Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 2)

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

No Kings thread is looking to be as engaging as a trans genocide sticky.   Biggest turn out in history huh?

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gop-warns-of-devastating-political-backlash-if-us-puts-boots-on-the-ground-in-iran-we-lose-60-to-70-seats.1475992/page-3#post-153163969

If that's the case I fully support boots on the ground.

"I want people to die because it's bad for republicans in the election."

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

[benji]

I also never want to hear that "good games sell themselves" and "quality is what matters most and drives sales" considering that this is unfortunately one of many examples (like Hi-Fi Rush and Rollerdrome for example) where you could do absolutely everything, and I mean EVERYTHING right in my honest opinion and still not have a job afterwards because this industry is just so unserious and just doesn't care about the working class at all.

If making an excellent, wonderful game isn't enough anymore in this industry, I have to ask. What are we even doing here at this point?

It's really remarkable how much these dudes have zero knowledge of a subject and then spend all their time whining about how it's apparently changed. Throw in some slop about how the "industry is just so unserious and just don't care about the working class at all" as if this has anything to do with what they're whining about. Or that there's any industry anywhere that meets their standards.

I think this is by design to a degree. Just like what happened with Las Vegas where visitation rates dropped significantly but local casinos did not care because they cater to higher income individuals now. I think this is where gaming is heading as well. Leave behind the bottom 50-60% of society and cater to mid-high to high income individuals. It's a symptom of late stage capitalism.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/analysts-anticipate-next-gen-consoles-will-start-at-a-50-higher-price-not-writing-off-1000.1475680/page-8

Selective events and launch prices in 2026 dollars:
~1871: late stage capitalism begins~
~1962: Spacewar! developed on MIT minicomputer after hours~
Atari 2600: $1025
NES: $547
SNES: $477
Sega CD (only the add-on): $696
PlayStation: $641
~1996: nvidia lays off 60% of its employees from the failure of the "too advanced" for the market NV1, survives only because Sega had to pay them $1 million for meeting random terms in NV2 contract before termination~
PlayStation 2: $567
-2001: upon discontinuing the Dreamcast, Sega lays off a third of its employees, which combined with previous cuts represents a reduction by 70% of employees employed at the launch of the Saturn~
Xbox 360 (with hard drive): $668
PlayStation 3 (60GB): $971
PlayStation 4: $560
~2014: Gamergate~
PlayStation 5 (with disc drive): $630
~2022: Elon Musk buys Twitter~
~2023: Israel randomly invades Gaza~
PlayStation 5 Pro: $728

[DavidCroquet]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

I was talking to my wife just yesterday about how candy is such a testament to an essential and shared human "goodness". Once upon a time, the world's greatest baker made a shortbread cookie with caramel and chocolate on it, and fed it to a literal king, and this king was like "holy fuck that's good"...and then he had to wait til this once-in-a-generation baker would return from his ten-year stint being leased out to to the Ottoman empire to experience the ProtoTwix again.

And now all of us, everywhere, can buy a twix--or a dozen!--in the store, anywhere in the world, anytime. Someone invented machines, someone else documented recipes, someone else managed logistics, all with the intent to deliver the Experience of Kings to the everday person. If this isn't evidence of a fundamental law of mutual human care, what is?

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Tune in tomorrow for my nearly identical spiel about about roadway planning and traffic laws.

Also this has nothing to do with Era and is entirely a drunk post, but I promise I believe all that I have written here even when I am completely sober.

[Rendle]

[benji]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

You don't get to be the world's largest food company without knowing how to do petty insurance fraud for less than $1 million of product. (~400,000 bars according to the story, which sell for ~$1.50 each at retail so I'm already massively inflating the value to Nestle themselves)

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Presumably the thieves were not aware the truck was full of KitKat's and targeted it for this reason. You'd have to get all the chocolate off 400,000 bars to use it as black market chocolate, it's mostly a wafer.  

[BIONIC]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

I was talking to my wife just yesterday about how candy is such a testament to an essential and shared human "goodness". Once upon a time, the world's greatest baker made a shortbread cookie with caramel and chocolate on it, and fed it to a literal king, and this king was like "holy fuck that's good"...and then he had to wait til this once-in-a-generation baker would return from his ten-year stint being leased out to to the Ottoman empire to experience the ProtoTwix again.

