Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
That wasn't my take, and I'm not sure whether you'd count me as an activist or not. But if you're going to tally up my score, I may as well set the record straight, no?
Not to mention I can see someone accusing me of voting illegally down the line or something if I'm unclear about it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.
Undoubtedly illegal immigrants have plenty of disposable income and familiarity with the Massachusetts transit system.
Regardless, ship them to Boston for 1/3rd the price instead of nakedly stoking partisanship for political gain. And why is the Governor of Florida concerned with Texas, and using funds his legislature approved for the state of Florida to ship illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts?
There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').
Border crossings, or at least apprehensions as a stand-in for crossings, from 2010-2020 were lower than they had been for the previous 30 years. The total number of illegal immigrants in the country flatlined in the same time. Moreover, there appears to be a limited ability for us to control how many illegal immigrants show up at our borders.
If by 'reins' you mean this story, it's not clear to me how the media mistaking reins for whips is related to federal ICE policy.
Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities, gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.
Your argument being that there should be a better federal support and/or shelter network to be certain that illegal immigrants can be humanely treated? Your terms are acceptable. Even if we tied it to border funding or some other carrot, I doubt Senate Republicans would care - Trump, at least, was offered border wall funding for protection for dreamers and wound up shutting down the government instead.
I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.
The governor of Florida is paying to fly illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts to score political points. I'm too stupid to rationalize how that is in the best interest of the citizens of Florida, so I'll leave that to my betters.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.
I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.
Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word. As would Emperor Jagang and his group of nihilistic-rapist-socialists who literally hate life and beauty. The infantile POTUS in powers of the earth as well, whose name escapes me.
I think you're conflating two issues, which I suppose I did in OP as well. Not every book on that list is like Iron Widow. Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin have both written fantastic books that I've enjoyed; Parable of the Sower in particular is amusingly pro-2A and nevertheless popular. But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.
The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.
As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.
It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies. I'm not sure I would trust any of the groups to recommend me books at this point, which is surprising given how consistently good the awards were from the 1960s all the way through the early 2010s.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are you sure that doing so is actually easier, more practical and/or more sustainable than building a figurative wall and deporting anyone who makes it across?
I suppose my point is that haven't we been doing that, and the incentives are so strong that people are coming anyways? I'm not going to propose that nothing we do matters, but it seems like short of fixing the economic disparities, there's no real lasting solution to the problem.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'm sorry you feel that way, my friend. I wish you the best.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you have any suggestions for comparable Red Tribe transgressions? From my perspective, Reds just look less invested in this part of the game, possibly from having a smaller "standing army", as it were, of professional partisans who spend all day thinking up culture war offensives to enact.
Either you already know the answer to this question, you'll say my response is categorically different (politics vs. social engineering) or that my response is just wrong, no? I doubt there's any huge culture war development I'm aware of that you remain ignorant of.
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False election claims, often knowingly false claims made by Trump et al to undermine faith in the election system for personal benefit. Recently elected Republican election official harassed by his own party for saying he hasn't found any evidence of fraud. Cyber ninjas debacle. etc, etc, etc. Explicit, unabashed gerrymandering. Power plays like this one.
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Roe v. Wade, Texas bounty hunter law, decades of unconstitutional abortion laws in southern states, assassination of doctors providing abortions, armed men screaming abuse at women walking into planned parenthood and a concerted effort to trick them into 'pregnancy crisis centers' instead.
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Nobody cares anymore, but southern states still push creation science and religion. Children are indoctrinated by whatever religious sect their parents choose for them. Children are inundated with things like the pledge of allegiance, armed forces propaganda and media glorifying the US military to an extent that you won't even recognize as weird if you haven't lived abroad.
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How about don't say gay laws? Or other anti-trans legislation? Laws banning discussion of [equity]9https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-of-topics-republicans-want-banned-from-the-classroom/2022/02)? What about book bans? There's a lot of focus on lawn boy and it's ilk, but look at some of the shit people are using that as cover to ban. Oh no, a child might see a muslim person portrayed as anything other than a terrorist! The horror! The handmaid's tale is banned by a dozen states.
