domain:open.substack.com?page=0
mrvanillasky
4m ago
I listen to music more nowadays since I am on concerta so some recommendations. A lot of it is farily mainstream electronic music wise but many may not have heard these
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Random Album Title by deadmau5 (pronounced deadmouse) turned 16 this year and it is my favorite album of his, electro and progresive house was fairly good during the late 2000s and it caputres a good bit of that vibe. Tracks I recommend are Alone with you which is my favorite track from the album, Faxing Berlin was one of his breakout hits at the time, I remember was another breakout hit where he collaborated with kaskade and Jaded.
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Polychrome by Koan Sound is a great micx of what many just call bass music, unlike deadmau5 their stuff is not 4 to the floor so the variation in drums is a nice contrast. Koan Sound music has great audio engineering.
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New Energy by Four Tet is pretty nice. It is not as strict genre wise as either of the two entries before, the standout track here is two thousand and seventeen which samples classical Indian music in the best way possible.
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Immersion, is Pendulums most popular album due to having thier most iconic tracks like watercolor,witchcraft,crush and The island. They make rock-heavy drum and bass, with the island being their non dnb mega-hit.
I should catch up on new music though so any suggestions are welcome.
Fights
Petr Yan fights Figeuridoin at UFC Macau. Finally, a UFC card that I can watch in the evening; otherwise, it's a pretty thin card. Some time ago I pointed how MMA did not feel as fun as it once was, 309 was just terrible. two 40 year olds fought where the older, less active one lost because he was older, less active and did not care. Bo Nickal threw the kind of strikes you dont expect from anyone not a heavyweight and Michael Chandler looked terrible too.
have a fun weekend folks.
Folamh3
4m ago
Laverne Cox gets my vote. Of all ethnic groups, black women tend to be the most androgynous looking anyway, which probably helps.
Folamh3
8m ago
It could give birth to a sort of "trans-o-sphere" equivalent of the "man-o-sphere" where trans people optimize on the traits that allow them to "pass" most effectively and efficiently, following a sort of "passMaxxing" strategy, if you will.
Why are you talking about this like it's a hypothetical? This space arrived years if not decades ago. Like some sort of weird bizarro-world version of rule 34, if you can think of some trait or activity which is even remotely gendered, you will find an online community of trans people tearing their hair out because they aren't "doing" it properly and/or a guide on how to do it more effectively:
- Feminine handwriting? Check.
- Vocal training? An entire subreddit.
- Gait? [Check].(https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/11b5nj/female_walkcyclegait_mtf/) (Bonus points because the post commences with "This is probably gonna sound like I'm way over-thinking / over-analysing this, but bear with me...")
This is a nice moment to take stock of the situation. Up to this point, you have lost and abandoned every single object-level argument you have made, over and over again. In this comment, you have implicitly acknowledged that you have again abandoned another argument that you've lost.
You know nothing about
This is also a nice moment to reflect on the fact that while, "You're stupid," is a great and effective argument on the third grade playground, it's not very becoming in a place like The Motte... especially when you've just lost and abandoned every single argument you've made so far.
Now, to get to Chesterton's Fence, which is in a sense moving up to the meta level, mostly abandoning any actual argument that would benefit from real in-depth domain expertise at the level of the practice of medicine, but instead moving up to the question of the history/intent of the government action.
One thing that is always a bit tricky about Chesterton's Fence is its conceptualization of "intent". One doesn't have to go full Scalia to know that, when it comes to law, 'legislative intent' can be a tricky beast. Things are sometimes done for a variety of motives affecting multiple agents. Sometimes, it is just a banal compromise (something that no one really intends, but merely accepts). Sometimes, it's a confluence of surprisingly different intents; see also the famous Bootleggers and Baptists theory. So, with that in mind, let's go through a little of the history, and see what all we can say about it.
