The common view is that women on average accomplish less (in areas which are publicized) because they are, from the moment of their birth, held back by society, or at least not encouraged to excel in any visible fields of endeavor. Logically, I would assume that this applies less to trans women, depending on their age at transition, and also whether they “pass” or not. Therefore, accomplishments by trans women should maybe not be seen as being as inspiring as should similar accomplishments made by people who were treated as women from birth.
(Similarly, I would therefore logically assume that accomplishments by trans men are treated as less inspiring than they maybe ought to be, since, compared to non-trans men, trans men accomplished things despite having lived through more years of society treating them as women.)
Of course, this focus on men/women/trans is diverting us all from the topic at hand, which is cool Minecraft stuff.
If you don't pass you are universally treated as a freak, and if you transition late you have usually wasted your time dissociating. At the same time regardless if you pass or not, you have to deal with transphobia (if you are not stealth) and with people with good intentions who are uninformed and try to discourage you and make you repress and waste your life.
Being treated as a male is not something that a trans female will benefit from, even if male upbringing is commonly associated with privilege.
OK, yeah, that makes sense. I guess that it shouldn’t really be surprising that there are a lot of hidden factors to these things than can be immediately intuited by the outside observer, therefore making logic and reasoning less than useful.
Year 2024, Humanity's in its golden age. Real problems? Extinct. War, crimes, poverty, hunger, even diseases: all banished into history textbooks. The only tear in this utopian tapestry? A handful of folks getting their knickers in a twist over the replication of certain patterns of zeroes and ones.
To be fair, it's vastly more easy to impact such as the DNS servers used or user tracking where you have jurisdiction, than to impact "war, crimes, poverty, hunger, diseases".
You can't "fix" war or famine or disease in a faraway country, really. You can try to impact with stuff like aid, or sanctions, or cooperation, but the actual impact on the ground can vary wildly.
That's exactly the problem people have with the EU. They care (and cost a lot of money) about small things while completely ignoring actual issues. Nobody really wants some digital IDs or censored DNS. Fix the damn war happening right on the border and the resulting energy crisis (I don't mean by buying Russian product). Also, stop making the energy crisis even worse.
I want a digital ID, it would save me a lot of time and would be extremely practical (and it's already technically possible anyway, it would be a waste not to have it).
> Fix the damn war happening right on the border and the resulting energy crisis (I don't mean by buying Russian product)
Oh, just "fix" them, right? Click on the Fix button in the "Diagnose issues" wizard? Why didn't you say that earlier, if only EU leaders knew it was that easy!
The EU is doing a lot to help Ukraine, with funds for the military and humanitarian sides, and donations of lots of equipment. European armies cannot get involved without risking escalation to nuclear war, which nobody wants, so I can hardly see what more you can ask them to do.
A for the energy crisis, guess what, the EU as a whole, and each individual country, has plans already in place and in progress to "fix" it. It just takes decades to deploy enough "green" electricity generation, replace infrastructure, update insulation at people's homes, replace their heating method, etc.
Save time, how? I still have to go renew my ID every ten years even with the digital one. It doesn't save me any time at all. Perhaps your local law had some problems that made online interaction hard, but I personally didn't carry or show my physical ID in the past decade once. Fix your local law instead of having the EU do it for you, we need their attention on difficult international issues.
No buttons. Hard, difficult and long work towards fixing. Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much.
It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done. Censoring DNS to be more like Russia is not that.
> Save time, how? I still have to go renew my ID every ten years even with the digital one. It doesn't save me any time at all. Perhaps your local law had some problems that made online interaction hard, but I personally didn't carry or show my physical ID in the past decade once. Fix your local law instead of having the EU do it for you, we need their attention on difficult international issues.
Proving your identity online when you need that is a pain, for government services or other things like banks (opening a new bank account). I vastly prefer having a digital ID that can be used to prove who I am online over relying on varying validation methods with varying levels of actual security - e.g. in France, for the tax office to be able to process your tax returns online, you need to prove your identity which happens by getting snail mail with codes; for banks, there's varying stuff like uploading pictures of your ID, or having to go to a bank branch for them to scan it. Having an uniform digital ID that anyone can attest means the problem goes away and everything is more secure, because nobody needs a scan of your ID card anymore.
> Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much
Are you under the impression that something as big as the EU can only do one thing at a time?
> It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
Or they work on the complicated stuff, but since it takes time, also have the energy and money to work on other stuff at the same time? Shocking, I know.
> My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done
Like, what more can be done specifically? Give more money, weapons? Sadly pockets aren't infinite, and especially with the hit due to Covid and Russian gas blackmail, European countries don't have large amounts of money laying around. And yet, they've donated billions of euros and billions of euros worth of equipment, as well as provided training for Ukrainian forces.
All your French problems could be fixed without EU digital ID. In my country I can use my bank account online login to prove my identity to the tax man. The only time I had to go somewhere in person is for my first bank account - same as with digital ID.
I am under the impression that these hard problems require so much resources that not even something as big as EU can split their attention to some small insignificancies, yes.
If they have time for something small and merely nice to have, they're not doing enough about the important things.
Even the smallest countries donated billions, a significant percentage of their GDP. If the biggest economies didn't donate hundreds of billions, there is much more to be done.