I'm sure if you cared more about the culture war you could make hay out of a dozen crazy bills proposed by some state legislators in the south.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
For one, I actively advocate for little beyond treating each other better and sometimes I wade into debates on COVID. It's quite rare that I write about culture war topics. I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable about the border or immigration.
If you're just asking what policy I would support, then no, I don't agree with letting anyone into the country. It seems like there was some agreement that border security was necessary as recently as the Clinton years, and I suspect that if you pressed the median democratic voter rather than the serially online or activist class most would say as much. While expressing some sympathy for the plight of migrants. I'd personally support increased efforts towards developing and stabilizing the countries these people are coming from, but this could either have been shown to be ineffective or is already happening and I'm ignorant of it.
I have a more favorable view towards skilled immigrants legally applying for citizenship, as well as refugee programs.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Interestingly, the 2021 numbers broke the 2000 record, though NPR gives some estimation caveats. There's some fun questions about how comparable these numbers are -- NPR's waffling about gotaways applies as easily in the opposite direction, not just for this year but also for large parts of the lulls. But more interestingly, the surge had resulted in a large number of policy changes to discourage unlawful immigration, most notably the 1996 IIRIRA.
Maybe so, but the people ranted about how soft Obama was on the border and how much better Republicans would do if we enacted their policies. Well, Trump got elected and not much changed; the trend towards increasing numbers of migrants potentially started in 2018 before being masked (heh) by COVID or not. I don't have a counterfactual world where Trump won reelection in 2020 to see what the numbers would be today, but I think there's a pretty good argument that even if we gave repubs everything they asked for (at least mainstream repubs, defined as a majority) the numbers would still be relatively high. I'm not convinced by the folks saying the entirety of the crisis is due to the fact that we wouldn't build the wall and improve morale among Border Patrol agents.
The media doing so, alone, doesn't particularly control. The President of the United States, in response to the media outrage, informed the country that " promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences," while the Vice President said "it evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery"... still doesn't exactly control, but it has a lot of impact on the day-to-day operations. Not because that particular sort of behavior was especially common, or even because horseback operations, but because Tall Poppy.
I agree with what you say here, but your original claim was that federal ICE policies have hobbled border patrol. Whatever, forget it.
No, my argument being that "treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points" has been a common practice, and there's been crickets, at length.
Your contention here being that the current administration was under fire for the bad conditions at their border facilities, so they shrugged and started bussing all the people to random cities rather than where the people actually wanted to go? And your claim is that, in the article you cited, the relatives they are supposedly being bussed to do not exist and were fabricated? Before you accuse me of strawmanning I'm just trying to fill in the gaps here, I genuinely don't see how the evidence you cited is equivalent to Desantis or how ostensibly bussing children in border facilities to relatives is treating them as chattel.
But there was also a contemporaneous leak describing the White House's perspective. Maybe that leak was wrong! Maybe Trump somehow -- unusually -- managed to pull the vast majority of Republican politicians to his whims, and trick the Democratic Senators. But it's strange how the writer here can't even seem to imagine the possibility that a 'compromise' bill is actually not giving much to the other side, while demanding a lot.
So is your argument that Senate Republicans would, in fact, accept a compromise?
The bill that you linked seems to be healthcare-related, not immigration, or else I'm just unfamiliar with the arcana of congress.
Can you make any deep guesses about why DeSantis wants to do this, or why he -- and several other states, many of whom have been running similar operations -- believe that it makes effective political points? Was he born wicked, or was wickedness thrust upon him?
Neither; I suspect he wants to do this to amass political power and support a 2024 presidential bid. In the same way I don't think that Biden really cares about student loans or a lot of the diversity stuff, I think he does those things for his partisans. Doing what your constituents want isn't a bad thing, the real problem is when politicians of all stripes do things to hurt the outgroup and we cheer them for it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
How are they being manipulated? From what I've heard, lots of those being bussed or flown out were asked whether they wanted to go and said yes.
They were (ostensibly, this is dependent on honest reporting) asked if they wanted to go to Massachusetts, not Martha's Vineyard. Would you consider it honest if I asked an immigrant if they wanted a flight to the United States and I dropped them off in Soldotna, Alaska?
