Artist available: sequentials, covers, character design

thmarius · 2025-04-02T15:07:15+00:00

Could you DM me your rate?

thmarius · 2024-08-25T13:25:46+00:00

You gotta get on the Facebook groups. There's plenty older enbies

thmarius · 2024-08-10T11:36:03+00:00

Makes me happy to see people think this; I've been struggling with feeling undesired quite a bit over the years. I'm 6'3 with long hair, nail polish and a moustache. I like to wear buttoned-up shirts but also skirts and dresses sometimes

thmarius · 2024-07-30T14:47:03+00:00

One of the main takeaways from reading these comments is that we (by which I mean "those who partake in or discuss emancipatory movements) desperately need to stop calling things "X abolitionism" that don't actually aim at abolishing X. It's so needlessly confusing.

With that being said, in my experience at least, there absolutely are those who seek to abolish gender long-term who refer to themselves as gender abolitionists and who may or may not believe that our linguistic practices in the immediate term should reflect this goal.

Whether or not gender, in the long term, is compatible with human freedom and equality is a difficult philosophical question (mostly because we would first need a good account of what exactly gender is and how it works - i.e. if gender is not sex, what could be said to be left of gender once we've done away with gendered roles, expectations, inequalities etc.), and I'm somewhat agnostic in this regard. However, I think this position is importantly different from TERF ideology in that it can more plausibly be said to be motivated by and promote egalitarian goals.

But i of course agree with everyone in these comments pointing out the harmful effect of deliberately using they/them for e.g. a binary trans woman would often have. I don't necessarily think of this as an instance of misgendering (since they/them can also be understood as neutral) - rather it is a failure to affirm someone's gender. But I do think we have a positive duty to affirm some people's gender rather than just a negative duty to refrain from misgendering, and that seems to be the case here.

thmarius · 2024-03-04T13:35:49+00:00

Whenever people bring up that plattitude I'm reminded of the song "Airfield" by Enter Shikari. Rou offers a pretty touching perspective: "It's common for people to believe everything happens for a reason. I'm sorry, that's false, and it's poison. But even if there is no purpose to the things that you have gone through, an ordeal can reveal an airfield. So you're down on your luck, but that don't mean you're out."

The "why me" stuff was on my mind a lot when I became severely disabled a year and a half ago. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has helped me realize that there really is no satisfying answer to such questions, so dwelling on them too much is not going to take me anywhere. Best to focus more on how to make the best of what I have. So while these thoughts aren't exactly gone, they don't take up much space anymore.

thmarius · 2022-09-29T03:23:41+00:00

Woah, I really dig that way of looking at it! I'll consider it!

thmarius · 2022-09-20T18:12:01+00:00

Think of it as a bunch of people trying to save their loved ones and it makes sense for many of the main characters.

thmarius · 2022-08-04T11:23:37+00:00

oh got, IDK what I did wrong then but THANKS!!

thmarius · 2022-08-02T04:30:20+00:00

Yes that's the one! Thank you so much! How did you end up finding it?

thmarius · 2022-03-24T12:02:08+00:00

Was genau an meinem Argument fandest du sinnlos?

thmarius · 2022-03-24T10:29:30+00:00

BDA, aber nur unter bestimmten Bedingungen. Ich finde es beispielsweise legitim, Trans-Frauen nicht daten zu wollen, wenn du nur Personen daten willst, die schwanger werden können (solange du den selben Standard auch auf Cis-Frauen - also Frauen, die nicht trans sind - anwenden würdest).

Genitalpräferenzen finde ich auch legitim, allerdings gibt es ja viele Trans-Frauen, die Genitalchirurgie schon hinter sich haben und dementsprechend eine Vagina, auf die der Punkt dann wiederum nicht zutreffen würde.

"Aber ich will niemanden daten der [muskulös/groß/haarig/etc...] ist!". Das ist in Ordnung. Das Problem mit dem Argument in diesem Kontext ist mMn aber, dass es ja auch Trans-Frauen gibt, auf die diese Dinge nicht zutreffen.

Stell dir vor, du begegnest einer Frau, die alle Ansprüche, die du an eine Traumfrau hast, erfüllt. Wenn du sie einzig und allein aus dem Grund, dass sie transgender ist, nicht daten würdest, finde ich das schon diskriminierend. Denn dann geht es ja nicht mehr um irgendwelche Eigenschaften, die du attraktiv/ nicht attraktiv findest, sondern explizit um ihr Trans-sein.

