From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.
From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.
From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.
At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.
At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.
It is only a matter of time. Only the rebelliousness and poverty of the majority of transsexuals is slowing it down.
It is prideful to think that this argument will not be trampled by the march of human science, and simply foolish to think either that said science will do nothing that is far more horrible or far more glorious than this.
And if we cannot deal with the world of rising power and madness, while maintaining our principles and our humanity? Then we (at best) become relics like the Sentinelese, and at worst are thrown to the wolves.
(If we can deal with it, then we have a world to win.)
Also, people who by these criteria are not women include anyone who doesn’t get pregnant (radfems: think “many lesbians”, religious people: think “nuns”), people who don’t undergo severe mental changes during their menustral cycles (I wouldn’t describe any of my gender/ASAB-related experiences as “hormonal insanity”, and I doubt I’m alone in this), and people who die before hitting menopause. (I would mention “pre-pubescent people” but they are arguably actually not women.)
And trans people generally take hormones? Which, when taking effect, probably causes “mood fluctuations” comparable if not more severe than having a menustral cycle causes.
Note: Desiree is not offended. She’s “offended.”
Desiree is also offensive and I’m offended by her but still!
Also, that list reads more like “things we need to liberate AFABs from”, not “things we need to impose on trans women as well”
also,
hot flashes and breast tenderness are already a thing which happens from patching the endocrine system and nuking the old hormones
mood fluctuations can happen but many people use a stable regimen which doesn’t cause them, while others imitate a menstrual cycle with progesterone; the fluctuations when starting treatment may be entirely just positive
post-surgical pain and bleeding is a kind of “honorary menstruation” for some who do have downstairs operations
And cis women who have been born without uteruses (or who have undergone a hysterectomy) are also without many of those
And I could make a similar list about shitty things that make one a “real man” and conclude that Caitlyn definitely isn’t one of those either
Let’s see… unwanted erections all over the place, a sex drive that feels like an agonizing compulsion instead of a source of joy, inability to think clearly when subjected to sexual stimulus or a status contest, the pain and discomfort of suffering physically in hard and demeaning jobs, the stoic necessity of killing one’s vulnerability to not have people descend upon it like a pack of vultures, the gutwrenching feeling when one realizes that others have seen you as a threat and gotten creeped out or worse and one knows that the only thing one can do is to let it be because trying to correct the misunderstanding would just be worse, all the myriad pains related to external gonads etc.
(and if you’re a cis man and you say you don’t experience some of the above, well, that’s exactly my point)
The
enforcement of conformity is so important for young children that
5-year-olds have more positive feelings toward a norm enforcer (even
though he is acting aggressively) than they do toward someone who simply
lets a norm violation go (even though he is behaving in a neutral
manner; Vaish, Herrmann, Markmann, & Tomasello, 2016).
Yet more reason to shed the evolutionary baggage ASAP.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
And then I also must add that my gender isn’t separable from my general transhumanism, so one would basically have to propose being cis-posthuman (which, frankly, starts to be a deal I’d actually take) as I simply. just. don’t. get. why estrogen would be different from ritalin would be different from provigil, or why orchidectomy would be different from direct neural interfaces would be different from anti-aging. One doesn’t get to call one set of things qualitatively different for me from the other in any justifiable way that doesn’t rely on “one is considered weirder than the other”.
And the bad feeling from not having feature X in my morph is pretty identical now that the most serious parts of firmware incompatibility are sorted out. To me, there is no “gender”; only bodymodding to be more me.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
Obviously, once you’ve decided to go out and do something, you have to then figure out what you are going to do before you can even make a plan to do it. Since the goal is to bring about a certain state of affairs in the future, we must then look at what we want, and what is not up to that standard in the present day, and focus our efforts there.
One of the bigger concerns is morphological freedom. This has been used variously in my experience to refer to both the state of being technologically able to decide that one’s body is whatever they want it to be, and also the political state of being sovereign over one’s body. To remove confusion, I will use the phrase “bodily autonomy” to refer to the latter, which obviously is something we will want if we get the former as it is hard to enjoy technologies one is not permitted to have because they are banned from civilian usage.
There are many sub-categories of this, but I will try to focus on things that are immediately relevant to our modern society and also will benefit a more free future when that technology becomes relevant. In the broadest terms there is the matter of what one is allowed to put in one’s body, what one is allowed to take out of it or replace, and the matter of not being socially punished for those decisions, even if you are not per se legally punished.
So what falls under these three parts? Obviously, in the matter of “putting things in,” we have the issue of various kinds of drugs which are heavily regulated. As far as taking things out, surgical measures immediately come to mind, and how it is very difficult to get a doctor to perform a surgery you consent to but is not strictly “required” even if you are both aware of the risks involved (unless, perhaps, it is cosmetic). But perhaps for one of these you were thinking of genetic editing, which can put things in to and take things out of people’s DNA sequences? Or perhaps children, who come and go from the mother’s womb, but not without frankly creepy levels of rules on how that is supposed to occur?
And obviously, the last concern of escaping more nebulous social punishment touches on all of these, but goes double for any “merely” cosmetic option which is unlikely to be restricted legally but may be severely punished socially if you decide to modify your body in a way people don’t like, or perhaps is considered “unprofessional.” Likewise encompassing, also, is the freedom to choose to not take on a popular modification, which, is… well, equally likely to get one socially ridiculed if you refuse.
I will go in to greater depth for these categories in my next few posts on this subject, but I felt it worth the time to explain my reasons for selecting those subjects. If you look in to any of these subcategories it’s plain to see that we aren’t really all that free. You may luck out and none of the existing social or legal pressures happen to be at odds with your personal desires, but those laws and organizations are still there, waiting for you to go against them – and as long as those restrictions are in place, they will be the model for future laws on the matter. We need to improve on the present if we want a better future.
And I love people who are so eager to reject the harshness of reality that they don’t take five seconds to check whether other people think it can’t be changed.
yes, play the largest most destructive game of terraforming. Do it.
Terraforming, by definition, should be pretty destructive.
Also this just sounds incredibly cool.
this would fuck up mars’s orbit though (otoh that could be beneficial), and the blast would… i don’t even know. they’d probably knock into each other at a relative velocity of multiple kilometers per second?? i don’t think we actually know what the physics of an impact like that would even look like.
the problem with mars colonization reallyisn’t lack of surface water anyway. in a closed system like a pressurized habitat you can recycle basically all of the water, and there’s plenty of ice for the taking at the poles. the important part of terraforming is atmosphere, once you’ve figured that out you can worry about oceans. (although i guess crashing ceres into mars would probably give it an atmosphere made of water vapor? which would be moderately helpful for colonists so long as it was less than earth atmospheric pressure, which it… probably would be? again, what the hell does crashing planets together even look like)
(…actually the first problem with mars colonization is surface gravity, but if the colonists and their descendants don’t plan to visit earth it’s… probably fine)
Well Mars’ mass would obviously rise if you added all that water, so that should help.
Mars is three orders of magnitude heavier than ceres. it wouldn’t make very much difference to surface gravity.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
The dragon-tyrant will fall.
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Uhh, I think this is just a bit of fiddling with the telomeres to account for someone with a genetic disorder. This may not actually do anything for anyone else.(or for anyone, actually) Even if it does, I suspect it won’t be much.
The important thing is that they are working on it, and achieving some outcomes. Rejecting anti-aging is far, embracing it is near, and these things help us get from abstract moralistic far mode to “I want more life, motherfucker” near mode.
