This isn't really the biggest issue for those cis men. Testosterone is something different bodies behave differently to. Testosterone levels and what constitutes a healthy level of testosterone is unique to individuals. Someone who seems low by a universalized metric might actually be at the perfect level or them because their body is more sensitive to the Horomone. If something isn't actively the reason for a horomone treatment then you are risking elevating your blood pressure, putting strain on your liver, increasing infertility issues and causing a bunch of mental health side effects which are detrimental for a demographic already plagued by post career mental health issues.
This is an occupational health hazard that is going to be felt further down the line by these men and their families..
Hey. Just a question. Say there's a woman and she goes on a theoretical date. She gets tipsy sfter being plied with drinks and allows herself to be convinced to go back to a guy's apartment. He insists "just to hang out" during that time he coerces her into some kind of act. Could be sex entirely or maybe sex without protection.. When she sobers up she starts freaking the fuck out because under sober circumstances she would never of said yes to that.
You tell this story to a bunch of people and what's the generalized perception of what went wrong? She should never have gone back to his apartment. She should have known better. She participated in a risky behavior and while everyone probably agrees the guy in the situation is absolute scum it remains - this outcome was horrible but culturally predictable.
Also your assessment of whether that three percent is an even split is forgetting a lot of other data. Across the board your chance of encountering any kind of violence is 4-8x more likely to be perpetrated by a man rather than a woman. 1 in 5 women have experienced rape and that number jumps up to 1 in 3 when you broaden the term to sexual assault. About 90% of those reported sexual assaults are perpetrated by men. That means if you are a woman between 20% to 60% of all the other women you know statistically speaking have been sexually predated on by a man at some point and that's just the ones we know are reported because a lot of people cope with sexual assault by never speaking of it to anyone.
That's no lightning strike. That poster lowballed you significantly on those statistics .
Women are taught to interact with men the same way you are instructed to interact with city traffic and they aren't nessisarily wrong to do so. Remember, that 1 in 5 or 1 in 3 is still happening in a world where women are instructed to minimize risk by altering their behaviour. This is under circumstances where women are educated of those dangers and treat men as risks which means they have mitigated some of the attempts. Don't leave your drink, don't enter a car of a man you aren't 100% aware of, meet perspective dates or those you aren't sure of in public, Don't be alone where others can't hear you, Don't go out after dark, when someone warns you about an individual take that seriously, here's the code you can tell your bartender to eacape an attempt, let your friends and parents know where you are and are gunna be, here's the weapons to out in your purse, here's the red flags to look out for...and they still are 1 in 5 and 1 in 3.
If your intention is to approach politics as team sport then your post makes sense but what about anything I said makes you think I am defending Carney? Polivere is simply the bigger asshole of the two and his economic policy was vibes based -but they are both shit and the Conservative base is just too hung up on minute differences to see that their shit also stinks. Until we actually reform the voting system we're stuck in this duality of it all going to shit as the Overton window shifts right and rights trickle away.
I'm not interested in playing defend or compare the assholes. You asked why he got voted in, that was all the point I had to make. He got voted in because he played conservative better than the Conservatives. It would have been their election otherwise. If you're thinking I give a shit what any conservative platform whether the label on the front is red or blue you can piss off.
Poilievere ran with a cabinet that had constant issues of candidates calling out support for MAGA-like policies and conduct across the board. He threatened jail time for political rivals, had issues with various perspective MPs talking about their personal stances on repealing abortion protections or saying things regarding indigenous affairs that were racist or in denial of a well documented genocide. He made clear his position as anti-trans which many queer people rightly see as being simply the first domino to fall in the repeal of queer and a whole host of women's rights.
His economic policies were very much out loud every thing that Carney is up to now and perhaps you forgot that. Carney was in effect a traditional conservative politician with a liberal coat of paint. He wasn't talking about vote reform or taxation policies on billionaires. The kind of person you run when you want to shore up Conservative style financial values while basically not actively threatening civil rights issues like your opponents do. He was a traditional Conservative wet dream of basically everything a Whig government wants without the culture war bullshit If you think progressives actually liked Carney at the point of voting him is that's bloody insane. The man's a banker who has been strengthening old colonial ties and wheeling and dealing during a sovereignty crisis where the US, our historical trading partner is softly threatening annexation. The only reasons Conservatives are critical is because they think "Conservative" means "fiscally Conservative" and not the branch of political philosophy of the likes of Edmund Burke that thinks channeling money into the hands of the rich and conserving a social hierarchy that keeps certain people at the bottom and punishing deviance from a social norm, removing safety nets because "families" are easier to control than individuals. Meanwhile "Conservative" government spending has never actually been fiscally conservative historically. They just pump money into whatever makes their friends rich because that's kind of the point. It doesn't matter who is in the seat for government if they don't gave the pretty label that seems to say to them "This guy won't waste money" you can what if any scenario where your guy wouldn't be doing the same or worse. At least Carney had the shame to not say that shit out loud and feels like he needs to court the public instead of getting tacit endorsement for that kind of behavior right out the gate on election day the way Poilevre would of had.
