User talk:Eira/Archive5

YOUR 2 YEAR BLOCK WASN'T GOING TO SOLVE ANYTHING
No, it won't solve anything if you let the troll continue his trolling on your talk page. -- Nx  / talk 19:53, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
 * "trolling" on a talk page isn't the or even "a" problem. He's a troll.  there is little if anything you can do, frankly.  He will sock up, and keep trolling.  you block an IP, he'll hop IPs.  it's what trolls do.  --[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]En attendant Godot  20:39, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
 * He'll stop trolling when he gets bored because all his edits are deleted and no-one pays attention to him. But as long as he gets attention like in the above section, he won't be going anywhere. -- Nx  / talk 20:42, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Voting proposal
Hello Eira. I was hoping you might consider my proposal for two-thirds voting. I understand (correct me if I am wrong) that your position is more one that no vote should be considered binding. But I am thinking, that a binding supermajority vote, might be a good compromise between those who favour binding majority votes and those who oppose them. It keeps the binding nature, but makes passage of the vote harder, which makes it less likely (albeit still not impossible) for an irrational/unjustified vote to pass. I suppose the downside, from the opposition to binding votes viewpoint, is that if a vote does pass, the greater majority must inevitably increase the moral force behind it, and hence make it of more binding force than current votes are. Anyway, I am hopeful you will give this idea your consideration. 12:46, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Fuck off Mara... you're a fucking religion-pushing concern troll. Your religion is not based in any form of reality, and so you're fucking delusional. Don't like hearing these words? Too fucking bad, I'm right, and your own words have confirmed this. Go off enjoy your lala land that you've imagined. Actually, do us all a favor and go attempt to prove your religion is true to yourself... go rejoin Maratrean. -- 15:21, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Ahaha damn right!-- 01:01, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Nom
Just letting you know that you've been nominated for moderator. Go here to accept or decline. Cheers. 03:49, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Subversive Speech
I hereby note, that in the actions taken by a "majority" of this wiki, the community has apparently decided it fair to declare certain forms of speech so subversive, that they should be deleted on sight, with no further explanation, simply because they appear to be from a certain individual. Human having taken a moment to repeat these words has apparently come under attack just for repeating that which he earnestly believes, under suspicion that this is providing sanctuary to a blocked person. How horrible indeed, imagine such a world where speech that it believed to originate from a subversive individuals, cannot be uttered, even in proxy through another person. What a horrible day. Shall we ban next Karl Marx? St. Thomas Aquinas? Charles Darwin? Julius Caesar? Bill O'Reilly? Sir Isaac Newton? Marcus Cicero? Who next shall we decided that any speech coming from them, no matter its source shall be removed from this wiki? Who next?

If free men fear that their words might be redacted, repressed, or censored by mere matter of the origin of the words themselves, then how can we call ourselves free? How can we call ourselves as being against authoritarian, and totalitarian ideologies, when we ourselves refuse to permit unblocked individuals to repeat words that resonate within them merely, because those words are believed, believed no less for no truth or proof can be offered that the words truly are from this person of which none shall speak, lest they invite the wrath of ban, to be from an individual the community has named subversive...

I suppose the most hilarious aspect of all of this, is that those who seek to kill the troll, themselves kill instead the wiki itself. For in tempting to stab out the cancer they perceive to be infecting this wiki, they would carve out our very hearts and present it high, as it is beating... slowly... laboringly... and they should stand proudly proclaiming that the cancer has been excised, and the wiki shall now be able to rest in peaceful slumber, no longer to be vexed by this contemptible life which has infected every soul of our community. Then they shall lie down, and sleep, comfortably in the eternal rest, never again to stir with fire and passion.

(The above was written by an unnamed author, with their permission, because revealing the author, would result in its immediate removal, and repercussions upon the poster herself.) -- 16:18, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * For a long time on RW, "who said it" has been more important than "what was said". Just because it's in the name doesn't mean this is a rational place. Occasionaluse (talk) 16:28, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Agree with you both. I think, when a certain editor posts direct personal attacks against other editors, it is one thing to revert them (although still inconsistent, when other editors do the same and don't get reverted), it is entirely another thing when that editor posts something that isn't a personal attack, just an opinion people don't want to hear. 19:16, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

