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Functionally, the difference between "Let's separate gender from sex" and "Let's do away with gender altogether" is nothing.

Unless you also intend to do away with the attendant behaviors, in which case you don't have any people left because all gender roles have done is take the naturally-occurring behaviors of human beings and segregated them according to sex.

As it is, the attendant behaviors are clustered together in semi-rigid groups. I would break these groups up as well, so that people could mix and match. Basically aiming for a situation where genderqueer (or something closely resembling it) and society-at-large become largely indistinguishable from each other.

Functionally speaking, how is that different from disconnecting gender from sex?

Technically it's not, but there's still a distinction between it and what is otherwise being proposed.

Imagine there's a bad traffic accident in which the two vehicles belonging to the same household involved become twisted together so they are hard to seperate, and after they are disconnected one is still drivable and only cosmetically damaged (perhaps it's much larger or something, bear with me) but the other is totaled. The smart course of action would be for the drivable vehicle to be kept and the wrecked one to be scrapped for parts and materials, this is analogous to my proposal. A more silly thing to do would be for the family to hang on to both vehicles and keep the wrecked one on conderblocks on their front lawn, and an even sillier proposal would be to keep the wrecked vehicle and get rid of the one that still works; the second proposal and in extreme cases the third proposal are analogous to what all of you seem to be proposing. The wrecked car represents gender, the working car represents biological sex, and the scrapyard and used auto parts store represent miscellaneous personality traits.


Additionally, people who are transgender rather than either normal or genderqueer identifying as a non-standard category are basically trying to have their cake and eat it too. Operating within he genderbinary system but refusing to play by its rules (as opposed to cisgender who operate within the system and play by its rules or genderqueer not identifying as a man or a woman who are outside the system and therefore have no societal obligation to play by its rules)

I'm sure your metaphor felt like it made sense when you started typing it, but it just doesn't work on any level.

And that last paragraph just makes you sound like a total idiot.

At this point in time, the idea of a society in which race and gender are mere background information about a person, and not a massively significant part of their personal identity and how people treat them, is just a pope dream. But it's still a conversation worth having, IMO. What would a society like that look like, and what would be necessary to achieve it? I think that the starting point is eliminating hunger and poverty, which is a pretty lofty goal.

I think you're right; you'd need to eliminate hunger and poverty first.

You'd also probably need to eliminate nation states as they exist today. Nations are essentially in competition with one another, and part of the reason race is so entrenched is because of that. There's a vested interest in keeping segments of the world divided along racial lines. You may also have to eliminate the idea of inheriting property from your ancestors and leaving it to your progeny for similar reasons; you want to get rid of any potential material inequality which might be inherited, in order to prevent origin from causing jealousy.

Then you'd need to radically restructure the role or message of religion, as most major organized religions perpetuate certain gender roles. There's some progress being made on that front, but I think you'd also need to break the 'organized' part and have religion seen broadly as one more fluid aspect of identity, rather than being prescribed by an authority, or you risk that authority bringing in the old 'mark of Caine' or 'natural role of women' arguments back to the fore.

Once you've eliminated the main reasons that people judge others - socio-economic status, religious grounds and nationalism - then race starts to be far less important. Presumably there'll still be sexual preferences, though, and people will still be prejudiced towards one another to some extent by the particular features they find attractive or undesirable. Gender, therefore, is still an issue.

I'm not sure how you go about removing the fact that people treat people of the gender they find attractive (or unattractive) differently to other people. I think removing a lot of the taboo around sex is a start - so you probably have to eliminate all sexually transmitted diseases, and make birth control trivially easy to obtain. You ultimately need to eradicate the idea that sex is a significant motivating factor, so that the possibility of sex is no longer able to colour decisions - and therefore what gender someone chooses to present themselves as can't significantly alter how they are treated by the people around them. Such a culture probably winds up looking pretty hedonistic from our standpoint. Or, alternatively, has completely eradicated sex in favour of a means of reproduction that involves as few biological parts as possible.

Transhumanist sci-fi ala 'The Culture' series or Eclipse Phase can provide some useful inspiration here. The basic idea is that when you can have everything you want and can spend your time how you want, the only thing that matters about you as a person is what you achieve with that time.

The Welsh government has raised eyebrows after responding to a Conservative politician's formal question about UFOs in the Star Trek language Klingon.

Tory Welsh assembly member Darren Millar asked economy minister Edwina Hart whether any alien craft had been spotted over the skies of Cardiff airport since it was brought back into public ownership.

But the Clwyd West AM was surprised when he was given the reply: "jang vIDa je due luq. 'ach ghotvam'e' QI'yaH-devolved qaS."

Which, in English, translates as: "The minister will reply in due course. However, this is a non-devolved matter."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/10/star-trek-welsh-assembly-ufo-question-prompts-dip-into-trilingualism-with-klingon

I really needed this today. 

And one of my favourite comments in ages!

The Tories have no honour - they speak like Ferengi!

