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On October 26 2024 01:45 Sermokala wrote: A better question than asking what Trump could say that would make Oblade or BJ vote for harris I think would be what could Trump say or do that would make GH, or leftists who think a trump presidency would be better for the nation long term, vote for harris.
"I have undeniable proof that Harris shot a person on 5th avenue"
should be enough, because unlike the current GOP, the Democrats have not bought into a Cult of Personality around Harris.
E: not enough for GH obviously as he is not a lesser evilist.
On October 25 2024 23:15 Uldridge wrote: It was sincere, my brain really is cooked. Sleep deprivatjon does that to someone. In any case, I was wondering how non-reformist reforms will eventually tackle entrenched systems like the legislatory bodies. Or do they somehow co-exist with one another? Do you even believe in the necessity of legislation?
I also find it difficult to slowly reach a critical mass as there are so many different ideological views now. It's basically pick your own adventure book. How do you convince people? Just by praxis? Also: how much time do you spend per week "spreading socialism" so to speak?
Part of praxis is working through those questions alongside comrades you organize with while utilizing previous works and experiences of other socialists. What would I be convincing you/people of in your mind?
Also: I spend as much time as I can muster and I never think it's enough.
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.
Not just my goals, but even modest liberal goals like ending the legalized and literal enslavement of US citizens can't be achieved through electoralism after over 100 years.
Lesser evil absolutism is wrong. It leaves one willing to vote for Hitler.
Accelerationism (on the left) assumes an inevitability of socialism that I personally think can easily be filled by fascists indefinitely, so I don't support it (among other reasons).
You have a ouroborous situation on your hands that you didn't address. I will engage with your slippery slope as is, even though there's no indication that Harris is more authoritarian or bloodthirsty than previous Democratic presidents. + Show Spoiler +
Under your own framework where achieving meaningful goals is a fight that's entirely parallel to electoralism and Hitler+ beating Hitler doesn't improve the odds of that parallel struggle going your way - there's nothing left in the equation that would make wanting Hitler to beat Hitler+ wrong.
It could be wrong if tactically voting for Hitler prevents non-Hitler from having a chance (i.e. a modicum of faith in electoralism), and it could be wrong if the bigger short term misery of Hitler+ leads to a larger long term reward (i.e. accelerationism). You took those out.
You want to be left with "it's wrong because we should have overthrown the government long before even considering voting for Hitler, duh", but we haven't or there wouldn't have been such a vote choice and you've established that the supposed overthrow attempt has nothing to do with the vote.
To be clear, I'm not saying that in that situation you have a moral imperative to vote for Hitler over Hitler+. You don't. I've personally sat out a run-off election where I couldn't hold my nose and put the stamp on anyone (though I would argue the difference in foreseeable outcomes between the two was infinitely smaller than between Harris and Trump). However, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on if I were to deem those that did manage to hold their noses immoral.
I understand and share your frustration with where the Overton window is currently positioned, but the interesction of those 3 positions is a self-cannibalizing mess and needs revising. The most obvious fix is dropping "wanting less short term misery is wrong because Hitler".
Can you imagine Obama campaigning bragging about Dick Cheney endorsing him?+ Show Spoiler +
(E: I should have mentioned Obama was also more oppositional to Netenyahu while he was doing less heinous shit than he has been on Biden/Harris' watch) Mind you Obama's 9 out of 10 people he bombed not being the target thing was a bit of a last straw for me to stop being a Democrat.
Electoralism undermines actual/revolutionary socialist progress constantly. Liberal electoralism (as led by avowed capitalists) is inextricably anti-socialist.
In a Hitler vs Hitler+ election the obligation is to overthrow the government by any means necessary. One way electoralism undermines those willing to meet that obligation is that those that are too cowardly to meet their obligation choose to point to the harm reduction of voting for Hitler as an excuse for not overthrowing the government they empowered to do horrific things to people they don't really care about. This is frequently in vain hopes Hitler doesn't come for them. Hence "First they came for..."
On October 26 2024 01:45 Sermokala wrote: A better question than asking what Trump could say that would make Oblade or BJ vote for harris I think would be what could Trump say or do that would make GH, or leftists who think a trump presidency would be better for the nation long term, vote for harris.
"I have undeniable proof that Harris shot a person on 5th avenue"
should be enough, because unlike the current GOP, the Democrats have not bought into a Cult of Personality around Harris.
E: not enough for GH obviously as he is not a lesser evilist.
