I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
“Where are you from?” California. “No, I mean where are you from?” Pasadena. “No, what are you?”
see also: “What are you mixed with?”
When it goes away from “hey, what’s up, are you traveling, fellow human” to “how can I categorize you” is where people start to see a clear problem.
Like, look there are tons of blonde-haired, blue-eyed 8th generation American people who are happy to natter on about the small Dutch village and French provincial town where Gran-gran-gran-mere and UberGrosOpa lived until the war brought them together, but asking someone to bring out that story upon first introduction is a bit rude, especially when the answer is “well my family has been here for four hundred years but we lose the thread somewhere in the middle passage” or “we’ve only been here two generations and fled from an oppressive regime” or “I’m not telling you because I’m not actually from here and I don’t know if you’re an ICE agent who’s going to follow me home and deport my parents.”
Seems like the kindest question is “so do you live/work/go to school around here?” for light chatter, but you’ve gotta be a level four friend to unlock someone’s backstory whether it’s tragic or mundane.
Also this sort of thing comes up a lot after people hear an “exotic” name or if someone isn’t easily slotted into a stereotypical category, which intensifies its interpretation as a microaggression - Janey from Omaha likely doesn’t get asked where she’s from as much as Zuelma from East LA does. The vast majority of people I know who interpret “where are you from” as a microaggression only do so after experiencing another microaggression (a long assessing stare or a comment on the strangeness of their clothes, hair, or *loudly* commenting on an accent).
Most people I know don’t see “where are you from” as an irritation, it’s the “where are you *really* from” that’s read as hostile.
[I work with a man who has a really hard-to-pronounce-for-the-unpracticed name, even though he’s the owner of the company and I’m fielding calls from cold-call vendors I hear “wow, I’m not even going to try to say that right - where is Boss from?” about 2-3 times a week. Montrose. He’s from Montrose.]
Aaaaaaalso the question of when it’s appropriate to use Spanish [or insert applicable language] is somewhat fraught. Another man I work with is the son of immigrants, has dark skin, and has a name that reads as Mexican, but his parents never allowed him to learn Spanish or speak Spanish with them because they though it would make it hard for him to get a job or would get him in trouble at school. As an adult he speaks only rudimentary Spanish and each time it comes up he insists that he doesn’t speak Spanish and is embarrassed by his poor command of the language. It’s difficult for him to talk to his parents because their command of English isn’t very strong. So when someone speaks Spanish to him he A) gets reminded of all that history and B) has to explain to the Spanish speaker that he doesn’t speak the language, and I’ve seen people call him a liar or stuck up for not speaking Spanish. No one speaking Spanish to him knows all that history and is bringing up that strain for the sake of being mean, but fuck I can’t blame him for getting worn out by it coming up on a regular basis. If I, a white woman, speak Spanish to a Latinx person am I making the assumption that they can’t speak English or am I trying to be accommodating and accept the fact that I live in an area with a dozen languages in use and a wide array of cultures sharing space? Am I being rude by asking them to tolerate my poor Spanish or polite by making the attempt? Both. Neither. It’s complicated.
Different people have different ideas about what’s rude, and I think that may be a better context to set that in. Is is rude to ask someone where they’re from? Probably not the first time, but it is rude to stare at someone then ask where they’re from.
The post was motivated partly by South Asian exchange students in $REDACTED ordering curry in Hindi and asking where the waiter is from when he does not understand.
Everybody immediately assumes the asker is white. Kind of my point here.
My dad has a co-worker who married a son of an Italian immigrant. The other day he (the father-in-law born in Italy) came to the shop and my dad used it as an opportunity to practise his Italian.
Turns out the co-worker took it as a slight. She had never learned to speak Italian.
This is also part of the more indirect costs of multiculturalism. A dozen different cultures, cultures mixing and flowing but simultaneously being prohibited from mixing and flowing because it’s “appropriative”…
You don’t just get 12 scales of what’s polite and impolite behavior. You get somewhere between 12 scales and one scale for every person in the area.
