DefinitelyNotARobot

Biological distinctions are quiet relative, so you could recontextualize how we define them, but there are still valid reasons as to why we make the distinctions we make. I don't think it's a simple binary such as "humans are primates" or "humans aren't primates", both can hold varying degrees of truthfulness. We have a lot in common with other primates, more so than with other animals, but we can also draw lines between what differentiates a chimp from a human. The question is whether these distinctions warrant a reclassification according to our scientific methods? Whether our scientific methods themselves are imprecise is another much deeper topic. You won't be able to differentiate between the intelligence of two ant workers, because the difference is so marginal relative to your intelligence as a human, that it's barely even noticeable. Consider that the difference in intelligence you perceive between humans and chimpanzees isn't even a slice of what's possible. A human lacks the intelligence to appreciate the insignificance of that difference on the larger scale. If you looked at this question from the perspective of an entity, as intelligent as the total of all intelligent life in this universe, they might not even see a huge difference between a human and a rock. The context really depends here. Are we looking at it from a practical day-to-day perspective, or from a broader big picture perspective? Similarly, the distinction between nature and technology makes sense from a practical perspective, from a broader perspective, the force that puts together a car is the same force that makes the sun move across the sky. There really isn't an inherent distinction, but it makes sense to distinguish between the two on a human level. Science doesn't have to be practical, but there are situation in which it's helpful to boil it down to a more useful level. It's for the scientific/biologist community to decide on how to balance the two.

I agree, but I'd say that the reason for this is that toxic masculinity and toxic femininity are asymmetrical. An example of toxic masculinity: You're unable to deal with your anger internally and as such feel compulsed to lash out at another person for staring at you or something. You externalize. An example of toxic femininity: You're unable to deal with your anger externally (through communication) and bottle it up, becoming passive-aggressive in the process. The sort of "Everything is fine *hmph* 🙄" deal. Generally speaking, aggressive men will be the most noticeable people while passive-aggressive women will be the least obvious. That's just the nature of how aggression manifests in these polarities. One if crude and in your face, and the other is sneaky and more elusive. So it's not that society "hates" masculine men, it's that masculine men are more direct in their influence than feminine women and as such tend to stand out further. This reflects in the discourse. That's the same reason the most outstanding SJW's are the dyed-hair women who yell at people and the Karen's. Those are women who reflect toxic masculinity. So don't get me wrong, I don't define these terms to be gender specific. Any person can reflect either extreme, to varying degrees. I agree.

The role models: In all seriousness, I do think that there are a lot of good role models out there, but it's also important for the parent to be a role model as well. I suppose that what you're proposing is the first step for raising the next generation of parental role models. There certainly is a value for that kind of education. So I don't disagree with the fundamental point, I just think that it isn't something that we will realistically see within the next decade or two. I'd love to be wrong though. That is definitely problematic, but that is also the value of experimentation. Doing stupid stuff like that pokes holes into our ideas. I think that we're generally too afraid to try out different things and to make mistakes and to fuck up. Understandably so, we're dealing with children here, those are human lives that we can potentially ruin, but I also think that we underestimate children and their capacity to learn from our own stupidity. Ironically, progressives are better at criticizing themselves than conservatives, because no intellectual argument you could lay out could hit as hard as the idiocy, of keeping young boys and girls from socializing with each other (I just assume that what you're saying is true for the sake of the argument, I won't bother checking the details of this story).

That's true. European leaders are definitely more mature than Andrew Tate (generally), but NOT being Andrew Tate doesn't necessarily make a person "wise" either (relatively speaking). How advanced, would you say, is our current scientific understanding of these ideas? Do you think that our general comprehension is enough to accommodate for the lack of proper role models? I think the latter is a big issue when it comes to educating children on these topics. That obviously doesn't diminish the value of trying, I'm all for it, it's probably better than having a guy like this do the education... ... but it will probably take a good amount of designing, training and implementing before we could get there (plus political will as you've pointed out). These are "logistical" hurdles we will have to overcome first.

Then let me call you a devil, for the loop shall go on.

@Leo Gura Okay, but how do we make sure that such people end up at the top of this field? A lot of men for example gravitate to personalities such as Andrew Tate and Donald Trump. How do we make sure that these courses don't end up being taught by some dubious frat bro, or some fedora-wielding Reddit mod?

