I'm a Foucault guy, so my narrative tends toward discursive power.

Foucault was a critical theorist which puts him in this same post-Marxist / neo-Marxist space where social idenities replace economic determinism as the drivers of oppression, which formed the academic and ideological grounding for the current anti-liberal "woke" worldivew.

Now personally, I'm against that entire worldview, but that doesn't mean that all of the critical theorists were completely devoid of insight either. For example, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" while I strongly disagree with his main thesis, does raise some valid ancellary points. Maybe Focault does too: I haven't read him.

And this post is an attempt to get away from that.

My argument is, you can't. This isn't a position which only seems political on the surface, but underneath it is making a good faith sincere general point about language. The reality is: this is politics all the way down, with nothing underneath but more politics. The politics of the trans movement is doing aren't there to serve their preferences about language as a goal: their preferences about langauge are only a means to their overtly political ends.

Has someone done that?

Yes, yours did that, which is what my argument about the age of consent demonstrates.

> "Ah, excuse me I don't see how the story of Ham can have any merit."

The idea of linking Ham to Africans is a later addition, not from the original story at all. The original story was saying something completely different from that very modern spin by white racialists. But at the same time, the Bible does not assume or even permit your modern quasi-Marxist moral framework in which slavery and colonialism are the prime historical evil to which all other evils are lesser. Just like how the Bible doesn't support the white racialists modern moral framework, it doesn't support yours either. So while you're wrong to attribute this white racialist moral framework to the story of Ham in the Bible, you're not wrong to have gathered that the Bible in fact does have a different moral framework from yours. It just isn't the same one as the white racialists.

> "Those stories are about worshiping a God of war,"

Sometimes people need killing. I'm not a pacifist.

> "leading to our very offensive culture"

Sometimes people should be offended.

> "in the US prepared for the Military-Industrial Complex and acts of war that violate international agreements."

I'm not a globalist either.

What the Book of Mormon is doing to white racialism is far more devastating than what you're doing. What you're doing is an external attack: rejecting the basic premises and asserting your own alien moral framework to judge the position from outside. What the Book of Mormon is doing is accepting the basic premises and moral framework and then showing, from the inside, how completely unworkable the position is. (which emerges near the conclusion of the narrative) And that is far more powerful than an external attack could ever be.

But again, it also isn't compatible with your quasi-Marxism so that doesn't mean it's necessarily on your side, except for also by coincidence being very clearly against 19th century white racialism as you are.

I admire William Blake's work on this actually and also Emerson, Lake and Palmer's surprisingly sincere and heartfelt rendition of it.

But the Book of Mormon is a little different, because Blake is using poetic license, while the Book of Mormon contains zero poetry. (that's not a critcism: it's a genre categorization. The Bible has poetry within it while the Book of Mormon does not contain any)

Also, the Book of Mormon claims that certain events surrounding the United States in particular are the literal fulfillment of some of the prophesies of Isaiah.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language.

Words mean things! Or, as Richard Weaver put it, "Ideas have consequences"!

I recently encountered on another forum a really absurd argument, that, "It's not politics: it's human rights."

That's just so completely absurd, because human rights are the most political thing in the entire world. There's literally nothing more political in all of human capacity for thought than the concept of human rights.

Our society has normalized a great deal of what I call "category laundering" to pretend that the most obviously political things aren't political, right along with the absurd category laundering of men being women and vice versa.

> "This is overly political"

Yes it is but it's political philosophy and it's historically grounded. I am not using "Marxist" as an accusation or insult, but as the real, openly acknowledged political forebear of a modern political coalition.

> "and I see no evidence of this."

I wasn't aware that my pointing out the historical grounding in Marxism of current left wing movements would be factually controversial. I could definitely go do the research necessary to prove this point historically. Not that doing so would prove the movement false or bad, because I never accused them of being Soviets, just ideological Marxists or more precisely post-Marxists.

I'm anti-Communist on theoretical grounds, but I've grown far more open to socialist economics in the past decade. Some of Marx's critiques of capitalism stick! I would not claim that Marx is a barren field devoid of insight!

> "No offence, but I'm interested in talking about the topic of the OP, and this is veering off."

I really don't think one can really get into the substance of the claims of the transgender movement without getting into its anthropology and the historical development of that anthropology.

The movement is very, very overtly political and always has been. It's very situated in a very specific ideological stack, just as surely as the Pope is Catholic.

> “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes."