Yeah, had to LOL at "War, crimes, poverty, hunger, even diseases: all banished into history textbooks".
That's with several major wars going on, including talks of nuclear escalation, worsening crime stats (in the US, but also elsewhere in the west), poverty on the rise (and thus hunger), and after the COVID pandemic toll (regarding diseases)...
In this case, the sarcasm is intended to confuse, and with some readers it achieves a little more confusion than intended.
kamma could have written something like "the EU should solve <really difficult problems> before concerning itself with <simpler problenm>" but that would have made clear that the really difficult problems are really difficult. The sarcasm is rhetorical device to distract the readers so they won't pay attention to the different levels of difficulty. Handwaving, basically, and the handwaving was a little too strong and distracted some readers too much.
If you've been long enough on internet forums, you'll see every inanity you can think of as "of course it's sarcasm" being presented sincerely.
Also, I've read too many posts/comments of the "the world has never been better" variety (usually citing Hans Rosling or some tech-bro favorite like Pinker), that sincerely push similar ideas of the state of the world in 2024.
100% of children would die. The world was awful, is awful and continue to be awful. We bring sentient beings to life to only subject them to the inevitable death.
You'll have an eternity of nothingness regardless of how many years of life you get. Perhaps you don't want only an eternity of nothingness.
As for the pathos, I've a hard time believing it compensates for even a billionth of say, the suffering of an abused child. There's no doubt that it would have better (impersonally, as Derek Parfit used that word) if the world didn't exist. But now that you're here, might as well enjoy it, but perpetuating it doesn't seem wise.
From Derek Parfit's On What Matters, chapter 126 (Has It All Been Worth It?):
> If someone dies a slow and painful death, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended earlier. The last part of this person’s life was worse than nothing, or in itself bad. We can reach similar conclusions about the whole of someone’s life. If someone’s life contains much prolonged suffering, and nothing or little that is good, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended just after it started. Things may be in one way different if we suppose instead that this person’s life had never even started. Perhaps we could not claim that this alternative would have been better for this person. But when we ask which alternative would have been impersonally better, there is little difference between these two comparisons. Since it would have been better if this person’s life had stopped just after it started, it would also have been better if this person’s life had never started. In other words, it would have been impersonally better if this wretched person had never existed. And since such claims make sense when applied to one person, they also make sense when applied to all conscious beings, or to the whole of reality.
Parfit thinks it was/is worth it, given the good things in life, and using future improvements in QoL as one of the arguments.
I don't. What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood? It would be very difficult to justify the creation of a world given that tradeoff, but people are much hesitant to accept that it is unjustified now that it already exists.
I am wildly uneducated on this topic, but I don't know if the concept of "impersonally better" makes sense when extended as far as "it would be impersonally better if none of this ever existed." I guess I can buy that "impersonally better" might be intelligible if there is some subjective experience to ... experience it, but in a universe with no consciousness how could we say any state of affairs is better than another?
As for this question:
> What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood?
I'm not really in the business of doing these sorts of utilitarian calculations, and I think this back-and-forth is a great example of why I don't think they lead anywhere useful. But it seems to me that you could make the same argument as Parfit above in reverse.
If someone led an essentially perfect life for 100 years, filled with all the things we all agree make life good, but then was subjected to 30 seconds of torture and then murdered, that's still a good life on net, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a serious argument that those 30 seconds of intense suffering at the end are terrible enough to make that life not having been worth living.
So, by the same kind of induction that Parfit does above, it seems you could contrive a situation where the vast amount of universal conscious flourishing being experienced by, let's say, quadrillions or consciousnesses would "outweigh" the suffering of however many millions of apes it took to get there.
And even in the particular case of a horribly murdered child, is it universally true that no life ending in that manner could have been worth the suffering at the end? If a child lives ten wonderful years with loving parents, doing all the best things a child can do, but then dies horribly, can we be sure that life wasn't worth living? That it would be better on net had it never happened?
I'm not sure, and like I said, I don't typically go in for arguments that work on this basis. I'll admit that's probably partially because they feel distasteful, but I think there's also an intuition worth examining that those types of arguments don't really work, that they miss something critical about subjective experience when we try to sum up all the goods and bads of a life into some metric that can assign that life into a bucket of "worth living" or "not worth living."
Good for you. But remember, not all brains are wired the same. Mine certainly isn't, and I'm not alone in this. The things you've listed, they just don't outweigh the pain of life and the inevitability of death for me. Nothing in life does.
You might feel it's your place to say things like "don't waste your life" or "seek therapy", assuming I haven't tried or don't know about these options. For a long time, I envied people like you, those who wake up every day with a reason, thinking there was something wrong with me. But the truth is, I was just born this way.
So, unless you can magically ensure that any life you bring into this world won't be burdened with a brain predisposed to unending existential suffering, I'd argue that you're not seeing the full picture.
Would you let another guy to paint your fence if that other guy just happened to rent a flat from the torturer and having no means to move out? Because that's the correct analogy, if you just cancel Russian that can't affect government in any significant way and stand against war (and de-facto most likely go to the prison if they are brave enough to just mention that).
Or how do you feel about being canceled out yourself because you live next to the torturer and not preventing him from torturing your neighbours at your own expense?
Proof?