But how feasible is such an idea really? The prerequisite to teaching what masculinity and femininity are, is that the people who give these courses understand it themselves. How do we reliably determine what values should be taught and who does the teaching, if society as a large seems to struggle with these things? Will it just have to balance itself out? These courses would have to differentiate from regular education, as regular education relies on education plans written by academic, nerdy people. These are the types of people that will have the worst understanding of what society needs in this area. It would need to be government funded, but it should't be ran by government people.

@Danioover9000 You're probably right. I wanted it to look symmetrical, but I was using "masculine/feminine" rather arbitrarily.

@Bobby_2021 I'm not saying that a transwoman is a woman. I'm saying that a transwoman is a transwoman. But what does it mean to be trans? Let me lay my view out for you. As I've said, there is an overlap between gender and sex, but there are ways in which they can be differentiated. Let's look at breasts for example. Men can go through hormone therapy and develop breasts naturally, but these breasts are structurally different from the breasts of a biological woman. Breasts can manifest in both women and men, but only women have full access to their utility (if we ignore women with some kind of genetic malfunction). So I agree in that a man can't be a woman, because we can't restructure our bodies to carry out the same tasks. However, that's where I draw a line between a man/woman and a transman/transwoman. There are biological aspects, such as the chromosomes of a person, which you don't have immediate access to. A friend of mine (super anti-trans) almost landed in bed with a transwoman, which traumatized the hell out of him. How did that happen? Well, when you see a woman on the street, how do you actually know that she's a woman? You use certain markers, such as her feminine shape/face/voice/mannerisms etc. to differentiate her from a man. There are a lot of trans people where it's obvious that they're trans, but that doesn't go for all transpeople. Sometimes you'd need to pay close attention to know the difference. I think it's easier with transwoman than with transman, probably because I'm attracted to woman and as such have a radar for when "something" feels off (which is why I used transmen as an example), but how can I be certain that my radar is always 100% accurate? I can't. Maybe it will trigger for an actual woman, maybe it won't trigger for a transwoman. Here is a personal annectode. I was once in the Netherlands with a bunch of friends (the same friend from earlier was also with us actually) and we were tripping on shrooms. We were sitting in the middle of a busy street, full of people partying and dancing, and... Well there is a huge LGBTQ community in the Netherlands, and so there were a lot of transpeople. We were sitting there and constantly debating about who was a real woman and who wasn't. One of my friends would call out a hot girl and another would say: "Bro, I think that's a guy." and the other friend would say "NO that can't be a guy look at her!". It just went on for ages. In that moment I realized that there are certain aspects of "being a woman" that don't necessarily coincide with their biological nature. If there was a 1/1 correlation, it would be easy to tell who is and who isn't a woman. 1 = green 2 = red What number does red correlate to? Not a difficult task right? So how can anyone ever be wrong about someone's biological sex, if sex == gender? You would see a person and you'd immediately know their sex, but that's not the case, because what you have immediate access to is mostly gender. This is more of an abstract argument, this isn't even concerned with social ideas such as what being a "REAL man" means, which are a more obvious form of gender, because people are more likely to disagree on that than they are to disagree on how many genders there are. Here is a simplified "graph" of my idea. It's a real bad graph. Sorry for that. The fact that you can't perfectly differentiate between sex in gender is actually something a lot of progressives seem to misunderstand. They understand the relativity of gender, but they don't understand the relativity of their own dissections. The graph I've provided is a rather arbitrary way to dissect sex and gender. It's just there to demonstrate that we can conceive of sex and gender as two things, while keeping our definitions of "man" and "woman" around. Gender being relative doesn't invalidate anyone that wants to live a traditional lifestyle. There are transgender people who will say that you have to fully accept them as a "woman", but I disagree with them.

Sex and gender have some overlap, but they're definitely not the same. One is genotypic, the other is more phenotypic. Most men wouldn't sleep with a transman, though they're biologically female. They've got a pussy, two X chromosomes, the ability to bare children, etc. Problem is... they look like a fucking dude. That's the difference between sex and gender. Someone might biologically be female, but their phenotypic expression might not be aligned with that biological nature. They might look like a dude, making them unattractive to most men, even though they'd make for a valid sexual partner biologically speaking. Why? Why would a transman be so unattractive, even though they've got female biology? Could it be... that there are other facets to "being a woman", that have nothing to do with their biological sex? For example: What would your family think if they saw you making out with a transman? Would they think "Look at this biological female that he's making out with.", or would they think "Yep, he's gay."? See how, in that moment, your family might not even consider the biological sex of that person, and might only care for their gender expression? Even if you told them that "She's actually a woman", they might still question why you were making out with a woman that looks like a dude. It wouldn't make that any more heterosexual. How can you making out with a biological woman ever be gay?

