Throwaway05
11hr ago
I think the most interesting questions are downstream of this: American adversaries don't seem to think we can be realistically defeated by force of arms, so what do they do in response?
I think this relates to other projects we talk about here like the role of foreign botnets in agenda setting in U.S. politics. It isn't really clear to me what extent that's a paranoid conspiracy theory vs. an actual thing in truth (it seems likely to be latter but I would like to know more).
You are right that the difference is practically immense between ability and will but it has felt to me in the last few months most people have forgotten those are two different things, even if the will is going to be more practically predictive.
Uhhhhhhhhh okay.
I guess if you want to go aggro over my asking you for what you were conversationally looking for then that's your prerogative.
puzzled shrug
EDIT: This user apparently blocked me for this line of inquiry. By motte standards of things this didn't really seem that heated to me so if anyone reading has a better theory of mind on the whole thing please DM me, thanks.
Throwaway05
12hr ago
I have at no point hidden my position from you. I've pointed out that woke framing is unnecessary and obscures the underlying reality of trans people, I've been quite consistent in this.
If what you are seeking is for people to defend the weakest form of the argument for the existence of trans people then....why are you doing that?
If what you are looking for is for people to specifically defend woke gender ideology then why the heck are you doing that? Especially here of all places.
Throwaway05
12hr ago
Apologies to the woke, but I think they are retarded. One of the reasons why they are retarded is because the woke framing has a bunch of inconsistent nonsense (which is what I think you are noticing and complaining about) that obscures underlying phenomena.
Transpeople make more sense under non-woke thinking than under woke. Woke people say all kinds of stuff about sex and gender, but a non-woke person will usually feel that men and women have some form of biological differences (say: trucks vs. dolls) in thinking and other factors that gets spat out as "gender" by society.
If someone is born with a more or less male brain and but is in a female body then you have a mismatch.
It would make sense that this is rare, it would also make sense that it happens on occasion, we get all kinds of variations in people and while this is probably evolutionary disadvantageous it doesn't seem nearly as damaging to reproductive fitness as gayness.
All of this I said before so where are you getting tripped up? If your problem is that you don't think trans people exist at all that you are likely just being disgruntled and reactive to the woke - gay people clearly exist, you see all kinds of case and news reports of bizarre shit in the population, why not this one?
If your problem is woke word games then who cares, that ideology says all kinds of nonsense that doesn't really explain anything and doesn't usefully related to anything in the world (or at least I believe so).
Throwaway05
13hr ago
Are you going anywhere with this?
Throwaway05
14hr ago
All that is an argument for "should" I jumped into this to make a point about "can."
I've seen a lot of people misunderstanding the situation about "can" (in part because making this unclear is in all likelihood an organized part of our adversaries propaganda efforts).
The Iranians are smart and clever and have a good plan and are winning or losing the political war depending on who you talk to. They lost the war war so bad it's not even funny.
This isn't a bad trade for them if they get what they wanted/out unscathed, but it's still happening.
And it's important that people understand it's happening because if you don't you'll miss how the ethics of conflict are being defined and the role of propaganda in shaping policy and mood.
Throwaway05
14hr ago
Unless I'm missing something isn't the whole point that the one group is the metaphorical arms of the president and the other group is supposed to be objective separate body? I feel like everything falls neatly from there...
Throwaway05
14hr ago
How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
Throwaway05
15hr ago
One of America's war aims is to leave the Iranian people in a better position after the war than before. Likewise modern Western armies have an incredibly strong taboo against civilian damage, to the point where we made a missile that acts as a fucking blender so it can kill literally one guy.
This level of restraint is basically a new invention, and most non-American armies don't bother (see: Russia). It's the equivalent of besieging a city and allowing food in "so that the civilians don't starve."
It's incredibly stupid but has been at times sustainable because the U.S. is that powerful and because most of our adversaries understand that the primary move is to use propaganda pieces to perpetuate fighting warfare in this way.
Loosen restrictions and things open up immediately.