And now all of us, everywhere, can buy a twix--or a dozen!--in the store, anywhere in the world, anytime. Someone invented machines, someone else documented recipes, someone else managed logistics, all with the intent to deliver the Experience of Kings to the everday person. If this isn't evidence of a fundamental law of mutual human care, what is?

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Tune in tomorrow for my nearly identical spiel about about roadway planning and traffic laws.

Also this has nothing to do with Era and is entirely a drunk post, but I promise I believe all that I have written here even when I am completely sober.

Post hog

[Boredfrom]

This is the big problem we have: regardless of what the Democrats do, so long as the GOP has lost it's collective mind and continues to embrace blatant fascism despite a majority of the nation rejecting those politics, we will continually be at risk of all this happening again and again. So long as we live in a world where the Democrats need to win or we fall to fascism, nothing can ever really get done. At the end of the day, there needs to be a way to force the GOP to appeal to a majority of the nation instead of a deranged minority. This is why I keep arguing the electoral college needs to go as it allows them to continue to go off the rails and still be competitive at the national level.

How is your forum going?

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

No Kings!
Only Ayatollahs!

[Uncle]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

I was talking to my wife just yesterday about how candy is such a testament to an essential and shared human "goodness". Once upon a time, the world's greatest baker made a shortbread cookie with caramel and chocolate on it, and fed it to a literal king, and this king was like "holy fuck that's good"...and then he had to wait til this once-in-a-generation baker would return from his ten-year stint being leased out to to the Ottoman empire to experience the ProtoTwix again.

And now all of us, everywhere, can buy a twix--or a dozen!--in the store, anywhere in the world, anytime. Someone invented machines, someone else documented recipes, someone else managed logistics, all with the intent to deliver the Experience of Kings to the everday person. If this isn't evidence of a fundamental law of mutual human care, what is?

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Tune in tomorrow for my nearly identical spiel about about roadway planning and traffic laws.

Also this has nothing to do with Era and is entirely a drunk post, but I promise I believe all that I have written here even when I am completely sober.

I don't think of it as having to do with human goodness, I think it's just evidence of how good practically all of us have it now, but because it's normalized we don't even think about it

even things like having a fridge is a ridiculous luxury that even kings didn't have access to

I can legitimately spend my whole weekend sitting around doing whatever the fuck instead of working in the field all day in the hopes of raising enough food to sustain myself or repairing a broken fence or mending holes in socks or worrying about being conscripted or raided

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

This is the big problem we have: regardless of what the Democrats do, so long as the GOP has lost it's collective mind and continues to embrace blatant fascism despite a majority of the nation rejecting those politics, we will continually be at risk of all this happening again and again. So long as we live in a world where the Democrats need to win or we fall to fascism, nothing can ever really get done. At the end of the day, there needs to be a way to force the GOP to appeal to a majority of the nation instead of a deranged minority. This is why I keep arguing the electoral college needs to go as it allows them to continue to go off the rails and still be competitive at the national level.

How is your forum going?

Didn't Trump win the popular vote? 

B-dubs you literally silenced a black woman and your white bread ass is over here trying to dictate how a whole nation should be run? Liberals are just as bad as conservatives, if not worse, because they'll lie to your face with a smile while the GOP will at least be honest and tell you they hate your fucking guts.

A liberal is only your friend until you tell them no.

[filler]

larry king somewhat alive 

[Alpacx]

This is the big problem we have: regardless of what the Democrats do, so long as the GOP has lost it's collective mind and continues to embrace blatant fascism despite a majority of the nation rejecting those politics, we will continually be at risk of all this happening again and again. So long as we live in a world where the Democrats need to win or we fall to fascism, nothing can ever really get done. At the end of the day, there needs to be a way to force the GOP to appeal to a majority of the nation instead of a deranged minority. This is why I keep arguing the electoral college needs to go as it allows them to continue to go off the rails and still be competitive at the national level.

How is your forum going?

Have the Democrats tried being more appealing to a majority of the country instead of a deranged minority?
 
Seems like a pretty good way to constantly win elections but what do I know, I'm not Nate Silver.

