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Should bakers be forced to make gender transition celebration cakes?

Brown and black people are noted to be particularly anti-trans. You then note the brown and black people here who support the baker over the trans person. Many gay people are also anti-trans, you've noted the gay people who support the baker. That's why I wondered if you wanted to go down that road.

I'm going to push back on this. I don't believe that any material number of ethnic minorities or homosexuals, or women for that matter, are "anti-trans". Rather, we're "anti-transgender-ideology".

A not insignificant number of women are completely supportive of transgender people being protected from mistreatment, having equal and fair access to housing, employment, and medical care. But those of us who object to the rhetoric do NOT accept that transgender people are in any way the actual sex that they identify as. Transwomen are not women - they're transgender identified men who wish to live as women. The lobbyist and activist approach to transgender 'rights' has been to replace sex as a protected category in law with 'gender identity', where that gender identity is completely internal and self-declared, with no objective measurement and no requirements of any kind. This has the effect of reducing the rights of women and increasing our risk of harm. It results in male-bodied people competing as women in the Olympics, despite the clear advantages of having a male body. It results in male people, who have been raised and conditioned as men, with all of the advantages of being a man in society being acclaimed as the "highest paid female CEO" or the "funniest female comedian" or being placed on short-lists for "female authors" or taking a position as a "female representative" in politics. It results in male bodied people, with no diagnosis and no medical treatment of any kind, being placed in shared cells with female prisoners. It results in males - with intact genitalia - being granted spaces in female-only rape and domestic violence shelters as a right. These are all things that affect females, but don't affect males. Women end up facing a two-pronged attack on this topic: transgender people who want to encroach on female spaces and support system as an entitlement, and men who are sympathetic to their plight and who do not seem to care about the cost being borne by women.

A fair number of homosexual people oppose transgender ideology, because it erases the entire concept of sexual orientation - something that gay men and lesbians fought long and hard to get acknowledged. Transgender ideology replaces sex with 'gender identity', and then redefines homosexuality to be 'attraction to the same gender identity' rather than to the same sex. This then gets used as to harass and condemn gay and lesbian people who don't want to have sex with transgender people. It has hit lesbians especially hard, where they are told that they have 'vagina fetishes' and are 'transphobes' because they don't want to consider transgender identified men as part of their sexual and romantic pool. They are subject to harassment, threats, and coercion if they don't want to engage in penis-in-vagina sex with 'transbians'. There are entire workshops out there for transgender identified men on how to overcome the "cotton ceiling" so they can work their way into the underwear of lesbians. Publications and organizations that advertise themselves as for the "LGBT" community publish articles with tips for lesbians on how to have sexual interactions with the penises of transwomen. It all comes with a very strong "just try it, you'll like it... you only don't like dick because you haven't tried mine" vibe to it. That's a particular sort of sexual coercion that lesbians have faced for a very long time, and just recently when that pressure was beginning to fade... now it's come back and is being pushed by the very organizations that purport to support lesbians and gay men.

When it comes to ethnicity, I can't speak in generalized terms. I know that at least some of it is a result of religion. But I also know a LOT of black and hispanic women who are extremely opposed to transgender ideology for the reasons listed above for women in general. But they tend to be much more vocal about it, because they are the ones who are most directly affected. There is a considerably higher proportion of black women in prison than there are white women in the US... so it is black women who face the risk of having their transgender cellmate rape and impregnate them because the justice system is taking the path of placing gender identity as a feeling above the reality of biological sex. There is a significantly higher rate of rape and domestic violence in black and hispanic communities, and a much higher proportion of women of color make use of domestic violence and rape shelters than do white women.

The thing that all of these people have in common is that we do not hate transgender people at all. We are not "anti-trans". We don't want transgender people harmed or discriminated against. But we're not willing to sacrifice our safety and our rights to provide entitlements to transgender people - entitlements that no other group of people has.

