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Chrisprattalpharaptor

Ave Imperaptor

9 followers   follows 4 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:21 UTC

				

User ID: 80

Chrisprattalpharaptor

Ave Imperaptor

9 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:21 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 80

There's also this guy, among others, who would take similar positions without making concrete predictions or taking any kind of responsibility for being wrong. I want to say the deleted user was Navalgazer420xx, but I could be mistaken. You can follow the links in that post for other people making that argument.

I suspect most of the people who were notorious for taking this position changed their username when moving to the new site based on posting styles.

They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.

Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.

That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.

But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.

An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit.

I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.

You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.

For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to.

Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.

Not Syo, but I would assume the majority, likely significant majority, of academics choose a field of research based on personal interests, whatever that may be.

Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.

In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.

I'd venture that the evidence that would convince a skeptic to not be so concerned is roughly parallel, and equally impossible, to the evidence that would convince you that the skeptic's level of concern is remotely justified.

So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?

Sidhbh Gallagher is a heck of a creep

Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?

Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?

the particular costs and lack of (visible?) critique from "within the movement" says something concerning. That WPATH seems to be removing guidelines (removing age recommendations for most procedures) when most of the world is adding more says something, too; we can disagree about exactly what that means, but I would be hard pressed to accept that it says anything good. How bad does the failure mode need to be, and how lacking the internal pushback?

To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?

I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.

Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.

About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.

I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?

I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.

My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.

So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?

If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?

The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?

The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.

Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?

...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities.

Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.

Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?

The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.

Thanks! That was a wild ride.

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories.

It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.

As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.

Bravo. If Zorba ever gets around to adding a version of reddit gold, I'll come back to this comment.

It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?

I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.

You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.

Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:

  1. Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.

  2. Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.

  3. All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

  4. Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?

I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?

Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:

As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):

Reduxx reached out to the Anthropology Department at CSUC for comment on Johnson’s association with a forum hosting child sexual abuse fantasies

which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.

I don't have access to a financial breakdown of the kinds of studies that feed into this database so I admit this is somewhat me talking out of my ass, but the sequencing costs involved are pretty low these days. I'd guess the cost of computation might even be comparable to running the SNP panels (maybe 25-50$ per sample in bulk, or even 70-100$ per sample in bulk if you just want full genome data).

The real cost is the army of nurses, doctors and scientists doing more or less unpaid labor for career advancement and altruistic reasons; doing this as a private company would be staggeringly expensive unless your scale is much smaller, and either way, any kind of payout from this data would be dubious. Getting the demographic and phenotypic data to associate with the genetic data is an enormous pain in the ass between IRBs, patients who are unreliable and disinterested in giving you data, making sure you're following all the regulations around PII, etc. Not to mention the fact that half the population hates the medical-industrial complex right now and is unlikely to cooperate on any kind of large scale project.

Ideally, we'd all be genome sequenced at birth and our medical records would be entered into a centralized system where researchers could access de-identified data. The ML folks and data scientists would be able to tease out a remarkable number of associations that we just don't have the power for right now. Although maybe we've just circled back to square one, where that centralized system would decide what you can do with it's data...

It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, and I'd probably agree with the first half of your comment.

As for the second, well, I think you just haven't found the right corners of facebook/gab/parler yet.

For all the bitching and moaning that progressives do about the Motte, does how the motte talk about progressives or their sacred cows even hold a candle to how most progressive places talk about right wingers?

Not for the most part, but you're comparing the highly educated and slightly restrained members of one group versus the rabble of the other. Compare /r/pol with the breitbart news comments section and you'll find some interesting symmetries.

In the event that you're genuine and not a troll:

Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

And ironically, you believe your outgroup are political extremists out to get you and yours leading you to 'take action' by buying a firearm and joining your local John Brown society. Political extremism is a huge problem, but tell me exactly how you're any better or how characterizing your outgroup as 'they would kill me if they could' is any better?

Maybe I'm just having a little moment and will regress to mean in a couple weeks, but this particular incident has shifted me from "no" to "They would if they could" regarding conservatives in this country, at least temporarily.

Do you not see the profoundly self-defeating hypocrisy involved in responding to accelerationism and domestic terrorism with veiled threats of your own? Let's pretend for a moment that you're actually a relevant target for political extremists in the same way that Nancy Pelosi, third in line for the presidency, is. Do you think that fedposting and flashing your guns are likely to bring down the temperature and decrease the likelihood of domestic terrorism in any meaningful way?

If you're really concerned about any of these issues, put on your big boy pants and try having a real conversation with people instead of fedposting massively inflammatory and uncharitable takes. You're harming the causes you claim to champion, and making all of our jobs that much harder.

I think they deleted it the morning after. I seem to remember some people mentioning it was deleted when they were replying.

If you ain't complaining about woke people, you're playing on hard mode my friend.

Thank you! All very good advice, and you were correct that I misread OP. Yes, I was being sincere.

Ah, I see. My apologies.

It feels like what would happen if ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor showed up any time you mentioned COVID to disprove you or interrogate you as if you were a collegial equal.

I apologize if you feel like I held the topic hostage or stifled conversation. I can sympathize with the idea that someone might be more knowledgeable about a field but not necessarily share your values or background, and I'm sure if you had access to all the same facts you may reach different conclusions than me. With that in mind, what would you suggest I do? Just lay off the hobby horse for a while? Be less aggressive?

No need to reply if you're uncomfortable, I know this is tangential to your point.

I do not agree, for the exact reason it's fair to call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer.

Groomer -> Pedophile

Groomer -> Ghislaine Maxwell

Groomer -> Guzman (whoever that Virginian legislator was)

Groomer -> Educators showing their charges books like lawn boy

Groomer -> Educators showing their charges media that has trans/nonbinary/gay characters not doing sexually explicit things

Groomer -> PM me classic memes

Groomer -> pro-trans people (always unclear how wide a net this is casting, sometimes allowing for plausible deniability)

All of these claims have been made in this thread, by numerous different people. At one end, groomers are pedophiles who want to fuck your children (serious and immediate threat!). At the other end, for someone doing something categorically different, you're casting a wide enough net that tens of millions of Americans are now Maxwell-Groomer-Pedophiles (yeschad.jpeg the trolls will say).

I stopped using the words racist, sexist and misogynist for the same reasons that the definitions have gotten so amorphous that some people would call tens of millions of Americans racist (yeschad.jpeg, their response is). Y'all are just playing the same game as the normie Blue tribers you love to hate, to a remarkable degree.

Accordingly I sympathize with @naraburns for not wanting to cross that bridge either, and there does come a point where calling a spade a spade is the most charitable course.

Ah, we're doing the call a spade a spade thing? Will you defend me saying this forum is populated by 'yes-men tripping over themselves to fellate [FC]?' And will you defend my right to call out people for being racist, fascist misogynists in the future, if these are the rules you want to live by?