[Boredfrom]

Funny how fighting games make apparent your universe has a massive gender imbalance, 20 announced characters and only 6 women and one they had to make up for it and Universa appeared in what 2 issues? :(

 
https://www.resetera.com/threads/invincible-vs-conquest-reveal-trailer.1476637/

“Why comics don’t cater to me? The person with a lesbian fetish.”

[filler]

they should have made hermoine black and had rowling play snape 

[Chumbawumbafan69]

The should call it The Please Be Mindful Of Others Day. No offensive slogans. No shouting. No slurs. No protesting outside the designated zone. Respect boundaries. Dress accordingly. Act responsibly. Emergency polenta and loose leaf tea available on request.

It looks like you weren't far off.

[benji]

This is the big problem we have: regardless of what the Democrats do, so long as the GOP has lost it's collective mind and continues to embrace blatant fascism despite a majority of the nation rejecting those politics, we will continually be at risk of all this happening again and again. So long as we live in a world where the Democrats need to win or we fall to fascism, nothing can ever really get done. At the end of the day, there needs to be a way to force the GOP to appeal to a majority of the nation instead of a deranged minority. This is why I keep arguing the electoral college needs to go as it allows them to continue to go off the rails and still be competitive at the national level.

Something which requires 2/3rds of Congress and 75% of the country to agree to do and wouldn't have changed the outcome of the last election.

[benji]

Jeff came to the rescue of one of his female popstars:


And some streamer who was sexually assaulting some guy like B-Dubs:


Then claimed something easily found to be factually incorrect was an objective fact:


Also praised a Disney-related celebrity for hating women (and admitting to piracy?):

[benji]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gop-warns-of-devastating-political-backlash-if-us-puts-boots-on-the-ground-in-iran-we-lose-60-to-70-seats.1475992/page-3#post-153163969

If that's the case I fully support boots on the ground.

"I want people to die because it's bad for republicans in the election."

To be fair, it won't be anyone he cares about. Try understanding empathy.

[Boredfrom]

I was debating if posting this because is AI related and I hate when a company cheapens it out, but ERA finds a way:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/warhorse-studios-kingdom-come-deliverance-reportedly-switching-to-ai-localizations-as-english-localization-editor-is-fired.1476271/page-4#post-153168676

Trash company. Sorry to the localizer. It's one of those roles that "gamers" harass too. It's hard to get people to understand how important it is even though it's literally the one facilitating their ability to play the game properly

The absolute hatred some have for localizers doing their damn job has only gotten more sickening over time. Criticism for certain choices? That's fine. I do that too.

But people getting offended by effective localization is just bizarro shit. Those that clamor for the "purity" of machine translation only are some of the most boring, artless fucks on the planet.

People acting like genre and setting appropriate flourishes of language in Unicorn Overlord or whatever are a crime against the original intent like it was the worst of some of Working Designs' excesses.

Oh, so we can admit that that Localization sometimes has some excesses and is not always “with the best intentions.” I remember how much OldGaf glazed Working Designs until people realized how many liberties they took.

Not everyone that criticizes translations are AI lovers, is so exasperating to see the defenders of localization as also being not creative and artless as the people they criticize.

 We need to turn this around soon because pushing humans out of the humanities is sole real fascist project shit.

No surprise to see Vavra here then.

Any one that is in humanities and is not a piece of shit knows that they are not on it for the money.  

You want to help people working on creative fields? Then don’t restart shit like “Vavra is a Nazi”  or try to guilt trip anyone for supporting stuff you don’t like.

[Boredfrom]

Being charitable to Warhorse, they probably want some localization expert that is willing to work using AI rather than outright using AI for everything when translating (I hope).

Still a dumb idea given that your whole franchise was lauded for having excellent writing and being able to connect a modern audience with a realistic medieval setting.

[benji]

 We need to turn this around soon because pushing humans out of the humanities is sole real fascist project shit.

Going to need someone to walk me through this one.

[benji]

Found this in the linked reddit thread that's the source for that Era thread:

Pory02
•
10h ago
We need a "Iwata-Rule" in the gaming Industry! before a company is laying off too many employees they have to reduce the costs for their higher ups!

excellentforcongress
•
6h ago
only support cooperatively owned game companies that dont have billionaires in the first place. all game company cooperatives, all cooperatives period, should be not for profit entities that cap salary at median wage with the aim of a global universal income, universal services, a just socialist future, and use any and all profit to move us towards a better future, not get someone like gaben another supercar or doomsday bunker.

