Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On October 23 2024 10:22 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Maybe if you had posted an article or the full context like we had asked you, or communicated things more clearly, or avoided bringing this up right as you were providing cover for that other poster's anti-trans rhetoric, we would have eventually agreed with you.
I think that if there was consensus here you would have gladly argued the case that there’s nothing wrong with Kayla wearing giant prosthetic tits to school if that’s how they chose to identify.
Mohdoo’s point was the same as mine: it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way. He didn’t offer anything materially different. You already had access to the nypost article when you were questioning me about what exactly I found inappropriate about what that person was wearing. I think Mohdoo just offered another dissent that you couldn’t dismiss as a right-wing bigot so your position came crumbling down like a house of cards.
Just to recenter ourselves, let's run the discussion back:
On October 22 2024 12:05 BlackJack wrote: As dogmeat said, they are arguably less delusional and out of touch than the people believing a man is a woman because he put on a wig and stuffed his shirt with giant inflatable tits.
This prompted Manifesto to respond, and you to respond to Manifesto with
On October 23 2024 02:15 BlackJack wrote: I don't know what the media machine is, but I would argue that since it would be considered inappropriate any other time in history for a man to show up to teach kids with Size Z prosthetic tits, and now we have a school board that was willing to defend it then they are the ones that are ideologically captured by some kind of machine.
Later, in response to DPB, you add
On October 23 2024 02:36 BlackJack wrote:To be clear, your ideology dictates that you accept that teacher as a woman simply for saying he is a woman. The wig and prosthetic breasts aren't even a necessary component of my post.
Eventually, RenSC2 posts an actual source for the story you're referencing
Bill Maher has also referenced this case multiple times and is the only reason why I know of it.
Your ending statement is this:
On October 23 2024 13:11 BlackJack wrote: I think that if there was consensus here you would have gladly argued the case that there’s nothing wrong with Kayla wearing giant prosthetic tits to school if that’s how they chose to identify.
Mohdoo’s point was the same as mine: it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way. He didn’t offer anything materially different. You already had access to the nypost article when you were questioning me about what exactly I found inappropriate about what that person was wearing. I think Mohdoo just offered another dissent that you couldn’t dismiss as a right-wing bigot so your position came crumbling down like a house of cards.
Where I take issue is specifically with the start being different than the end. You're being critical of the school board, and imo that makes sense. People have a right to identify how they want to identify, to a point. In this particular case, it was a man identifying as a woman with a medical condition. Identifying as a woman? Fine. Identifying as having a medical condition she doesn't actually have? Questionable. The school board accepting the 'identifying as having a medical condition' and allowing size Z prosthetic breasts is the issue.
You opened with "they are arguably less delusional and out of touch than the people believing a man is a woman because he put on a wig and stuffed his shirt with giant inflatable tits." and are trying to end with "it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way.".
You literally state "...believing a man is a woman because..." and later try walk it back to being about the tits. You also stated "The wig and prosthetic breasts aren't even a necessary component of my post", but are now trying to claim the prosthetic breasts ARE the necessary part and are inappropriate either way. You can't be critical of the school board and claim they're delusional for believing a man is a woman, and then say it has nothing to do with gender it's about the tits.
Also, let's not forget that our source is an american conservative tabloid's article about an extreme edge case happening in a different country. That's not a terribly robust footing to make any kind of substantial point from.
My take has always been, for example, transgender men are not the same as biological men but I will happily identify them as such and used their preferred name and pronouns because that's the kind and courteous thing to do.
The woke take is "a transgender man is literally the same as a biological man and if you disagree you're committing violence against trans people."
Honestly I have little interest in a debate of whether a man can be a woman or vice versa. It's inevitably going to turn in a semantic debate where I insist that a man is a biological male and everyone else insists a man is "anyone that claims to be a man." I would much rather have a discussion on what happens when woke ideology is applied in the real world, such as the case with the school board defending the teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts.
Can you please define "a biological male"? I'm not sure what that means, insofar as which criteria you believe are necessary for a person to be considered biologically male.
In my experience this normally refers to chromosomes, and trans people to my knowledge overwhelmingly have the chromosome pattern matching their 'biological' sex. Genitalia can be altered but chromosomes cannot. And yeah a very small group of people are something else than xx or xy but those people aren't necessarily related to trans people in any way.
Biologically it's gametes. We have either sperm or eggs, there is no third type (it's "binary"). In many animals chromosomes can determine the sex but they don't define it. Famously, in alligators incubation temperature determines sex.
Edit: so chromosomes are a useful shorthand but edge cases don't make the whole exercise arbitrary.
This is close to true, perhaps good enough for government work, but it’s not quite right. Fundamentally, what someone’s “biological sex” is depends on what purpose you have for defining their biological sex – for sex-linked genetic traits, for instance, chromosomes *is* what you would care about, whether or not their gametes match.
Stepping back a little, biology is a constant exercise of looking at enormously complex, heterogeneous systems, and trying to define rules and categories that will help understand how they work, even though every rule or category will have nontrivial exceptions you’ll then have to account for. Even something relatively robust like “species” has weird exceptions that make it a little hard to delineate exactly how many species of this type of bird there are in a certain population, or where the dividing line is between them. But if we define a prototypical case, and describe the characteristics that the vast majority of cases follow, we can talk about the cases that deviate from the rule and why, which is still a better understanding than we had before.
The nitpicky problem with “sex is binary, you either produce one gamete or the other” is that a small number of people produce both, and a huge number of people produce neither. The more fundamental problem is that when people talk about sex, even specifically “biological sex,” their gametes may or may not be relevant. If I’m talking about a chimeric individual (someone whose body is made partly of cells with a different genetic set), and I say that one of their genetic sets is male and the other is female, I don’t think anyone would think I was talking about gametes. Or, to put it another way, if I say “a male liver cell” it would be idiotic to respond “liver cells don’t produce gametes so there’s no such thing as male or female liver cells.”
All of which is to say that we could, perhaps, say “gametes are binary” in that any individual gamete is one or the other (I’m not aware of any exceptions to that, although there’s no theoretical theoretical reason there couldn’t be). But biological sex is a complex constellation of traits that usually correlate into two populations, but not always. If you’re gonna push your glasses up your nose and say in a nasally voice, “Well actually, biological sex *is* binary” I could maybe excuse the know-it-all technicality of it, if you weren’t also wrong on the technicality.
