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ArjinFerman

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joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
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ArjinFerman


								
								
									
								
								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Tinfoil Gigachad

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One of the open questions on the trans issue is just how big is the problem, really, particularly as it relates to children, and how often they're prescribed irreversible medical procedures. One attempt to answer it is the Stop The Harm Database, they go over insurance / Medicaid / VA claims and try to find procedure and NDC codes relevant to gender affirming care. According to them something to the tune of 14,000 minors received hormones, blockers, or surgeries between 2019 and 2023, with 5,747 of them getting some form of surgery. That report is not without criticism, we discussed it before and it was pointed out that the number includes laser hair removal as a surgery, so at first glance it looks like the "central example" of the kind of gender surgery that would cause people to freak out is actually a lot less frequent. However, evidence keeps accumulating that the numbers are just as bad a trans-skeptics are indicating, and perhaps even worse.


First, a small sanity check. The first pediatric gender clinic in the US opened in 2007, Stop The Harm now has 54 in it's database. These 54 clinics have to pay their bills somehow, and that implies a throughput that is probably more consistent with the 14K number being accurate, rather than an overestimate. Of course that alone tells us nothing, a clinic can offer a wide range of non-invasive services, like psychological support, or hell perhaps they do keep the lights on with laser hair removal.


If you followed the culture war for a while, you might remember that originally the argument was "no one is doing gender surgeries on minors, chud", but the actual healthcare providers are sometimes so far away from the culture war front, that they don't realize what they're doing is controversial, and proudly show it off. Here's Keiser Permanente's paper on how many gender-affirming mastectomies they performed on minors between 2013 and 2020. In that period they had 209 patients, the majority taking place at the end, as the trans trend was gaining momentum. They helpfully provide a chart of the incidence rate, and point out it increased 13-fold during that period, to a rate of 47.7 per 100K. The incidence rate gives us an opportunity to run another sanity check. If we take the population statistics by age and sex from 2020, add up the girls aged 13-17 (the age group from the paper; about 3.18% of the total population), multiply that by the total population from the 2020 census (331,449,281), we get 10,540,087 girls matching the demographic from the paper, and when we multiply that by the incidence rate, w get a grand total of 5027 potential mastectomies in the whole country, for 2020 alone. Now, again, that's just a sanity check. Kaiser Permanente is in California, the bluest of blue states, so I'm happy to grant that the incidence rate in other parts of the country is likely lower*, but it does hint at the Stop The Harm numbers not being insane, and the surgery statistics not being carried by laser hair removal.


So has someone tried to run a proper estimate for the whole country? On one hand we have a JAMA paper - National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US giving us 3.7K mastectomies for the 12-18 age group, between 2016 and 2019. Now there's a bit of an issue here in that the authors decided to include 18 year olds in the group, so we have no clue as to how many surgeries were done on minors. I'm pretty sure this is deliberate obfuscation on the parts of the authors, as I've seen multiple people ask one of them for the 12-17 numbers, and them going "oh, haha, sorry that's how we grouped, and it would be too much trouble to go back and recalculate it now". When other academics (from SEGM, I think) asked for the raw data, they went with "lol, no". I wish I could link it, but this was in a Twitter thread that took place around the time the paper got published (3-ish years ago), so I don't even know how to begin looking for it.


On the other hand we have the Manhattan Institute's """report""" giving us from 5,288 to 6,294 mastectomies between 2017 and 2023, and I put it in quote marks because it looks more like an article to me. They say they got their hands on an insurance database, and presumably they ran the right queries, but I'm still salty about the lack of detail on methodology. That said, this number does not actually contradict the JAMA paper. Note that in that paper they ran the numbers for 2016-2019 - the period when the trans trend was just picking up. 2019 was without doubt the year with the most mastectomies in their paper, not just by the Manhattan Institute's chart, but by Kaiser Permanente's as well. Further the MI chart would give us between 1700 and 2500-ish mastectomies for the years 2017-2019 - well within the bar given in JAMA. It's in fact lower, as 2016 saw a lot fewer mastectomies, if you go by KP's incidence rate, and you wouldn't reach 3.7K even if 2016 was exactly equal to 2017. This however is expected because, like I mentioned, the JAMA paper includes 18 year olds. All in all, despite my gripes with how the article is written, the numbers seem perfectly consistent with the numbers given by """mainstream""" sources.


