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Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 7:25 am
by Straha
adr wrote:
Straha wrote:I must not post in the TEO's race threads
wat iz the topic this time? i've actually been hitting teo daily for the last week to follow saxonite's posts, i find them interesting
See, the thing is that Saxtonite isn't wrong... He's just not right. See how he ignores the incredible amount of species privilege he possesses, or the way in which he discounts the 'native Americans' claim to land in the thread(s) he advocates for black nationalism.

Or, by contrast, look at the way his relatively basic claims are treated. Those threads are shitshows and to participate in them is to condone them, and I shan't have that.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 7:46 am
by Jung
My main issue with the whole separatism idea is it sounds pretty utopian

As in, completely ignoring the actual political realities which I'm p sure would make such a project a complete non-starter

That and on general principles I'm kind of leery of "we'll solve the problem by moving them away from us" as the solution to people not being able to get along with people different from them.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 8:12 am
by Dooey Jo
adr wrote:i find it so sad that all kinds of marxists and others on the left agree that the workers united will never be defeated...

...yet they continue having big battles over if you're a marxist or a leninist or a marxist-leninist or a maoist or a hoxhaistist or a castroist or blah blah blah blah blah
they should unite against our common enemy


the people's front of judea?!

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 9:27 am
by Gands
RogueIce wrote:
Gands wrote:Can the next testing chat be Testing Chat 5: Assignment Miami Beach?

We need more Police Academy references.
I approve of this message.

Also fixed the title for you. :oinkoink:
Interestingly, it was always listed in Australian TV as just Assignment: Miami. I assume that means that nobody in Australia knew what the fuck Miami Beach was.

We sometimes get weird renamed things. The Weird Al film UHF was renamed The Vidiot from UHF here. Also, Airplane! is called Flying High, presumable to deal with the fact that it's spelt aeroplane here. Mysteriously, Mr Mom and The Great Mom Swap remained unchanged in their titles here, despite them being changed for the UK.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 10:24 am
by Oxymoron
Straha, tell me if I'm wrong, but from reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I got the impression that Persian / Farsi / Iranian, as a language, doesn't differentiate between men and women.

Is that right ?

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 3:50 pm
by adr
The Mormon missionaries just came back for a follow up. Alas, I didn't even start actually reading the book yet, but we had some chat on general principles for about two minutes....

then spent the next ten talking about bicycles, as they saw my sport bike inside the house. lol

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:17 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
Jung wrote:
Infinity Biscuit wrote:For now, "male" and "female" should work without issue?
So you acknowledge the terms are useful descriptions of the natural world, but you think we should not apply them to humans for social reasons?

This seems rather different from "Sex doesn’t really exist in any meaningful capacity. Sex has no cultural or logical root in anything."
I'm not saying that it has no cultural root at all, or that there's no meaning to it. Just that it's not a hard and fast biological rule like people try to say it is, but a constructed conceptual tool.

I mean, look at how the sex differences are in nature. In animals alone, you have males impregnating females, you have males and females depositing gametes externally, you have females who deposit eggs into or onto the male who carries them to term, you have males who exist entirely as tiny parasitic gonads attached to the females, you have creatures that switch between male and female depending on temperature or social conditions, you have creatures where the females impregnate themselves, countless different forms of hermaphrodism... and that's just the reproductive measures. Genetically, some animals have males as the ones with the odd chromosome out, some have females with that, some have neither. And then you have the whole aspect of plants having sexes.

There's obviously nothing out there that is specifically "male" or "female". Sometimes it's a matter of which has the larger gamete, sometimes it's who puts more energy into the offspring, sometimes it's genetic or genital shape or something else, but you'll always find some example where some or most of that won't apply. You honestly probably could provide a better understanding of what's going on by ditching "male vs female" here and talking about the actual differences, but for now it seems sufficient? I dunno maybe it should be abandoned, too, but that's a lot further in scope than what I was trying to talk about.

For people, all that it really brings to the table is a way to hurt trans individuals. If you're willing to use the sex vs gender distinction, you're already necessitating clunky turns of phrase anyway. You could say "abortion is a women-as-a-sex's issue", or you could say "abortion is a people-with-uteruses's issue" (or probably a version that's less clunky). They're both a bit more cumbersome than the traditional "abortion is a women's issue", but both are much less cissexist, and the latter is much less so than the former.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:25 pm
by RyanThunder
or we could just use "boy"/"man" to mean "person with testicles" and "woman"/"girl" to mean "person with ovaries".

of course I guess there's the case where somebody has both of those and i have no idea what to do with that.

