Fuzzy Sets, Family Resemblances, and Conceptual Truths
a laundering of warmed over bigotry from pinker and walsh for the "thinking" set by mr. shermer, a thought daddy and nominal psychologist speaking well outside his area of expertise - there is no distinction recognized between biology and society and no grasp of either. a sickening read, for all the olive branches he timidly offers up about how "transphobia is bad" and "everyone is human at the end of the day" while fearmongering about transness as a social contagion. he quotes the author of a book called "you're teaching my kids what?" - 50 years ago, that book would be about racemixing. 40 years ago, satanic rituals. 30 years ago, fags - the modern fag is the tranny. it sickens me to see people falling for it
"If so, then why does a person assigned at birth as a male but who identifies as a female need to remove the penis? Why does a person assigned at birth as a female but who identifies as a male need to add a penis? If a “woman” or a “man” is whatever anyone claims as their identity based on internal beliefs and feelings instead of external equipment—as one online influencer told Walsh, “Some people are boys, some people are girls, some are both, some are neither. Gender is all about how you feel on the inside and how you express yourself.”—then why would anyone put themselves through the ordeal of transitioning?" what a lack of understanding of the motivations behind transitioning, of the concept of dysphoria / struggling with the stark contrast between self-perception and appearances / the way you're treated. why would a skinny teen with dreams of becoming a bodybuilder ever want to exercise and build muscle? why would a married woman who wants to have an affair take off her wedding ring at a bar? this is the crucial misunderstanding that so many people fail to even realize they're making - to be a woman is to be treated like a woman, to be a man is to be treated like a man. we define what it is to be a particular gender through our behavior and our expectations, not through some collection of meat. why is a graceful ship on the water called she? why is a deeply pitched computer generated voice perceived as a man's? because we associate these characteristics to them. why is a mother-in-law a go-to person that comedians joke about not wanting to talk to? all it is is the mother of your spouse, there's nothing inherently bad about that, right? the entire trans "debate" relies on the confusion between what is real and what is bestowed on real things by our behavior. sure, you can say that a woman is a vaginahaver and a man is a penishaver - but are you gonna say to little David "hold on, sport, let's see your cock before you can go play with the boys"? no - you hear the name, you see the clothes, you perceive all the things that we associate with the category "boy", and you let him play and live his life but not for long! if these trannytrackers win the """"debate"""", soon we will all be reduced to meat
how reductive. how contrary to human experience. a man produces sperm, a woman produces eggs - so a eunuch is no longer a man? is a woman not a woman after menopause? a man has a penis, a woman has a vagina - so what about one of the people who are born with ambiguous genitalia, bodies with characteristics of "both" sexes? it's idiotic, and no scientist will tell you that sex and gender are the same thing. it's not wokeness gone wrong, it's not an abandonment of objective truth, as michael here hysterically says - it is objective truth.
fascinating how the head of skeptic magazine takes a fucking Daily Wire commentator at his word when he says he's just asking questions, and yet assumes that the people he tricked into his film are all squirming around because deep in their heart of hearts, they secretly agree, but can't admit it because of the woke mob. i hope you're happy, cocksucker, because they're coming for atheists next, you credulous fool
How much of this is "I am obsessed with figuring out the status and history your genitalia, and I'm gonna punish you for it"? Because that seriously seems like 99% of it. The Walshes and Crowders and Shapiros and Petersons leading this movement must do it out of some combination of fear and fundie bigotry, and I guess some queer-curiousness or something. I dunno how, but the well runs disgustingly deep. Can't they just fuck off and treat all people with respect? No, they cannot. How's that for a choice? Choosing not to be a hateful asshat? Watching this all ratchet up again lately is fucking sickening, and the amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation pouring out of this culture warfare is already causing serious problems in some states. Besides laughing at and shaming (if possible) these people, voting, etc., what can we do? Attend community events to show support and ward off any disruptors?
Whenever you're quoting Jacobellis v. Ohio you've already lost, because Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it" was tossed by the Supreme Court a mere seven years later as being uselessly vague. It's extremely disingenuous for Shermer to treat the dialog between Grzanka and Walsh as anything other than "someone weaponizing language" and "someone talking to someone he knows is weaponizing language." However, squeezing a tortured scientific definition out of a culture war is kind of what old intellectuals do to prove they're ready to be ignored.
