5434a
15hr ago
It depends how you define castration. The strict definition would be a double orchiectomy. If these chemicals made your balls wither up and drop off then yes, that plainly qualifies as chemically induced castration.
It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].
If you define it as anything that reduces normal sexual function then you put it on a vague and very wide spectrum and it becomes a matter of arguing the balance. The trouble is that would drag a lot of other things into the category. Too much whisky? Recreational amphetamines? SSRIs? It's starting to look like I've been chemically castrated a few times and it reversed rapidly with a good night's sleep and some eggs and coffee. What looked like a powerful rhetorical weapon to attack the trans movement finds itself a little impotent.
What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.
If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.
5434a
3d ago
powerline adapter
I'd recommend paying the extra for power passthrough so as to not lose a socket, and wifi for the added connectivity. All the gains with none of the trade offs.
5434a
6d ago
An individual claim is only one piece of circumstantial evidence. It's also trivially faked and so provides an incredibly weak basis for the epistemic confidence of our assumptions and should be weighted accordingly.
"A woman is anyone who says they are a woman" prejudicially privileges the weakest evidence over all the other evidence.
5434a
7d ago
That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.
It's not that it's simple, it's that it's simplistic. It's intellectual garbage. Accepting it sincerely is corrosive to the very meaning it seeks to assume. It naively installs a back door to womanhood at the cost of collapsing the entire structure. What good is saying you are a woman if being a woman holds no more meaning than a kid saying that he is a t-rex? Should we alert the local zoo that we've discovered a living dinosaur? Why not?
5434a
7d ago
Efforts to nail [language/meaning/words] down are always doomed.
Can meaning be refined and, albeit imperfect, made more exact?
You mention position but the direction matters too. There is a position where transwomen are not women, and there is a direction that when followed arrives at a point where transwomen are women. That is not the only direction meaning can travel, and that's not the point where that particular direction comes to a rest.
Recasting meaning so as to recategorise transwomen as women isn't bold intellectualism, it's sophism. If it was intellectualism it would pursue the direction until it could travel no further, but it always stops at that. one. point.
5434a
9d ago
the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction
Like modern art's relation to photography I feel your discussion of modern architecture is missing some mention of the development of novel materials. A great big part of why so much of it is steel beams, sheet glass and reinforced concrete or finished in synthetic colours and assembled with adhesives and rivets or such is because they were newly available and made what was previously impossible possible. Tie that in with the "truth to materials" attitude from the Arts & Crafts movement and you arrive at a distinctly industrial era aesthetic, both in the sense that the materials are made in a factory and the resulting buildings are often vaguely reminiscent of the factories where the materials were made.
5434a
15d ago
5434a
16d ago
My mother grew up on a farm and as a result always took the pragmatic position regarding these matters that nature knows what it's doing, and it knows what it's not doing too. One seed grows, another seed doesn't, they both had the same care and conditions. All you can do is keep sowing and keep caring. Sounds like you and your wife share a similar level-headed and caring attitude to each other.
5434a
21d ago
Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. It's short, with suitably lively prose to paint the picture of unfettered big-R/little-r romantic emotionality. Haven't finished it yet but the closing section kind of reminds me of reading Faust in how it's unravelling into disjointed fragments.
5434a
22d ago
You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.
Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.
5434a
25d ago
5434a
30d ago
The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.
5434a
30d ago
This argument can easily go either way. Since before humanity the mother supplied the egg, the womb, and archetypically the nursing and parenting too. Now technology means that we can take an egg from one woman, implant it into another, and then pass the baby to another after delivery. They're all doing parts of mothering but none of them are doing all of mothering, and so there's always room to say they are or aren't a "real" mother, it's a matter of how pedantic you need to be.
To illustrate by inversion, would you say that the random Swedish woman is the mother? Because there's a trivial counter that she had no part in a biologically fundamental part of mothering. But does that mean that the child doesn't have a mother? Or two? If two, why are they different? I don't know the answer other than it seems the word is inadequate to properly describe the novel situation. Metamother? Metasexual reproduction? Egg mother, womb mother, and breast mother? Fractional mother? I don't know. Just that if you draw your line too rigidly you probably have to conclude the child doesn't have a mother, which doesn't sit well with the drawing of rigid lines. Relaxing those lines though opens up an argument that anyone who can claim a part of the label is entitled to the whole, and we all know where that goes.
