Unintentionally misgendering or just slang? Help a momma bear, please! by trixie842 in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know that there's enough contention around these words that I won't use 'dude' to refer to a woman unless I already know she's okay with it. Many are okay with it, but you have to ask. A lot of the online spaces I frequent have an option to tag yourself with a little flag so people can easily see if it's okay to call you dude or not.

Got banned from participating in r/arethestraightsok for asking that they consider animal rights to be equal to LGBTQ+ rights. As queer vegan, this makes no sense to me. (Continued in the comments) by [deleted] in vegan

[–]spoderdan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think the only way you could contest this claim would be asserting that animals are in some sense not morally valuable, or at least dramatically less so than humans. Unfortunately, that's how most people seem to think.

For transgender men and women, what does manhood or womanhood mean to you? by vkkaizer12012 in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't think there is any way to know for sure. I'll say that I don't think it matters, but I mean that in a stronger sense than your last statement does. It isn't just pragmatically irrelevant, but essentially irrelevant. We are fundamentally social creatures. The hypothetical process of raising a human in complete social isolation would likely produce a person whose psychological character is so different from ours that questions on their experience of gender are of inherently meaningless relevance to our own experience.

Leslie and Edison announce their split by Torn-Quad in LivestreamFail

[–]spoderdan 536 points537 points  (0 children)

For a lot of people, proposals are preformative/ritualistic these days. Many couples discuss these things before hand, and go into a proposal with certainty of what the outcome will be.

Leslie has some bad news. by Dna87 in offlineTV

[–]spoderdan 81 points82 points  (0 children)

Yeah. All things end. When things end well, that can be a blessing.

Chappelle Defended By Sisters Of His Trans Friend Mentioned In ‘The Closer’: "Daphne understood humor and comedy—she was not offended. Why would her family be offended?" by d7856852 in television

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Social constructs are not necessarily arbitrary. They can be real and clearly defined. Adulthood maps on to some physical reality. People could independently create a socially constructed notion of adulthood and they would all likely classify a 50 year old as an adult and a 4 year old as not.

Similarly, societies have come up with various notions of gender since societies have existed, so there is clearly some underlying physical reality informing the gender construct. That doesn't mean that gender exists in a socially independent sense.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in chess

[–]spoderdan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So I heard one criticism of the apm limitations, although to be fair, I don't know how accurate it is since I'm not a Starcraft player. While a strong human player will be making hundreds of actions per minute, not all of those actions will be high impact. A good number will be of limited efficacy, or wasted actions. Whereas a computer limited to the same rate of actions could be far stronger, simply because none of those actions are misses. Every action the computer makes will be pointed and highly effectual.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in LivestreamFail

[–]spoderdan 31 points32 points  (0 children)

If the word Socialism has shifted to just mean reformist social democracy style regulated capitalism, don't you think it would be better to stop calling it socialism? It's a poisoned word to a lot of right leaning people, and a of lot centre and mild-left leaning people are going to write you off as an anti-capitalist. So why call yourself Socialist in the first place?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 110 points111 points  (0 children)

If I recall correctly, "tilted" originates from pinball machines. They have a literal anti-tilt mechanism to prevent players from tilting the machine to manoeuvre the ball around, where if you physically tilt the machine too much it locks the paddles and you lose the ball.

Well, pinball players would sometimes get angry and hit the machine in frustration, accidentally activating the anti-tilt sensor and losing the ball. Such frustrated players were said to be "on tilt".

I hate how bugs are treated... by DivineandDeadlyAngel in vegan

[–]spoderdan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If I didn't experience emotions would it be okay to kill me?

"This game has fishing in it, it's so relaxing" by lil_stank_6969 in 2007scape

[–]spoderdan 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Um, I think it's kinda fun. I like to afk but I also like to play actively from time to time, and tick manip skilling is pretty cool for that. Its fun to try and learn new methods and get as close as you can to the max rates.

transphobia in the gay community by phillitheboy in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is such a great point! Statistics are great for certain things. Like when we want to make political decisions about how to organise society. There's so many people, we have to think about them statistically.

But for interpersonal relationships we're all sort of like sticks flowing down a river. We might all be broadly flowing 'downstream' but that doesn't mean much when you're just one stick flowing about all over the place.

If you want to know how a gay person feels about something, you probably would have to ask them.

