I'm glad you recognize the pseudo-religious nature of trans ideology, but you dismissed other leftist as concepts as "just bad ideas" rather than sharing this pseudo-religious nature. I would argue that while the trans cult might represent wokeness taken to its most extreme, wokeness in general is still a pseudo-religion.
Number one, you point out that the claims made on issues like race can be debated empirically. While they can be, the fact is that the vast overwhelming majority of leftists who believe that all non-whites are systematically oppressed, do not believe this because they crunched the numbers. They believe it uncritically, automatically, and without thought. They believe it for the same reasons that someone who grew up in a devout household believes that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior. And if you show them the numbers and tell them that their beliefs don't hold up to reality, this will have no effect. They might counter-argue you, but they will never change their mind, and if they do, it won't be because you showed them a bunch of numbers.
My favorite anecdote that I have demonstrating this effect is a brief exchange I once had with my cousin. Somehow the topic of Trump's border wall came up, which she of course said was a terrible idea. I asked her why, and she responded that it wasted too much government money. I then asked her, what if it could be built for zero dollars? Should it be built then? Her response was that, well no, of course it shouldn't be.
Second, one of the functions of religion is to impart meaning in one's life, and the woke cult clearly serves this purpose as a replacement for (and rejection of) traditional religion and spirituality. Rather than being assured that they are good people because they believe in Jesus Christ, leftists feel assured of this because they support Black Lives Matter and the like. The parallels with the George Floyd event in particular I think are far too overt to be ignored.
I would love for you to be right, but I’m not so sure. Elon Musk has only so much power.
I suspect the reason Silicon Valley cares more about policing wrongthink on gender than on feminism or race is because males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming).
This is not true of hardline feminists and the kinds of minorities racial discourse considers marginalized. Gender is personal to SV.
The Twitter purge of rebels against the Trans hegemon was the template for all category cancellations that followed. And remains to this day (as you point out) the true locus of rage at Twitter HQ. The story has barely been told. Kinda hard to when so many people were deleted and everything they tweeted got disappeared along with them. Elon needs more than to just re-animate the Twitter murdered. Their trashed Twitter feeds must be revived with them. Or were the Twitter blue-heads smart enough destroy all the evidence of their rampages against the trans-dubious? That probably goes against company policy but they've been making their own rules for 6 or 7 years now. Probably busy torching the record of their subterfuge as I write this. There will still be enough left to make for a Stasi-like archive of their secret war.
>>Most people define woman as “human with XX chromosomes
Once you get below 115 iq, most people don't even know what chromosomes are.
The real definition of woman is "human with lots of feminine features" where "feminine features" include shorter stature, fatty hips, non-resonant voices, narrower necks ect. How many features you need to cross the line into woman hood will vary depending on which neural network your brain is running.
The author does not seem to have experience with, or understanding of, religion. I would also guess that he's autistic, which would make religious psychology and feeling even more foreign.
"Ritual" exists in religion (just as it does in Woke--chanting, swaying, repeating sayings over and over) but it is not the reason we have religion. Religion gives meaning to people's lives, gives them an impossible aim to devote their life to, gives them a community with shared discourse conventions and convictions, tells them that they are good. Specifically, in America, it's Christianity that has done this.
I was an evangelical Christian for the first 25 years of my life. Woke is essentially religious. The behaviours and motivations are all emanating from the exact same region of the brain as the behaviours I witnessed and engaged in. They are not even aware of the striking similarities they have to each other. Furthermore, Woke is a post-Christian ideology, parastic on the lingering scent of original sin, self-abrogation, and damnation.
I know exactly what a Woke person is thinking and feeling when they encounter the heathen. I know how they feel when someone says forbidden words, when they ruminate upon the Kingdom of Equality arriving on earth, and when they swat away the doubts.
There are differences of course. Woke appears to be less joyful, there's no singing, they have worse mental health, there's no afterlife, and you can't be forgiven. Sounds like a bad deal.