The relevance of all this to US politics is slim, except that one faction has committed itself to the rhetorical position that sex and gender are binary, and anyone who disagrees is a leftist radical wholly detached from scientific reality. Those folks are incurious dullards, every bit as censorious and tyrannical as BlackJack’s woke scolds who insist biological sex doesn’t exist, but in my experience, substantially more numerous and vocal.
I'd consider a coin flip as something that is a binary. Of course there's a small chance that the coin lands perfectly on its edge leading to a result that is neither heads nor tails. To me, the people pointing out this (literal) edge case are the ones pushing their glasses up their nose and saying in the nasally voice "well actually.." For some reason I've never encountered a person that wants to go 12 rounds on whether or not a coin flip is actually binary because coins can land on their edge. If I did I would really hope they were trying to make some broader point and not trying to scold me for being dumb enough to think a coinflip is binary.
What are we even disagreeing over then? I mean, when shitty right-wingers (including randos on Twitter, but also, like, Ted Cruz and the like) say it’s binary, they mean “the exceptions don’t exist, those people are just deluded.” You’re acknowledging the nontrivial exceptions exist, that values besides 1 and 0 are possible (and, I’d wager, significantly likelier than a coin landing on its edge), but you still want to use the word binary because, what, you like the sound of it? The mouth feel? Define words however you want to, I guess, why should I care?
Meanwhile I opened with an explicit endorsement of the idea that the categories are useful even if they have edge cases and exceptions (as all biological categories inevitably will) and yet both you and Intro keep coming back to “isn’t it easier to just use the categories even though there are a few exceptions they don’t account for?” Yes, I already said so! Newtonian physics is fine for most purposes, just don’t insist it’s all there is or “well actually” people who are talking about quantum mechanics.
Meanwhile those shitty right-wingers are using this bullshit to ban healthcare for trans people and fearmonger that the Satanic democrats are trying to trans your kids. You’ve already pretty clearly said you don’t agree with that shit (I don’t know about Intro) but that’s virtually the only policy implication of this topic and this is a US politics thread so what are we even doing here?
I don’t know how “sex is binary” or non-binary helps any argument of any issue related to trans issues. That’s why I said I was hoping there would be some broader point to be made because arguing over something so trivial seems pointless.
I think there are some interesting things to discuss regarding transgenderism. Nature vs nurture, social contagion, but from past experience my earnest attempt to just ask questions has been met with “you’re just a transphobe who is trying to mask their transphobia under the guise of JAQ.”
I can tell you have a lot of disdain for US Republicans like Ted Cruz for trying to ban healthcare for trans people. I would instead offer that a lot of European countries have also started to draw back on gender medicine and that can’t be blamed as easily on the Ted Cruz’s in the US legislature.
The clown world I object to is not about men identifying as women or women identifying as men. It’s about 19-year-olds lecturing Richard Dawkins on Twitter because his decades of study in biology has caused him to conclude sex is pretty damn binary.
On October 25 2024 09:03 Razyda wrote: I think you guys are wrong and it is big part of the reason why Dems are loosing this election. You just kind of conditioned to think that people will vote for Trump only because they are some kind of nazis, fascist, racist, transphobes. Meanwhile you have Kamala telling her actual supporters "I am speaking now" and Trump chatting up random people, or taking a stunt at McDonald. What I find funny about that is that Trump is pretending to care about average person, Democrats cant be bothered to do even that, all they do is grandstanding about the issues which maybe 10% population is giving damn about. Now you are unhappy with the current sate of things and you choose between someone who pretends to care about you and someone who cant be bothered to do even that. Meanwhile bunch of people who would rather vote for Trump than keep the status quo are getting actively alienated. And this are the people who will sway from Trump if he does some stupid sh...t. So yeah I think that his appearance on Joe Rogan is mistake (kind of unnecessary point of failure)
PS: just watched Piers Morgan uncensored (I like the idea of the show, hate the execution)
I dont know who the guy who is a friend of the Trump son is, but it is one of the most dangerous people I've ever seen.
Yeah we have no extant footage of Hitler wearing a yarmulke, going to the wailing wall, saying he loves the Jewish people, or giving Israel billions in aid as Drumpf has. On the other hand, Drumpf did fail to go to film school, but Drumpf also never fought a war for another country's army, unlike Hitler, and that also doesn't seem to outweigh his daughter marrying a Jewish person. So it doesn't look like the jury would be out for long.
While Harris campaigns on him being Hitler, packing SCOTUS, abolishing the filibuster, and abridging speech and religious liberties to consolidate a total stranglehold on government while her president, Biden, says he needs to be locked up, she has cleverly and strategically avoided an appearance on Joe Rogan, which would be a chance for her to say something possibly detrimental and campaign ending - to a wider audience than the ones she's already said, I mean. What an act of utter political shrewdness! Drumpf, on the other hand, who isn't taking a break for a single day, avoided 60 Minutes because he's a big orange coward and will finally appear on the mother of all podcasts, JRE, which is the much longer format, sans editing.
I think that if there was consensus here you would have gladly argued the case that there’s nothing wrong with Kayla wearing giant prosthetic tits to school if that’s how they chose to identify.
Mohdoo’s point was the same as mine: it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way. He didn’t offer anything materially different. You already had access to the nypost article when you were questioning me about what exactly I found inappropriate about what that person was wearing. I think Mohdoo just offered another dissent that you couldn’t dismiss as a right-wing bigot so your position came crumbling down like a house of cards.
Just to recenter ourselves, let's run the discussion back:
On October 22 2024 12:05 BlackJack wrote: As dogmeat said, they are arguably less delusional and out of touch than the people believing a man is a woman because he put on a wig and stuffed his shirt with giant inflatable tits.
This prompted Manifesto to respond, and you to respond to Manifesto with
On October 23 2024 02:15 BlackJack wrote: I don't know what the media machine is, but I would argue that since it would be considered inappropriate any other time in history for a man to show up to teach kids with Size Z prosthetic tits, and now we have a school board that was willing to defend it then they are the ones that are ideologically captured by some kind of machine.