I find this line of attack childish and silly but I obviously would prefer Harris stop supporting genocide and beat Trump than lose to Trump.
I'm just pointing out Democrats are so insistent on supporting genocide they'd rather lose than give up their support for genocide.
Also that their supporters are so far gone that they look at that and rather than blame the people refusing to stop supporting genocide for them losing the support of people that don't support genocide, they blame the people refusing to support genocide for their genocidal shitbags not getting enough votes to beat Republicans preferred genocidal shitbag.
On October 26 2024 01:45 Sermokala wrote: A better question than asking what Trump could say that would make Oblade or BJ vote for harris I think would be what could Trump say or do that would make GH, or leftists who think a trump presidency would be better for the nation long term, vote for harris.
"I have undeniable proof that Harris shot a person on 5th avenue"
should be enough, because unlike the current GOP, the Democrats have not bought into a Cult of Personality around Harris.
E: not enough for GH obviously as he is not a lesser evilist.
I find this line of attack childish and silly but I obviously would prefer Harris stop supporting genocide and beat Trump than lose to Trump.
I'm just pointing out Democrats are so insistent on supporting genocide they'd rather lose than give up their support for genocide.
Also that their supporters are so far gone that they look at that and rather than blame the people refusing to stop supporting genocide for them losing the support of people that don't support genocide, they blame the people refusing to support genocide for their genocidal shitbags not getting enough votes to beat Republicans preferred genocidal shitbag.
So you'd vote for Trump to prevent a bona fide murderer from becoming president? Because it wasn't an attack. It was me pointing out that you don't play that game and would vote anything else rather than Trump, even if that meant risking a bona fide murderer would be the nominee in your state.
As for the genocide, I don't disagree, I just think there's more people who'd refuse to vote for Harris if she stopped supporting Israel than if she continues doing what she's doing. Damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda deal.
On October 25 2024 23:15 Uldridge wrote: It was sincere, my brain really is cooked. Sleep deprivatjon does that to someone. In any case, I was wondering how non-reformist reforms will eventually tackle entrenched systems like the legislatory bodies. Or do they somehow co-exist with one another? Do you even believe in the necessity of legislation?
I also find it difficult to slowly reach a critical mass as there are so many different ideological views now. It's basically pick your own adventure book. How do you convince people? Just by praxis? Also: how much time do you spend per week "spreading socialism" so to speak?
Part of praxis is working through those questions alongside comrades you organize with while utilizing previous works and experiences of other socialists. What would I be convincing you/people of in your mind?
Also: I spend as much time as I can muster and I never think it's enough.
Wait, have I actually not read through it all? Community wise engagement is not the same as how we push legislation top-down, no? You seem to have gone mostly local and haven't really drilled down on your non-reformist reforms. It seems I asked some pertinent questions, because I felt like you were talkint generalities so I was wondering about some specific vision/practical implementation.
Do you also hone your own theory when dealing with what you currently observe or do you generally try to follow contemporary scholars/academics?
Also you might be suprised to hear this, but I perhaps couldn't be described as being more to the left. I'm not an activist, but prescribe to Bakunin's collectivist anarchism. Not that it matters, but, just wanted to share. I am quite receptive to left leaning ideas. Just don't hold me accountable I'm not a revolutionary please or not remember some of your replies.
On October 25 2024 10:14 Sermokala wrote: [quote] + Show Spoiler +
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.
Not just my goals, but even modest liberal goals like ending the legalized and literal enslavement of US citizens can't be achieved through electoralism after over 100 years.
Lesser evil absolutism is wrong. It leaves one willing to vote for Hitler.
Accelerationism (on the left) assumes an inevitability of socialism that I personally think can easily be filled by fascists indefinitely, so I don't support it (among other reasons).
You have a ouroborous situation on your hands that you didn't address. I will engage with your slippery slope as is, even though there's no indication that Harris is more authoritarian or bloodthirsty than previous Democratic presidents. + Show Spoiler +
Under your own framework where achieving meaningful goals is a fight that's entirely parallel to electoralism and Hitler+ beating Hitler doesn't improve the odds of that parallel struggle going your way - there's nothing left in the equation that would make wanting Hitler to beat Hitler+ wrong.
It could be wrong if tactically voting for Hitler prevents non-Hitler from having a chance (i.e. a modicum of faith in electoralism), and it could be wrong if the bigger short term misery of Hitler+ leads to a larger long term reward (i.e. accelerationism). You took those out.