One could have a more expansive history, but I only have so much time in a day, so I think an acceptable place to start is 1937. Prior to this point, USP was a private organization that published their own compilations of drug information. (As Mitch Hedberg would say, they still do, but they used to, too.) Alongside this, the government did have a legitimate reason to ensure that consumers at least had some understanding of what products they were buying, so the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act adopted the USP and said that a drug was "adulterated" if it failed to meet the USP's standards. Then, a company brought an "elixir" to market that used diethylene glycol, causing lots of harm and about a hundred deaths. There was a clear gap in the law and standard, because if the product had been called a "solution" instead of an "elixir", there would have been no legal violation. (Note that liability damages are a separate question and plausible pathway to accomplishing some fence-like goals and may be a useful tool in the toolbox.)
Enter the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. This was "intended", in the Chestertonian Fence sense, to be a more robust labeling law, in an extremely pre-information-age era. This fence was not intended to restrict a person's ability to self-medicate. With the above caveats about divining intent for fences from legislative history, FDA chief Walter G. Campbell said:
There is no issue, as I have told you previously, from the standpoint of the enforcement of the Food and Drugs Act about self-medication. This bill does not contemplate its prevention at all. . . . But what is desired . . . is to make self-medication safe. [The bill provides] information that will permit the intelligent and safe use of drugs for self-medication. . . . All of the provisions dealing with drugs, aside from those recognized in the official compendia, are directed towards safeguarding the consumer who is attempting to administer to himself. If this measure passes, self-medication will become infinitely more safe than it has ever been in the past.
Sen. Royal S. Copeland (D-NY) said:
There is no more common or mistaken criticism of this bill than that it denies the right to self-medication. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The proposed law simply contributes to the safety of self-medication by preventing medicines from being sold as “cures” unless they really are cures. It requires that drugs which have only palliative effect say as much on the label.
The House committee reported:
The bill is not intended to restrict in any way the availability of drugs for self-medication. On the contrary, it is intended to make self-medication safer and more effective.
It wouldn't have made sense for the elixir tragedy to be the impetus for a law requiring prescriptions, because almost all of the deaths that came from the elixir were under the direction of a government-licensed physician. (Prior to any mandates, I'll note, some manufacturers voluntarily made their products "prescription-only", and one would have to have a separate exploration as to whether the intent there was commercial or something else. That said, I don't believe that they had required this drug to be prescription-only, but I'm not sure.) Having a prescription requirement would have saved almost none of the precious lives in question. Since then, we have not had any splashy self-medication string of deaths that would justify a prescription requirement, either. One other additional note at this point is that, even in the absence of such government requirements, the vast majority of people who took this drug did so under the direction of a doctor; many many people leveraged the expertise of medical professionals, because they found it valuable. It was not banned to leverage a doctor's expertise. (It just happened to get them killed when they followed the doctor's advice in this case.)
So what happened? Who intended it? Who built the fence and why? Turns out, the problem was mostly that the FDA was part incompetent, part just unfortunately operating in a pre-information-age era. They set out extremely vague, but strongly-worded labeling requirements. Manufacturers were scared off by how vague the requirements were, not even being sure how much stuff they really needed to put on the label to remain compliant, and in a world where all that information pretty much had to be printed directly on the little bottle, at great expense, many manufacturers were unhappy. Of course, in every regulatory scheme where half the job is keeping consumers happy and half of the job is keeping producers happy (and rich), and especially when the latter group is likely the buddy-buddy industry counterpart to the regulators with a revolving door, sometimes, you gotta do something to make the industry happy. So the FDA, on their own, without Congressional intent or authorization, just exempted medications that the manufacturer designated as prescription-only from their labeling requirements. How much of this is due to the fact that they were just not competent to come up with a more acceptable and precise labeling requirement and how much of it is just due to pre-information-era constraints? Not sure.