We brought up a few factors that could imply they numbers are overestimated, but are there any pointing to them actually being underestimated? The MI believes even their liberal estimates are undercounting the actual numbers:




Two caveats should be mentioned. First, 2023 data are incomplete, making it premature to conclude that a dip occurred that year, relative to previous years. Second, even the liberal estimates are an undercount, as the data are limited by two constraints: the procedures had to be covered by insurance, and patients had to have a preexisting diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The out-of-pocket costs of “top surgery” can be as low as $3,000, a sum many middle-class families can afford. Further, if it is true, as is being alleged, that gender clinicians are using false diagnostic and procedural codes for insurance billing, these cases would not show up in our data.




That last bit might raise an eyebrow. Normally, I'd say it reminds me of a bit I once saw in an Adam Curtis documentary, about how the OG Neocons were screaming about the USSR building up a massive fleet of submarines, and when it was investigated and they found no such thing, they started screaming that this means the Soviets have a massive fleet of stealth submarines. In this case, however, well bear with me...


The link at the end of the quoted paragraph leads to a story about Dr. Ethan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge, whistleblowers from the Texas Children’s Hospital who exposed it for still providing gender-affirming care, even as the hospital officially announced it's putting a stop to them. For their trouble, they were rewarded by Biden siccing the FBI on them. The case of Dr. Haim is one of the biggest affronts to justice I saw in recent years, but I'd need an entirely separate effort post to go over that. The article slowly builds a decent-ish case that the hospital may have illegally billed Medicaid for the gender affirming procedures, but it's not directly relevant to my argument.  The interesting bit is when you followed these two down the rabbit hole. They testified in congress about this matter, and Vanessa Sivadge, as far as I understood her testimony claims to have personally witnessed the doctors putting down the wrong ICD code in their diagnoses:




Mr. ONDER: Tell me a little bit, what was going on? They were downright putting the wrong ICD–10 code in these patients’ charts?


Ms. SIVADGE. Yes. Thank you for that question. Yes, Texas Children’s Hospital, through two particular doctors, were intentionally misdiagnosing patients, and I saw this with my own eyes. They were, for example, labeling a male with a testosterone deficiency to administer testosterone. They would do this because, on the medical chart, they would put the preferred gender identity of the patient and not the biological sex. This makes it very difficult to detect fraud for any insurance company who gets the billing code. It’s very difficult to distinguish what is actually happening.




Now, these congressional testimonies always felt a bit too generic to me, so we don't get much beyond a "trust me, bro", even if it's backed by a threat of perjury. Dr. Haim for his part never claimed to see it personally, but the issue seems to have become a personal hobby horse of his, and if you follow him you can see he dug out a lot of interesting things, like, for instance this fact-sheet,  which he also testified about, from the Campaign For Southern Equality. They sent it out to gender clinics, and outright come out and say "hey, these (gender dysphoria related) codes are commonly rejected by insurance providers, try using ones like 'E34.9 Endocrine disorder, other' instead". Or how about this coding update from the American Medical Association where they recommend doctors stop using the code for gender affirming breast reduction/removal and use either the one for "treatment or prevention of breast cancer", or "reduction mammaplasty"?


Ok, so we have a few institutions encouraging the use of alternative diagnosis / procedure codes, how much of an impact could that have on the national estimates of incidence. Well, much like with Kaiser Permanente happily informing us on how many mastectomies they performed, some pro-trans researchers happily estimated the impact of using alternative codes for us:




The ICD-10 code was the most common way we identified GDY – 97% of patients were identified using either E34 or F64. Utilizing billing codes is an imperfect but practical way of identifying transgender patients for chart review, which has been used by multiple previous studies.23,31–33 Some codes used in similar adult studies, such as F65.1 “Transvestic Fetishism,” or Z87.890 “Personal History of Sex Reassignment,” were not present in our population. While the exclusion of the latter is likely due to the age, multiple interviews with gender-affirming care providers in our adolescent clinic revealed that providers prefer to use E34.9 “Endocrine disorder, other” for patients, as it is a less stigmatizing diagnosis. The use of E34.9 was specific to providers in the adolescent clinic, who indicated they did not use this code for patients other than those in the gender program. Together, these codes captured more patients than gender identity fields would alone (Table 2).




