I had been musing recently that battles over pronoun use in the UK have a different flavour to the same ones in other countries, because the UK's flavour of anti-trans rhetoric (and particularly TERFery) is rooted in class. So people see the use of a nonstandard pronoun as an attack on their social status in a way that's hard to translate to other cultures. A high-status person in British society, particularly a high-status woman, is expected to be able to assert their will by giving orders and defining the moral worth of others. Someone who ignores that is a direct challenge to the TERF's authority and position in society, and puts all that status and access at risk. That's why they counterattack so hard and so desperately.
The epitome of worldbuilding-as-politics is probably the Warhammer 40K setting, which is very carefully tuned and balanced to always ensure the fascists are right and heroic for it. It's so rooted in the standard western nerd adolescence that people get really upset if you point this out, but why else does the setting love hidden corrupted deviants hiding in human form so much? Because the writers want pogroms and purges, and they want the people running the pogroms to be good guys.
Ha! I'll raise your WH40K and slap down four of a kind that came out before it: "The Price of Freedom", "Space Marines", "Space Opera", and "Year of the Phoenix" as right-wing spooging (right-liberal for SM and SO but close enough). FortyK's merely the Albigensian Crusade telescoped into the future, conservative fodder but hardly fascist.
If you start with a wrong premise like “words shape and reshape our reality” everything that flows from it will be equally deluded and warped.
Words DESCRIBE our subjective experience of reality, they cannot make it be true beyond the personal.
The premise reminds me of another iteration of the The Secret; that if you wish for and talk yourself into believing something long enough and hard enough you should be able to conjure it into becoming reality. No amount of wishful fixation that an individual human is a person of no sex, or the opposite sex to what they were born is going to make it true or real. Regardless of the dragooning and coercion of innocent and protesting bystanders who get press ganged aboard the ship of fools.
A graph is a visual aid to assist quick understanding of results tracked from combining 2 sets of data. Even the blind can still understand the information being imparted if it's presented in other formulations. Braille? Do you "read" Braille? Is it still the same information if given in a format you're unfamiliar with?
The map is not the territory. Even as the navigators Magellan and Cook mapped the coastlines of landmasses they discovered and moderns do the same with satellites...beyond representation and semantics there is a real solid piece of dirt and rock being described.
Which is the reality - the map of 1600, 1700 or 2023? Will it keep changing into the future?
The facts stay the same - this is the water, this is the solid land - maps and graphs only provide a mimetic representation.
The phrase "words shape our reality" is just slightly metaphorical - words shape our perception of reality. The words we know to describe a particular subject matter influence how much of it we can perceive, and can alter our perceptions, as they often contain additional information not strictly present in the reality.
"if you wish for and talk yourself into believing something long enough and hard enough you should be able to conjure it into becoming reality"
Well, you're apparently talking yourself into believing that you're both a conservative and an anarchist; do you think you really are both, or are you just desperately trying to appear that way to make yourself more palatable to others?
I don't identify as a foodstuff, therefore making myself "palatable" isn't high on my agenda.
I have been an "anarchist" until recently. As the claim isn't sufficient to convince you, heres a few of my life experiences - I voted Greens for 40 years and was a member of Extinction Rebellion. In the 1980s I lived in New Zealands most controversial cult community for 4 years, Centrepoint Community, a conglomeration of people who followed a radical post modernist lifestyle (manufacturing drugs and chid sexual abuse were de rigeur, most of the leaders went to jail in the 1990s). I gave away a child I gave birth to to people who literally took possession of him before I'd delivered the placenta. For many years I worked for a man assisting him in the drug import and distribution business. I worked as a prostitute for 6 years, regularly engaging in BDSM...
It will interesting to have try to fit that into a story I'm a conservative hard right Christian bigot.
Todd, you know everybody who won't buy the trans agenda has to be dismissed as a hard right, christian bigot. This year I've also been called a nazi, insane and an insufferable moron. All that may be true along with my certainty that homo sapiens are a species of mammal that are born as either male or female and that nothing can change that. Not hormones, cosmetic surgeries, stiletto heels or wishful thinking.
I have chosen to believe there is a truth and reality beyond subjective desiring. As an older woman who believed a great deal of the garbage that the "left" manufactured for most of my life, I can only urge you to observe how your life works out when you believe garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.
Our successful, democratic societies are falling apart due to over consumption of garbage...keep watching how things are unfolding.
As a woman I could never have lived the life I lived in most parts of the world, it is only because I was born in a time of prosperity and stability in a western country (New Zealand) that it was possible. I don't have many regrets but I hope to live the last few decades of my existence imparting a cautionary tale.
"you know everybody who won't buy the trans agenda has to be dismissed as a hard right, christian bigot."