It was said some study found that above a certain level, diversity imposed a higher cost due to all the needs to overcome communication and negotiation barriers, effectively wasting what could have been productive time for insufficient gains. I wish I cold find it.
You realize when you cut out the beginning of the post like this it’s practically impossible to tell what you’re responding to? In this case, your point stands alone, but it’s still mildly irritating.
Huh. I was trying to do my readers a service by not cluttering their dashes so much with long posts that they’d already read 90% of.
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
But also your Chinese-American grandparents will tell you where you are from and tell you how important it is to not forget that and always get it right and point to it on the map. They also never want to go back because that place was a hellhole and they’re so glad they made it out of the cultural revolution alive.
God Bless the United States of America, friend.
The effect wears off over generations, until it becomes a “well your great great grandfather was German” but you don’t speak a word of German and the most that’s left of unified German ethnic experiences in your life is some hollow copy of Oktoberfest.
(Right now I’m trying to figure out if East Asians are the next group that will be absorbed by America’s homogeneous Generic White Identity, if it will be some other group instead, or if some other path will happen.)
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
This person seems anything but rational. I’d say start with giving working minors the right to vote because they pay an income tax
“Rationalists” is more of an anthropological label, and one I don’t claim for myself, in part because most of them believe in Open Borders or something similar, but I’m an unironic Nationalist.
Anyhow, I give a more direct/accessible and serious reply later in the thread.
Although the irony that what I said is less impenetrable than certain philosophers or schools is not lost on me. I can provide a close reading if you’d like.
Oh, and I’m not actually a time-travelling supervillain. My blog description does convey real information about my positions, but it isn’t literal.
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.
the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.
Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors. After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.
People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.
I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.
> in which soup is defined as referring to a weighted cluster of objects, both real and uninstantiated, which is socially negotiated between communicators, reaching an overlapping mutual understanding which does not include cereal with milk
I wish there were a conservative party anywhere that was conservative in the sense of ‘it rarely gets the computer working to smash it and also it rarely gets the country working to smash it, our policies will all be reversible and tested before they are scaled up and we will treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions like the courts and good diplomatic relations with our neighbors’.
“We’re going to test this incrementally” is an admission to the clueless public that you think you might be wrong. It’s a very smart view, because given the history of politics there is a reasonably high probability of being wrong, but the political rivals will jump all over it instantly.
i know you meant well when you said 30 isnt ancient, but im nb so my life expectancy is actually 30 :(
Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.
A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.
Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article:
Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.
“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”
But again, the article gives no source for this figure.
I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.
Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.
Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.
And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.
I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.
But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for Addressing
Violence Against
Transgender and Gender
Non-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.):
Promote Hope
for the Future
It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)
One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:
These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.
The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimated
lifespan figures coming from?
FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list.Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]
But not everyone is murdered.
Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by other
people. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).
Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.
Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.
In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.
It’s very interesting that STEM bros worship men like Einstein, hail him as a god among men, but entirely ignore his economic views … like how he was a socialist … lmao.
Are you suggesting they admire him for his contributions to physics, which is his field, but not his economics, which is not his field? Maybe I should go ask the world’s most cited economists particle physics questions - after all, Hollywood said all scientists are supergenius generalists, and would Hollywood ever lie to us?
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
“My nation, why would I care for that? I was only born there!”
And raised there. And educated there. And cultured there.
You’ll defend yourself? You and what army?
Oh, you don’t have an army. The country does. Fancy that.
“How ignorant,” you say, to want to defend or identify with the place with people like you, who speak your language, practice your culture, are bound together for the common welfare and common defense. You know, your home.
Not all homes are good homes, but that doesn’t make homes in general bad.
Nazi.
I did warn you, Slart, I am a time-travelling supervillain. There’s no excuse, really. It says so right in my blog description.
I don’t want to hear any complaints about how “it’s unethical” from you when I sell the last remnants of the Alt Right a serum that will enable them to become Entryist Ultranationalist Separatist Yakuts, starting the final break-up of the Russian Federation and the secession of Alaska from the Union. Reviving continent-spanning superstates from the future doesn’t come cheap, you know.
