Another sense of “Red Pill,” but relevant to some of the side-discussions here:
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Well, if you feel so strongly about it, okay.
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And finally, I stick with “racial categories are genetically meaningless” because that is what the science says, not just because it is agreeable with my politics.
My claim is that commonly used racial categories cluster genetic data better than randomly chosen categories. In this sense, racial categories are not genetically meaningless. Software-clustering algorithm find categories that are similar to commonly used racial categories, although the result varies with the number of categories that you ask for (as is expected for a clustering algorithm). A common sense phenotypical analysis should make you suspect that the “race is purely a social construct” idea is a-priori unlikely, simply on account of the fact that you can guess where someone is from (ancestry) based on their looks better than chance. Where does this information come from?
There’s an argument by Lewontin that was popularized by the left which asserts that for racial categories, in-group variation is greater than between group variation. This is usually the cornerstone of the “race has no basis in biological reality” claim. It turns out that the argument is only correct when you look at individual bits of genetic data. When you start taking into account (edit:) frequency of alleles at several loci at the same time it becomes possible to categorize people into races.
I consider myself fairly open minded and fairly good at changing my mind based on new information, but I have yet to hear an argument that convinces me that these views are wrong. I’m not a geneticist, so it’s quite possible that I’m making a fundamental mistake, but as far as I can tell the “Lewontin made a false claim that was popularized” explanation matches the data best, and the people I read online who seem to be knowledgeable about genetics seem to agree with this view. You seem to be knowledgable about the science behind this, so if you have a counterargument, I would love to hear it. I encourage you to either PM me or start a new thread (so as not to derail this discussion). I also encourage you to read through the “race and genetics” thread I linked above to avoid repetition of the same arguments.
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I didn’t read it that way, but can see how one could. I don’t think that is the only problem with the piece, of course that just make me wonder which other parts “you” are reading differently than “me”
What about differing brain structures/developmental hormonal differences? What about physical, surgical assignation of ‘sexed’ individuals at birth as @morganmay points out?
Do you really perceive gender as a discrete, binary system?
There seems to be very little consideration of the spectrum of gender in your bullying pronouncement at @MarjaE, let alone any kind of consideration for another human.
Which, by the way, made me feel sick.
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Those right wing wankers have totally ruined “red pill” for me that I have trouble reading it used in other contexts like your link. Especially since the right-libertarian individualist interpretation of The Matrix trilogy is completely off base too.
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I ‘liked’ because her comment made me feel sick too. The denigration was palpable.
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Ach, we have it too good in here. My first reaction was to just be sarcastic and caustic. But I’m really curious to hear some answers.
Oh yeah? Then why do we watch movies and TV horizontally, and hate portrait videos on YouTube so much, hunh? Answer me that!
!
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That train crash footage is a good description of this whole thread and it’s only gonna get nastier … 
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Everybody seems to have sorta kept their cool (within what they would probably define as their own set of boundaries) so far.
Holy crap, if I’m not puking out sarcasm, there’s hope yet!
I hate getting to these threads late.
edit: ‘out’ not ‘our’. D’oh.
That was my reaction, as well.
What kind of person does this to another person?
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Someone with a strong ideology?
Someone strongly attached to an ideology?
I remember the Cultural Revolution from when I was a kid, weird fragments scared me then, learning more about it as I got older didn’t help; I don’t trust anyone who promotes or ascribes to a strong, inflexible ideology. They’re either being used, or (ab)using.
Some nice propaganda, though!
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I just want to cite one of Pterry’s great portmanteaus: Endarkenment. It may be culturally insensitive to use derogatorily, though. Not all dwarfs!
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Anyone kidding themselves that anything remotely approaching a meritocracy exists anywhere in the world, let alone in the USA, has absolutely no business landing in the libertarian left quadrant.
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Political formations are never simple. For instance, the Republican Party was mocked, at its foundation, as a mis-matched coalition of disparate political interest groups (the artist was clearly racist and sexist, among other things):
By my preferred definition, I think you could usefully describe the Republican Party, at its genesis, as a moderate left party, as that would be a useful description of its general trajectory, at least until the defeat of the Radical Republicans and the dismantling of Reconstruction. Of course, left and right doesn’t capture the full complexity of what’s going on, such as who within the Republican Party opposed Reconstruction, and why.
It’s easy to mock Tumblr, but I think this is an expression of its audience, which from what I’ve seen is mostly young adults – late teens, early twenties – who’ve reached a stage in life in which they want to claim their right to name themselves and assert their own identities independently of the definitions they’ve received. No, left versus right doesn’t capture all the nuances of this. However, one of the great things about Tumblr’s culture is that, fractious as it seems, there’s implicit mutual support. If someone takes the trouble to describe themself as “cisgendered”, it implies acknowledgment of the transgender community, for instance. It’s an expression of solidarity.
One of my core principles is, always side with the oppressed, against their oppressors, and I think this is the core moral principle of the left, as a self-conscious community. It’s a formulation of the concept of solidarity. It may be complex in practice, but I think it’s clearly comprehensible.
And what I’ve seen of the people the article calls the “Redpill Right” is that they reject solidarity, they refuse to side with the oppressed when it doesn’t serve their own selfish interests. So whether they think they’re on the left or not, they’re on the right.
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Body morphology, genetics, brain structure. Each can correspond to male, or female, or something in between. When some are not matching, who gets to decide which one to take precedence?
You can have all sorts of problems. With androgen insensitivity syndrome, you can have XY genes but female body and brain. If the hormones get out of order at the crucial development stages of brain, you get a gender-identity for a non-matching body (oops). And there is a plethora of various things going wrong in these three variables; any combination seems to exist.
Who should get the right to usurp what variable is The One?
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