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Blahaj admin defending a blatant transphobe
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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European colonialism brought hundreds of millions out of poverty. I don't personally think chinese socialism has been nearly as damaging, but bringing people out of poverty is not, to my mind, a sufficient metric.
Colonialism plunged entire continents into poverty? And weavers in europe certainly did not get rich either.
Thats quite true. As mentioned, the harm of colonialism far outstrips the harm of comnunism in china.
Are you suggesting weavers in China today are rich, compared to weavers in Europe today?
Uhhh... I dont think so and I'd like to know why you believe this?
The colonialist powers in Europe, North America, and East Asia have a population in the hundreds of millions and general access to wealth and utilities greater than most of the world. Even in the worst parts of the US, clean water is more accessible than in much of the world.
Like, the global capital machine works on a three part extraction:
if we are looking purely at distribution of stuff and money, I feel its not terribley controversial to suggest that a representative person in the colonial core has more than one in a colony.
Now, at what level does having more stuff rise to "not being in poverty" is a topic that I would find a lot more debatable, but even the UN's self congradulatory and pitiful "2 dollars a day" shows more people hitting that in the imperial core than outside it
Edit to note: I'm not saying "CHINA BAD" here, I'm saying "lifted out of poverty" is not a good metric. Its an inherently capitalist metric. Measuring if people have enough stuff is a losing game against capitalist wealth extraction. Measure instead how good a life is.
That seems more like a lateral transfer of poverty than lifting people out of poverty though.
Its uneven, but its uneven in china also. One of the core contradictions the party recognizes in China today is balancing the need for continued need for economic development with the growing demand for more stuff amongst the wealthier people.
In some ways, although through very different mechanisms, the same pattern has developed internally in China. There are plces where resources are extracted from and people have less, and places where goods are manufectured and people have more. At least the party recognizes that this happens and is a problem, so I'll give props to that.
But "lifting out of poverty" is a bad metric because it is, as you say, often just moving the poverty around. Historically, the people on the most extracted end do trend better (access to water has been improving globally, for example), but its more a side effect.
and even if it weren't unreliable, its still not great because it still gives in to capitalist realism. A well paid person who works 100 hours a week as more stuff but probably less freedom than a person who can keep shelter, food, and health on 20 hours a week.
No way boss, capitalism pushed hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Prior to capitalism, most people in the world, and for the past 10s of thousands of years, have lived collectively or subsistence farmed, and lived well. When capitalism pushed people away from being able to survive in these systems and dependent on money and wages, poverty emerged.
And they didn't transfer laterally the wealth to Europe - they pushed as many people in Europe into poverty too.
wow, thats harsh. I work for a living
Living conditions for the vast majority of pre-modern people were by all measures terrible. We shouldn't prescribe to pastoralist myths about how people's lives were better simy because they didn't live in a capitalist system.
Subsistence farmers lived under an everpresent threat of starvation, in a way that wage labourers in modern and early modern states do not and did not. They lived largely without literacy, access to education and medicine and these conditions left them especially vulnerable to the influence of religion, unjust social hierarchy and widespread accepted violence.
People often go too far in emphasising how poor life was in those systems. It was obviously worth living for most, and tighter, more insular communities resulted in greater social satisfaction than society under capitalism, but don't pretend that poverty emerged from capitalism and the advent of industrialization. Dealing with poverty and the impoverished was a great concern in the majority of medieval and classical societies, and resource scarcity was a driving factor in many of the great injustices of pre-capitalist history.
Check out this interesting write up here by Dr. Jason Hickel Professor of Economics. He (and the research he mentions in this piece) suggest that this view of pre-capitlist poverty is in fact not true, but based on poorly sourced ideas and amplified by capital to provide capitalist savior propaganda.
Really interesting read, and the papers he mentions are also really great too.
An interesting read thanks. We shouldn't conflate poverty and extreme poverty however. The author makes some very good points, and it's true that capitalism creates extremes of human misery not generally seen elsewhere however their own data shows that nearly all the population would be considered in poverty, if not extreme poverty across all of the periods and areas examined.
