Catsnakes_
6mo ago
If you walk up to somebody to get into an argument with them (even if they're encouraging you to do this), can you really say you were ambushed?
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
You can make all kinds of responses to the right wing narratives, but I don't see how criticizing the dead man is a necessary component of any response to how the right wing is acting unless the speaker means to tacitly add "(and so for that reason it's good that he's dead)" to the end of their response.
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
In the moment of somebody's horrific shooting, all that needs to be said about them is "what a horrific tragedy". You can wait a week for the blog posts and the content will probably be better for it. You might miss the timing window for some sick Twitter dunks but I think that's probably for the best.
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
Why does Musk or Trump blaming the left mean specifically that "the left" needs specifically to criticize Kirk as some sort of a response (rather than criticizing Musk or Trump, for instance, given the victim isn't the one blaming the left)? "the left" could even respond to Musk and Trump the way many sensible people did by disavowing the senseless violence without qualification and leaving it at that, which defangs that attack.
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
First, I don't think that scenario is a central example of what we're talking about, which is mostly people just putting shitty remarks about him into the ether apropos of nothing other than the event itself. That said, how and when you communicate is as important as the literal words. If I post "RIP Charlie Kirk. He was a great conservative mind." as a little eulogy and you reply with "actually he was a hack who believed whatever Trump told him to believe" then your message was heard loud and clear.
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.
People could also just not comment on the guy's assassination. Going on Twitter to criticize the guy 10 minutes after he gets internally decapitated live in front of his kids (rather than just saying "what a senseless tragedy" or just remaining quiet and saving the takes for a week later) does in fact amount to saying "he deserved to get shot" and both the intended audience and their political opponents are correct to interpret it that way!
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
(Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
You could just look this up and see what he actually said (and then discuss it here) rather than just taking it on faith.
Catsnakes_
6mo ago
I think you have to be actively looking to give them an out to buy this for a second. People don't laugh and clap at car chases.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.
(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
Is tuna officially off the list for some reason?
Mercury content. The other fish on the list are smaller and don't accumulate as much mercury.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
The attack almost feels like category error, and I can't think of many people who would feel chastened by it or feel the need to respond to it. Christians are often doing a substantial portion of the charitable work in any given community. In my experience, the people running food banks, taking meals to shut-ins, visiting prisoners, and finding resources for single mothers are affiliated with one church or another. They might agree that some nebulous others are being bad Christians who only care about people they don't have to think about, but certainly none of them exist at their church and to the extent the people being targeted by this criticism even exist they aren't serious in the first place and aren't listening.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
You're only tossing that out now that other commentors poked holes in your other attempted explanations. You may as well blame the tooth fairy. If you genuinely thought that you would have opened with it, and you'd have some concrete ideas about what regulations are in the way. Your profession by and large does not give a fuck about the human aspect of medicine or the cost to individuals, and this wildly out of touch crypost from you is full of evidence of it. Luigi's only mistake is he didn't get the surgeon who ruined his back too.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
So if it's not your salary that's at fault, and it's not the medical cartel's restriction of the supply of doctors that is at fault, and it's not the insurance companies because they're legally required to pay out such a large portion of their revenue, whose fault is it? All I see in this thread is a bunch of deflecting and blame shifting but without one concrete indication from you as to what the actual problem is that needs to be solved. When you've attempted to shift the blame to other elements of the healthcare system, other commenters have replied with evidence to the contrary that seems to surprise you. So who is at fault?
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
"well I don't know who that person is, but I know the infection control nurse is the person who goes around cancelling all of our tests that will show that the patient got a hospital acquired infection" (through nobody's fault)
"this is the person who goes around committing what amounts to fraud because we don't want to get caught having caused an infection" (which is totally our fault, they got it while they were in our care). What do you think this sort of a thing sounds like to other people?
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
People "go back to college" all the time, what are you talking about? You think people wouldn't career change into medicine if it was only a 4 year thing because the curriculum being designed for 18 year olds would make it, what, too easy? Your messages in this entire thread are alien but this takes the cake.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.
That's simply not the case. The state has a vested interest in stable family configurations that produce children that grow up to be healthy citizens, and that's exactly why marriage is a recognized concept in the first place.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
This is uncharitable, boo-outgroup Trump-sneering thinly disguised as "both sides suck" complaining. You should be ashamed of this comment and go vent your spleen some other place rather than bringing down the level of discourse here, especially given that you are a mod.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
But how do you propose we deal with the real phenomenon then?