 Until everyone globally makes the same income, don't buy any games.

Also:

Makoto_Kurume
•
21h ago
It’s crazy that nowadays, even after creating successful games, the people behind them can still be laid off. The fact that this has become normal is really terrible.

So it's more like every other industry? And the game industry has always been?

Bnois
•
17h ago
Why learn how to draw if AI can do that. Why learn how to narrate if AI can do that. Why learn a second language if AI can translate it all. Hard not to get depressed really

homemadegrub
•
15h ago
Ai will wreck all of the digital art industries I think unless something is done. Games, music, movies and static art all gone. Taken by computers. These are all jobs that employ and sustain people's livelihoods.

 

lunix42
•
17h ago
And I'll bet money that every dev at WHS, you know, the actual workers, are against this. And yet decisions like these are made by the money grubning CEOs and shareholders that make money off everyone else's work. Fuck these soulless bastards.

So Plaion, the ones that funded the development of both games?

Joperhop
•
19h ago
As a backer from the kickstarter days with the first game, this is majorly disappointing.
Dont support AI.

devfern93
•
18h ago
As a fellow Kickstarter pledge, I’m feeling the same. It’s really disheartening for a company that I really respect to go down this path

Kelly_HRperson
•
14h ago
And they've become massively successful selling 5 million copies in a year, yet they're so strapped for cash they can't afford to pay one person? After taking our money at the start

TellAllThePeople
•
11h ago
But... But... How will the billionaires make their next billionaire if they don't replace all their human capital? What about shareholder value?

On 22 January 2014, Warhorse Studios launched a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter with the goal of generating £300,000, ten percent of the US$5,000,000 budget, in order to prove to investors that there was an audience and desire for the game. By 20 February, the effort had raised a total of £1,106,371.[11] Even after the end of the Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding was continued through the studio's website. On 1 October 2014, Daniel Vávra announced through a YouTube video that the game had raised US$2,002,547 from a total of 38,784 backers.

...

The game reportedly cost 750 million crowns, approximately US$36.5 million, including marketing costs.[18]

You backers were $34 million short, thank Vavra for the billionaires and shareholders who kicked that in, right?

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

video games are consumer capitalism, the hobby is made for those who can afford it.

Keep crying about video games, first worlders, while then using your VPNs to exploit the very same "kind" companies who dare to allow those in the global south to buy their products for cheaper. Y'all are nothing more than leeches. Y'all are why some companies don't consider reginal pricing anymore.

Literally hurting the global south to save a few bucks off your "hobby".

[malfoyking]

Well… 

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

Going to read through the whole series as I prepare for the HBO masterpiece. 

[benji]

Great website:

Sex, the concept of "biological sex" itself rather than the fact of reproduction, functions on the presumption that there are two reproductive types of human body and that one is inferior to the other. Don't believe me? The most recent Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex for discrimination purposes describes the distinct groups

with their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group.

But biology, in the conventional sense of describing the ways that organic bodies function, sustain themselves and reproduce in nature, rather than prescribing categories onto bodies for ideological reasons, does not recognise these "distinct" types nor an inherent disposition towards discrimination that flows from the body's matter. As to the question of discrimination, it has been the key objection of the feminist movement for the last century or more that women's biology does not ordain women for oppression (as shown in the badge shown at the top of this essay). To this date, no convincing argument as to why a uterus or breasts means one should be inherently disposed to second class citizenship has emerged. As to the science of sexual distinction, for decades there has been a growing scientific consensus that the category of sex is of some use for understanding reproduction generally, but which in drawing broad brush strokes fails to capture nature's diversity.

I argue here that we have already seen that this idea of sex "distinction" itself, of sexes being at odds with each other puts us at odds with understanding discrimination from a sexual diversity lens. If we can only understand "sex" in terms of absolute and universal separation between types of reproductive body we are insisting on excluding the understanding that many real world bodies do not reproduce.

