DeltaAro

Spacenik86's post is kind of confused, but this line is very important: I’m always surprised how many people regard laws as good instruments to change attitudes and for reeducation. Probably they regard themselves as philosopher kings bringing the sheeple to their senses. But isn’t Putin the only true philosopher king? Last year the enlightened president Putin banned Jehovah’s Witnesses and put and end to their superstition and the harm it causes: No one will die anymore because of being brainwashed into rejecting blood transfusions. In backwards countries like the US they let 14-year-old teenagers die because of this insanity. His Yarovaya law is very fair: it bans a religious organization as extremist if it encourages members to refuse life-saving treatment. Jehovah’s Witnesses could have changed their teaching and they would still be allowed. Still, Putin is not a man of petty religious intolerance. In most cases, he does not want to restrict the freedom of believers. For example, you are allowed to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding in Russia. Christians do not have this freedom in the US. Only when it becomes serious, like a matter of life and death, Putin in his unending love for humanity sees himself forced to intervene. Enlightened, tolerant, fair, loving and all-around sane – that’s Putin. The US government does everything the other way around which is exactly the wrong way. ----------

imho there is a difference between making X a political issue itself and caring about the connections of X with politics.

A nice topic for a PhD thesis in sociology! It’s a weird branding from a non-US standpoint. “Liberal anti-liberty” is imho most pronounced in the following areas: a minimalist interpretation of certain important civil liberties, like freedom of speech and freedom of association anti-discrimination laws (at least the extreme variants, like quotas for elite positions) weird/extreme views on public health (e.g. making everything about oppression. If one honestly thinks that the public is 'tricked' into buying unhealthy food, instead of simply liking unhealthy food more, heavy-handed paternalism is easy to justify) environmental protection Now being liberal doesn’t mean being anti-liberty in those areas. But if you are, you’re probably liberal. Conservative anti-liberty impulses go in a very different direction.

Sure, the question would be what is the meaning of the word “woman” in the trans woman Wikipedia article? I guess the progressive view only makes sense from a quasi-Cartesian perspective. The sense of gender would be roughly like one of Descartes’s “innate ideas”; the sex of the body – conceived as a machine anyway – negligible, arbitrary or obscure. The traditional view, according to which biological sex is a real, objective property of each human individual as a whole, and gender refers to the social constructs based on biological sex, is more Aristotelian. Now, I don’t obsess about this issue enough to start a fight about it. So you can dismiss this as concern trolling, if you want. But I wonder if the general population can ever be convinced of the progressive view? If cuisine would be such a big issue as gender, would we want to define “cuisine” in a similar way, one that completely detaches it from what it is assumed to be about: food (cause food is also defined by its raw biological function – providing nourishment for humans)? And launch a skeptical attack on the concept of food? Japanese wax food display – an example of Japanese cuisine?

I guess I would’ve scored more on loyality but some questions were romance-focuses and Americanocentric. Overall I identify most with left-libertarianism, so yeah.

Your scores: Care 89% Loyalty 11% Fairness 47% Authority 3% Purity 33% Liberty 81% Your strongest moral foundation is Care. Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.

Though how do you know that? I only “know” that I’m a man in the sense that my biological sex seems to be male. Certainly I don’t feel an internal sense of gender. Well, transgender theory is very complex and subtle, there are no authoritative sources, there are many inconsistencies how in different contexts the terms (male, female, etc.) are used and it is an extremely polarized issue. If we only look at the Wikipedia situation: … something does not add up here. Also, if the natal bureaucracy would have assigned “female” at birth to me, I would not feel like a trans man. I would just feel someone made an extremely obvious mistake here. Like if they spelled my family name in a wrong way.

It refers to romantic attraction, which is difficult to grasp. I believe that there is something like romantic attraction, but if it were definitely proven that it doesn’t exist, I would still feel aromantic. Bu the disconnection happens to occur in a specific sense, namely “the full romantic program is not executed”, not in some other way which doesn’t fit the normative societal expectations. This is what all arospec orientations like grayromantic, akoiromantic, frayromantic, etc. seem to have in common: romance = lacking / absent / less pronounced / incomplete (no other way to put it … that sounds very normative). It’s even called theistic Satanism, to differentiate it from the LaVey version of Satanism, which is atheistic.

Yes, you’re right… it’s about Mars and I liked that one very much. The remake was a victim of the Mars Curse, though.

Oh that one… The Martian was one of the few successful movies about Mars, and probably the only one I liked so far. I never watched John Carter, but I’ll give it a chance.

What is the worst romantic movie you’ve yet encountered? I vote for The Space Between Us. I only watched it because it’s about Mars. Though movies about the Red Planet tend to suck (and include some of the worst office bombs as John Carter on place 7 and Mars Needs Moms on place 18 for loss adjusted to inflation), which is called the Mars Curse. And oh dear, this is no exception. It probably does not get any cheesier, cringier and clunkier than that. And why Britt Robertson, who is in her late twenties, and clearly looks like a grown adult woman, plays a high school girl is a mystery to me. To be fair The Space Between Us was very unintentionally funny and so still kind of entertaining. Highly regarded romantic movies just tend to bore me.

Some acronyms like YMBA (you might be aro…).