These are all groups of people who have directly faced disadvantage as a result of an innate, immutable characteristic of their lives, one over which they have no control. We can't "identify" out of being female or male. We can't "identify" out of being black or brown or white. We can't "identify" out of being sexually attracted to people of our own sex, or of the opposite sex. And we all understand how vitally important freedom of speech and freedom of belief are to us - because that is the means by which we've been able to make progress in the world. It was the first amendment that allowed the protests, marches, public speeches, rallies, and petitions that got minorities equal civil rights ,that got women the right to vote*, that got acceptance of homosexuality and allowed gay and lesbian couples to get married.

The fantastical apologetics in the above post are worse than I've seen with creationism.

I think the biggest issue is that she doesn't communicate an understanding that trans people can't "identify" themselves out of their own lives either. They can't "identify" their way out of their emotions any more than I can "identify" my way out of my own life.

I didn't properly identify my way into it. I merely named it. "Guy who studies algorithm and precise language to describe tasks to be executed in electromagnetic force by an array of confluences bound within the intricacies of a circular graph of precious metals scribed in space", and long before I named that appropriately, I was searching for a staff.

Similarly, some people identify the voice of the hormone monster and know that is the dissonant note in their life, and when the note is changed, the dissonance is, in fact, greatly reduced.

The fact is, if I walked into a store and asked to buy a birthday cake to celebrate my Nth year on this earth as a Wizard, colored purple because mmmm deep purple looks wizardy, and maybe silver and gold sprinkles amid a smattering of rock candy "diamonds" and other colored sugar crystal sprinkles?? And was told that they will suffer not a witch to live happily on his birthday...

Well, I honestly don't know what I would do. Twenty years ago, you take them to court and they suck it. Nowadays they start a GoFundMe and make a million dollars for being shitty, and it doesn't matter that you can do the same, because I fucking wouldn't. I just want to not be discriminated against when I want a cake.

Then, I live in Minneapolis so I don't really foresee that happening. Back when I was in Missouri, though...

People don't decide their identities... That's not how this works. Rather, we find them and reveal them.
 
"Agree with"?!? Certainly; but that's not what you did. You offered the government saying so as evidence that those who agree with you are right. Anarchists are allowed to do that too -- free speech, after all -- but it's hypocritical.

This one sane judge agreed with the truth.

A cake with no message has no damn message.

Would the nihilist agree?
 
Angra said:
Being forced to do some things is part of living in any human society, civilized or otherwise.

Exactly. This baker is as free to contest the law he violates as I am to protest having to shovel snow outside my business. In the meanwhile, if I don’t pay the fine for not doing it they can shut down my business.

Some instances of forcing are acceptable government behavior. Some aren't. Some are just. Some aren't. And so on.
.

Newsflash: We don’t get to decide these things as individuals.
We do get to assess these things like any other thing we ponder, and of course as individuals. And when we reckon that some instances of forcing are not acceptable, unjust, etc., we sometimes talk about that on the internet, in forums made for that purpose. For example, we do that when we say that a government should not force women to carry out pregnancies, should not force them to abort, should not force people not to argue against Christianity or Islam, should not force people to endorse Islam or Christianity or any other religion, and so on.

Just consider the consequences of accepting your argument "Newsflash" above.
 
We can easily do an experiment.

Bake 3 cakes. No message on any.

I will imagine a message for each cake.

We bring in subjects to tell us the message the cake is giving them.

Then compare.
 
If that's the way this is supposed to go, then why don't you go ahead and explain to me how it is that you do not fully support #BLM when they decry discrimination, prejudice, and mistreatment. I mean, they are "the people who have ACTUALLY faced discrimination, prejudice, and mistreatment" in that context, so we should only accept their side of the argument, right?

Lol, okay buddy. Why have you imagineered that I don't support BLM?

By the company you keep in this forum. Your less than full throated endorsement leads me to believe that I was correct in my assessment that you do not "fully support #BLM". Also the above is a very good reason not to imagine you have won an argument on the internet because you think you have more brown and/ or gay posters on your side. You don't know who you are talking to due to the nature of the forum.