Trans bodies are imposed on by the sex distinction
For the purposes of trans people this idea of sex distinction moves from the merely problematic nature of the real world overlap between men and women on many physical characteristics, into outright absurdity.

A view of the world that says, as the Supreme Court ruling says in paragraph 7, that biological sex is immutable, or as they put it:

We also use the expression “biological sex” which is used widely, including in the judgments of the Court of Session, to describe the sex of a person at birth

We have to therefore contend with the fact that this is in direct contradiction to the reality that biological bodies are dynamic bodies. In truth the Supreme Court while it was at pains to say that it was not wading into wider debates chose to talk about biological sex in a way that means it can not be changed, and it had to make that choice in order to come to the conclusions it pre-ordained when it refused to allow trans people to argue our case.

Biology, as a dynamic process, and as a field of scientific study however, does not recognise any such "immutability" of bodies. We aren't carved out of some mythical metal only forged by the gods. We are soft. Biology is the study of bodies in change. We are born. We mature. We are injured. We encounter and resist disease. We become disabled in ways that our bodies carry the scars into our future. We age. We die. We decay. The entire concept of "biological sex" as an immutable thing, formed out of this pre existing insistence on the distinction and the categorical difference of sex is an ideology being pressed on to bodies and most of all it is being pressed ideologically on to the bodies of those of us who change our sex characteristics.

The sex distinction is a border that trans people have been crossing by any means available for as early as we developed the means to do so. There is nothing in biology that indicates that we can not. In fact it is through understanding biology that we take hormones to modify these secondary sexual characteristics. We modify the quality of our voices, our fat distributions, the distribution of our facial and body hair. We remove sex organs, we surgically reconstruct different sex organs. We undergo transformations to reform our bodies into bodies we are comfortable with. None of this happens all at once. We are not infinitely malleable. Trans people know there is no sex distinction because trans people know there is no magical crossing over period where after enough HRT and surgery we are metaphysically ordained to be a different sex. Rather this process demonstrates for us the imaginary nature of this immutable wall between the sexes. We are able to modify our sex characteristics within the limits of biology itself and the techniques we have to change it. But we do modify them.

This model of sex as fixed and binary and sociologically neutral is not necessary. We have understood for many years that, for instance, race is not a biological reality, but a social one with biological/phenotypical traits that can be targeted for discrimination, but which are not themselves a coherent biological category. And yet we still understand that racial discrimination exists and that we need protections against this. We understand that disability discrimination is often targeting physiological characteristics but that there is no shared disabled body or shared biological trait necessary for disability discrimination to be addressed as a problem to be regulated against in society.

There is absolutely no need for sex to be considered special in this regard. There is no reason why sex is established to be immutable and distinct (against all the evidence that aspects of it can and do change). In fact we know that many times women are victimised not just based on their sex characteristics being part of a female norm but because the way they deviate from the stereotype of their sex, such as in the case of tall or muscular women who are targeted for bullying or hostility for being a woman who does not fit the "distinct" sexual difference expected of women. Enforcing the sex distinction on women in this manner is itself one of the most common forms of sexist abuse in the world. The insistence that women must stay in their box is the key demand of patriarchal sexist society.

Put simply: we need to abolish sex. We need to abolish the ideological, social and environmental barriers which attempt to govern and limit the diversity of sex in the real world.

Pushing back at the idea that there exists an uncontroversial materially rooted immutable fact known to us as Biological Sex is in fact crucial because the whole point of the trans and sexual liberation argument is that this construct carries ideological barriers embedded within it that don't meet our material needs.

In fact, I will go further than pointing out the clear lie in claiming that there is an obvious meaning of biological sex that is fixed at the point of birth (as claimed in the ruling) — I'll contradict it and provide a workable meaning and definition for talking about sex. I'll start with the observation that human beings are sentient, biological beings (and while some may dispute this, I am happy to wait for such an objection and leave it as accepted otherwise as a reasonable statement of fact by you my dear reader). If there are obvious material consequences to be held about these two features of our experience, these are that:

It matters what we think and feel because we are thinking feeling beings.
We are dynamic systems of matter constantly in a process of change and metabolism until we die.

