FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
11hr ago
I think that that is less from any inherent differences in the religions and more from cultural differences in the places in which they are practised;
This sounds suspiciously like an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
Ever since I was a child I've assigned sexes to letters in the alphabet. I didn't realise this was a form of synaesthesia until a few years ago. It sometimes leads me to assign unintuitive connotations to words based on what the initial letter is.
From the study each of your links cites:
Quality Assessment
Based on the NIH quality assessment tool, the majority of article [sic] ranged between “poor” and “fair” categories.
In the current study, we identified a total of 7928 cases from 14 different countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest attempt to compile the information on regret rates in this population. However, limitations such as significant heterogeneity among studies and among instruments used to assess regret rates, and moderate-to-high risk of bias in some studies represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of “true” regret.
You've shared that airplane bullets meme with me in the past. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who underwent an elective procedure and doesn't regret it will be more willing to participate in a study about the efficacy of said procedure than someone who regrets undergoing said procedure. A person who sadly took their own life after undergoing one of these procedures wouldn't appear in any of these studies, and there's at least one study which found that trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery were more prone to suicide than trans people that didn't. (I'm not claiming the relationship is necessarily causative, but simply illustrating that these procedures aren't the silver bullet they're commonly presented as. Note that this was a longitudinal study following participants over thirty years, over three times longer than the longest study included in the regret meta-analysis and four times longer than the mean.)
The authors tabulate all the people who participated in the original studies, but don't give us any indication of what the denominator is (as obviously they couldn't, this information not being available to them).
Suffice it to say that I think "gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacement surgery" is an irresponsible claim to make in a vacuum and without qualification. If I cited an otherwise identical meta-analysis making the opposite claim, you'd be pointing out all of these methodological shortcomings.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
Also, bringing up the matter in an unrelated comment isn't very nice.
Ignoring my replies to you while talking about me in dismissive tones in replies to another commenter also isn't "very nice".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
How many fundamentalist Christian communities do you know in which women must cover their entire bodies with the exception of their eyes?
How many suicide bombings have been committed in the name of fundamentalist Christianity?
And when are you going to admit you were wrong to claim that we have good reason to believe gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacements?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Regarding Johnny Depp's divorce and subsequent defamation lawsuits, I know Amber Heard.
... but did Amber Listened? I don't think so.
Headline is CW, but I'm posting here because the syntax made me do a double-take. CW material is spoilered out.
Pakistani Uber Eats driver admits
When I saw it on Substack it was in all caps, so it read PAKISTANI UBER EATS DRIVER.
First self-driving cars – now cars that eat people!
Irish journalist who presented himself as an expert in fake news and disinformation is discovered to have lied about his academic credentials.
I wanted to call this Ireland's answer to Jason Arday, but alas, he's no diversity hire.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I'm aware that people misuse the term, but I was using it according to its literal (correct) meaning of "a person who would like to have consensual sex, but is unable to find a willing partner".
It's fascinating that The Handmaid's Tale has been so widely interpreted as a satire of Christian fundamentalism, when my understanding is that Atwood intended it as a critique of radical Islam. She wrote it in the seventies eighties shortly after the Iranian revolution, and as I understand it, it was her way of trying to explain what Iranian society had become in an American context. "What if the Shah Ayatollah came to Wisconsin" sort of deal.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
True, and plenty of women allege that he groped them, exposed himself and similar in full view of TV cameras. So however he conducted himself in private was at least as bad as he did in public.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I've never written fantasy, but
I've been having my alpha-reader-slave (ie my GF) read my chapters and then quizzing her on them.
Don't do this. There is nothing to be gained and plenty to be lost by showing someone else your work in progress: it will only break your creative flow and cause you to second-guess yourself even more than you're already doing.
Get the entire story down on the page as quickly as possible, don't look at your first draft for six weeks, complete a second draft, then you can show it to someone else.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault
From the Guardian:
Russell Brand has been found guilty of raping a woman and sexually assaulting three others over the course of five years of his showbusiness career.
Brand, 51, was described during his trial as a ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator. He was accused of raping women in a hotel room, in a bar toilet and at his luxury London townhouse. He sexually assaulted women in front of his entourage at their workplaces, including at a radio station and TV studio.
The Hollywood actor turned online influencer was accused of gaslighting his victims after the attacks, and treating women as a “disposable commodity” and a “means to an end” to satisfy his voracious sexual appetite. ...
He had pleaded not guilty to three charges of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault against six women, in allegations spanning 10 years from 1999.
