This is just a bunch of gestures. The reality is that AES states are truly guided by Marxism, and are true attempts at Communism, but haven’t made it to the Communist stage of development.

Why are you including things which have not yet made it to the Communist stage of development as examples of success of Marxist theory? That isn’t a proof that Communism is great yet. It’s calling the experiment before actually seeing if it works.

And I am not quick to call the USSR or Cuba particularly Dictatorships of the Proletariat. They became actual Dictatorships that carried forward the heirachy of the paramilitary organizations that spawned them never ceeding them to the workers councils like they were supposed to do instead creating new dynasties of career politicians…Career politicians of a one party state are not “working class”.

It really is a hype based philosophy. I look at Marx as a bit of a stochastic terrorist of his time. His ideas aren’t dangerous particularly taken with a grain of salt but because they are written to lead one to become angrier and angrier without being given an outlet to work towards things on a constructive way Communist communities start hopeful and sour over time.

He always dances around how that limiting of other classes authority and individual inequities is going to be handled because the answer… Is violence. A generous read is that he is naive to believe everyone will see he’s right and kumbaya the whole thing into existence but more likely because of the language he uses other places he’s flat out for the nessisary purge required to achieve his aims.

Issue being is anarchic mobs are generally fairly weak… So to make a successful change you basically need paramilitary leaderships and military like heirachy to achieve that purge… And then so far in history that paramilitary heirachy never has effectively dissolved after the fact because if everybody is doing communism correctly creating competeting heirachy is antithetical… You are just supposed to ignore that the paramilitary heirachy that becomes the state isn’t strictly playing by Marx’s rules either but by then a population isn’t in a position to argue.

It depends on what ideas you deem to be “correct”. He was very good at elucidation of the nature of how European models of property rights were impacting large swaths of the population at large… But its difficult to say if he had everything figured out because his “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t seem to ever actualize in a lasting fashion. It usually ends up as an authoritarian state arguably because the system is vulnerable to the first group that decides to break faith with the covenant. A lot of Communist hopefuls tend to either take the examples of this happening as “not true Communism” or try to minimize the bad aspects of regimes that adopted the principles… It does seem once power is too laterally spread it becomes weak to any hierarchy that as long as they can talk a good game and use Marxist language.

In either case a lot of us would not call those outcomes “proven correct”. I would say he had some very lasting ideas which are useful tools… But the fact that none of the places where attempted enactment have particularly lived up to his hype means that like a lot of philosophy of his time that the answers are a lot more complex and nuanced than he could have forseen.

Actually I find that it allows more range of Socialism strains to be discussed. A lot of Marxists tend to look rather poorly at any mixed Socialism blends as either heretical or as liminal states with Communism as a complete end goal instead of being legitimate in their own right.

Where ever Marxism tends to particularly flourish erasure of a lot of other Socialist philosophy tends to be the norm. Socialism is a big range of different veiws of how publicly held and private property domains intermix with a lot of foundational philosophy some of which pre-dates or were contemporaries of Marx. Marx may have coined the term but it’s important to remember that when he was writing his work there were specific peers in his feild that some of it was directed at who he was sort of in agreement with and sort of not. Many wholeheartedly adopted his term for the broad stroke of their own philosophy even though they would later be at loggerheads about details. Later in life Marx really did not get along with other prominent Socialists of his era. Those who subscribe very heavily to his text tend to follow his tradition of being very dismissive of other Socialist strains and rather combative because the text is very fiery and segments well into calls for violence

If one wants to go talk Marxism the other instances are always there and are generally better venues. It’s valuable to have spaces that have differences so that other schools of political thought have air. As far as Marxists here go, since having a group that usually denies others the very words they use to self identify by, demanding they be called illegitimate, sucks all the air from the room they are generally not particularly welcome in the space unless they demonstrate they can play nice with others.

Yeah dysphoria/euphoria runs a gamut of severity. Some folk only experience the effects of the dopamine hit of it being what you want, some just have the perpetual downer… most of us it’s a combo plate of both.