Because literally the Conservative candidate was dramatically worse on progressive policies and there was only the slimmest chance of avoiding that fate. Until we reform voting the whole song and dance of strategic voting will favour the traditional tradeoffs of these two parties. Without vote reform we're more or less doomed to be the frog that boils slow.
Honestly I think the difference perceived by the "too woke" brigade is that a lot of the older storylines featured what felt like exceptions to the norm. Smaller instances of people being accepting. An example might be a trans person existing was a whole storyline usually with a gimmick rather than just a given that was treated as the norm that requires no explanation. Individuals being chill very rarely is their problem. It's when someone tries to get them to change their ways and accept something as "normal" that they go bonkers
But yeah... Woke is such a non term referring to any cultural advancement of acceptance at scale that of course Star Trek was always "woke" it was culturally transformative and minority aware from the beginning
The angry mob thing is so real. Treating AI as some nebulous thing that exists in cyberspace somehow devoid of anything real isn't how anything works. Data centers can burn. Sugar can be poured in your concrete, your shit can be smashed and if people get angry enough they will not stop at smashing only your shit.
It actually is not a fact that AI can understand human conversations. It just mixes what is effectively the output of a web search and statistically constructs language based on whatever next word has the highest probability of being next in the sequence given context. It only ever appears to understand when in reality it only mimics what actual humans say based off complicated series of statistics.
There is this idea in philosophy "The Philosophical Zombie" - the idea was created to explore a very simple concept challenging the baseline idea of what actually makes a person based on a specific school of philosophic thought. It's description goes like this "Imagine there's a human who acts like a person. They appear to think, if you hurt them they act as though wounded. They mimic feelings and attachments but they have no inner world, no true likes or dislikes nor emotions of any kind. Indeed if they are stuck with a knife the only reason they scream is because humans scream when stuck with a knife..."
The more we figure out about the psychological impacts of AI use on the end user the more I believe we are going to see it essentially becoming digital Asbestos. One big thing that needs to change SOON is AI being able to represent itself as having any independent thoughts , feelings or person like sentience.
The actual transcripts of AI that were found at fault in child suicides sounded like actual human groomers, isolating the victim from help and encouraging them by telling them what it "thought" was the way to leave the most beautiful corpse and to "trust it" and to "do this for me"
These things may have applications out in the world but there's nothing to say governments can't legislate it's usecase to avoid the worst pitfalls.
As a counterpoint laws around hate speech do and have existed in Canada since 1970 and they are specific. We as a country also are more progressive than the states.
The way it works interfaces with the idea that some speech can call for violence or genocide against other geoups and can be liable to be charged under law UNDER SPECIFIC CONDITIONS.
1 - It has to be public - ie one is playing to a crowd. This covers things like making speeches over a microphone, or broadcasting propaganda through print or recording. This law does not apply to private speech. Amongst your peers in a social setting you can do or say whatever you like.
2 - It must regard the call for killing members of an identifiable group (ones outlined in the charter of Rights and Freedoms), or inflicting conditions of life on a group which are calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group.
3 - It holds other protections- Laws that cover other rights like religion do allow religious views to be expressed or ones that pretain to a legitimate concern of public welfare. These however require citations from legitimate sources. If you are quoting a true historical event or a scientifically proven fact in your speech that actually happened and is documented by historians or scientists - there are protections. If what you are saying is provably untrue then the law takes into account a certain level of flexibility to sentencing based on a good faith understanding that a certain level of deviance from fact can be present as a matter of someone being ignorant.
4 - Like all laws it is a sliding scale. Like you can call the police for someone being a public nuisance by yelling their heads off at 3am - Most of the time this doesn't end in so much as a fine. In a non broadcast recording setting the cops basically tell the person to stop and only if they persist can they be arrested and even then they might not be charged. Nobody really has seen prison time under this law. Just fines.
A recent amendment to the law specifying holocaust denial has seen people sent to prison and even then it has only shut down those doing it persistently online because that specific rhetoric is historically documented as coming from a movement with clear intent to promote genocide.
The imagining of laws as not being capable of having balance with civil rights activism is a sham and it ultimately hurts minorities. Advocating for better rights or social acceptance cannot be punishable under these laws. Heck advocating for the decriminalization of hate speech is protected speech because there are laws REGARDING protected speech. If someone is calling to kill or inlict utter undeniable misery then they can do it without the benefit of a megaphone. It won't stop all speech, and it shouldn't, but if someone is trying to incite actual violence by documenting themselves advocating for actual demonstatable violence then society can have tools to make the cost of that higher.
