From e661d1cd3b02d78d485f05d638a90245faefe5e6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2020 22:57:50 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] check in --- ...e-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md | 2 +- ...-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 2 +- ...ary-2020.md => placeholder-february-2020.md} | 10 ++++------ notes/epigraph_quotes.md | 4 ++++ notes/notes.txt | 17 +++++++++++++++++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 2 ++ 6 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) rename content/drafts/{placeholder-9-february-2020.md => placeholder-february-2020.md} (54%) diff --git a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md index ba751ea..e92daf5 100644 --- a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md +++ b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether b But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction. -That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic). +That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic). Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex). diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index d2aa205..a598e3d 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -200,7 +200,7 @@ And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mista Some readers who aren't part of my robot cult—and maybe some who are but didn't drink as many cups of the Kool-Aid as I did—might be puzzled at why I've been _so freaked out_ for _an entire year_ (!?!) by people being wrong about philosophy. And for almost anyone else in the world, I would just shrug, [set the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to), and move on with my day. But when the _universally-acknowledged leading thinkers of my robot cult_ do it ... -Even people who aren't religious still have the same [species-typical psychological mechanisms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) that make religions work. The systematically-correct-reasoning community had come to fill a [similar niche in my psychology as a religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p5DmraxDmhvMoZx8J/church-vs-taskforce). I knew this, but the _hope_ was that this wouldn't come with the pathologies of a religion, because _our_ pseudo-religion was _about_ the rules of systematically correct reasoning. The system is _supposed_ to be self-correcting: if people are obviously, _demonstratably_ wrong, all you have to do is show them the argument that they're wrong, and then they'll understand the obvious argument and change their minds. +Even people who aren't religious still have the same [species-typical psychological mechanisms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) that make religions work. The systematically-correct-reasoning community had come to fill [a similar niche in my psychology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PMr6f7ZocEWFtCYXj/is-humanism-a-religion-substitute) [as a religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p5DmraxDmhvMoZx8J/church-vs-taskforce). I knew this, but the _hope_ was that this wouldn't come with the pathologies of a religion, because _our_ pseudo-religion was _about_ the rules of systematically correct reasoning. The system is _supposed_ to be self-correcting: if people are obviously, _demonstratably_ wrong, all you have to do is show them the argument that they're wrong, and then they'll understand the obvious argument and change their minds. So to get a sense of the emotional impact here, imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bible—or at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on. diff --git a/content/drafts/placeholder-9-february-2020.md b/content/drafts/placeholder-february-2020.md similarity index 54% rename from content/drafts/placeholder-9-february-2020.md rename to content/drafts/placeholder-february-2020.md index f59b8c8..8437e1f 100644 --- a/content/drafts/placeholder-9-february-2020.md +++ b/content/drafts/placeholder-february-2020.md @@ -1,11 +1,9 @@ -Title: Placeholder, 9–10 February 2020 -Date: 2020-01-01 -Category: commentary +Title: Placeholder, February 2020 +Date: 2021-01-01 +Category: other Tags: meta, cathartic, Emacs Status: draft Writing is hard. [Again, you'd think](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) it wouldn't be—it's easy to think, easy to spend all day pacing and thinking, and if the thinking seems to take place in words, and seems to be connected to hands (the pacing would at least seem to suggest its connection to legs), then you should be able to connect the hands to a keyboard and the keyboard to a machine running Emacs, and just do all the thinking in Emacs. -It's not that simple, somehow. Something is blocked, somewhere. Maybe the sense that thinking takes place in words is an illusion. The process by which the brain _generates_ words can't itself be made of words, because words aren't ontologically fundamental. Whatever it is, the inefficiency by which _n_ hours of pacing can only be converted to 300_n_ words _tops_ is even under the best of conditions—when all you have to say is something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019, as long as energy is conserved. - -Sometimes ... +It's not that simple, somehow. Something is blocked, somewhere. Maybe the sense that thinking takes place in words is an illusion. The process by which the brain _generates_ words can't itself be made of words, because words aren't ontologically fundamental. Whatever it is, the inefficiency under which _n_ hours of pacing can only be converted to 300n words _tops_ is even under the best of conditions—when all you have to say is [something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019, as long as energy is conserved. diff --git a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md index 90e8cc6..333ad0d 100644 --- a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md +++ b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md @@ -331,3 +331,7 @@ https://xkcd.com/1942/ > Things, the way they were > > —"I Can See the Light" + +> Yet each generation seems to accept the craziness of the past generation, even when balking at the craziness of the new generation. We think that in the past, academia was on track, and that those who opposed progress were crazy, right-wing nut-jobs. But we dissidents think that this time, this new generation–well–they have gone too far and have gone crazy. There is a certain Cthulian horror when suddenly you realize that many of the nut-jobs in the past were actually right. Many were slandered retroactively, not because they were wrong, or evil, not because they made bad predictions, but because they lost and the winners wrote the histories. There is a horror in realizing that you are just like them, this cycle has played out before, and that your children’s generation will see you as the nut-job. +> +> —[Devin Helton](https://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html) diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index e9da52b..0587c9b 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1504,3 +1504,20 @@ Protip: you don't have to preemptively commit suicide! Wait for other people to "how did you realize you were non-binary": https://twitter.com/QueerGirlEmilie/status/1225517017035350016 religious affiliation is shared environment https://twitter.com/ent3c/status/1161717179802443778 + +https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/f1nedr/tims_bragging_in_female_weight_lifting_subs/ + +during a Feb 2020 discussion of salary transparency: "For those of you telling me I make too much: [...] I'm one of the top women in my role." https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1228528673726140416 She transitioned in May 2018!! (https://blog.thea.codes/i-am-thea) Last year's taxable income: $360k https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1228457455350235137 + +> prairie dogs are not a type of dog and guinea pigs are not a type of pig https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f4dmsf/all_for_those_who_find_the_term_cis_offensive_how/fhqah6k/ + +> The function of 'trans' in that term is to indicate that they're not actually a type of woman. +> +> Compare: counterfeit money, toy gun, soy milk, glass pearls, veggie meat, faux fur https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f4dmsf/all_for_those_who_find_the_term_cis_offensive_how/fhpxjx0/ + +"privative adjective": http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/Fake/fakeguns.htm + +> Long story short, I was pro-trans until I had exposure to actual trans people. Then the wrongthink started creeping in: wow, this looks an awful lot like a social contagion and wow, this looks an awful lot like a homophobic fetish and wow, this looks an awful lot like lesbian self-erasure and wow, this looks an awful lot like a protracted exercise in medically-assisted self harm. https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f1finv/formerly_qt_supporters_who_are_now_gc_what_made/fh5tzj5/ + +> being a trans woman is 10% war on hair & 90% coming to terms w the fact that wanting tits ultimately led to u joining an anti nazi coalition +https://twitter.com/avaavita/status/908416401312018433 diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 4002c1f..ee88448 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,3 +1,5 @@ +_ If in Some Smothering Dreams You Too Could Pace (UTT) +_ Placeholder, February 2020 (UUT) _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity (UUT) _ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT) -- 2.17.1