And anorexia does have a somewhat similar approach to lessening body dysmorphia. Stay away from mirrors, avoid people who focus too much on your appearance… We as a society just have come to a concensus that making commentary about people’s weight is really rude and harmful. Anorexia however is socially based. It’s a response to a societies beauty standards and you don’t find it in cultures that don’t have those beauty standards. Transness however just pops up everywhere often in complete opposition to beauty standards, cultural norms or religious doctrine across time and place.

A lot of us go through this phase right before we accept being trans where we try to be like the apex version of our birth sex. We try to over gender perform because if you are the perfect cis man or woman you should be fine living off the external validation of others the way cis people do… But when that ultimately fails to fix the problems and actually often makes them worse the reality becomes there are only a few options. Be miserable until you run out of strength and die either by suicide or a life shortened by stress… Or you explore ways that might solve your rocksolid internal need but also potentially cost you family, friendships, careers, respect, safety and basically turn up the heat on external pressures to conform.

QED the pilot thing was probably a bad example I won’t use again.

How about this, if someone changed their name and you saw a picture of them from before that update… Maybe a baby pic let’s say, what name would you use when identifying the person in the picture?

How does one actually identify if they are a “man” or a “woman”? What list of criteria makes one of a certain gender?

Okay so “am I a trans person? 101”. A lot of what cis people perceive as gender is best described by gender performativity theory. Basically at birth you were coded using physical sex characteristics as a guideline and a whole complex kicked into gear. You were probably praised for performing gender well and informed and shamed by others when you did not conform. This creates an external goad of social expectation that trained you how to feel about yourself. Most cis people don’t appear to really question this because as long as nothing interferes with your ability to fit this model and cause social friction it’s fine. Some challenge the conventions but not really identity. Gender is a thing you do rather than are under this model because it’s a mass social phenomenon of culture clustered vaguely around sex characteristics. Being a Femboy for instance is something you perform. It’s not a trans identity even though they might be easily mistaken for a trans woman.

But then there’s a VERY different experience… And this is the rough thing to explain to cis people because it literally does not make sense. That’s the hard part in this dialogue. How gender works for trans people is strictly not logical and if you experience this phenomenon you cannot logic yourself out of it no matter how hard you try… Because now we are dealing with a subconscious function. Importantly this is not a delusion. A delusion would be belief in something that doesn’t exist, this is the opposite. This is intense but uncontrollable feedback about observable physical reality.

It you are trans, for whatever reason, your brain has an internalized feedback system that targets your physically held sex characteristics. Your perceptible sex characteristics make you feel things completely independent of anything external. You feel intense envy for sex characteristics you see other people have that you do not. Emulation of those characteristics make you feel incredible for literally no logical reason…it’s like getting hit by a truck full of dopamine even when you acknowledge it makes no sense to feel that way. Reminders that you don’t have those characteristics make you feel completely deficient. You can feel disconnected from your body and in social spaces you can feel fake or invisible, unable to express yourself. Oftentimes this friction between constant internal feedback and external pressure to conform to the opposite of that feedback causes stress which means you get stress related illnesses. Digestive issues, headaches, skin problems, harmful nervous behaviours, depression, social anxiety, escapist self medication or addiction issues… Some get metaphysical about this in the idea that there is a sort of spiritual aspect that never aligned but it’s probably some kind of brain structure thing. But the idea of “being a (enter whatever here)” stems from the very consistent feedback that aggregates around a specific sexual phenotype. If you feel like your life essentially sucks because you don’t have the physical characteristics that come from a masculine puberty then you can backwards engineer that feeling into the sentiement “I should be a man”.

So when you face this friction between external feedback and internal feedback you have two routes to combat that stress.

Option one : You physically change the features that cause the feedback. You no longer are envious because you have the feature you want and you don’t feel deficient or self conscious anymore because your physical reality has changed. The internal feedback loop is satisfied and you get that nice hit of dopamine from all forms of witnessing your physical body in action.

Option two - you remove the external feedback.