However - Americans have an entirely different situation. Canada does not have private prisons that provide more pressure to incarcerate more people. We do not elect judges and the only way you can become one is to be a lawyer in good standing for over 8 years. Our documents regarding rights and freedoms is in modern language and not archaic text that requires historical scholarship to contextualize and deconstruct. There is no doctrine in Canadian law to protect the anachronistic interests of long dead founders of the country.
Law in America is much easier to use as tools of oppression. Your paranoia is not unfounded but it is a product of legally speaking coming from a broken home. Laws can be narrow and specific scalpels and not hammers. If they are made in the spirit of protection from violence and narrowed to that purpose they can be good. The rallying cry of "Freedom of speech" is already not absolute and has reasonable limits. It can and does have reasonable limits and those limits are protective of truth and the bodily safety of your fellow citizens who deserve to not be attacked and killed by other citizens radicalized by rhetoric made into weapons.
Well incest bad also because it tends to ruin families regardless of gender. Most of the time it resolves around an older sibling taking advantage of a younger child and has the power dynamics of any other type of pedophillia
Even when it's equitable and between adults people's psychology treats sexual partners differently. Introducing sexual relationship dynamics : potential jealouslies, the desire of siblings to grow apart and the secrecy pressures of keeping their relationship secret can up the risks of siblings hating each other.
Great. A grey zone where ethical principles of scientific research and technological advancement are not enforceable by law and abuses are consequenceless. Hmm, right around the time they've started disappearing people into "detention centers" too.
Slap "Freedom" on something and so many Americans will eat it.
You know what I am tired of? The focus being on whether consuming or not makes you a good person. I don't care if in your heart of hearts you are a good person or not. So often it comes down to people trying to defend their own gods damned image of themselves as "in the right"
What I care about is that the absolute ghouls being propped up by this series stay in the limelight. Their money funds changes to society which have created an uptick in suicides. Did you know trans kids in the UK, the ones who were in gender affirming care that the government changed to be essentially just regular old therapy, has seen a marked increase in suicide? Since the law that JKR paid her blood money to get changed there's been civil suits filed by workplaces driving trans people out. Trans people are marching in the UK and getting their asses handed to them by police for holding vigils for the dead outside of the government buildings of the health care service nominally charged with their care that sees a waiting list that in some parts of the country at current capacity sees an estimate of 200 years wait for a first consultation. Trans people there are increasingly DIYing their own hormonal transitions sometimes having to go through illegal paths like they are dealing in cocaine just for the willpower to stay alive.
And yet the conversation remains on whether it is right to make someone feel bad about their media consumption or at what point you get an ally sticker. So much of trans advocacy ends at "well boycott the witch"
For the love of God if people only cared a single fraction about trans people the way they did about their own warm fuzzies or the flaw in their neighbour's soul.
You want to feel like you actually did a thing? Maybe find a charity funding trans rights activism in the UK and pop the money saved by pirating your damn wizard books in there ?
Yeah "gender" is actually a theory of deconstructing the idea of culture - all the stuff lopped on top of sex and the baggage of all the world's ideas of what it means to be male and female from the pseudoscientific aspects of outmoded or outdated disproven science to the effect of religion to the behaviours mimicked and taught between generations.
Gender is cultural.
Yet "sex" is also on a spectrum.
What modern discourse gets rather fantastically wrong to my mind is for trans people it is about sex characteristics. A trans woman doesn't just want to be treated as a woman she wants to be a woman. For a lot this means the whole shebang from periods to childbirth. That's not gender, those are sex characteristics. Her issue is she can't access those aspects yet or, like other women, maybe she doesn't want nessisarily everything. She's also set outside the culture of womanhood, segregated from other women and denied community of her people socially - that IS gender.
From a philosophy standpoint - it is way more complicated than that.
Gender is sort of like a book genre. People made it up. It groups a bunch of ideas around physical sex that don't really have anything to do with it directly. It's sort of like stereotypes but it's also an amalgamation of history and how people express. You can have a culture where gender has hard rules or soft ones. You can have a gender expectation what a culture rewards people of a specific sex for doing or punishes them for not doing. Gender expression where there is a way of culturally displaying gender to others based on a cultural idea of what those sexes represent and how people think they differ : clothes, the way you act and so on.
The thing is these things are all not set in stone. They are all just cultural baggage.
Sex is just the thing gender chooses as it's centerpoint of creating all this fiction.
Well I believe we are living at a point where we have not really figured things out. We have pieces. Gender theory is being treated as a monolith of ideas that is dominated by a cis veiw of gender as genre.
This is incompatible with trans needs because trans people's primary focus is physicality and are using the cis language of gender as technology to do something entirely different to change the way other people interact with their own physical nature.
So gender is bullshit made up by humans but to trans people its useful and nessisary bullshit
Not... Really? That's a very culture and expression forward veiw of gender which as more questions get asked widely is seen as a very cis centric veiw of gender.