In any event, since manufacturers found the FDA's hamfisted labeling requirements so vague/onerous, they generally preferred to just take the exception, presumably with the Chestertonian intent to make more money and reduce their regulatory risk. I'm not even sure that the physicians were part of the bootleggers or baptists; they might not have even lobbied for this exception, only realizing later how lucrative the arrangement would be for them as well as the manufacturers. The result was that many drugs which were actually totally safe to self-administer suddenly became prescription-only, primarily because the FDA went out on its own in making new rules, did a kind of bad job at it, and manufacturers would now make more money this way.
In the next decade or so, there was clearly some confusion. The rules didn't make sense. There was no consistency or logic in whether a drug was prescription-only or not. It was entirely up to the manufacturer, who would presumably decide based on money and risk (mostly regulatory risk rather than safety risk). So, two professional pharmacists in Congress (unsurprisingly named Durham and Humphrey) created the Durham-Humphrey Amendment of 1951, which codified the prescription-only/OTC divide and put the decision under the purview of the FDA. Of course, don't forget, those drugs would be dispensed by professional pharmacists, folks near and dear to those two congressmen.
So, that's the story. What is the "intent" of the fence? Well, sure, consumer protection is in there somewhere. But it's pretty confused with tales of differing motives, incompetence, and plain difficulty of living in the past. Is it a messy story of how we got to where we are today? Absolutely. Does that mean that there aren't possible good features of the system we have today? Of course not. Does anything in there imply that this is the only plausible way of doing things and we'll have megadeaths if we do anything differently? I doubt it. But since we've now gone through the exercise of going through how the fence got there and why, perhaps we can turn back to the real questions: today, right now, what are the real, serious, justifications for such mandates/bannings?
Francesca Albanese's report to the UN. I know you said that she is "cartoonishly anti-Israeli" but if you can spot any lies in here that I missed feel free to point them out.
This is just an appeal to authority. If there are particularly compelling arguments, you can reproduce them directly here.
There's actually no point relying on the number of civilians killed to identify genocide or ethnic cleansing, because by the time those figures tell you that a genocide is occurring it is already too late to do anything about it, and the point of identifying genocide/ethnic cleansing is to make sure it doesn't happen again.
So there's no point gathering evidence to support your claim? That's a bold position to take.
For what it's worth, I don't find the argument about whether or not Israel is actually a committing a genocide to be that interesting - the answer is just so clearly and blatantly yes.
That's not really an argument. I could just as easily say the answer is so clearly and blatantly no.
I like these conversations a lot more when the Israeli side is willing to admit that they're a blood-drenched, bronze-age state intent on ethnic purity and conquest via force of arms to reclaim the territory their god said was theirs - when you're willing to admit that there are actual conversations that can be had.
I think your mask might be slipping here. But I'm not surprised you like these conversations more when your opponent just admits you're right and they're wrong. You do have to do the work of convincing them first, though.
Incidentally I'm curious as to where you get the idea that Israel is intent on ethnic purity. You do know that 20% of the population is Arab, right?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
32m ago
Nobody seems to be having that conversation. The consensus on the left seems to be that only a bigot would even ask the question. I mean the dominant position seems to be forcing businesses to open their bathrooms to trans women. Then complaining and calling women bigots for objecting— even for extremely vulnerable places like homeless shelters (this is how JK Rowling became such a pariah).
DradisPing
41m ago
There's a saying "code should be written to be understood by humans first an only incidentally executed by a machine".
None of them are actually harder or easier to read, it's just a matter of familiarity. You need to train your brain to quickly parse code and tweak that for new indentation styles.
You're going to have a better time if you just learn to read the most common styles quickly. You're inevitably going to be reading a lot of other people's code.
I like otbs. It's K&R without skipping braces on one liners, which can lead to bugs on a messy merge.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
1hr ago
Who cares?
Anyone who feels the fact that they're Jewish gives them some sort of special credibility when it comes to criticising Israel. Which is sort of what these people want to imply, otherwise why point out that they're Jewish at all?
They're an example of jews for whom their Jewishness is a central element of their life and still oppose Israel.