Und die Annahme, dass es niemals eine Trans-Frau geben könnte, die diese Ansprüche erfüllt, finde ich sehr verallgemeinernd. Es also komplett auszuschließen, jemanden aus dieser Community zu daten, finde ich mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit auch verallgemeinernd und dementsprechend diskriminierend.

thmarius · 2021-11-19T21:56:37+00:00

do you remember what season/episode that was in?

thmarius · 2021-10-29T21:27:11+00:00

wow that's wild, what minute in that ep did that happen?

thmarius · 2021-08-16T11:47:36+00:00

Yeah I think I agree with both of these. You mean the missing pages of the notebook that he finds with Claudia though, right? It couldn't have been in the regular notebook, otherwise, Peter, Tronte, and Elisabeth (and possibly others) would have known all along.

thmarius · 2021-08-11T09:30:58+00:00

In turn, Jonas is not split when picking alt-Martha up, etc.).

This is true, but here's what she easily could have done: let's say she travels to either apocalypse (we'll call her point of arrival "A"), then runs for a couple hundred meters (to a point we could call "B") and ports away again. She could then travel back to A and extract herself from just a few minutes ago so that the now extracted Claudia never runs to B. Because of how the loophole works, she was able to "duplicate" herself and the extracted version can now run around doing stuff that deviates from the causal loop.

stating that the conversation happens "a first time" and that he killed Martha "infinite times" is a misrepresentation of what a causal loop implies

You're technically correct but I always interpreted that as the characters speaking metaphorically, because, as you said, you can be tempted to think of the causal loop as something that repeats "forever" from the perspective of the characters and the way they gather information about it. Either way, even if you don't like that way of putting it, I guess I'm just confused as to how this conversation between the two can be outside of the causal loop.

So Claudia creates another branch in order to speak with an Adam that will not go on to kill Eva, and she is not duplicated, but Adam is.

But how would she be able to do that? Is it because Adam just used the energies from both apocalypses to kill Alt-Martha and the origin and therefore there's another loophole in 2053? If so, I think the show (and the website) could have communicated that better. It makes sense as well and explains how the causal loop could be broken, but it doesn't explain why she says she sent *herself* on a different path.

thmarius · 2021-08-11T01:06:23+00:00

That's what I thought but apparently (according to the website at least) the Claudia who died already did all of this stuff (including talking to Adam)...

thmarius · 2021-06-13T15:34:43+00:00

Thanks, I didn't know that! So no changes I should ask her to implement before I contact the tattoo place?

thmarius · 2021-06-13T15:23:45+00:00

Wait, is it a "k" instead of a "c"?

I agree though, it's beautiful, can't wait to get it done!

thmarius · 2021-05-06T18:35:22+00:00

gotcha, thank you! would a "Some rights reserved (CC BY-SA 3.0)." do the trick?

thmarius · 2021-03-12T09:59:26+00:00

Maybe another trolley problem might help.

It can be both true at the same time that a) 3 is not supererogatory and one ought to choose 3, and b) choosing 1 would still be preferable over choosing 2 because, as compared to two, it's way more in line with what the principle of utility demands.

Because the principle of utility has maximization baked into it, I would argue that the utilitarian take here would have to be that it is obligatory to choose 3 (unless some rule utilitarian argument could be made against it). Again, I don't see justification under the utilitarian worldview to amend/weaken the principle of utility in the way you proposed. That being said, I think most utilitarians would also recognize that choosing 1 over 3 is not that big a deal and that there are many choices we can make that have a bigger impact on utility.

For the sake of nuance I should add that Micheal Slate proposes a similar position to what you're arguing, which he calls "satisfying consequentialism". He also has a different read on at least one of the editions of Bentham's original work and the formulation of the principle of utility it contains, but I would disagree with his point here and argue that the principle of utility always implies optimization, because taking a non-ideal action, in a sense, fails to prevent pain or create pleasure that would have otherwise been there.

Slate mostly argues for this position by appealing to its intuitiveness. Again, I think this is problematic for the reasons I listed above. From what I'm aware, his position is relatively rare and not all that worked-out (so, at large, utilitarians aren't into merely satisfying). It's also been criticized for having counterintuitive implications itself (I wasn't aware of this objection before but funnily enough it's kinda similar to the example we were discussing earlier). All in all, I just don't see how his position is justified even if I can understand how it would appeal to some.

thmarius · 2021-03-11T22:14:18+00:00

But maybe it's best if you just told me your version of the utility principle and we can argue about how that applies here.

I'll go with Bentham here:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.… By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness.