You’re shitposting, but the reverse causality and a selection effect (because anime telegraphs emotions like the landing strip for an aircraft carrier) for unusual neurotypes are entirely possible.
“My nation, why would I care for that? I was only born there!”
And raised there. And educated there. And cultured there.
You’ll defend yourself? You and what army?
Oh, you don’t have an army. The country does. Fancy that.
“How ignorant,” you say, to want to defend or identify with the place with people like you, who speak your language, practice your culture, are bound together for the common welfare and common defense. You know, your home.
Not all homes are good homes, but that doesn’t make homes in general bad.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessary to go to certain extremes, but if you don’t see the appeal of nations, if it looks like only flag-waving to you, you might be a fish breathing water and wondering about the validity of ponds.
“Well if your culture is so strong it would survive-”
Let me get a baseball bat and smash that guy’s computer. If his computer is so strong, surely it will survive getting hit with a giant metal stick.
What’s that? Computers are complex and expensive and only strong in a sort of economic-utility sense that has nothing to do with physical strength?
Why gee, could it be when Nationalists are talking about the importance of culture, they aren’t talking about pure replicator power, but rather something that’s ‘strong’ more in an economic-utility and social technology sense?
I’m not entirely against the idea of prisoners working on things - the question is, who benefits?
If exclusively the prisoners benefit and the state/corporations only benefit from a resulting reduction in crime, then it does not encourage high levels of incarceration.
If corporations or the state legislators benefit, it encourages high levels of not only emotionally-punishing but also counter-productive imprisonment that harm not only inmates, but also most everyone else who isn’t a crony.
Or at least have them training rescue dogs or repairing fire-fighting equipment or something that is more like a charitable social good.
I mean, if we had prisoners farming vegetables that were only served to the prisoners at the prison, I don’t know if it would reduce recidivism, but no one would be giving kickbacks for it!
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
So no, don’t let the children vote.
Not even for school board? Schools have basically no incentive to value students’ day-to-day interests and so will do stuff like block every bloglike website even during lunch hours.
Then again, student-elected officials decided to host lunch concerts and put loudspeakers by the library windows close enough to shake them.
Not even for the school board, but gradually increasing levels of democracy, like gradually increasing levels of alcohol, might be appropriate in some way.
When I was a teenager, I campaigned against my high school’s ban on digital audio players, which were not actually a problem. The question is, how do you separate out high schoolers doing away with bad restrictions and high schoolers doing the school equivalent of looting the national treasury (in this case, running at cross-purposes to education)?
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
So no, don’t let the children vote.
It’s not defensible though. Children make up like 25% of the population but get no voice. That undermines the concept of consent of the governed.
Oh right, some people still believe that government is justified by such concepts instead of its effectiveness at delivering benefits to the national population.
It’s “defensible” in the sense that it isn’t going to be constantly moved around by Republicans and Democrats fighting each other.
I’d be more inclined to agree with you if most children were sinesalvatorem as children, but they aren’t. Children are largely ignorant. Often, the part of the brain responsible for evaluating long-term outcomes is literally underdeveloped in children. It isn’t their fault, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a net reduction in voter quality - and even more constant political brainwashing aimed at children than is currently aimed at them.
Additionally, by the “consent of the governed” logic, children are also not responsible for the government and therefore are not valid targets in war. Let children vote, and this status is lost.
Now you’ll say “but we let incredibly ignorant people vote” as if this weren’t a lesser evil in comparison to having politicals write knowledge tests which exclude only their political enemies, or not letting the conditions of the ignorant in society risk a backlash for politicians so that there is at least some incentive not to destroy them.
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
so yeah, the period of craziness that lasted from 1900 to 1990 was basically the old empires getting broken down and turned into ethnocentric nation states.
the period of craziness we are in now involves trying to cobble together empires again now that they have a complete lack of popular credibility.
Would you care to expand on this?
WWII ended with all the people that had moved around across Europe and Asia being put back neatly inside the borders of ethnic nation states, so all the Germans pushed out of Poland and Czechwhatever back into Germany, Japanese out of Korea, and of course formation of modern state of Israel.