If you had to put into a percentage, how much of "this" life you think you have experienced, what would that number look like? If you're honest with yourself, it's not going to be that big. In fact, it's going to be infinitely small, because you don't know ANYTHING about "this" life. You haven't even felt 0.0001% of what there is to feel. Have you felt what it's like to watch your whole family get killed? Have you felt what it's like to get raped? Have you felt what it's like to get shot, stabbed, burned? Have you felt what it's like to fulfill all of your dreams and loose it all in a night? Have you felt what it's like being a literal slave, working hard hours in the sun, while your master is relaxing on his porch, drinking a cool lemonade juice? You're talking about the final boss of the game, when you haven't even played through the intro yet.

Also, fuck the Oblivion horse armor, I think the Creation Club is a much worse crime against humanity. It's basically the horse armor DLC on crack.

@Leo Gura Definitely. If you compare the amount of weapon types and armor in Morrowind to what you've got in Skyrim it's a stark contrast. Nothing that can be fixed with mods, but the problem is that this process of simplification doesn't limit itself to the amount of content, but also to the foundation of the game. It's relatively easy to mod in new content, but not so much with entirely new mechanics, as this will cause compatibility problems with the base game and other mods. The issue now is that they've become aware of how big the modding community has become, and part of their strategy seems to rely on modders to fix their game. Every Bethesda game I've ever played had a "community patch" mod which does a lot of bug fixing for the game. How come nobody at Bethesda ever looks at these mods and goes: "Maybe we should fix these bugs in the base game?". They don't seem to care one bit. I don't see how such people will care enough to try and experiment with new game play mechanics altogether. So my prognosis is that we will get the same game with a different skin. Perhaps I'm wrong, I'm going to judge the product off of the product itself.

And this can become an issue with how people are using words, you are right, but it can also reflect an issue with a preexisting definition, which is my point. There was once a controversy with a YouTuber that was caught watching deep-fake porn of friends. People were genuinely calling him a rapist. That is obviously a problematic use of the word. However, if someone were to step in and propose a new word that captures the "involuntary" aspect of rape and the "boundary crossing", while not being as morally loaded as the actual word, I think it would be fair. In a sense, deep-fake porn has certain qualities that are similar to rape, but to actually use the word "rape" here feels like it's misconstruing the actual severity of the case, and as such is a rather misguided use of the word. Something can have similarities to rape without necessarily being rape. This one issue is actually reflective of both what you are saying (people are misusing, abusing and weaponizing the word), while simultaneously being reflective of a potential limitation of our definitions. That's what I was saying earlier when I said that multiple definitions can hold varying degrees of truthfulness simultaneously. At a certain point we have to sit down and draw lines between these varying definitions and perhaps come up with new words. Definitions aren't commandments set in stone. They need to be honed and attuned to the challenges our environment provides. This can't happen if you simply deny/ignore another person's definition, which is precisely what is happening between the opposing sites of this conflict. "THE" Jews don't exist. Israel is a Zionist state, prior to being a Jewish state. Different Jewish people will have a different relationships to Israel. There are different doctrines and individual perspectives that make it much more difficult than Israel being the "State of the Jews". Painting this image actually drowns out the voices of all the Jewish people that don't identify with Israel. Again, you assume that they do it simply because they don't "like what is happening in Palestine". It's true, the word "genocide" can be used in such a way, and in a similar way the word "Jewish state" can be used in a propagandized way. My point is simply that these words can be used differently, by different people, in different contexts, which should be obvious. If someone that has never read the definition of a "genocide" calls what is happening in Palestine a genocide, it's going to be different from a scholar using this word. The problem there is that you can't divide everyone up into two categories. There aren't those that use the word the "right" way and those that use it the "wrong" way. Your usage can be "inaccurate", without being outright "wrong". It can be "precise" without being completely "true". Discourse has to be had about the limitations of this word, which is precisely what is not happening since people are busy screaming "It's a genocide! NO it's NOT a genocide! NO NO it IS a genocide! NO IT'S NOT". It's unproductive.

Just wait until TES6 releases in 2096. You will be speechless by then (mostly because you'll probably be dead).