Later, in response to DPB, you add
On October 23 2024 02:36 BlackJack wrote:To be clear, your ideology dictates that you accept that teacher as a woman simply for saying he is a woman. The wig and prosthetic breasts aren't even a necessary component of my post.
Eventually, RenSC2 posts an actual source for the story you're referencing
Bill Maher has also referenced this case multiple times and is the only reason why I know of it.
Your ending statement is this:
On October 23 2024 13:11 BlackJack wrote: I think that if there was consensus here you would have gladly argued the case that there’s nothing wrong with Kayla wearing giant prosthetic tits to school if that’s how they chose to identify.
Mohdoo’s point was the same as mine: it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way. He didn’t offer anything materially different. You already had access to the nypost article when you were questioning me about what exactly I found inappropriate about what that person was wearing. I think Mohdoo just offered another dissent that you couldn’t dismiss as a right-wing bigot so your position came crumbling down like a house of cards.
Where I take issue is specifically with the start being different than the end. You're being critical of the school board, and imo that makes sense. People have a right to identify how they want to identify, to a point. In this particular case, it was a man identifying as a woman with a medical condition. Identifying as a woman? Fine. Identifying as having a medical condition she doesn't actually have? Questionable. The school board accepting the 'identifying as having a medical condition' and allowing size Z prosthetic breasts is the issue.
You opened with "they are arguably less delusional and out of touch than the people believing a man is a woman because he put on a wig and stuffed his shirt with giant inflatable tits." and are trying to end with "it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way.".
You literally state "...believing a man is a woman because..." and later try walk it back to being about the tits. You also stated "The wig and prosthetic breasts aren't even a necessary component of my post", but are now trying to claim the prosthetic breasts ARE the necessary part and are inappropriate either way. You can't be critical of the school board and claim they're delusional for believing a man is a woman, and then say it has nothing to do with gender it's about the tits.
Also, let's not forget that our source is an american conservative tabloid's article about an extreme edge case happening in a different country. That's not a terribly robust footing to make any kind of substantial point from.
My take has always been, for example, transgender men are not the same as biological men but I will happily identify them as such and used their preferred name and pronouns because that's the kind and courteous thing to do.
The woke take is "a transgender man is literally the same as a biological man and if you disagree you're committing violence against trans people."
Honestly I have little interest in a debate of whether a man can be a woman or vice versa. It's inevitably going to turn in a semantic debate where I insist that a man is a biological male and everyone else insists a man is "anyone that claims to be a man." I would much rather have a discussion on what happens when woke ideology is applied in the real world, such as the case with the school board defending the teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts.
Can you please define "a biological male"? I'm not sure what that means, insofar as which criteria you believe are necessary for a person to be considered biologically male.
In my experience this normally refers to chromosomes, and trans people to my knowledge overwhelmingly have the chromosome pattern matching their 'biological' sex. Genitalia can be altered but chromosomes cannot. And yeah a very small group of people are something else than xx or xy but those people aren't necessarily related to trans people in any way.
Biologically it's gametes. We have either sperm or eggs, there is no third type (it's "binary"). In many animals chromosomes can determine the sex but they don't define it. Famously, in alligators incubation temperature determines sex.
Edit: so chromosomes are a useful shorthand but edge cases don't make the whole exercise arbitrary.
This is close to true, perhaps good enough for government work, but it’s not quite right. Fundamentally, what someone’s “biological sex” is depends on what purpose you have for defining their biological sex – for sex-linked genetic traits, for instance, chromosomes *is* what you would care about, whether or not their gametes match.
Stepping back a little, biology is a constant exercise of looking at enormously complex, heterogeneous systems, and trying to define rules and categories that will help understand how they work, even though every rule or category will have nontrivial exceptions you’ll then have to account for. Even something relatively robust like “species” has weird exceptions that make it a little hard to delineate exactly how many species of this type of bird there are in a certain population, or where the dividing line is between them. But if we define a prototypical case, and describe the characteristics that the vast majority of cases follow, we can talk about the cases that deviate from the rule and why, which is still a better understanding than we had before.
The nitpicky problem with “sex is binary, you either produce one gamete or the other” is that a small number of people produce both, and a huge number of people produce neither. The more fundamental problem is that when people talk about sex, even specifically “biological sex,” their gametes may or may not be relevant. If I’m talking about a chimeric individual (someone whose body is made partly of cells with a different genetic set), and I say that one of their genetic sets is male and the other is female, I don’t think anyone would think I was talking about gametes. Or, to put it another way, if I say “a male liver cell” it would be idiotic to respond “liver cells don’t produce gametes so there’s no such thing as male or female liver cells.”
All of which is to say that we could, perhaps, say “gametes are binary” in that any individual gamete is one or the other (I’m not aware of any exceptions to that, although there’s no theoretical theoretical reason there couldn’t be). But biological sex is a complex constellation of traits that usually correlate into two populations, but not always. If you’re gonna push your glasses up your nose and say in a nasally voice, “Well actually, biological sex *is* binary” I could maybe excuse the know-it-all technicality of it, if you weren’t also wrong on the technicality.
The relevance of all this to US politics is slim, except that one faction has committed itself to the rhetorical position that sex and gender are binary, and anyone who disagrees is a leftist radical wholly detached from scientific reality. Those folks are incurious dullards, every bit as censorious and tyrannical as BlackJack’s woke scolds who insist biological sex doesn’t exist, but in my experience, substantially more numerous and vocal.
I'd consider a coin flip as something that is a binary. Of course there's a small chance that the coin lands perfectly on its edge leading to a result that is neither heads nor tails. To me, the people pointing out this (literal) edge case are the ones pushing their glasses up their nose and saying in the nasally voice "well actually.." For some reason I've never encountered a person that wants to go 12 rounds on whether or not a coin flip is actually binary because coins can land on their edge. If I did I would really hope they were trying to make some broader point and not trying to scold me for being dumb enough to think a coinflip is binary.
What are we even disagreeing over then? I mean, when shitty right-wingers (including randos on Twitter, but also, like, Ted Cruz and the like) say it’s binary, they mean “the exceptions don’t exist, those people are just deluded.” You’re acknowledging the nontrivial exceptions exist, that values besides 1 and 0 are possible (and, I’d wager, significantly likelier than a coin landing on its edge), but you still want to use the word binary because, what, you like the sound of it? The mouth feel? Define words however you want to, I guess, why should I care?