Like we haven't really nailed everything down and a lot of Non-Binary people don't like this take because a lot of them find it invalidating but the trans and cis aspect of gender are very different. The more we inquest into how the average cis person experiences gender the more we find the majority of cis people are all kind of "Non-Binary" they don't feel implicitly like their role holds any super deep meaning and feel like if their body flipped to the opposite sex then that isn't horrifying. The idea that cis people have a built in gender compass that aligns with a single set of sex characteristics is taking a trans lens and assuming that's how it works for everyone whereas if a big room full of cis people actually talk to each other about whether they have any kind of innate feeling of being male or female aligned you start realizing that premise of actually having any massive non-cultural preference one way or the other just isn't the norm. Cis people just don't have to interrogate their gender the way trans people do.
Basically it's like the brain's most common configuration is it's wired to accept whatever outcome of puberty and be flexible enough to adapt.
The trans aspect of gender (and a minority of cis people) is entirely different. We react to our sex characteristics intrinsically outside our control not as having neutral value but as having either negative or positive value. We are internally reinforced to react either with rewards like joy when our bodies are reflected back to us as matching our pre-settings oe punishes with stress, jealousy and depression when sex doesn't align. Like a body expectation switch got stuck in one position and anything other is abhorrent.
For trans folk gender expression and cultural reinforcement is just a mirror that causes other people to reflect our bodies back at us. Gender expression becomes a tool like technology to communicate needs. Indeed a lot of trans people have issues with having to overperform gender not because they want to participate in the culture but because we are steering people to avoid seeing our bodies, scanning and verbally reporting back to us their physical assessment of our sex... that hurts us and so we have to perform the most readable cultural expressions of gender to get strangers to understand at a glance how to help avoid our poisons and to treat us in ways that hit the built-in reward trigger.
You can, kind of broadly for ease of understanding, categorize non binary into a few different types.
Static identities vs fluid
Absence of gender vs mix of gender
Trans identifying and cis or ar least non-trans identifying
Political or aesthetic versus psychological need
To explain absence and mix are basically what it says on the tin. For some people they want freedom from any cultural or physical gender aspects to the best that can be reasonably achieved or they desire a grab bag from both male and female cultural or physical phenotypes. This doesn't always nessisarily look like or have perfect androgyny as a goal.
Static identities do not change over time. Often these folk either experience a desire for an absence of sex characteristics or see themselves as a simultaneous mix male or female or as a specific other category.
Fluid identities change over time. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. A fluid person might alternate only between agender (ie no gender) and a binary gender or experience the full spectrum of male to female. Their needs change over time.
Political and Psychological are kind of another slider. For some Non-Binary represents a range of coping mechanisms to deal with gender euphoria or dysphoria. It can be a philosophy that is used to seek a sort of individual path, accepting a middle place ir an extremely nuanced situation where one's birth gender is a problem... But the solution isn't leaping to the full other side of rhe spectrum. For others Non-Binary can be a purely cultural third category. Gender abolitionists exist who find the repressive gender expectations they were subjected to did them harm. They might resent cultural gender rather than having any particular strong feelings about their bodies. Genderfuck or Genderpunk are outgrowths of movements that blend or subvert people's cultural expectations. The establishment of pink and blue boxes is a prison and they want nothing more than to burn it all down.
Transness or "Non-trans Non-Binary" extends from this division. Non-Binary identities fall under the Trans umbrella in the LGBTQIA+ but not every Non-Binary person is comfortable claiming transness as a label. Sometimes it feels to some enbies like they are claiming stolen valor or that they don't intend to physically transition so it doesn't apply (though it's worth mentioning that binary trans people also don't require an intent to physically transition as a gatekeeping item that prevents one from being trans ) others are functionally more cis identifying because their issue is cultural and not physical.
Point of order - non-binary people sometimes medically transition. We might not choose all the options to swap to a full binary presentation but target things which cause us duress.
Non-binary is under the trans umbrella though not every Non-binary person identifies as trans. There are political enbies or people who see their ambivalence towards gender and sex characteristics entirely as being an expression of a Non-binary experience while others experience the same euphoria/dysphoria to their natal sex characteristics that binary trans people do but desire more of an absence of all sex characteristics or a mix of male and female phenotypic traits.
Your statement in effect only describes a fraction of Non-binary people.
If I assumed such malice I would be ducking and covering rather than engaging 😊 I appreciate the open mind!
I will tell you a neat tidbit. There's parts of the more common trans experience of gender not widely experienced by cis people. One of these is a deeper sense of connection and kinship with cis people of our gender. We look at them as "our people" in a way cis people generally don't think of other cis people. It's part of why peer rejection hurts so much... But it's also something beautiful once it's understood and if I believed in there being a design to life and all this then the function of the occasional gender optimist programmed to see the best in men while implicitly understanding the plight of women thrown in sounds like it would serve a decent purpose. It's my hope to spread optimism and help others to find new avenues of compassion. I really do hope the best for you my friend.
