a_shovel

What did you post? Did you get banned or what?

Thank you for introducing me to the term "disguised query". I've been looking for a way to describe this aspect of how people discuss sex.

The purpose of this study is to allow the administration to say "Official CDC Study Concludes Vaccines Cause Autism". Then, the rebuttal to that statement will be not "No, there's no such study", but instead "yes it does, but the study was run by a discredited crank", which is a huge win because the target audience will stop reading after "yes".

The study doesn't need credibility for this purpose, it just needs to exist. I think it technically doesn't even need a body, just a title page and maybe an abstract to quote from.

I've heard legends of a time, perhaps back in the mid 2000s, when companies paid so much for banner ads that you didn't need another revenue source for your website with Flash games or what have you. If such a time ever existed, it ended long before Flash did.

The link is that autistic people are cool and awesome, and therefore are more likely to do other cool things, such as be transgender or gender non-conforming.

> The 24 February state department cable obtained by the Guardian instructs visa officers to apply Immigration and Nationality Act section 212(a)(6)(C)(i) – the “permanent fraud bar” – against trans applicants. Unlike regular visa denials, this section triggers lifetime exclusion from the United States with limited waiver possibilities.

It's becoming clear that the current Republican goal regarding transgender people is to establish that being openly transgender is a form of fraud (that is: establishing that trans people stating their gender is an act of deliberate deception), so that they have some basis to prosecute them arbitrarily. Bringing up athletes is just misdirection.

I lost a bit too much time exploring through the first place submission. There's a bunch of big publishers that get huge million-number blocks mostly or entirely to themselves, and there are hundreds of thousands of tiny independent publishers that get only ten numbers at a time.

In the words of @drlizpowell.bsky.social, "Imagine if Airlines could just break your legs and say 'whoops!' and then face no consequences."

All the things that differentiate race are genetic, sure, but which things are used to categorize people into race is socially constructed. Why do people base racial categories on skin color but not, say, finger length or whether you can wiggle your ears? Biology can't tell you that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Being a defense contractor isn't a problem that a little corporate rearrangement can't fix. Put the consumer division under a new subsidiary with a friendly name and you're golden. Even among the small percentage who know the link, it's likely nobody will really care. For certain markets ("tacticool" gear, consumer firearms) being a defense contractor is even a bonus.

I initially thought that this was an announcement for a new pledge and thought, "they're going to forget about this the moment it's convenient." Then I read the article and realized, "Oh, it's already convenient."

Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.

This last Christmas season, my dad and I wanted some classic Christmas music on the TV, so we checked out Youtube for one of those multi-hour videos. We ended up choosing which video to play based on which AI-generated cozy Christmas cabin had the most coherent architecture. One of them had the snow piling up inside the cabin.

We eventually found one that looked okay, but I didn't see any visuals that didn't look generated. Surely there are at least a few vintage public-domain paintings of Christmas trees or similar that they could have bumped up the saturation on and done a slow pan over.

xkcd "Work": https://xkcd.com/1741/

"Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me."

Fired for accidentally misgendering someone, or fired for intentionally misgendering someone repeatedly, often for extended periods of time? The first is the situation being discussed, the second is the situation that actually happens.

Oysters used to be so abundant they were a poor people's food. It's hard to understand how overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction have destroyed ecosystems.

Some people think we can just pretend we're not part of an ecosystem if we pour enough concrete. It doesn't work, it just makes everything worse. A damaged ecosystem is not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to us. A flooded coastal base will soon be the least of our concerns. We need to fix damaged ecosystems and replace destroyed ones

I think you're misunderstanding the article. It's analyzing the claims Reed made, specifically the ones she made in her affidavit, and whether they had been corroborated by the NYT or elsewhere. It's not analyzing the claims made in the NYT article by Ms. Hamon or by Reed. Reed doesn't mention any kind of unexplained increase in this particular claim, so the response is adequate.

Besides, the claims listed in the article are just the ones where some amount of truth has been found. If you scroll to the bottom, it has a link to the spreadsheet where you can see the author's tally of Reed's claims, including the claims where the author found no corroboration and ones where the author considers the claim to have been refuted by the available evidence (evidence which includes the third link in my previous comment, which I do recommend you read).

> "Although a recent New York Times investigation largely corroborated Reed’s account,"

This is entirely false. The New York Times did not corroborate any of Reed's allegations of wrongdoing against the clinic, and large parts of it have been disputed by patients and parents of patients.

https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jamie-reeds-alle...

https://www.studlife.com/news/2023/02/22/wu-denies-ags-reque...

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/parents-push-back-...

It's a power thing. Authorities make arbitrary changes just because they can, and exercising their power feels good. They ignore the reason people object to those changes and interpret the objections as challenges to their power and direct personal insults.

Basicly, "I'm in charge" outweighs "this is dangerous".

I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.

I have no idea what that first thing is supposed to be if not some weird kind of throne.

"Advocates" is probably a better descriptor than mine tbh. Anyways, here's how I counted.

1. "cutting a boy's penis off is an appropriate treatment for liking dolls" - Not a position held by trans people or allies. We support the rights of transgender and cisgender people to be as gender-non-conforming as they like.