Meanwhile I opened with an explicit endorsement of the idea that the categories are useful even if they have edge cases and exceptions (as all biological categories inevitably will) and yet both you and Intro keep coming back to “isn’t it easier to just use the categories even though there are a few exceptions they don’t account for?” Yes, I already said so! Newtonian physics is fine for most purposes, just don’t insist it’s all there is or “well actually” people who are talking about quantum mechanics.
Meanwhile those shitty right-wingers are using this bullshit to ban healthcare for trans people and fearmonger that the Satanic democrats are trying to trans your kids. You’ve already pretty clearly said you don’t agree with that shit (I don’t know about Intro) but that’s virtually the only policy implication of this topic and this is a US politics thread so what are we even doing here?
I don’t know how “sex is binary” or non-binary helps any argument of any issue related to trans issues. That’s why I said I was hoping there would be some broader point to be made because arguing over something so trivial seems pointless.
I think there are some interesting things to discuss regarding transgenderism. Nature vs nurture, social contagion, but from past experience my earnest attempt to just ask questions has been met with “you’re just a transphobe who is trying to mask their transphobia under the guise of JAQ.”
I can tell you have a lot of disdain for US Republicans like Ted Cruz for trying to ban healthcare for trans people. I would instead offer that a lot of European countries have also started to draw back on gender medicine and that can’t be blamed as easily on the Ted Cruz’s in the US legislature.
The clown world I object to is not about men identifying as women or women identifying as men. It’s about 19-year-olds lecturing Richard Dawkins on Twitter because his decades of study in biology has caused him to conclude sex is pretty damn binary.
I don’t follow what Europe’s doing, I’m sure they have their own shitty people to worry about. There’s really no good reason for these decisions to be made by legislatures. Difficult medical decisions have been made between patients and their doctors (and their legal guardians, where children are concerned) for ages, and medical communities are perfectly capable of producing and evaluating clinical evidence for and against any given therapy. There’d be an argument for regulatory agencies to be making decisions (since they’re supposed to approve treatments for safety and efficacy anyway) except as I understand it, pretty much all of the relevant drugs were approved ages ago for largely uncontroversial applications, and it’s pretty normal for doctors to have freedom to prescribe off-label as they see fit.
I mean to be honest I don’t think you’re the transphobe people accuse you of being but you don’t do a great job explaining yourself. Like, people who are obviously coming from a “trans ideology is just a delusion caused by the woke mind virus and must be destroyed” place start posting about it and you tend to sound like you’re agreeing with them, and using a lot of the same “man pretending to be a woman” language they would, when apparently you’re only trying to make mundane points like “there are biological differences between cis and trans men” (something I’ve never heard a trans person deny) or “polarization on this culture war issue sometimes makes woke scolds take dumb positions.”
I know you live in San Francisco, arguably the woke scold capital of the world, so maybe it’s understandable that you feel the urgency of combating their orthodoxy much more acutely than I do. But it’s hard for me to give that too much credence when you’re going on about some Bill Maher segment or college kids being mean to Richard Dawkins on Twitter (a man who, wherever his contributions to science, is obviously extremely bad at Twitter). I’m sure they’re saying dumb stuff sometimes, but idk, maybe just grow up? Like, if they’re doing significant harm then sure, go oppose them in the proper venue, but otherwise it’s okay to let other people be wrong, even obnoxiously wrong, without picking a fight with them or demanding that society condemn them.
On October 25 2024 09:03 Razyda wrote: I think you guys are wrong and it is big part of the reason why Dems are loosing this election. You just kind of conditioned to think that people will vote for Trump only because they are some kind of nazis, fascist, racist, transphobes. Meanwhile you have Kamala telling her actual supporters "I am speaking now" and Trump chatting up random people, or taking a stunt at McDonald. What I find funny about that is that Trump is pretending to care about average person, Democrats cant be bothered to do even that, all they do is grandstanding about the issues which maybe 10% population is giving damn about. Now you are unhappy with the current sate of things and you choose between someone who pretends to care about you and someone who cant be bothered to do even that. Meanwhile bunch of people who would rather vote for Trump than keep the status quo are getting actively alienated. And this are the people who will sway from Trump if he does some stupid sh...t. So yeah I think that his appearance on Joe Rogan is mistake (kind of unnecessary point of failure)
PS: just watched Piers Morgan uncensored (I like the idea of the show, hate the execution)
I work with Trump voters and go to school with more. They do not treat the people they talk about politics that they disagree with as human beings. As bad as you think leftists talk about conservatives in this thread in real life they're much worse. They do not consider immigrants as human beings anymore. They haven't considered Muslims as human beings for 23 years now. Gay and trans people aren't just not human to them they're actively evil people that need to be removed from society.
Trump has conditioned his fans to not believe people are arguing with them in good faith and has lied so much and with so little regard to reality that it is impossible to reason with them. We work with entirely different sets of facts now in this country. Tariffs are something other nations pay for. The wall was going to be paid for by Mexico and be effective at stopping migration. You can easily and ethically seize and deport people who are here illegally back to the country they came from. People are going to die from the covid vaccine en mass but also trump is great for developing it so fast. The people who stormed the capital are both Antifa plants and are political hostages. George floyd died from an overdose and was a felon so he doesn't deserve pity. Any sort of prosecution for trumps crimes are lawfare, don't pay attention to the process or the evidence presented. Trump filled up the oil reserves when you can easily find out that he drew it down a lot. Taxes went up during bidens term when it was the tax plan that trump put into place. Tampons not being restricted to womens bathrooms is weird and funny. Hunter Bidens laptop being suppressed was government suppression of the truth even thought it was bidens team when he wasn't in the white house, but the supression of JD vances dossier on twitter is somehow perfectly find and not a problem. There was widespread election fraud but no evidence of it anywhere. You don't have to accept that you ever lose an election and disrupting the transfer of power isn't an issue, but directly comparing what trump says to what hitler said is an issue.
You look at BJ and you do not see someone who thinks of you as a human being worth respecting with a simple conversation. You look at oblade and you see someone who wants to just talk about thinks that no one is talking about.
You see GH trying to push away anyone that might support him as hard as possible and wondering why no one agrees with his violent revolution.