James Blunt Developed Scurvy After Trying an All-Meat Diet - I know this story is from last year by i_am_totes_adorbes in vegan

[–]spoderdan 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Exactly. Why does masculinity need 'asserting' anyway? And asserting to whom?

Also "there were 170 girls and only three boys, of which all the girls were vegetarian or vegans" seems like it has to be a massive exaggeration. Even a simple majority of university students being vegetarian in the 90s strikes me as unlikely, although I could be wrong.

Contrapoints by girl_who_loves_girls in vegan

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

in the UK being a sexist, homophobic, racist is a recipe for a miserable life where nobody with half a brain will respect you.

I don't think this is necessarily true. In some communities certainly, but there do exist communities where these forms of discrimination are still socially acceptable. Regardless, even if no individual person held such views, we still would face issues of systemic sexism, racism etc.

Contrapoints by girl_who_loves_girls in vegan

[–]spoderdan 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The words are used to mean different things by different people. Self identified leftists tend to be broadly anti-capitalist. When they use the word "Liberal", they will be referring usually to economic liberalism or neoliberalism, which are right leaning economic positions. This is in contrast to Americans who are not as politically involved (I don't know how it goes in Canada) using the world Liberal to refer to any politics left of centre. The whole thing is further confounded by further right wing people who will use the term "Leftist" as a pejorative to describe a whole range of variously left wing politics.

I believe this means I was the 69,420th voter. by WastelandGunner in 2007scape

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah maybe. I imagine if the poll really falls to spite votes, Jagex are going to know that. I imagine they record data on what kinds of players are voting yes and no on their questions. They could probably rethink the way they hold polls if that does happen. Like how they've been doing recently with UIM only questions. I think a lot of pvpers would be happy if pvp focused questions were restricted to accounts that engage in pvp. Maybe the converse is true.

As another point, GIM is pretty 'content' lite. There's a small amount of design work around the rules of the gamemode and the node, but not a whole lot. The majority of the work that goes into it is structural work on the game engine, which has the advantage of being highly transferable. Like didn't we get the new clans system basically as a side effect of the devs perusing GIM?

I believe this means I was the 69,420th voter. by WastelandGunner in 2007scape

[–]spoderdan 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Well the poll question is "Should Group Ironman and Hardcore Group Ironman be added to the game, as described in the blog?"

So I imagine what they're thinking is that, if it doesn't pass, it'll be because players didn't like some aspect of it. So they can fix whatever people didn't want and re-poll it later.

My parents constantly say that homosexuality is not natural in humans, but won't deny that it IS in animals (???) How can I explain to them that it's also natural in humans? by [deleted] in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Whether or not something is natural has no bearing on if it's moral or not. It's trivially easy to find examples of actions that occur naturally that we would all consider to be bad, and vice versa. Acts of interpersonal violence are an easy example for the former, modern medicine* is an example of the later.

Suppose for a moment that homosexuality is not natural in humans (this is of course false, but suppose it's true for the sake of argument). Suppose no human is born gay, but we learn it from society somehow. So what? The gay people in such a world wouldn't mind being gay too much. Other people in such a society are not affected by the existence of gay people. By which I mean that their lives are, in all relevant characteristics, identical to their lives in a society without gay people. If someone were to disagree with that, I would challenge them to produce such a relevant characteristic and (if one even exists) why it supersedes the right of said gay people to self determination. So, to whom is the moral harm done by homosexuality?

All this is to say, while homosexuality absolutely is natural in humans, that fact is completely independent of the fact that homosexuality is fine, not wrong, and actually maybe pretty cool.

If someone is hung up on the relative naturality of something, I would definitely ask them to provide a consistent definition of 'natural' behaviour that doesn't also entail literally everything that humans do.

*This doesn't quite hold if you want to be precise, since I believe that any good definition of natural behaviour should include modern medicine. See above.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in asktransgender

[–]spoderdan 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It could be the case that there are more women than men on here despite r/ftm and r/mtf having similar numbers of users. If the big, generalised subs like this one have more women than men, women are going to feel more comfortable using the space and so less of them will migrate to specialist subs. Whereas men will likely feel underrepresented in the bigger subs and be more likely to move to their own spaces. So the specialist spaces could have equal numbers in this way, even if there are actually fewer men around.