From what I'm seeing, about half of the trans patients taking hormones might be hiding under E34.9 “Endocrine disorder, other”, which is pretty important as Stop The Harm might include laser hair removal, but it does not include code E34.9 (they do did manage to grab all the relevant mestactomy codes, despite the AMA recommendation, however).


As a side note, the hospital, that the authors of the second paper are affiliated with, recently received a subpoena from the DOJ, demanding records related to pediatric gender-procedures, which they decided to completely ignore, almost like they have something to hide. The DOJ's petition to enforce compliance has now been granted, so I suppose we will, at some point, find out if they were on the up and up.


Ironically legal issues might be yet another way of providing us with yet another sanity check. One more interesting thing that popped up on my feed from following Dr. Haim is this court case, here's the interesting bit:




The Court finds the following facts were proven by a preponderance of the evidence for the purposes of the hearing on preliminary injunction:


16. The TRUE Center saw 1140 patients under 18 in 2025. Of those, 257 patients were prescribed puberty blockers and 549 patients were prescribed hormone therapy. In 2024, the TRUE Center saw 1203 patients under 18. Of those, 260 were prescribed puberty blockers and 549 were prescribed hormone therapy.




The TRUE Center is in Colorado. According to Stop The Harm Colorado saw a combined total of 240 patients taking hormones or puberty blocker. In other words, the numbers found by the court, for a single clinic, for a single year, were 2-3x greater than the numbers from Stop The Harm for the entire state for the entire period from 2019 to 2023. @gattsuru called their numbers eyepopping, it might their own they were being conservative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Back when I was a young lad I would have told you "yeah the drivers in Germany are great". Nowadays, between Germany getting diversified, and the driving culture in my country improving, the contrast is not so stark. Some time ago I also saw a video from an Indian guy saying that Italy, of all places, has good driving culture (though I suppose it makes sense if India is the reference), and when he was driving there he felt this subtle pressure to perform up to the standards of the rest of the country.


You're right that everyone might complain about their neighbors, but different groups definitely perform differently.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It helps when the footage actually refutes the allegation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


No need to get snarky. Pretend for a moment that I am very good at noticing. Consider that the modal alt-rightist wants all the progressive gibs but for white people, thats pretty collectivist by any definition




Yes, I agree, but I don't think they're so collectivist that they've purged any trace of individualism from their worldview, which I think would be necessary to confidently answer a question like "Do you really want to tell me that the average HBD believers, Alt right, and dissident rightists are in any form individualists?" in the negative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You're probably referring to this, and the recent follow-up. Much like you, I think the flaming-out poster is entirely imagining any "10 step plan to reshape society so that AAs collectively have reduced social impact, freedom, rights, and political power".




HBD is boring to me




Fair, but I don't think you should misrepresent others' opinions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Followed up by here's my 10 step plan to reshape society so that AAs collectively have reduced social impact, freedom, rights, and political power.




Can you give an example? Most I've seen is people arguing to remove the special privileges that were given to them, and therefore to actually equalize social impact, freed, rights, and political power.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Do you really want to tell me that the average HBD believers, Alt right, and dissident rightists are in any form individualists?




Yes. Allowing for collectivism in your framework is not the same thing as "not being individualist in any form", though with how extreme the demands for individualism are (at least as far as a certain group of people is concerned), I understand the distinction might be too subtle to notice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It sounds like you're disagreeing with his argument. I don't really have on opinion on the proportion of autists to AGPs, I'm saying he might be perfectly right about their prevalence in either locality, but it's irrelevant to how acceptable I find trans activism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They changed something in how they format the data. This happens every once in a while and usually gets fixed within a few days.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I absolutely despise modern journalism and it's inability to present information, but hey, turns out you're actually right. On the other hand - darts. I tried to find results for pool / snooker, but that only yielded a lot of mewling from journos. So it's not a clear "no differences in hand-eye coordination" thing, but it turns out Samuel Colt did, in fact, make us equal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is it possible the "transgender intolerance" of the right is a self reinforcing feedback loop?




