It is crazy, the kind of crazy that when forcefully imposed results in harm, in the attempt to apply concrete absolutes to everyone at all times, ignoring the complex nuance of life. How we have to live with contradiction because the universe has the ability to overwhelm any capacity we might have. Which again brings as back to power, those with power best able to be resilient in the face of chaos.

You mentioned Voltaire without specifying who you thought to be above criticism.

God its exhausting how the left eats itself.

re: both/neither gametes
It's a black swan argument, so I can I can't give proof or reference to a studied case where someone is born that way. So I'm quiet happy to accept the current large/small gamete argument as a classification system.

So again lets bring this argument back to where is really stems from, societies definition and treatment of women an men, and how it chooses to formally identify them.

The Guardian: cancel Doctor Who
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...e-whittaker-pc

Are you sure it does? If there was an agenda to highlight the stupidity while ignoring the insight of those who would change the status quo, how would you know?

Honestly though, I do enjoy that laments of people who rail against favourite stories lost to change.

If we want to keep our stories, we need to come up with some new ones that fit the times instead of trying to rehash the same old shit over and over, because the priority is to make fucking money off what's familiar.

Not just new stories - new history, new maths, new science!

Just like Dr Kimya Nuru Dennis suggests:


Burning books is a 100%-accurate sign that one’s ideological position is super great

And who is this doctor that we might listen to them?

Oh they're saying something I agree with in a good light/disagree with in a bad light. So that's definitely what we want to hear.

That's what counts as robust science, right? Making computer chips or saving lives, science is about confirming what we already believe.

Well, that's the lesson I'm learning from Ab right now.

Ab: Fuck social media!

Also Ab: Thank fuck for social media!

Pretty accurate summation of Social Media though isnt it. Supremely horrible, but god damn its handy.

You right.

Not as handy as an article about the difficulties of being a non-binary lesbian

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/1...y-and-lesbian/

Well it's (traditionally) normalised that female attraction is a male thing and male attraction is a female thing so no wonder.

An interesting video from the SciShow
There Are More Than Two Human Sexes

A Sporting Chance: The seismic shift happening in youth sports

This is good to see. It's always difficult when populist rhetoric holds back progress.

Yeah, it’s a very positive trend. Not an issue of politics or correctness at all.

70 odd percent of people think it's political correctness gone mad.

Wonderful isn't it? Reaching this point of the discussion. If maybe we don't all burn, we might get to enjoy a future of diverse sexual expression.

It's very common for traditionally hetero men to enjoy encounters with or pornography of transsexuals. (I first guessed this when I noticed I'd find lesbian porn and trap porn amongst straight porn, but not gay porn. Later I discovered this had been studied and found to be the case.) That's not my jam, but I have noticed some... strangely enticing feelings towards some of my more androgynous female friends. Along with more familiar responses to their very feminine girlfriends. If I was younger, that would have caused some concern about what that meant for me. Now I get to notice and wonder, which is much more productive.

It's going to be a difficult transition, as detailed in the article. Especially while there are those who are comfortable with tradition that seem compelled to pick at those who are not. This will pass along with the volume of people caught in that dynamic.

Once we're over that hump, we might enjoy a time where we can just be who we are, enjoy what's mutually enjoyable without all the hangups and conflicts I at least struggled with, and certainly see many others struggling much worse. Well, all things being equal, which they aren't. Climate change will put pressure on everyone, sex tends to give quickly under pressure, it being a favourite point of release as we fail to cope.

Seems to me that defining oneself as “a person who is not a woman and who is attracted to people who are only attracted to women” might be a recipe for disappointment, e.g. a complaint in the video on the linked page:

“They want me to be more of a woman rather than someone who identifies in the middle … so they’re almost bullying me out of my own identity“

Damn lesbians and their same-sex-attractedness. let’s just call it what it is: nonbinaryphobia, literally worse than Hitler

Yes, there will be all kinds of disappointments and upsets to be faced, contradictions to be reconciled or grieved.

The process will take generations.

I don't share your same interest, in fact I have a decided disinterest in the sex lives of others, at least of strangers. I obviously get more interested if there might be some sex in it for me.

Are you worried you'll struggle to socially navigate if sex and gender roles become all topsy-turvy?

Ab tell me your secret to eternal life

Just remember to remind your grandparents that it's straight people having all the gay kids.

I should have as "as sex and gender roles become all topsy-turvy", rather than if.

It will take generations for a new equilibrium to be formed, after us people of the old way have passed on as you point out.

But like I said, we may just revert back to something even more draconian as we turn to totalitarianism in the face of devastation.

The issue of sexual attraction is a red herring, at least in the context of that “non binary lesbian?” article I linked. It seems to me that this is a POLITICAL issue for many of the people featured, not a sexual one. For those people this isn’t an issue of who you are attracted to, it’s a holy quest to deconstruct a power narrative.

“ As a lesbian you defy probably one of the biggest gender roles that exists, which is for your life to revolve around a man, so that links into how being non-binary also doesn’t conform to expectations of gender”

Yes yes, you read Foucault and your first year sociology tutor couldn’t get over the fact that Marxism sucks, so um, patriarchy!!1

The fact that these people are getting their feefees hurted as the result of rejection by lesbians just shows that they haven’t themselves worked out that their intellectual political stance might clash with someone’s physical sexual stance.

