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[silverspawn]

In that analogy, does turning into a werewolf represent transitioning or does it represent not transitioning?

[faust]

In that analogy, does turning into a werewolf represent transitioning or does it represent not transitioning?

That's part of the problem I have with it. We have the episode with Enid's parents, where her refusing to conform to her mother's expectations (read: of gender performance) is painted in a positive light, and this episode plays heavily into the trans allegory.

Then we come to the finale and the writers just kinda forgot about that (never again will I be able to criticize bad writing in a TV show without using that phrase...) and had her transform, completely messing up the previously established themes. I would have had more respect if Enid didn't transform, or at least transformed into something other than a wolf.

[silverspawn]

Yeah. The thing is, you can phrase that both as a reason why the analogy is poorly handled, or why it doesn't exist.

If wolfing (=turning into a werewolf) represents transitioning, the analogy doesn't work because in that context, wolfing is the normal, expected thing. So presumably wolfing represents conforming, in which case the fact that she turns makes no sense at all, as you said. But even putting that side, there's a different problem. On the trans side of the analogy, Enid would actively want to not conform -- but in the show, she wants to wolf, she just can't. If it's intended, why isn't she grossed out by turning or something?

I just rewatched the scene with her family (which is actually super short), and true, she's put off by them wanting to send her to the conversion camp again, but nonetheless, she's not opposed to the wolfing itself. So it's all kind of half-baked.

I'm not sure I'd bet on it, but why can't it just be genuinely unintended?

[silverspawn]

Ok for some reason I just played a 96,3% accurate game. Guess I'll have to become a professional chess player now.

[silverspawn]

 Consciousness is boring anyway.

[faust]

I just rewatched the scene with her family (which is actually super short), and true, she's put off by them wanting to send her to the conversion camp again, but nonetheless, she's not opposed to the wolfing itself. So it's all kind of half-baked.

I'm not sure I'd bet on it, but why can't it just be genuinely unintended?

It could, I don't really care. It read a certain way to me and others, and that is due to explicit wording that was used ("conversion").

There are similar instances in the show, like the siren's cult mom or the equating of "outcasts" with Native Americans.

[silverspawn]

Was going to ask this in the Interview Thread:

Something I've wondered for years: why does the Curse Pile scale 10->20->30->... with the number of players, rather than 10->15->20->...?

Like, the way it works is that there are more [curses per player] if there are more players. And that seems odd since junkers are already strong in early expansions -- and already even stronger in 3p because more other people get to play witches.

I know with 15 Curses and 3p, it won't work out perfectly because curses are handed out 2 at a time -- was that a major consideration? If so, I think "6 per player", so 12 -> 18 -> 24 ->... would have worked.

But it's got to have been asked before, so let's not. Also why do I even care, I don't play dominion.

[silverspawn]

I just rewatched the scene with her family (which is actually super short), and true, she's put off by them wanting to send her to the conversion camp again, but nonetheless, she's not opposed to the wolfing itself. So it's all kind of half-baked.

I'm not sure I'd bet on it, but why can't it just be genuinely unintended?

It could, I don't really care. It read a certain way to me and others, and that is due to explicit wording that was used ("conversion").

There are similar instances in the show, like the siren's cult mom or the equating of "outcasts" with Native Americans.

Yeah, very reasonable. If the thing made you feel X, it doesn't really matter what the intent was.

[silverspawn]

Because it's cool to make different comments back to back that have zero relation to each other.

Consider Alice being married to Bob. Bob suspects Alice is cheating on him. So he goes to a Private Investigator (PI) to confirm this. The PI quickly finds evidence of said cheating. But after two weeks, they tell Bob that Alice was faithful, and use the information on Alice to blackmail her into giving them money. Also, they do this every time, this is just their business model. Every investigation they do, they tell the person that their partner was faithful.

That was the subject of last night's dream. So it happened in the dream, and then I was trying to explain it to other people, but it didn't work, the concept was too complicated to get across. No one understood me.