The problem isn't that we don't think of them as human beings its that we do think of them as human beings and are disappointed when they don't act like them. I'm a Christian that belives in christ when he told everyone that loving your neighbor was one of the two commandments that all others depended on. These people pretend to be Christians yet do not follow his teachings.
2. There's the notion that the status quo is imperfectly optimal and just needs modifications within its own parameters (this would include reformism with socialism/communism as it's ultimate goal/ideal).
3. There's fear of people losing their comfort, social status, livelihoods, lives, etc.
4. There's the uncertainty that a revolution would be successful in overcoming the existing system that comes with fears of the consequences of a failed revolution (like the sacrifices being made in vain/retaliation for insolence).
5. There's fear of a successful revolution that removes the existing power structure only to replace it with something similar/worse.
And yet you show no understanding of any of these points being legitimate nor do you treat the people who believe these things with the respect you are entitled to. You deny electoralism as being a legitimate way to achieve your goals and constantly advocate for the abandonment of it. You harp all the time about how you don't think democrats have an issue with genocide and yet cannot provide an alternative to it past just letting trump genocide even harder. When was the last time you tried to argue with BJ or Oblade or provide any insight into an issue that wasn't exclusively anti democrat or anyone on the left side of the country?
Being able to recognize the pattern of what people tell you when they disagree with you is not understanding why people don't agree with you.
I don't know what you mean by "legitimate" in this context, but yeah, they are reasonable concerns I don't mind discussing (save for #1 because it's basically always engaged in bad faith in this context by right wingers that oppose it).
Electoralism is futile for a variety of reasons, but Trump destroying democracy would settle that.
The alternative was for voters that oppose genocide to pressure Democrats, Biden, and Harris to withdraw their support for genocide 10+ months ago before the first primary was even started. Instead you guys, and Democrats generally, immediately went the shame, blame and threaten route with the "just letting trump genocide even harder" trash.
Part of why I've been harping on all this stuff is so that if Harris does lose you guys can't pretend like you (and Dem voters generally) didn't defend/support Democrats being trash when you needed to be joining the people demanding better.
Especially when the bar is in Hell at not supporting a genocide that the majority of voters want them to stop supporting.
And this is the best example of you pushing away everyone who support you need to build with and not understand why no one wants to support your violent revolution. If Harris loses the leftists who voted for Jill stein will be blamed and the party will pivot right in order to win further elections. Jill stein took enough votes away in 2016 for trump to get elected, she didn't run in 2020 and biden got elected, now shes running again in 2024. You, and leftists like you, have spent the entire cycle being an incredible ass outright saying your intent is to help get trump elected and then rub it in peoples faces for the next four years again like you did something good or should be seen as the superior person. You are not coalition building, you are not building any support, you are only setting yourself up to be the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong under trump. If there is a revolution socialists are not going to be the people the democrat electorate goes to for leadership during it. They're going to be right alongside conservatives for who caused conditions to get so bad.
I know what you think you are doing but everyone has been incredibly patient for you to understand what you are actually doing.
Nothing GH has done indicates he has been trying to “help get Trump elected and rub it in people’s faces.”
It would have made more sense if he had. These 3 positions don't work together:
- electoralism is futile - lesser evil voting is wrong - not an accelarationist
If his goals cannot be achieved through electoralism, and he's not cheering for the worst possible electoral results to accelerate change through non-electoral means, what we're left with is "less misery in the short term costs nothing and impedes me in no way, but wanting it is wrong."
There's an implied false dichotomy between participating in flawed electoralism and overthrowing the system. There's nothing stopping you from both doing the former and attempting the latter, they're completely parallel choices. You can throw your molotovs 5 mins after having hedged on the non-fascist if you want to.
On October 25 2024 15:45 Uldridge wrote: Why are you calling him Drumpf all the time? It's triggering the fuck out of me lmao
I call Drumpf Drumpf for a few reasons: It's disarming; to reclaim the name; and preemptively strategically conceding tearing him down with childish and nonsense pejoratives, which is a distraction, in order to immediately move on to actual things that at least have a chance of mattering. In my experience people are far more likely to be triggered by Tr*** than Drumpf. Like if you submitted Twitter or this thread to a blood pressure study comparing the two, I'm pretty sure we'd have a significant result.
I don't feel like it's disarming at all. If anything it's inflammatory. It feels like you deem other people too far gone or stupid so you want to belittle us by using a phonetically infantilizing version of Trump. It's patronizing, please stop. At least for me, I don't see red whenever I see his name spelled out, and I don't think you have actual data other than vague assumptions other than being 'pretty sure' over things happening in digital spaces. I think we can manage. But the beauty is that you can do whatever you want and all I can ask for is refraining because I don't think it's necessary. So the ball's in your court
On October 25 2024 17:53 Uldridge wrote: I don't feel like it's disarming at all. If anything it's inflammatory. It feels like you deem other people too far gone or stupid so you want to belittle us by using a phonetically infantilizing version of Trump. It's patronizing, please stop. At least for me, I don't see red whenever I see his name spelled out, and I don't think you have actual data other than vague assumptions other than being 'pretty sure' over things happening in digital spaces. I think we can manage. But the beauty is that you can do whatever you want and all I can ask for is refraining because I don't think it's necessary. So the ball's in your court
Drumpf was the original family name when one of his ancestors moved to America. Then, at some point, it got changed to Trump, presumably to sound less foreign.
I just said it's reasons other than patronizing specifically after you asked me. What was the point of asking. It's the literal name of his ancestors. If you feel infantilized, there are browser extensions that can filter words to your heart's desire. People call Drumpf a rapist on every other page despite being shown a court document that says the opposite. Thanks for the ball though.
Yes and I was explaining to you what it feels like to me when you're using the name. So you see how dialogue works? Or does only one side get to do the explaining? Your explanation is only there after me asking for it. How am I to assume what your intention is wth the name?
Edit: using browser extensions is part of the problem. I wish we could just live in a world where we mind each other instead of telling tjem to filter it out just so you toot your horn into the void for the sake of it.
Edit2: my ancestors have all kinds of names. Hell my first name would be completely different. Let's all start going by our ancestral names shall we?