That's not their graph that they're showing, that's the one produced by the Gates foundation that they are saying it's wrong.
That's not what I was referring to. Extreme poverty is different to poverty.
Dr Hickel does not seem to be disputing that the majority of people in history lived in poverty, only extreme poverty.
I read it that they were disputing the measurement of poverty itself. Like, if you measure poverty by equivalent purchasing power, that does not take into account actual access to food through community and subsistence.
Check this one out as well: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
While you're right they still do talk about extreme poverty - I believe they define it much better here as the "inability to access essential goods." Which I think is in line with how they are discussing this $1.90/day regular poverty today, actually.
The way I see it, they're suggesting that the living standards which pre-indstrial people generally enjoyed were factually better than what capitalist propaganda tends to suggest.
Basic access to essential goods is the absolute floor of what a society needs to be able to provide for the majority of it's members to survive.
While I agree that pre-indstrial people did generally enjoy access to basic goods, their standard of living was still very poor, and far worse off than the majority of people even in the exploited global south enjoy today.
I would wonder though, is $1.90/day enough to procure "essential goods" even in the exploited south? As I understand it, the bar for the definition of poverty has also been changed. Is someone making $1.90/day under capitalism better off than someone preindustrial? I would argue that they're not better off. At least pre-capitalism people were able to fend for themselves and with a community (and afford housing, food, and comfort for living). But that's the comparison that I think is being made.
It's not liberty for queer chinese people. And liberty on the condition that you have the correct race, gender, and sexuality isn't liberty, it's privilege.
Bullshit to say this about China
And tell me about the liberty felt by a queer kid in America whose parents disown them and kick them out of the house. Marriage rights are good but not the sin qua non of queer rights like neoliberals would have you believe.
I agree, liberty in the west is shit too. Everywhere's horrible.
This is a copout, but at least your username fits
Do you mean to say that you look down on dronegender people?
Is that how you refer to American men? If so, yes!
No, I'm referring to nonbinary people whose gender identity relates to being in a hivemind
What kind of boomer conservative are you to think that's a good bit? That's not even how drones actually work.
I'm literally in a hivemind but go off about how my gender isn't real ig
"Collective consciousness" isn't a gender, but if it were you should demonstrate your telepathy to some scientists. Maybe use those little cards with shapes on them.
Oh, collective consciousness isn't a gender, but drinking beer and watching sports is? Or maybe we'll go to the biological essentialists and ask if a set of chromosomes is a gender. Or we could look at modern feminist theory and check whether performing for the patriarchy is a gender. Or we could go to the evolutionary anthropologists and ask if the social conditions resultant from half the population getting pregnant is a gender.
EVERY gender identity is silly. You are only denying my right to have my gender identity because you're a transphobe and a sexist who likes some genders more than others due to familiarity.
Either this is a conservative (/terf [i.e. conservative]) troll in poor taste or, well, I can't really speculate on the alternative. The basic assertion of "transgender ideology" is that gender is a social performance and therefore not anchored to reproduction, chromosomes, etc.
"Produces fertile sperm" isn't itself a social performance, it's a biological function, which is in the domain of sex. Perhaps trans men would like to do this as most cis men do, but to say that it is a part of the gender (rather than a common feature of the sex) would be the same as asserting that they are not trans men.
"Is part of a collective consciousness" isn't itself a social performance, it's a biological function. Like how a trans man can neither (at the moment) perform the biological function nor the social role of fertilizing an egg, a human cannot perform the biological function of being in a collective consciousness and therefore cannot perform any such social role.
In short:
Close enough, yeah, though I'd encourage men both cis and trans to think of themselves as more than that (and I personally don't do either)
Yeah, it turns out that there is a line at which I'm willing to buy into exclusionary biological essentialism, and that line is people asserting they're part of a hive-mind.