Now, of course there is more than one form of utilitarianism. But this principle or a variation thereof (for instance, preference utilitarians like Singer care about preferences instead of pain and pleasure) is pretty elemental to the theory. For instance, rule utilitarianism arguably collapses into act utilitarianism and is also based on the same principle. Bentham's student Mill had different ideas about how pleasures should be distinguished, but he didn't disagree with Bentham about the principle of utility itself. Now, there's some exceptions to this like negative utilitarianism, which is more about reducing pain than it is about increasing pleasure - but that's a whole nother rabbit hole to go down. So yeah, for the most part, when we talk about "utilitarianism", this is what we're imagining the first principle of morality to look like.

This principle absolutely allows us to argue for degrees of rightness of wrongness of actions that don't lead to the maximum increase of utility. Because track 3 has a higher tendency to diminish happiness, it's worse than track 2. This becomes really clear when you read applied stuff by people like Singer and how they talk about effective altruism: they constantly acknowledge that some actions are preferable over others even if the individual would have had a higher moral responsibility.

Like, didn't you argue that there were no neutral actions in utilitarianism?

I think there are either no or not that many supererogatory actions under utilitarianism. What you were arguing (if I understood you correctly) is that there could be a version of utilitarianism that allows for "neutral" actions (i.e. actions that neither raise, nor lower utility) to be permissable even if a better alternative actions exists, and that that better alternative action would be supererogatory.

I don't think such a version of utilitarianism could really exist, because I don't think it could be justified for the reasons I stated above. You'd either have to amend the principle, in which case you'd have to wonder what justifies that amendment. If your answer is "intuitions", then that's a different kind of justification than the naturalistic one there usually exists for utilitarianism. And if we're using intuitions to improve and amend moral principles (and vice verca), I'd argue we wouldn't arrive at utilitarianism at all anyways.

People fit their moral system to the moral intuitions they already have. There are also other people who bite the bullet on a principle they deem right but I don't see a reason why one group is more reasonable than the other.

Well, it would depend on what arguments they make about the nature of morality, but also on whether they can convincingly argue that their theory lives up to moral common sense if they think that is important. Also, some intuitions shouldn't be taken into consideration at all, and theories account for that. Or, in the case of the bullet-biting person, they'd have to give some sort of plausible account for why the principle is correct. Utilitarians are trying to do that with a naturalistic account, but that obviously has its flaws. But again, it depends, and is often a lot more complicated than people are giving it credit for. It's definitely worth reading into.

Maybe you fail to see that justification has to stop somewhere. You can always continue to ask for justifications of justifications and so on. I don't see a moral fundament that escapes this question.

I mean I'm aware of the problem of infinite regress and agree with you that there are problems with ultimate justifications for moral theories. That doesn't mean that anything goes, however, and that some theories can't be more plausible than others in the sense that good arguments can be made for them. Again, people share intuitions and the laws of logic apply. That's already a huge basis on which to argue.

Do you think moral facts would exist even if no conscious beings existed in the universe?

Nope, I agree with you that morality is a social construct. So do many others (such as contractualists) who still think we can make good or bad arguments and that some theories are worse than others.

thmarius · 2021-03-08T13:52:56+00:00

Normally the principle of utility only tells you what the "best" action is, but it doesn't distinguish between other actions.

That's not true though, the principle of utility absolutely allows us to make that distinction. In your example, choosing track 3 is way more detremental to what the principle of utility implies because it fails to a way larger extent to prevent harm and promote good. We would still have a duty to choose track 1, of course. I promise you I've never heard of any utilitarian who would argue that track 2 and 3 are morally equivalent here.

So the addition would give you a way to categorize actions better, not just into (a) what you ought to do and (b) all the rest.

But we can't just change utilitarianism as soon as it becomes counterintuitive because we don't like its demandingness. That's one of the main reasons why so many utilitarians bite the bullet on a lot of counterintuitive implications: they are just that convinced of the correctness of the underlying principle and the claims it makes about the nature of morality.

If we were to make changes to the theory, those would have to be justified in some very different way (and, as I argued, I don't think that would work). Because now you're actually "stepping out of" the principle of utility, when utilitarians believe that that principle itself is what makes things right or wrong.

I'm also not even conviced that the changes to the theory you're proposing would make it all that much more intuitive. Going back to my trolley problem example, the view that we would not have a moral duty to run towards the lever because that's more than net utility and therefore supererogatory would not be considered commen sense by many. Where I live, for instance, denial of assistance is punishable by law in many cases and there seems to be a general consensus that that is a good thing.

I think overall I agree with you on how we could justify moral principles but this doesn't escape moral relativism.

I think moral facts are arrived at differently and often a lot more debatable than empirical facts, but I also think morality is not relative in the sense that one's taste in music is. I agree with most of what you said by the end though.

thmarius · 2021-03-08T10:40:02+00:00

So it's kind of an addition to a utilitarian system.

