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And then when they turn 18 they become legal adults, famous for making good decisions that align with their long-term interests.
Yeah this is pretty terrible, and the "the statistics on how things actually tend to go in practice are shit to begin with and then further obscured by biased parties on all sides" bit means that it's very hard to make a well-informed decision here. Such is life in an environment of imperfect and sometimes hostile information, but it still sucks.
I don't think it's beyond the pale, I just expect that the costs of regulation here, as it is likely to be implemented in practice, exceed the benefits. I don't actually think it's a good thing that a bunch of teenagers feel like they're trapped in the wrong body and that their best shot at happiness is major medical interventions, I just expect that any attempts by our current regulatory apparatus to curb the problem will cause horrible "unanticipated" problems.
If you have some statistics that show that, actually, regulation here is likely to prevent X0,000 unnecessary surgeries per year, which in turn will prevent Y,000 specific negative aftereffects, I might change my mind on that. But my impression as of now is that this is a small enough problem, and regulation a large and inexact enough hammer, that it's not worth it.
You're not wrong, adult detransitioners are quite bitter about people going "you made your decision when you were 18+? Well, fuck you then, I guess!". I'd be happy with banning the practice from mainstream medicine entirely, if this is what you're offering, but what I offer is a compromise.
No, it's not, actually. An environment of imperfect information is one where everybody gets to make their case, and everybody gets to make their decision, not one where one side gets to pretend they're The Science, and hound all skeptics and dissidents.
Yeah, there are statistics that show the dstience rate was above 80%, before activists took over the field. Do you have any statistics to show any of these surgeries are necessary to begin with?
Tuskagee was a spit in the bucket compared to what's happening, not to mention George Floyd, or MeToo. If you can link to making that s sort of argument about these cases, I'll believe that you actually made this argument in good faith.
Huh, apparently reddit is more of a tire fire than I thought, because I definitely made the "what exactly do you hope to accomplish, how does what's currently going on accomplish that, and are there any downsides to normalizing looting unrelated businesses and homes in response to injustice" point during the 2020 riots. But apparently it's been memory-holed. IIRC it was my second most downvoted comment ever.
I've got quite a lot of "measures to contain covid have costs as well as benefits, and I've seen no evidence that the benefits exceed the costs and quite a bit of evidence of the reverse" of you're interested in that.
Honestly though, you will probably not have much success modeling me as "on your side" or "against your side" - I would like to grill, and I object to moral busibodies who get between me and my grill with their schemes to make society better. And I especially object when those schemes aim to solve tiny problems that affect a few thousand people in a country of hundreds of millions, or when those schemes obviously won't help with the problem they're supposedly trying to solve, or when the cure is clearly worse than the disease.
That's no fun, how am I supposed to dunk on you then?
I can sympathize. I still have a libertarian temperament, even I don't think modelling people as free-floating atoms is either accurate, or something to aim for.
I think this is the part I object to the most. While your response to BLM was laudable, it doesn't exactly touch on what I was trying to get from you. BLM was objectionable regardless of whether the way the police treated black people was a big problem or not. It's exactly the idea that things that don't affect a large enough proportion of the population shouldn't be talked about, or have any action taken to stop them, that I have a problem with. You could probably justify several genocides on the grounds that the targeted ethnicity was tiny compared to the global population.
These are fine arguments to bring up, but obviously I disagree they apply in this case.
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