Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Noticeably treating a coworker differently because of your beliefs about their gender identity is not a balanced and pragmatic solution.
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I Met Paul Graham Once
491–500 of 860 posts
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#492Great, cohesive, and clear essay! Hear hear. One thing that I think is underappreciated in our current times, that gets lost on both the left and the right sides -- an individual is more important than their identity . - A specific trans person can also be an asshole. - A specific white man can also be a saint. Extremists on both political sides will scream about the reasons one or the other of those statements is wr…
Good thought. The only change I'd make, to make your neutrality explicit, is to say - A specific trans person can be an an asshole. A specific trans person can be a saint. - A specific white man can be an asshole. A specific white man can be a saint.
Yes, the also implies that there is a default.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is genuinely absurd. 99.99% of the time the issue of 'where do female identify rapists belong' is brought up, it's because someone who disagrees with the broader point is trying to create some kind of gotcha. It happens constantly online. Leftist A will say something about respecting gender self-identification and then rightwinger B will manipulate the conversation so that the leftist is now trying to defend put…
It's not a left versus right issue, not really. Most of the feminists arguing against gender self-id are on the left. This isn't a gotcha either. When the horrific outcomes of males being transferred into women's prisons is brought up, it's typically being done to explain why gender self-id policy is so harmful to women. Often, the person advocating for gender self-id hasn't spent any time considering this impact at…
> It's not a left versus right issue, not really. Most of the feminists arguing against gender self-id are on the left.
In the sense that the vast majority of all feminists of any kind are on the left? Is there such a thing as a rightwing feminist? JK Rowling?
> This isn't a gotcha either. When the horrific outcomes of males being transferred into women's prisons is brought up, it's typically being done to explain why gender self-id policy is so harmful to women.
This is literally the point I was trying to make about these types of conversations. It's extremely tempting to argue with your blanket assertions of 'detriment to [other] women and girls', but now instead of talking about the person in the article's very real concern about being discriminated against while working or even being attacked while socializing, we're talking about some extreme hypothetical about women's prisons.
Also, it's weird how often people are completely silent about the treatment of female prisoners... until it's related to transgender issues. Or female athletes for that matter. If you were actually worried about it, there are probably bigger fish to fry.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but in practice what sort of common ground do you think we can find here? Because it sure seems like the only possible solution is to give Ukraine enough advanced weapons to exterminate all the orcs. If you have a feasible alternative then I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. The real world is an ugly place and sometimes there is no win-win solution.
Are we solving the Russian-Ukraine war in this thread? ;) - Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine. - Putin doesn't seem to care about the number of Russians lost in this war. - Direct involvement by western armies could lead to a nuclear escalation. NATO could easily push Russia out of Ukraine in a conventional war. Too big of a gamble…
> Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
OK, general. I wasn’t aware of your military credentials. Russia is about 12 months away from completely exhausting all of its Soviet stockpiles of (tens of thousands of) vehicles and artillery, and their war economy is already unable to sustain production at replacement rates.
On the contrary, it’s only a matter of time.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is genuinely absurd. 99.99% of the time the issue of 'where do female identify rapists belong' is brought up, it's because someone who disagrees with the broader point is trying to create some kind of gotcha. It happens constantly online. Leftist A will say something about respecting gender self-identification and then rightwinger B will manipulate the conversation so that the leftist is now trying to defend put…
Don't assume bad faith where it doesn't exist. As I clearly think, given what I said above, most of what trans people want is obviously fair and just. To go through life, being treated as their preferred gender, and not facing discrimination of various kinds for that choice. But that isn't where we are. Instead we are in a world where Kamala Harris was, completely unforced, recorded talking about protecting trans rig…
So now you're arguing that it's all kamala harris and those darn leftist's fault for bringing up trans rights and if they had just shut up, everything would be peachy keen?
Like, I'm genuinely not trying to create a strawman, I'm just rephrasing literally what you said.
I'm reminded of MLK's quote about white moderates here...
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
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To demonstrate that you're in the "in group", it is not enough to simply support most of what they are into. You must take a potentially expensive position that demonstrates your absolute support. That's exactly what you're doing with your own rhetoric, you know.
No, I definitely don't know that.
My "rhetoric" about the issue which Donald J. Trump spent something like 1/4 of his ad spend on. I didn't pick it to sound extreme. I picked it because it was very important to how politics will play out for the next 4 years.
If you don't like what Trump does now, you can thank Kamala's attempts to ingratiate herself to trans activists back in 2019.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#497Didn’t we agree no more politics on HN?
If Trump getting shot doesn’t make on HN, I don’t think Trump announcing his gender policy should.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#498> I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means.2 I know for a fact, that for most people – including many of the people he hangs out with – it just means “left-wing thing I dislike”. I got the impression that he thinks it’s bad, and that companies should purge people who are too woke. Maybe I’m being unfair to him.
The funny thing is that Paul Graham has a framework for thinking about these sorts of things, which is explained very eloquently in "beating the averages". He calls it the "Blub paradox".
Blub is a hypothetical programming language that is roughly average in terms of expressive power and abstraction. The Blub programmer can recognize languages that are inferior to Blub because they lack some important feature that they would find it difficult to do without. On the other hand, they can't recognize the merits of more powerful languages very easily because the features are unfamiliar and seem like "a bunch of abstract nonsense invented by ivory-tower academics" that have limited real-life application.
I think the same thing works for social views. It's easy for someone somewhere on the spectrum from might-makes-right brutishness on one end and perfect wisdom, justice, and harmony on the other to know when they're looking down. But someone who is more "progressive" than they are will usually appear indistinguishable from someone trying to impress their friends with how "woke" they are.
I think this comes into play in elections. Voters in general seem to be more willing to vote for someone more conservative than they are than someone more liberal.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#499Some of the disagreement or confusion seems to stem from the definition of the word "woke" which means different things to different people? Having read both essays I don't see them necessarily in disagreement. pg criticizes the performative and orthodox nature of some social justice activists' behavior, however it doesn't seem that the author's behavior here is performative at all. Perhaps we should just avoid these…
If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing. In some circles, someone being gay or trans will always be a sin, and non-whites seen as “lesser beings” (both their views not mine). As it stands, these people vote more consistently for the same party and in larger numbers. We should hire…
>If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing.
"If we name our religion the Religion of Peace..."
This line of illogic has been memed for years: https://imgflip.com/i/67qfsz
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're calling a coworker something that they are uncomfortable with enough to get HR involved, HR may be the prigs but you're being an asshole.
Yes on a pragmatic basis, if the coworker is male and gets upset at being referred to by "he", but it goes against your own personal beliefs to refer to him as "she", it's best just to refer to him by name and practise wording your sentences to be pronounless. And, where possible and not disadvantageous, to avoid situations where he's involved in your own work. With this approach, he's less likely to make a complaint…
If it goes against your personal beliefs to call someone what they prefer to be called at no expense to yourself, then you need some new personal beliefs.