You don't know what gratitude means until you've lost it all. 😉

It would probably not be a singular number, but a range of numbers. I'm not sure if most people will ever get close to a 10, as most people would've probably killed themselves at that point, so it also kind of depends on how you define a 10, or rather on how far you want to stretch this scale, as you could take it infinitely far. Like how would you even compare watching your mom get raped vs being stuck in the worst trip you've experienced for an eternity? I think that it's something that can't be assessed outside of a retrospect. Sometimes bad things happen and they end up making you stronger. Sometimes seemingly good things happen and they end up creating some of the worst consequences and the most suffering for you. Imagine fulfilling all your dreams in life, but then everything goes wrong and you loose it all. You might answer this question differently based on the stage you are at during all of that. So whether a life of suffering is a well lived, depends on what YOU do/are capable of doing with that suffering. It could serve as a solid foundation for a beautiful life, but it also could represent the rottenness of your foundation, which keeps bringing everything you try to build back down.

That's the definition YOU accept. Someone could say that the "intentionality" part is limiting, because an "atrocity is an atrocity independent of whether it is intentional or not". Actions or policies may lead to devastating consequences for certain populations, regardless of explicit intent. That's one way to disagree with the official definition. I generally agree that this these talking points are being weaponized, however, dismissing all uses of "genocide" as purely manipulative might oversimplify the complexities of these view points. Is part of the reason some Israelis want to paint the image of "the Jewish state", because it allows them to call their opposition anti-Semitic? Sure. However, that isn't to dismiss the majority of Israelis, who will say this not in an attempt to manipulate anyone, but simply because they believe it to be true.

My bad, I didn't get the "orthodox" part.

That's fair. I think one of the problems is that there is no universal definition of what a "genocide" is. There are definitions in the dictionary, there are legislative definitions, but people are unable to find any common ground. So it's not simply about finding proof of a genocide, but also about understanding how people define this word and what points they can make to support their definition/what points could be made in the favor of other definitions. Different definitions will have different degrees of truthfulness, but generally speaking, it's possible for multiple definitions to hold some degree of truth simultaneously. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a genocide or NOT be a genocide, but it could fall into a spectrum in between. At that point we run into a similar problem as the word "rape", as "rape" can mean "Someone jumped out of a bush and hit a woman with a rock and assaulted her", but it can also mean "Some guy forced himself on his wife when she didn't feel comfortable with him doing so". These cases are obviously different in their degree of "bad", but we still apply the same word, which comes with its own faults.

@Vrubel Of course. The amount of children a couple will have depends on factors such as education, access to birth control, your socioeconomic status, religious beliefs and dogma. Is this true? I believe the Jewish population has increased only by like 5-6 million people since WW2, which is not that much considering that 11 million Jews survived. In fact, the global Jewish population has only recently hit a level similar to pre-WW2, which was around 16-17 million Jews. They are yet to fully recover their numbers. Contrast that with the Palestinian population which has grown almost 30 times its size in the same period.

For example: "Oh no, look! The population growth rate will start declining according to theglobalgraph, it must be that the Palestinians are being prevented from having children!" I can just use this singular statistic to try and draw whatever image I want to draw. By itself this is of little meaning, because it completely ignores how the future of this conflict might affect the future of the graph. If Palestine "won", maybe we would start to see this figure rising? This is obviously concerned with the future of the population growth, while the graph the op provided shows us the past total population, but my point isn't concerned with the content of this particular graph, it just serves as an example.

@Scholar My point is simply that one figure isn't significant enough to get a deeper insight into this issue. We don't know how this conflict has affected this number. We can speculate and say that if there was a "real" genocide, this number would be lower, but we could also speculate and say that this number would've been higher if it wasn't for the "existence" of this genocide. It's all speculation and that's what I'm pointing towards. The OP could've provided a broader range of stats and figures and connected them into a broader point, but this one stat holds no weight on it's own.

So? Who is to say that they wouldn't have been at 3.5 million people by now if it wasn't for the situation between Israel and Palestine?

That makes sense. To me this idea sounds dystopian, as I can see a future where the majority of people might only have AI as a friend because it basically serves as the perfect "yes-man". But when I think about it it's probably an unavoidable part of AI and as such, instead of worrying about it, we should take measurements to make sure that the AI is equipped to handle such a relationship without hurting the person in the long run. In one reality it's going to enable peoples social anxiety by allowing them to vanish into their safe space, in another reality it will actually be able to help people make friends. I hope that that's the sort of reality we're moving towards.