I think you have to be very careful talking about what 'everyone' will do.

60% of the world is still without flushing toilets. Progress really shouldn't be taken for granted. Whilst it is true that equality and tolerance regarding sexuality and race has become more mainstream and accepted in the more economically developed countries, I'm willing to bet that the majority of human beings are still racist, sexist and intolerant.

I sometimes get too caught up in the definitions of words myself. I found the discussion around race as cultural heritage very interesting, but what it 'is' for most people?

Race and gender are significant components in what people use to judge you at first sight - for this purpose, the 'cultural' element of race is (mostly) irrelevant. Instead, people will judge other people based on skin colour, physical attributes etc.

How you look - in every way, from how fit you are to how attractive to what you're wearing and how you're holding yourself - feeds into this first impression, the initial judgement people make before you've even opened your mouth. Right now, skin colour and gender come with a whole bunch of expectations attached regarding social and cultural roles. When you open your mouth and get to know people, that's when those expectations can be challenged and changed - but they'll still exist, and a lot of people won't react kindly to the undermined expectations.

I don't expect that to change any time soon. In a hypothetical utopia where all of these things are entirely in your control and you can choose to change your outward appearance to match what you think of yourself to be? That's going to become even more relevant - because it becomes a shorthand language used to tell others who you consider yourself to be.

As it is, the 'sex' component of gender and the 'physical' component of race are almost entirely outside the control of most people in the world - but they are still used to judge, because our appearance is one of the most solid identifiers people use to tell who we 'are'.

CLEAREST EXPLANATION OF BITCOIN EVAR!!!

'Sorry, something went wrong'

That does actually about sum it up. 

[DSquid: online handle too literal]

Cain:  modded IRL into Skyrim

Junkie:  invented interdimensional access to store crowbar for quick usage

DSquid:  online handle too literal

Alty:  actually left Alaska after all that

Look whose talking. I know what happened to Bobo, you bastard.

There seems to be a bad case of unemployment going around my social circle.

Two friends lost their jobs this week, a third is worried he will by the end of the week, and I discovered on monday that my boss has brought in someone else to do the data entry work that makes up ~80% of my role. He then asked me to put together a research project with very broad parameters to present to him tomorrow. (What are midlands councils up to?)

This is obviously a test. If I pass, I might get a promotion and more interesting work! However, after chatting with him today, I'm not convinced I'm going to give him what he wanted in the end. I'm not sure I want to, either; this work has been intensely draining and I've wound up working way past my 9-5 to try to complete it to a reasonable standard. If that's the new normal, I won't be able to pursue my actual career goal.

I'm surprisingly okay with this. When I took this job, I didn't expect more than 2 weeks work; it has been 10 months. My screenwriting tutor has been very impressed with the quality of the work I've put out for him, and has said he'd like me to keep in touch after the end of the course, with a potential for working with him - if I can complete a finished script in the next five weeks (to prove I can meet deadlines) which, shouldn't be a problem. (Hopefully)

But in some ways, it would be a relief if I lost this job tomorrow and was free to dedicate some serious time to my script. I have a month's notice (when they let the office manager go, they paid her for it but didn't make her work it) which - combined with my savings - would be enough to live comfortably for three-four months...

I like the money, and I'd be sad to see that go... it'd be better if I could string it out to a full 12 months before moving on somewhere else, but, I've been feeling for a while that they've been taking advantage - I just haven't been motivated to find something else whilst I've generally been comfortable and exploiting the 'work from home' factor.

Still weird that such a sizeable chunk of my social circle are suddenly experiencing work woes this week.

One of the biggest problems psychology has, IMO, is the tendency to fractionalize into philosophical camps that all use their own jargon and charts and are named for their own gurus, the people who initially wrote the book that spawned the school of thought that their followers subscribe to. This tendency seems to be seated pretty deeply in the discipline, to such an extent that students seem to strive to spawn their own schools of thought in order to prove that they're good enough thinkers, that they've arrived. To have a system named after you; that's the hallmark of being a big name in psychology.

Interestingly, I felt the same way about Power Studies in politics.

You've got about a dozen major thinkers who all work from their own definition of what power 'is', and to teach it the lecturer basically had to lay out what each individual theory meant.

I once got very excited when I realized that you could talk about all these different areas of 'Power' by using words like 'Influence' and 'Coercion' and 'Force' instead of just insisting on using 'Power' every time, and then combine all the theories to apply to their actual context instead of pretending they were all mutually exclusive because they were camping on the same word. My lecturer basically told me 'you aren't as smart as the people who came up with these definitions, drop it'. Which... yeah. In retrospect, that guy was kind of a dick.

The proposed increase to the minimum wage would be nice...

... if there was any indication it was going to happen and they weren't just throwing it out there to score points against Labour. 2020 for a £2 rise? Are you fucking kidding me?

