Tanista
4hr ago
Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.
I mean, if we have zero idea then it's still a scandal anyway.
Tanista
5hr ago
I did stress that I'm playing Devil's Advocate Doctor.
I know. You just run into places in these discussions where you're clearly in need of a common touchstone, even if we can't get back.
Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".
True. But, practically, internal dissension seems more relevant than the inability to get the entire human race to agree. Nobody in America is overly bothered by the fact that Saudis have a different moral code.
Although the balance has shifted with how connected we are.
Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.
This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.
Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.
It doesn't disprove the "narrow is the path and few find it" argument if even otherwise healthy people have issues that require correction imo. Seems like it does the opposite.
On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.
You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.
- Our nature hasn't changed as much as some people imply with statements like this. And that's had benefits and downsides.
- Consider how I view the object level issue: I think the things said about the state of the science are bad (outrageous really), the transformation experimental and not particularly good and the consequences of humoring some of the extreme activists' claims awful. I do not treat all forms of "progress" this way and I don't think it's a contradiction.
And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.
The standard for any treatment (or social convention for that matter) has never been that it's 100% successful.
I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.
The situation before the general pullback, where public cachet was redistributed to a small number of people who would likely be even smaller given healthy puberty, combined with credulous diagnosing and taboos against "conversion therapy" seems totally backwards.
I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.
I meant it in the broader sense. I suppose what the Greeks would call eudaimonia and now philosophers translate as "human flourishing", to avoid exactly these problems.
Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.
And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.
Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.
It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).
Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.
Maybe that's what I see myself as doing, but for society.
The arguments against a lot of TRA claims and medical practices to help them are usually on pragmatic grounds.
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.
It has some bearing on whether they meaningfully exist. It's a normative claim: trans adults do not exist in the same way that what we've termed "cis" adults exist, so their judgments about puberty should not be treated the same.
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.
If a news article talked about the "AAPI" ethnicity, do you also feel like there's no context in which one can question whether that ethnicity is meaningful?
I certainly don't think of "AAPI" the same way I think of African-Americans.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.
It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and psychological changes.
It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision.
Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.
She said the assessments would address what she called "diagnostic overshadowing" - when patients' other healthcare issues were overlooked in cases of patients questioning their gender.
...
"What's unfortunately happened for these young people is that because of the toxicity of the debate, they've often been bypassed by local services who've been really nervous about seeing them," Dr Cass said.
"So rather than doing the things that they would do for other young people with depression, or anxiety, or perhaps undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, they've tended to pass them straight on to the Gid service."
We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy , or that they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners)or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.
Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desired when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.
Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.
You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.
I don't think @Southkraut's point has anything to do with "like". I can like drag queens and not grant that drag queens exist in any sort of sense that places them in a similar place as the category of women.
The question is whether it makes any sense for society to place the interests of a few people who want to avoid the otherwise normal healthy developmental pathway with the rest of the human race as if they're equivalent.
If you're not a transhumanist and "trans" is not a mirror of "cis" and is instead just a compassionate term for people who identify with the opposite sex for whatever reason it simply doesn't mean anything to you that puberty is also irreversible.
What of it? Puberty is the normal pathway.
Going after the woke =/= going after them for being anti-Israel .
I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.
I can't tell if pro-Palestinianism already had its moment of immoderate greatness or if philosemitism is having its own.
From a purely cynical perspective, it seems like it would be easier to tamp down on certain attitudes about Jews if there's a general woke regime that reacts horrifically to any perceived attack against any victim of history, the more the merrier.
Having an administration or people hellbent on dismantling that entire system (and whose main talent is exacerbating negative polarization)make exceptions for one group seems suboptimal in comparison. This is how normal people get ideas.
Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.
I mean, if you're concerned with Canadian unity, it's arguably more alarming that the premier of Alberta is doing this.
PP will understandably be tossed out if he should lose this election and the CPC will likely overcorrect. Any tensions with Smith or the (continued) perception of diverging interests between Alberta and other provinces can't be erased or fixed so easily.
If there was an indie Hollywood studio head that worked for a company that had a track record of producing franchises
lost two of those in a visible, controversial way in quick succession and is in the middle of taking the mother of all swings and then stepped down as "god-king" before seeing it through I would wonder if there was a connection.
And that's basically the sort of company they're aiming to be.
Trouble in conservative media? While the left has been catastrophizing over losing the war for attention, a major conservative outlet seem to be stacking a few Ls.
Daily Wire Co-Founder Jeremy Boreing To Step Into New Role Focusing On Entertainment
Boreing, who founded the company in 2015 alongside Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson, said that he is turning his “full attention to creative and entertainment ventures for the company.” Robinson will step in as full-time CEO and assume the day-to-day operations of the company.
“When Ben, Caleb, and I founded The Daily Wire in 2015, we set out to build an institution. I’m enormously proud of our team, of our many battles, and of the successes we’ve achieved together over the last decade. And we’re just getting started,” Boreing said. “To get us to the heights we know we can achieve, we have brought in a world-class executive team that I am confident will thrive in taking us to the next level under Caleb’s ongoing leadership while I turn my full attention to creative
My first thought was "did October 7 kill the Daily Wire?". Candace Owens was one of their big stars but they lost her over antisemitism (she's promptly become even more unhinged). Maybe this took more of a bite out of their base than I assumed at the time. The general split in the Republican party between traditional views on supporting allies and the allegedly anti-war segment that questions spending money on foreign partners ,especially (((those allies))) , could create problems for a company like DW.
And then, not long after that, they lost Brett Cooper as well for still-undisclosed reasons and utterly failed to replace her in a way that seemed to only destroy her former show and made Cooper more popular. Matt Walsh is doing great but can he and Shapiro really cover the company's costs, especially given its ambitions in media?