Shortly afterwards the European empires dissolved and lost their colonies in Africa, India, and Indo-China, although not without another fight.
Then the Soviet Empire fractures and Yugoslavia breaks up into a handful of states with a new one added every few years.
To some extent this process is still continuing, with separatist Kurds and Basques and Catalans and even Scots and Welsh (!) and Cornish (!!!) groups all agitating for their own ethnic states.
At the same time you have clumsy attempts to create a new European empire in the form of the EU, an empire without an emperor, nothing but bureaucrats and technobabble that no one believes in, devoid of any legitimacy.
Britain, France, Germany, Japan, all used to be actual empires, now they are not. The Ottomans had an empire, Turkey does not. Russia and China used to be empires, remained empires under Communism, now they are both ethnic nation states struggling to digest their minority populations.
South Korea exports TV dramas, not an empire. Israel exports weapons, not an empire. France has nuclear weapons, not an empire.
Is Argumate a White Nationalist?
- BuzzHuff News, 2018
01!me: characters in books work like mathematics with algorithms designed by the author and won’t be as complex or intelligent as actual people
02!me: characters in books are abstractions made by authors to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of readers to extract money and political ends from readers
03!me: characters in books are people-ish; the brain is lazy and actually good at running “people” programs
galactic buddha brain: people are characters in books
A decent person recognizes that anti-social behavior – yes, even murder – is a problem stemming from the hierarchical organization of our society, as well as individual relationships between human beings. The solutions to this behavior lie in changing society in such a way that creates an atmosphere of complete freedom in complete solidarity, and attempting to mend relationships between individuals and groups as best as possible.
now I’m an eternal optimist, but.
As yes, complete freedom and complete solidarity at the same time. All we have to do is just presume everyone is identical, and-
Throwback to when I posted pictures of my lawn here last year and got yelled at because apparently everyone on the planet lives in California
The whole “lawns are bad; they waste so much water” thing is fucking bizarre. It’s like, dude, have you ever considered living in a place that’s actually capable of supporting human life?
I think people fail to distinguish between “lawn” and “yard”. A lawn is deliberately manicured; a yard is just wild.
I’m no landscaping expert or horticulturist but I’m pretty sure you don’t have to water lawns.
You do if you’re planting a lawn from scratch but once it’s there the rain takes care of it.
People in California plant grass that isn't suitable for their climate and dries out in the sun, so they have to water it.
Another option is living in a water basin that has lots of fresh water available… like not-California the Great Lakes region. Since it all ends up back in the lakes again anyway, it isn’t drawing down the water table like in Texas. But people don’t like living on the Great Lakes.
That’s not reality. 9/11 was ridiculously and falsely linked to Iraq by the lying liars then in the WH. But they wanted to do it anyway. Just because Bush claimed to be isolationist in his 2000 campaign, doesn’t mean he was telling the truth.
Really. You think they could summon up the political will to do it when Bush was just *barely* elected President in the first place? 9/11 is what gave them the power to engage in that level of mid-east meddling.
It’s correct that Iraq was not really involved in 9/11. The problem is it’s in the same general area of the world, among other things, enabling the Bush Administration to falsely tie them in the public’s perception.
But Saddam wasn’t really pursuing WMDs, all that was left was stuff leftover from a long time ago that was missed in an earlier sweep. So how do you gin up support for an expensive war against some random middle eastern dictator that isn’t even really arranging terrorism against you?
External image
Step one - get your shoddy approval rating spiked into the stratosphere by a massive middle eastern terrorist attack, massively boosting your low political capital, allowing you to even attempt to make this threat narrative without looking like a paranoid lunatic in the first place.
in my experience enthusiastic male programmers outnumber enthusiastic female programmers by approximately 100 to 1 by the age of 15, but maybe this has shifted slightly over the past few decades.
(numbers not completely pulled out of my butt, based on observation of room containing roughly 300 juvenile coders, three of which were presenting as girls).
perhaps we need earlier interventions, possibly starting in the womb.
The alternative method is infecting more programmers with the cat-girl virus.