That asocality is associated with aromanticism is pretty obvious. A strong reverse association OTOH would only exist if aromantic traits were as rare as asocial traits, which I doubt. Asociality is also a trait that really sticks out, while aromanticism is subtle enough that if you fit into the norm otherwise (allosexual straight, cis, social, no mental health problems, etc.) you probably never come across the term and adopt this still obscure label. So online aro communities at this time don’t really reflect the general aromantic population.

A strange interest in the Mosuo people.

Ice cream!

Today I tried a tea from Nepal and one from the Nilgiri region. The Nepal tasted exactly like a Darjeeling, and the Nilgiri exactly like a high grown Ceylon. Probably I overestimated my skills as a tea connoisseur.

If it only was as easy like with other things we find childish and boring… sigh. Romantic love is a serious matter in many other ways… that’s how people find their life partners. And it’s not boring but sad if you find yourself strangely unimportant compared to your friend’s crush they know for three weeks. Really … it sometimes feels like I live in a parallel universe where nothing makes any sense. If a couple discusses things like a joint mortgage I cannot imagine how it probably has all started with the typical cheesy stuff …… maybe even baby talk. cringe.

“Aren’t you drinking?” “I never drink… coffee.” Raspberry tea is not camellia sinensis. Bad! Oolong is good, though I like it more on the black side. I like the true milky oolong.

The stated job of nearly all English dictionaries is to describe the meaning as used normally by English speakers. They probably did that correctly here. In my observation someone not deeply involved in LGBTQIA+ issues would scratch their heads if they encountered “aroace lesbian”. To let Xs decide what X means sounds very nice and fair but runs into the obvious circularity problem. E. g. what if (!) cis women define “woman” in a way that trans women aren’t women? That “homosexual” is derogatory (usually regarded more so as a noun) is a different issue. Now, if we take the above definitions, there can obviously be aroace lesbians. I don’t know how a definition can ever be wrong. There can be other problems with a definition like that it is very far removed from standard usage, misleading/manipulative, offensive, harmful, unwieldy, etc. Since Merriam-Webster is a descriptive (not prescriptive) dictionary, they would simply state a wrong fact if they gave a definition that didn’t match what English speakers usually mean by a certain word. Don’t blame the messenger!

I gave this as an example. Because I’m still wondering what is the question? Is it a question purely about the word lesbian (how it is used by whom, etc.) or is it a question that we have no sufficient understanding of because we do not have elucidated what lesbian means? Do we want to behave like Humpty Dumpty: "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' " "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say! … or not? So would you want to tell me what the complex meaning of the word lesbian might be so that we can have a discussion if there can be aroace lesbians? Well, sorry. But I didn’t even ask “Is it ethical to use the label aroace lesbian?”. I just asked if that was the question! In general, I think that certain usage of words can be unethical – like manipulative. It could be downright illegal, as in fraud. It’s probably of no use in a court of law if I told you the stone in a ring is a diamond (yet in reality it is cubic zirconia) and defend myself like Humpty Dumpty.

That’s not the job of dictionaries. Most large ones today are descriptive, not prescriptive. They describe the predominant meaning of a word for all the speakers of a language. I’m sorry, I’ve gotten too old for untangling such obvious ouroboros situations. Do Xs decide who is an X? That sounds fair, but then who is an X? Ouroboros again. If aroace lesbians can exist or not depends on the meaning of words. Probably we don’t want to talk about this… maybe the question was: is it unethical to use/push the “aroace lesbian” label?

We have words and meanings of words. The meaning of words can change. According to the modern meaning of the word “dolphin”, a dolphin is not a fish because it does not have gills. Yet, in bestiaries from the middle-ages dolphins were categorized as “fish”. This is not wrong, it just reflects a different meaning of the word “fish” (e. g. has such-and-such a shape and is an aquatic animal). What would be wrong is fully understanding the modern meaning of “fish” and believing that a dolphin is a fish in this sense. Virtually all major encyclopedias and dictionaries define “lesbian” (noun) as a homosexual woman. If we accept that meaning, aroace lesbians are not a thing. Like fish who are mammals are not a thing. Period. Case closed. We can only argue about if we should change the meaning of “lesbian”. There are two reasons for this: Cleaning up our words for economical reasons. If we still would insist on calling dolphins fish, this would be annoying for biologists. It’s more convenient if normal language and scientific language agree. So we have all been taught the new meaning of fish (= “gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits” – which is much more precise yet in most cases still honors tradition). We value a word for certain reasons, for example because is evokes certain emotions, has a cultural heritage etc. and want to make it more inclusive. As the ranks of the army and navy have been expanded in meaning to be used in the air force, too. Who knows… maybe someone did protest like “In the good old days commodores were on real ships on the ocean and didn’t fly around in those newfangled aircraft!!!” To change the meaning of “lesbian” so that there are “aroace lesbians” imho clearly fails reason 1. It does not make anything clearer or more economical. Regarding reason 2 I don’t feel qualified to say something. For practical reasons I don’t think such attempts will be well-received.

So that’s a blend, right? Who produces it? All black? Or also green and white?

Do you drink tea? I mean camellia sinensis. ? Sorry, no Yerba Mate. From Assam to Matcha to Yin Zhen! I never drink... coffee. I prefer 2nd flush Darjeeling.

Also he was first in proposing that pure chemicals could be medicine. Still we’ve yet to find anything that makes him a great philosopher. You seem to like him more as a pioneer and reformer of medicine.