Flowersignup
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User ID: 3556
Flowersignup
16d ago
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
There are human males who currently live their life taking estrogen, wearing clothes typically associated with women, being referred to as she/her by their associates along with a corresponding female associated name and other things like that. Vice versa with human females doing testesterone and social changes.
That's just observable reality. Whether or not you think that includes a human male as a "woman" is a categorical dispute, that these people exist and are doing such things is just plain fact.
You can not like them and still acknowledge the very obvious objective reality that there are adult humans who are living their life in modern society as the other gender through medical treatment and social changes.
Whether or not you accept the identity from a categorical perspective doesn't change that there are people doing that.
Edit: to be clear since there is confusion, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on the merits of whether or not trans people actually fall into the category they wish, I'm saying that "trans adults" is meaningfully a group. It refers to a category of people that we all understand is meant when said. It means people like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Ellen/Elliot Page. This is a group that does indeed meaningfully exist.
I think more people could understand the depths of this debate better by steelmanning the pro puberty blocker/pro HRT side a little and seeing that allowing people to go though puberty normally is also not reversible. And a lot of transgender adults (and teens off the very basis that they are seeking out hormones) openly express that they wish they didn't have to go through their natural puberty.
So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.
There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.
And blockers came up as the compromise solution and promoting them as the free space where everything can be reversed seems just like wishful thinking from everyone. Because if it's true then it's a very easy solution that won't cause any harm.
Flowersignup
16d ago
It doesn't necessarily matter how it happened so much as that it happened and speaks to a wider failing in OPSEC procedures. They're sending sensitive information across the internet without even verifying who the recipients are.
Even if there wasn't anything classified on its own (despite the reporting certainly suggesting there is), a lot of information can still be sensitive if you gather it in one place because it can allow foreign agents to build up and intuit the classified info from context. Known as classification by compilation Likewise insight into how they make plans and act on them can be useful tools for our enemies.
The more little bits of information you can gather and the more context you can put them in the more dangerous a piece of information becomes, even if on its own it might be public knowledge.
And you'd be surprised how many seemingly unimportant details get tracked by journalists and foreign agents, pizza deliveries going up during big news (people were staying later than normal or celebrating or whatever else was a trend noticed back in the 90s. All because it's just one tiny little hint helping to build up context.
This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?
China or Russia isn't going to tell us "Oh yeah we have eyes on X and Y private conversations because they're incompetent and don't actually check things." They're gonna sit there and eat their free lunch and just like seeing one cockroach means you need to be ready for more hiding around, one basic security mistake is a strong reason to worry about others that haven't been revealed.
And it apparently being done through improper channels is even worse because it incentivizes people who fuck up to keep silent about it cause they just don't have the fuck up to contend with but their own improper choice they have to answer for as well. It's also the complete opposite of any smart Cover Your Ass strategy because now any failure is on you because you went around the proper and official path.
Flowersignup
17d ago
Vacuuming and babysitting are both things that people often hire workers to do. It might be ok if it's incidental, but if you had a routine where he did these things, it could easily be seen that you are accepting the labor in kind in exchange for the room.
Remember that your friend is a guest and you are the host. You are not roommates from the perspective of the law, as he is simply on holiday and staying over at your house instead of a hotel. Personally, I would never ask a guest to do something like vacuum the house
I get the logic but I still believe that to be way too broad. We split basic home living tasks because he was occupying the space for the duration. When I went to visit him a few years ago I did the same there and we split the chores because I was occupying a space and leaving behind the typical household mess of dirt on a rug or dishes needing to be cleaned. This is what we see as polite, we're best friends and we don't want to impose as a guest just as much as we want to be a good host for each other.
Other activities such as driving a car and making meals are likely fine as they are acceptable leisure activities to do under the visa, and the fact that you benefited from them is incidental.
Doesn't that apply to other tasks like vacuuming or dishes? You benefit from cleaning up the space you live in so you don't have to be in a dirty space. I don't see how driving a car or making meals is any different when those are both also potential jobs people pay for.
Flowersignup
17d ago
Illegal: Clean up, do the dishes, tend to the garden
Agent: You're about to have a real bad day
If that would actually count as work when caught then I think we have an issue with the definitions being used. I had a friend over from the UK myself last year for about 2-3 weeks, he stayed in my spare bedroom and I made him clean up after himself (obviously) and he helped me with a few chores like doing dishes and vacuuming throughout because he was temporarily living there and when you're living with someone you help do the things. I made meals sometimes, he did sometimes. Sometimes I did the driving, sometimes he would. And hell I left the house at one point to get groceries and left him in charge of my niece when she was spending the night over. Because again that's all just part of being with a person living in their space.
I don't think any reasonable person would hear "you can't work on this visa" and understand it to cover basic chores like that.
Flowersignup
18d ago
A hacked website can just as easily display false data as real data. It seems real from a common sense angle but the court system can't just take "Well this random guy on the internet who edited the webpage says it's legit" so realistically someone has to try to sue for discrimination and get it to the courts so they can subpoena things properly.
