sj_zeroApr 28, 2022
I have very few policies about who I will or will not follow on fedi, but one hard rule I try to follow is "no pronouns in the bio".

Not "no troons", I don't have a particular problem with people's life choices and am glad to follow some who are cool and interesting and most importantly chill. It's just "No Pronouns".

I can legally refer to the queen as "that craggy old whore with the scepter jammed up her arse" all day long, but certain people think they're entitled to be referred to in their preferred manner. In my country, it's legally protected in fact.

People with legally protected titles, is it? Aristocrats, you mean. I'm not that interested in hanging out with aristocrats. Go hang out with your elitist friends, oh lord almighty xir. I'll hang out here in the mud with the proles.
Show threadAverage AdminApr 28, 2022
@sj_zero not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but I'm not of the impression that pronouns are much of an "elitist" (however you want to define that) thing
Show threadsj_zero
@messs55 They certainly are. I don't know how else to define someone who you must legally address the way they demand to be addressed but as an elite.

Also, you'll find that many of the people holding institutional power, the actual elites, they've got pronouns in there too. It isn't an accident. The whole concept came from institutions for elites and spread from there.
Apr 28, 2022 at 4:24pmWeb
Show threadAverage AdminApr 28, 2022
@sj_zero leaving the legal aspect be for a moment (not an expert on that), thinking in more practical terms: how do you propose we communicate how you want to be referred to online? Unless you literally don't care, I don't see many sensible solutions and you don't strike me as a gender abolitionist (if you are then there is that)
Show threadsj_zeroApr 28, 2022
@messs55 For one, I don't care. There's a comic from 1995 that says "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog", and what's blown me away is all the people who don't think that's acceptable. Back in the early 2000s, someone 'came out' as a woman on one of my programming forums, and at the time I talked about it in an FBXL Audio edition how that person went from being a "genderless blob of internet jelly" to a woman. And really, it didn't matter before and it didn't matter afterwards. It's only if you expect to give someone special treatment based on their gender that it should matter what their gender is. (of course, a lot of people demand special treatment, 'cause they're elitist and imagine themselves the elite over you)

We have a solution, but elitist control freaks won't like it: It's to calm down and stop worrying about what goes on in a conversation between two people who aren't you.

By definition, a pronoun is used to refer to someone instead of your name. It's then going to be only used in a conversation where you and another person are referring to a third person who would have been named but for the fact that you both know who it is. In other words, it's a conversation between two third parties. Stop white knuckling the reigns.

English convention is to use gendered pronouns if you know the person and what they are, but if you don't know what gender a person is, you use "they/them".

With all the anime avatars, it's safer to call anyone a they/them anyway.
Show threadAverage AdminApr 28, 2022
@sj_zero you liking a more anonymous of the net is a-ok, but I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say. You make it sound like "elitist" are demanding you give your pronouns in a given conversation. And concerning your comparison to aristocracy: Who was legally entitled to a special title "in ye olden days"? Only the aristocrats. Who is now legally entitled to "a special title"? Everyone. So I don't think that comparison really works.
Show threadsj_zeroApr 28, 2022
@messs55 I think you've got it backwards. It isn't about asking that others present their pronouns, it's about the very first thing about yourself that you say being "This is how thou shalt address me in my absence"

Instead of just using a simple rule for everyone(indeterminate=they), you start having to have a giant lookup table of every single person you're talking to. Seems like a simple answer to just go "you know, it's fine. Go on with you life, I'll follow someone else."

I'm not entitled to a special title. They wouldn't even look at my case -- directly into the bin. I'm guessing neither are you. Neither of us are part of the esteemed aristrocratic class.
Show threadAverage AdminApr 28, 2022
@sj_zero okay, I think I'm starting to see where you are coming from. Regarding "being the first thing you say about you": I think people generally like to assert their identity and their choice of pronouns is an important part of their identity for some. But you still lost me with the "aristocratic class" who are they?
Show threadsj_zeroApr 28, 2022
@messs55 The aristocratic class would be composed of any person who gets special treatment under the law or in society. It shifts around over time. When I was growing up, the aristocratic class would have been the religious sorts who had an outsized influence on how world governments operated. They were able to use that influence to do things like keep gay marriage illegal despite there being no non-religious basis for doing so.

