From 95d7cd291595b658bce04b230eb001c8458393e8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2017 10:46:15 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] minimized "There's a Land ..."? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I still don't know how to execute on the anecdote I was going to tell here. What if we just cut it? And cut the _Free to Be_ blockquote, which wasn't adding enough value for the space it takes up?—does that make the title too inside-referencey, or was that already the case, quote or no? --- ...hat-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md | 54 +------------------ 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 53 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md b/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md index 0d6abd0..3e1539a 100644 --- a/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md +++ b/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md @@ -4,15 +4,6 @@ Category: commentary Tags: discourse, transhumanism, bullet-biting Status: draft -> _There's a land that I see -> Where the children are free -> And I say it ain't far -> To this land from where we are_ -> -> —"Free To Be ... You and Me" - - - > If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to _make it so_, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ. > > —[Greg Cochran](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/) @@ -29,49 +20,6 @@ Firstly, philosophers since the days of D. Hume have recognized the distinction Secondly, not only does the nature _vs._ nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: [not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/) (Consider the case of [spelling reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform): no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are _genetically_ determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.) -Because of these epistemological errors, adherents of the beautiful moral ideal - -that may put us at a competitive disadvantage to our ideological enemies - - - -I _want_ to believe that sex differences in personality and interests are small-to-nonexistent. I _want_ to believe that trans women are women. - - - - -out of the three women present— - -(or four if you believe in gender identities, because on that worldview, I'm obviously a trans woman in denial) - -—they're _all_ trans. (And none of them pass.) - - - - -[...] - -Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision). - -_I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is— +Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision). _I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is— ... you're going to have to bootstrap from _today's_, unremediated, genderspace. Which requires _understanding_ it first. - - -OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT— - - * ✓ beautiful moral idea of equality - * ✓ —makes people believe that group differences are superficial/fake/social - * make sure to explicitly explain _why_ this is appealing - * ✓ but this is crazy because: - * ✓ is does not imply ought - * people feel the need to accept the naturalistic fallacy _inference_, - but deny the antecedent and perform _modus tollens_—I think it's more - tenable to reject the conditional - * ✓ social vs. biological isn't even the axis you care about - * but, we also assume things are biological/fixed when that's convenient for - "minority" things we want to protect (sexual orientation, gender identity) - * requiring crazy beliefs in order to be a good person is a drain, a drag, and - a tax on sanity - * _be specific_ about what's gerrymandered and wrong about "sex diffs - real/gender identity not" -- 2.17.1