Hyperion
3mo ago
Khelif likely has 5-alpha reductase deficiency. This enzyme turns testosterone into dihydrotestosterone which is required to produce male external genitalia.
This doesn't; however, prevent the body from producing and using testosterone to otherwise masculinize the body and brain. People with this disorder are often raised as girls; then, when they undergo male puberty, with it's massive surge of testosterone, they usually realize the truth of their biology and start identifying as men.
Someone with this disorder still has actual testicles that produce male levels of testosterone and is by any reasonable definition of maleness or manliness a male/man.
I'd guess Khelif grew up in a backwards environment where people didn't know about such things and Khelif and those around them didn't want to admit to the incongruence between the assumed sex and the reality in front of them.
Hyperion
3mo ago
I think what you are saying is mostly true; however, people like Charlemagne and Cortez exist in a Christianity that was reimagined by Germanic warrior aristocrats after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
The same is true, from the other direction, with Homer, who is 'writing' about these bronze age warrior elites in a post-collapse iron age society that has largely moved away from that old model of aristocratic chariot riding warriors, into a form of warfare and social organization that is more broad based and reliant on large numbers of middle class hoplites.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds.
This is again, just because Christianity was Germanized. The German warrior elites kept doing their warrior things, things inherited from their proto-Indo-European ancestors and culture they share, because of it, as well as the influence of the Indo-Iranian, chariot riding elites, that so influenced both cultures.
There isn't any mystery to why members of an Indo-European warrior caste share similar values and traditions.
Hyperion
3mo ago
They've been doing that for months now. I get that it's a shitposting subreddit, but the joke you are going to run into the ground has to at least be a little funny. I unsubscribed a long time ago.
Hyperion
3mo ago
Boys still score higher than girls on standardized tests and other objective measures. They just do worse when you include subjective assessments of their abilities.
It's called hyperbole. Everyone knows what those words literally mean, which is why using them figuratively creates emphasis. It's not a lack of verbal skills, in fact it takes verbal skills to be able to encode and decode the hyperbole.
Hyperion
3mo ago
India is very communalist and is divided into thousands of endogamous castes. China is one big melting pot of a population with a big focus on being a meritocratic peasant society. These lead to very different societies.
Hyperion
3mo ago
The only way to defeat the Houthis is to just starve the population until so many die that support for them either falls or the whole movement crumbles.
I've thought this for a while about both the Yemen war and everything about Palestine. If aid was cut off these states would not only starve, but they would be robbed of a significant source of income from what they skim off the top of aid shipments. To say nothing of the Iranian military aid mixed into the humanitarian aid.
We did worse to the Belgians in WW1, but now we can't lift a finger to protect our own interests.
tradition reasoning sends the issue to the legislature,
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
Those words mean something to some of us...
Hyperion
4mo ago
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%.
The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.
The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%
Hyperion
4mo ago
Corporations, as creatures of the state, should be able to have their speech limited by the state, which was the law prior to CU v. FEC.
Does this apply to media corporations? Or do I have to be the sole owner of a newspaper to have speech rights and if I incorporate I give them up to the state?
Hyperion
4mo ago
When people use the word dictator they use it in the modern sense, which is a bunch of military generals subverting supposedly democratic revolutions for their own personal gain and power. This is also how Julius Caesar used it in the waning days of the Roman Republic.
Cincinnatus was a great dictator, just like George Washington was a great general and president. But, we don't call Washington a dictator, because he went out of his way not to become one. A feat not replicated by the various revolutionaries that have given us the modern definition of dictator.
Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.
Yes and no. The spider society really does have nuclear families, a class system, constitutional monarchies and a World War and Cold War that mirror that of 20th century Britain. The physical descriptions and names are made to more mirror human culture by the autists, but fundamentally the spiders' history and social structure is like 20th century Britain in reality, that part isn't made up.
Also, although, the humans are weirded out, the spiders find humans extremely cute; because, spider children can only look in one direction like humans and spiders find the way humans stare at them while speaking, adorable.
Hyperion
4mo ago
It's pretty wild, but it suffers from the fact that the aliens are just humans who happen to look like spiders. Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.
I think this is by choice since the author seems to believe in a kind of Whig view of history that liberalism is the only real way to advance and anything else is doomed to slow death or stagnation.
The Three-Body Problem did a better job of showcasing actually bizarre aliens, instead of people who look bizarre.
Hyperion
4mo ago
Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.
Hyperion
4mo ago
his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off.
I think this is true of the internet in general. You sometimes hear that Gamergate started it all, but really it was just the moment a certain faction of previously apolitical people realized that progressives were going to politicize the internet and everything.
Hyperion
4mo ago
His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.
Hyperion
4mo ago
You can get better odds on a black jack table if you want to gamble. I thought it was certain that the Democrats would dump Biden a week ago; but, he, somehow, is hanging on. That's why the bet is so even. Most of the time, if you think you've found a mark, you are the mark.
Hyperion
4mo ago
I miss when our elites would just slam an axe into each other's skulls and then payed the weregild afterwards. Made things easier for the masses they ruled over.
Hyperion
4mo ago
What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?
Hyperion
4mo ago
I think it might be more a long the lines of communists declaring social democrat parties social fascists. It's hard to place DeBoer, he just seems to lash out at everyone and seems like a rather awful person to be around, even when he isn't going through a manic episode.
Hyperion
4mo ago
Impeachment is a political question, not a legal question. That is why it's handled by congress. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this. Congress is so sole authority that decides questions of impeachment. No judge can overrule them.
Hyperion
5mo ago
The guy you are arguing with is a literal Nazi who wants to convince moderate 'race realists' that they are really Nazis too. It's why he plays these weird definitional games that mirror those of progressive activists.
Hyperion
5mo ago
Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way.
No he said being cuckolded as in literally raising someone else's child as your own would be worse. That's worlds apart from an affair that leads to no children.
Hyperion
5mo ago
One thing I like about fantasy and science fiction and so forth is its utility as a lens upon our own world: it lets us consider what things would be like if something we believe is true were different.
A lot of people are unable to consume media in this way. If a piece of media says something is true in this fictional hypothetical that wildly diverges from out world, they are trying to say it is also true in our world. So, Starship Troopers a story about a united humanity fighting against literal bugs is really promoting racism and white supremacy in our world, despite it's protagonist being Filipino.
It's similar to people who argue against the hypothetical in thought experiments. They seem to believe worlds in which their current politics fail just can't exist and anyone who would think up such a world only does so to push evil beliefs in the here and now.
That's not how testosterone works. The biggest differences come from puberty. Having low T as an adult doesn't change what happened physiologically during puberty.
At the end of the day humans are supposed to be sexually dimorphic. One sex is supposed to be bigger and stronger. The weird edge cases like 1/5000 intersex people, or trans people who can't accept their biology should just accept competing with men or do anything else with their time.
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