Yeah if anything he's the mildest of the televangelists. And if anything, prosperity gospel seems to appeal the most to the poorest.

Of course, it's obviously not good and I don't mean to minimize transphobia. But this very specific online cult is mostly dedicated to clocking cis celebrities. I think Bevvy is the biggest account of these, and TW here is here clock list.

I realize I'm going to hell for this, but I can't not laugh at someone who thinks all the Duggars, Eminem, Drake, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, Bob Marley, Stallone, Usain Bolt, Trump, and Elon Musk are all trans.

Also she clocked Elliot Page as a guy before Elliot came out. That's swag.

Do you remember the title? I've heard the Transmaxxing one but not that one.

Sadly transmaxxing turned out to be mostly fake/ironic. I liked the idea that incel eggs were tricking themselves into transitioning and then realizing they were trans all along.

You're probably right. I don't want to give the impression that I'm defending these people. I just think they're a different kind of crazy. Again, they seem to believe that all cis people are trans and all trans people are cis. They're so transphobic that it loops around and they apply their transphobia to cis people.

They wouldn't explain anything because they are incoherent. They don't believe that this is wokeness run amok, or a trans agenda being pushed by the Democrats, or whatever. They believe that all elites throughout history were trans. As noted in the podcast, one notable EGI poster believes that Hitler and Stalin and Trump and every US president are all trans. It defies any coherent reactionary worldview. Who is your reactionary leader? Guess what, they're EGIs too.

I don't think these people will be the source of stochastic transphobic violence. Because again, if they were to target someone, they would attack cis celebrities who they believe are actually trans, unlike trans people who actually were always cis but briefly pretended to be trans.

There are absolutely reactionaries who use trans people as a standin for anti-semitism, but EGI conspiracists seem pretty different. Maybe there's an unholy synthesis of the two in the works. But I don't know how that's even possible.

The only reason I can say I "like" EGI transvestigators is because I'm reasonably certain they will never actually target trans people. Their worldview is incompatible with most transphobes because it is so bizarre and totalizing.

To reiterate: EGI cranks seem to believe that all famous people are actually trans, including right wing politicians, and that actual trans people were cis all along. It is, for them, a completely nihilistic worldview. What could you do? They can't even be transphobic effectively. Their version of transphobia would be calling Megan Fox or Scarlet Johansson the t-slur. Which, although bad and wrong, is also absurdly funny.

Maybe I'm distanced from this by being cis(?), but also I only know about this because two trans woman made me actually laugh out loud.

Imagining getting CTE from LARPing...I would know for sure that god hates me

Who could have predicted that plot twist?! Besides anybody who's heard his extensive musings on horse genitals and the ethics of CSAM

After listening to the Seeking Derangements episodes on Bevvy and EGI, I kind of like transvestigators.

The worldview of EGI (elite gender inversion) is that any notable person ever is/was secretly trans. From this premise, their worldview becomes so convoluted that it's not even conventionally transphobic. For EGI believers, anyone famous and trans is actually a cis person who de-transitioned back to being cis. So for them, Caityin Jenner is a cis woman who transitioned as a trans man, won the Olympics, and then de-transitioned back to being a cis woman.

It's so odd and convoluted that it kinda rules. It's like transphobia that only targets the hottest cis celebrities. And there's no political organizing possibility because "it's all of them, it can be no other way" includes Trump and his birthing hips. The product of it is mostly drawing insane diagrams about celebrities.

In a way it's oddly trans affirming. If you're a trans woman, you were actually always a woman who briefly pretended to be a guy. If you're trans but she can't tell, you are actually trans (because you pass).

I think we're on the same page. As long as a common enemy is shared, big tent coalitions can mostly function. Although in the cases I mentioned, Islamists came to the conclusion that Marxists were the shared enemy and that they could better function in a coalition with Western forces. That tension is always present. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is only workable as long as victory seems unlikely and nobody thinks about the future. For example the KMT turning against the CPC in WW2.

I think there's serious anarchists who would see in collective farms a revolutionary re-organization of society that is leashed by the state. In the same way that Marxists would see reform as insufficient if the rule of capital is not overthrown. If the state is the origin and mechanism of oppression, the existence of a state means that oppression will continue. So for serious anarchists I would think the goal would be to organize the collective farms to overthrow the state.

And that's a good delineation of socdem vs demsoc, I'll use that in the future.

I interpret it this way:

The point of the Marxist critique of religion is not to strip away the tool that helps people endure suffering. The point is to end the suffering so that people can have real liberation.

Especially the belief in an afterlife. When I was religious, I had a sense that no matter how bad or disappointing life was, there would be something better after. Suffering in life had a reward in death.

Deprived of that, life became very bleak. Some people suffer horribly all their lives and then they die. I often fixate on people with horrible lives or debilitating illnesses. We only have one life, and some people don't even get a half-decent one.