This is somewhat of a trend recently where I try to explain coherent concepts to other people in my dream, and it's kinda hilarious.

[silverspawn]

The Dennetian school of thought says that consciousness is an illusion. I think the popularity of this idea is mostly based on an wrong understanding of what it means to be an illusion.

When you perceive an object, 100% of the time the thing you see is not the object itself but your brain's reconstruction of the object. (This is indirect realism.) So in some sense, all perception is illusion. Still, we call some things illusions and others not. If I reach out for my now empty can of black tea and grab it as intended, we don't call it an illusion. If you see an oasis in the desert and run toward it but there's just sand, we do call it one. So what exactly does the illusion label mean?

I'd argue it means "the presumptive cause of the percept is different from the real cause". You thought that [the percept of the oasis] was there because [there's an oasis], but actually it was there because [some weird physics quirk that causes Fata Morganas]^1.

This definition seems to work across the board, e.g., visual illusions, dreams, libertarian free will, whatever. We call things illusions if we're wrong about what caused the percept.

Thus -- and this is crucial -- being an illusion doesn't mean the percept doesn't exist. The percept exists either way. In fact, you could construct two scenarios where someone perceives an identical percept, but in one case it's an illusion and in the other case it's not.

And this is why consciousness cannot be an illusion. The illusion property is all about the cause of a percept, which, in the case of consciousness, is irrelevant; the percept itself is the proof of consciousness. This makes it unique; in most cases, we care about what caused a percept, but for the existence of consciousness, it's just the percept itself.

There's this popular idea that the only thing you can know is that you exist. I'd challenge this; I'd say the only thing you know is exactly the precise nature of your current percept; some people also call this your "observer moment". So it's not just "there is a percept", but also what it is; you can't be wrong about there being the quale of red. You can only be wrong about what caused the quale. (You can be wrong about past observer moments since those are based on faulty memory.)

The idea that you can be wrong about the percept itself isn't even well-defined, like, that sentence doesn't map onto anything. Being wrong is a property of statements; you can only be wrong about [conclusions about the percept].

---

(1): Fata Morganas as understood in pop culture probably don't exist, but that's beside the point.

[silverspawn]

The more I think about it, the more I dislike the treatment of elves in Harry Potter.

So they're all slaves. And Rowling thinks that's bad, as expressed by Dumbledore. But despite this, she includes various things that makes it feel less creepy. Like they don't speak proper English. And at least Dobby is being a bit silly. Like, he gives Harry socks for Christmas. And he thinks socks are non-matching by default, hahaha.

And I think that's bad. If you have an uncomfortable element, don't wince away from it; step close to it and explore! That's an interesting thing that your story can say interesting stuff about! Exploring unfomfortable things is a plus! The things she did to make it less creepy are actually themselves creepy, once you notice them.

Separately, it's bad because it doesn't make sense. Dobby served the Malfoys for years, he has got to have cleaned their clothes, he knows how socks work.

If you think slavery is bad, then commit to that! Don't make them appear subhuman because they use wrong grammar. And don't make Hermione's s.p.e.w a thing that everyone is annoyed by. Like what even is the message with all these contradictory signals?

[faust]

If you think slavery is bad, then commit to that! Don't make them appear subhuman because they use wrong grammar. And don't make Hermione's s.p.e.w a thing that everyone is annoyed by. Like what even is the message with all these contradictory signals?

The message is that we shouldn't question systems of power, probably. It's the conservative idea that things are bad, but there is no way that they can be made better.

Also I think the best way to get the message across would have been to make the elves appear subhuman and then turn this around and end on the message that having them as slaves is still bad.