Which, at least, the Bulwark is suggesting is part of the problem: Boreing decided to adapt the Pendragon Cycle and may have bitten off more than he could chew. It's an action fantasy series is a far cry from a Matt Walsh documentary or sports comedy. The Bulwark is not a neutral source but it is a risk we've previously talked about here when discussing attempts to create an alternative to Hollywood.
Combine that with a bit of a downturn and dubious personnel decisions like treating modern influencers like interchangeable cogs and...someone had to take the fall.
Tanista
6d ago
Next Dem president likely to let 20M in next round, at this rate…
Maybe they think this is a battered wife approach to politics and are just tired of it.
The fallacy in the pro-immigration-for-all argument is thinking that geographic change (transplanting people from poor countries to rich ones) will solve what is fundamentally a social problem (poor countries are poor and remain so because they have poor-quality people).
It's also not self-evidently more just even if it were true.
A lot of the criticisms of hardline immigration positions on the grounds of geographic luck count just as much against most migrants themselves.
Why do central Americans have a disproportionate right to see their living standards improved, even if we agree borders are unjust? There are poorer people who couldn't even conceive of making journey. Clearly, nothing about de facto not enforcing the law eliminates the problem either.
Tanista
6d ago
Hows that working out for you?
Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?
Tanista
7d ago
Only those who (erroneously) claim that they have found a solution and predicate their support for various trans policies on transwomen being women in something other than a spurious sense right?
When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
Is this supposed to be a descriptive claim about how people are using these words?
How do you deal with both naive and committed essentialists?
A person could respond that he doesn't mean the same thing when he calls a man a woman, as in a bitch, compared to if he calls them a mother. In the latter case, he may happily be corrected with a birth certificate and brush it off as irrelevant in the former case. He may also not see any contradiction between gesturing to feminine behaviors that women are assumed to generally possess without ever granting that a person is a woman if they possess those traits but lack certain other, more specific characteristics.
How do you avoid the charge that you're helping such people along to a conclusion they don't actually share?
Tanista
7d ago
Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
Taking ESB alone this is a bit of an issue, though Yoda does explain it with "forever will it dominate your destiny". But ROTJ definitively answers this.
The Dark Side isn't just the target of a rival cult. It's literally space heroin, with the attendant mental and physiological changes. As with heroin, under no circumstances should you take a "sample", even for good reasons, from a weird man in a robe.
The Emperor was clearly willing and able to incapacitate Luke. If he actually had struck down Vader and resisted the Emperor, he would have woken up in a very small cell, having lost everyone he cared about and betrayed his values facing psychological torment until he broke. No amount of post-nut clarity would save him at that point.
And if he managed to kill the Emperor he would simply be the most powerful junkie.
This is perhaps the best fic detailing what would happen if Palpatine got his hands on Luke at the end of ESB and maybe my favorite series in the fandom, period (and a lot of the EU). It certainly does a better job of selling the fall than Dark Empire.
Tanista
11d ago
It's a real mind fuck to want Trump to lose but not to lose so soon that everyone goes back to business as usual.
Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.
The answer was, TL;DR: "Because good person does not do such things, and you want to be heckin' good person"
Putting aside whether Christianity triumphed because it was distinct in its focus on morality (Julian the Apostate certainly thought lacking this focus on charity was a weakness of traditional religion), it was often "you would be a bad member of the clan/city/people". You either insulted your worshipped ancestors or the very kin you needed to survive.
Sam Seder's ideology suffers from coming at an incredibly individualistic time and encouraging those tendencies more and more.
I don't blame him that much for speaking up, he was dealing with a debate-bro in a format ill suited for it. But it is a legitimate problem when your ideology simultaneously attacks all things that impose duties on people, push them to live their best lives and then have to turn around and try to jerry-rig some new commandments without many of the tools we've traditionally used for that and without admitting what you're doing.
In fact, if we're going to criticize people's performance, the debate-bro allowed Sam to say ludicrous things, like imposing one's beliefs being mainly a feature of theocrats. That is a ludicrous thing to grant given how the secular supposed-cosmopolitans act when they feel they have the whip hand. Ultimately, there's no escape from needing to have a set of values for a community. What you'd hopefully do is shrink the size of communities but everyone is going in the opposite direction.
Tanista
13d ago
But man, i am an outlier, people here hate america now, moreso than ever before
I think it was mostly a LARP before, except for a few people deeply invested in a sort of left-wing anti-Americanism.
Now? It'll be interesting to see what happens after Trump is gone because Canada needs the US but the loathing may linger.
Tanista
13d ago
Trump has a way of dragging the party/base towards him.
I've seen some right wing figures who in no way expected a tariff war with Canada falling somewhere between joking about it now (a coward's way to not take a position) and going "well, maybe we should let him cook and see" or uncritically repeating his statements about the trade imbalance.
I think it's the attention gap: the average American doesn't think about Canada enough to immediately jump on this. If they start feeling the pain themselves (especially if the EU and China are also implementing their own tariffs), that may change and there may be some pullback.
I prefer to know those people by name.
You know who is to blame for trans madness by name (off the top of my head Rachel Levine had a pivotal impact on WPATH's removal of age guidelines). You could easily find out who to blame when the American Anthropology Association says something batshit.
What you mean, I think, is that you can't hold them accountable. But that's not just because they're obscure.
It cuts both ways: Elon Musk isn't accountable to you either. The AAA at least has to pretend to hold to some code of conduct because that is what allegedly justifies the outsized power bequeathed to them.
What are institutions?
An organization with set of norms, traditions and procedures meant to direct people towards a goal over extended periods of time?
I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.
It's honestly hard to tell because the goalposts move in lightning speed whenever a new form of buffoonishness is unleashed.
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