You want to be left with "it's wrong because we should have overthrown the government long before even considering voting for Hitler, duh", but we haven't or there wouldn't have been such a vote choice and you've established that the supposed overthrow attempt has nothing to do with the vote.
To be clear, I'm not saying that in that situation you have a moral imperative to vote for Hitler over Hitler+. You don't. I've personally sat out a run-off election where I couldn't hold my nose and put the stamp on anyone (though I would argue the difference in foreseeable outcomes between the two was infinitely smaller than between Harris and Trump). However, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on if I were to deem those that did manage to hold their noses immoral.
I understand and share your frustration with where the Overton window is currently positioned, but the interesction of those 3 positions is a self-cannibalizing mess and needs revising. The most obvious fix is dropping "wanting less short term misery is wrong because Hitler".
Can you imagine Obama campaigning bragging about Dick Cheney endorsing him?+ Show Spoiler +
(E: I should have mentioned Obama was also more oppositional to Netenyahu while he was doing less heinous shit than he has been on Biden/Harris' watch) Mind you Obama's 9 out of 10 people he bombed not being the target thing was a bit of a last straw for me to stop being a Democrat.
Electoralism undermines actual/revolutionary socialist progress constantly. Liberal electoralism (as led by avowed capitalists) is inextricably anti-socialist.
In a Hitler vs Hitler+ election the obligation is to overthrow the government by any means necessary. One way electoralism undermines those willing to meet that obligation is that those that are too cowardly to meet their obligation choose to point to the harm reduction of voting for Hitler as an excuse for not overthrowing the government they empowered to do horrific things to people they don't really care about. This is frequently in vain hopes Hitler doesn't come for them. Hence "First they came for..."
That's perfectly fair, but in that framework there's nothing wrong with voting for the lesser evil, what's wrong is that voting for the lesser evil is the entirety of the plan. And the slippery slope breaks down at this stage, because the reason voting for Harris (unlike hopefully Hitler) is the entirety of the plan is that most of them find her positions palatable rather than evil - which I'm aware you disagree with, but that's a different point.
While I don't think electoralism is very likely to bring about meaningful change for the better, I do think that's more likely to happen than revolution. Something stuck with me from 2016 when Bernie lost the primary to Hillary with some help for her from the DNC. Bernie didn't fall out of a 5th floor window and the votes were cast and counted. The pushback against him from the DNC was a mere speed bump compared to the forces that would be opposing a system overthrow, yet that pushback was described as impossible to overcome and given as a reason to abandon all hope in voting. I have a hard time reconciling the idea that electoral speed bumps are impossible to climb yet the dragon teeth and barbed wire that would be standing in the way of overthrowing the government are more manageable.
One task is merely difficult, the other is gargantuan. Being entirely defeatist about the former while remaining optimistic about the latter is commendable yet baffling.
My pub quiz team name is Dick Cheney for some reason, I think mostly because he’s legendarily a complete arsehole. I wasn’t there for its founding and I’ve never asked.
I don’t think the Dems are bragging that he’s endorsed Harris, it’s more ‘Jesus Trump is such an arsehole that even Dick Cheney can’t stomach him’
Have we moved on from Hitler versus non-Hitler to Hitler x1 versus Hitler x2? Everything’s getting a bit Dragonball Z for my tastes…
If a you believe a system is fundamentally flawed at its core, and not merely in some state of fixable disrepair why would one participate in it? I don’t get why this is quite so controversial in this particular thread. Or indeed why GH (or anyone) necessarily even has to have tangible, or even vague solutions to the problem, although GH has articulated some of his ideas to be fair
I’m unsure who I’d vote for if it came to Mecha Hitler versus Hitzilla, I likely would vote, although that that is my choice on the hypothetical ballot would rather reinforce my lack of faith in wider structures
On October 26 2024 04:36 WombaT wrote: If a you believe a system is fundamentally flawed at its core, and not merely in some state of fixable disrepair why would one participate in it? I don’t get why this is quite so controversial in this particular thread. Or indeed why GH (or anyone) necessarily even has to have tangible, or even vague solutions to the problem, although GH has articulated some of his ideas to be fair
This particular round was about whether those participating in it are wrong to do so and whether their participation in it precludes them from fixing it in other ways in parallel. Not about whether GH or anyone else has an obligation to participate (they don't).
On October 26 2024 01:45 Sermokala wrote: A better question than asking what Trump could say that would make Oblade or BJ vote for harris I think would be what could Trump say or do that would make GH, or leftists who think a trump presidency would be better for the nation long term, vote for harris.