Right, but they'd oppose it whether or not there was a war in Gaza. Given that's what this discussion is all about, their opinion isn't relevant.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
If a man can successfully pass as a woman then he should be allowed to use women's restroom
Here's the thing with that, they never do unless they are literally pre-puberty (so not a man) or on T-blockers from before puberty or asian (inherent low T). That's why they are pushing the acceptability boundary even to those who don't try to pass. Trying to make it so its taboo to question the ones who obviously don't even while trying. Like those absolute delusional people on reddit who claim trains woman are all around you and you simply can't tell, the reality of the situation is anything but.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1hr ago
Sure I see what you mean. Maybe I'm being imprecise due to lack of experience with therapy proper.
My concern is this. Tim thinks he's a woman. He works on training a chatgpt instance to provide gender affirming care for him to help him cope with beginning the process of transition. But Tim isn't a woman, by whatever definition you like, (even assuming MtFs "exist" one can still not be an MtF), he's simply delusional.
But because Tim is building the therapist prompt by prompt, if he hears from the therapist "Tim I don't think you're trans, I think you're delusional and using this to cope with xyz;" Tim will say "Oh rats, the instance is hallucinating, let's try something else."
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
We are literally tolerating Puppy/Dog/Furries in the military. There are even images of them wearing their uniforms with the bondage dog masks. None of them have been dishonorably discharged for their shenanigans.
_malcontent_
1hr ago
AOC argued against the bathroom ban on Capitol Hill by saying that it will be bad for women who will need to be stripped searched to prove they are women. https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5002529-ocasio-cortez-mace-johnson-transgender-bathroom-ban/amp/
Does that mean she’s backing away from the trans rights argument, or just using a talking point that will resonate with most women?
sun_the_second
1hr ago
This looks very wrong to me. Closing brace being at the same indentation as the start of the block is what makes sense to me.
if (condition) {
do_it();
}
Another case of why having principles sucks. The state offered him a sweetheart deal and then reneged. The worst person you know was a darling, but then a victim, of the state. The former doesn't inveigh on the latter as it would enshrine a terrible precedent.
his career is effectively over.
This would be interesting to bet on. It amazes me how people can eek out public careers for decades despite being vile. How many millions would tune in to a reality TV show featuring Smollett, now or in the future? We know he's shameless.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Which indentation style do you prefer?
IMO, Ratliff makes the most sense, because it's the only style that reduces the number of tabs after typing the closing brace, rather than before.
if(this){
that();
if(nothing){
something();
}
}else{
other();
}
Indentation style is a problem for the IDE. The user should never think about it.
I find it disconcerting and nonsensical for the IDE to automatically delete a tab before the cursor when the user types a closing brace in non-Ratliff styles. Also, I'm not much of a programmer, but I imagine that writing a program to pretty-print code in non-Ratliff styles must be a major hassle, because it would force you to move the cursor backward and then forward again after finding every closing brace.
cjet79
1hr ago
Hey guys, what's your experience with chronic sleep deprivation?
I think I never slept normally. So my whole life? I seem to have a circadian rhythm that just pushes me an hour later every night no matter what. If I wake up consistently at the same time every day I will just feel permanently deprived of one hour of sleep, and I will consistently stay up an hour later than I should.
If my sleep schedule is totally unmoored from a specific wake up time it will just drift forward again and again. It will do this until I'm napping through the day and staying awake all night (like I am right now).
I need about 5-6 hours of sleep sober and about 8-10 if I'm drinking. Good sleep is something I highly value. I've occasionally taken medicine to fall asleep (nyquil, melatonin?/melanin?), but it seems to lose effectiveness, and I've avoided the addictive habit forming stuff.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
I think people with androgynous physiognomy wearing female-coded clothing (such as Sarah McBride, or indeed Nancy Mace as Twitter trolls took considerable delight in pointing out) used to be able to walk into a woman's bathroom and pee in peace. Most of these people were and are cis women, and they shouldn't have to get their ladyparts out to prove eligibility before they go into a stall.
