Patrons Only: No More JEDI Mind Tricks, Down With Objectivity, And Jesse Wins The Latest Skirmish In The Science-Based Medicine War

Vader, he's a spiritual brother, y'know, down with the force and all that good shit. Then this cracker, Skywalker, gets his hands on a light saber and the boy decides he's gonna run the fuckin' universe; gets a whole clan of whites together. And they go and bust up Vader's hood, the Death Star. ... And Jedi's the most insulting installment! Because Vader's beautiful black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty, old white man! They tryin' to tell us that deep inside we all wants to be white!

"Problematizing" has to be one of the most cynical and miserable methods ever devised.

I didn't subscribe, but I read the heck out of Metamagical Themas, a collection of Douglas Hofstadter's SA articles.

What’s next? NOBODY gets a routine pregnancy test? This stuff really worries me. Does anyone have a sense if this craziness is ever going to abate?

I think you misrepresented the JEDI article. Problematizing Star Wars has happend as soon as it went out, and it has appeared in the mainstream from time to time, as the numerous links to books and articles peppering the piece show. The criticisms leveled at the franchise are, on the standpoint of film and media analysis, nothing new, nor are they outlandish. But the article goes so much further than that. Such as implying that using the "JEDI" acronym creates a guilty association with each and any other group that has used Star Wars references that the authors disapprove of such as the US military. Same with the association with Disney. The authors' disapproval of Disney's coporate practices bleed into negative connotations for any reference to Star Wars. From there the article end in a grab bag of every last reasons thay can come up with to oppose the use of that term : that Star Wars supposedly frightens women out of STEM studies, or even that the use of acronyms is exclusionary. As for activists sucking the fun out of everything, I think given that the progressive activist movement is basically a moral crusade, isn't that what they are there for ? For some there is no greater pleasure than to scold others from a made-up position of moral superiority.

Christ, yes. We’ve pandemic fatigue, empty shelves at the supermarket and nationwide petrol shortages, so the Tories should be ripe for a few hard political blows. Instead, Labour’s spent its conference giving interviews about how there’s something terribly wrong with people knowing that only female people have cervices. So much for rebuilding the Red Wall…

Joolz

"I checked. They have a staff of 100, and they have" __a_slack_account______

Manzell Blakeley

6:29 YES, this is what drives me *nuts* about this stuff: in the UK, the Tories are dismantling healthcare and siphoning money to their rich pals and screwing the economy over through leaving the EU and botching the pandemic disastrously, yet the opposition can't even tell us what a woman is.

Of course not, because it's impossible to research such things. Anybody who proposed to do so would be immediately labelled a bigot, and there are no statistics kept because that would be bigoted too (and probably literally violent in fact)

I’m still struggling with - if sex doesn’t exist, why does anyone need to medically “trans” at all, especially with puberty blockers?

Joolz

The "any objections to our arguments prove them correct" rhetorical device is known as a Kafkatrap. The term was coined in a blog post by Eric S. Raymond which described several different variants on the technique: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122

It's official: RBG has posthumously come out in favor of choice for men.

I just gotta say, you guys are hilarious

Been about 20 years since I last flipped through a collection (may pick up sooner or later), but IIRC all men die but there are trans-men around - who are hunted down by some of the "amazons" or other groups - who think they're men who survived or something similar. Y is asked if he's one pretty early on...

LT Fish

One thing that I’m still trying to understand in this whole debate is - when it comes to healthcare - if biological sex/gender doesn’t exist, then why do some medications work differently in males and females? I once had someone on Twitter try and tell me that a person who was born biologically female (or male) but is trans and feels internally male (or female) will have a better pharmacological response to their internally felt gender rather than their assigned at birth gender. Wrap your head around that. But still - I’m genuinely curious about how to answer this if there are no genders/sex (all of this language is confusing as fuck)? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18929073/

I think the letter has been removed from Reply All Reddit already - does it exist anywhere else?

I wish this episode was unlocked for a wider audience - I’d love to send it to a few people

Congrats on getting with GaS Digital! 🎉🎉🎉

This is a useful comment. I agree that there are kernels of validity in much of this theory. But as you say, the public discourse ends up being so reductive that it reaches a point of easily debunked absurdity. For example, one could easily point out that there are many robust oral traditions in the western world and that cultures from China to Egypt to India have long written traditions. And that the reason written materials are so much more prevalent In the cultural canon is simply because they were more easily and widely disseminated. But framing it as worship suggests did this is completely arbitrary, irrational, and designed to entrench western cultural dominance. Which is where you lose most normal people. It also doesn’t help that these principles are sometimes applied in glib and self-serving ways by their proponents. Of course, this happens with many good ideas and is not necessarily an indictment of the ideas themselves, but certainly serves to discredit them with the public.

Somebody in the subreddit suggested "people of penis." I really hope it catches on! 😂

Academia for them is still really competitive (less so than humanities, but still, really competitive.) Industry jobs are much easier to get.