"I have undeniable proof that Harris shot a person on 5th avenue"
should be enough, because unlike the current GOP, the Democrats have not bought into a Cult of Personality around Harris.
E: not enough for GH obviously as he is not a lesser evilist.
I find this line of attack childish and silly but I obviously would prefer Harris stop supporting genocide and beat Trump than lose to Trump.
I'm just pointing out Democrats are so insistent on supporting genocide they'd rather lose than give up their support for genocide.
Also that their supporters are so far gone that they look at that and rather than blame the people refusing to stop supporting genocide for them losing the support of people that don't support genocide, they blame the people refusing to support genocide for their genocidal shitbags not getting enough votes to beat Republicans preferred genocidal shitbag.
So you'd vote for Trump to prevent a bona fide murderer from becoming president? Because it wasn't an attack. It was me pointing out that you don't play that game and would vote anything else rather than Trump, even if that meant risking a bona fide murderer would be the nominee in your state.
As for the genocide, I don't disagree, I just think there's more people who'd refuse to vote for Harris if she stopped supporting Israel than if she continues doing what she's doing. Damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda deal.
I was talking about Serm's question itself, sorry for the confusion. I don't want Trump to win, but Democrats are trying really hard to let him. The genocide thing is just one especially obvious example of the depravity Democrats have sunken to.
The people that would refuse to vote for Harris if she sided with the majority of voters and stopped arming Israel's genocidal campaign weren't going to vote for her in the first place or are exactly as I describe, Democrats that insist on supporting genocide even if it means they have to support Trump winning to get it.
Ironically more Republicans want to stop supporting Israel's genocidal campaign than Democrat voters want to continue and still people cling to this idea that Democrats are supporting genocide for votes (as if that's not totally depraved) www.scribd.com (Pgs. 7, 65)
On October 24 2024 00:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
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.
1. So you can imagine a scenario where legislatures should intervene, are you gonna say whether you think this is one of those scenarios? If there a reason you’re keeping us in suspense? Personally I don’t think puberty blockers are all that similar to pain pills but given you’re the one that brought it up, do you? Or is it just kind of an irrelevant aside about how doctors are bad sometimes?
2. Yeah like I said I don’t really follow what Europe’s been up to, because I don’t care. I’m not sure why “Sweden has decided…” should change my mind any more than “Alabama hahas decided…” or “Florida has decided…” would. Nothing against Europeans, y’know, but I never bought the idea that Europe is automatically more progressive or enlightened. They’ve got their own weird culture wars, I don’t need any more of those.
Given that trans issues have been a constant culture war conversation for several years now, it’s not implausible to me that more young people are associating their personal difficulties to gender presentation than would have in the past. Maybe 50 years ago a 14 year old who didn’t quite fit in would just be angsty, now they’re more likely to consider whether it’s that dysphoria thing everybody’s been talking about constantly. I dunno. This has been turned into a moral panic about kids trans-ing each other or transitioning to be cool, which I just don’t buy – it’s a huge hassle at a minimum that would put a huge target for harassment on your back, even in a younger generation that’s more accepting about it. A confused kid could misattribute their problems, but I don’t think a meaningful percentage are doing it to get to eat at the cool table.
But if more kids are self-reporting dysphoria than did in the past, and trying out social transition to see if that helps them (followed by medical interventions if it does), I don’t immediately see why that’s a crisis. If it’s not helping them they’re gonna have to figure that out for themselves. I guess you’d worry there’s some risk of their woke parents and peers will be so eager to support them that they’ll feel like they can’t change their mind? But I’ve always known people to be pretty ready to accept whatever they think is right for them. I mean, the whole point of the “start with social transition, then stay on puberty blockers for a while” thing is to give them time to think about it and change their mind if they want.
At the end of the day increased prevalence is pretty weak evidence that they’re “wrong” somehow. If they’re as malleable as you’re worried they are, maybe they’re never going to change their mind because this is who they are now; is that so bad? Or maybe prevalence really has increased for some reason (idk, some PFAS side effect or something); so what? Kids and their parents and their doctors are making difficult medical decisions, all we can do is try to give them the best information possible.
3. Believe me, I know you’ve been posting about it for years. Whenever I have trouble figuring out what you’re on about, I try to figure out if there’s an angle that would incorporate the concept “self-censorship,” and if there is, I figure that’s probably where you’re coming from.