Y'know, there really were slaves during the US Civil War who offered to fight on behalf of the Confederacy. I very much doubt they were insane, closet Confederates, hot to own slaves themselves, or just possessing of a low IQ; nevertheless, they had their reasons for what they said (mistaken, though, I'm sure). I sometimes wonder if other slaves (or former ones) killed them for "breaking ranks" so heinously. Certainly, I think they were at least shunned and forced out. Maybe even some of them regretted their words later and worked to make amends, even if just to set their own personal records straight. Regardless, they deserved whatever happened to them, no matter how they felt about themselves.
You believe what you want about yourself; just don't be surprised when the people you thought you were part of come to their own conclusions.
"my certainty that homo sapiens are a species of mammal that are born as either male or female"
>shrug<
Science says otherwise.
"As an older woman who believed a great deal of the garbage that the 'left' manufactured for most of my life"
And believing in this particular bit of garbage the Right has manufactured makes things right with . . . . Who, exactly? You and your ego?
"I hope to live the last few decades of my existence imparting a cautionary tale."
Well, don't do us any favours.
And don't let the door hit you on your ass on your way out . . . .
What science says Homo Sapiens are not a dimorphically reproducing species of mammal? Tell me their names, don't give a link to a paper. Has somebody nominated the radical geniuses who discovered that for a Nobel Prize? Who was the last person with testicles producing small gametes and no uterus who gave birth to a human infant? There is not a single male in the whole of history of humanity who did that. Women have penises and men have vaginas - are you really claiming thats true and real? Please say it in writing. Does your Mum know you think that?
Hilarious that you think I'm the crazy person.
I can understand why you want to slam the door on me and my ass. I'm sure Penny will organise it soon.
We have only one mind, for both truth and intent. Ideas often express intent, not truth, and the left does have a bad habit of disproving people's fears as untruths. That is, I think, the core of what is so destructive about the left's ideas.
The right's ideas are not destructive in the same way, although some of that dismissal of intent as untruth appears to be part of how our society works now, and it doesn't work nearly as well without it.
Great spiel thanks for sharing. As a pedant, I’ll point out that you’ve repeated that Carl Sagan quote and the sentences around it twice in the same essay! One of them needs to be deleted :)
I had been musing recently that battles over pronoun use in the UK have a different flavour to the same ones in other countries, because the UK's flavour of anti-trans rhetoric (and particularly TERFery) is rooted in class. So people see the use of a nonstandard pronoun as an attack on their social status in a way that's hard to translate to other cultures. A high-status person in British society, particularly a high-status woman, is expected to be able to assert their will by giving orders and defining the moral worth of others. Someone who ignores that is a direct challenge to the TERF's authority and position in society, and puts all that status and access at risk. That's why they counterattack so hard and so desperately.
The epitome of worldbuilding-as-politics is probably the Warhammer 40K setting, which is very carefully tuned and balanced to always ensure the fascists are right and heroic for it. It's so rooted in the standard western nerd adolescence that people get really upset if you point this out, but why else does the setting love hidden corrupted deviants hiding in human form so much? Because the writers want pogroms and purges, and they want the people running the pogroms to be good guys.
Ha! I'll raise your WH40K and slap down four of a kind that came out before it: "The Price of Freedom", "Space Marines", "Space Opera", and "Year of the Phoenix" as right-wing spooging (right-liberal for SM and SO but close enough). FortyK's merely the Albigensian Crusade telescoped into the future, conservative fodder but hardly fascist.
(Nice to read you again, Laurie!)
Welcome back! I've missed your words and I hope your time away was good for you.
If you start with a wrong premise like “words shape and reshape our reality” everything that flows from it will be equally deluded and warped.
Words DESCRIBE our subjective experience of reality, they cannot make it be true beyond the personal.
The premise reminds me of another iteration of the The Secret; that if you wish for and talk yourself into believing something long enough and hard enough you should be able to conjure it into becoming reality. No amount of wishful fixation that an individual human is a person of no sex, or the opposite sex to what they were born is going to make it true or real. Regardless of the dragooning and coercion of innocent and protesting bystanders who get press ganged aboard the ship of fools.
How well will someone who's never seen a graph before understand something best expressed with a graph?
A graph is a visual aid to assist quick understanding of results tracked from combining 2 sets of data. Even the blind can still understand the information being imparted if it's presented in other formulations. Braille? Do you "read" Braille? Is it still the same information if given in a format you're unfamiliar with?
The map is not the territory. Even as the navigators Magellan and Cook mapped the coastlines of landmasses they discovered and moderns do the same with satellites...beyond representation and semantics there is a real solid piece of dirt and rock being described.
Which is the reality - the map of 1600, 1700 or 2023? Will it keep changing into the future?
The facts stay the same - this is the water, this is the solid land - maps and graphs only provide a mimetic representation.