Bad actors using the wrong bathroom for nefarious reasons is a problem we have, empirically, managed to solve without bathroom laws for about a century. Assaults by strangers in public bathrooms are not exactly a common form of sex crime. It isn't worth creating a new problem of Karens harassing manjawed cis women in order to fix it.
jake
2hr ago
These three images are found in the article: 1 -- 2 -- 3
None of these images show gunshot wounds. These show children x-rayed after a bullet was placed beneath their heads or neck.
These are radiological findings of actual gunshot wounds to the head: 1 -- 2 -- 3
Image searching "cranial gunshot wound radiological imagery" is all you needed for the debunk.
Quoth the article:
These photographs of X-rays were provided by Dr. Mimi Syed, who worked in Khan Younis from Aug. 8 to Sept. 5. She said: “I had multiple pediatric patients, mostly under the age of 12, who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. Usually, these were single shots. The patients came in either dead or critical, and died shortly after arriving.” Dr. Mimi Syed
That's damn bad luck she only had fakes to hand over. Guess we'll have to take her at her word, same for the journos and editors who applied I would estimate at approximately zero scrutiny and negative intelligence. On that note,
I believed the story because there's a huge number of people talking about what they saw treating casualties in Gaza
Nobody treating casualties in Gaza is a reliable source. The Israelis sure as hell aren't reliable either, but you are talking about the bleeding-est of bleeding hearts. These are people truly incapable of thinking about the conflict in terms any more complex than the immediately real of what they see treating the wounded. There is something admirable to those who go out of neither ethnic nor religious obligation, felt, implied, whatever. A white Catholic doctor treating those people, as I'm sure exists, is doing good, but they're never thinking critically. Critical thinking does not lend itself to going halfway around the world to treat war casualties. Critical isn't the same as clear, you know, they might be the clearest thinkers of all. Like, what the hell is everybody else thinking? People are dying and we can help. But if it is, that's warm, it's goodness, while realpolitik is frigid. If they're told an Israeli soldier shot the child they're treating, they will believe it, because they don't have it in them to doubt those who told them. Doubt would send them packing, but really, the doubt would make it so they never went.
I do not. I honestly have no desire to go looking for footage of children being gruesomely murdered, no matter how much it might strengthen my argument on an online forum. I'm aware that this is a dodge, but I'm sure you can appreciate that not only is graphic footage of child murder extremely hard to stomach, it is also banned by almost all major platforms and is frequently removed after it gets too "popular". I regret seeing the clips that I have seen and have no desire to repeat the experience.
This is a place for evidenced discussion and the evidence you provided is fake. To be clear, I don't believe you're commenting in good faith, I believe you're doing a good job at disguising mundane antisemitism. Namely because if you had seen as much graphic footage as you claim, you would know acute gunshot wounds to the head don't look like that. So either you're practicing sophistry in service of your point, or if I were to extend faith, it would mean you're too naive to yet comment on this issue, as it would be total indictment of your ability to assess the truth of things, such as your supposed videos. You take those bullet images uncritically, I must assume you take "graphic footage" equally uncritically. To match your anecdote, I've seen a lot of modern, graphic war footage over the last 15 years and I have not once seen a video anything like you describe.
So basically, pics or it didn't happen. Provide the video or stop citing it as though it has any bearing. I don't want to witness the child victims of war, but I've heard this so many times that I'd rather see it to know the truth of it than be forced to continue only speculating. I would certainly rather see it than take you at your word, because I will not take you at your word.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Having someone who's more intelligent than you, knows a lot more about medicine than you, and has had a lot of practice managing patients instructing you on what to do helps a lot.
No one is talking about banning doctors. There are options other than "mandatory" and "banned". You can still have literally every word of that.