Yes and after being met by your willingness to share your perspective I have nothing but sympathy. At the same time, it's not your name nor does my use of it have anything to do with you.
I know this is petty, but why not: if you find it normal to use the word faggot as a slur, not related to homosexuals and a homosexual starts asking you why you use it and it being triggering/offensive to them, would you offer the same explanation? What about the n-word?
On October 25 2024 07:44 Razyda wrote: Ok wild take, but I think Trump is making a mistake with Joe Rogan. He does well in hostile interviews, but I can easily see him relax and saying bunch of stupid shit in what is more of a friendly chat, than interview. Imo risk he didnt need to take.
What do you think might be something that Trump could say that could result in negative consequences for him?
This is somewhat unfair question as I cant predict future. However given how Trump sometimes wander off topic when he talks I can easily see him going like that for example: "we have to end this war, you know, there is lots of people dying you know, in war, which is horrible thing, people dying in war, like the one we had here against slavery, which we won, you know, and then freed all the slaves, because slavery was a horrible thing and wrong and also done wrong, I would do it much better"
It is not to say that he will say something like that, it is more of an example how I can see him mess up on Joe Rogan. I think he does much better job on avoiding stuff like that this election than he did in 2016 and 2020, and probably keep himself in check on interviews, but 2-3 hours of what is apparently friendly chat he may get relaxed and drop the guard.
On October 25 2024 09:03 Razyda wrote: I think you guys are wrong and it is big part of the reason why Dems are loosing this election. You just kind of conditioned to think that people will vote for Trump only because they are some kind of nazis, fascist, racist, transphobes. Meanwhile you have Kamala telling her actual supporters "I am speaking now" and Trump chatting up random people, or taking a stunt at McDonald. What I find funny about that is that Trump is pretending to care about average person, Democrats cant be bothered to do even that, all they do is grandstanding about the issues which maybe 10% population is giving damn about. Now you are unhappy with the current sate of things and you choose between someone who pretends to care about you and someone who cant be bothered to do even that. Meanwhile bunch of people who would rather vote for Trump than keep the status quo are getting actively alienated. And this are the people who will sway from Trump if he does some stupid sh...t. So yeah I think that his appearance on Joe Rogan is mistake (kind of unnecessary point of failure)
PS: just watched Piers Morgan uncensored (I like the idea of the show, hate the execution)
I dont know who the guy who is a friend of the Trump son is, but it is one of the most dangerous people I've ever seen.
What’s your proposed alternative?
Crazy idea, but how about thinking about them as human beings?
I work with Trump voters and go to school with more. They do not treat the people they talk about politics that they disagree with as human beings. As bad as you think leftists talk about conservatives in this thread in real life they're much worse. They do not consider immigrants as human beings anymore. They haven't considered Muslims as human beings for 23 years now. Gay and trans people aren't just not human to them they're actively evil people that need to be removed from society.
Trump has conditioned his fans to not believe people are arguing with them in good faith and has lied so much and with so little regard to reality that it is impossible to reason with them. We work with entirely different sets of facts now in this country. Tariffs are something other nations pay for. The wall was going to be paid for by Mexico and be effective at stopping migration. You can easily and ethically seize and deport people who are here illegally back to the country they came from. People are going to die from the covid vaccine en mass but also trump is great for developing it so fast. The people who stormed the capital are both Antifa plants and are political hostages. George floyd died from an overdose and was a felon so he doesn't deserve pity. Any sort of prosecution for trumps crimes are lawfare, don't pay attention to the process or the evidence presented. Trump filled up the oil reserves when you can easily find out that he drew it down a lot. Taxes went up during bidens term when it was the tax plan that trump put into place. Tampons not being restricted to womens bathrooms is weird and funny. Hunter Bidens laptop being suppressed was government suppression of the truth even thought it was bidens team when he wasn't in the white house, but the supression of JD vances dossier on twitter is somehow perfectly find and not a problem. There was widespread election fraud but no evidence of it anywhere. You don't have to accept that you ever lose an election and disrupting the transfer of power isn't an issue, but directly comparing what trump says to what hitler said is an issue.
You look at BJ and you do not see someone who thinks of you as a human being worth respecting with a simple conversation. You look at oblade and you see someone who wants to just talk about thinks that no one is talking about. You see GH trying to push away anyone that might support him as hard as possible and wondering why no one agrees with his violent revolution.
The problem isn't that we don't think of them as human beings its that we do think of them as human beings and are disappointed when they don't act like them. I'm a Christian that belives in christ when he told everyone that loving your neighbor was one of the two commandments that all others depended on. These people pretend to be Christians yet do not follow his teachings.
So you posted all that to prove my point and then extended "Trump voters" to "anyone who has a different opinion" because I dont think BJ and GH are Trump voters.
On October 25 2024 18:10 WombaT wrote: I’ve long found that exceptionally irritating as well, but I imagine that’s the whole point
To me, it reeks of "I don't want to be judged for being a Trump supporter, so I'm going to do the bare minimum level of defiance and call him the wrong name, while I champion his immoral and illegal deeds. That makes me 0.00001% different from the rest of MAGA, so I'm unbiased!"
I receive it as something hilariously juvenile, like a child playing hide and seek by standing in a completely open corner and thinking they're invisible because they covered their own eyes. Suuuuure, oBlade, we toooootally can't see you!
I don’t pay it much mind anymore, and sometimes reading it makes me laugh, because every time he writes "Drumpf", he reminds me that he's an unserious person. It's like if oBlade called Trump "poopface" while rallying behind the fascist, racist rapist. Ultimately, I interpret it as oBlade conceding, not resisting.
Just to recenter ourselves, let's run the discussion back:
[quote]
This prompted Manifesto to respond, and you to respond to Manifesto with
[quote]
Later, in response to DPB, you add
[quote]
Eventually, RenSC2 posts an actual source for the story you're referencing
[quote]
Your ending statement is this:
[quote]
Where I take issue is specifically with the start being different than the end. You're being critical of the school board, and imo that makes sense. People have a right to identify how they want to identify, to a point. In this particular case, it was a man identifying as a woman with a medical condition. Identifying as a woman? Fine. Identifying as having a medical condition she doesn't actually have? Questionable. The school board accepting the 'identifying as having a medical condition' and allowing size Z prosthetic breasts is the issue.
