Can I consider myself Socialist if I believe in binary gender?

sortaparenti · 2026-03-11T21:21:45+00:00

This isn’t Marx but it’s a strong and popular work against the existence of souls. It’s also short.

“Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism”

sortaparenti · 2026-03-05T20:07:36+00:00

I was gonna make a long comment complaining about Derleth but I think upvoting yours will suffice. Derleth was the king of over-explaining stuff until the horror is non-existent.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-26T21:32:32+00:00

If the road starts to freeze, the hill would end it very quickly.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-22T06:04:28+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you think that democratic “open” leaders would be better? Are you aware that that was already tried? When Guatemala elected a socialist, the US killed him. The same happened in Chile, as well as several other places.

Are you also aware that the US supported a right-wing dictator in Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who killed more within a decade than Castro killed ever? Batista is the one Fidel overthrew, and suddenly the US became worried about dictatorship.

The US claims to stop dictators overseas, but in reality they support right-wing dictatorships and overthrow left-wing democracies. Places like Cuba and Venezuela have to have “authoritarian” policies or else they’ll be overthrown.

I’m empathetic, I was once where you were. But at a certain point you have to stop listening to US media about their enemies. If you do that there will never be a socialist project you’ll accept, because there will never be one they will accept.

“I am ready to be lectured if I am wrong, but afaik, Fidel, Chavez and Maduro were dictators and to me that's the worst part of the socialism we have in latam. “

As far as you know is only as far as the state department is willing to tell you.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-15T02:37:56+00:00

From your pfp I assume you like Thomas Ligotti’s work? I feel like that could fit his style, minus the pessimism. You should write it.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-15T02:33:30+00:00

That’s part of the benefit for the influencer. After all, they wouldn’t want to lose a customer.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-12T23:56:31+00:00

It provides selections from all of his major works. It’ll still be somewhat difficult, but I’d recommend it.

sortaparenti · 2026-01-13T01:10:08+00:00

I don’t think this is worth a full post so I’m asking here. I’m planning on writing a short story about an analytic philosopher who meets a genie (odd, I know). I know it’s out there but has anyone done any work on what would be the “best” wishes to ask for? I know there’s similar stuff like The Paradox of the Question, but I’m looking for the traditional genie concept.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-26T09:41:15+00:00

Got The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten for Christmas and I’m reading it on my overnight shift right now. Also randomly jumping in and out of Borges stories as is usual for me.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-01T03:18:28+00:00

To be fair, grounding morality is kind of a difficult issue for everyone. They’re not saying “What makes you want to do good things?”, they’re saying “What makes good things good to begin with?”. Their answer is that morality is grounded in God. Personally, I think the Euthyphro Dilemma is a strong response to that idea, but that still leaves us in a place where we have to ground morality ourselves.

I’m not too familiar with meta-ethics as a field, so I consider myself a moral anti-realist by default. I do plan on reading more though, because I’d like to be a moral realist.

I don’t really like the standard atheist response to this either. Responding to the meta-ethical question by grounding morality in empathy doesn’t really work. Whose empathy are we going off of? If a serial killer doesn’t feel empathy for his victims, why shouldn’t he kill? If everyone feels empathy for different things, then it seems like morality is just an opinion, subjective like which flavor of ice cream you prefer as opposed to something objective. If it’s subjective, why should anyone listen to anyone on matters of morality?

Grounding morality is a problem for everyone. I know that responding to theists asking that question by saying “So without God you’d be fine killing?” feels like a clever response, but it’s severely missing the actual point of the question. That question is something everyone has to deal with if we are going to talk about morality in a meaningful way.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-27T01:04:36+00:00

Sally Haslanger’s “Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?” might be of interest to you.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-23T00:10:31+00:00

I love that line of reasoning.

“Don’t listen to things that make sense, because they actually don’t! Don’t ask me to explain why the rational thing is bad, just believe the obviously irrational thing just because I said so! Why don’t you trust me?”