There was some contemporaneous discussion around these parts when these allegations first came out. At the time, I remarked on the widespread perception that rape is the product of sexual frustration (hence, that "incels" are more likely to rape women than sexually satisfied men), and how the best evidence from the social sciences and criminology points in the opposite direction:
men who have numerous sexual partners, one-night stands, concurrent sexual partners, visit prostitutes etc. are more likely to commit rape or sexual assault than men who do not meet this description. In light of this evidence, Brand probably sitting in the 99th percentile for sexual partners should significantly raise our priors that he is guilty of what he is accused of. The fact that he's famously promiscuous isn't dispositive, of course, but it's highly relevant to the accusations.
Brand wasn't merely promiscuous (he once claimed that to have had nine orgasms on a single night in Dublin; an Irish journalist wondered how many of those were prompted by him catching sight of his own reflection), or merely a cad. Perhaps his most infamous moment in the public eye came in 2008: after a brief dalliance with the actress Georgina Baillie, he recorded himself prank-calling her grandfather (actor Andrew Sachs, best-known for playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers) to gloat about fucking her, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2. By her own account, Baillie was humiliated by the experience and didn't speak to her grandfather for eight years; I vaguely recall reading an interview with Sachs where he described the experience as the most upsetting and traumatic of his life (and this is a Jewish man who was forced to flee Germany as a child). Brand himself described the ensuing controversy, during which the BBC was slapped with a £150k fine, as "fun" (he begrudgingly apologised to Sachs six years later, and paid for Baillie's drug and alcohol rehab). Even at the time, some thought that the amount of press coverage the scandal received was disproportionate, which is not an unreasonable position to hold. Nonetheless: a man displaying such callous disregard for the privacy and sexual boundaries of a woman with whom he's been intimate (not to mention displaying such naked contempt for her family members) would be appalling even if he'd been a bit more discreet about it. But he behaved this way when he knew he was being recorded for an audience of millions. Can you imagine the kind of shit he got up to in private?
After his career in Hollywood plateaued, Brand reinvented himself as a political activist, then subsequently as a podcast conservative and born-again Christian (someone quipped that he'd given up "preying" for "praying"). His podcast tended to the conspiratorial, suggesting that nebulous elites were trying to silence him for daring to speak truth to power. It's not hard to join the dots and deduce that he knew these allegations were going to come out sooner or later, and that he was attempting to head off the problem by pre-emptively rubbishing them.
I have never had an easier time believing that a man convicted of rape is, in fact, guilty thereof. Pretty boy like him is going to have a rough time in prison: it wouldn't surprise me if he's placed on protection for a significant chunk of his sentence.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Surely you can agree that sending someone a thousand AK-47s is a very different proposition from sending them a thousand Kevlar vests.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Well, that seems misleading. The Iron Dome is exclusively defensive.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Nicole Shanahan
Huh. I thought Musk only dated weirdo art hoes, I didn't realise he was a man of culture as well.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
After looking up the data, Israel gets $350 per citizen almost exclusively for war.
By "exclusively for war" are you including funding for the Iron Dome and other defensive measures?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Are we playing five degrees of separation here? I have not seen credible claims that he is personally a member. His mother was reportedly active in the Egyptian MB (EMB, henceforth) in the 1970s, and reportedly he defended a friend who was imprisoned for funding the EMB in 2021.
One degree of separation is a lot less than five.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @ThomasdelVasto?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Forgive my sarcasm, but: yes, and some women are taller than some men and are really interested in computers.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I think Presidential races tend to be much closer (aside from Obama in 2008, the margin of victory has been 5% or less in every race this century), which inevitably leads to noisier poll results. Midterms don't seem to be as close, for whatever reason.
the most hardcore anti-Rowling folks on the left immediately stopped accusing her of being anti-semitic the moment October 7 happened.
Did they? According to Spiked they were accusing her of Holocaust denial as recently as March 2024. I think the specific claim was that denying that trans people were one of the primary targets of the Holocaust is tantamount to Holocaust denial, but they were obviously hoping people would interpret this accusation as a denial of the Holocaust in toto.
I'm more than a little alarmed by the number of people who actively foment hatred against Jews and yet who are willing to use baseless accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel against people they despise for unrelated reasons.
I finished the comic book adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's interesting that I hadn't read the original book in about twenty years and yet I remembered the details of the plot perfectly. It was a faithful, well-crafted adaptation which for the most part quotes Lee's original dialogue and narration verbatim. Recommended.
Doing a complete ideological 180, I started on The Camp of the Saints. (The Amazon delivery driver called me to tell me he was on his way, and from his voice he was obviously a first-generation African migrant.) Stylistically, it reminds me of Ayn Rand and, to a lesser extent, Milan Kundera. While not exactly a fast-paced book, so far I'm not finding it a chore to get through.
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