Absurd Extracts: What Is the "Best" Post?

[muteKi]

imagine constantly using Holocaust victims to try to push your political agenda to help male perverts

 

[Issun]

I don't think I'm okay with Imagine Dragons' rebranding.

 

[muteKi]

As always I feel adding context is against the spirit of the thread, but I do believe that you should go in with the knowledge that TIM is an acronym used by the biggest pieces of shit on earth to refer to trans women.

You know what, Jen, I don't disagree that the examples are cherry picked, in some sense. The problem we have, as in all our discourse, is that you don't understand what the implications of cherry-picking are. You think cherry-picking = bad. You're wrong.

If the purpose of the article was to show that there's a runaway tide of lesbians being coerced into sex by TIMs, then cherry picking wouldn't show that. We'd need proper data.

But if the purpose was to show that there are women who want to tell their story and that there might be something we ought to be looking into in more detail, cherry picking is exactly the right thing to do.

Here's how.

Suppose you're a journalist and a lesbian contacts you saying she's been coerced into sex by a TIM and she feels it's happening a lot and that this might be a widespread problem that hints at some fucked-up backhand systemic rewiring of society, then the first step is to go out and look for more examples.

This is what happened.

It's exactly the right thing for a journalist to do under those circumstances.

And as a result, it's true that the article only says what it says: that there's a bunch of lesbians here who say they've been coerced into sex by TIMs.

It doesn't say how often it happens, but neither does it pretend to.

The article was presumably intended to give us pause for thought, to make us think "wait, what?" To make us wonder if this is really happening.

Well, it's happening. Those 60 women TOLD you so. And you need to listen to them instead of pretending they're a statistical blip. We don't know from that article whether they're a statistical blip or not, that's for studies to determine.

But we DO know 60 women were abused in that way. We know it happens. We know we can't pretend it doesn't.

So let's start from the bottom up instead of the top down. Let's forget about ideology, for a moment. Let's think about those poor women and their plight and think what should we do?

What should we do?

The only humane response is to provisionally believe them, to find out how prevalent this is, to look into the potential causes and so on.

But you don't do that.

You say "pfft, this is only 60 women and they might be lying".

You do that because your thinking is top-down. You're beginning with an ideology and looking at how the evidence fits it.

That's a perfectly valid way of thinking, obviously.

I'm a top-down thinker myself, mostly. I like to understand how to evaluate evidence.

But you're mixing apples and hand grenades. You're forgetting how science is done.

This article tells us that there's a rabbit away, that there's something that needs explaining.

So this is what you, Jen, as a good scientist know you ought to do next:

You look at those testimonies of the 60 women and you form a hypothesis to explain what's happening.

And the scientific method sprawls outward from there.

Who knows what we'll find! That's rather the point.

We're doing bottom-up thinking to explain the things we see in front of us.

The top-down thinking comes later, when we're trying to explain it or trying to work out what to do about it.

Your problem, Jen, is that you use the words of science without the slightest understanding of how it is done in theory or in practice.

You use the words of science to fraudulently reject anything that disagrees with your predetermined ideas and to select everything else.

You can take comfort only in the fact that you are not alone.

But to get back to the original point: cherry picking is fine if cherries are what you're after. It is not a reliable method for scientific discovery, but it's absolutely *great* for generating hypotheses.

And it is even better for journalists trying to work out what the *fuck* is going on with startling, unexpected societal upheavals such as everyone suddenly saying that men are women.

The.
End.

 

[RT-55J]

gonna pretend that post is about those things from Balan Wonderworld instead

 

[Becksworth]

I'd ask if they have numbers on cis-gendered lesbians coercing other lesbians into sex (and cis-gendered males too for that matter) over the same period of time as a point of comparison, but I doubt they care about any of that.

 

[muteKi]

Again, I hate to bring context into it but this is a discussion about a certain BBC article that centered a cis lesbian adult actress who in fact has multiple bathroom (and other) assault accusations against her

 

[Exposition Owl]

TIM is an acronym used by the biggest pieces of shit on earth to refer to trans women

I object on behalf of the Tims of the world. We really don’t want our name to be used to hurt people.

 

[muteKi]

FWIW this is the same guy just now -- and indeed, my apologies to all the Tims of the world, you don't deserve this association.

But it isn't, is it? It's just how brains work. We notice patterns, we can't help it. If we didn't, we wouldn't be able to function. But here's the thing: noticing patterns is not enforcing them. If we notice that, say, men tend to behave in a particular way (aggressive, egotistical, dismissive, entitled) then we're not perpetuating that behaviour. We're trying to do the opposite. We're saying "don't act like such a dickhead".

The reason we might apply this kind of analysis to men rather than individuals is that it's more efficient.

This kind of behaviour is evident in a lot of men, so it seems reasonable to ask men as a class to sort ourselves the fuck out, don't you think? We can see where the biggest problem lies: the typical behaviour of males. Women need to fear that behaviour because it is all too often predatory, isn't it? And not just as an afterthought. Not just as collateral damage. Many men seek out women to hurt and inventive ways to hurt them.

The thing is, mutey, that women aren't stupid. They have learned to recognise this sort of behaviour and work out the best way to avoid it. Which is to have spaces away from the people who do it. Spaces away from men.

I can't blame them in the slightest, can you?