And I mean, catch me on the right day and I worry about it too. There’s a lot of political conversations on both the left and the right where it feels to me like everybody is reading the room and trying to figure out the right thing to say in this crowd, and nobody is actually thinking sincerely about the underlying questions. I start thinking about the French Revolution sometimes, the way the orthodox position can change so fast and everybody re-orients so easily to it; the few that actually believe in something and stick to it are liable to get isolated, flanked from all sides, and destroyed, leaving nothing but a population of cynical survivalists who will say anything because they believe in nothing.
But that’s when I’m feeling particularly melodramatic. Most days I think people might have to choose their battles a bit regarding what they say on politically charged topics when their career could be affected, but we get a pretty distorted view of this from stuff like Twitter. For most people in every day life, they mostly have about as much freedom to think and say whatever they want as they ever had. If there was a HUAC responsible for it that we could dismantle I’d say let’s dismantle it, but when it’s just a fuzzy-headed orthodoxy agreed on by Twitter mobs, I don’t think there’s much to be done. Don’t give it too much oxygen, don’t give it any more power than it already has, but otherwise, God knows we have a lot of worse problems to worry about.
Personally I think the onus is on the people recommending a particular treatment to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. If health experts in Europe see it another way you seem more likely to conclude that there must be a lot of transphobes in Europe as well, as opposed to maybe the evidence for your beliefs isn't as strong as you thought. The reason I bring up Europe is to make you confront your opinion that we should just leave it up the medical professionals. We have a situation where different medical professionals in different countries might believe different things. So...? What now...? Do you think we should go along with both even if they are saying contradictory things? Should whether or not a child gets gender-affirming care just be left up to the random geographical circumstances of where they were born? Kids in the UK and Sweden will just have to go without because you can't be bothered to care about what Europe is doing?
It seems like you don't even really care about the evidence as you have a sort of laissez-faire approach of let's just let kids socially transition and "see if that helps them" and then "if it's not helping them they're going to have to figure that out for themselves." Like when has that ever been a way to practice medicine? Let's just let children figure it out for themselves what's the best treatment and it's not the end of the world if they mess it up?
Also I'm sure you probably suspect that I lean more libertarian on most things. So naturally, no, I wouldn't typically conclude that lawmakers should be the ones deciding trans issues. But I'm also not willing to conclude that nothing should be decided by lawmakers. But it's not like Republican lawmakers are the ones exclusively trying to butt in. In California they passed a bill instructing courts to consider whether a parent affirms a child's gender when making custody decisions. Think about that... European health commissions have concluded there is not great evidence for gender affirming care but in California if you don't do it you might lose custody of your child in a custody dispute.
On October 26 2024 04:36 WombaT wrote: If a you believe a system is fundamentally flawed at its core, and not merely in some state of fixable disrepair why would one participate in it? I don’t get why this is quite so controversial in this particular thread. Or indeed why GH (or anyone) necessarily even has to have tangible, or even vague solutions to the problem, although GH has articulated some of his ideas to be fair
This particular round was about whether those participating in it are wrong to do so and whether their participation in it precludes them from fixing it in other ways in parallel. Not about whether GH or anyone else has an obligation to participate (they don't).
On October 24 2024 01:04 Liquid`Drone wrote: [quote]
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.
1. So you can imagine a scenario where legislatures should intervene, are you gonna say whether you think this is one of those scenarios? If there a reason you’re keeping us in suspense? Personally I don’t think puberty blockers are all that similar to pain pills but given you’re the one that brought it up, do you? Or is it just kind of an irrelevant aside about how doctors are bad sometimes?
2. Yeah like I said I don’t really follow what Europe’s been up to, because I don’t care. I’m not sure why “Sweden has decided…” should change my mind any more than “Alabama hahas decided…” or “Florida has decided…” would. Nothing against Europeans, y’know, but I never bought the idea that Europe is automatically more progressive or enlightened. They’ve got their own weird culture wars, I don’t need any more of those.
Given that trans issues have been a constant culture war conversation for several years now, it’s not implausible to me that more young people are associating their personal difficulties to gender presentation than would have in the past. Maybe 50 years ago a 14 year old who didn’t quite fit in would just be angsty, now they’re more likely to consider whether it’s that dysphoria thing everybody’s been talking about constantly. I dunno. This has been turned into a moral panic about kids trans-ing each other or transitioning to be cool, which I just don’t buy – it’s a huge hassle at a minimum that would put a huge target for harassment on your back, even in a younger generation that’s more accepting about it. A confused kid could misattribute their problems, but I don’t think a meaningful percentage are doing it to get to eat at the cool table.