One way to not obsess over what you feel you are missing is to not be constantly reminded. Changing how everyone addresses you is part of this. When people generally call you a woman for instance what they are doing is adding up all your physical features, coming to a conclusion based on what they physically witness and spitting it back out as a physical assessment of you. Your internal feedback system is VERY AWARE of this computation happening and reverse engineers it instantly. Internally it is something like this : "This person called me ‘she’ because they noticed my high voice (oh how I wish my voice was lower!) and because I have boobs (fuck I wish I could just slice the damn things off) and because of my narrow shoulders (Gotta work out more) and is now creating an expectation of conforming to a cluster of social garbage and treat me like I am different from men which sucks but makes sense because I have a high voice (fuck I should talk less) and boobs (maybe if I starve myself…) " and the thought spiral continues.

So what you can do is trick the brain. You ask to be called by male forms of address and ask to be treated as culturally male and what happens is basically your mind fills in the empty room. You might not have the physical characteristics but it becomes theoretically possible to the mind that maybe those physical features aren’t actually being noticed. It creates a sort of protective uncertainty. It obscures the witnessable physical assessment aspect of someone else’s calculation of your sex. Even if logically it’s pretty obvious what your birth sex is and you are absolutely sure someone is just gassing you up it denies that internal feedback immediate purchase. It creates room to consider - maybe my physical features aren’t all that different from what I desperately wish they could be. “Man” in this usage is not just a social category. It’s verbally applied medicine.

Of course the issue with option 2 strictly is that it’s kind of only good at handling the feedback that comes from interacting with other people. No amount of people calling me a man is gunna help when I am in front of a mirror, or when I talk and hear my own voice or demonstrate some kind of physicality that my cis male counterparts do not have. But sometimes you get what you get and it has to be enough. Not all fully baked transitions make us perfectly indistinguishable from cis people. The process is imperfect so we ask other people to socially make up for physical shortfall.

A lot of trans people realize how important these things are once that friction is resolved. Like if you suddenly have like five different physical maladies that suddenly clear up because they were caused by stress you have normalized your entire life and you suddenly feel like going outside your house takes half the energy it used to it becomes really obvious what you’re doing is working and nessisary. The experience can be a lot like quiting a very bad job that was slowly killing you.

I suppose that assumes a woman cares about fashion and that fast fashion is something every woman wants to buy into. A lot of women I know shop vintage because they want items they can wear reliably for years and modern items do not offer that level of quality. If you want to buy out of the fast fashion assumption of “need” it seems like you have to literally go back in time because if you buy fast fashion it is literally trash in a year. Nobody will thrift it worn because it will be worn out. It doesn’t seem like brands have options for women that lie outside of this system in addition to those junky options or offer those junk items at a lower cost. If all you can buy new is junk then stepping outside of the system requires you to avoid the ease of simply buying new off the rack. It requires work and luck. If you grew up inside that system that’s your established normal.

We can say that mens fashion is static… But why can’t both gendered fashion silos have more static options or at least price fast fashion at a different price point to reflect those cheaper materials? It seems like saying one sex has inherent requirements for fubgibillity which seems honestly kinda sexist. There’s a lot of men who want more interesting fad like stuff and women who want staples that will last a decade.

I mean you can get it or not it’s not a debate. Trans etiquette is something that a concensus of trans people request of other people and we set the standards based on how gender makes us feel, not how cis or even isolated trans individuals understand gender. This isn’t an exercise of strict logic. This is dealing with a culture of people dealing with a problem you don’t have and telling you where their pain points are. You don’t have to listen just like you don’t have to obey another culture’s etiquette when you are abroad… but expect to be treated as out to lunch or annoying to deal with. If I took you to meet other people in my community and you did that to one of their past photos I would be embarrassed on your behalf. If you did that to me I would probably not bring it up but internally wince because unless you were a friend I would treat you as a temporary inconvenience.

When someone says “I used to be a woman” my reaction is largely that is just incorrect. I never was a woman there was simply a stage of my life where I was afraid to be a man or unaware that other options were possible. In short - I was coerced. Other people identified me as a woman based on the sex characteristics I had and I identified as a woman because I did so out of fear of social reprisal or because I was kept in ignorance by dint of a society refusing to treat that knowledge as something I was allowed to have. Saying I “was a woman” would imply that I chose to do so freely, which I did not. Quite frankly when they look at a picture of me and read my past self as a woman it’s a reminder that to a lot of people that presentation and body type is all that they need to misgender me in a round about way. They are referring to a time when I was a prisoner to a system and identifying based on what they think I should be coded, not how I code myself. You think it’s fine to say I changed from woman to man because of social category and that it’s a construct - but to be honest that’s a pretty cis take. I react negatively to my SEX characteristics and use gender performance to stop people from bringing up my assumed sex characteristics into conversation. Language is a mirror through which we catch glimpses of ourselves. The mirror does me damage, I don’t linger in front of physical ones and I ask people not to use linguistic ones. When you call me “she” even in past tense you are referring to aspects of my body that I do not have the capacity to feel neutrally about.

