HJ Hornbeck has a post titled Watch Your Language, criticizing Laci Green for a series of tweets on Trump’s ban on trans people in the military. I have numerous disagreements with HJ’s post, and it feels too long to leave as a comment. On the other hand, this is a bit arcane, so I don’t actually recommend people read this unless they’re especially interested in the topic.
TL;DR: It is reasonable to call trans discrimination gender discrimination (as opposed to gender identity discrimination).
When Trump was elected, and for many months following, people kept on talking about why he was elected. What caused it? This conversation irritates me deeply, because people lack a base-level understanding of what causation is. But I’ve waited to say anything because I thought it might be too crass to insert a philosophical discussion into a political one, at least while it was still hot.
Cause and effect is often thought to be a fundamental part of the way the world works, but I and other physicists understand that it is not. For a brief explanation, I recommend this video by Sean Carroll. It is better to think of causality as an emergent property, more in the realm of philosophy than physics.
What does physics have to say about the cause of Trump’s election? It’s everything in Trump’s past lightcone! It was the DNC, it was Clinton, it was Comey, it was Russia, it was neoliberalism, it was identity politics, it was ancient supernovae. This answer is rather naive, but what did you expect from us? Physics can’t provide all the answers.
When we talk about causes, we’re typically just selecting a few things from the past lightcone, and highlighting those things as important. In philosophy, this is known as causal selection. Sean Carroll talks a little bit about causal selection. He says that one way of thinking about it is that a cause is something that has great leverage over the future. But that’s just one way we might think about it.
I will only make a brief comment on this, because I don’t think it is really worth more than that.
In Berkeley, where I live, Richard Dawkins was invited to give a talk about his new book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. The sponsors of his talk, KPFA, a progressive radio station, decided to cancel the talk because of “abusive speech” by Richard Dawkins. This story has hit some of those frozen peach buttons, with Jerry Coyne declaring it “a terrible blow for free speech”.
The one and only time I ever saw Dawkins speak was at the very same venue, talking about another book he wrote, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. There are many things I find objectionable about Dawkins, but I am personally able to separate that from his science writing, which seems fine. So I don’t really agree with KPFA.
But geez, by turning this into a free speech issue, you’re making me take the opposite side! Obviously, the KPFA, being the sponsors of the talk, has a right to cancel their own talk. In fact, it would practically be a violation of KPFA’s free speech, if they were forced to sponsor a talk from someone they didn’t like. Also, doesn’t sponsoring talks cost them money or something?
People are always thinking of these issues in terms of the speaker’s free speech, but if anything, it’s about the inviters’ free speech. If speakers have a right to platforms, where are all my speaker invitations, and why isn’t anyone standing up for my free speech?
This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015. Actually, it used to be two articles, but I concatenated them here.
So, let’s talk about cisgender people, and how our sparing cis intellects assume the most ingratiating posture of surrender whenever the subject of trans people is broached.
When a trans person says they feel like this gender or that gender, many cis people find that confusing. “What does it feel like to feel like a man? *I* don’t feel like I am a man. Rather, I’m a man because society railroaded me into this role.”
If you feel sympathetic to this response, you may be interested in the theory of cis by default. Under this theory, some cisgender people simply do not have an internal sense of gender (“feeling like a man” or “feeling like a woman”), and simply go by the gender they’re told they are from birth.
This implies that not all cis people are the same. Some cis people have an internal sense of gender, some do not. If you’re confused by the very idea of an internal sense of gender, maybe you’re one of the people who doesn’t have one.
Renowned YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano recently talked about whether White people can enjoy Jay-Z. This was in response to a viewer question who asked what he thought about people who said that Jay-Z’s recent single, “The Story of O.J.” wasn’t for White people.
I mostly agree with Fantano’s answer: yes, White people can certainly enjoy Jay-Z’s music, yes they can enjoy rap, and yes rap is already ingrained in our musical culture. However, I observe that Fantano changed the question from “Is Jay-Z’s music for White people?” to “Can White people enjoy Jay-Z’s music?”
When someone says, “This music is not for you,” they are not trying to say “Stop enjoying this music.” Or, at least I don’t think they are. The question referred to arguments in the YouTube comments on Jay-Z’s video, but I couldn’t actually find these arguments. Instead what I found was a bunch of White people rather defensively asserting that they did enjoy the music.
What are they even reacting to? Did they read some YouTube comments that I can’t find? Or is it a matter of misinterpretation, in the same way that Anthony Fantano himself subtly changed the original question?
Let us consider an idea that perhaps isn’t really worthy of consideration, the idea that taxation is theft. This is a common idea in certain libertarian political philosophies, so I don’t really need to reinvent the wheel. I found a perfectly good rebuttal upon a basic search.
The article suggests three different ways to interpret the claim that taxation is theft:
I skimmed the comments to see if there were any other interpretations, and concluded we should add one more:
4. Taxation resembles theft in that there is an involuntary exchange of wealth under threat of force.
It’s time for my monthly linkspam, just a collection of articles I found interesting from the past month.
In the Shadow of the Holodeck – A couple of months ago, my linkspam featured an article by Ian Bogost called “Video games are better without stories“. This article here reinterprets Bogost as saying “most of even the successful cases of storytelling in video games are, formally speaking, extremely unambitious.” That is, successful video game stories are still very traditional in structure, rather than offering infinite branching possibilities. It turns out that people like traditional story structures. IMHO the problem with branching story structures is that it’s difficult to traverse them in a Hamiltonian path, so you either miss some content or you replay some content. This reminds me of Scott McCloud’s predictions about infinite canvas webcomics. Such webcomics exist but it turns out that they’re kind of clunky to actually navigate.
I did end up playing What Remains of Edith Finch, the game that inspired Bogost’s article. Contrary to what people were saying, this game was extremely literary. It was a story about stories about death. But yeah, the structure was almost entirely linear, and it could very well have been told in book form.
Games telling stories? – Here’s another article about whether games tell stories. It seems to be targeted at people taking games studies 101. I recommend it to anyone who wants to think about the question more systematically.
An intersex perspective on the trans, intersex, and TERF communities – This is an excellent article that gets into some of the differences in how trans and intersex communities talk about things, and how that can create friction. Found via Shiv.