[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
[2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.
If we’re going to compare January 6 to the George Floyd riots, one was explicitly political, and the other one was fed up populace.
One started with a rally intended to gas the mob up in hopes of securing the capital for their fuhrer. The other was started as the result of the outright murder of an individual by a state actor.
One was essentially organized by the Republican Party leader, and the other was an impromptu display of discontent.
That's literally exactly the same as Trump. He encouraged a protest, but literally told them to peacefully protest, just as many of those Democrats did.
How many Democrats: got up on stage for a rally for themselves then -> told the attendees to go and “peacefully protest” then -> the protestors went and turned into a riot?
How many of the George Floyd protesters were chanting to hang a public official? With the intent of dismantling democracy?
These are not the same.
Some try to argue that black people are overrepresented in the criminal population because of over policing, but it simply does not follow that this would cause almost 50% of murderers to be black. It would require a lot of special pleading to explain the evidence, eg. ok, maybe most murderers are black but most other encounters with police are racially motivated, and/or police would have to be letting upwards of 10,000 white murderers go to reach demographic parity with black offenders. These epicycles are stupid, you need to let go of this left dogma that vehemently believes that all groups are necessarily the same and only oppression drives observable differences in outcomes. Whatever the ultimate source of the group differences, police action broadly following the distribution of criminality with no racial component is best supported by the facts (there are always individual exceptions of course).
Proper statistical arguments like this debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged, so as I said, unless you think Floyd's murder by itself justified the protests and the riots and the ensuing death, injuries and destruction, then neither set of protests/riots were justified. But it's interesting that only one of these false narratives is amplified as true and is culturally taboo to question.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[2] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...
source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
Only because it somewhat goes against one anti-Trump narrative do we now accuse the commentator of “splitting hairs”/being overfocused on details. Sorry, but details-obsession is part of Hacker News for you. Trump does more than enough idiotic things, I’ve never understood the desire to just make up things about him.
Any remotely sane administration, faced with something similar, would just put out a statement about how a speechwriter made a mistake, the intent was different than the exact wording used by the President, and let it go.
Instead, various lackeys are left to performatively scramble and media outlets are under pressure, all to find some twisted interpretation under which he can retroactively have been right all along. Madness reminiscent of Orwell's writing. It makes you wonder, happens if he says "pi is 3"?
For those people, it is the left that is twisting the words and factually incorrect ( e.g. Trump did not mix up transgender and transgenic).
Using poetic or lose language is rhetorical style that trump has employed since the first term. Trump keeps doing it because the feeble response makes it a winning tactic.
For many people, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are "The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it" or scientists weren't "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."
"If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?"
> The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).
They are striving to be role models, and they are role models for their followers, and this is clearly visible in changea in social interactions...
You generally don’t hear someone screaming “with all due respect I must disagree” before shooting someone.
This is what we tell our children until they get old enough to process the adult world. Reality is... "it's complicated, ____ (son/daughter name here)." Our leaders (at least in the US) haven't been real role models for probably centuries... reality is the whole "virtuous king" thing has been aspirational since the ancient Greeks.
Even when I disagreed with some of what he did (and didn't do), I absolutely can't recall a single time that I didn't admire the manner in which Obama spoke and behaved.
* find an expert who has apparently superior knowledge about a widespread problem afflicting his people
* immediately seek guidance from that expert and conscript him into solving that problem
* apply that guidance by directing resources to test the theory experimentally
* begin to hold that expert accountable when their experiment fails to follow that expert's predictions
* Stop seeking accountability and reverse course when it does produce results (despite this process being very public), and offer the expert the job of fixing more things.
Could you ask for more? Do you think the current democratic discourse is above or below this level?
Or non-democratic discourse for that matter. How did we deal with Lysenko's theories on crop yields?
this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results.
of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”
so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point.
if you read the abstract that they link to [0]:
> Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung
asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue.
if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist
> and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women
but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can:
> In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol
if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with.
so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones.
if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible.
now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements.
1. X says that A did stupid thing B!
2. Y makes fun of X because obviously A didn't do stupid thing B.
3. Z (that's you) points out that A did a thing B', that is like B, only not stupid, but technically X described it accurately if tendentiously.
How do you deal with that? I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection. But realistically this will now always be a fight between X's and Y's faction, because Z's position, though true, is too complicated to fit in a soundbite.
I don't know how we get back from that. If it were truth vs lies it would be manageable, but the truth isn't even on the table because it's too big to fit into the argumentative paradigm.
It was not "technically described accurately" tho. It was a lie and comment you are responding to makes that clear.
So I think that response to that tactic would be to simply call it a lie rather then "technically accurate".
edit: Nevermind I retract this. I think you're right about this paper in particular. I guess it comes down to whether a study involving weird things with gender hormones is "about gender"? But it still seems like the core debate is ultimately not very much attached to actual reality.
edit: It's like the "chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay" Alex Jones meme - if you thought "no that's nonsense there were no chemicals in the water" you would know less about Atrazine than Alex Jones did, despite Alex Jones also being wrong about what's going on with the frogs. The way in which you think that someone is wrong can also be wrong, even if that someone is in fact wrong.
