above, we would be doing advocacy on the streets and in the businesses, and perhaps even humanizing the sides for each other when the outcome isn’t enforced by scary men with guns, but rather the result of negotiation with These Actual Real People Right Here. The heavy lifting happens outside the government anyway, and the way I see it taking away the main weapon of my enemy is worth an insignificant disarmament for myself. No advance in civil rights has ever happened before it had been created and popularized privately, and the state has only pushed hard on the brakes. Take away the brakes, we don’t need the mostly entirely hypothetical gas pedal.

2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 14 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

The Need for Political Transhumanism

unknought:

2centjubilee:

Alright, so…

There’s a bit of a problem with the group of transhumanists we have around nowadays.  A fair number of them are merely passive, accepting, waiting for the next change.  I realize that not everyone has the time or energy to commit to any kind of action, but I’ve seen the issue raised of “how about we, y’know, do something about this?” and someone pipes up, “I prefer transhumanism as a philosophical movement!” and everyone starts agreeing and saying politics is a dangerous practice full of -isms and so on and so forth that is corrupting to Pure Ideals.  Some say, “well, I think everything is inevitable” and thereby justify their non-involvement, to great applause.

This is a non-productive stance. We owe it to our selves and our future to work to change it to one that is better.  No force is unstoppable, and no philosophy is pure.  (788 words)

Keep reading

Why do we think the “freedom to change your body” is assured, and will not become “actually, you have to change your body in this specific way”?

YES YES YES YES YES

As a trans woman, witnessing the rise of the “low T” industry has been fascinating – and more than a little frustrating. The complex that’s emerged here is seemingly designed to ensure that as many men as possible will be on prescription testosterone. A man might feel tired, and he happens to see a commercial about how this could be “low T”. He’ll go to a site like IsItLowT.com, and a quiz that might be no more accurate than a coin flip will tell him to see his doctor. And he’ll make an appointment at his local “low T clinic”, where even normal ranges aren’t considered high enough. Before you know it, we’ve got a billion-dollar market on our hands.

But many trans people require treatment involving sex hormones as well. As Dr. Abraham Morgentaler writes, “It could be said that testosterone is what makes men, men. It gives them their characteristic deep voices, large muscles, and facial and body hair, distinguishing them from women.” So it’s no surprise that trans men would often want more testosterone, and trans women would often want to get rid of theirs and replace it with estrogen.

Yet our experiences of engaging with the medical system could not be more different from that of cis men seeking treatment for low T. A spokesman for AbbVie described campaigns like IsItLowT.com as “disease state awareness initiatives”. But there are no major marketing initiatives raising awareness of transition treatments, or running commercials suggesting that if you’re tired and depressed, you might be transgender. None of these businesses are promoting websites about gender dysphoria, or offering unhelpful quizzes that tell a significant fraction of cis people to talk to their doctor about transitioning. And there are no multi-state chains of clinics focusing exclusively on transition treatments – let alone telling cis people that even if they’re healthy, transitioning can make them feel even better.

There is no overbroad promotion of trans medications – because most of the time, we don’t even have access to the basics. Medical transition is recognized as effective and necessary by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Unlike “low T”, transitioning isn’t the subject of any real medical controversy. But if you haven’t yet realized you’re trans, you’re not going to learn about it from a commercial break during Monday Night Football. [http://genderanalysis.net/2014/09/low-t-a-tale-of-two-hormones-gender-analysis-01/](Low T: A Tale of Two Hormones)

1. Any technology will be co-opted by normativity unless people actively pump against entropy.
2. Every tool of our liberation will turn into yet another prison if we don’t constantly work to liberate ourselves.
3. The system will always find a creative way to fuck you over because it is just so slightly biased against even acknowledging that someone like you might ever exist.

Right now, we are already having impressive ways to seize control of our bodies, and those ways are hypocritically regulated to reinforce, not undermine, the oppressive structures that surround us.

(this is also one of the reasons why I find the ideas of a state-run queer/feminist/anti-tradition social engineering conspiracy utterly laughable; you haven’t seen but a tiny fraction of the diversity we could have if human creativity was genuinely unleashed from its shackles!)

2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 46 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink