This has mostly been reported as "trans women banned from women's chess" but it's much more sinister. (as if it weren't already.)
ALL trans people are targeted by this ruling. Trans men will be stripped of all chess titles won, which can only be returned to them by “changing the gender back to a woman” (from the ICF’s ruling). ALL transgender chess players will be marked as trans in their files.
If you play or know anyone who does take a stand on this. It's ugly.
This news has caused some people to ask why "women's chess" even exists -- women can compete in the open tournament. The women's competitions were a recognition of just how far behind chess is when it comes to cultivating and welcoming female players.
Not that shocking they are even more far behind when it comes to even knowing what that would mean. (eg not excluding trans women.)
But all this misses the bigger point. They don't want any trans people at all in their games.
I think there are some obvious reasons why thats true.
My brother was pretty good at chess and won some trophies on the school team so I tried to join. (he told me when he joined he didn't even know how to play.)
This ended up being one of the most explicit experiences with sexism in my life! The first time I showed up they pretended I was in the wrong place. "This isn't the chess club it's the Anime club."
I told the advisor who now resented me for making him come to the meetings. 1/
If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.
When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.
Voting brings me no joy — but I never miss an election out of a kind of stubborn spite. I’ve never heard anyone explain how having all the marginalized and left leaning people not vote would be more annoying to the Democrats and Republicans than if we all do vote— and for the Democrats especially in the primaries.
I also don’t think voting is real political engagement, but it’s kind of the bare minimum. Even if you do a write-in for every office.
I don’t have every answer. (And I certainly can’t force any democrat to do anything.) The one thing that has worked is building local networks. If there are homeless people in your area get to know them, work with your neighbors to help them with food, (or in my case using my mailbox) find out who the worst cop at the nearest precinct is and help file complaints. Show up at school board meetings and co-op board meetings— talk to who isn’t being talked to amplifying what they say.
A lot of people don't know the difference between capitalism and ... having markets and shopping and little coops and companies in non-super-essential economic sectors that operate independently.
Markets existed before capitalism and will exist after.
Of course in the US there are people who think that ... the postal service is communism. Or that any government service is communism.
And of course communism is the worst most evil thing in the universe.
To be honest I don't really know what I think about communism I've grown up soaking in absurd definitions and extreme positions. So communism is the postal service and communism is evil... this leads us to the absurd conclusion that mail carriers are the servants of Satan.
Capitalism is similarly muddled. For the longest time I though capitalism was "when you go shopping at a store" --and so the people who hated capitalism were confusing to me. What's wrong with going to Hot Topic and getting a cute black velvet choker?
You know you are dealing with a deep and pernicious ideological divide when any conversation has to start with new definitions for all the fundamental words in the discussion.
Parallel universes are real! You shall be sent to live in one... forever.
You will get a choice between 5 universes that each have a similar collection of languages though technology & culture may be very, possibly hazardously, different.
To make your choice you may request one (1) kind of typical artifact. This will be fetched from each universe, you may compare to make your choice.
Electronics will be disabled. If the artifact doesn't exist... you get nothing.
Universe A: A simple wooden bench, kinda modern but unremarkable.
Universe B: High-backed iron chairs in a little semi-circle
Universe C: A little weather proof cubby that contains rolled-up blankets.
Universe D: A tree that is bench-shaped
Universe E: A rubber ballon thing that moulds itself to your body.
It’s not a public square until it is controlled by the public democratically. Anything less is a substitute, a stand in for The Big Conversation we probably should be having.
The fears people have about “collective action for the common good” aren’t trivial. The potential for corruption, cheating and diversion of the public will to private whims is real.
Too many people are more comfortable letting some powerful man tell them “I’ll take care of people like you” and screw the Big Conversation.
Sorry, I didn’t see your toot in my notifications because I blocked sarfeo (for refusing to answer). I’ll respond now:
Yes, in fact there were various economic systems that predated capitalism, and none of them were communism, but they featured all the same flaws that are currently ascribed to capitalism.
That’s why I’m always saying that if you’re blaming capitalism for, say, greed or bigotry or environmental harm, you’re blaming the wrong thing.
The blame belongs with the root economic causes, which are universal issues, not an aspect of any single system. It’s the fault of resource scarcity combined with human nature.
So, for example, the colonialism that we’re still fighting the vestiges of happened under feudalism and mercantilism, not modern capitalism.
However, we’re not going back to any of these historical systems, and there are no viable modern alternatives to capitalism.
The USSR and China, for example, ran under a command economy and that was a huge failure.
What actually works, and what you actually find in the real world, are mixed economies, which is to say regulated capitalism.
