Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to describe what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control …
After some recent Twitter and Discord discussions, I'm still amazed at how well my "only Nixon could go to China" effect continues to hold up: everyone is respectfully sympathetic to the poor self-hating trans woman even when her whole bit is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When …
I'll write my way out
Write everything down, far as I can see
I'll write my way out
Overwhelm them with honesty
This is the eye of the hurricane
This is the only way I can protect my legacy—"Hurricane", Hamilton
So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …
Chinese legend tells of a eunuch named Zhao Gao, a chancellor to the Second Emperor. The power-hungry Zhao Gao wanted to arrange a coup, but was worried that the other members of the imperial court wouldn't cooperate with his designs.
One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given …
Here we are in the future
Here we are in the future and it's wrong—"Who We Are", Steven Universe: The Movie
Whether or not you support the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the successor ideology, it is imperative that students of literature …
Friend of the blog Tailcalled responds to my 2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia!
Summarizing—Ozy had claimed that the concept of autogynephilia is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women also have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant …
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass
Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I"
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out—"The Impression That I Get …
There are lines I've always felt I had to toe
Some were blurry, some unseen
Some I've had to learn to read between
So many boundaries
Far more than you know—"Crossing the Line" (extended lyrics), Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure
Emily Cibelli, Yang Xu, Joseph L. Austerweil, Thomas L. Griffiths, and …
She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how …
(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; previously, previously)
But always above you
The idea raises its head
What would I do if the Earth fell apart?
Who would I save, or am I not quite brave enough?—Laura Barrett, "Deception Island Optimists Club"
Six or sixteen or …
I listened with interest to this segment (starting at the 3 hour, 23 minutes, 48 seconds mark) from Hyperpodcastism's interview with Curtis Yarvin (loose transcription elides some amount of "um", "you know", "like", "sort of", repetition, false starts, &c.)—
INTERVIEWER: More lightning round takes on what became of Less …
(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)
Okay, three years lat—three months, three months and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response. I was pointing at something real with …
This is a pretty good book about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in cognitive repertoires (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In my last book review, I mentioned that I had …
In the depths of despair over not just having lost the Category War, but having lost it harder and at higher cost than I can even yet say (having not yet applied for clearance from the victors as to how much is my story to tell), I'm actually pretty impressed …
This is a super-great book about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am unreasonably excited about this book …
With the Hopes that our World is built on
They were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
They denied she identified as Dutch;
They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to …
"[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."
—The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets (back in March), linking to a Quillette interview with Lisa Littman (positer of "rapid …
One common reaction by the Blanchpilled to autogynephilia-truther sites—I mean, the shouty sensationalist kind run by conservatives or radical feminists that almost never use phrases like "uselessly low-dimensional subspace", not The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought—goes like this:
That is going to make the problem worse. We need …
Previously on The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought ("The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions", "Reply on Adult Human Females"), we've considered at length the ways in which the self-identity criterion for gender (e.g., "Women are people who identify as women") fails to satisfy some of the …
We need a term to describe the property that cis women and trans men have in common with each other, and that cis men and trans women have in common with each other. I'm unhappy with all three of the most frequently-used alternatives.
The "mainstream" trans-rights answer to this seems …