Ugggggh
I’m not made of highly unethical experimental preference-modifying subconscious neuromemetic virus precomputed vector model patches.
in my experience enthusiastic male programmers outnumber enthusiastic female programmers by approximately 100 to 1 by the age of 15, but maybe this has shifted slightly over the past few decades.
(numbers not completely pulled out of my butt, based on observation of room containing roughly 300 juvenile coders, three of which were presenting as girls).
perhaps we need earlier interventions, possibly starting in the womb.
Mass hormonal doping to alter the neurotypes and sexualities of the population, but unironically.
You ever get the feeling in certain sexually liberated subcultures - kink, poly, body positivity - that you’re expected to find everyone attractive by default?
Like you’re supposed to choose your partners pretty much at random - your preferences can be superficial but never integral to your sexuality, and they must always be toothless. Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect. We’ve looped right back around to calling sex and romance the highest forms of human interaction: to deny them to anyone, the logic goes, is a slight to their very humanity.
I’ve been noticing that a lot in poly communities lately, but this article really crystallized the concept for me. To wit:
When you call a fat body “cute,” it’s patronizing and de-sexualizing. …
[W]hen someone calls me “cute” in a setting where I am showing my body or
expressing my sexuality, it plucks me right out of the narrative I am
trying to create.
…
Try “beautiful,” or go out on a limb and say “sexy.” And don’t panic
when you find that “beautiful” and “sexy” start to change in meaning for
you. They should. These are words that belong to everyone who wants
them.
You are entitled to express your sexuality in any context you want (in this case, a Facebook group for nude photos), but I am equally entitled not to participate in it. The idea that someone posting nudes in a group I happen to be part of obligates me to express sexual admiration for them - well, as we say in The Industry, it creeps me the fuck out. Would the author of that article apply the same standard to a dude showing off his erection?
By all means create your own sexual narrative, by all means claim any word you feel you deserve, but the minute you obligate me to take part in it is the minute I get the fuck away from you. Desexualizing a person is not the same as dehumanizing them.
Very yes.
“Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect.“
As an obligate monoamorous person (why. is. that. not. a. word?!) this is how 99% of Bad Polycourse feels to me, too.
And it’s so weirdly regressive, too - I thought we had agreed that romance doesn’t have to be The Ultimate in relationships! Suddenly we’ve gone right back to “if you really loved your friends you’d be dating them” and I’m just like…when did we decide that friendship was lesser?
Status competition in sex runs deeper than ideology, I’d wager. Much deeper.
Github eliminated gender bias in selecting conference speakers for ElectronConf by using randomized blind review, 100% of selected speakers turned out to be men, so they are cancelling the conference
amazing
Cowardly, dishonest, misandrist trash.
(no clue what this conference is about/looking for in speakers, other than it’s in a coding field and they want a mixed panel)
If you assume misogyny exists, which obviously this conference is, then surely this is a predictable result of that? Women would face attrition before even entering the field, falling off during study and falling behind after becoming professional. Coding is not an innate natural skill; at least, it’s not a pure natural skill, where it all comes from within, and opportunities don’t matter. So those who get promoted would be men, thus men would get better more often; those who stick around more would be men, have more resources to pursue and direct projects would be men.
This isn’t like playing music, where you can do most of it in your own time. You can play and practice those fancy difficult pieces on your own. (You would see a class bias still, since free time and instruments are expensive.) You can’t really do that with big projects in coding, can you? You can’t work on AI without getting promotions, you can’t work on team projects without being above entry-level. You can’t get design experience and other stuff without big resources and connections. All of which come with moving up the ladder and being liked, which if we’re assuming misogyny, doesn’t happen as much for women.
I would only expect maybe pre-college level blind reviews to turn out an equal gender slate (other minority sections not addressed). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen data that says even then, it’s already skewed male. If you’re assuming misogyny, then its cascading effects will result in a lot of the “top people” being male in a “male field”. Hence, the speakers would be male by any unbiased selection process. You can’t use this kind of review to pick speakers if you’re aiming to promote people you believe are marginalized. That’s like saying, “well let’s use the size of people’s fortunes to choose speakers, surely that’s a good measure of success”, but obviously you’re going to get a biased panel there too, not a population-representative one.