Capitalism is terrible, but it’s better than everything else, so maybe it’s not so terrible. It’s the very best thing we’ve got for creating wealth. Of course, it needs some help with the distribution side, which is where taxation and regulation comes in.
But we’re way past the point where we can take the idea of communism seriously. It’s been tried and it’s always failed, with no sign that it will ever do anything but fail again. It never even came close to working, not even a little, not even for a little while.
I thought you were talking about “communists” now it’s “American socialists” — placed as equal & opposite to a growing fascist movement that nearly took over the country. Really? This is irresponsible and either disingenuous (or if not disingenuous, ignorant.)
There is no American Socialist Movement.
Social democrats … exist and are politically marginalized.
To call even the group of five or six college students who think they are Communists as power hungry as fascists is absurd.
I've been trying to find the right way to articulate this-- but the folks on the right have it backwards about who is driven by "white guilt" --
This impulse to cover up and distort the history of slavery reeks of shame. It's, frankly, weird. Nobody has perfect ancestors, what sort of crisis of identity leads one to lie about the past.
It's just the things that happened. You learn about them you learn from them. You do better. Don't make it so emotional and personal.
I assume you get why it's not a nice thing to say that "slavery helped black people in some ways" but I think some people miss why this particular idea is exceptionally racist.
One of the main arguments to justify slavery was that it "civilized" black people by making us Christian & teaching us obedience to our "betters." Black people were "lucky" or "better off" as slaves.
It assumes that when people were enslaved they had no skills, nothing to offer, that they were basically animals.
I get the feeling the original idea they wanted was "black people benefited from slavery because they became Christian." -- but, this was probably too obviously a violation of separation and racist.
Black people didn't just passively learn Christianity, btw. We re-invented it into a theology of liberation that drove the Civl Rights movement. So much synthesis and invention occurred despite slavery not because of it.
So much of what those people knew has been lost forever, but not all of it.
Does Mitch McConnell have a family? Does anyone love him enough to talk with him about... the finite nature of life. The preciousness of hours, minutes seconds?
How from dust we all have come and to dust we shall all return?
He could be petting some kittens. Listening to the sound of a child's laugh-- Dude really wants to die in front of us holding a pen mid-way through signing a bill that forces orphans to work in coal mines or something.
There are many different sides to the "Dave Debate"
Should people named Dave exist? Should they have rights? Are they people at all?
I'm not anti-Dave, in fact I am a great supporter of Daves. I just think we need to ask some questions. But if you ask these questions people get so mad.
Shouldn't we at least have a sober reasonable discussion? What's wrong with that?
I'm concerned that people who are just asking questions about Daves are being silenced by some sort of mob mentality.
There are important voices in this debate, very important voices, and we are silencing them. We should be allowed to disagree with people, and question whether Daves are really Daves or if they should go with their birth name of David.
Specifically the anti-Dave voices, I'm just especially concerned that they get heard. Not that I'm anti-Dave, I'm just saying, those voices have a real danger of not being heard.
if those voices aren't heard, not only will you not hear anti-Dave voices, but this could lead to a slippery slope where suddenly we can't talk about Karen, either.
I am very reasonable and serious, and you won't catch me getting on either side of this debate, because both sides are very extreme.
Just be sure we don't silence the important anti-Dave voices.
I'm really mad at several college professors in the CS department at my undergrad who told us all "self driving cars are coming" and trusting them as authorities I quashed my many qualms and wasted a lot of time in otherwise important conversations about urban planning insisting that we account for the impact of this 'inevitable' variable.
"They will be safer than human drivers." tapped into my confirmation bias ... I hate drivers, after all. Of course every one could be bested by a machine. 1/
I should have trusted what I'd learned from first-hand experience programming & writing programs that processed images & that made decisions.
I should have noticed the parallels to the 'work' (self-perpetuating failure cycle) of the RAND corporation & compstat.
I knew the problem of making a car drive was hard. Messy. But, I dismissed this knowledge from my experience because authoritative people said "the smart boys in the valley have this all worked out"
Been thinking the importance of knowing when we've been tricked or taken in and (this is the harder part) the importance of talking about it.
Imagine if every victim of a scam, every person who was deluded by bad ideology was open about what they learned? If we just all decide that if you can realize you were tricked that's almost as good as never having been tricked at all.
Everyone falls for something at some point. Changing the dynamics of shame can inoculate the future.
In 100,000 years an alien ship enters our solar system. The earth has no remarkable intelligent life, but it's a beautiful biodiverse planet recovering from some bad extinctions. The aliens don't notice the traces left by humanity right away, this is just a survey trip and not much monumental remains.