“But there’s no such thing as gender and those lesbians should accept that and desire me”

Yeah, erase homosexuality, I’m sure gays and lesbians really appreciate that sentiment after only having been allowed to legally exist for the blink of an eye.

Man, Chasing Amy would never get made in the 21st century.

Of course it's political. That's why people are getting fired. Because there's a change in power dynamics.

Previously gender and sex roles were imposed upon us by powerful institutions. Religious, medical, political, familial. Now we're entering a time when we can choose these things for ourselves.

Some are reacting to a loss of power, others are angry because if they didn't get to choose no one else should, others are exploring new ways of being, and so on.

Again, this is an opportunity to reflect on one's self, consider how it is the ideas you hold onto formed, what alternative ideas are waiting to be discovered.

As you point out, people who have found some measure of power after being so powerless for so long will be dismayed to discover that power already waning. And we'll see that dynamic play out. It will be messy.

Which will not be justification to revert to tradition.

What else ya got?

I forgot mention the most significant institution of our age, especially in relations to sex and gender: the military. The rigidity of the military is perhaps the dominant source of our reaction to gender politics. It eclipsed religion.

It would be interesting to take movies throughout history, trying to pin a date on each after which it could not be made.

How so?

It was the explosion of the military that went along with the emergence of modernisation at the start of the 20th century.

Religious and military traditions are probably about as old as each other, depending on how you slice it. Religion has definitely had more reach within communities than the military for much of history, as such people are well adapted to accommodating it.

The reactions we're talking about here arise from the contradictions that inevitably emerge in any system of rules we try to create and live by. Our ability to elegantly cope with these contradictions, while still enjoying the benefits of any system we create, determines our general effectiveness. Right?

Prior to the rise of the military, the degree of influence and control religion held over people was regional. No one is crediting any religious organisation with the kind of competence required to achieve the degree of order a modern military can. And communities have had a long time to find ways of coping with experiences that fall outside of any ostensibly religious values.

I like to recall a time when I was working as a research assistant for an Anglican priest out of St John's College. The topic came up once and she talked about how in at least the region she was familiar with, historically those exposed as lesbians were sent off to live on the convent... with the other lesbians. We had a good laugh at the irony.

The conditions modern military traditions arose in were sudden, dramatic and compelling. Aligning with the military appeared a matter of immediate survival. This had a number of relevant consequences, primarily military tradition became a single dominant culture over the Western world, the West dominating the globe. Modern military tradition being a highly ordered regime which its members are forcibly compelled to follow, an order achieved in part by robust definitions about anything the regime might find useful. And where religion is really only imposed locally by people within their own communities, the military has to do the opposite: impose itself upon people anywhere amongst unfamiliar people. A military creates uniformity out of diversity.

These traditions were highly effective, on a scale and unlike anything seen before, as demonstrated by our ability to project power around the world.

How this tradition handled that which fell outside of useful definitions was either forcefully or with complete indifference. It had to be that way, right? People were dying in volume, the priority was effectively resisting immediate existential threats. As these threats gave way we were left with our inelegant approaches to the contradictions in our new values. Obvious examples being alcohol and domestic violence. Individually we can manifest a dazzling and puzzling array of expressions.

And so we're left with the struggling and bumbling that we're documenting and discussing in this thread. This is how new insight is generated. Fun, right!

Can you define “the military” please?

Only what your average Anglophone from the 1900s onwards might imagine when you refer to "the military", obviously something that would vary but with not too great a range.

For instance if you were to pick up a paper from 100 years ago or today that referenced "military" in some way. About whatever definition you would imagine that would more or less apply in both cases.

Or maybe "the thing that projects physical force about the world so effectively."

We've been here before. The Roman empire probably expected a few generations and everything would be dandy. Instead, it was an empire in decline. I predict decline before a great androgynous future. Just my two cents, because history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

I never appreciated my social/classics education at the time, but so far it's been fucking bang on - a focus on totalitarianism, race relations, and the decline of civilization. But I went to a white supremacist elite school (so I've been told), and so their lessons are obviously invalid. THIS TIME it's different.

All I can see right now is that there’s an undefined thing called the military that has something to do with the English language in the past century; an assumption that this undefined thing possesses an attribute of “rigidity”; and an assertion that this rigidity determines our attitudes to gender politics.

That’s not a thesis, it’s gibberish.

Oops, I thought you were being curious and would read my post in good faith.

Of course, given the emotive tantrum you threw in your previous post, I should have realised otherwise.

My bad.

Does anyone else see the irony in demanding a robust definition in the context of an exploration of the emergence of a culture that demands robust definition?

I can't believe I went to that effort to put my thoughts together like that only to be so thoroughly punked. You've trolled me in a way CCS wishes he could have.

Touché.

You made a claim that depends on the definitions of the terms in your claim. So far there is insufficient definition forthcoming to enable consideration of the claim. Unless we know what “the military” and “rigidity” are in this context there’s no room for dialogue.

(The definition of “religion” isn’t relevant to the main claim)

what

Sorry for the spoiler.

I just don’t see how you could describe the Empire of Juvenal’s time as being in a state of decline. Things were booming.

Stephen King is cancelled

https://twitter.com/StephenKing/stat...58848403599361