Actually, it totally is and we totally can do exactly that.

> "Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings."

Uh-huh. And this fluid, ever shifting approach then applies directly to words like "child" and "adult" and "consent." We're no doubt supposed to understand these words, not as a static system of definitions, but as a web of practices, habits, etc, so that we can't point at a statute and say, "This person was underage" because words like "underage" can't be understood in such static, rigid terms.

I do agree but there's more to it than this.

The trans ideology has an absurd premise that the word "gender" means what previously would have been understood as only part of gender role -- they posit that gender is just a social role. Never a biological role -- just a social role and that's all. And this is based on the further absurd premise that society is constructed so as to produce these social roles in a way which is arbitrary and elective, not essential or necessary and defintiely not determined even in part by a universal unchanging human nature.

And that assumption that society is arbitrarily constructed and that human nature is not fixed comes from their ideological grounding in Marxism. Marx posited that societies and social roles are products of the class system and that the class system can be changed to produce different societies and social roles. Marx saw social roles as determined, not by a universal unchanging human nature, but by economic determinism, or in other words, by money.

However, because the trans ideology gets its Marxism not directly from Marx but filtered through the heresy of the Frankfurt School, they substitute money for social roles being determined by sexual oppression instead. Still, the reason they were initially open to the idea of social constructionism is ultimately because of their historical / ideological heritage from Marx.

That's why, even though the transgender practices are very obviously a very capitalist product of Big Pharma, to make them reliable customers for life, they can frame this obvious exploitation as liberation, because their worldview says it isn't money that determines social roles: it's social systems of oppresion.

But here's where reality impacts their project:

Gender (or sex, which is in fact synonymous no matter what anyone says) is more than a social role. It's also a biological role. Humans are mammals, designed to send and receive signals concerning the feasibilty of sexual reproduction all day, every day. This is not a product of The Patriarchy bemoaned by feminists: this is either Creation or human evolution or both, depending on which propaganda mill you prefer to shop at.

And when you start engineering signals that intentionally disrupt how the process of sexual selection works for the whole community, then you aren't showing what a wonderfully expressive unique individual you are who sees through the oppressive system. Instead, you screw up and dump interference into the signals everybody else around you is sending all the time.

The most obvious example of this is that men can't be friends anymore, else all the women will assume they're gay, and so won't consider them suitable mates, thus disadvantaging (in sexual selection terms) any men who publicly maintain close male friendships, thus discouraging them from cultivating said friendships. Thus public homoeroticism kills public male friendship at not just a psychological but also at an institutional level. Not because anybody decided there was going to be a formal rule against male friendship in order to persecute gays, and not because they think they might be actively persecuted for being gay, (they won't be) but because you've manipulated and changed the baseline social assumptions about what the sexual signals everyone is sending mean, and in the process, destroyed something very precious and very human.

And that's just public homoeroticism. Transgender takes that effect and only magnifies it tenfold, so that now, overt signals of attraction between the sexes -- the exact kind necessary to carry on the human race at all -- become inherently suspect. Men and women don't know what the hell they're even supposed to be or look for on a visceral level. The new standards and practices this movement advocates don't liberate and support the one different individual and insulate them from xenophobia -- in fact, they jam and disrupt the social/sexual signals for everybody else!

This is a real problem -- not just a religious problem, but a very secular problem -- because it affects birthrates. Not birthrates among gay or transgender people, but across the whole society. The more sexual confusion you dump into the system by making deviant sexual behaviors "loud and proud" in public, the more difficult it becomes to navigate how the hell normal people are supposed to meet up and have babies. And the world is not overpopulated -- that's nonsense. This is killing us.

This is one of the many reasons why sexual deviancy needs to stay marginalized. Not necessarily persecuted, but definitely kept out of the public eye. Sexual norms have a social function which is critical for the long term prosperity and survival of any human community and cannot be modified within certain very narrow guidelines without widespread chaos and destruction in the long term.

In short, the conservatives are right about this.

> "Because this is a question of linguistics, and not an attack on any individual. I'm simply noting common language, and what is most rational for any English speaker to conclude based on the sentence structure."

When it comes to gaytrans, language is the battlefield, not held in common at all.

If you go listing your preferred pronouns, then that act is the most definite public signal of your entire political platform that you can make. It guarantees which side you voted for and support in politics 100% of the time. It tells everyone all they need to know without any serious doubt about your stances across the whole slate of public issues, from abortion to zoo subsidies. Even an actual literal Trump hat isn't as clear of a one-sided partisan poltiical signal as that is.