The Iranians can't do much if 16 million people in the Tehran metro area are starving to death. Now that's pretty abhorrent but this is how wars were fought throughout history and America has the ability to make it so.
Without drifting that far into awful behavior you can still force evacuation of cities, destroy critical infrastructure and all kinds of other stuff we are very very voluntarily not doing and a good chunk of which is totally valid even with this restrictive mode of warfare.
Throwaway05
16hr ago
Iran succeeds because the U.S. and Israel (despite propaganda to the contrary) fight with two hands tied behind their back.
If we fought like Russia fought, or even worse like a country in WWII we'd "win" pretty quickly.
Iran does not have a peer military, it has an ineffective organized military and essentially a very well organized insurgency and excellent doctrine that takes advantage of Western militaries primary weakness (political will).
The U.S. has the ability to stab Iran in the gut and step back and wait for it to bleed out, Iran knows this and therefore made sure that their combat model is making as much trouble while they bleed out as possible. They've also given themselves a very large helmet so they can't just be shot in the head (IDK the metaphor fails).
So we don't.
Making this further complicated is the fact that we don't actually hate the Iranian's, and figure that leaving them in a good state is better for us later.
Make no mistake, Iran knows our exact strategic posture and how to take advantage of it but that doesn't mean that we can't just do something different if we want to. That's what got us into this, Trump called Iran on some of the threats and went to town, but now he has to clean up and go home before the midterms.
That's not Iran being "strong" it's masterful use of the cards they have.
A question - why hasn't Iran pushed a major terrorist attack on US soil? They could probably pull it off, but they don't because they know that if they do and they miscalculate how bad it is then America will actually come for them for real.
That only ends one way.
Throwaway05
16hr ago
I'd google it and try and see what tricks you can do, I think you can look at the underside of a mattress but with the way my travel habits work out it's not something I actively think about so I'm not the best source.
I would definitely use some of the other tricks in terms of things like where to put your bag and stuff, lower level hotels are much more likely to have the problem and taking it home suuuuccckkkksss.
Throwaway05
16hr ago
Australia
Point of order - Australia is less habitable than it appears, the population heat map looks the way it does for a reason, same with Canada.
Now ingenuity can make it work but the empty space is unused for a reason.
Throwaway05
16hr ago
Do I understand your position correctly?
No, you don't.
To my recollection I don't really take a stance on what to do about people who (actually) identify as trans or have trans thought content.
I also think (based off of my reading of other comments you make in this thread) that you've missed the core insight of my initial post.
Which is: The problem is that a number of phenomena that vary from pretty convincingly "true" trans to not really trans at all (tomboys) to definitely not trans and even activists should acknowledge it (forensic malingerers) all get labeled the same thing.
This has all kinds of negative effects, such as not getting people the correct care (ex: Schizophrenic patient needs antipsychotics, malingering patient needs boundary setting) and also things like an inappropriately enhanced level of skepticism in the moderate and conservative population.
How difficult to deal with trans people are is entirely orthogonal to the question of why they exist and it seems obvious they should exist given the variation in the human population (especially if you believe in non-woke biology).
This is not helped by the woke incoherent post-modern understanding of gender theory that probably doesn't match the biological roots of the true underlying phenomena.
Throwaway05
18hr ago
I think conceptualizing the situation as Iran being strong is the way to think about it, holding the best hand is much better, but mixing up these two confuses some things.
Iran is a homeless man with a gun outside of a guy's office building. Threatening? Sure. But it is a homeless man with a gun. The man in the office can go buy some body-armor and a shotgun, he can hire some thugs to beat the guy up, and so on. He doesn't because he's worried about inconvenience and cost and other people in the building bitching at him.
Iran's calculus as it has been for the last several decades is to find a way to ride the annoying line and not trigger an actual response. Yes they can be a physical threat (especially with Russian and Chinese intelligence) but fundamentally they continue to only exist because the U.S. cares about civilian casualties what happens afterwards, nagging third parties.
As a politically entity the U.S. can be defeated and that's the goal, but it is a mistake to lose track of the force disparity.