I know a fair number of other trans folks who wish to expunge every pretransition photo from existence in part because they invite people to comment on this sort of temporal understanding of gender. If we could have you forget we were ever our birth sex we would. Instead most compromise by asking for a retroactive update.

It was actually super cool, when Elliot came out he went to the showrunners to let them know they had nothing to fear, he wouldn’t change his appearance or anything because he was signed on for the show length.

And the show runners in an industry first established a new gold standard by telling him “Nah, how about we just make Vanya into Victor and make it canonical.” So they worked with Page giving him a lot of creative control over the character’s personal journey and showed probably the best depiction of early transition on tv.

Trans etiquette wise you aren’t correct. If someone transitions you apply current identity to all photos taken beforehand because the person is the same person. In the same way a picture of a pilot taken before they got their pilots licence is still a picture of a pilot your current understanding of a person updates to current and is retroactively applied.

Saying " this is so and so back when they were a woman" is considered rude since people generally look at their pre transition selves as not having a gender that aligns with their birth sex but rather a stage where they and other people around them did not know their current needs. People will generally not check you on it though if they think that your understanding is very basic. Proper nuance would say “Back when they identified as a woman” because then the implication is that the person didn’t nessisarily change, but the general understanding and social category did… but functionally speaking it’s close enough for someone who isn’t up on best practice.

So general flow chart here starts with context. When an actor plays a character that character’s gender is considered before the actor.

In this case this picture is from Umbrella Academy but before the character comes out as a trans man. The role was specifically altered for Page by the show runners to make the role more comfortable for the actor (he offered to delay transition goals for the production but the production being incredibly awesome decided that this was something they could flex) so this meme is referencing one of the most recognizable trans actors in the world in a part where the character’s coming out was basically happening during Page’s transition.

Since the character is trans but this pic is before the transition it follows real world etiquette where pre transition photos should use current preferences of identity.

So the answer is from the trans community standpoint is that unless you jumped out of the series before that reveal and were fully unaware then yeah, making this meme with this pic with this specific context is pretty gauche but an easy mistake.

Actually the character is canonically a trans man named Victor… This is from Umbrella Academy but before the character came out. You are correct in general respects just this example particularly is both of two men both canonically and non canonically so its actually kind of not super cool to use this particular image for this gag but largely forgivable if someone honestly was completely unaware of that context when making this meme which if you peaced out before the next season would be a very understandable mistake.

Probably more Non-binary my dude. Bi is more about what type of appliance voltage you’re attracted to rather than what you got in your house.

It’s a lot more than socks. Went looking for a duffel coat once for work and checked both isles in stores. Mens coat - nice woven and well fulled 100 percent wool, thick quality stuff, Women’s isle, cheaper felted wool half the thickness… Same price, same basic style, same store.

Ever since whenever I go looking for stuff I check both isles. Higher quality fabrics are generally reserved for men’s items though women’s stuff is priced the same. You’d never know the difference if you only shopped one gendered option.

Due to a guy at work spewing right wing radio into my work space for a few weeks before he was stopped I heard a lot of Musk in interviews… It is the most sycophantic non-sense that they pass off as journalism. The framing of the questions are always overflattering (“So we know your new plans for the widget is AWESOME but what can you tell us about…”) and no actual critical questions are even posed.

A lot of it is that his entire company exists on hype. Critical thinking is trained out of his audience by simple lack of exposure. I imagine if an interviewer were to treat him as anything less than the tech messiah he just doesn’t give them the opportunity. Provided the novel data problems with AI remain unsolved he may find himself in hot water if his audience ever gets wise.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.