[coolso]

Many of the silliest progressive ideas are being / have been normalized thanks to Big Tech and the establishment doing one or more of three things:

1) actively censoring people who speak out against them

2) preventing discussions from happening in the first place (comments disabled, dislikes hidden)

3) actively promoting the ideal progressive version of the idea to cut down on dissent

Take the pronouns thing. Every other Instagram account of a female has her official pronouns (which you may only choose from a list of officially allowed ones so as to cut down on dissent via things like “your majesty / his highness”) set to she/her. I’m sorry but we all know you’re a woman. Why are you putting your pronouns up? The idea is a preposterous one; don’t even get anyone started on the they/them abomination.

And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored. As a result it’s bleeding out into the real world.

I hang in very progressive social circles. Trust me when I tell you, you do not want this reality. Their lives are defined by their progressive causes and perceived slights and micro aggressions. Every introduction “must” involve your pronouns and if you “forget” them they will innocently ask you of them. As a result people are bumbling pronouns all the time, I cannot tell you how many times even the pronoun experts start to say “she” or “he” in casual conversation referring to someone but then panic and stutter and say “they” because they can’t quite remember what pronoun this particular person wants to go by today or if they’re a they/them who despises people who feel like they should be able to speak freely without knowing they’re very, very special and are too special to go by a binary pronoun.

Mockery is the best defense against stupidity. Which is why it’s under such a big threat. And it’s why Elon is taking over Twitter.

[rrose]

> Take the pronouns thing

oh boy.

> Why are you putting your pronouns up?

To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.

> they/them

They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.

> And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored.

Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.

[Banana699]

>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.

This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns.

It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous.

Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded.

>They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.

Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy".

>Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia.

Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress.

This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[andrepd]

I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns. Don't you think it's at least a bit weird that you're so obsessed and irate about such a minor detail?

Also, it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios, yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform (by all means wealth inequality is one of the major problems of the modern age).

EDIT: About the singular "they" thing: that whole paragraph is hilarious (quantum what?) but it's a pet peeve of mine to correct those misconceptions. Your sentence is grammatically incorrect, even when the function is singular, the agreement in number is still plural, e.g. "someone wrote their name here" -> "they have written their name", not "they has written their name".

Plus, singular they has been attested since the 14th century. Plural they...? Since the 13th.

[Banana699]

>I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns.

Eh, not really. I don't even live in a country where that's a common practice (thankfully), my comments naturally tend to be long whatever their subject are, you can verify this yourself by looking at my post history.

>it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios

So, first off, I'm not 'up in arms', it's just that as a man with a certain propensity towards heresies, it's second nature for me to look at a social web and immediately notice the conformists, and I'm not a big fan of conformists. Secondly, I never implied those people are doing anything 'world-ending', although they are participating in their fair share of censorship-defense and general internet poisoning, but really they are just engaging in a pitiful and obvious illusion. I'm bringing that up, half-ridiculing it, and half-pointing-out it's counter-productive to what they actually want.

>yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform

Where exactly did I mention that I support or even care about Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter :) ? and who do you think controls facebook, youtube or reddit, the progressive spaces who ban you when you look funnily in their general direction? or are billionaires only bad when they hold opinions you don't like ?

>Your sentence is grammatically incorrect

Congratulations on noticing the obvious, that's kinda the whole point of the example. 'They' doesn't make sense for a known person of a definite gender, your examples are all assuming the default usage of it as a placeholder for somebody of an unknown general gender, but the moment you start using it to refer to a specific person you start running into issues like whether to use "is" or "are".

>singular they has been attested since the 14th century

OK ? how is this relevant ? where did I express problems with the fact that 'they' can be used to refer to a single unknown person ?

[MatteoFrigo]

The truth remains that if you use "they" as singular you sound like a moron.

"Someone" has indefinite number and is not singular. Implicitly plural antecedents ("anyone", "everyone", "each ...") are not singular either.

[andrepd]

>The truth remains that if you use "they" as singular you sound like a moron.