Flowersignup
18d ago
Yeah you're right she's UCP, but they're working in tangent with the CPC. After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.
Flowersignup
18d ago
New thing that might possibly hurt the conservatives even more is the recent Breitbart interview by Danielle Smith (premier of Alberta).
In it she says
So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I’ve told administration officials. Let’s just put things on pause so we can get through an election,”
Notice that it's "on pause" for why people are pointing this out as a failure and
but I would say, on balance, the perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with, I think…the new direction in America,”
So at a time when Trump is upsetting Canadians so much that it's pushing for a resurgence in support for the liberals, the CPC's public strategy seems to be digging the grave even deeper. Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.
There's a very high chance that the conservatives have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here and it's almost entirely thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive rhetoric and trade wars on Canada, and a strong showing by the Liberals to capitalize on this effectively.
Flowersignup
19d ago
Of course former precedent does matter but changes matter too.
Think of it like this, let's say a parent has a 10 year old who suddenly starts muttering to themselves about killing you in your sleep. And they keep doing it over and over, and they sometimes brandish a knife and say they're gonna stab you. And they started stabbing animals outside.
You could go "Haha well, they've never killed me before when they were younger so it won't happen now" and sleep soundly, or you could go "Huh they've never threatened me before, I should probably get them checked out and get medical help".
I assume you would choose the second one. I assume you understand why a change in their rhetoric and behavior is meaningful. The parent that chooses the first one gets stabbed at night and is "surprised" despite being told that it would happen.
Flowersignup
19d ago
As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1. Whether that is because he himself has changed, a difference in advisors/staff, or a change in the Republican party around him I do not know.
But what we do know is that things have changed quite a bit, and he is now calling for Canada to be made into a state. A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.
Flowersignup
19d ago
I'm not aware of any time during the first administration that Trump talked about taking over Canada or Greenland, especially not so consistently. So what makes it different is exactly that, he's now saying he wants to.
Now whether or not he can do it is a different question from whether or not he wants to do it. I think the chance of a Canada annexation is unlikely. But he has signaled consistently (along with his aides saying he is serious) so the motive seems real.
Flowersignup
20d ago
"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.
I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.
1: "Repeated preoccupation"
This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"
2: "Aides say he's serious."
Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.
3: "Canada says he's serious"
Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.
4: "Questioned our border"
He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.
5: "Loves big real estate deals."
Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"
6: "Fits into his world view"
Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence
7: "Threatened other countries"
He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.
8: "Consider his influences"
People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.
9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"
Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.
10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"
They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.
11: "Spins Canada as abuser"
They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.
12: "Information Bubble"
Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.
13: "No Personal Morals"
Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.
While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.
Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.
Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"
He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"
All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?
So for discussion, there's a few questions.
Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?
Flowersignup
20d ago
We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
Have we? I've not seen any experiment where they take a city without day shelters for their homeless and then put funding into day shelters and see what happens.
Flowersignup
20d ago
Do you earnestly believe that everyone in a night shelter who goes to a library or mall during the day due to lack of a day shelter being available are so deeply unwell they need forced hospitalization?
It seems to me the first step should be "make a day shelter available" and then the second step for stragglers who are too unwell to use it is the mental institutions.
Flowersignup
21d ago
That might be the intent, I don't know. But the result seems to be, as we can see in those threads, "oh shit where do I go? Oh the library or the mall".
It seems the lack of day shelters just turns other things into day shelters.
and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming.
I kinda have to disagree with this and for the fundamental reason that the US is still pretty much the leading economic and military power in the world, and even through Covid we made a stronger recovery than most other nations. Clearly whatever we are doing is working pretty well. I don't know exactly what or why but we seem blessed by something.
Shaking up the etch-and-sketch to start all over is something I would employ for a shitty economy like Argentina (as Milei has rightfully done), while preferring general status quo with surgical tools for the big dogs like America. It's possible that eliminating the DOE is part of the surgery, but the lackadaisical approach so far to cutting government (the firing and then rehiring of nuclear experts or bird flu scientists, etc) and making changes (like the backlash over labeling Jackie Robinson or that military officer DEI, something easily avoidable if they just had a pair of eyes go over the list first) doesn't leave me confident about any individual decision they make.
It doesn't even seem to be a shoot first and ask questions later policy, it seems to be a "shoot first and correct the things with immediate and visible consequences or backlash" policy.
Flowersignup
21d ago
But then what do we do? We either have a place to go (day shelters, library, etc) or put them in jail. But the US already has really high incarceration rates to the point even the "soft on crime" states look pretty extreme compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe some of this is explained by a difference in definitions (and I definitely think we should discount some of the countries like Russia and China since they might even be faking data) but it's hard to imagine there's much categorical flummery available within the question of "is a person locked up against their will by the government?", especially compared to western peers so I'm not sure how effective just keep locking up even more is going to work out for us.