[silverspawn]

This song is dope

[silverspawn]

Fictional characters don't have enough unpredictable mood swings. If you were an alien going off fiction, you'd think that mood, performance level, and happiness level are all perfectly predictable from outside circumstances

[silverspawn]

I'd be very interested in a list of things that are taken for granted in pop culture but are quite simply false. Like the idea that some people have perfect recall. I feel like there would be a lot of really interesting stuff on that list, including a lot that I don't yet know. What things do I unquestioningly accept that are just objectively untrue?

[Awaclus]

Two pretty big ones are what drowning is like and what rape is (typically) like.

[silverspawn]

Two pretty big ones are what drowning is like and what rape is (typically) like.

woah okay so, I would have guessed (please correct those)

-- most rape is probably between people who have had consensual sex before, but one person doesn't consent in that instance, and in that case it's probably not as bad as it's typically portrayed, but still very bad. I mean it's typically portrayed as being morally at least as bad as murder.

-- drowning is extremely gruesome and horrible

[silverspawn]

I think another item may be that in most battles across most battles in most of recorded history, people actually fought with spears or spear-adjacent weapons, not swords.

[Awaclus]

-- most rape is probably between people who have had consensual sex before, but one person doesn't consent in that instance, and in that case it's probably not as bad as it's typically portrayed, but still very bad. I mean it's typically portrayed as being morally at least as bad as murder.

Well. I did say I'm against content warnings out of principle, but I feel like I might have to make an exception here.

I don't actually know if it's necessarily typically between people who have had consensual sex before, but it is definitely typically between people who know each other on some level beyond having literally just met. It's not like people don't ever get raped by strangers IRL, but in studies about rape victims, generally it seems only about 10-20% were raped by a stranger depending on the study — and those samples are biased towards excluding cases where the rapist was known to the victim because it's much more difficult for those victims to bring their cases to light, so in reality it's even lower. Then there's the related misconception that it typically happens in a public location of sorts, which is similarly not true; the most likely location is the victim's home.

There's also misconceptions about the typical motivations for rape, which is not actually physical sexual desire like it's often depicted in pop culture (it is a factor, but not a big one), and has a lot more to do with the rapist's self-esteem. Insofar as it has to do with sex, it's less about the fact that it feels good to have sex and more about the fact that it feels good to think of yourself as a person who has sex, but often it's not even that either, it's just a power fantasy fulfillment thing to establish the rapist's preferred power hierarchy between them and their victim. Relatedly, there is a misconception that dressing "provocatively" (i.e. attractively) will increase your risk of getting raped, while actually the opposite is true (and the effect is small) because the minority of rapists who are actually picking and choosing their victims based on appearance are not looking for a maximally attractive victim, but a victim who looks maximally easy to dominate, which provocative clothing signals that you aren't.

Also relatedly to motivations, there is an enormous misconception about how the typical rape plays out, and basically literally every depiction of a rape in a movie ever gets this completely wrong — a rape scene in a movie will generally feature relatively strong physical violence or drugging the victim and otherwise basically no effort from the rapist towards anything other than achieving physical sexual satisfaction for themselves as quickly as possible, e.g. a lot of clothes are kept on, only one position is used, there's no foreplay, the rapist doesn't even try to pleasure the victim in any way, etc. What actual rape typically looks like probably resembles consensual sex more than it resembles what people think rape looks like — many victims don't put up physical resistance, so there won't be physical violence, and usually rapists want to emulate consensual sex because the point is that they get to feel powerful enough to do all of that regardless of how the victim feels about it, and it certainly isn't over as quickly as possible. There's such a big discrepancy here between what reality is and what people think it is that you can basically tell with a fairly high accuracy what rape accusations are credible — the accusations that play out like movie rapes are likely made up, and the rest are likely true — and also such a big discrepancy that many people who have in fact been raped don't even realize what happened to them was rape.