Y’all just need to get over your transphobia and start calling males “people w penises”

I work for a nonprofit and I feel like there's some subtle misunderstandings of the DEI framework at play here, so I'll grit my teeth and steelman the "objectivity, rigor, and worship of the written word are white supremacy culture" argument. First: In this philosophy, "white supremacy" is not the same thing as "white supremacy culture." Pure white supremacy is the active belief that white people are better than all other races by virtue of their whiteness; white supremacy culture is the ingrained network of institutions and social practices that benefit white people and disadvantage nonwhite people, that all of us - white and not - are passively mired in and perpetuating unconsciously all the time. The idea is, we have all these supposedly-objective standards for how people should behave, communicate, and judge the quality of information, but we don't realize these standards are actually just manifestations of this invisible white-people-benefiting culture, and by enshrining them we close the door on more diverse approaches. For example: "Worship of the written word" refers to the (presumed to be Western/European) cultural norm that information must be communicated in writing, in a form it can be preserved and responded to also in writing, in order to be worth engaging with. Cultures that rely/relied more on oral transmission of information are therefore, within this framework, lesser, because there is no cultural "room" for their mode of communication, and any information they transmit imperfectly in writing is then seen as inferior/not worth preserving. Likewise, because the dominant white culture is the one that defines "objectivity," the gatekeepers in that culture (who don't have to be white!) get to determine what clears the hurdle of "objective," and aren't held accountable for their own biases. The problem is that these subtle distinctions, which often don't sound completely crazy when you connect them to specific instances of institutional discrimination, can't actually coexist with the idea of an overarching white supremacy culture that bleeds into literally everything. You end up making nonwhite people sound universally stupid and socially inept. The underlying idea might be, "Insisting that people have near-perfect spelling and grammar in order to succeed at their jobs, even when their performance is fine or above-average in other respects, disadvantages nonwhite people who have less formal education, so we should both set quality standards and expand our metrics for success to encompass more skills and talents," but somehow it always ends up garbled into "It is racist to suggest that nonwhite people could ever meet any standards and the idea of standards is racist." It's supposed to diversify the kinds of thinking to which we assign merit, but that's couched in a framework that only works if you take it as universal, objective truth. So it all turns inevitably to bullshit. Also, I want to put money on that JEDI article being fake, but I'm scared of losing my money.

lmao heard it here first RBG was a TERF

I'm starting to think the whole Force is made up

DrSmart

It's definitely a difference between transactivism and actual trans people. An argument can be made that trans people are probably more acutely aware of their own bodies than average, and need to be aware of the issues that can arise with the very sex-specific transition treatment, and yet somehow ignoring the sexed nature of human bodies is supposed to help them?

keepin' me sane

laurem_ipsum

To be fair, I think they were expecting good faith. The goalposts have been moved many times by now, but the whole thing in 2012ish was "there's biological sex, and then there's gender, and we identify with gender and it would help our mental health if you would use gender pronouns instead of sex pronouns with us." For people who took them at face value, it wasn't obvious that the activist endgame would be totally insane sex-denialism even codified in the law. People who used preferred pronouns were just "being kind," not strategizing. (And I say this as a pretty hardcore GCer who avoids wrong-sex pronouns...though oftentimes that means avoiding pronouns entirely so that I won't be "literally murdering" people. What a mess we're in.)

It strikes me as extremely patronising to assume, as some LGBT+ orgs seem to do, that a trans or NB person won’t realise that medical treatment pitched at men or women might be relevant to them based on their natal sex, and thus avoid it to their detriment. It’s one thing to say that the description will make them feel excluded - I get that - but to suggest that they actually won’t register the relevance of that treatment seems far fetched and infantilising?

Jules O'D

here is my question for ppl that say it was the smarter political choice to say it's polite to respect people's pronouns. what exactly did you expect to happen? what was your grand political strategy here? of COURSE they were going to come back and say you now have to just believe biological sex isn't real. you've already conceded that it's polite and the right thing to do just to believe whatever they say. I'm a bit annoyed looking back on those who made the claim that it was those who DIDN'T respect personal pronouns who were the ones who were advocating for a poor political strategy.

Thanks, fixed

Y The Last Man is based on a comic that started in ‘02. They added a trans guy character who doesn’t exist in the comic to update it. I personally think it’s handled pretty well.

Wasn’t Samuel Jackson a Jedi?

JGraves

I lost IQ points reading that scientific American article.

I hate to be that person but are engineering and math really that competitive? Isn’t part of the reason they’re paid so well the scarcity of employees? Genuine q.

TIL I was not the only weird nerdy kid who subscribed to Scientific American at a single-digit age.

Do you know what’s JEDI? Medicare for all is JEDI.

Ahh yes, the notoriously ableist Jedi. The organization whose savior was one-handed, whose grand leader was two feet tall, and that is full of people who use their magical powers to live with their blindness and deafness. Clearly an anti-disability organization.

Every time I saw someone talking shit on Twitter about that Urban Institute "objectivity bad" thing, the responses were a fucking lesson plan in Motte and Bailey. "Oh, no, when we say 'objectivity is bad', we don't mean 'objectivity is bad'! We just mean people aren't as objective as they say they are." Which... I am seriously starting to despise these sorts of disingenuous little shits. To paraphrase the March Hare and Mad Hatter, they seem allergic to actually saying what they mean, even when they mean what they say.

R.S.

Correct me if I'm wrong: JEDI is a made-up acronym?

Manzell Blakeley

Don't have a Twitter, so can only respond here, Jesse, while you are in Portland, go to SLAB SICILIAN https://www.slabportland.com/

DrSmart

I watched the 1st 5 episodes of FX's "Y-Man" . They handle the trans issue subtly except for one brief rant in Ep 5.

Y: The Last Man was a graphic novel series originally from c 2003. There was a few mentions of trans men in the first issue that I borrowed from the library - they used the word "tr***ie" - tbf the character who said it would likely have used that kind of language even now - and "post op". Trans men are a little biit more prominent in the first episode of the TV show.

Alex Wright

Outcomes known for newborn health in pregnancies of transmen?

Jen

Found out my (communist) younger brother (libertarian) also listens to Blocked and Reported after he sent me a funny Jesse tweet. BARpod brings families together 💖

suz

I see the r/replyall mods are tired

They died last week and their wills specified free and complete release.

Man oh man, am I curious why Jesse and Katie aren't letting me pay for this extra content but they're still pumping it out.

Michael