My position is that it's not a real phenomenon, and I thought I made that clear from the first sentence in my comment. There are sexual fetishists that can be dealt with largely by ignoring them, but GD is not a real thing with a medical cause. Telling people that it is is the thing that creates it.
So if we are to find any sort of solution, surely it has to provide for studying the problem. Or we're just leaving these people to fend for themselves.
Yes, you deal with it the same way you deal with furries/otherkin/people that think they're literally able to do magic. You pat them on the head and say "no you aren't a girl, you've got a dick and that's what that means." If they want to play pretend beyond that, fine. But if we collectively stop giving it space, then the number of people that want to play pretend will drop back down to a totally unnoticeable number and we won't have to care as a society at all.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
No, we should drop the whole exercise and stop giving the concept any thought space at all, because it doesn't exist other than as a cognitohazard/toxic meme. A child (especially an autistic one, which appears to make up a huge proportion of "trans" individuals) going through puberty and having a hard time does not know what's going on. They don't know why they're having a hard time, they don't understand their own emotions, or why they are having a hard time relating to others but what they do know is that it is unpleasant and they would like it to stop. The child doesn't know that approximately everyone has a hard time during puberty and adolescence, since they've got no frame of reference outside of themselves, and they don't know that nobody who is honest has a solution to that difficulty other than growing out of it.
Enter the well-meaning teacher or activist, who offers a silver bullet: the reason you feel weird and like you don't fit and your body is uncomfortable isn't because you're autistic or going through puberty, it's because you're in the wrong body, so all you have to do is transition. Kids are susceptible to believing what an authority tells them, especially one proffering a solution to their problems, and on top of that the authority often primes them by asking if they "feel like a boy" or other questions about internal state that no one healthy ever thinks about and then uses the kid's ambivalence as evidence in favor of the theory. (And now the poor autistic kid thinks normal people have either a pink or blue light in their head telling them what they are, and this is just one more reason they're not normal, and etc)
Of course this is a basically unfalsifiable theory under the best of circumstances, and there's no way to "try it on" to see if it works. When it inevitably fails to solve the problem and in fact makes it even worse, proponents can blame the failure on not doing it early enough, not doing it hard enough, or "transphobia", all of which boils down to "do the thing that isn't working harder". Even if the kid could see through the smokescreen and realize that this isn't helping, the cult-like qualities of the social changes (love bombing, breaking down of relationships, renaming) make it borderline impossible to walk back. It's a social and cognitive trap that vulnerable people are susceptible to, it makes their lives measurably worse, and the only way to cure it is to burn it out of the culture entirely before it gets any more rooted. Giving it legitimacy by taking it seriously as a field of medical research only empowers it.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
They probably mean Kensington in Philadelphia, which looks roughly like the aftermath of a zombie movie.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?
Do you think this is some kind of a dunk? Every father I know, including myself, wishes they could do exactly that.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
That suffers from a similar failure of reasoning. To think that was a coup attempt requires a similar sort of video game logic to thinking that Trump (or Kamala for that matter) becoming president will somehow result in the constitution being abolished or massively amended. It's thinking that there's a magic chair that if you can just touch then the objective marker says "completed" and it plays the "overthrowing the government" cutscene. If the necessary pieces were in place for that to happen (meaning, the vast majority of the federal apparatus was already on board), then touching the magic chair would be unnecessary.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
The glaring hole in the motivated reasoning is that if you believe that the Republicans are going to do a bunch of stuff that's illegal/procedurally impossible the second they're voted into power, then why would you believe that they would wait until they're voted in to do it? If they were going to illegally do it in November after winning the election, they'd just illegally do it now.
Catsnakes_
1yr ago
How do you convince a 22-year-old of either sex that their perception is mistaken, that there is value in seeking committed relationships with another person?
You don't, their family life is going to embed their feeling on that deeper than you could convince out of them. Unfortunately, if they didn't have parents, grandparents, and other very close family and friends to model how to behave in one while they were developing, they're not going to be successful in one even if convinced of the value.
Beyond that though, I don't know that there's much value in worrying about that article or what its implications are. People that are dating after 60 mostly have something wrong with them. I don't mean that as a moral judgement, just a fact about baggage and dysfunction. That goes double for solitary people writing misanthropic replies in the NYT comments. Those people aren't having an impact on young people who had good relationship behavior modeled for them, and they can't really make things worse for those who didn't.
What kind of criticism is relevant to him getting shot that shouldn't be understood by the right as saying "and so he deserved it"? With regards to Floyd, rightists were clearly saying he had brought it on himself and that was the entire point.
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