Throwaway05
18hr ago
y, and then book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough,
Just be careful of bed bugs.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I will have you know that only applies to 50% of the Jets fans I know. That's right 1 out of 2.
I consider it a personal accomplishment knowing that many.
Throwaway05
1d ago
What is your evidence for this claim?
What's your evidence you can't do this? You can determine if someone likes bananas, is a neurotic person, has had an episode of diverticulitis from just talking to them.
You can even do very hard things like determine if someone in jail is pretending to be crazy or not.
Why would this specific thing be any different?
Throwaway05
1d ago
I mean it's not rocket surgery, assuming no need for secondary gain you just ask some pretty basic questions and you can figure out which of the phenotypes are here (assuming secondary gain it's harder but we do have inventories for that).
Coming up with and validating a structured interview or formal scale request genuine research and investigation, even if a few guys in a room can quickly spitball something that likely does the job that ain't the same thing a formal gold standard form of testing.
As for if it actually exists, I mean you have people who are attracted to feet, children, being murdered and eaten. Getting the gender/sex wires crossed seem to be a much simpler thing.
Throwaway05
1d ago
The answer also isn't no.
Does an objective way exist? Almost certainly.
Do we know what it is? No. Politics impairs true scientific verification.
Is that too strict a bar? Likely.
Could myself and a bunch of other non-woke educated professionals hash out something that is "good enough" in a day? Likely.
Scientific rigor encapsulates a wild and wide range of certainties.
Throwaway05
2d ago
I think the science would have to advance beyond the politics for the answer here to be yes.
Throwaway05
2d ago
In my clinical experience (which is admittedly anecdote, research on anything related to this topic is poor) I've encountered people who seem to be trans because of mental illness, people who have predisposition to mental illness and are trans and mentally ill, and people with no mental illness whatsoever but are trans.
Just like depression is a word for a variety of phenomena that include "I live in a war zone" and "my brain is clearly malfunctioning in an obvious way that generates depressive thought content" and a million things in between, "trans" refers to a variety of complex social, psychological, and biological phenomena.
Throwaway05
2d ago
From a clinical perspective - my licensing bodies and professional and social milieu have very strongly embraced the idea that trans identification needs to be accepted without clarification or question, even when it is deeply questionable (for example patients in the forensic setting clearly seeking special privileges).
I don't have any interest in harming my license are ability to teach by deviating from this in the slightest so I will not.
That said.
You can investigate the various "trans" phenomena, explicate on the types, do research on outcomes and care needs, test questionnaires and scales that help you identify what's going on for an individual person...all the usual things.
We know what to look into but nobody really does it because countries are either "burn the trans" or "transition children immediately" with no effort at moderation.
This has improved a tiny bit in the US in recent years, however.
Psychiatry in particular has a pretty good history of breaking apart various phenomena into healthy, range of normal human experience, and mental illness (this side of the conversation is missed by normies for the most part).
Throwaway05
2d ago
A real trans person is pretty much what you expect, they do exist and are rare. The clearest examples I can find are people who have absolutely zero social deficits or mental health issues they just seem to have identification with the opposite sex. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a weird misfiring of biology could create this (rarely) and that in a permissive social environment these people would be allowed to exist.
Slicing these people off from "fake" trans people should be reasonably easy but in the modern environment where you aren't allowed to asks questions it is impossible. A fact of life in medicine is that we treat people who are almost certain not trans (especially a category I didn't mention above - malingering types) as trans because it's not acceptable to ask questions.
Hopefully things will settle down and we'll be allowed to get more focused care each segment.
Throwaway05
2d ago
Which of us is correct about Russia, Iran, and the U.S. is a different issue from the fact that you seem pretty heated by relatively mild discussion on the internet.
You can disagree with someone including about important things like religion and politics without thinking they are subhuman or wish you harm. This kind of black and white thinking always leads to bad things.
Every company in the world needs to be researching whatever the hell is the secret sauce for buccees, even my completely zero whimsy elderly father loves that place.
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