First, it’s funny that you refer to Dave Chappelle in the way you do. He and his (white) writing partner built their entire career off of portraying racial stereotypes in the most offensive and outrageous way possible. Just the other day, my coworker and I were watching a chappelle show skit which spoofed a 50’s sitcom revolving around a white family named the “Nigars”. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I was nearly in tears with how hilarious and absurd the entire skit was. All of us knew for a fact that something like that could NEVER get made today, but it’s ironic chappelle’s legacy has become more about poking the LGBT bear than the comedic genius of his show/early standup.
“Kendiism” is proving to be much less resilient than you seem to think here, if only because the effects of these ideas have been universally awful for damn near everyone outside of black Ivy League grads. After the riots of 2020, people began taking anti racism seriously, and the people who espouse these ideas were given tremendous influence over city governments, schools and police departments. Even where depts weren’t officially “defunded”, officers hands were tied with stricter rules of engagement. They were told not to pursue “small” crimes like drug dealing, shoplifting, and traffic violations. Schools stopped suspending kids for “equity” concerns. Cities limited private investment in black neighborhoods to prevent “gentrification.” As anyone with a brain knew at the time, the results have been disastrous by all possible measures. It’s not subtle at all, and let me tell you that people of all races are fed up with the BS. The idea that 15 year old kids are killing in broad daylight with glock extended mags because white people sing *all* the words to the Wu Tang song isn’t nearly as believable once the killings reach the BLM/Ukraine flag neighborhoods. I’m not saying that people are ready to discuss race/iq (not totally convinced by those arguments either), but the “systemic racism” excuse has definitely worn out it’s welcome. Even on Reddit, where being conservative is an autoban, mentions of “systemic racism” on shooting threads in my city have gone from top comment to -40 downvotes. Kendi has rapidly lost ground in the marketplace of ideas.
Trans issues are easy to “debunk” because of the obvious contradiction: “genitals don’t determine gender, so therefore I must mutilate my genitals to match my gender or I will kill myself.” For the vast majority of people, however, they have never seen or interacted with a trans person, so they don’t even think about it that deeply, It’s a pure abstraction and they choose the path of least resistance. I agree that opening the conversation a little bit will reveal to the wider public how nonsensical the ideology is.
The one I believe is most sticky, however, is feminism. While things like the wage gap (mostly bs) and female CEOs can be tested empirically, I’m more concerned about things that are harder to quantify. What has the “sexual revolution” done for the mental health of men and women? What are the long term effects of unlimited porn access from a young age on the sex lives of men and women? What are we going to do with all of the displaced, mediocre men who are no longer valued by society? These are all questions that society has not even begun to discuss, and I unfortunately think the conversation will remain taboo until social stability has been undermined.
"If liberals want to use the word that way, fine." It's not fine. The word is taken. It refers to female adults who need a name to distinguish them from male adults when it comes to policy. By definition the word "woman" excludes men because the concept does. Should we can the sky the ground in pilot's manuals?
Ideologues want us to pretend that men are women if they say so by forcing us to *say* so too. If these lunatics went around pointing at random objects and using the wrong words and were laughed at like the imbeciles they are, that would be one thing. But that's not what's happening.
The Woke have the audacity to be whiney crybullies when sane people use words as they appear in the dictionary. You can't even say "transwomen" are male because they decided "male" shouldn't ever be used for sex again, just for gender feelings. Ask them what sex a gender nonbinary identity woman or man is and watch them act like sex denialists buffoons.
Language is an oligarchy or at best an aristocracy. Elites define language. Family structure is always an aspect of the culture's religion, and here the Progressive elite priests (which is just Quakerism, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%20Universal%20Friend) is defining the family structure for this society.
So, they are right by definition.
Underlying realities, however, are not subject to democratic or elite control. They have a prior existence. Male and female are reproductive strategies that result in propagation of the species. Trans may be a valid gender state, but it isn't a successful reproductive strategy. You can of course choose to use other words than "man" and "woman" to define the two successful reproductive strategies, but their existence is prior to language.
There are two things that I actually care about in Gender Ideology:
1. I don't think kids who we legally do not allow to have sex can consent to removing their sex organs
2. A Trans-Man is a man, and a Trans-Woman is a woman. But gender and sex are different. We can acknowledge someone's gender without throwing out the fact that sex is real, binary and (under current technology) immutable.