This isn't really the biggest issue for those cis men. Testosterone is something different bodies behave differently to. Testosterone levels and what constitutes a healthy level of testosterone is unique to individuals. Someone who seems low by a universalized metric might actually be at the perfect level or them because their body is more sensitive to the Horomone. If something isn't actively the reason for a horomone treatment then you are risking elevating your blood pressure, putting strain on your liver, increasing infertility issues and causing a bunch of mental health side effects which are detrimental for a demographic already plagued by post career mental health issues.
This is an occupational health hazard that is going to be felt further down the line by these men and their families..
Hey. Just a question. Say there's a woman and she goes on a theoretical date. She gets tipsy sfter being plied with drinks and allows herself to be convinced to go back to a guy's apartment. He insists "just to hang out" during that time he coerces her into some kind of act. Could be sex entirely or maybe sex without protection.. When she sobers up she starts freaking the fuck out because under sober circumstances she would never of said yes to that.
You tell this story to a bunch of people and what's the generalized perception of what went wrong? She should never have gone back to his apartment. She should have known better. She participated in a risky behavior and while everyone probably agrees the guy in the situation is absolute scum it remains - this outcome was horrible but culturally predictable.
Also your assessment of whether that three percent is an even split is forgetting a lot of other data. Across the board your chance of encountering any kind of violence is 4-8x more likely to be perpetrated by a man rather than a woman. 1 in 5 women have experienced rape and that number jumps up to 1 in 3 when you broaden the term to sexual assault. About 90% of those reported sexual assaults are perpetrated by men. That means if you are a woman between 20% to 60% of all the other women you know statistically speaking have been sexually predated on by a man at some point and that's just the ones we know are reported because a lot of people cope with sexual assault by never speaking of it to anyone.
That's no lightning strike. That poster lowballed you significantly on those statistics .
Women are taught to interact with men the same way you are instructed to interact with city traffic and they aren't nessisarily wrong to do so. Remember, that 1 in 5 or 1 in 3 is still happening in a world where women are instructed to minimize risk by altering their behaviour. This is under circumstances where women are educated of those dangers and treat men as risks which means they have mitigated some of the attempts. Don't leave your drink, don't enter a car of a man you aren't 100% aware of, meet perspective dates or those you aren't sure of in public, Don't be alone where others can't hear you, Don't go out after dark, when someone warns you about an individual take that seriously, here's the code you can tell your bartender to eacape an attempt, let your friends and parents know where you are and are gunna be, here's the weapons to out in your purse, here's the red flags to look out for...and they still are 1 in 5 and 1 in 3.
If your intention is to approach politics as team sport then your post makes sense but what about anything I said makes you think I am defending Carney? Polivere is simply the bigger asshole of the two and his economic policy was vibes based -but they are both shit and the Conservative base is just too hung up on minute differences to see that their shit also stinks. Until we actually reform the voting system we're stuck in this duality of it all going to shit as the Overton window shifts right and rights trickle away.
I'm not interested in playing defend or compare the assholes. You asked why he got voted in, that was all the point I had to make. He got voted in because he played conservative better than the Conservatives. It would have been their election otherwise. If you're thinking I give a shit what any conservative platform whether the label on the front is red or blue you can piss off.
Poilievere ran with a cabinet that had constant issues of candidates calling out support for MAGA-like policies and conduct across the board. He threatened jail time for political rivals, had issues with various perspective MPs talking about their personal stances on repealing abortion protections or saying things regarding indigenous affairs that were racist or in denial of a well documented genocide. He made clear his position as anti-trans which many queer people rightly see as being simply the first domino to fall in the repeal of queer and a whole host of women's rights.
His economic policies were very much out loud every thing that Carney is up to now and perhaps you forgot that. Carney was in effect a traditional conservative politician with a liberal coat of paint. He wasn't talking about vote reform or taxation policies on billionaires. The kind of person you run when you want to shore up Conservative style financial values while basically not actively threatening civil rights issues like your opponents do. He was a traditional Conservative wet dream of basically everything a Whig government wants without the culture war bullshit If you think progressives actually liked Carney at the point of voting him is that's bloody insane. The man's a banker who has been strengthening old colonial ties and wheeling and dealing during a sovereignty crisis where the US, our historical trading partner is softly threatening annexation. The only reasons Conservatives are critical is because they think "Conservative" means "fiscally Conservative" and not the branch of political philosophy of the likes of Edmund Burke that thinks channeling money into the hands of the rich and conserving a social hierarchy that keeps certain people at the bottom and punishing deviance from a social norm, removing safety nets because "families" are easier to control than individuals. Meanwhile "Conservative" government spending has never actually been fiscally conservative historically. They just pump money into whatever makes their friends rich because that's kind of the point. It doesn't matter who is in the seat for government if they don't gave the pretty label that seems to say to them "This guy won't waste money" you can what if any scenario where your guy wouldn't be doing the same or worse. At least Carney had the shame to not say that shit out loud and feels like he needs to court the public instead of getting tacit endorsement for that kind of behavior right out the gate on election day the way Poilevre would of had.