At the very least it seems there's a deeper issue to be addressing in why the US seems to have way more visible homeless than Taiwan or Japan or New Zealand or the UK.
Total amount of money isn't very useful if it's being spent on things that aren't effective. It's a similar issue to what we see with drug rehab, all the money going to the Christian centers whose cure is "find God" or the reiki ones or the horseback riding ones or the chicken processing plant one not only doesn't help, it likely hurts compared to the more evidence backed solution of medication.
I imagine if a bunch of the money currently spent on "homelessness" just went to day shelters or (even better for a pretty large amount of homeless) just having temporary housing/apartments available, we'd have all the people in those instead of heading off to their local library.
Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters. People don't realize this but a lot of shelters are closed during the day and will literally kick out the people using them and tell them to come back that night.
This presents an obvious issue, if the shelters are where you're supposed to go when you're homeless but they're not open, where are the homeless using them supposed to go? Some places have daytime shelters but as illustrated by this thread often the answer is just "go to the library". Some others (across multiple threads, you can find quite a few discussing where to go when the shelters close) include heading out to the woods, the mall, a movie theater, setting up a tent, coffee shops, a university/community college, even a storage unit or go do their day job (something like 40% of homeless have a job and that number is rising).
Now maybe if we do get plentiful and reliable day shelters where homeless can go, there will still be some shitty stragglers at the libraries and parks and buses. There probably would be a few at least and we can figure out how to get them away then but until the option of daytime shelters is at least available we can't be expecting anything else. They have to exist somewhere and they're gonna choose a place that is open to the public, air condition and feels safe.
Flowersignup
24d ago
Them is a pronoun used to refer to a prior named person and/or group. I know people are used to conspiracy "Them" usage as some vague Illuminati Jewish Conspiracy, but it's also just normal English.
The biggest issue is framing your conclusions as our conclusions. We need to investigate. We should discard him. No. This is a discussion, not a petition. Please don’t speak for everyone.
My thoughts on what people should do when seeing misinformation doesn't mean others have to follow it. I think we should call the police about a break-in but that doesn't mean a person has to if they got robbed.
I think I found some potential timestamp fraud in government we should be looking at.
No one is working 120 hours a week.
That leaves 7 hours a day (yes including weekends) for anything else that isn't working so they wouldn't be getting good enough sleep, they're not showering, they're not messaging their families, and all the fun Doomscrolling on social media Musk seems to have time for. And if they are spending lots of time not doing work while working (like other office jobs) then they should be revising down to reflect that they're counting their shower times and twitter scroll times. I don't get to claim I did 50 hours of work because every morning I get up, poop, brush my teeth and shower and commute taking up roughly an hour and the time I spend driving back and getting gas and other parts of life. (Edit: Also for musk specifically, what about all the other jobs he's supposed to be doing? Are we supposed to believe this man never sleeps?)
80 hours? Definitely possible.
100? Really pushing it.
120 for a sustained period? That's a lie. They're either lying or are doing other things while claiming they work which is also a lie. And either they're actually clocking in 120 (in which case that's a really strong sign of timestamp fraud) or he's lying about their hours worked to everyone else.
Why bring this up? Well Musk keeps lying, about a lot of things. They famously lied about the amount of money they cut forcing them to delete it.
He lied about social security by implying that all the people on numident were falsely receiving benefits
BBC verify did a debunking of the Gaza condom claims, he mislead people about FEMA spending being spent on migrant housing (they administered over funding from a separate program and none was using from normal FEMA funds), etc etc.
And in general the way I think about liars is these two points
1: We need to ask "why are they lying?". Why claim you're working 120 hours a day when it's obviously not true? Why mislead people on social security fraud or FEMA spending? Why lie?
It could be that they were trying to do something properly, could not find actual good evidence but wanted to save face. It could be that they have an ulterior motive. It could be that they're genuinely incompetent with what they are doing. But there is a reason and understanding that is important.
2: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. When a known liar keeps making misleading or false claims, it's on us to stop taking the things they say at face value. Fool us again, shame on us. Whenever Musk makes a claim about fraud or waste or hours spent working, we should discard him as a tainted source. It's not to say he can't be telling the truth about something, but this water spout is corrupted and we should draw from the clean river of truth somewhere else. He can bring the receipts if he wants to be believed.
Edit: To be clear here the possibility here is.
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He's just straight up lying in general
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They do work a whole lot but they're including things like showering and brushing teeth and other morning/night activities in their time which is not normal and highly misleading.
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They're seriously truthful and they're working off less than 7 hours of sleep every day of the week for months not doing basic human things like showering, brushing their teeth, cleaning up their trash, or taking breaks ever. Or maybe they fit that in by only doing 6 and a half hours of sleep perpetually instead. Either way they are superhumans but disgusting ones.
Most likely it's just the first
No, I'm saying that these people exist in response to a comment that said
"Assuming one grants that a thing such as
meaningfully exists"
But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.
If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.
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