[1] Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526
[2] A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830
> We expect that our studies would serve to develop potential sex- and gender-specific treatments and recommendations for dosage of therapeutic agents to treat and prevent asthma in cis and transgender women.
It may also be that "sex and gender" is used because it isn't actually known what causes the differences observed in the population and that gendered socialization, treatment, or preferences could be contributing factors. This study for instance found that girls were less likely to see a doctor or get diagnosed with asthma even when controlling for symptom severity.
Atrazine is causing hermaphroditic frogs, chemically castrating them, and turning male frogs into behavioral females.
Trump often plays in a similar gray zone (e.g. dual meaning, hyperbole, simplification) with language because It is often a winning tactic.
Trump and Jones generate soundbites that cant be easily refuted with democratic soundbites. Overly simplistic rebuttals often end up even less accurate and more detached from reality.
I have given some thought to why this is, and I think it is for a few reasons. First, I think that democratic respondents don't share as much linguistic & conceptual framework with the target audience (e.g. a feminized male frog = a gay frog).
Second, and relatedly, I think rebuttals are afraid to engage with certain topics, and therefore end up tying themselves up in knots.
Last, is they have an oppositional defiant disorder where everything must be denied. "YES and" responses are off limits.
They cant just say "Yes, and poor chemical regulation is turning the frogs gay, and that is a bad thing"
The message is not scientific complain about frog, read message is that "we" should band up against "them" and collectively now bully this or that person/group. It is in-group bonding based on common enemy that is vilified.
You can not counteract that with rational rebuttal. That never works, not on schoolyard, not in work, not in politics. The whole things is about making people feel certain way.
So I should adopt poor behavior because some other group did? There's sometimes a point to that for in person interactions with small groups but I don't see how that applies at larger scales. It becomes nothing more than an excuse for the poor behavior of your own in-group, which further exacerbates polarization for little to no benefit.
Realize that such behavior isn't going to change the mind of the opposition, and those in your group already agreed with you regardless. Then the bad behavior is a particularly harmful form of virtue signalling.
On a larger scale, demanding that victims enable and accommodate their own bullies achieves exactly the same as in school yard. Bullies get stronger and dominant while victims get blamed for what bullies do.
That is why Canada is responding to tariffs. Whan goes on here is that republican enablers really want everyone else to just accept insults, lies and attacks passively and ineffectively. It feels good to them, because they are in group and harm to out group feels good.
The rest I pretty much agree with.
As far as I'm concerned, responding to immature behavior or misrepresentations or whatever with your own similarly poor behavior is not (at least in general) a form of self defense. It's just childish behavior.
If your argument amounts to "they behaved like a child so it's okay if I behave like a child" then I guess we just have fundamentally incompatible worldviews.
The much more important point that I was trying to make though is that, even if you feel 100% morally justified that doesn't make it an effective tactic. The behavior you described in your earlier comment serves only to further divide parties that already disagree while actively eroding social standards. It isn't just pointless behavior, it's actively harmful.
Historically, with a slap, either open handed or with a glove to induce a dual. But we live in more genial times where such egregious violence is deemed unavailable.
> I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection.
Indeed. People using incompetent and mistaken assumptions doesn't improve on their desire to tear up the political foundations in the US.
Being scientists, they saw an opportunity to study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes. SHOCKING AND SCANDALOUS.
*Some* of the studies were about the potential physiological effects of hormone therapy. They used mice, but the point was to study how humans are affected by HRT.
The way the article is written makes it sound like they're putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns.
You have to be careful there. Plenty of individual animals in the wild exhibit social behaviors that we would associate with unconventional gender roles if they were humans. There are known evolution-based rationales for many if not most of these behaviors, and it's safe to say there are unknown evolution-based rationales for the rest.
We're not special.
Also conventional gender roles change over time, and vary by culture, because gender is performance. It used to be conventional for men to wear high heels and makeup and kiss each other on the mouth, and sexual relationships between men weren't always considered transgressive of masculine norms.
I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa.
I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.
-"The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it"
-Scientists weren't actually "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."
-Trump confused transgenic mice with transgender mice
It reminds me of historical elections where one candidate called the other homo sapiens and the ignorance of the public fell for it
The word he used was transgender, and the studies were all for transgender health in a mouse model.
Critics are the ones bringing transgenic into the conversation, which neither matches what he said, or the majority of the studies.
It is as if Bob called the ocean blue, but Sally claims Bob really meant red, while simultaneously pointing out he is wrong because the ocean actually blue. It is a really weak criticism.
A more coherent response is simply: "Studying transgender health in mouse models is important, and those studies were a good use of money"
He attempted a bit of misinformation, which characterizes most of his address. Certainly, his supporters interpreted it to mean transgender mice. IMO, this was deliberate. If it wasn’t deliberate, then Trump is just an idiot. If it was deliberate, then he’s purposefully spreading misinformation in pursuit of some culture war.
No matter how you cut it, it reflects very poorly on our president.