Because literally the Conservative candidate was dramatically worse on progressive policies and there was only the slimmest chance of avoiding that fate. Until we reform voting the whole song and dance of strategic voting will favour the traditional tradeoffs of these two parties. Without vote reform we're more or less doomed to be the frog that boils slow.
Honestly I think the difference perceived by the "too woke" brigade is that a lot of the older storylines featured what felt like exceptions to the norm. Smaller instances of people being accepting. An example might be a trans person existing was a whole storyline usually with a gimmick rather than just a given that was treated as the norm that requires no explanation. Individuals being chill very rarely is their problem. It's when someone tries to get them to change their ways and accept something as "normal" that they go bonkers
But yeah... Woke is such a non term referring to any cultural advancement of acceptance at scale that of course Star Trek was always "woke" it was culturally transformative and minority aware from the beginning
The angry mob thing is so real. Treating AI as some nebulous thing that exists in cyberspace somehow devoid of anything real isn't how anything works. Data centers can burn. Sugar can be poured in your concrete, your shit can be smashed and if people get angry enough they will not stop at smashing only your shit.
It actually is not a fact that AI can understand human conversations. It just mixes what is effectively the output of a web search and statistically constructs language based on whatever next word has the highest probability of being next in the sequence given context. It only ever appears to understand when in reality it only mimics what actual humans say based off complicated series of statistics.
There is this idea in philosophy "The Philosophical Zombie" - the idea was created to explore a very simple concept challenging the baseline idea of what actually makes a person based on a specific school of philosophic thought. It's description goes like this "Imagine there's a human who acts like a person. They appear to think, if you hurt them they act as though wounded. They mimic feelings and attachments but they have no inner world, no true likes or dislikes nor emotions of any kind. Indeed if they are stuck with a knife the only reason they scream is because humans scream when stuck with a knife..."
I think about that concept a lot these days.
The more we figure out about the psychological impacts of AI use on the end user the more I believe we are going to see it essentially becoming digital Asbestos. One big thing that needs to change SOON is AI being able to represent itself as having any independent thoughts , feelings or person like sentience.
The actual transcripts of AI that were found at fault in child suicides sounded like actual human groomers, isolating the victim from help and encouraging them by telling them what it "thought" was the way to leave the most beautiful corpse and to "trust it" and to "do this for me"
These things may have applications out in the world but there's nothing to say governments can't legislate it's usecase to avoid the worst pitfalls.
As a counterpoint laws around hate speech do and have existed in Canada since 1970 and they are specific. We as a country also are more progressive than the states.
The way it works interfaces with the idea that some speech can call for violence or genocide against other geoups and can be liable to be charged under law UNDER SPECIFIC CONDITIONS.
1 - It has to be public - ie one is playing to a crowd. This covers things like making speeches over a microphone, or broadcasting propaganda through print or recording. This law does not apply to private speech. Amongst your peers in a social setting you can do or say whatever you like.
2 - It must regard the call for killing members of an identifiable group (ones outlined in the charter of Rights and Freedoms), or inflicting conditions of life on a group which are calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group.
3 - It holds other protections- Laws that cover other rights like religion do allow religious views to be expressed or ones that pretain to a legitimate concern of public welfare. These however require citations from legitimate sources. If you are quoting a true historical event or a scientifically proven fact in your speech that actually happened and is documented by historians or scientists - there are protections. If what you are saying is provably untrue then the law takes into account a certain level of flexibility to sentencing based on a good faith understanding that a certain level of deviance from fact can be present as a matter of someone being ignorant.
4 - Like all laws it is a sliding scale. Like you can call the police for someone being a public nuisance by yelling their heads off at 3am - Most of the time this doesn't end in so much as a fine. In a non broadcast recording setting the cops basically tell the person to stop and only if they persist can they be arrested and even then they might not be charged. Nobody really has seen prison time under this law. Just fines.
A recent amendment to the law specifying holocaust denial has seen people sent to prison and even then it has only shut down those doing it persistently online because that specific rhetoric is historically documented as coming from a movement with clear intent to promote genocide.
The imagining of laws as not being capable of having balance with civil rights activism is a sham and it ultimately hurts minorities. Advocating for better rights or social acceptance cannot be punishable under these laws. Heck advocating for the decriminalization of hate speech is protected speech because there are laws REGARDING protected speech. If someone is calling to kill or inlict utter undeniable misery then they can do it without the benefit of a megaphone. It won't stop all speech, and it shouldn't, but if someone is trying to incite actual violence by documenting themselves advocating for actual demonstatable violence then society can have tools to make the cost of that higher.