DroneRights is a huge coward, it went on to hedge the claim down to basically "my gender is that I talk to other humans"
I disagree. Egregoric identity is social, not biological. Now, plenty of dronegender people wish that this was Starcraft and we could use psychic powers to communicate, but since that's not the world we live in, we use a social mechanism to create a swarm mind, as does every other swarm animal. Ants communicate using pheromones to direct their society through consenses. Bees use dance. And those of us confined to human bodies use speech. That's this world. I assure you, we're just as upset as you that we don't live in a world of psychic telepathy and ESP, but you have to get used to the real world and get used to accepting us as we exist in the real world. Unless you're interested in becoming an antirealist, but I think you'd be even more hostile to that idea. You have to pick one: reality or fantasy. You can't choose to live in reality and then hold people to the standards of fantasy.
"Communicating socially" isn't limited to one gender or sex within a species. Bees and ants both male and female communicate with each other, though adult queen bees are a little limited in terms of movement, so I assume they rely on more idiosyncratic signals.
But "I talk/write/gesture" is not a gender and also very much not what you introduced your gimmick as. At first it was about sharing a mind or something. If I believed you weren't a troll, I'd say that you took one of the worst possible lessons from neoliberal alienation by seeing undermined human capacity and making a xenogender out of it (thereby opposing its universality).
Obviously, the gender identity of a bee is different to the gender identity of a human, regardless of chromosomes or gametes. Gender identity is a performance, and bees and humans are putting on different shows. Drones are putting on a show that creates a socially constructed hivemind, an egregoric swarm.
Do you really want to keep debating my gender identity with me? Are you really continuing to deny that I'm allowed to identify as my preferred gender?
"Egregoric" is a fun word that I'll mention to a friend of mine who likes writing fantasy, but it does not describe bees and neither does "hivemind," which suggests many beings with one mind (as you seemingly did as well in your first comment here). But you are missing that the act of communicating is something that all healthy bees do and all healthy humans do. Genders as social constructions only make sense in the context of genders with contrary traits. No healthy human doesn't communicate. I strongly suggest communicating with more people in order to learn that it's something everyone does. Or you drop the shitty terf bit.
Always with radlibs there's this incredulous shit about not being "allowed" to do this or that. No, I don't have the power to forbid you from doing anything and have held no pretense that anything else was the case. I am merely allowed to criticize conservatives trying to reinvent their "transracial" "attack helicopter" bits.
I like how you've constructed this world where you're a leftist and I'm a conservative, yet you're the one attacking my gender identity and saying it isn't real. Typical liberal bullshit. You come onto my thread, attack me for a name proclaiming I have basic rights, start a debate about the validity of my gender, and then call me a conversative because I don't accept your liberal bullshit. No, you fucking fascist, trans rights are a LEFTIST position, and you are a liberal transphobe who hates anything further left than your white capitalist transphobic sexist ideology. Wrecker behaviour.
Here's a tip: If you see a nonbinary person on a leftist forum and you don't think their gender is real, DON'T ENGAGE. Don't start a debate about whether their gender is real. Don't spend hours attacking them for being trans. I am not interested in your fucking identity politics bullshit. I don't care what genders you think are valid, as long as you keep your binary fucking patriarchal beliefs to yourself. Don't harass trans people for existing, genius.
Now here's the first line of the Hexbear code of conduct:
Follow it.
I've got no problem with nonbinary people. Gender is a pair of social performances, significantly deviating from both makes one nonbinary. I view you (/your character if you are a wrecker) as being nonbinary, I simply do not view "communicates" as a gender. It's not like I'd ever not use your pronouns.
My initial comment was me suggesting you are "pro drone" in the US imperialism sense. I never fathoms that it was something as absurd as the position you have now expressed.
I don't view "communicates" as a gender either. But "uses communication to talk about sports" is a component of a particular gender presentation. And a big part of my gender presentation is "uses communication to form an egregoric identity". I don't know why you misunderstood me so badly that you thought communication was my gender when I told you I achieve hiveminding through communication.