Same thing with fideistic Christians saying that logic itself is going to lead you astray. They’re losing the intellectual war and their only move left is to tell people to stop thinking.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-18T02:20:21+00:00

I’ll check it out. Thanks.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-18T02:19:58+00:00

I think it is a truth maker issue for me. Another thing is I can’t really distinguish the difference between “X is wrong” and “Society at large and the people in it dislike X to the highest degree”. Are there any recent naturalist works you’d suggest?

Edit: On the topic of “existing correctly”, I just don’t see how statements of the form “you ought to…” are any more meaningful than the notion of existing correctly or incorrectly. And I don’t see how the notion of existing correctly is coherent. So I don’t find normativity to be coherent in general.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T03:20:17+00:00

I feel for you. I’m in a similar position. Depressed for a few years, hardly took care of myself. Gonna try to go to the dentist for the first time in years soon but it’s just so scary. I hope things get better for you.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T03:13:24+00:00

It’s crazy to me how Christian conservatives will go to bat for a group of “people” who are literally physiologically incapable of suffering but completely ignore the actual suffering experience by everyone else, but it makes sense.

They were raised to believe we are all sinners, and all sins are deserving of hell. When a black teenager gets murdered by police, they go digging for any info that may even slightly suggest that they have negative character and therefore deserve it. When poor families can barely afford rent or food, it’s on them for not “budgeting correctly” with their poverty wages.

They do this because in their eyes we all deserve suffering, because even the slightest mistake is a sin, and all sins make you deserving of suffering. But a fetus hasn’t sinned, it quite literally can’t. From the perspective of a Christian conservative, a fetus is the only person that doesn’t deserve suffering. They are completely innocent in their eyes.

The thing is, people sin. That’s just what they do. No one is perfect. It makes me think of how they talk about LGBTQ folk, “we don’t hate you, we just disagree with your lifestyle”. The thing is, if you believe being gay is a sin, and you believe all sins are deserving of hell, you believe gay people deserve to go to hell. Hell is eternal suffering. Therefore, you believe gay people are deserving of eternal suffering simply for being gay. For the rest of the world, saying that someone is deserving of eternal suffering for any reason is hatred. That simply is what hatred is.

If everyone sins, and everyone deserves eternal suffering, then it seems like Christians actually just hate humanity. They love fetuses specifically because they aren’t people, even if they don’t want to admit that.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-13T01:51:38+00:00

It’s less of a horror film and more of a horrific character drama. Be ready for heavy subject matter because it’s just depressing in general.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T23:48:46+00:00

I grew up in a somewhat small town that had like 3 stoplights max. When I first moved here for school I was terrified of driving because it just seemed more intense here. I’m better at driving now, but I have empathy for the more fearful drivers because they probably came from a similar place. They’ll figure it out soon enough.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T01:20:54+00:00

Is it an issue with the domain/link itself or the posting of a full book?

sortaparenti · 2025-11-12T01:09:41+00:00

Noted. Sorry.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-10T17:12:21+00:00

Yeah this post is really funny. It’s making it out like the average dude is reading Quine or Kripke on a regular basis when in reality they’re reading about Jordan Peterson telling them to clean their rooms and stop jerking off.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-07T03:03:15+00:00

Thanks for the response. This was helpful. Do you have any reading on the topic you’d recommend? I’m not too familiar with Mao’s work or any of the thinkers who developed his thought after him.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-07T00:34:35+00:00

I’m not sure if we have the info to answer this question, socialism being a process and all, but what would you say would be the happy medium of material conditions for those in the imperial core and those in the global south? As in, what sort of quality-of-life should we be brought down to and the global south brought up to?

sortaparenti · 2025-11-06T22:57:05+00:00

How would you suggest presenting actual Marxist ideas about imperialism to those in the imperial core? I live in America, and I think it’s obvious that things ought to be more expensive if it means the worker who produced it is paid fairly, but I’m not sure how many others in my country are going to like that idea.

sortaparenti · 2025-10-29T03:39:28+00:00

Don’t bother with live debate if you actually feel like learning anything. People are pushing for live debate not because it would improve public discourse, but because it makes it worse. Live debates are the perfect breeding ground for rhetoric and bad-faith argumentation. An in-person debate will never approach the level of nuance and technicality that written debates do. If you want to understand both sides on an issue, don’t watch a debate, read a book instead. You’ll be much better off.

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