I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree. I support any adult who wants to change their gender and I sympathize with people suffering from gender dysphoria. But can we please just acknowledge reality about the sex binary, and have rational discussions about what kids can, and cannot, consent to instead of bickering in esoteric arguments on whether intersex conditions 'prove' that the sex binary is false?
I'm making a public prediction that gender ideology will keep thriving in the free marketplace of ideas. It has already won its current position in an uphill battle. It will keep doing just fine on more equal footing. Do you want to make a manifold prediction market about the issue?
The thing is, your model of gender ideology is extremely lacking. The fact that you can't see any methodology is a failure of your map, not the territory. You are right that in the basis lies the argument about definitions, but it doesn't have to be based on "we can define words whatever we like" type of sentiments. Definitions based on strict logical categories are worse at describing the way humans actually use words than definitions based on the idea of simularity clusters.
Being a woman, the way people use the word, isn't a thing based on just one factor, be it chromosomes or self-identification. Both things are just approximations. There are multitudes of factors, which we do not even notice ourself subconsciously counting. Even very anti-trans people like Ben Shapiro have to perform constant self-censorship, occasionally correcting themselves in order to keep misgendering passing transwomen. And even very pro-trans people will assume that a person claiming to be woman, while having a central example of male body and experiencing no dysphoria whatsoever is probably confused or lying.
Sometimes I wonder whether the marketplace of ideas and the questioning of everything, like the definition of marriage, the definition of man and woman, etc., is how we got here in the first place. Some things shouldn't be up for debate! I don't think you beat trans ideology by having better ideas and arguments necessarily, but perhaps by opening a space where it can be subverted and ridiculed.
I'm glad you recognize the pseudo-religious nature of trans ideology, but you dismissed other leftist as concepts as "just bad ideas" rather than sharing this pseudo-religious nature. I would argue that while the trans cult might represent wokeness taken to its most extreme, wokeness in general is still a pseudo-religion.
Number one, you point out that the claims made on issues like race can be debated empirically. While they can be, the fact is that the vast overwhelming majority of leftists who believe that all non-whites are systematically oppressed, do not believe this because they crunched the numbers. They believe it uncritically, automatically, and without thought. They believe it for the same reasons that someone who grew up in a devout household believes that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior. And if you show them the numbers and tell them that their beliefs don't hold up to reality, this will have no effect. They might counter-argue you, but they will never change their mind, and if they do, it won't be because you showed them a bunch of numbers.
My favorite anecdote that I have demonstrating this effect is a brief exchange I once had with my cousin. Somehow the topic of Trump's border wall came up, which she of course said was a terrible idea. I asked her why, and she responded that it wasted too much government money. I then asked her, what if it could be built for zero dollars? Should it be built then? Her response was that, well no, of course it shouldn't be.
Second, one of the functions of religion is to impart meaning in one's life, and the woke cult clearly serves this purpose as a replacement for (and rejection of) traditional religion and spirituality. Rather than being assured that they are good people because they believe in Jesus Christ, leftists feel assured of this because they support Black Lives Matter and the like. The parallels with the George Floyd event in particular I think are far too overt to be ignored.
“If language is a democracy, trans ideology is January 6.” I will be plagiarizing this line.
I would love for you to be right, but I’m not so sure. Elon Musk has only so much power.
I suspect the reason Silicon Valley cares more about policing wrongthink on gender than on feminism or race is because males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming).
This is not true of hardline feminists and the kinds of minorities racial discourse considers marginalized. Gender is personal to SV.
The “mainstream” trans movement has no way to reject the prosthetic boob shop teacher without rejecting the entirety of its ideology.
Yes that’s very well put.
The Twitter purge of rebels against the Trans hegemon was the template for all category cancellations that followed. And remains to this day (as you point out) the true locus of rage at Twitter HQ. The story has barely been told. Kinda hard to when so many people were deleted and everything they tweeted got disappeared along with them. Elon needs more than to just re-animate the Twitter murdered. Their trashed Twitter feeds must be revived with them. Or were the Twitter blue-heads smart enough destroy all the evidence of their rampages against the trans-dubious? That probably goes against company policy but they've been making their own rules for 6 or 7 years now. Probably busy torching the record of their subterfuge as I write this. There will still be enough left to make for a Stasi-like archive of their secret war.