Nope. Portraying the trans issue as being primarily about who gets to go to which bathroom, or some visceral "ick" factor,  is at least 10 years out of date. The reaction to the trans issues comes from progressives seeing the provision of irreversible medical procedures to minors as an inalienable human right, that justifies nearly everything, including public school teachers transing children behind their parents' backs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The EU makes no laws about that. The EU has no police force or court. The EU can’t jail anyone.




Oh wait, this is not how you phrased it originally. The EU very much does make laws about it, and it does have it's own courts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So what?




Right back at you. It's still accurate to portray the EU, particularly the legal entity, as anti free speech, because it clearly is.


I also don't recall people claiming the cases in Germany and the UK are representative of all of Europe, so I'd appreciate a link. I also don't remember anyone's claims being exaggerated, people accurately reported on actually existing cases.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The European Union as an entity has a clear anti free speech stance, regardless of what member states think on the subject.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Presumably this was a Grindr hosted political event rather than a literal gay orgy.




Porque no los dos? Even the CPAC confererence has a reputation for being a depraved pit of debauchery, what chance does a liberal event organized by Grindr have?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


33% have between 6 and 21 children




What?!


I don't disbelieve, I'm just impressed. Even if the top of the range is that one couple who really fucks, the sheer logistics of it all...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why should I privilege the views of a non American specifically selected on idealogically grounds over the 12 randomly selected ordinary American citizens who apparently spent like two weeks listening to just the testimonies alone who all decided he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt




I never understood this argument. The evidence the jury gets to hear is curated, so they don't necessarily see everything, the quality of the arguments depends on which side can afford a better lawyer, and people are easily manipulated by the general zeitgeist and the media bombarding them with propaganda about racist police.


Also no one is arguing you to privilege the guy's argument, presumably you posses sufficient reasoning faculties to evaluate his argument on your own.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The US won for ~20 years, we had dominance over most of Afghanistan while barely even lifting a finger.




The "barely lifting a finger" was a massive money pit that could have funded all sorts of "everybody gets a pony" programa from universal healthcare to a permanent base on the moon, and the "winning" was a state where you failed to subdue your enemy.




The issue techieland has isn't in winning the war, but in convincing their people that a war halfway across the planet is worth the relatively minor expenditure on them against a group of people who see their side as existential and go into hiding.




Even in that framing it sounds like they have a shortage of manly men that would enable them to take decisive action.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"The government we set up collapsed, and we had to leave" is a curious definition of victory.




If you moved Belgium next to the Taliban any war would be laughably one sided in Belgium's favor.




Belgium has a quarter of the population of Afghanistan, and almost 10% of it is Muslim. Moving it closer would, if anything, work to their disadvantage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Who wins?






Techieland obviously.




That's not what I saw in Afghanistan.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for May 19th, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Claude lied to me! So here I was trying to optimize the bullet simulation. To do that I have to create a similar spatial index that I made for the bugs. That one is kept in a series of buffers, which in glsl work kind of like C structs. Now wanting to recreate 3-4 of those I was wondering if there's a way to somehow keep the bullet data in the same buffer as the bugs, but have the data well organized. Since the bug-data is an arbitrary length array that gets tricky, I can't have two of those in the same buffer... but I could do that if one of them is fixed length. Then I find out the glsl also has "constants" that you can set from the cpu-side, and that I can use them to define array lengths. Like I said, lies.


It sort of worked but the program was using the constant's default value, not the one set from the CPU. A series of bugs ensued that weren't entirely obvious to troubleshoot. When I finally got to the bottom of it, it turned out I'm back at square one. Next step: do the same thing again, but with actual compile-time constants.


How have you been doing @Southkraut?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've seen lots of hemming and hawing as to why there's a difference, but not many attempts to quantify it. I suppose someone could go over various pool, darts, or e-sports tournaments and compare scores between leagues, but that's a bit too much work for me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Well those are the same thing.




Hardly. It clearly means if you're organizing opposition against Skynet, you still should put men in charge of the military affairs. We may ultimately lose, but "we'll all die anyway, so it doesn't matter" is a very defeatist attitude.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did. What wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. What truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.




Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots, and logistics games are probably one of the most male-skewed hobbies on the planet.