Olgratin_Magmatoe

With a tip of the keyboard to a certain someone who has blocked me and won’t see this (a shame really):

I can take a pretty educated guess as to who that is. You're not wrong for posting this in the slightest.

These shenanigans are the exact type of bullshit that shows the U.S. is a failed democracy, and is in need of severe election reform. That goes for the form of financial reform, switching to more representative types of voting like approval voting, measures taken to make gerrymandering impossible, etc.

That’s how I feel, but I don’t think it takes away from people who see the situation as similar to being trans.

I was speaking more about the intention of the writers at the time they made the character. Seeing it as an allegory for being trans is still 100% valid despite it probably not being the intentions of the writers.

I edited my comment to make that more clear.

And also, just in general, it’s so easy to treat trans people with respect. It’s very easy, and if you do make a mistake on their pronouns or accidentally deadname someone, I’ve never ever had them take it offensively, just apologize and we move on.

Agreed

any man who genuinely tried to bring up circumcision as tantamount in the abortion conversation would be rightly laughed out of serious consideration.

The point has sailed over your head. At no point did I say they were tantamount. I said they are relevant to each other, because they're both problems dealing with bodily autonomy.

but frankly the scale and scope of the two are so wildly and enormously different as to instantly render any attempts at comparison moot.

I never said otherwise.

Keep your kinks to yourself.

Fuck the polls, fuck the analysts

go fucking vote

I still wouldn't say that one reads as a trans allegory. The conflict arises from failing to meet social expectations, not from changes in gender.

But yeah, it definitely reads as a queer allegory.

I’d argue that men centering themselves in the discussion which largely centers around attempts to remove bodily autonomy from women only hurts, not helps the cause.

I think we'd have to take a poll from the general population and compare it with a poll from an anti-circumcision group and compare it to be sure.

Regardless, I said it was a pathway, not a guarantee.

I don’t buy the flying saucer stuff, it strikes me as at best creative speculation.

I'm glad we're in agreement there.

For example if you were viewing technological development on different planets, all other things being equal but one has a fractured global government with hundreds of different defense concerns and intra-class conflicts sapping resources and scientific ability, vs a planet that has progressed beyond that, and is able to direct all resources towards a single purpose. One of those is going to be more effective in material terms.

I also agree here, though I think the importance of the speed of progress isn't the important part here. Even if it takes a billion years, it potentially wouldn't matter because an extraterrestrial race could have evolved a billion years earlier than us. Though this gets into the problem of stability over long periods like you've mentioned.

I would actually point out that we have an extremely pressing example on our current planet where the endless-growth orientation of our economic system is de-terraforming our planet before we have demonstrated any ability to re-terraform it, when you’re looking at things on an interstellar timescale this starts to look like something self-defeating rather than a ticket to rapid development.

Absolutely, but another thing to consider is that it may not be a requirement to have a fully habitable planet. Earth has already, since before industrialization, had places that are effectively uninhabitable to humans. We're reducing the area that is habitable at a terrifying rate, but it could be the case that it becomes irrelevant. My mind goes to a world like that of Earth within the Warhammer 40k series. The Earth is just fucked, plastered and cemented over, with a poisonous atmosphere, etc. They just brute force the problem by ignoring it.

That, and living on a planet may not be necessary in the first place. Given the composition of our asteroid belt, it has basically everything we'd ever need for potentially thousands of years, easily available and minable, relatively speaking. Outside of food problems, it could potentially be possible to live nomadically in space.

any systems which are not at a stable equilibrium will simply not exist long enough to actually have an impact.

Maybe, maybe not. It could be the case that wormholes, alcubierre drives, and other forms of FTL shenanigans are impossible, and the only way to get somehwere else is to send a generational ship. If that's how things play out, intelligent life might hope from one system to the next in a manner similar to conway's game of life. It isn't at equilibrium, because each planet is drained of resources rapidly, but there is enough momentum to keep things going.

The rationale is essentially just that any system stable enough to actually sustain existence at those timescales across those distances would necessarily look different, and could not look like a system with constant boom and bust cycles, as eventually the technology gets the the point where the ‘bust’ is a self-annihilation.

That could be the case. It also could be the case that those timescales aren't needed, because FTL is somehow possible. We literally just don't know right now.

To add even more to this complete speculation, it may be the case that there are stable political systems, without boom and bust cycles, that aren't capitalist, socialist, or communist. It could be the case that technology inevitably advances such that the bust is self-annihilation, but it could also be the case that technology inevitably advances such that there isn't any possible way for their to be a bust, that it isn't possible to revolt against the bourgeoisie/monarch/dictator. AI systems are going to get a lot more crazy over these next few years, and a large chunk of it will be used to quell protest and dissidents. They can already track people based on the gait of their walk, what when (not if) that technology is expanded upon? The technology is very clearly here to use small scale drones to attack individual people, what happens when (again not if) that technology is expanded upon? We may find ourselves in a position with the bourgeoisie impossible to touch thanks to technology.

This question of economic/political stability is essentially just one possible answer to the fermi paradox and great filter.

I guess I’m just not that confident that we’re on a trajectory which would result in us becoming an interstellar civilization without the need for major overhauls to our political economy first,

Yeah, I agree.

and it makes it hard to envision aliens getting to that point while still also being tied up with internal ethnic strife and economic crises.

Maybe I've just focused on science fiction dystopias too much, but I can envision it. But that's not to say I think it likely.

It’s a dick topic of extremely minimal consequence in the grand scheme

I disagree. I think this country has a problem with respecting bodily autonomy, and a large part of that is men trying to legislate women's bodies. Showing these men that they have a horse in the bodily autonomy race so to speak is a good thing. Maybe it's only a minimal effect, but it's a potential pathway out of harmful beliefs.

this looks like a bunch of dick-obsessed weirdos complaining because their dicks are too small.

it’s just being so focused on the topic in the first place is fucking weird.

I've been on lemmy for about a year now. And this one off handed thread is the only place I've seen this topic discussed, in the entirety of this last year. I think you are vastly overstating the frequency to which this is discussed.

It's a bodily autonomy issue that has justifiably left a lot of men feeling powerless and angry. People are gonna talk about it.

Don't forget putting entirely too much effort into building contraptions with sticks, clay, wood, rope, etc. Somebody had to invent the forge bellows.

I don't think the writers intended the Trill to be a an allegory for being trans. It was probably just supposed to be a cool sci fi stand in for being different. You can only show current, real life discrimination being non existent in the Federation in so many ways before you have to make up new things.

But it also doesn't change anything. Trans allegory or not, it's yet another instance showing how Star Fleet and the Federation value everybody, no matter if they're different or how they're different. Fuck the transphobes.