WoodScientist

How to really be Satan: send an important video note. Make it recorded outside with a lot of wind and background noise. Then, just to be fun, slow the video down to 80% playback speed, reencode it, and send that!

I voted for the Dems in 2024. And honestly, I wish I hadn't. I was disgusted by their stance on Palestine, but I figured at least they would support trans people against conservative extermination efforts.

For my vote and vocal support, how did Dems reward me? Democrats rewarded me by voting for the first anti-LGBT federal law in 30 years, willingly sentencing several hundred trans children to death for cheap political points. All Republicans had to do was attach their persecution bill to a "must pass" defense spending bill, and Democrats folded like a house of cards. And they also refused to stand to defend the first trans person elected to the House. I have no doubt that this pattern will continue. To laws that must pass to fund the government, Republicans will just attach one rider after another that strips my civil rights away one at a time. And Democrats will tit tit and say, "well, I really wish we could prevent Republicans from murdering innocent people, but this bill simply has to pass, so our hands are tied."

Even AOC, who was one of the few people to say anything in defense of the new trans representative, didn't have the courage to actually stand up for trans people directly. She said bathrooms bans were bad because cis women might get caught up in them. And they demonstrated this complete surrender to fascism before Trump even came into office.

In the end, I did not get the satisfaction of a clean conscience. I held my nose and voted for a pro-genocide party, because I hoped they would at least stand up for my rights. But I didn't get even that. Instead I got a party that is perfectly willing to throw people like me to the wolves, as long as Republicans give them a fig leaf excuse to use. Honestly, I wish I hadn't voted for Kamala. Democrats aren't going to stand up for my rights, and I still have the guilt of voting pro-genocide on my conscience.

I suppose it should have been pretty obvious. Dems were willing to throw one minority group to the wolves for political expediency, why wouldn't they do it to another?

Good news boys, if we're willing to use women this way, we can actually do the same for men! This is one unique sexual reproduction horror story that can in theory be inflicted on both sexes!

Pregnancy without a uterus, impossible! You say. But ectopic pregnancies are a thing. We all start out as parasites. As an embryo develops, it looks for a surface of flesh rich in blood vessels to latch onto. The primary function of the uterus is to provide an inner lining that is sort of a "disposable surface." The inner lining is rich in blood vessels, the ideal environment for a zygote to latch onto and grow from. The embryo can integrate its blood vessels with the uterine lining and thoroughly mess those up. Then after pregnancy the whole inner lining is just sloughed off. That in inelegant terms is the uterus - an organ that produces a nice safe surface for the zygote to latch onto that won't harm the person carrying the pregnancy.

But, things don't always go well. If a zygote somehow tears through the uterine wall, then ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy outside the uterus, can result. And this a serious life-threatening medical condition. The fetus as it develops will latch onto not the intended uterine surface, but the vital abdominal organs. Giving "birth" in this case is done surgically, and it's more akin to cutting out a cancer than a healthy live birth.

But while it hasn't been tried due to the obvious health risks and huge medical ethics issues, there's little reason to think that ectopic pregnancies couldn't be carried in a male admomen. DNA and chromosomes shouldn't be a barrier. The placenta that the fetus grows is evolved to prevent the fetus from being rejected like a donor organ. It's not like mothers and infants share their DNA.

So in theory we could use men in vegetative states as one-time use surrogates. There has been research proposed and papers written on the possibility of trans women carrying children via uterine transplant, but this method, deliberate artificial ectopic pregnancy, is in principle a lot simpler. You don't need to transplant a delicate organ and find a way to carry a pregnancy while taking anti-rejection drugs. You just implant an embryo in the surrogate abdomen and let it go to town. Let it latch in to whatever internal organs it wants. Then after nine months, just cut open and discard the surrogate father.

It wouldn't be as simple as just implanting an embryo. The pregnant vegetative man would likely need to have his hormone profile monitored and heavily manipulated. But this is easy enough. Testosterone production could be nuked by simple castration, and erogenous estrogen and progesterone could then be introduced as needed before and during the pregnancy. After the pregnancy, it is unlikely the man would survive. So this is a one time deal. But if we're OK treating people in persistent vegetative states like resources to be exploited, I see no reason to throw out half of our potential surrogate population simply because they happen to be men.

People, and especially journalists, need to get this idea of robots as perfectly logical computer code out of their heads. These aren't Asimov's robots we're dealing with. Journalists still cling to the idea that all computers are hard-coded. You still sometimes see people navel-gazing on self-driving cars, working the trolley problem. "Should a car veer into oncoming traffic to avoid hitting a child crossing the road?" The authors imagine that the creators of these machines hand-code every scenario, like a long series of if statements.

But that's just not how these things are made. They are not programmed; they are trained. In the case of self-driving cars, they are simply given a bunch of video footage and radar records, and the accompanying driver inputs in response to those conditions. Then they try to map the radar and camera inputs to whatever the human drivers did. And they train the AI to do that.

This behavior isn't at all surprising. Self-driving cars, like any similar AI system, are not hard coded, coldly logical machines. They are trained off us, off our responses, and they exhibit all of the mistakes and errors we make. The reason waymo cars don't stop at crosswalks is because human drivers don't stop at crosswalks. The machine is simply copying us.