The phrase "words shape our reality" is just slightly metaphorical - words shape our perception of reality. The words we know to describe a particular subject matter influence how much of it we can perceive, and can alter our perceptions, as they often contain additional information not strictly present in the reality.
"if you wish for and talk yourself into believing something long enough and hard enough you should be able to conjure it into becoming reality"
Well, you're apparently talking yourself into believing that you're both a conservative and an anarchist; do you think you really are both, or are you just desperately trying to appear that way to make yourself more palatable to others?
I don't identify as a foodstuff, therefore making myself "palatable" isn't high on my agenda.
I have been an "anarchist" until recently. As the claim isn't sufficient to convince you, heres a few of my life experiences - I voted Greens for 40 years and was a member of Extinction Rebellion. In the 1980s I lived in New Zealands most controversial cult community for 4 years, Centrepoint Community, a conglomeration of people who followed a radical post modernist lifestyle (manufacturing drugs and chid sexual abuse were de rigeur, most of the leaders went to jail in the 1990s). I gave away a child I gave birth to to people who literally took possession of him before I'd delivered the placenta. For many years I worked for a man assisting him in the drug import and distribution business. I worked as a prostitute for 6 years, regularly engaging in BDSM...
It will interesting to have try to fit that into a story I'm a conservative hard right Christian bigot.
"Anarchist artmaker and cultural conservative."
You state words "cannot make [reality] true beyond the personal".
So make a choice . . . .
(BTW, since words seem to matter to you oh-so-much, where did I state you were a "hard right Christian bigot"?)
Todd, you know everybody who won't buy the trans agenda has to be dismissed as a hard right, christian bigot. This year I've also been called a nazi, insane and an insufferable moron. All that may be true along with my certainty that homo sapiens are a species of mammal that are born as either male or female and that nothing can change that. Not hormones, cosmetic surgeries, stiletto heels or wishful thinking.
I have chosen to believe there is a truth and reality beyond subjective desiring. As an older woman who believed a great deal of the garbage that the "left" manufactured for most of my life, I can only urge you to observe how your life works out when you believe garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.
Our successful, democratic societies are falling apart due to over consumption of garbage...keep watching how things are unfolding.
As a woman I could never have lived the life I lived in most parts of the world, it is only because I was born in a time of prosperity and stability in a western country (New Zealand) that it was possible. I don't have many regrets but I hope to live the last few decades of my existence imparting a cautionary tale.
"you know everybody who won't buy the trans agenda has to be dismissed as a hard right, christian bigot."
Y'know, there really were slaves during the US Civil War who offered to fight on behalf of the Confederacy. I very much doubt they were insane, closet Confederates, hot to own slaves themselves, or just possessing of a low IQ; nevertheless, they had their reasons for what they said (mistaken, though, I'm sure). I sometimes wonder if other slaves (or former ones) killed them for "breaking ranks" so heinously. Certainly, I think they were at least shunned and forced out. Maybe even some of them regretted their words later and worked to make amends, even if just to set their own personal records straight. Regardless, they deserved whatever happened to them, no matter how they felt about themselves.
You believe what you want about yourself; just don't be surprised when the people you thought you were part of come to their own conclusions.
"my certainty that homo sapiens are a species of mammal that are born as either male or female"
>shrug<
Science says otherwise.
"As an older woman who believed a great deal of the garbage that the 'left' manufactured for most of my life"
And believing in this particular bit of garbage the Right has manufactured makes things right with . . . . Who, exactly? You and your ego?
"I hope to live the last few decades of my existence imparting a cautionary tale."
Well, don't do us any favours.
And don't let the door hit you on your ass on your way out . . . .
What science says Homo Sapiens are not a dimorphically reproducing species of mammal? Tell me their names, don't give a link to a paper. Has somebody nominated the radical geniuses who discovered that for a Nobel Prize? Who was the last person with testicles producing small gametes and no uterus who gave birth to a human infant? There is not a single male in the whole of history of humanity who did that. Women have penises and men have vaginas - are you really claiming thats true and real? Please say it in writing. Does your Mum know you think that?
Hilarious that you think I'm the crazy person.
I can understand why you want to slam the door on me and my ass. I'm sure Penny will organise it soon.
We have only one mind, for both truth and intent. Ideas often express intent, not truth, and the left does have a bad habit of disproving people's fears as untruths. That is, I think, the core of what is so destructive about the left's ideas.
The right's ideas are not destructive in the same way, although some of that dismissal of intent as untruth appears to be part of how our society works now, and it doesn't work nearly as well without it.
Great spiel thanks for sharing. As a pedant, I’ll point out that you’ve repeated that Carl Sagan quote and the sentences around it twice in the same essay! One of them needs to be deleted :)