There's also a misconception that rape is committed almost exclusively by men against women which is also very prevalent in pop culture. While it is probably true that that is the most common type of case, there is actually a lot of male victims, probably around 30-50% of victims or something like that IRL, and way more female perpetrators than is shown in pop culture, although it is extremely difficult to reliably estimate the real numbers because statistics only show what people are willing to talk about, and a lot of these cases where one or both of the genders of the people involved are atypical go unreported because of stigma. Meanwhile, I can only think of one female-on-male rape that I have ever seen in a work of fiction (it was in Kara no Shoujo).

-- drowning is extremely gruesome and horrible

I don't know how it feels, but it looks and sounds rather peaceful and quiet, because a person who's actually drowning isn't able to make the kind of a racket that's usually seen in movies.


In summary, the way pop culture depicts rape and drowning probably indirectly causes more people to drown and get raped and fewer people to get the help they need. I know this from reading the news.

[silverspawn]

I shall wait for the right mental state to read it

[silverspawn]

y'all know you only see the posts I submit and not the ones I delete

[faust]

There's also a misconception that rape is committed almost exclusively by men against women which is also very prevalent in pop culture. While it is probably true that that is the most common type of case, there is actually a lot of male victims, probably around 30-50% of victims or something like that IRL, and way more female perpetrators than is shown in pop culture, although it is extremely difficult to reliably estimate the real numbers because statistics only show what people are willing to talk about, and a lot of these cases where one or both of the genders of the people involved are atypical go unreported because of stigma. Meanwhile, I can only think of one female-on-male rape that I have ever seen in a work of fiction (it was in Kara no Shoujo).

Where do you get that data from? 50% seems an extremely high exstimate.

When I went looking for it, most available statistics give 10% or less as a percentage of male victims (e.g. here, here or here). Now granted you claim that atypical cases are underreported (though if 50% of rape victims were male, how is that an atypical case?), but it seems a leap to just assume the actual numbers are that much higher.

[silverspawn]

I've distinctly remember 30% mentioned on Astral Codex Ten (then SlateStarCodex), but I don't remember which post. But since faust is a huge fan of Scott, I think we can all agree that this number is definitely correct.

[silverspawn]

I also found and still find 30% surprisingly high given evolutionary incentives

[scott_pilgrim]

There's also a misconception that rape is committed almost exclusively by men against women which is also very prevalent in pop culture. While it is probably true that that is the most common type of case, there is actually a lot of male victims, probably around 30-50% of victims or something like that IRL, and way more female perpetrators than is shown in pop culture, although it is extremely difficult to reliably estimate the real numbers because statistics only show what people are willing to talk about, and a lot of these cases where one or both of the genders of the people involved are atypical go unreported because of stigma. Meanwhile, I can only think of one female-on-male rape that I have ever seen in a work of fiction (it was in Kara no Shoujo).

Where do you get that data from? 50% seems an extremely high exstimate.

When I went looking for it, most available statistics give 10% or less as a percentage of male victims (e.g. here, here or here). Now granted you claim that atypical cases are underreported (though if 50% of rape victims were male, how is that an atypical case?), but it seems a leap to just assume the actual numbers are that much higher.

Note that in the CDC data (your first link), "made to penetrate" is not considered to be rape. This might be a tactic to downplay the severity of rape when the victim is male (by considering it to be somehow fundamentally different from "forced penetration", even though the psychological consequences are believed to be the same). Comparing the lifetime numbers in tables 2.1 and 2.2 gives about 22 million women and 7 million men (adding the 5.5 million "made to penetrate" cases and 1.5 million "rape" cases), but for the 12 month data it's 1.27 million women and 1.267 million men, so just about 50%.

Now I think it's reasonable to consider all of what the CDC lists as "other sexual violence" to be rape, in which case the ratio is about 26% male according to the lifetime data, and 43% male for the 2010 data. In any case, I don't think a 30-50% range is unreasonable (especially considering again, that men are probably less likely to recognize their experience as rape, and even when they do, are less likely to report it).

My understanding (though I might be wrong about this) is that these data often exclude prison rape, which is actually a considerable percentage of total rape cases and the overwhelming majority of victims in these cases are male.