I live in one of the richest regions on the entire planet, not in terms of money but in terms of real, practical wealth; food production. This is a region so absurdly rich that the previous inhabitants never developed agriculture because they didn't have to. Food is practically throwing itself into your mouth from the moment you go outside in the morning. Nobody was in fear of starving. The climate is mild and trees are abundant, so shelter is not a big worry. They had a lot of time on their hands, which they filled mostly with art and sports. For social status, they cultivated the idea that the more parties you had and the more stuff you gave to other people, the higher your status was, and also giving good advice increased your social status. So people spent all their free time making cool stuff to give away, and tried to only give advice that would actually be useful.

So, basically the exact opposite of the America of today.

Goddamn, that sounds wonderful.

This rant was partly inspired by the eco discussion we had elsewhere, but also by a radio programme where a Professor of physics was talking about how our obsession with 'marketable' science is holding us back in all sorts of areas. It is very difficult to build a rounded knowledge base, he was saying, because if you only focus on short term 'quick return' studies, you don't open the field to the kind of 'blind' research that has generated a lot of our most exciting developments in the past.

His basic argument was that life is better when you focus on what you want to learn, not what will make a quick buck. That resonated with me.

I'd like to ask if it's really greed or if greed is a symptom of something even greater, the zeal for feeling superior to others or the desire of power over others and being able to do with others as if they were puppets?

In my opinion, what it is is simply how we have decided to symbolize social status. The desire for social status is inherent, and when we decided that social status would be symbolized with the hoarding of resources, we doomed ourselves to annihilation by greed.

Yeah, I think this is on the money. (No pun intended)

Social status and one's 'good character' used to be tied to the good you did for society. Money has never been completely unimportant as such, but the accumulation of wealth was never seen as an inherently worthy pursuit; it was the things you did with that money which determined whether people thought you were a good person worthy of respect, or a foolish miser who nobody would mourn.

Now, you see the profit motive brought up in areas where it would have been completely unthinkable a hundred years ago. How much money will this art make? What is the return of investment in your research?

It used to be that the rich and wealthy would be patrons of the arts and sciences as a way of giving back to society; now we demand that the arts and sciences give back to their patrons because Profit is the highest value.

This seems much needed at the moment, in these bleak, terrible times.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/08/millionaire-who-rescues-migrants-at-sea

Catrambone was determined to start rescuing people in 2014 and had set a hectic repair schedule. "It cost a crazy amount of money," said Cauchi. The boat was bought and repaired, for a total of $5.2m, by the Tangiers Group (and still sits on the company's books) but would be operated by a foundation Catrambone named Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas). He hired Martin Xuereb as director in February 2014, after cold calling to invite him for coffee. "I am not in the habit of meeting for coffee with someone I don't know," Xuereb, now 47, told me, but he and Catrambone ended up talking for five hours. "I wasn't expecting him to be so young. What hits you straight away is his vision, his perseverance and his determination." No volunteers had done anything similar since 1979, when a group of Germans chartered a freighter named Cap Anamur to rescue migrants fleeing Vietnam. An attempt by the same group to rescue 37 people off Italy in 2003 ended with crew members put on trial for facilitating illegal entry into the country; they were found not guilty, and the migrants were deported.

...

The first call came through after four days, on 30 August. The Moas team quickly found itself involved in the simultaneous rescue of two migrant boats, including a wooden fishing vessel with 350 people – many of them families from Syria – that was slowly sinking. By the end of the rescue, water was flooding onto the main deck of the fishing boat, and many of the migrants were in the sea. So many small children were rescued that the Phoenix almost ran out of baby formula. "That was a shock for most of the crew," Catrambone recalled. "We were a bit overwhelmed with the thought that this was really happening. These children and mothers were at the hands of the sea, at the hands of death."

The Phoenix rescued 1,462 people in 10 weeks and helped a further 1,500 onto Italian navy vessels. (There were also lulls when the crew fished for bluefin tuna.) The Phoenix operates in international waters that start just 12 nautical miles from the shores of Libya – now one of the world's most violent places, where two separate governments have only tenuous control over their territories. An American consultant hired to advise on security fretted that the ship's unarmed crew was too close to Libyan waters, but Catrambone decided he was overreacting – after long periods working in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a narrow brush with death during a missile strike in Israel), Catrambone felt he knew how to calibrate risk; the success of his own business, he says, is based in part on the tendency of others to exaggerate danger. "We are not afraid to go where others are [afraid]," he told me. "We don't need a military convoy to take us."

Yes, this is a man who is a millionaire - who has profited from warzones, even. But he's invested millions of his own money and much of his own time into saving the lives of the desperate and unfortunate because ...

"If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you don't even belong in our community. If you allow your neighbour to die in your backyard, then you are responsible for that death."

And that's heartening, isn't it?

Look, if you store your bang beaks out on deck like that, you can't very well play the innocent.

That ship was asking for it, okay?

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Some of us LIKE the ocean, thanks!

I... do not understand what Google is even trying to do there?

What use does this technology have other than being terrifying?

Wasn't their mission objective 'Don't Be Evil?'