About your comment on "Gender and Sysops":
Women are better at communication because of biology, but are inferior at math because of patriarchy. That makes sense. --24.62.109.225 (talk) 20:36, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I can't quite figure out if you're being sarcastic here, or if you think it really does make sense. However, women are worse at clicking buttons fast because of biology. I don't disregard that biology can have an effect upon people, but one has to be realistic about what is actually caused by biology, and what is not. Every study that has been done to locate the reason why women perform worse at math than men find that it is because of stereotype threat, and stereotype confirmation/internalization. (Naturalized US citizens are more likely to pick fast food choices for food, if it is suggested to them that they are not 'really' Americans. They don't plan on this, or are even aware of it. It's just an unconscious desire to conform to a stereotype in order to 'better fit in' with a group that they want to be identified as.) Meanwhile, women are significantly less likely to be autistic, and have been shown in research to have an increased response when witnessing others experiencing strong emotions, and female-to-male transsexuals have noted regularly that they are incapable of crying like they used to once they start hormone therapy. Hormones cause very distinct and sometimes crazy emotional changes in individuals, and it's entirely clear that women have more estrogen than men, and men have more androgens than women. If testosterone has been shown to reduce the empathetic character of a person, and raise "click button speed", then clearly testosterone will do this.
 * Here, a better example, testosterone is a natural steroid, and increases the ability to grow muscle tissue. As a result men on average are way more capable at sports than women. As a result, women compete in a different class. This is not sexism, it is biology. Women don't run slower than men because of patriarchy, but they certainly do perform worse on tests because of expectations that they will perform worse. -- 14:36, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Nice stuff. Neb and I talk a lot about this. I've decided to "learn" (as it were), cognitive linguistics, which always draws me into brain "stuff".  do you have any names of authors you'd recommend who have written about the comments above.  Neb has suggested Lisa Elliot  and Cordelia Fine but if you had any other suggestions about "brain and gender", i'd love them. Neb's cites have crushed my "crush" on S. Pinker, damnit.  heh.  [[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot   Some would use a tautology to describe it ("The way things are done around here is the wa 18:08, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The totality of the differences are ascribed to a number of factors including, but not limited to stereotype threat. In any case, the gap is virtually non-existent in some places. (I think this is the most recent meta-analysis.) Stereotype threat affects the studies of women's ability to detect emotion as well (that's covered in Fine, as WfG mentioned). Also, claims about hormones have been misinterpreted and exaggerated in many cases (see Anne Fausto Sterling's Myths of Gender on that). Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:32, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm confused as to how you are "correcting" anything I wrote. Are you arguing that hormone changes have no effect on bodies and minds? Because I was arguing that they have a complex relationship with, but do cause changes in bodies and minds. (Bodies is clearly easily enough to prove: puberty.) Are you arguing that testosterone is not a steroid and thus aids men in the development of muscle tissue? Are you arguing that hormones don't effect emotional profiles? So, the whole aggression due to androgen floods is a myth, and doesn't actually exist? (Because, you know, it's scientifically validated.) So, I guess what I'm saying is, don't just point me at an essay that pretty much covers all of the topics that I already understand, and pretty much said myself. Also, don't tell me that hormones don't have any impact upon behavior at all, because such a statement is clearly false. (It's not uncommon for someone experiencing a hormonal tumor to experience a pretty drastic personality change.) Does this mean that every single emotional change/trait that we culturally attribute to hormones is actually caused by the hormones? No, I already said it was a complex relationship, and there is not a clear cause-effect relationship. However, if women experience increases in pimples, water-weight gain, and severe cramping that is readily resolved with hormone therapies (a.k.a. birth control pills) then obviously it can cause behavioral changes as well. (And if we throw out physical issues linked to menstruation as being "unrelated", or merely correlated, or figments of imagination/cultural indoctrination, then we may as well throw out "runny nose" and "fever" from symptoms produced by a cold. I can hear the argument "but colds don't cause behavioral changes, how can you argue that hormonal changes do!" Um... because colds don't pass through the blood-brain barrier, while hormones do.) -- 01:42, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * "...exaggerated or misinterpreted in many cases" apparently equals denial. You made a number of demonstrably wrong statements: 1. Every study finds that females are worse at math due to stereotype threat. Wrong, as per the above meta-analysis. 