But if more kids are self-reporting dysphoria than did in the past, and trying out social transition to see if that helps them (followed by medical interventions if it does), I don’t immediately see why that’s a crisis. If it’s not helping them they’re gonna have to figure that out for themselves. I guess you’d worry there’s some risk of their woke parents and peers will be so eager to support them that they’ll feel like they can’t change their mind? But I’ve always known people to be pretty ready to accept whatever they think is right for them. I mean, the whole point of the “start with social transition, then stay on puberty blockers for a while” thing is to give them time to think about it and change their mind if they want.
At the end of the day increased prevalence is pretty weak evidence that they’re “wrong” somehow. If they’re as malleable as you’re worried they are, maybe they’re never going to change their mind because this is who they are now; is that so bad? Or maybe prevalence really has increased for some reason (idk, some PFAS side effect or something); so what? Kids and their parents and their doctors are making difficult medical decisions, all we can do is try to give them the best information possible.
3. Believe me, I know you’ve been posting about it for years. Whenever I have trouble figuring out what you’re on about, I try to figure out if there’s an angle that would incorporate the concept “self-censorship,” and if there is, I figure that’s probably where you’re coming from.
And I mean, catch me on the right day and I worry about it too. There’s a lot of political conversations on both the left and the right where it feels to me like everybody is reading the room and trying to figure out the right thing to say in this crowd, and nobody is actually thinking sincerely about the underlying questions. I start thinking about the French Revolution sometimes, the way the orthodox position can change so fast and everybody re-orients so easily to it; the few that actually believe in something and stick to it are liable to get isolated, flanked from all sides, and destroyed, leaving nothing but a population of cynical survivalists who will say anything because they believe in nothing.
But that’s when I’m feeling particularly melodramatic. Most days I think people might have to choose their battles a bit regarding what they say on politically charged topics when their career could be affected, but we get a pretty distorted view of this from stuff like Twitter. For most people in every day life, they mostly have about as much freedom to think and say whatever they want as they ever had. If there was a HUAC responsible for it that we could dismantle I’d say let’s dismantle it, but when it’s just a fuzzy-headed orthodoxy agreed on by Twitter mobs, I don’t think there’s much to be done. Don’t give it too much oxygen, don’t give it any more power than it already has, but otherwise, God knows we have a lot of worse problems to worry about.
Personally I think the onus is on the people recommending a particular treatment to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. If health experts in Europe see it another way you seem more likely to conclude that there must be a lot of transphobes in Europe as well, as opposed to maybe the evidence for your beliefs isn't as strong as you thought. The reason I bring up Europe is to make you confront your opinion that we should just leave it up the medical professionals. We have a situation where different medical professionals in different countries might believe different things. So...? What now...? Do you think we should go along with both even if they are saying contradictory things? Should whether or not a child gets gender-affirming care just be left up to the random geographical circumstances of where they were born? Kids in the UK and Sweden will just have to go without because you can't be bothered to care about what Europe is doing?
It seems like you don't even really care about the evidence as you have a sort of laissez-faire approach of let's just let kids socially transition and "see if that helps them" and then "if it's not helping them they're going to have to figure that out for themselves." Like when has that ever been a way to practice medicine? Let's just let children figure it out for themselves what's the best treatment and it's not the end of the world if they mess it up?
Also I'm sure you probably suspect that I lean more libertarian on most things. So naturally, no, I wouldn't typically conclude that lawmakers should be the ones deciding trans issues. But I'm also not willing to conclude that nothing should be decided by lawmakers. But it's not like Republican lawmakers are the ones exclusively trying to butt in. In California they passed a bill instructing courts to consider whether a parent affirms a child's gender when making custody decisions. Think about that... European health commissions have concluded there is not great evidence for gender affirming care but in California if you don't do it you might lose custody of your child in a custody dispute.
A lack of uniformity may just point to a complex issue that has divergent opinions on how to approach it. It certainly won’t be beneficial for individuals subject to the policies and procedures put in place by the folks who get it wrong, in the long run it will figure out what is close to optimal.
I don’t think it’s especially helpful that it’s such an incredibly politically charged medical issue, in both directions. Which does absolutely become a real problem if that political pressure gets directed in dictating medical practice.
On October 24 2024 01:04 Liquid`Drone wrote: [quote]
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.
1. So you can imagine a scenario where legislatures should intervene, are you gonna say whether you think this is one of those scenarios? If there a reason you’re keeping us in suspense? Personally I don’t think puberty blockers are all that similar to pain pills but given you’re the one that brought it up, do you? Or is it just kind of an irrelevant aside about how doctors are bad sometimes?