We are never able to become "immutable" in any of our characteristics unless we die. Immutability is death for anyone. The process of ceasing to meaningfully grow and change is what dying is. It's an utter nonsense and a pretence to act like these truths about the nature of life itself can just be ruled out of our awareness by a judgement that decides that "sex" is a meaningfully known and obvious quantity which is self evidently fixed at birth. The dispute about this fixity and its self evidence is the central matter of the argument specifically because transsexuals, by definition, change aspects of our sexed bodies and expression in ways that make the presumptions of sexual fixity a problem for us and actively harmful to us in our day to day lives.

Part of the problem of the claim of immutability of sex is that sex is itself not clearly defined and it never has been. The more scientists study sex, the more sex becomes a complex mash of things relating to our wider biology, psychology and so on. As to the matter of a workable definition for sex, I offer this: Sex is not clearly one thing or another but rather it is a way we label and interpret a broad range of aspects of our physiology, psychology and sociology, relating to how we reproduce as organic systems, from the chromosomal blueprints that code our protein synthesis, to our secondary sex characteristics, to pheromone production and sensory apparatus that guides us to experience sexual pleasure to the organs and gametes that communicate genetic information through heterosexual intercourse, to immunopathologic differences arising from some members of our species maintaining the capacity to host and give birth to a new life, to many other features in our existence that have some relationship with our reproductive characteristics and processes. That relationship between any "sex" characteristic and reproduction may be strongly correlated or it may be quite tenuous and speculative and it may in some cases be outright stereotype based owing to the ways over time, sexual reproduction has accumulated a huge corpus of ideological baggage naturalising the idea that the "sex" that carries pregnancies is inherently inferior to the "sex" that makes other bodies carry babies. The sexual revolution and the advent of birth control and reproductive technologies has strikingly interrupted even the idea that some bodies are for pregnancy and some bodies are for making others pregnant and new developments in uterus transplantation threaten to disrupt this apparently eternal edifice of sex even further.

Sex is not a single thing but a domain of understanding and discourse about the relation of individuals to roles, behaviours and characteristics associated with reproduction.
Sex is itself both a way that we change ourselves as biological systems and that set of characteristics which we can change. And it is intensely social. Sex is probably among the most socially salient features for most of our species because it is the feature that selects for our evolution and evolution selects for reproducing beings that care a lot about sex. The idea that it is "immutable" when random mutations over time are the entirety of why our species survives and our sexual relations define many features of how our socialisation and social structures as a society function is, to pardon the pun, fucking ridiculous. There is no law of immutability of sex like there is a law of gravity. Rather sex is part of how we mutate and every biologist on earth including the transphobic ones knows this.

In a physical sense there are very few immutable properties in the universe. The brilliant mathematician Emmy Noether showed how each of these conserved properties and physical laws arises from a universal principle of least action around mathematical symmetries in the universe. The "it's just biological sex"-ers rest on a pseudoscientific worldview that has no respect for the fact that the number of hard rules in the universe is actually very small and the discovery of these hard barriers to what can be changed was in fact remarkable for how few things genuinely can not.

Gender Critical Beliefs have had a relatively tidy description set in law. That is, the gender critical ideologue believes that:

sex is biological and immutable,
people cannot change their sex and,
sex is distinct from gender-identity

However, what I discover when I find time to argue with GCs, is that it’s not simply that “trans women are men”. Rather for them, frequently instead when it comes to subjects like trans inclusion in sports, sex-segregated spaces, or other endeavours, the GC believes most of all that trans women ought be regarded and treated as if we were men, and it follows on from this that it is necessary to ignore documented facts where they might trouble this obligation.

That is to say, so far as I can tell, Gender Critical Beliefs are less a set of beliefs than a practice obliged by the need to redefine trans people, our rights and human dignity out of the conversation.

...


Let’s ignore the philosophical question over what a man or a woman is because it doesn’t matter as much as not subjecting any group to disproportionate harms vindictively. What we have in practice if we look at the evidence here is a bloody minded social movement that is insistent on continuing to do harm to trans women by APPLYING male norms to us in full knowledge that they do not fit. This bears a striking resemblance to the ways that biases towards catering to the male norm have negatively affected women throughout history, causing fatal risks in cars, hostile environments in workplaces, and pushing women out of numerous social endeavours.