Perhaps we could sweep the whole argument aside and ask why does it matter, what matters is knowledge of the underlying facts. But then the argument rears up again because the label implies a set of facts that ought to provide knowledge, otherwise what use is the label?
Just some thoughts.
5434a
1mo ago
Started Generation F by Winston Smith, from the short-lived era of blog-turned-book behind-the-scenes public sector exposés. It's partly "if only you knew how bad things really are" but so far it's been let down by its shallow analysis. For example the author questions why the number of supported housing units expanded so rapidly under New Labour? Answer: Because "it became easier for parents to offload their children into State care". Leaving aside how that puts the cart before the horse it also begs the question of how New Labour and more importantly their backers and supporters benefitted from this change, and this coming immediately after a brief accounting of his workplace's state-funded running costs.
The characters are very two dimensional too, boiling down to little more than interchangeable pastiches standing for male resident, female resident, coworker, and lower/middle/upper management.
On the plus side it's not shy about critiquing the poor/negative outcomes of the system the author finds himself working under.
5434a
1mo ago
Where are all the other assassination attempts that they caught?
There was the second attempt two months later where the Secret Service caught that guy on the golf course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Donald_Trump_in_Florida
And this list of other stories I don't remember even hearing half of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Donald_Trump
11 incidents in 9 years.
5434a
1mo ago
(Gen x get nothing, as is tradition.)
"Baby Boomers got sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. We got AIDS, crack and techno."
5434a
1mo ago
Then this and that happened
Reminds me of the Snoop Pierson interview where she recalls walking down the street, seeing some people arguing across the road, "and then one thing led to another and I got sentenced to seven years for attempted murder".
5434a
1mo ago
Yes, integrated router-modem. ADSL/standard wired landline telephone connection to the cabinet though, not coax cable which appears to be what DOCSIS is used for.
5434a
1mo ago
The router is an integrated modem-router, ~20Mbs ADSL, copper to the cabinet then fibre to the exchange.
I realise it's low powered hardware but that should be offset by being specialised to the task, right? Rebooting takes <30 seconds. It's not the best router but it's less than 5 years old, and when it's connected it works without any issues.
5434a
1mo ago
Last chapter of Castles of Steel, never thought I'd find WW1 naval warfare interesting enough to read a 900 page book about it. Never thought that so much naval warfare would involve two giant fleets hiding as far away from each other as possible either, or that when they did meet they could spend the whole day trading 12 inch shells and still sail home largely intact.
Thanks to @netstack for the recommendation. Definitely not a book I would have started without seeing his posts about it.
Low stakes small scale idle curiosity question for the network engineers here: Why does my router (edit for clarity: ADSL router-modem) take so long to connect to the internet? I don't mean a full reboot of the system, just <disconnect> <reconnect>. It takes about 5 minutes. Feels like I could reboot my phone and connect to wireless internet faster than a simple hang-up-redial cycle on a wired connection.
To my naive mind the process should consist of authentication over what is effectively LAN, and then connection/access to the WAN, like connecting to a network switch but with many more users. My little consumer grade network switch doesn't take 5 minutes to start up, it's been a long time since I rebooted it but if I had to guess I'd say it takes less than 30 seconds from a cold start, and reconnecting after pulling the cable and replugging it takes less time than sitting back down. What processes are actually happening?
5434a
1mo ago
Apparently at least one risk is scalding when hot water is used to set the braids, causing injuries bad enough to require hospital admission.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468912222000062
That article notes some other injuries that read like they're more in line with simply pulling the hair so tight that it either comes out or damages the scalp.
The picture that emerges is of people wanting to give their young daughters a cool hairstyle, baulking at the price of a hairdresser, trying to DIY it at home and either spilling boiling water on their kid or more likely letting a full head of hair that's freshly loaded with boiling water fall back onto the kids neck, shoulders and chest.
The article is about the UK but in America you have the issue of any resulting hospital bills to consider on top.
Reading around the topic of cosmetology there's also stuff about hairdressers being more prone to reproductive issues like low birth weight and premature ovarian failure due to exposure to toxic chemicals.
Even as a reasonably intelligent person who would be naturally wary of boiling water or less immediate risks like chemical burns I wouldn't have intuited that hair styling could contribute to ovarian failure.
I don't agree with the definition. It would classify a child being prescribed puberty blockers as an on-label treatment for precocious puberty as being chemically castrated.
More options
Context Copy link