So when women see aggressive, obnoxious behaviour, it's hardly surprising, is it, that they want to remove themselves from the vicinity of the people who are behaving that way. Into spaces that exclude the sort of people most likely to be doing it.

Do I need to join the dots, mutey?

We humans generalise because it works. We see patterns where they exist. Sometimes this misfires, and we see gods and magic and so on where there's no such thing.

But listen to *almost every woman who has ever existed*:

Males are predatory. They are dangerous. They think mostly of themselves. They will attempt to overcome any and every boundary to get what they want.

They will put in enormous effort to do this, even though they themselves probably couldn't do a cost-benefit analysis that explains why.

I don't care whether it's how we're wired or how we're socialised: that's not women's problem, is it?

Women's problem is that we men *do* behave like that, as a rule, and one of their solutions to that problem has to be the maintained of spaces away from men.

Not all men, mutey. I certainly hope that I've never been a danger to women and I'm constantly on the lookout for that sort of aggressive, entitled behaviour in myself.

Sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't.

But I have no problem *whatsoever* with women making assumptions about what my behaviour is likely to be or with them wanting spaces away from me.

You, mutey, *do* have a problem with that.

I think you should probably ask yourself why.

So back to the original point: it's hardly surprising, is it, that women are attuned to typical male pattern behaviour, because it affects them every single day.

And frankly, if you're offended by occasional false positives, then you are absolutely displaying male pattern behaviour and you should probably be avoided.

 

[Phantoon]

I object on behalf of the Tims of the world. We really don’t want our name to be used to hurt people.

Now imagine what it's like to be called Karen

 

[Positronic Brain]

How can I unread something? >_<

 

[Exposition Owl]

Now imagine what it's like to be called Karen

I almost mentioned that in my post, but I worried that I’d be trivializing transphobia with the comparison.

 

[q 3]

listen to almost every woman who has ever existed, or, alternatively, simply listen to me, a man

 

[muteKi]

listen to almost every woman who has ever existed, or, alternatively, simply listen to me, a man

I think my favorite part of terf ideology is that they will unironically make arguments that amount to "everyone who's already dead agrees with me"

 

[Felicia]

I think my favorite part of terf ideology is that they will unironically make arguments that amount to "everyone who's already dead agrees with me"

 

[Issun]

I think my favorite part of terf ideology is that they will unironically make arguments that amount to "everyone who's already dead agrees with me"

I instantly thought of this:

 

[q 3]

“Literacy” was always the most basic tool of totalitarian propaganda. If you are not literate you can’t be fed communist propaganda. The most steadfast anti-communist I knew in my childhood was my maternal grandfather who was illiterate. Communist propaganda did not reach him at all. The more one read, the more one was subject to indoctrination, which is something which of course I experienced myself.
This is the reason why achieving “literacy” is always the first aim of communist regimes. Elementary.

 

[Issun]

The responses to that tweet were legion, but none so perfect as this one:

Wait Andrzej, are you saying that your grandfather was anti-Communist in Poland during World War II?

 

[muteKi]

How do you think they know one of the victims of the long island serial killer was a crossdressing Asian male? From the bones. All there was was bones.

 

[muteKi]

poking the bear here but the biggest tell that cisgender bisexual people in opposite-sex relationships often lack the range to take up the kind of space they do is that they can’t just sit with or ignore the possibility of feeling unwelcome.

 

[Becksworth]

I have no clue what they are going on about aside from possibly disliking bisexuals.

 

[muteKi]

Yeah that's about right

 

[Ludendorkk]

"Bisexuals complain when you act bigoted towards them, which just proves they were untrustworthy all along"

 

[muteKi]

sometimes double standards are not a bad thing. You know I believe in universal male socialization that predisposes us to evil violent behavior. With that first principle, my beliefs about this are completely logical.

 

[Becksworth]

Corporations have one loyalty, and that is to money. Selling games on PC would just give them more money. People will continue to buy the Switch and people who care about playing on PC will play on PC.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled "People twisting themselves into rhetorical knots to justify bigoted opinions" to present to you "People twisting themselves into rhetorical knots to justify port begging"

 

[q 3]

no ethical port begging under capitalism

 

[Becksworth]

I see a clown image and immediately do not believe. Come on guys

Bro you seriously doubting the snitch?

Context: somebody with exactly four twitter posts all in the past week or so is alluding to Hollow Knight: Silksong being at the XBox Showcase and the usual places are losing it.

We have learned NOTHING from Jon Cartwright.

 

[Becksworth]

Context: somebody with exactly four twitter posts all in the past week or so is alluding to Hollow Knight: Silksong being at the XBox Showcase and the usual places are losing it.

We have learned NOTHING from Jon Cartwright.

You know deep down I was hoping to eat crow here, BUT I was also hoping for a release date with said serving of crow.

 

[Octopus Prime]

You get to nibble on a crow, at least. And that ain’t nothing.

 

[muteKi]

Get the facts first, not hearsay. There is a witness who states Johnny did NOT hit Mr. Brooks.

 

[Becksworth]

A machine translation, but still funny enough to post:

Hello everyone! This is Waddle Dee.
This time I will deliver worldwide information!
The number of Awoofies Kirby has slaughtered has exceeded 1 billion in the world!
But it's a tremendous number ... As expected, Kirby!

Good job on the war crimes, Kirby!