Weaponizing language is the dark art of lawyering, and the Republicans have invented language-nukes to try to confuse every non-issue they can. Wittgenstein, who this author misunderstands entirely, famously used a description of a court room to illustrate how all the most precise words in the world couldn’t describe what a jury trial is to someone who didn’t already know what a jury trial was. I’m sure he did that to needle all the asshole lawyers in the world who make the first ten pages of every contract “definitions”. When Blackmun said he knows it when he sees it, it was the most human thing anyone on the court probably ever said, though obviously that’s a big problem for a rule-of-law society. Protecting (or destroying) a class of people is a lot easier when you can name the class precisely.
The KGB, according to Thomas Rid in Active Measures, operated under the guiding principle that the governments of free societies pay a heavy penalty for lying. After all, they govern by consent and falsehoods are a well-established justification for revocation of consent. The governments of authoritarian societies, on the other hand, face zero penalties from lies because they govern by force. Truth is actually more expensive than lies for authoritarian governments because it offers the possibility for accountability. Courts are authoritarian by definition. Judges decide what goes. There is a hierarchy of judicial power and the ground rules of legal systems require those judges to adhere to codes and standards by various degree, depending on the strength of the judiciary. Potter Stewart ducked responsibility with his "I know it when I see it" line, and regretted it towards the end of his life. It was a standard that took two other supreme court cases to iron out: Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Wittgenstein would likely have approved of the "average person" test and condemned the "lacks serious value" test. But he also would have likely argued that pornography is, by definition, a culturally fluid thing. Potter Stewart? Wrote the dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut: "I know it when I see it" is the verbiage you use when you want to maintain absolute power in the judge rather than the law. It's exactly where the Republicans want to go, because the Republicans have been unabashedly authoritarian since Sarah Palin. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,"I get nowhere in this case by talk about a constitutional 'right of privacy' as an emanation from one or more constitutional provisions. I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision."
Invoking Wittgenstein in this “debate” misunderstands Wittgenstein entirely. All of the Philosophic Investigations can be summed up in the passage where the the one guy tells the other guy that the way you know what the color red is is by someone pointing to a red object and saying that thing is red, which is followed by this (brilliant) passage: What Wittgenstein is getting at, I believe, and I’m admittedly no student of philosophy, is that descriptivism (which was popular when he was writing) fails entirely on even a cursory cross examination. Until we agree on a concept, we cannot understand one another, and importantly, those concepts are impenetrable to further language dissection. So to use that to champion some asshole who’s out there trying to play gotcha with academics completely and totally misses one of the only good revelations that 20th c. philosophy ever brought us. "So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" It is what human beings say that is true and false ; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.
There’s really something quicksand-like about The Trans Issue, where it seems people engage and then become completely mired in it. J.K. Rowling’s dedicated her Twitter feed to it; Jordan Peterson has apparently decided it’s his central issue now. And the animus is just palpable. Like I think people just weren’t aware that within transness as a whole is an unimaginably deep well of shame, self-loathing and mental illness, and by engaging with it in this combative way they kind of inadvertently siphon off some of that energy to go process on their own. I feel like there would be something kind of empowering about being centered in a Culture War if it weren’t just so fucking exhausting
The culture war would be empowering if the pendulum wasn't currently swinging the wrong way, and it's no coincidence that, like too many other things, the white Christian nationalist minority viewpoint is driving most relevant policies. There was a TERF or TERF-adjacent op-ed in NYtimes the other day (no thanks, won't link) about the radical left's erasure of women being comparable to the radical right's various oppressions, because the term "pregnant 'people' " used by the left is allegedly an affront to women and etc.. Shit was weird. Somewhat analogous to "well pardon me but All Lives Matter". Yes, women writ large are indeed currently under attack in the U.S., but to both-sides progressives and right-wing Christian nationalists in the context of feminism and inclusive language right now is very counterproductive to feminism, I think. The Roe repeal was effective almost a year ago in TX, but now the TX AG aims to criminalize oral and anal. Hmm, wonder who that's intended to target?? The Roe repeal arguably screws over everyone with a uterus. Anti-sodomy laws are even more targeted. I feel no sympathy for the demographic psychologically self-tortured by the existence of LGBTQ+ people, and I feel the opposite of sympathy for the people making money by pretending to hate everything LGBTQ+. But I have a lot of sympathy for the LGBTQ+ community right now, and women, too. It isn't some zero-sum game, though. The smallest non-white-nationalist minorities (and maybe one of the more vulnerable) are LGBTQ+ folks, as we slide towards fascism. Again, I find myself at a loss for determining the proper thing to do next, and it's disgusting what e.g. sitting ivy league senators are getting away with, right now.