But maybe it's also true that I wouldn't have had any interest in socialism until I lost that belief. Any earthly reform pales in importance to conversion. After all, one is eternal, and the other is transient.

I'm aware of both the social model and the medical model, I think. I'm not committed to either. As a lib I was more familiar with the medical model, but now I've been exposed to enough Marxist critiques that I only know how much I don't know. Some Marxists skew too far towards social model for me, like maybe Harriet Fraad.

I like to think of everyone as having traits in a spectrum. If one of those traits is too low or too high it can become an issue. Someone with too much courage is foolhardy; too little, a coward. And I think the closer to an average a trait is, the better the social model applies. But when you get to the extremes, the medical model is more useful. Someone with an extreme lack of courage might have severe anxiety or phobias; an extreme surplus might make someone impulsive and an extreme-risk taker. That's a somewhat simplistic example but whatever.

Maybe it's a copout but I'll say there's a dialectical relationship between the medical and social models.

For example, I do feel like stimulants are overprescribed to kids diagnosed with ADHD. There should probably be adjustments made to school and home life before resorting to stimulants. But more severe manifestations probably will always require some level of medication. But at the same time, medication is much easier than broad social changes, and a doctor can only do one of those two things, so they do what they think will help.

Like you said, I think even in a utopia or a forest I would be mentally unwell. I dwell a lot on this question because I think I have issues caused by both social and biological factors. But I also vascillate between believing and disbelieving the diagnoses based on how I feel that day.

Slapping yellow paint on where you're supposed to go can't cover up the fact that a game is full of playtime-extension disguised as "exploration". 10% recycled gameplay and 90% filler.

The way that the autistic brain develops is fundamentally different to that of an allistic person

I have a pet theory that there's a bunch of categorizable pathways the brain can develop (like autism) but they aren't as obvious or well-recognized. I'm not sure if personality disorders fit into this (or even are what psychologists say they are). Instead of a crossroads with an autistic and allistic path, it's like a 3D thing with tentacles shooting out in every direction. Like to me ADHD seems less like a brain illness and more like a possible developmental path the brain can take, and the real issue is expecting people to all function like a "NT" person would. Like a leftie in a right-handed world. I could be way off though

The crazy thing is that if you're in 3D graphics, VFX, or some video editing applications (Resolve I think especially leans on the GPU), a 4090 is an economically practical purchase. The initial investment is high, but so is the cost of render farms. And if you're a pro, render time is literally money. Can't use your PC if it's rendering. And in Blender at least, 4090s score much higher than even other RTX 4000 cards. As much as 2x higher. And if you're doing animation, you have to multiply the time it takes to render 1 frame by 24/30/60 frames per second. Now imagine a 24fps video that lasts ten minutes. 10x60x24=14,400 frames, so if you can shave off 1 second per frame, you've saved 4h of render time.

For gaming it's a waste. Who cares about a crappy AAA game having 10% more pixels to see ugly, "realistic" characters jankily mumbling their way through the worst dialogue committed to the page. Games should be games, and trying to force them to be stories ends up with the worst of both worlds

External gpus (eGPUs) exist. The problem is you have to pay for the housing, and the connection severely limits the power you get from the card.

Also great points. It's one of those historical events like Molotov-Ribbentrop that seems bad when you have only a cursory knowledge of the events, but then becomes another soviet W when you study it.

For example Katyn. Oh no, the Soviets executed fascist military officers, fascist cops, and fascist intelligentsia. How horrible. The Polish invasion of the USSR? Polish pogroms? Never heard of them

If libs complain about the USSR invading Poland, you can ask them to compare a map of the second Polish republic with modern Poland. Particularly how much of Ukraine had been annexed by Poland. And ask what the status of Ukrainians and Jews was in Poland.

again see my example of MLs and Islamicists

I think this is a complicated example because although at times Marxists and Islamists made common cause, Islamists were also a very effective weapon against communists, such as in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc.

If you're holding up Makhno as the highest aspiration of big tent initiatives, I'd suggest retirement

I'm just not aware of many anarchist-communist alliances at scale, so those were the two examples I thought of. I don't think the Zapatistas or Rojava are clear examples, or at a large scale.

but that's because the socdems want to defend capitalism and the anarchists don't

And yet there's comparatively successful political coalitions that involve both socdems and communist parties. I'm thinking particularly in South America. China and the DPRK have sanctioned liberal/socdem parties, but I don't believe anarchist organizations are permitted. I mean, many social democrats see themselves as reformist socialists or Marxists of some stripe. And third world social democracy seems very different from imperial core socdems, but we don't have to qualify socdems as "western socdems" to criticize th

I'm not arguing against tolerance or mutual respect or focusing on primary contradictions.