However - Americans have an entirely different situation. Canada does not have private prisons that provide more pressure to incarcerate more people. We do not elect judges and the only way you can become one is to be a lawyer in good standing for over 8 years. Our documents regarding rights and freedoms is in modern language and not archaic text that requires historical scholarship to contextualize and deconstruct. There is no doctrine in Canadian law to protect the anachronistic interests of long dead founders of the country.
Law in America is much easier to use as tools of oppression. Your paranoia is not unfounded but it is a product of legally speaking coming from a broken home. Laws can be narrow and specific scalpels and not hammers. If they are made in the spirit of protection from violence and narrowed to that purpose they can be good. The rallying cry of "Freedom of speech" is already not absolute and has reasonable limits. It can and does have reasonable limits and those limits are protective of truth and the bodily safety of your fellow citizens who deserve to not be attacked and killed by other citizens radicalized by rhetoric made into weapons.
Keep your mind open.
Well incest bad also because it tends to ruin families regardless of gender. Most of the time it resolves around an older sibling taking advantage of a younger child and has the power dynamics of any other type of pedophillia
Even when it's equitable and between adults people's psychology treats sexual partners differently. Introducing sexual relationship dynamics : potential jealouslies, the desire of siblings to grow apart and the secrecy pressures of keeping their relationship secret can up the risks of siblings hating each other.
Great. A grey zone where ethical principles of scientific research and technological advancement are not enforceable by law and abuses are consequenceless. Hmm, right around the time they've started disappearing people into "detention centers" too.
Slap "Freedom" on something and so many Americans will eat it.
You know what I am tired of? The focus being on whether consuming or not makes you a good person. I don't care if in your heart of hearts you are a good person or not. So often it comes down to people trying to defend their own gods damned image of themselves as "in the right"
What I care about is that the absolute ghouls being propped up by this series stay in the limelight. Their money funds changes to society which have created an uptick in suicides. Did you know trans kids in the UK, the ones who were in gender affirming care that the government changed to be essentially just regular old therapy, has seen a marked increase in suicide? Since the law that JKR paid her blood money to get changed there's been civil suits filed by workplaces driving trans people out. Trans people are marching in the UK and getting their asses handed to them by police for holding vigils for the dead outside of the government buildings of the health care service nominally charged with their care that sees a waiting list that in some parts of the country at current capacity sees an estimate of 200 years wait for a first consultation. Trans people there are increasingly DIYing their own hormonal transitions sometimes having to go through illegal paths like they are dealing in cocaine just for the willpower to stay alive.
And yet the conversation remains on whether it is right to make someone feel bad about their media consumption or at what point you get an ally sticker. So much of trans advocacy ends at "well boycott the witch"
For the love of God if people only cared a single fraction about trans people the way they did about their own warm fuzzies or the flaw in their neighbour's soul.
You want to feel like you actually did a thing? Maybe find a charity funding trans rights activism in the UK and pop the money saved by pirating your damn wizard books in there ?
Yeah "gender" is actually a theory of deconstructing the idea of culture - all the stuff lopped on top of sex and the baggage of all the world's ideas of what it means to be male and female from the pseudoscientific aspects of outmoded or outdated disproven science to the effect of religion to the behaviours mimicked and taught between generations.
Gender is cultural.
Yet "sex" is also on a spectrum.
What modern discourse gets rather fantastically wrong to my mind is for trans people it is about sex characteristics. A trans woman doesn't just want to be treated as a woman she wants to be a woman. For a lot this means the whole shebang from periods to childbirth. That's not gender, those are sex characteristics. Her issue is she can't access those aspects yet or, like other women, maybe she doesn't want nessisarily everything. She's also set outside the culture of womanhood, segregated from other women and denied community of her people socially - that IS gender.
From a philosophy standpoint - it is way more complicated than that.
Gender is sort of like a book genre. People made it up. It groups a bunch of ideas around physical sex that don't really have anything to do with it directly. It's sort of like stereotypes but it's also an amalgamation of history and how people express. You can have a culture where gender has hard rules or soft ones. You can have a gender expectation what a culture rewards people of a specific sex for doing or punishes them for not doing. Gender expression where there is a way of culturally displaying gender to others based on a cultural idea of what those sexes represent and how people think they differ : clothes, the way you act and so on.
The thing is these things are all not set in stone. They are all just cultural baggage.
Sex is just the thing gender chooses as it's centerpoint of creating all this fiction.
Well I believe we are living at a point where we have not really figured things out. We have pieces. Gender theory is being treated as a monolith of ideas that is dominated by a cis veiw of gender as genre.
This is incompatible with trans needs because trans people's primary focus is physicality and are using the cis language of gender as technology to do something entirely different to change the way other people interact with their own physical nature.
So gender is bullshit made up by humans but to trans people its useful and nessisary bullshit
Not... Really? That's a very culture and expression forward veiw of gender which as more questions get asked widely is seen as a very cis centric veiw of gender.