>>Most people define woman as “human with XX chromosomes
Once you get below 115 iq, most people don't even know what chromosomes are.
The real definition of woman is "human with lots of feminine features" where "feminine features" include shorter stature, fatty hips, non-resonant voices, narrower necks ect. How many features you need to cross the line into woman hood will vary depending on which neural network your brain is running.
Censorship distorts the marketplace of ideas, Elon is restoring the market
The author does not seem to have experience with, or understanding of, religion. I would also guess that he's autistic, which would make religious psychology and feeling even more foreign.
"Ritual" exists in religion (just as it does in Woke--chanting, swaying, repeating sayings over and over) but it is not the reason we have religion. Religion gives meaning to people's lives, gives them an impossible aim to devote their life to, gives them a community with shared discourse conventions and convictions, tells them that they are good. Specifically, in America, it's Christianity that has done this.
I was an evangelical Christian for the first 25 years of my life. Woke is essentially religious. The behaviours and motivations are all emanating from the exact same region of the brain as the behaviours I witnessed and engaged in. They are not even aware of the striking similarities they have to each other. Furthermore, Woke is a post-Christian ideology, parastic on the lingering scent of original sin, self-abrogation, and damnation.
I know exactly what a Woke person is thinking and feeling when they encounter the heathen. I know how they feel when someone says forbidden words, when they ruminate upon the Kingdom of Equality arriving on earth, and when they swat away the doubts.
There are differences of course. Woke appears to be less joyful, there's no singing, they have worse mental health, there's no afterlife, and you can't be forgiven. Sounds like a bad deal.
A couple of thoughts here.
First, it’s funny that you refer to Dave Chappelle in the way you do. He and his (white) writing partner built their entire career off of portraying racial stereotypes in the most offensive and outrageous way possible. Just the other day, my coworker and I were watching a chappelle show skit which spoofed a 50’s sitcom revolving around a white family named the “Nigars”. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I was nearly in tears with how hilarious and absurd the entire skit was. All of us knew for a fact that something like that could NEVER get made today, but it’s ironic chappelle’s legacy has become more about poking the LGBT bear than the comedic genius of his show/early standup.
“Kendiism” is proving to be much less resilient than you seem to think here, if only because the effects of these ideas have been universally awful for damn near everyone outside of black Ivy League grads. After the riots of 2020, people began taking anti racism seriously, and the people who espouse these ideas were given tremendous influence over city governments, schools and police departments. Even where depts weren’t officially “defunded”, officers hands were tied with stricter rules of engagement. They were told not to pursue “small” crimes like drug dealing, shoplifting, and traffic violations. Schools stopped suspending kids for “equity” concerns. Cities limited private investment in black neighborhoods to prevent “gentrification.” As anyone with a brain knew at the time, the results have been disastrous by all possible measures. It’s not subtle at all, and let me tell you that people of all races are fed up with the BS. The idea that 15 year old kids are killing in broad daylight with glock extended mags because white people sing *all* the words to the Wu Tang song isn’t nearly as believable once the killings reach the BLM/Ukraine flag neighborhoods. I’m not saying that people are ready to discuss race/iq (not totally convinced by those arguments either), but the “systemic racism” excuse has definitely worn out it’s welcome. Even on Reddit, where being conservative is an autoban, mentions of “systemic racism” on shooting threads in my city have gone from top comment to -40 downvotes. Kendi has rapidly lost ground in the marketplace of ideas.
Trans issues are easy to “debunk” because of the obvious contradiction: “genitals don’t determine gender, so therefore I must mutilate my genitals to match my gender or I will kill myself.” For the vast majority of people, however, they have never seen or interacted with a trans person, so they don’t even think about it that deeply, It’s a pure abstraction and they choose the path of least resistance. I agree that opening the conversation a little bit will reveal to the wider public how nonsensical the ideology is.