2. Stereotype threat affects the results of emotional reaction studies as well, as per Fine. 3. If button-clicking refers to reaction time, then men are faster, but this gap has also been shrinking over time. 4. The testosterone-aggression link is not "scientifically validated" in humans -- it's mostly in rats and other animals. The connection is much less clear in humans.   Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 02:42, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * "Much less clear in humans", but still there. I never claimed that "every study finds that females are worse at math due to stereotype threat", that would be a retarded notion to take. After all, there are studies that find that black people are inferior to white people, and that validate creationism, and AGW denialism, and homeopathy, and all sorts of bullshit. Also, there is more to women performing poorly on math tests than just stereotype threat anyways. Active discouragement to do well in math results in women concentrating on math in the first place is just one further part of the systemic bias against women doing well in math. Women who are well studied in math are just as capable as performing well as men. Wait, stereotype threat results in unconscious manipulation of unconscious factors of emotional reactions? It's like some Inception shit going on in here. "Subconsciously, I know I'm a good liar, so I'm going to subconsciously not produce deception-covering micro-expressions!" WTF? "Button-clicking" does not refer to reaction time, it refer to how quickly one can press a button. It is a known and documented feature of female-to-male transsexuals that once they begin taking testosterone their button clicks per minute go up. (I saw a program on TV where they were measuring an FTM's button click rate in order to collect scientific evidence, and they mentioned how button-click rate was cause-effect correlated with testosterone levels.) -- 04:52, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * "...but still there." Possibly not. There are pro-social effects as well. You might want to try actually reading the sources I've provided. "I never claimed that "every study finds...that would be a retarded position to take." "Every study that has been done..." Well, I'm glad you think so highly of yourself. "It is a known and documented feature of female-to-male transsexuals..." I didn't know that -- source besides "I saw it on the teevee once"? I'm not really inclined to believe "well-documented" after your "scientifically validated" fact wasn't really a fact. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 07:41, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Possibly, we're all brains in a jar, or a raw computer simulation without any real physical presence. Hormones cause bodily changes, why the fuck would they not also cause behavioral changes? People are so weird about this notion that animals are affected by deterministic factors, yet suggest that humans are subject to the same things, and WOAH NELLY! We gotta back off from this, because the Lord made us different from animals!!!one!
 * "Every study..." bleh, it's a stupid phrase that is indoctrinated. I still "OH MY GOD!!" but I don't believe in any gods. So, are you going to use that quote mine against me?
 * No, I don't have a better source than "saw it on the teevee", but tell you what, since I'm would just google it anyways, why don't you go do the work yourself? AND YOUR OWN GOD DAMN SOURCE SAYS AGGRESSION DUE TO TESTOSTERONE HAPPENS. But no, you have your retarded "we ain't like animals" blinders on, so what the fuck... why should I care? Just be another god damn denialist. -- 21:05, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * On the contrary, the Nature report notes that it can affect behavior, but also behavior that's pro-social. The problem with testosterone studies is that they require a lumbar puncture for the most accurate reading of levels within the brain, which can't be done in regular experiments, leading to the spurious correlations as the articles note. Because something occurs in animals doesn't mean we can necessarily extrapolate that to humans -- otherwise we could just do animal testing and then unleash every single new drug to market immediately! (Big Pharma's wet dream, no doubt.) But I guess I'm just a "denialist" who believes in mind-body dualism for some reason -- clearly I have no idea how the brain works. Guess I better send that degree back to the alma mater. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 21:54, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