Bind this in a nice cover and you'll be sure to get your linguistics doctorate summa cum laude.

[urdumbaf]

MatteoFrigo sounds like they are a moron

[rrose]

what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.

[Banana699]

>are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad?

Well, considering this word can be basically JIT-redefined to mean anything on the fly, I wouldn't say this question is necessarily meaningful without some shared state. What I can say is that I would never like or support making fun of people for things they can't change, if your meaning of 'transphobia' includes that, sure that's bad.

But you know what else is bad? religious authority. The existence of a vague and ill-defined sin that a select class of people can arbitarily expand and contract it's definition to include and exclude anything and anyone they like or dislike, and civil authorities and institutions bending over backward to please that class. Transphobia is the modern day heresy, it's something you can throw at someone without the slightest understanding what they have said and get a mob to descend on them if you get your timing right. Lgbt 'acceptance' groups are strikingly similar to the fanatically religous, down to the particular language used to redirect criticism and pretend they are open to dissent.

>Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia.

In order for this to be a real 'talk', and not just a one-directional sermon between identical replicas, you have to allow people who are hostile to the artificially-dominant stance. Those who think transphobia isn't a real problem, or those who think it's a real but exaggerated, and so on and so forth. I'm not seeing any of that on any trans conversation I have ever seen on social media, all I see is an incredibly aritifical and incredibly religious "As We All Know Tran Lives Matter, Much More Than The Rest Of Us Actually", it reminds me of when dictators invite themselves to staged talkshows and pretend that the conversations aren't scripted.

>I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation

Considering the amount of censoring and manipulation that happens on social media, I think that's not convincing argument for censorship. If you kill 90% of humans you're going to eradicate an aweful lot of diseases, if you imprison 70% of people you're going to catch a lot of criminals, etc... Any strategy where you do the same thing to a significant percentage of the population is going to work more or less like random guessing aka a 50% coin flip, unless you're really unlucky or the population is really skewed. You're better off measuring ratios of where it works and where it doesn't work.

[hyperdunc]

Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear.

This trend isn't meaningful, it's narcissistic.

[jquery]

I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.

[hyperdunc]

Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me.

We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.

[jquery]

It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them.

I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.

[rrose]

it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.

[wyclif]

Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.

[andrepd]

>Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will

>bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine

>I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters

My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?

[wyclif]

In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.

[hyperdunc]

It being incredibly important to them is part of the narcissism.

They can believe whatever they want, but they don't get to demand validation from anyone who's not willing to freely give it.

This pronoun nonsense is as much of a coercion as it is a kindness. I won't participate.

[andrepd]

I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly.

Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.

[rrose]

It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.

[akomtu]

Some relevant offtopic here. Long time ago I came across a book of occult nature that, among other things, outlined 6 soul types, one of them being a curiously accurate portait of what we call wokeness now:

...individualised by vanity were born into city populations, and life after life they tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their dominating idiosyncrasy of vanity led to much quarrelling and often-repeated ruptures among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, their minds strengthening in an undesirable way, and becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Their emotions, as they repressed animal passions, grew less powerful, for the animal passions were starved out by a hard and cold asceticism, instead of being transmuted into human emotions; sex-passion, for instance, was destroyed instead of being changed into love. The result was that they had less feeling, birth after birth, and physically tended towards sexlessness, and while they developed individualism to a high point, this very development led to constant quarrels and rioting. They formed communities, but these broke up again, because no one would obey; each wanted to rule. Any attempt to help or guide them, on the part of more highly developed people, led to an outburst of jealousy and resentment, it being taken as a plan to manage or belittle them. Pride grew stronger and stronger, and they became cold and calculating, without pity and without remorse.

[diputsmonro]

Cool story bro.

I could also write up paragraphs of text filled with vague generalizations and prejudices about people living in the rural countryside, and paint up a picture that all the people who live there are abominations who uniquely suffer from the negative aspects of the human condition..

But I won't, because this and that are both mindless factionalist drivel.

[robonerd]

Do you mind sharing the name of this book? I'm interested in reading about the other sort of souls.