I suppose the downside of that would be that you could never actually fully transition from man to woman via GRS? So maybe that's not as good an idea as it sounded like in my head...

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:27 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
Did you just suffer from amnesia or something or

how did you forget the whole "cissexism" thing that was the entire point of this discussion

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:27 pm
by RyanThunder
See my edit

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:36 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
A trans woman is a woman before she undergoes genital reconstruction. A trans woman is a woman if she choose to never undergo that procedure. A cis woman who has no ovaries is a woman. I thought this sort of stuff was already basic knowledge we were all working off of since we were talking about less obvious stuff?

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:40 pm
by adr
remember, there's a lot of other stuff attached to those words. "man" doesn't just mean "has a penis", but it also means all kinds of other things in today's world

like if you say "be a man" (which you shouldn't btw) you don't mean "physically grow a penis", it means all kinds of other stuff like stop crying, make more money, beat people up, you know a whole broad array of things


maybe if we were on another planet that didn't have sexism in the first place, that didn't have transphobia already, man and woman wouldn't be such loaded terms

but alas we aren't there

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:44 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
It doesn't have anything to do with gender roles, either. One of my friends (a trans guy) loves to wear cute skirts and stuff (I met him when he was crossplaying) and I can't think of any ways he particularly fits the machismo standard of masculinity. Doesn't make him any less of a man, though.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 5:54 pm
by RyanThunder
So we're defining 'woman' and 'man' as states of mind now? For lack of a better way to put it.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 6:02 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
Gender identity is a complicated thing, and I'm not sure how much cis people can fully understand it (grok it? is grok a real word oh god chrome's spellcheck says it is). But it's an intrinsic part of a person and who they are, of varying degrees of importance.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 6:47 pm
by adr
yeah, i went with gender roles there to illustrate that the words just have overloaded meaning, but the reason i picked that wasn't even a conscious decision but prolly cuz is it is one i can more easily relate to personally....

anyway i've been trying to find a personal analogy for gender dysphoria and the closest i can come to is maybe a limb injury or numbness, both of which i've been feeling this week so they are fresh in my mind.

from what i've read (being cis myself that's the best i have) it's still different, doesn't capture the wrongness you feel, but kinda gets the idea of you not being /you/ because your brain expects one thing but the body does or looks another.

you know your arm is numb, you go to move it... and nothing happens. it isn't painful, but aside from not doing the task you wanted to do, that just feels wrong. there's not something there that your own brain is convinced is supposed to be there

and indeed this is distinct from the social aspects. this is you look in the mirror and don't feel like you're seeing yourself (literally, for some people from what I've read), not someone else looking at you


so idk i think i kinda get it

unless i'm totally wrong.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 7:55 pm
by adr
so in unrelated stuff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_River_(New_York)
Environmental issues[edit]
About August 10, 2005, the Black was contaminated
wait, "the Black"? who calls it that?

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 8:00 pm
by Infinity Biscuit
Isn't that fairly common for rivers? I know the river I'm on is talked about as "the Penobscot", and you hear about "the Hudson", "the Mississippi", "the Rhine", etc.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 8:24 pm
by adr
Huh, I didn't even think of that. But, yeah, we call the St. Lawrence River "the saint lawrence" too, but I've never heard anyone say "the Black".

Maybe it's just because local people usually just call it "the river", and non-local people don't have any reason to talk about it at all. It just sounds so strange to my ears, whatever the reason.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 8:28 pm
by Oxymoron
So... I think I'll have to watch "American History X", because it seems quite interesting.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 9:39 pm
by Losonti Tokash
everyone should watch that movie

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 10:32 pm
by Straha
Oxymoron wrote:Straha, tell me if I'm wrong, but from reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I got the impression that Persian / Farsi / Iranian, as a language, doesn't differentiate between men and women.

Is that right ?

Yes and no.

Yes in that there is no grammatical gender and the pronouns are gender neutral, which can lead to a great deal of ambiguity when it comes to everyday situations.

No in that there are words for men and women, and collective nouns which are used for groups of men, women, and mixed genders.

There's something to be said for how this influences Iran's remarkably progressive views on trans* issues and sex/gender-changes.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 10:35 pm
by Oxymoron
If I may ask, to which measure are their views on the issue(s) "remarkably progressive" ?

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 11:25 pm
by Kryten
SRS is provided for free by the government, actual gender is recognized on birth certificate, et.c. Still a bunch of issues, like not being recognised as their actual gender without having had SRS, but a heck of a lot better than most Arab nations.

Re: Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 11:27 pm
by Oxymoron
And remember kids, Iran is evil and should be bombed, okay ?