And critically, it doesn't matter at all what the actual pronoun preferences are. Only the fact that you did it alone says everything. (I mean the rhetorical you, not you personally)

How we should use words is itself the critical question. There really isn't any neutral, objective standard of reasonable English to which you can appeal. English is what's on trial. It can't also be the judge.

> "I am not denying that trans gender people exist"

Are you a Catholic?

Do you believe that when the priest says mass over the bread and the wine, that they transubstantiate to become the actual literal body and blood of Jesus Christ?

If you deny that belief in transubstantiation as not being true, then are you attacking Catholics -- or Christ? Because you're certainly denying that the thing they believe in exists.

And for the trans movement, the eqiuvalent of that denial is blasphemy. It should get you ostracized. It should get you fired. It should get you stripped of any public credentials or authority. It should get you banished not just from the public square but from the universe itself.

There's no "separation of church and state" for the trans religion. No "two kingdoms" theory. There's just, ironically, iron clad dogmatic absolutes.

Or at least so far. They'd need to probably have some kind of schism so that they have to deal with significant sectarian problems within their own communities before they'd develop anything approaching liberalism.

That is, if we approach calling transgenderism a religion not as an insult, but as a genuine way of undersatnding their historical development. Which I think is key to comprehending what's even going on with this issue.

> "The question is mostly pointing out that the phrase in ambiguous without further clarification, and the most rational conclusion is to assume 'woman' not modified by any adjective, means 'adult human female'."

That really does entail denying that "trans people" exist. It clearly is saying "trans women" aren't really women: that only adult human females are real women. And that is clearly what the trans movement is explicitly against and has been very vocal about.

> "Trans can be due to trauma,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "trying to escape a sexist environment,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "heterosexual inversion (straight men who get sexual and romantic feelings from taking on femininity),"

This seems to literally be homosexuality? Unless I'm misreading you?

I obviously don't have a degree in gender studies so what I'm saying is not necessarily intended as sarcasm. I really do look at transgenderism as being based on homosexual tendencies that have merely been socialized and politicized under a new branding to manufacture a victim narrative identity, the same way that the "gay" identity was originally manufactured out of homosexual tendencies in the 19th century. (Proudly and openly at the time, I might add, by those who were consciously doing this. They said they were doing this: it wasn't a debate at the time whether this was the case or not)

> "This place is not reddit, and as long as people understand what philosophy is supposed to explore, you can dive into any philosophical concept about any topic."

OK, well, let's hope so, but when I saw that rule, my immediate thought was, "This is totally is Reddit." Reddit is exactly the site I thought of -- that this is just like Reddit, so why aren't these people just using Reddit? But I don't know that it's just like Reddit: I'm only saying that was my thought or suspicion.

In fact, the Book of Mormon is fully informed by this narrative about the curse of Ham and is referencing it clearly, and everything that I said is true about it. It looks like it's endorsing the curse of Ham narrative early in the text, but late in the text it is revealed that it is really against it, by showing the consequences of it on a large scale. The more righteous people in the Book of Mormon, turn out in the end to be the Lamanites who started out with this curse you refer to, but by the end of the text, they are elevated above the Nephites and given all the Nephites promises, while the Nephites themselves are utterly destroyed for their pride and hubris. And those promises extend explicitly to the present day. It is a complete reversal by the end of the text! In a way that doesn't seem possible early on!

Even having this topic open for discussion at all is something I find surprising because the rules of the forum say:

> "Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them."

And the "etc" pretty obviously includes a maximal dogmatic presumption that any challenge to left wing orthodoxy on any questions of social issues whatsoever is clearly disallowed, no matter how civil, no matter how educated. That is what this rule as written means and any disagreement with me on that point concerning what this text from the forum's rules in fact says is frankly dishonest, because words mean things.

Which means I may very well get banned for pointing this out:

The trans movement is fundamentally anti-philosophical and dogmatic. Dissent is not tolerated and even attempting to define the boundaries of orthodoxy so as not to stray from them is against the whole spirit of that community because what's valued there is a vibe, not an idea. Criticism is for apologists to dismantle outsiders with nihilism, not to show the movement itself a way forward. There will never be a genuine philosopher for the trans movement unless it grows past this stage early religions always have.