You can’t fix bias like this by starting at the top. You have to explicitly say, okay this happens, so to counter it let’s hear from some of those minority people and give them the opportunities they haven’t been getting, **so that they can then be on the par they would have had they not faced bias*. That’s what affirmative action IS, recognition that people are being held back at all levels, and then fixing that at all levels. You can’t both expect to get equal representation in things like these reviews *and* claim you need affirmative action. Blind reviews do not remove the long-term effects that cause people to not be in the top of the field to begin with. It would stop biased promotions, but it wouldn’t go back in time and fix everything that caused people not to rise who should have, which is what they seemed to expect. It only goes down one level, not the many layers of you’d need to reach through
The only place where this effect isn’t true would maybe be in the hacker world? Far as I understand that’s pretty much all self-taught and totally blind. Everything else relies on above-the-table, ie someone else offered to you, opportunities. All of which would be biased by prejudices.
The problem, of course, is that they often haven’t found the systemic misogynistic biases they’ve been looking for. I can’t remember the exact details, but there have been studies where they have tried altering voices to sound more feminine, observed acceptance rates for commits on FOSS projects by gender, and so on, and they most often come up empty-handed on it.
But of course, to say there is an imbalance in the frequency of neurotypes in populations based on hormone levels during development is forbidden darkspeech, even though it is uniquely women who, it is commonly thought by the same people who object to any biological influence on cognition even at the statistical population level, must be carefully herded into various professions. (And of course, the constant messaging that “soft dev is misogynist!” by those same people cannot help but be discouraging.)
I rather strongly suspect that one might find autistic traits (or similar) overrepresented among computer programmers relative to the norm, or other correlations. After all, my ex who helped me get into programming is neurodivergent and bi, and I’m not quite such a pure normie myself…
Am I missing something? Notch responds to the term “mansplaining” with explaining “mansplaining”. This is funny. When others double down on not getting the joke, he doubles down as well, making it all the more obvious. Why does everybody act like they are not getting the joke? Is there a meta-joke? Am I the only one who is not in on the non-joke?
Sufficiently fundamentalist rhetoric is indistinguishable from satire. The real joke is that we’re in the middle of the anthropocene extinction event and a writer is writing about writings that two writers wrote to one another.
In this case we here are even worse, writing about even more meta Bullshit, self-aware enough to know it, but not strong enough to change.
The story of my life. The last three posts on this chain, i mean.
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
Wonder Woman strikes a blow against the patriarchy by having the male lead be only 4 years older than the female lead instead of 40 years older.
MRAs might see it as a victory against “female hypergamy” when the woman is actually older and slightly wealthier. Not sure how to be woke in that case.
Oh, this one is obvious. By the laws of vague internet liberal feminism, any activity can be transmuted into female empowerment if it’s done by a woman. Easy! Next question, please.
I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:
I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.
Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?
In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.
So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans.
That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)
So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.
“Paki” bad. “Bikey” good.
Let’s just refer to every nationality as they refer to themselves in their own countries, for cultural respect. Sure, it will feel weird saying “nihonjin” without saying “wa”, and everyone else will look at you like you’re Steve Naruto Midnight Raven the Ultraweeb, final boss of the figurine and dakimakura dungeon,
Wait, where was I going with this?
Oh, right, to avoid further confusion, by decree of the International Society for Metrification, residents of the United States of America shall now be known as either United Statesians or Unionese,
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
If children vote the same as their parents that doesn’t exactly seem unfair, given that their parents are trusted rightly or wrongly with other aspects of their well-being. And if it’s a secret ballot, they can rebel as much as they like when they feel the inclination to do so.
Plus is it really that difficult to find a 14 year old that is more politically savvy than the average 30 year old?
I was 14 once and I certainly wouldn’t give my 14 year old self the vote. 14yo Miti did not understand much about war. 18yo Miti had far sounder judgment on such matters.
I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:
I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.
Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?
In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.
So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans.
That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)
So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.
it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”
Okay, I laughed at that one.
To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.