The easy answer would be to point at one group or another, but that's not really correct. Today, a new secular religion has formed, and it forms the basis of the new aristocracy. The intersection of characteristics, identity, ideology, and opportunity is where the peaks of the new aristocracy lie. If you are the exactly correct combination of the four, you will be in that class. The vice president of the united states is a really good example, becoming one of the most powerful people on the planet despite being an idiot.

That being said, masses of ambitious people see that and they act in sort of a cargo cult manner. They see characteristics, and they see the ideology, and they see the identity, and they believe that if they can achieve the ideology or the identity, or have the characteristics, that they too can enter the aristocracy.
Show threadAverage AdminApr 28, 2022
@sj_zero Interesting, I have to admit, I haven't come across this way of looking at society or this class dynamic in the exact way you lay it out (do you have that from somewhere? Like a philosopher or writer?).
But you basically think that anyone who is putting pronouns in their bio is chasing after that aristocratic "glamour" and that is why you think it is bad to do so?
Show threadsj_zeroApr 28, 2022
@messs55 It's a way of thinking I've sort of come to trying to fit all the data I see into a coherent model. I'm sure there's bits and pieces from all over, not a totally original model.

I wrote about some of the symptoms in The Graysonian Ethic, but I didn't get into the details because the point of the book as advice for my son was to implore him to think for himself and choose his own path, rather than doing a deep dive into a specific analysis of anyone else doing stuff. Rather than focus on individuals, I focused on the veneer of social justice corporations put on to distract from supporting genocidal regimes or other horrible stuff. They have a different incentive, obviously.

One of the reasons I love coming on to talk about stuff with people is it gives me a chance to try to fit all my different thoughts together in a way that makes sense, and the process of discussion helps me articulate and work through ideas I've come to that are intuitively there but I haven't been able to work through intellectually yet.

I really appreciate the fact that you're having this discussion with me, I think it's helping me put a lot of disparate ideas together in a coherent whole. Thanks for that, this has been a really interesting conversation.

One of the things I'm trying to do when I post, when I discuss with people, is to seek truth(sometimes even when I'm joking, and I joke around a lot too because humor is a universal salve). That process of seeing truth means playing with a lot of ideas, and a lot of the time it means you're slaughtering someone's sacred cow (even if you stitch it back together afterwards because there were no gold nuggets inside), or you're even playing with ideas that are wrong because there might still be something right inside.

Given what we've discussed so far, I think it's safe to say you could argue that people who are performing to try to get into that aristocracy are bought into the ideology. Appearing to be a strict adherent after all is something they are striving towards in pursuit of their end-goal.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that there are seriously problematic elements of the ideology itself. Now, don't get me wrong! "Be nice to certain people" isn't a bad thing, but "turn off all human empathy, turn off all sense of fairness, make the punishment for violating the rule complete destruction of your life and even the most benevolent cause can become true, unmitigated evil."

There is a culture of destruction of wrongthinkers out there. It's the reason people are getting kicked off of platforms like patreon, youtube, twitter, or facebook. It's the reason people are fired from their jobs after someone starts harassing the HR department with campaigns designed to get them fired. It's the reason why people think it's ok to "punch a nazi" and go out and violently attack people who are not nazis, or call the police to swat someone. It's the reason why governments filled with these people think it's ok to abuse process to harm their political enemies.

There isn't a monopoly on this from the pronouns in their bio folks (and not every person with pronouns is a psychopath, I'm not saying that), but given the current state of the aristocracy, the chance that institutional punches land is much higher than if one of the cross in the bio folks were to call my boss and tell them I hadn't gone to church in 10 years, or calls my bank to tell them I'm a sexual deviant. Back when I was a kid, the church folks would have had much more power to destroy you, and they routinely tried and routinely suceeded.

It's the same reason I finally left reddit, because I didn't feel I could disagree with someone and be secure in my person. If I can't be wrong, how am I supposed to find what's actually right? If I can't be right if it disagrees with someone else, what's the point of even trying? If there's a sword of Damocles over my head, why keep sitting in that damn chair?