Saying the trans movement is a "cult" is actually intelligent if by "cult" you mean "early stage of a newly emerging religion" in a historical sense and not in the pejorative sense of the 20th century anti-cult movement. "Cult" after all, is the root word of "culture" and the historical root of cultures as well. It remains to be seen whether anyone within the deeply anti-conservative trans community will ever grow the conservative instincts necessary to conserve their own community in the long term, so that they can eventually grow from a cult into a religion and from a religion into a philosophy. (a process that typically takes at least something around 150 years)

Not that I even want this to happen: I just recognize the historical pattern.

But anyway, about the rules of the forum: this raises the question of why the trans question is being allowed at all. You're not allowed to question feminism or the gay movement, but you are allowed to question the trans movement? Why? What possible combination of philosophy and political theory allows for drawing the line at such a completely abitrary place?

As far as I'm concerned, trans is just gay with extra steps. All these movements are a package deal, not meaningful to evaluate separately. And I've thought for years that, while I understand you need to have some rules to maintain some common ground, a philosophy forum which would ban Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, can't be any good.

Believing some people have dark skin because "God" cursed them is a little too offensive for me. — Athena

I hope you are aware that the Book of Mormon completely reverses its narrative on race by the end of the text. It sets things up to make you think it's going to side with 19th century white racialism early in the text, but then pulls the chair out from under that view by the end. It goes to the very core of that worldview and then brutally rips the guts out of it. Not as an outsider, but from a place of deeply understanding it, paying the narrative cost of doing that. And this wasn't an accident by any possible account either because Joseph Smith Jr and the early Latter Day Saints were vocally anti-slavery in a time and place where it was physically dangerous to be so. It is an explicitly liberal text (in the 19th century sense of the word liberal) and not what you'd assume if you go into it with a shallow reading, uninformed by historical context and then quit reading early on because of a stereotype.

Yes, it does say some things to set up the kind of world where white racialism makes sense: the kind of world which that worldview implicitly assumes must be how things work. But those statements do not stand unexamined by the end of the text.

Now I'm not saying everybody who gives it a fair reading does or should get convinced or converted to the Mormon church. I'm not with the Mormon church. I'm just saying, for the moment, that this particular charge of racism against the Book of Mormon can't be sustained given what was really going on both in the text and in the historical context of the 19th century.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether the Book of Mormon is true or false -- which is fair enough, because the text obnoxiously necessitates that kind of evaluation in its opening lines. But I think insufficient attention has been paid to the orthogonal question of whether the Book of Mormon is deep or shallow. My argument on this would be that no matter where you stand on its historicity, in fact, it is deep.

This is real disappointing, because I was hoping for something far more interesting: The question of, when specific religions fail to be passed on to the next generation, what causes this failure to happen, approached as philosophy of history. And not just religions but institutions, beliefs and practices of all kinds.

Instead, it seems to be just garden variety Reddit atheist stuff from the 2000s.

This is why the first new world religion spawned in the New World, Latter Day Saintism, fixes this problem with the Book of Mormon.

T

So, can the state (governing body) just dictate that women cannot have abortions unless their health is severely threatened? In other words, could all 50 states have a policy that automatically rejects abortions on the grounds of rape and incest? — Chany

I'm Pro-Life. The media and pro-abortion activists always seem to assumr this is an irrational religious thing. That only shows they're in an echo chamber. They aren't listening or thinking.

Pro-Lifers are logical. They aren't just expressing a personal dislike of abortion as being icky or disgusting. They are reasoning from the premise that abortion is murder and that's not an extreme position in the Pro-Life movement -- that is the mainstream Pro-Life view. So they do of course want to ban abortion / murder.

Are rape and incest babies somehow less human than other babies? If abortion is murder, then no exception for rape or incest can be rationally justified. Such a thing would be logically indefensible.

By the way, I'm not praising Hamilton here either. He had his own set of problems. But going to France wasn't exactly a genius move.

Also, Lin-Manuel Miranda is a racist. A great songwriter, but also a huge racist. He's like a 21st century Richard Wagner. Puts on huge impressive stage musicals constructed out of leitmotifs, and is super racist in his politics. Totally Wagnerian.

Jefferson gave up on the inanity and went to France.

That is called real thought, based on real knowledge — ernestm

What?

You do know France erupted into a violent revolution which was a complete and utter failure to protect the people's liberty to such an extreme degree that they spread war to all of Europe all for nothing under an egomaniacal dictator and eventually straight up abandoned the republican project altogether and restored the monarchy just to stop the madness, right?