2. Yeah like I said I don’t really follow what Europe’s been up to, because I don’t care. I’m not sure why “Sweden has decided…” should change my mind any more than “Alabama hahas decided…” or “Florida has decided…” would. Nothing against Europeans, y’know, but I never bought the idea that Europe is automatically more progressive or enlightened. They’ve got their own weird culture wars, I don’t need any more of those.
Given that trans issues have been a constant culture war conversation for several years now, it’s not implausible to me that more young people are associating their personal difficulties to gender presentation than would have in the past. Maybe 50 years ago a 14 year old who didn’t quite fit in would just be angsty, now they’re more likely to consider whether it’s that dysphoria thing everybody’s been talking about constantly. I dunno. This has been turned into a moral panic about kids trans-ing each other or transitioning to be cool, which I just don’t buy – it’s a huge hassle at a minimum that would put a huge target for harassment on your back, even in a younger generation that’s more accepting about it. A confused kid could misattribute their problems, but I don’t think a meaningful percentage are doing it to get to eat at the cool table.
But if more kids are self-reporting dysphoria than did in the past, and trying out social transition to see if that helps them (followed by medical interventions if it does), I don’t immediately see why that’s a crisis. If it’s not helping them they’re gonna have to figure that out for themselves. I guess you’d worry there’s some risk of their woke parents and peers will be so eager to support them that they’ll feel like they can’t change their mind? But I’ve always known people to be pretty ready to accept whatever they think is right for them. I mean, the whole point of the “start with social transition, then stay on puberty blockers for a while” thing is to give them time to think about it and change their mind if they want.
At the end of the day increased prevalence is pretty weak evidence that they’re “wrong” somehow. If they’re as malleable as you’re worried they are, maybe they’re never going to change their mind because this is who they are now; is that so bad? Or maybe prevalence really has increased for some reason (idk, some PFAS side effect or something); so what? Kids and their parents and their doctors are making difficult medical decisions, all we can do is try to give them the best information possible.
3. Believe me, I know you’ve been posting about it for years. Whenever I have trouble figuring out what you’re on about, I try to figure out if there’s an angle that would incorporate the concept “self-censorship,” and if there is, I figure that’s probably where you’re coming from.
And I mean, catch me on the right day and I worry about it too. There’s a lot of political conversations on both the left and the right where it feels to me like everybody is reading the room and trying to figure out the right thing to say in this crowd, and nobody is actually thinking sincerely about the underlying questions. I start thinking about the French Revolution sometimes, the way the orthodox position can change so fast and everybody re-orients so easily to it; the few that actually believe in something and stick to it are liable to get isolated, flanked from all sides, and destroyed, leaving nothing but a population of cynical survivalists who will say anything because they believe in nothing.
But that’s when I’m feeling particularly melodramatic. Most days I think people might have to choose their battles a bit regarding what they say on politically charged topics when their career could be affected, but we get a pretty distorted view of this from stuff like Twitter. For most people in every day life, they mostly have about as much freedom to think and say whatever they want as they ever had. If there was a HUAC responsible for it that we could dismantle I’d say let’s dismantle it, but when it’s just a fuzzy-headed orthodoxy agreed on by Twitter mobs, I don’t think there’s much to be done. Don’t give it too much oxygen, don’t give it any more power than it already has, but otherwise, God knows we have a lot of worse problems to worry about.
Personally I think the onus is on the people recommending a particular treatment to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. If health experts in Europe see it another way you seem more likely to conclude that there must be a lot of transphobes in Europe as well, as opposed to maybe the evidence for your beliefs isn't as strong as you thought. The reason I bring up Europe is to make you confront your opinion that we should just leave it up the medical professionals. We have a situation where different medical professionals in different countries might believe different things. So...? What now...? Do you think we should go along with both even if they are saying contradictory things? Should whether or not a child gets gender-affirming care just be left up to the random geographical circumstances of where they were born? Kids in the UK and Sweden will just have to go without because you can't be bothered to care about what Europe is doing?
It seems like you don't even really care about the evidence as you have a sort of laissez-faire approach of let's just let kids socially transition and "see if that helps them" and then "if it's not helping them they're going to have to figure that out for themselves." Like when has that ever been a way to practice medicine? Let's just let children figure it out for themselves what's the best treatment and it's not the end of the world if they mess it up?