Or have you somehow decided that the only way to support BLM is to support vandalism, arson, and violence done in the name of BLM, while not actually being done by BLM?

Or maybe you missed the point that it wasn't even about #BLM, but rather it was about your wholly asinine comments that indicate you think the side with more brown and/or gay people on it in this discussion gets to win the internet.
 
The fantastical apologetics in the above post are worse than I've seen with creationism.

Would you care to be a bit more specific about what you consider to be "apologetics" that makes it akin to creationism?

Yeah, it was a bunch of bullshit before. Now, you've created ad hoc hypotheses counter to facts and studies, just like creationists and other fundamentalists do. You've made the bullshit worse by doubling down and adding even more complex bullshit to it.
 
What is the second one? Third place at the dog show?
First place at the Women's Suffrage struggle.

There you go.

No message.
No message because you say so? You have the good fortune to live in a place and time enlightened enough that it's a long-settled issue; nearly everyone who ever saw a suffragette march is dead. If we were having this discussion a hundred years ago you'd be in doubt that the ribbon carried the message "I support women's right to vote."
 
No message because I got no message from it.

I could clearly observe it and it had no message.

You say it stood for something.

That is not a message to me.
 
No message because I got no message from it.

I could clearly observe it and it had no message.

You say it stood for something.

That is not a message to me.

images


I can clearly observe this and I got no message from it. Therefore it must not have been a message.
 
A message is something where the receiver of the message can understand the message.

If something isn't understood it is no message.

Tell me what the message of this is:

cake.jpg
 
A message is something where the receiver of the message can understand the message.

If something isn't understood it is no message.

Tell me what the message of this is:

View attachment 34277

A message only needs to be understood by the recipient. Whether others can read it or even detect it isn't relevant.

Let's consider a very widespread case: The global positioning system.

You're an alien who has landed on Earth. You are told the GPS system exists but not the nature of the signal. Can you find it? Sure, by studying the satellites in orbit. However, if you're limited to what you can find with a radio scanner on Earth you're not going to be able to even find the signal, let alone decode it.

All 24 satellites are talking on the same frequency and the signal is far below the noise floor--your receiver is going to be picking up far more noise than message and all 24 messages are talking on top of each other. Only if you know the encoding system can you even find the pattern in the noise.

(They do it this way to keep the power requirements reasonable. The transmitters on the satellites put out 44 watts. If I'm remembering the math right it would take more than 4000 watts of transmitter power to simply bring the signal up to the noise floor.)
 
A message is something where the receiver of the message can understand the message.

If something isn't understood it is no message.
Why on earth would something being received by a person who doesn't speak the language it's written in make it not a message? Anata wa fugouri desu.

Tell me what the message of this is:

View attachment 34277
Beats me. If it's a message, I don't speak that language. But I don't make believe that my mental handicap constrains others not to send messages in a language I don't know.
 
Why on earth would something being received by a person who doesn't speak the language it's written in make it not a message?

A message is something a person can understand. No understanding = no message.

Beats me. If it's a message, I don't speak that language. But I don't make believe that my mental handicap constrains others not to send messages in a language I don't know.

Since you don't know I'll tell you.

That cake has no message.

And it still doesn't have a message even if I pretend it does.
 
Should bakers be forced to make gender transition celebration cakes?

No.

If a message about that is written on the cake. No.

If there is no message anywhere. Yes.

Just because a person says they will pretend a cake has a message does not give it one.
 
untermensche said:
A message is something where the receiver of the message can understand the message.
Estás mandando cualquiera.



By your standards, there is no message, right?


My standard says a cake with no words is not a message.
I meant your other standard, namely the one I was quoting, namely the one that says "A message is something where the receiver of the message can understand the message."

By your standard, it seems my reply "Estás mandando cualquiera." is not a message because you can't understand it.
 
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