The doctor has a list of all the medications you are taking
ROFL. Only if you tell him. Or he works for the same conglomerate as your other doctors with the same records system. And again, no one is preventing you from doing these things. And again again, they're generally just a second set of eyes, and a pharmacist does this. There are so many ways that you can have some eyes on what you're taking and look for interactions without blanket bans on prescription meds. But if the point is to make sure you don't take specific different medications at the same time, they're gonna need to be in your house 24/7.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
"Littlepeople shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of their Randian overlords" seems to be both a core driver of Musk's politics and a conventional aspect of right-wingery.
Musk is right-wing, and he is eccentric, but the way he is right-wing is entirely conventional. On economic issues he is anti-spending, anti-regulation, and anti-union. On social issues, the views he expresses on X are whatever the right-wing version of the current thing is (even if it is obvious bullshit).
Would it? Most of the time, when industry advocates are here arguing this sort of point, they're implicitly assuming that the use of medical professionals will drop to zero (or be banned). Thus, they're imagining the least knowledgeable person deciding on their own medical treatment. But when we look at the car maintenance world, we see the vast vast majority of low-knowledge folks still using automotive professionals. The rate of self-injury is, indeed, low, but someone needs a bit more than arguments from bad imagination if they're going to rest on a claim that the rate of self-injury would surely be "quite a bit" higher.
You hear this same shit from the realtor cartel, and frankly, any cartel that wants to maintain its market power. "Oh real estate transactions are so complicated; can you imagine how the sky would fall if we didn't get our 3% cut of every transaction?! PEOPLE WOULD BE HARMED!" You know what really would happen if you lost some of the sketchier tools to maintain your market control? First, you'd probably have to clean up your act, but second, lots and lots of people would still use you, but for your actual expertise, rather than because they think they're basically forced into it. Sure, will there be some harm that didn't occur before? Probably. But there's some harm now that wouldn't occur then, too. You need an actual argument about magnitudes rather than just imagination.
EDIT: Remember when it was every state, rather than just two states, who banned you from pumping your own gas into your car? Surely there were folks saying how risky and dangerous it would be (gasoline is flammable, don'cha'kno?) to let ignoramus individuals do it. How's that argument looking for those two states that have held on to it?
sun_the_second
2hr ago
Had trans women limited themselves to peeing in peace, you might have had an occasional Karen freaking out seeing someone who looks like a man in the women's restroom, but most people wouldn't have cared. My recollection is that this wasn't an issue for many years.
Really? Before the trans debate, do you think men could just occasionally walk into the women's bathroom and pee in peace while only being freaked out at by rare Karens?
Folamh3
2hr ago
This article made me laugh probably more than anything I've ever read on Substack: https://suedonym.substack.com/p/the-real-lesbian-master-doc
(Mods, please delete if it's too culture-warry.)
Folamh3
3hr ago
If half of the rapes are committed by men in women's bathrooms who had previously invoked their gender identity as an excuse to be there, then I would agree that this was a huge fucking problem and we should restrict access to improve women's safety.
But the point habitually made by gender-critical feminists is that, once these policies are in place, a bad actor doesn't even need to invoke the concept of gender identity as an excuse to enter the ladies' room. Once you've established a precedent that certain male people are allowed to use the ladies' room, and you're not allowed to kick up a stink about it even if they have fully intact male genitalia (because not all trans women - indeed, the overwhelming majority - want to undergo bottom surgery) or if they're making zero effort to pass (because "trans women don't owe you femininity"), it is inevitable that bad actors (many of whom don't even consider themselves trans) will exploit this ostensibly well-meaning policy for their own ends.
A policy of allowing certain male people to enter the ladies' room presents obvious risks for female safeguarding even if literally 100% of people who call themselves trans women are perfectly pure angels who would never hurt a fly. (It need hardly be said that many are not.)
This is basically my position - I think it would be great if Australia gave the Jews a chunk of their desert or whatever. But as you say, not going to happen.
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