You opened with "they are arguably less delusional and out of touch than the people believing a man is a woman because he put on a wig and stuffed his shirt with giant inflatable tits." and are trying to end with "it doesn’t matter if they are trans or a troll, the prosthetic boobs are inappropriate either way.".
You literally state "...believing a man is a woman because..." and later try walk it back to being about the tits. You also stated "The wig and prosthetic breasts aren't even a necessary component of my post", but are now trying to claim the prosthetic breasts ARE the necessary part and are inappropriate either way. You can't be critical of the school board and claim they're delusional for believing a man is a woman, and then say it has nothing to do with gender it's about the tits.
Also, let's not forget that our source is an american conservative tabloid's article about an extreme edge case happening in a different country. That's not a terribly robust footing to make any kind of substantial point from.
My take has always been, for example, transgender men are not the same as biological men but I will happily identify them as such and used their preferred name and pronouns because that's the kind and courteous thing to do.
The woke take is "a transgender man is literally the same as a biological man and if you disagree you're committing violence against trans people."
Honestly I have little interest in a debate of whether a man can be a woman or vice versa. It's inevitably going to turn in a semantic debate where I insist that a man is a biological male and everyone else insists a man is "anyone that claims to be a man." I would much rather have a discussion on what happens when woke ideology is applied in the real world, such as the case with the school board defending the teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts.
Can you please define "a biological male"? I'm not sure what that means, insofar as which criteria you believe are necessary for a person to be considered biologically male.
In my experience this normally refers to chromosomes, and trans people to my knowledge overwhelmingly have the chromosome pattern matching their 'biological' sex. Genitalia can be altered but chromosomes cannot. And yeah a very small group of people are something else than xx or xy but those people aren't necessarily related to trans people in any way.
Biologically it's gametes. We have either sperm or eggs, there is no third type (it's "binary"). In many animals chromosomes can determine the sex but they don't define it. Famously, in alligators incubation temperature determines sex.
Edit: so chromosomes are a useful shorthand but edge cases don't make the whole exercise arbitrary.
This is close to true, perhaps good enough for government work, but it’s not quite right. Fundamentally, what someone’s “biological sex” is depends on what purpose you have for defining their biological sex – for sex-linked genetic traits, for instance, chromosomes *is* what you would care about, whether or not their gametes match.
Stepping back a little, biology is a constant exercise of looking at enormously complex, heterogeneous systems, and trying to define rules and categories that will help understand how they work, even though every rule or category will have nontrivial exceptions you’ll then have to account for. Even something relatively robust like “species” has weird exceptions that make it a little hard to delineate exactly how many species of this type of bird there are in a certain population, or where the dividing line is between them. But if we define a prototypical case, and describe the characteristics that the vast majority of cases follow, we can talk about the cases that deviate from the rule and why, which is still a better understanding than we had before.
The nitpicky problem with “sex is binary, you either produce one gamete or the other” is that a small number of people produce both, and a huge number of people produce neither. The more fundamental problem is that when people talk about sex, even specifically “biological sex,” their gametes may or may not be relevant. If I’m talking about a chimeric individual (someone whose body is made partly of cells with a different genetic set), and I say that one of their genetic sets is male and the other is female, I don’t think anyone would think I was talking about gametes. Or, to put it another way, if I say “a male liver cell” it would be idiotic to respond “liver cells don’t produce gametes so there’s no such thing as male or female liver cells.”
All of which is to say that we could, perhaps, say “gametes are binary” in that any individual gamete is one or the other (I’m not aware of any exceptions to that, although there’s no theoretical theoretical reason there couldn’t be). But biological sex is a complex constellation of traits that usually correlate into two populations, but not always. If you’re gonna push your glasses up your nose and say in a nasally voice, “Well actually, biological sex *is* binary” I could maybe excuse the know-it-all technicality of it, if you weren’t also wrong on the technicality.
The relevance of all this to US politics is slim, except that one faction has committed itself to the rhetorical position that sex and gender are binary, and anyone who disagrees is a leftist radical wholly detached from scientific reality. Those folks are incurious dullards, every bit as censorious and tyrannical as BlackJack’s woke scolds who insist biological sex doesn’t exist, but in my experience, substantially more numerous and vocal.
I'd consider a coin flip as something that is a binary. Of course there's a small chance that the coin lands perfectly on its edge leading to a result that is neither heads nor tails. To me, the people pointing out this (literal) edge case are the ones pushing their glasses up their nose and saying in the nasally voice "well actually.." For some reason I've never encountered a person that wants to go 12 rounds on whether or not a coin flip is actually binary because coins can land on their edge. If I did I would really hope they were trying to make some broader point and not trying to scold me for being dumb enough to think a coinflip is binary.
What are we even disagreeing over then? I mean, when shitty right-wingers (including randos on Twitter, but also, like, Ted Cruz and the like) say it’s binary, they mean “the exceptions don’t exist, those people are just deluded.” You’re acknowledging the nontrivial exceptions exist, that values besides 1 and 0 are possible (and, I’d wager, significantly likelier than a coin landing on its edge), but you still want to use the word binary because, what, you like the sound of it? The mouth feel? Define words however you want to, I guess, why should I care?
Meanwhile I opened with an explicit endorsement of the idea that the categories are useful even if they have edge cases and exceptions (as all biological categories inevitably will) and yet both you and Intro keep coming back to “isn’t it easier to just use the categories even though there are a few exceptions they don’t account for?” Yes, I already said so! Newtonian physics is fine for most purposes, just don’t insist it’s all there is or “well actually” people who are talking about quantum mechanics.
Meanwhile those shitty right-wingers are using this bullshit to ban healthcare for trans people and fearmonger that the Satanic democrats are trying to trans your kids. You’ve already pretty clearly said you don’t agree with that shit (I don’t know about Intro) but that’s virtually the only policy implication of this topic and this is a US politics thread so what are we even doing here?
I don’t know how “sex is binary” or non-binary helps any argument of any issue related to trans issues. That’s why I said I was hoping there would be some broader point to be made because arguing over something so trivial seems pointless.
I think there are some interesting things to discuss regarding transgenderism. Nature vs nurture, social contagion, but from past experience my earnest attempt to just ask questions has been met with “you’re just a transphobe who is trying to mask their transphobia under the guise of JAQ.”