Also I'm sure you probably suspect that I lean more libertarian on most things. So naturally, no, I wouldn't typically conclude that lawmakers should be the ones deciding trans issues. But I'm also not willing to conclude that nothing should be decided by lawmakers. But it's not like Republican lawmakers are the ones exclusively trying to butt in. In California they passed a bill instructing courts to consider whether a parent affirms a child's gender when making custody decisions. Think about that... European health commissions have concluded there is not great evidence for gender affirming care but in California if you don't do it you might lose custody of your child in a custody dispute.
I wouldn’t exactly say I “don’t care about the evidence.” I’m a chemist who works in the pharma pipeline, I certainly think the data we generate helps prove (or disprove) safety and efficacy in a way that ultimately improves treatment outcomes.
My wife is also chronically ill, and wrt the bolded, that’s exactly how medicine works a lot of the time: you talk to your doctor about different treatment options, you try to make an informed decision, and then you reevaluate periodically whether the current regimen is getting the job done or needs to be adjusted. Psych stuff especially tends to be a lot of trying to find words to describe your emotional experiences, trying different treatments or medications with ambiguous evidence as to their efficacy, and periodically revisiting the subject to decide if things have improved.
I’m not a medical professional, but the normal way for this to work is for medical professionals to try their best to assess the existing evidence and help patients make informed decisions, meanwhile doing clinical trials and case studies and meta-analyses to try to generate more conclusive evidence and eventually settle on a consensus standard of care. I’m not saying that system is perfect, but is there any particular reason to think it needs to be bypassed here? Pain meds were a systemic problem to do with addictive substances and financial incentives that perhaps demanded an external correction of some kind, but I’m not seeing any obvious reason that would be necessary here.
Like, if some doctors in Sweden think the benefit of puberty blockers isn’t worth the detrimental effects on bone density or whatever, okay. I’m not gonna read their evidence because medical journals are boring and I’m not a doctor, but hopefully other medical professionals will, and either provide convincing arguments why they’re wrong or generate further supporting evidence why they’re right. Either way, why get legislatures involved?
CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.
How are you ok with this? He keeps on about the stolen election nonsense and is now trying to intimidate people with threats of jail time. Is this really the type of country you want to live in? Do you think you are immune and wont eventually get caught in the crossfire? This is the exact reason we shouldve never let his lies go unchecked. How did you let it get to this point?
CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.
How are you ok with this? He keeps on about the stolen election nonsense and is now trying to intimidate people with threats of jail time. Is this really the type of country you want to live in? Do you think you are immune and wont eventually get caught in the crossfire? This is the exact reason we shouldve never let his lies go unchecked. How did you let it get to this point?
Easy answer. He said nothing wrong. If election officials are corrupt they should be jailed. To back up this point, I'm willing to have a 5 page discussion about the exact meaning of the word corrupt, and if you're lucky I'll somehow manage to get a few pages in there about woke nonsense.
Colorado which we will all remember has universal no excuse mail-in voting is now dealing with people intercepting and returning other people's ballots that they filled out.
In other news the 5th Circuit ruled Mississippi can't take ballots after Election Day (previously 5 days after)
Congress statutorily designated a singular "day for the election" of members of Congress and the appointment of presidential electors. Text, precedent, and historical practice confirm this "day for the election" is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials. Because Mississipppi's statute allows ballot receipt up to five days after the federal election day, it is preempted by federal law. We reverse the district court's contrary judgment and remand for further proceedings.
Have listened about 2 hours worth so far and Rogan is giving Trump a pretty easy ride, it's been good for Trump.Not to mention the massive audience this goes out to.
Saw on twitter from a Harris spokesperson that Harris was in talks to appear on Rogan but that isn't happening, due to scheduling or something.Really should have fit it in IMO, guess they were worried about her going for 2-3 hours in this sort of format with her history of word salad.
@Nettles yeah im aobut 2 hrs in I expected Rogan to go a bit harder. Tbh this is going well for trump though this format suits his long rambly ways they even joked about it. If Kamala was capable of this kind of a discussion she really should have, I doubt she is.
On October 26 2024 01:45 Sermokala wrote: A better question than asking what Trump could say that would make Oblade or BJ vote for harris I think would be what could Trump say or do that would make GH, or leftists who think a trump presidency would be better for the nation long term, vote for harris.
Not the person in question. But for me it would take proof of bad policy. I have multiple times in real life stated I would vote for a rock over Trump. That is based on him being a large net negative in any political position that isn't a parody.
I don't think serial murderer would be enough. Can find comparable crimes for Trump depending on person values for various crimes.
EPT