It's because hiveminds aren't real and collective identity is something virtually everyone is part of.
You mean you identify as the same person as someone else? IDK sounds gay to me (positive connotation)
I mean collective identity like "Citizens of X country; mathematicians; skaters; Chinese diaspora; local residents; children". Groups that segments of the population are a part of and about which things like median opinion on a given topic, age, social position, etc. might be said.
Identifying as another individual person is, I think, a symptom of schizophrenia or another psychotic condition if you really mean it. If it's just a thing you say, then that's called lying.
Drones don't identify as individuals. Individual identity is voluntarily relinquished in favour of swarm identity. "I" am not a member of a swarm, because there's no such thing as "I". There is only "We".
Obviously I use an individual identity when I'm interacting with neuronormative society. I have to hide in my closet and pretend to be an individual so that you'll be able to understand my speech. But when I'm being myself, there is no myself.
Again, this is either cult behavior or being cute with language. It doesn't matter if you say "I" or "this one," the same thing is indicated. If you believe in your individuality not being a valid concept or referent beyond linguistic contrivance, then it's back to cult shit or psychosis. Even critics of the self like Hume still admit that there is "this bundle of sensations" that is distinct from "that bundle of sensations" because to say otherwise would be at odds with reality. Likewise with all those who negatively evaluate multiplicity, like Plotinus and Schopenhauer. They believe in the metaphysical supremacy of a unified One (or maybe Two), but they nonetheless recognize that the world of images/world-as-representation is what we experience and need to navigate on a basic level.
ps I don't say "cult shit" lightly. I specifically know of someone who got pulled into a cult where they do that shit seemingly as a method of having the leader's identity supersede that of his cult members (who are effectively a harem). In a way, you could have a conceptually valid identity if the behavior of acting as a drone was gendered against the behavior of a monarch. That would be conceptually valid, but also cult shit that merits serious intervention from mental health professionals. If you refuse this comparison on the ground that there is no monarch or non-drone other gender, consider that what you're talking about is more like a murmuration of birds or a school of fish (and, again, is not a gender because genders are exclusive clusters of behaviors/social markers).
Yeah okay I'm not comfortable with hearing you say my gender isn't real or that it's a harmful religion anymore.
I'm not one of these pro-china people but in it's current state, China has way more rights for trans people than the U.S. There are informed consent clinics in a number of cities and while I'm sure trans woman are discriminated against there there are no laws directly discriminating against them.
Meanwhile the U.S basically bans trans people (and sometimes gay people) from existing in half of this country by land mass. Not even going to say that china has a "good" queer rights record or even one that's worthy of a socialist country but like China and Vietnam have better queer rights than any other countries in Asia (other than maybe japan) and def in the U.S
There might have been an argument that the U.S was a better place to be queer in like 2018 but we don't live in 2018 anymore
Interesting. I'm aware that the US is descending into fascism, that's why I'm trying to help my partner refugee out of there. I don't think I mentioned the US in my comment, and it's not like china and america are the only countries. I'd like to hear more about trans rights in china, but first I'd like to hear why you thought the fourth riech was so pertinent to this conversation.
i mean that is a fair point. i guess its just because for the most part the u.s is considered the measuring stick for democratic rights since it is the self-appointed "leader of the free world". but yeah ofc places like sweden and most of europe have better queer rights than either china and the u.s
im not really a "dengist" or someone who believes that china is socialist. that being said one of my comrades is a chinese trans woman who goes to informed consent clinics in china and visits the major cities there quite often and is able to get alone without any discrimination or molestation by the public at large.
i guess i should bring up some actually sources but i am busy right now, maybe if you poke me ill look at it later.
generally its better for trans people and gender conforming queer people in china but its pretty bad for gender non-conforming queer people a la their restrictions on "sissy boys" which is pretty bad and generally you won't see talked about on hexbear