I can tell you have a lot of disdain for US Republicans like Ted Cruz for trying to ban healthcare for trans people. I would instead offer that a lot of European countries have also started to draw back on gender medicine and that can’t be blamed as easily on the Ted Cruz’s in the US legislature.
The clown world I object to is not about men identifying as women or women identifying as men. It’s about 19-year-olds lecturing Richard Dawkins on Twitter because his decades of study in biology has caused him to conclude sex is pretty damn binary.
I don’t follow what Europe’s doing, I’m sure they have their own shitty people to worry about. There’s really no good reason for these decisions to be made by legislatures. Difficult medical decisions have been made between patients and their doctors (and their legal guardians, where children are concerned) for ages, and medical communities are perfectly capable of producing and evaluating clinical evidence for and against any given therapy. There’d be an argument for regulatory agencies to be making decisions (since they’re supposed to approve treatments for safety and efficacy anyway) except as I understand it, pretty much all of the relevant drugs were approved ages ago for largely uncontroversial applications, and it’s pretty normal for doctors to have freedom to prescribe off-label as they see fit.
I mean to be honest I don’t think you’re the transphobe people accuse you of being but you don’t do a great job explaining yourself. Like, people who are obviously coming from a “trans ideology is just a delusion caused by the woke mind virus and must be destroyed” place start posting about it and you tend to sound like you’re agreeing with them, and using a lot of the same “man pretending to be a woman” language they would, when apparently you’re only trying to make mundane points like “there are biological differences between cis and trans men” (something I’ve never heard a trans person deny) or “polarization on this culture war issue sometimes makes woke scolds take dumb positions.”
I know you live in San Francisco, arguably the woke scold capital of the world, so maybe it’s understandable that you feel the urgency of combating their orthodoxy much more acutely than I do. But it’s hard for me to give that too much credence when you’re going on about some Bill Maher segment or college kids being mean to Richard Dawkins on Twitter (a man who, wherever his contributions to science, is obviously extremely bad at Twitter). I’m sure they’re saying dumb stuff sometimes, but idk, maybe just grow up? Like, if they’re doing significant harm then sure, go oppose them in the proper venue, but otherwise it’s okay to let other people be wrong, even obnoxiously wrong, without picking a fight with them or demanding that society condemn them.
1. Yes, I generally agree with you. The best people to make medical guidance would be medical professionals and their regulating bodies. But there may be room for exception. For example, pain management clinics that were essentially pill mills where well-intentioned and ill-intentioned doctors alike helped contribute to the opioid epidemic. There's several good documentaries on this. Perhaps a more uniquely American problem given our for-profit healthcare system. It is, nonetheless an example of why you can't automatically allow for medical professionals to be left to their own devices.
2. Here's an article that gives a brief summary of European countries restricting trans health care for minors. For example the Swedish government's most up to date guidance says “risks of puberty suppressing treatment … and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits.” I have little doubt that if that happened someone in the United States you would be outraged over someone denying life-saving gender affirming care to transgender minors. The thing that really bothers me is that I suspect you have very little idea what causes gender dysphoria, whether it can be melded onto young impressionable minds, why there has been a 1500% increase in it over a short period of time. Even people that study this professionally don't have good answers. So I don't know why you feel so confident in labeling people transphobes if they don't agree with your beliefs on these topics.
3. You can look at any single grievance on wokeism and sort of dismiss it as a one-off and not something I should be in a stink over. But I've been posting about it for years now. Sure Richard Dawkins will survive if he gets a little flak or an award or two gets revoked because he refuses to fall in line with the group think. For every Richard Dawkins there might be 10 other biologists that will self-censor themselves because they don't want to do with that. There may people declining to publish their research results because it came to the opposite conclusion they were hoping for. In my opinion the harm is immeasurable by the people wishing to make it taboo to tell the truth if the truth is inconvenient to them.
On October 25 2024 07:44 Razyda wrote: Ok wild take, but I think Trump is making a mistake with Joe Rogan. He does well in hostile interviews, but I can easily see him relax and saying bunch of stupid shit in what is more of a friendly chat, than interview. Imo risk he didnt need to take.
What do you think might be something that Trump could say that could result in negative consequences for him?
This is somewhat unfair question as I cant predict future. However given how Trump sometimes wander off topic when he talks I can easily see him going like that for example: "we have to end this war, you know, there is lots of people dying you know, in war, which is horrible thing, people dying in war, like the one we had here against slavery, which we won, you know, and then freed all the slaves, because slavery was a horrible thing and wrong and also done wrong, I would do it much better"
It is not to say that he will say something like that, it is more of an example how I can see him mess up on Joe Rogan. I think he does much better job on avoiding stuff like that this election than he did in 2016 and 2020, and probably keep himself in check on interviews, but 2-3 hours of what is apparently friendly chat he may get relaxed and drop the guard.
Thank you for posting an example! I understand you're not claiming that Trump will definitely say something like that. Could you please elaborate on why that hypothetical rant would make him lose voters? I feel like they'd read that and say that all Trump was really intending was to say the war and slavery are both bad. Thoughts?
On October 25 2024 18:30 Simberto wrote: Such an incredibly conservative position to have.
I could do something that makes life better for other people, that wouldn't cost me anything at all. But i don't have to. So i won't.
Don't know about conservative but it's called freedom, also, define "cost" and "make life better."
There are swathes of people who physically cannot say his name, for other reasons. They call him instead any nickname from 45 to Commander-in-Cheeto to Divider-in-Chief, I think Obama shares this last one though. He is the single most dehumanized president since Obama. Just look at the incidence of "rapist." People can't help themselves.
On October 25 2024 18:31 Uldridge wrote: I know this is petty, but why not: if you find it normal to use the word faggot as a slur, not related to homosexuals and a homosexual starts asking you why you use it and it being triggering to them, would you offer the same explanation? What about the n-word?
If that were the case, which it's not, I would not offer the same explanation, because it wouldn't make sense in that context. I wouldn't be reclaiming those words because those words aren't slurs towards me. However, if I still have free will in this hypothetical, it would be an obvious act of politeness to be sensitive to another person's identity I was interacting with and not use those words with them.
Which doesn't apply here unless you were a member of the Drumpf family.
EPT