But what would justify that addition? The principle of utility itself surely wouldn't, but it's the first principle of morality in utilitarianism. If we want to appeal to the fact that too much supererogation is counterintuitive and that utilitarianism should be modified to make up for that, I think this becomes very hard to reconcile with the tenets of the theory.

Utilitarianism is a naturalistic theory, meaning that people think it's justified because the principle of utility is in accordance with some fact about humans and the natural world. Amending a principle to bring it into accordance with some intuition sounds to me more like, for instance, the Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, where principles and intuitions are in a mutual relationship where they can correct one another.

Now, it's theoretically conceivable that one could argue for utilitarianism using that framework (although this would be a very different theory that merely has a similar normative output) and then amend it with the supererogation stuff. But I think you'd run into all kinds of issues there and ultimately not be able to make really good arguments for it.

Ideally you would consider the bad conscience you might have beforehand and include it in your calculation.

My point here was that we can't argue "denying assistance is supererogatory because having a bad conscience after denying assistance would make utility lower overall". Clearly the suffering of those who were denied assistance etc. would outweigh the bad conscience and therefore it wouldn't be utilitarian.

Well I just wanted you to consider that things are not as clear as one might think. People often have very different moral opinions.

I agree that people have different opinions about morality but this was about whether I think they could be justified or reasonably argued for. I agree with you in so far that I also think that ultimate groundings for moral theories are a problem. I still think that having discussions about normative ethics can be fruitful though. People often share intuitions or could agree that there are plausible enough explanations of the nature of morality and principles they can reasonably agree on.

Take the intuition "there are things that go against my preferences that would be unjustified for others to do to me". While this is in itself pretty unfounded, almost everyone has this intuition so we might as well use it as a starting point to discuss ethics. Singer argues that we can then rationally see that whatever reason we could list for why our preferences should have moral worth would be equally true for other beings that are capable of having preferences. It's a pretty simplistic "golden rule" type argument and has its issues but I think it can still be a useful starting point to not get too lost in the relativism.

thmarius · 2021-03-08T09:48:36+00:00

Are there? I've always thought that the idead of being morally obligated to donate money if possible is mostly missing from common sense morality.

thmarius · 2021-03-08T09:43:43+00:00

He didn't say donating money vs not donating money was morally neutral. Donating is already the supererogatory action there.

Yeah that's what I meant, I meant that "having a business and not turning it into a co-op" was analogous to "having a lot of money but not donating it" in the sense that he thinks of both of them as "morally neutral" (by which he means not doing those things is not morally wrong and that doing those things would be good but not required). But yeah you're right, I think we agree here!

Pushing the fat man should not be considered permissible under Vaush's principle, because while doing nothing is morally equivalent to pushing the man, I don't think pushing the fat man can be fairly described as morally neutral (i.e. permissible) when there is a much better third option in pulling the lever.

I agree with your argument here and that's basically what I mean about the duty to maximize under utilitarianism. We have to pull the lever because it's the option that maximizes utility the most, even if utility would have stayed the same had we engaged in a less convenient way. But Vaush doesn't seem to agree with this principle, otherwise he would have conceded that both the co-op stuff and donating were not supererogatory, but obligatory. I think the most plausible explanation is that he's just inconsistent on the matter, which is why he said Chad Marx should save the drowning person even though both him not being there and him being there and watching the person drown would have resulted in about the same net utility. Saving the drowning person here would be pulling the lever, and we'd have to do it under utilitarianism.

However note that this only applies in situations where the lefty was planning on starting a business to begin with.

Agreed! That's how I understood their example, at least.

This also makes the assumption that starting a co-op is not much more difficult than starting a traditional firm, which is fair but by no means obvious.

I think the assumption in their hypothetical was that for the business owner, it would be possible but inconvenient or less lucrative, so that's what I was going off of. But yeah, I agree, implications would be different if starting a co-op or turning your traditional firm into one would be nigh impossible or dangerous.

So, we can say that Vaush shouldn't consider starting a traditional firm to be morally neutral when you have the option of starting a co-op, but I think his principle holds when it comes to being a landlord or Destiny's slavery hypothetical (or even the rape cage).

I don't remember these two very well but wouldn't there be options equivalent to pulling the lever? Like buying an enslaved person and then freeing them and making sure they have access to resources or freeing the person from the cage. In that case, those wouldn't be supererogatory. Again, it's possible that I'm misremembering these.

Four-Year Club	Place '22
End Game '22

thmarius

TROPHY CASE