Like we haven't really nailed everything down and a lot of Non-Binary people don't like this take because a lot of them find it invalidating but the trans and cis aspect of gender are very different. The more we inquest into how the average cis person experiences gender the more we find the majority of cis people are all kind of "Non-Binary" they don't feel implicitly like their role holds any super deep meaning and feel like if their body flipped to the opposite sex then that isn't horrifying. The idea that cis people have a built in gender compass that aligns with a single set of sex characteristics is taking a trans lens and assuming that's how it works for everyone whereas if a big room full of cis people actually talk to each other about whether they have any kind of innate feeling of being male or female aligned you start realizing that premise of actually having any massive non-cultural preference one way or the other just isn't the norm. Cis people just don't have to interrogate their gender the way trans people do.
Basically it's like the brain's most common configuration is it's wired to accept whatever outcome of puberty and be flexible enough to adapt.
The trans aspect of gender (and a minority of cis people) is entirely different. We react to our sex characteristics intrinsically outside our control not as having neutral value but as having either negative or positive value. We are internally reinforced to react either with rewards like joy when our bodies are reflected back to us as matching our pre-settings oe punishes with stress, jealousy and depression when sex doesn't align. Like a body expectation switch got stuck in one position and anything other is abhorrent.
For trans folk gender expression and cultural reinforcement is just a mirror that causes other people to reflect our bodies back at us. Gender expression becomes a tool like technology to communicate needs. Indeed a lot of trans people have issues with having to overperform gender not because they want to participate in the culture but because we are steering people to avoid seeing our bodies, scanning and verbally reporting back to us their physical assessment of our sex... that hurts us and so we have to perform the most readable cultural expressions of gender to get strangers to understand at a glance how to help avoid our poisons and to treat us in ways that hit the built-in reward trigger.
You can, kind of broadly for ease of understanding, categorize non binary into a few different types.
Static identities vs fluid
Absence of gender vs mix of gender
Trans identifying and cis or ar least non-trans identifying
Political or aesthetic versus psychological need
To explain absence and mix are basically what it says on the tin. For some people they want freedom from any cultural or physical gender aspects to the best that can be reasonably achieved or they desire a grab bag from both male and female cultural or physical phenotypes. This doesn't always nessisarily look like or have perfect androgyny as a goal.
Static identities do not change over time. Often these folk either experience a desire for an absence of sex characteristics or see themselves as a simultaneous mix male or female or as a specific other category.
Fluid identities change over time. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. A fluid person might alternate only between agender (ie no gender) and a binary gender or experience the full spectrum of male to female. Their needs change over time.
Political and Psychological are kind of another slider. For some Non-Binary represents a range of coping mechanisms to deal with gender euphoria or dysphoria. It can be a philosophy that is used to seek a sort of individual path, accepting a middle place ir an extremely nuanced situation where one's birth gender is a problem... But the solution isn't leaping to the full other side of rhe spectrum. For others Non-Binary can be a purely cultural third category. Gender abolitionists exist who find the repressive gender expectations they were subjected to did them harm. They might resent cultural gender rather than having any particular strong feelings about their bodies. Genderfuck or Genderpunk are outgrowths of movements that blend or subvert people's cultural expectations. The establishment of pink and blue boxes is a prison and they want nothing more than to burn it all down.
Transness or "Non-trans Non-Binary" extends from this division. Non-Binary identities fall under the Trans umbrella in the LGBTQIA+ but not every Non-Binary person is comfortable claiming transness as a label. Sometimes it feels to some enbies like they are claiming stolen valor or that they don't intend to physically transition so it doesn't apply (though it's worth mentioning that binary trans people also don't require an intent to physically transition as a gatekeeping item that prevents one from being trans ) others are functionally more cis identifying because their issue is cultural and not physical.
It's a very big tent of different people.
Point of order - non-binary people sometimes medically transition. We might not choose all the options to swap to a full binary presentation but target things which cause us duress.
Non-binary is under the trans umbrella though not every Non-binary person identifies as trans. There are political enbies or people who see their ambivalence towards gender and sex characteristics entirely as being an expression of a Non-binary experience while others experience the same euphoria/dysphoria to their natal sex characteristics that binary trans people do but desire more of an absence of all sex characteristics or a mix of male and female phenotypic traits.
Your statement in effect only describes a fraction of Non-binary people.
If I assumed such malice I would be ducking and covering rather than engaging 😊 I appreciate the open mind!
I will tell you a neat tidbit. There's parts of the more common trans experience of gender not widely experienced by cis people. One of these is a deeper sense of connection and kinship with cis people of our gender. We look at them as "our people" in a way cis people generally don't think of other cis people. It's part of why peer rejection hurts so much... But it's also something beautiful once it's understood and if I believed in there being a design to life and all this then the function of the occasional gender optimist programmed to see the best in men while implicitly understanding the plight of women thrown in sounds like it would serve a decent purpose. It's my hope to spread optimism and help others to find new avenues of compassion. I really do hope the best for you my friend.