The one I believe is most sticky, however, is feminism. While things like the wage gap (mostly bs) and female CEOs can be tested empirically, I’m more concerned about things that are harder to quantify. What has the “sexual revolution” done for the mental health of men and women? What are the long term effects of unlimited porn access from a young age on the sex lives of men and women? What are we going to do with all of the displaced, mediocre men who are no longer valued by society? These are all questions that society has not even begun to discuss, and I unfortunately think the conversation will remain taboo until social stability has been undermined.
"it can be adaptive for an individual to have no distinction between 'what I believe' and 'what is good for me to believe.'"
I've always wondered if Trump "really does" believe the 2020 election was stolen from him in this sense.
"If liberals want to use the word that way, fine." It's not fine. The word is taken. It refers to female adults who need a name to distinguish them from male adults when it comes to policy. By definition the word "woman" excludes men because the concept does. Should we can the sky the ground in pilot's manuals?
Ideologues want us to pretend that men are women if they say so by forcing us to *say* so too. If these lunatics went around pointing at random objects and using the wrong words and were laughed at like the imbeciles they are, that would be one thing. But that's not what's happening.
The Woke have the audacity to be whiney crybullies when sane people use words as they appear in the dictionary. You can't even say "transwomen" are male because they decided "male" shouldn't ever be used for sex again, just for gender feelings. Ask them what sex a gender nonbinary identity woman or man is and watch them act like sex denialists buffoons.
Don't give them an inch.
Language is an oligarchy or at best an aristocracy. Elites define language. Family structure is always an aspect of the culture's religion, and here the Progressive elite priests (which is just Quakerism, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%20Universal%20Friend) is defining the family structure for this society.
So, they are right by definition.
Underlying realities, however, are not subject to democratic or elite control. They have a prior existence. Male and female are reproductive strategies that result in propagation of the species. Trans may be a valid gender state, but it isn't a successful reproductive strategy. You can of course choose to use other words than "man" and "woman" to define the two successful reproductive strategies, but their existence is prior to language.
There are two things that I actually care about in Gender Ideology:
1. I don't think kids who we legally do not allow to have sex can consent to removing their sex organs
2. A Trans-Man is a man, and a Trans-Woman is a woman. But gender and sex are different. We can acknowledge someone's gender without throwing out the fact that sex is real, binary and (under current technology) immutable.
I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree. I support any adult who wants to change their gender and I sympathize with people suffering from gender dysphoria. But can we please just acknowledge reality about the sex binary, and have rational discussions about what kids can, and cannot, consent to instead of bickering in esoteric arguments on whether intersex conditions 'prove' that the sex binary is false?
I'm making a public prediction that gender ideology will keep thriving in the free marketplace of ideas. It has already won its current position in an uphill battle. It will keep doing just fine on more equal footing. Do you want to make a manifold prediction market about the issue?
The thing is, your model of gender ideology is extremely lacking. The fact that you can't see any methodology is a failure of your map, not the territory. You are right that in the basis lies the argument about definitions, but it doesn't have to be based on "we can define words whatever we like" type of sentiments. Definitions based on strict logical categories are worse at describing the way humans actually use words than definitions based on the idea of simularity clusters.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/a-humans-guide-to-words
Being a woman, the way people use the word, isn't a thing based on just one factor, be it chromosomes or self-identification. Both things are just approximations. There are multitudes of factors, which we do not even notice ourself subconsciously counting. Even very anti-trans people like Ben Shapiro have to perform constant self-censorship, occasionally correcting themselves in order to keep misgendering passing transwomen. And even very pro-trans people will assume that a person claiming to be woman, while having a central example of male body and experiencing no dysphoria whatsoever is probably confused or lying.
Sometimes I wonder whether the marketplace of ideas and the questioning of everything, like the definition of marriage, the definition of man and woman, etc., is how we got here in the first place. Some things shouldn't be up for debate! I don't think you beat trans ideology by having better ideas and arguments necessarily, but perhaps by opening a space where it can be subverted and ridiculed.
"There is no other movement that has more to fear from a free marketplace of ideas."
Islam?