I think it is extremely difficult to find the truth in these matters, because it is very difficult to design experiments to successfully disentangle the biological from the social. On the biological side, one can certainly find people who with all sorts of different genes and hormones, including less common combinations of those. But, culture is a given which you can't remove the subjects from. Cross-cultural studies can help, but even if you find an apparent cultural universal, you have not proven a role for biology, since you can't assume that the set of existent cultures represents the set of all possible cultures which could exist, and apparent universals may have explanations in commonalities not strictly biological (e.g. shared level of economic or technological development, or a shared history.) Even if you look at people who are transitioning, no doubt hormonal changes have a major impact, but I think the social and cultural construction of what it means to be female and male and transsexual also plays a major role, and it is hard to say where biology ends and where the social/cultural begin. 19:09, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, female to male transsexuals knowing that men tap buttons faster than women subconsciously started tapping buttons faster when they started taking testosterone. See, there are ways to test if biology is a factor in something, because if it is true that biology is a factor, then we should witness people for whom biology has diverged in such a way that there would be variation from the "universal normal". For instance, we know that having two arms is biology and not cultural, even though it is a nearly universal trait of all people. Acting like we can't extricate the entanglement between culture and biology at all is the same fucking stupid bullshit that I've come to expect from you. (Note: there are some cases where culture and biology are deeply entwined, but the notion that we can't ever disentangle any culture-vs-biology argument because some of them are difficult to do is wrong.) -- 01:22, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Um, I don't for a minute deny that hormones have some influence on the brain, and that when transsexuals start taking hormones, and notice some cognitive differences, that at least some of those are due to hormones. But at the same time, I think we tend to underestimate the extent to which even matters such as transsexualism are constructed by society and culture — transsexuals are acting, to some extent, within particular cultural understandings of what it means to be one gender or the other, and what it means to transition between them. One thing I notice, is that — this is certainly not universally true, but it is a definite tendency — transgender people when transitioning often feel a greater compulsion to behave in a gender normative way with respect to the gender to which they are transitioning than cisgender people of the same gender do. How many web pages by M2Fs have I seen covered with pink and butterflies! I completely understand the situation they face - when there is such a pressure to pass, to prove one really is the gender one feels one is, one tends to adopt the most conservative, or even exaggerated, approach to doing so. By contrast, those who natally posses that gender, are under no such pressures, and hence are much more free (in a way) to act in ways which question the prevalent conceptions of what it means to be that gender. I do think though, that as society with time becomes less transphobic, these pressures upon transgender people will reduce, and they may become closer to cisgender people in their behaviour in this regard. 08:12, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Quoting my parenthetical above: "Naturalized US citizens are more likely to pick fast food choices for food, if it is suggested to them that they are not 'really' Americans. They don't plan on this, or are even aware of it. It's just an unconscious desire to conform to a stereotype in order to 'better fit in' with a group that they want to be identified as." This stereotype conformation in order to deflect the appearance of not being part of an identified group is nothing that is constrained only to transsexuals. It is difficult to argue that "wearing makeup" is in any way a form of natural consequence of estrogen, and not totally social/cultural indoctrination. The idea that all behavior changes of transsexuals is automatically because of hormone changes is a strawman that you appear to be hoisting up in my stead, so that you can beat on that rather than deal with my real argument: there are some behaviors that are a result of complex interactions of hormones. Which is exactly what your first sentence stated, which means that your entire diatribe on my talk page is entirely worthless because you're arguing the same god damn point that I am. So, unless you're arguing that hormones have no effect, or hormones have all effects, then shut up and get the fuck off my page. You already know that I hate you, so don't be surprised when you drop a steaming heap of antagonistic shit on my talk page, and I respond negatively. You're a fucking idiot moron, and none of your ideas deserve consideration. (I mean, fuck, you don't even believe that hormones really exist, they're just part of the pattern of consciousness, so hormonal changes are all in our head according to you.) -- 20:23, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * What made you think what I said was disagreeing with you somehow? I was responding to the discussion above generally, not your own views specifically, so why should you assume what I said had to be necessarily disagreeing or agreeing with you? I also don't understand why you hate me, I don't hate you. I don't see the value in going through life hating people, especially people on the Internet who you barely know, and have never done anything beyond expressing some opinions contrary to yours. 07:07, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

All this just for an old essay I wrote. It kind of makes me want to update it. 19:21, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, didn't read it. I just came in to correct Eira and the troll BON's facts. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 19:26, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Exactly. I was actually replying below about an article i'm fucking up and noticed the BON comments and Eira's reply.[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot   Some would use a tautology to describe it ("The way things are done around here is the wa 19:32, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Harrumph.  19:44, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

bible translation
For what it's worth, I'm totally revamping that page, since it was by and large, a rehash of "translations of the bible" - but also had lots of stuff not included in the other page. But I can only edit in blocks of 15-20 minutes. So i write a bit, go work, come back. It will have lots of unexplained things if you catch it at the wrong time. But I'll get it done, and let you all know that "ok, i think this is readable, please destroy it for me" when it's time. :-) The two pages are Bible translation and Bible Translations if you are curious to see why I thought they needed to be reworked, or better parsed or something.Godot   Some would use a tautology to describe it ("The way things are done around here is the wa 18:03, 17 November 2011 (UTC)