Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles — LessWrong
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> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing…

content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.

    So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      ghost of 2007!Yud

      This part gets me the most. The current day Yud isn’t transphobic (enough? idk) so Zack has to piece together his older writings on semantics and epistemology to get a more transphobic gender essentialist version of past Yud.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      This particular conservative religion is the robot cult.

      and remember that the robot cult is considerably less transphobic than Zack, and that’s half the problem Zack has.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      A standout, self-contained example of the general badness of this post is this anecdote (CW: transphobia/misgendering):

      A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. “I’m so mad,” she fumed. “I look like this right now”—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—“how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?” It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn’t get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand— It was a compliment! That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like David Bowie or Eddie Izzard, rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and done something to pass better next time.[15] The horror of trans culture is that it’s impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they’re behaving like a TERF’s hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.

      It is baffling that they choose to speculate about/rationalise the offending comment to cast aspersions on the protagonist and “trans culture” as a whole.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        it’s stupid and i wouldn’t have brought it up if zack wasn’t such a fucking dick, but that’s fucking rich coming from someone who’s so high on their own completely misguided biological essentialism, at the exclusion of any social reality, that they think an apt and plausible way to pass as a woman in public is to use a full head silicone mask

        alas, too much of a transphobe to know better

        • MBM@lemmings.worldEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          This is wild, there’s like multiple essays worth of text and subtext in there. It almost makes me sad for Zack and his severe brain worms

          • Deborah@hachyderm.io
            0·
            10 months ago

            If you haven’t looked at the multipost silicone saga I’d personally avoid the guttingly sad combination of uncanny valley and dysphoric self-loathing and a weird amount of unexamined… well, I don’t want to say misogyny. But it ain’t great.

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Until I came across a comics table hawking TransCat, the “first” (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything I’m fighting—not out of hatred, but out of a shared love that I think I have the more faithful interpretation of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was … not good. “There’s so much I could say that doesn’t fit in this context,” I said to the table’s proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe.

          a vile thing to write at any time, but to do so within this post in particular is just incredible

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        “eyy the lady shoulda taken it as a compliment!” is so classically misogynist that this is wrapping back around to gender affirmation