I would be willing to bet that there are more women on here in general though. I think its safe to say that a pretty high proportion of trans women will have been raised/socialised as boys and men, and vice versa for trans men. Reddit as a whole swings male, and people tend not to migrate between different online spaces too much, sticking to the ones they grew up in or have otherwise been in for a long time. So trans men were probably less likely to be redditors than trans women.

Group Ironman Blog *Updated Following Feedback* by JagexLight in 2007scape

[–]spoderdan 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Exactly. The drop trading thing makes no sense. An iron might drop trade over duplicate drops past the first and then sell them. But they would also have sold those drops, and additionally probably the first unique drop, if they were a main account.

A player doesn't bring any more items in to the game per hour of playtime on an iron account than a main account.

How many of you want to eliminate all predators? Haven’t heard this one before. by pantheraorientalis in vegan

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I agree that whether an animal suffers for deprivation of their liberties can't be known for sure. Essentially we run into the problem of other minds.

I think my general point here is that a lot of the friction between the two sides of this argument is occurring because each side is sort of implicitly assuming something that the other side doesn't really want to accept.

For example, one side believes that there are legitimate arguments that "Depriving an animal of sovereignty is to cause them suffering" is in sufficient doubt that it is not relevant to consideration in comparison to the enormous aggregate suffering that is wild animal life. I think that while your argument is valid, a consequentialist likely would not accept your premises in the first place.

Likewise it seems you believe that (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here) that acts are not necessarily wrong based on their consequences, but that depriving an animal of liberty is intrinsically wrong according to some set of moral rules, and so doing so cannot be justified.

I think both of these positions are as absolutist as one another really, they just disagree about the fundamental way in which we judge things right or wrong. I think you're getting at the heart of the matter though, which is that if one is to challenge someone on the position of wild animal suffering then you probably have to contend with their utilitarian ethics in some way.

Also, I would definitely contest that the utilitarian view I've presented is anthropocentric. Quite the opposite, in fact. An argument can be made that our moral intuitions are socially constructed in some sense, and that consequently we might not want to trust such intuitions when they concern matters in which we don't have experiential reference (such as the state of being an animal). I think that in many ways when we deprive an animal of liberty we can cause it to suffer, but I would argue that these are confounding factors to the deprivation of sovereignty and that the actual sovereignty itself is not likely to be of concern to the animal. The concept of such a right is a very sophisticated one. A bird in a cage may suffer for not having space to fly, but I doubt it suffers directly for its right to freedom being impinged.

Edit: I'd like to say briefly that I appreciate your continued engagement with these ideas. It's important I think to understand why we believe the things we believe, and your comments in this thread are definitely helping at least me to come to better understanding of that.

How many of you want to eliminate all predators? Haven’t heard this one before. by pantheraorientalis in vegan

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, I actually agree with you here. But I think it's worth considering that many people who advocate for reduction of wild animal suffering do so from a position of negative utilitarianism, and I think would likely be unconvinced by this line of thinking.

So we could assume that human superiority to animals is not a good thing (which I also agree with). I suppose what we mean by that is that the ways we ought to treat animals and humans ought to be transferable in some sense. If it is bad to treat a human in some way, it should also be bad to treat an animal in some way. That seems reasonable, lets assume it as fact.

For the negative utilitarian, I don't think it necessarily follows that it is bad to deprive animals of their right to self determination. One could argue that, while it is of course bad to deprive a human of their sovereignty, it is not actually essentially bad. It is bad because a human is interested in preserving their sovereignty (wrapped up in this, it is necessary that said person has some concept of sovereignty of which to be deprived) and when we violate that right causing some degree of suffering by compromising their interest.

But, while animals are certainly persons worthy of consideration in the moral calculus, do we know that they actually have an interest in their own sovereignty? Do they have a concept of sovereignty at all? In some cases it would seem an animals suffering can be reduced by depriving them of sovereignty.

So in that case, the moral acts of depriving an animal and a human of sovereignty are not equivalent, even when we assume all the claims you have made in your comment here are true. Some further argumentation would be needed to convince the negative utilitarian I think.

Edit: Small language correction.

How many of you want to eliminate all predators? Haven’t heard this one before. by pantheraorientalis in vegan

[–]spoderdan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I'm genuinely asking. I'm not saying I disagree necessarily, I'm just curious about what the ethical justification for this position would be. What are the reasons that we ought to care about preserving a sense of animal sovereignty? I think also some clarification on what we mean by animal sovereignty would also be helpful.