But, they do pick up a signal, coming not from Earth, but from Mars. "How strange?" they think. Mars is obviously the inferior planet for life. Earth is incredible. But they go to investigate. 1/
@prdan@futurebird For anyone interested, just looked it up and New England in 1850 was 25% forested. Nowadays it's close to 75% forested. For anyone familiar with the area, imagine it with only 1/3 of the trees currently. That's how much has changed in the last 170 years.
@mat@futurebird I think I found it. It was in the final email from David Brown to Earth from the shuttle Columbia before it broke up on re-entry, which makes it all the more impactful to me.
"“If I’d been born in space I know I would desire to visit the beautiful Earth more than I’ve ever yearned to visit space. It is a wonderful planet.”
Is there anyone serious who is saying this? Or is this just another way to make the tech seem more powerful than it is?
I don't get this "we're all gonna die" thing at all.
I do get the "we are too disorganized and greedy to integrate new technology well without the economy getting screwed up and people suffering... but that's another matter..."
These systems really aren't that sophisticated. And the whole "machine programs itself to be smarter" concept is fundamentally broken even if you had something at a level ready to do such a thing. It seems like a huge distraction for the very real need for other more mundane kinds of regulations like: The right to know if an article was primarily generated by a LLM-- or if it had a real human author or editor...
A good litmus test is "Are people on DAIR-community.social saying it?" If the answer is yes, it's probably a real concern, and we would be wise to pay attention.
If the answer is no, then it's probably being promoted by some eugenics adjacent dude that hasn't spent the past decade thinking about ML harms, but is now somehow treated as an expert on the topic.
Listen I know we need a lot of variables in math. A single alphabet won’t due. So capital and lower case letters can be different variables. I can even roll with the idea that letters of the same case in different typefaces can be distinct— but, I still find the abusive use of C in Hoggs Mathematical Statistics a little extreme… we couldn’t get more distinct typefaces? How many students have cried because you did this, Hogg? (i otherwise love this textbook it’s so much fun) /math rant
I used to want to start a rumor (on Facebook, of course) that the internet is running out of ASCII characters and that people would need to start saving old emails to recycle letters, words and punctuation for future Facebook posts.
I have this horrible addiction to parts. The worst thing is the intermittent reinforcement of finding a use for a part (even if it is only every 5 years) which ensures I keep hoarding.
I'm starting to really like Jamelle Bouie's writing on politics. While he still essentially has a liberal perspective (as opposed to a radical or left perspective) he's really good at identifying and criticizing liberal process, technicality and hypocrisy-based criticisms of the right.
These are criticisms that don't address the gulf in values, morality, or outcomes, but focus instead on things like finding hypocrisies, or showing how the right is failing to live up to the constitution. 1/
The problem with simply showing that the right is hypocritical is that they know this and do not care. They don't want to treat people equally or apply rules fairly.
Take the whole supreme court mess. The hypocrisy is staggering! "You blocked Obama from appointing and yet did not apply the same standard for Trump, instead you enabled his appointments!"
To this the right says "Of course. We are trying to win. What on earth are you playing at?"
If anyone stands in my way (and they do!) I just tell them I’m voting for their guy.
No, they aren’t allowed to ask, and no, I don’t have to answer. But if there was any trouble started, I don’t have a gun, and the police aren’t going to protect me.
This is how bad the pearl-clutching is on the right. They see it as their sworn duty to stop women, minorities, gays, trans, anyone but them from having any rights.
There are literally no rules they won’t break, since the ends justify ANY means.
Seeing their attempts at indoctrination fail to take hold the indoctrinated can only imagine they have been stymied by some equal and opposite form of indoctrination. That we might be sincere about creating the space for each young person to find their own way, to make up their own mind is impossible from their perspective.
That we wait on the outcomes of experiments and study to determine what is best? Just a lie.
If the research showed spanking were healthy and effective I’d support it. It’d be easy to support. People I have loved and respected swear by it. It makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard. But the data are crystal clear— so I had to adjust. There is no “good whopping” — we know better now.
And this is why I live an out life as a trans person these days. Having transitioned 31 years ago, I remind people by my existence that trans people have been around for a lot longer than it might have been obvious.
We were invisible because in those days, the standards under which we were permitted to access medical transition required us to be "stealth" after we transitioned, living entirely pretending to be cis women, cutting all ties with people in your former life, and so on. It was a shattering traumatic way to require things be done, and became (for me) exhausting. I stopped after 12 years, though I maintained my privacy in some contexts.
Just figured that might not be a perspective people here would have.