I don’t especially care one way or another for the argument that trans women are or aren’t women. I care that trans women are hurt by the assumption that we are, and should be regarded as men. This has been found numerous times to have a harmful effect on us in discrimination cases around the world where people have tried to defend anti-trans discrimination on the basis that “we just treat all males the same way” resulting in an identifiable negative effect that only affects trans women (and more broadly transfeminine people assigned male at birth who also aren’t cisgender men, see Taylor v JLR).

GC beliefs focus on definitions of what people ARE categorically in a question begging philosophical exercise about whether meaningful discrete sex categories exist in a species with so much range in overlapping sex characteristics. They do this because doing this is an important distraction from looking that the practical realities of what happens to trans women when that belief about what “is” is transformed into an “ought” in the form of law or policy. Questions of how to define a group of people do not need tight formal boundaries on them in order to have practical utility in any other circumstance, and in any other circumstance, people will generally agree that any definition of categories ought to meet the needs of those affected by categorisation. It’s because of this that categories are in natural language far from immutable and are instead regularly subject to cultural and social changes to suit the needs and norms of the culture creating them.

A consequence of understanding this is we shouldn’t be arguing from categories at all. We should instead argue from human needs, welfare, civil rights and liberties, and the basic common principle that everyone has needs that must be met and a just society is one that broadly works to balance everyone’s needs. Where we create categories in language to denote particular groups we should do this in a way that is compatible with the dignity and rights of those involved. Where we allocate resources in society to different groups which we have labelled any given way, we should do so in a way that’s compatibel with the dignity and rights of those involved.

This seems like a really simple basic, frankly liberal ethical norm rather than a radical demand. And yet it seems to be radical by present day standards where it people take this seriously as a philosophical debate between the merits of gender Platonism vs Social Constructivism or whatever while trans people are going hungry, getting raped, abused by partners, or being killed.

A topic of significant discussion in the UK during the last week has been “why can’t biological women have something for themselves?”

Ask yourself this: Why does the UK not officially allow men to set up clubs that exclude women? Why does this country not allow white supremacists to set up white only parties?

All of our equality legislation is designed around preventing the exclusion of marginalised groups in society through discrimination. Banning a group of people from a space is not automatically acceptable in any circumstance. What we have instead is a system where by default all discrimination is illegal, but some protected groups of people are allowed, under limited circumstances to exclude the dominant social group. That has a test attached — this discrimination has to be proportionate and it has to be for a legitimate aim. For instance a women’s domestic violence group therapy session has the legitimate aim of providing a space where women can share their vulnerability together after violence from men, and that can’t happen freely if their abusers are able to sit in on the session. That’s a legitimate aim. The proportionality test is achieved by proving that there isn’t a different less severe form of discrimination that balances the rights of those involved.

...

When this comes back to trans people in women’s spaces, the question you really should be asking yourself is not “can’t we get a space that’s free for non trans people” but on what planet are you from that trans people are somehow so dominant that you can’t escape us anywhere? On what planet are trans people doing so much violence that you need a trans free space to recover and feel safe? At the root of this demand for trans exclusion is a lie — the lie that trans women are somehow dominating society, controlling everyone and everything. It doesn’t get stated so explicitly as that most of the time but it underpins the logic of the question of our removal in the first place.

I’m frustrated with the "sex is a natural kind" side. They foolishly throw around population ideas around sex being a bimodal cluster concept with only two kinds and jump to a claim that every human being fits immutably into one of the two, while refusing the obvious knowledge of ambiguity in population data and that modifying such traits that make the clusters up is the fundamental observable natural reality of transition. They also routinely ignore that such observations at a population scale lose meaningful information as you change your scale to the individual , a single data point within the population. They also ignore that choosing to talk about various groups within the whole changes your frame of reference, in the same way that gerrymandering does, creating a perspective where the bimodal population observation is no longer rational over your observed sample group.

Capitalism is a system which maximises wealth extraction via labour value. It’s a machine which is intrinsically hostile to most people’s rights and existence, but the ways this plays out is different for different types of people. The trans community is very small and therefore cheap in terms of pinkwashing capitalism. So superficial trans rights reforms are a common way of buying good publicity for the ruling class.