Note re: "transed her son because her husband wasn't happen with his 'girly' interests" - Having seen the talk she gave that you are referring to, she made no claim of the sort. Also, 'transed' is not a word that describes a coherent concept that exists.

2. "why does he then need further intervention to be that girl" - Nobody needs any interventions to be a girl. "Girl" is just a label.

3. "a child who wants to be a girl totally needs to lose his dick and the parents are Nazi's if they question it" - Advocates do not believe this. Trans adults can have SRS if they want it but it's not "required" for anything and it is not offered for children.

4. "Where is the research showing that children come up with 'gender dysphoria' without adult prompting them" - Most transgender adults were once transgender children. It's quite common to see them say on twitter, tumblr, etc. that nobody told them about gender dysphoria when they were young, and that they had to create their own vocabulary for it when they tried to explain their feelings to their parents.

5. "these are the words they'd use and the interventions that they'd have asked for without 'therapists'" - This one is just confusing. Of course they wouldn't use the same words and independently develop the same medical treatments we have now.

Note re: Money and Reimer: Money was influential in early study of transgender people, but it's important to note that this does not make him an "advocate". Reimer was not transgender, and it always confuses me why anti-trans people think what happened to him supports them. He knew he was a boy, others ignored him, and he suffered greatly as a result, in many of the same ways that transgender people suffer when they aren't allowed to decide their gender for themselves.

Note re: "Why isn't the much more likely explanation - that these adults are pedophiles" - This is not a more likely explanation.

6. "Where, without an adult telling them that a sex change is a real thing is possible for them to have, do you have children asking to be surgically changed to look vaguely like (ie, cosmetic only) the other sex?" - Children generally do not ask for SRS. Apart from that, I'm not sure what your point is here?

7. "How many children, without weird homophobic parents, want their genitals surgically modified?" - This is pretty clearly a reference to the conspiracy theory that transition is a form of gay conversion therapy. Like many conspiracy theories, it's really stupid. Homophobes are generally transphobic as well. Many trans people were asked "why couldn't you just be gay" when they came out to their parents, showing that they see being transgender as worse than being gay (not that they would have approved if they were gay either). Also, only about a quarter of transgender people describe themselves as straight, compared to about 90% for the general population, so if it were a form of gay conversion therapy then it would probably be the most counterproductive form yet devised.

Note re: "explain why wanting to be a dinosaur doesn't warrant surgery but wanting to play with dolls does" - (This is a duplicate of #1, but to reiterate: ) Transgender and cisgender children have every right to play with whatever toys they want, regardless of what gender they are marketed to. It's the transphobes who say children should only play with toys that match their gender.

Note re: "why not just agree with me?" - Because you are wrong about many, many, many things. There's more than this that you're wrong about, but if I listed everything you were wrong about and gave long-form sourced arguments in rebuttal, it'd be a full-time job, and I'm not doing one of those unless I'm getting paid to do it.

I don't know any trans people who believe any of the things that you're suggesting they do. Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.

On another note, in this comment you mentioned the genitals of children and surgery on the genitals of children ten times. Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for, I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?

Tough crowd.

<joke>I wonder, does this also make knees harder and faster?</joke>

The problem is that tearing it down would be a huge embarrassment to everyone involved, especially if it was closed due to safety. Leaving it SBNO indefinitely makes it an eyesore, but lets them avoid assigning blame like a demolition would force them to.

"A bit like" is underselling it. It is that. Occasionally, I politely ask people objecting to the term "cis" what word they would prefer I use instead. I've had people directly tell me I should refer to cis people as "normal".

Another, much more interesting response I've gotten multiple times is that I should use "man/woman" instead of "cis". Which implies that transgender people either don't exist, or don't belong to either category.

To be clear, that's a completely reasonable position to take on them.

Historia Civilis's summary of the crown incident is convincing to me.

> It's highly dramatic, and it seems to have played out a little too perfectly. In my opinion it's pretty clear that Antony and Caesar coordinated the whole thing ahead of time. Cicero reached the same conclusion. ...

> Some say that this Lupercalia incident was Caesar testing the water. If the crowd had been into it, he would have accepted the diadem. Others say that this was a performative rejection of the crown, staged so that he could continue to wield his other king-like powers as he wished.

> I'm kinda in the first camp. Caesar was vain. He liked being flagrant and wearing his Triumphator outfit during festivals. He liked his special little golden chair that was definitely not a throne. He liked all of the pomp and circumstance. My feeling is that in his heart, he wanted a crown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj2UksH_nSI [20:27 - 21:30]

Honestly, not surprised. Starbucks's strategy on unions seems to be to union-bust as viciously as possible with the thinnest of pretenses, and trust that the federal government will let them do it with a slap on the wrist (if anything), as it always has.

> It’s against the law to fire workers for organizing. But as Rizzo and the other Starbucks workers were learning, there’s also little to stop companies from doing it. The National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees union elections and protects workers’ rights, has struggled to hold on to staff members amid deep budget cuts. Since 2010, it is down about 520 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce. The primary penalty that it can impose on companies for dismissing pro-union employees — reinstatement with back pay — has been a paltry deterrent, labor advocates said.

This punishment is so tiny it fails to qualify as a penalty at all.

Liberal Muslims exist.