Of course these don’t help most trans people (especially those who are still exploited under capitalism in various ways), but our mainstream charities aren’t in a position to acknowledge that, because that would put fundraising via the state or via wealthy philanthropists at risk.

...

Fundamentally the things that trans people really urgently need are things that Capitalism is systematically failing to provide or undermining for a lot of people:

radical improvements to the NHS,
better social housing availability,
protection in education environments and support,
labour rights/protection,
refunding specialist DV/SV support.

These things were not on the cards for trans rights reform because they hurt the extraction capabilities of the ruling class, requiring taxation and funding or wide scale restructuring of property (housing for instance). That’s the extent to which capitalism is hostile to trans rights and existence.

It occurred to me today that JK Rowling really has still not apologised at any point for spreading age old blatantly antisemitic stereotypes of greedy hook nosed bankers to children. At least I certainly can’t find it if she has apologised publicly for this.

In the Trump Era, there seems to be an endless array of instances in public life of the powerful just refusing to recognise harm they’ve done to minority groups at all. Sometimes they will play act as if they care (as Rowling has at points over Labour antisemitism), while nevertheless also refusing to acknowledge or make any sort of amends or enter into accountability for their own behaviour and actions.

JK Rowling’s work is littered with antisemitic and racist tropes, and the reactionary anti-LGBTQ movement she has aligned herself with have a big track record of trafficking in similar, from the American conservatives and their previous poster-girl Maggie Berns baiting around George Soros, to virtually identical rhetoric and propaganda from East European Christian Nationalists.

...

I’ve tried to raise awareness of this seminal talk by Jewish Polish Feminist Agnieszka Graff before, but for various reasons I suspect many who follow my research work will not have watched it. It’s very long and the audio isn’t fantastic and it is hard to read the slides. But I think it is really important as an early canary in the coal mine from another locale dealing with the same reactionary panic over “Gender Ideology” as we are presently in the UK. It’s an important part, I think, of both of recognising the shapes of the issues that are appearing and understanding them adequately to organise against them. One of the important characteristics raised in in point two of the slide from where the link provided above jumps into the talk: The threat to the child, and the idea of child sacrifice. Agnieszka Graff says

“This has a history, and this is the history of ethnic cleansing campaigns”.
I should add at this point, Agnieszka Graff at this point had had explosives thrown in her lectures. She’s not exagerrating, the reactionary violence had already reached an elevated level.

It’s important for me to say, this goes beyond JK Rowling because this isn’t just about one rich woman. This talk happened long before JK Rowling even stepped into this arena. What I’m trying to draw attention to is instead a matter of conservative forces coalescing around and behind a movement which is founded on tropes heavily rooted in antisemitism and fascist activity.

One of the ideas put forward by Agnieszka Graff (quoting Zuzanna Radzik) is that “Gender has replaced the Jews” — that “Gender Ideology” itself is the latest reincarnation of antisemitic conspiracy theories — a “Cultural Bolshevism” scare for the present day.

In her chapter with Elżbieta Korolczuk in the book “Anti Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilising Against Equality”, Graff argues anti-genderism is a “new version of an old polarization … at the root of the present trend: ‘gender’, claims Radzik, has simply replaced Jews and homosexuals in their role of the demonized enemy of the illiberal wing of the Polish Catholic Church.”

...

It is often noted that the most common “Nazi book burning” image shared as a symbol of early fascist ravages against free speech is in fact the burning of the library from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexual Research Institute where he catalogued data on transgender and homosexual life and organised a very early civil rights movement for the freedom of LGBT people. And it is not noted often enough that this book burning was also due to the fact that Magnus Hirschfeld was Jewish, and this was not just an attack on the records of the early LGBT movement but on what was demonised as “Jewish science”.

We need to never forget that these things, our struggles, are not separate but integrally related to each other.

So much to shut up, listen and learn.

[Daffy Duck]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/thieves-break-off-with-12-tonnes-of-kitkat-in-heist.1476349/page-2#post-153162907

Is black market chocolate really that lucrative? Seems like a lot of risk for candy. Unless this is some false flag thing and Nestle stole the truck, gets the insurance and sells the candy elsewhere

Do these idiots just think everything is a false flag?

[benji]

Do these idiots just think everything is a false flag?

It's what they would do. Remember, "every accusation is a confession."