But, of course, conservatives are just going to turn around and say that this is exactly what liberals have been doing, and in the even more literal sense of "point-scoring," namely deliberately refusing to enforce immigration laws in order to politically profit from future naturalizations or even present unlawful voting by illegal immigrants.
Politically, perhaps, although if we had that conversation we'd likely recycle tired talking points about how the United States has always been a nation of immigrants. The US population share of immigrants is higher than it was in the 80s, but on par with the early 20th/late 19th century.
From a humanitarian perspective, I strongly disagree that they are equivalent.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're correct insofar as democrats aren't nonpartisan saints, also dislike outgroup media and have their own criticisms of red tribe media.
You're incorrect insofar as the politicians and base of one party are much more vociferous in their criticisms of what they call the mainstream media, of CNN and 'the failing NYT,' of fake news and the Washington Compost, sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd, the dying WSJ, 'Dumb as a rock Sour Lemon Don Lemon,' and so on and so forth. I suppose about 8 years ago I can remember people saying 'Faux News.' I can remember some measured comments from Obama bemoaning conservative media and echo chambers, but it really pales in comparison, doesn't it?
We can talk about why that is, and I don't think it's because my outgroup are moral monsters, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks for the reminder. I promise upfront not to argue with you, but if you're willing to indulge a question I'd appreciate it.
IOW, there are rules.
From my perspective, I hold my tongue on a lot of snarky one and two line posts that strike me as culture warring. 1 2 3 4 5.
Not to complain or cry that they should get warnings and/or bans, but my impression was that we were thunderdoming it. Are you willing to comment on whether from your perspective the mod philosophy is the same as in the Old Place or if there was a deliberate change early on to retain users?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I never really see you posting here calling out anyone on your side for being gleeful about suffering
Wherein I complain about woke people taking over science fiction awards (so many upvotes!)
Wherein I incredulously share an anecdote about a woke woman denying physical differences between men and women (oh so many upvotes! The community loves me)
Wherein I say the BLM protests were probably on balance bad and many of the conservative critiques were correct (you may want to ctrl+F BLM).
I could go dig up older reddit posts in the same vein, but since you can't be arsed to put any effort into it, I don't see why I should either. For a while now I've wanted to say kudos for the great name and flair, but honestly, your one and two liners aren't worth engaging with so this'll be the last you hear from me.
Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.
When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.
And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.
What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?
You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.
Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?
It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.
But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?
We probably shouldn't be.
There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose.
Can you cite the study you're referring to?
Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.
How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.
But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.
Children have an amazing innate immune capacity to generate sterilizing immunity. From a public health viewpoint (herd immunity!), it is therefore critical that we leave the children alone. But protecting our children from C-19 vaccination is also critical from an individual health viewpoint as vaccination with these non-replicating vaccines will prevent adequate education of their immune system. This is because spike (S)-specific, non-neutralizing antibodies (Abs) that are continuously recalled by the circulating Omicron (sub)variants will steadily outcompete their innate Abs and thereby prevent the child’s innate Abs to instruct the immune system on how to discriminate ‘self’ from ‘self-like’
It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.
Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
talked about the allergy thing and Red Queen Syndrome(?),
I'm assuming they meant the Red Queen hypothesis? We're in an evolutionary arms race with pathogens and we have to run as fast as possible just to avoid losing ground.
had the ballsy idea to fly to some African country and intentionally contract a hookworm(!)
Yeah, people have seen this kind of thing for a while. There's been some efforts to identify the molecular bits that mediate the immunomodulation, but my impression the last time I looked into it (probably nearly a decade ago to be fair) is that there's something about live worms that's required to get the immune system going, much like how live attenuated vaccines are normally better. I doubt live worms as a treatment would make it past an IRB, or be very appealing for most people.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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...
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
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.
Most of what you write doesn't register to me as 'facts,' particularly if you're drawing on personal experience. When you say things like so-and-so was involved in a leftist terrorist group in the 70s and is now a university professor it comes across as an unsupported fact but one that I can easily check by wikipedia. When you say Blues are responsible for the plight of black Americans with no supporting data, it strikes me as an opinion that may or may not be true and is complex enough that even if superficially true is the tip of an iceberg. It contains about as much information as me saying that Reds are responsible for the plight of black Americans, no? My response could easily have been that, we both likely would have been wrong and could have gone in circles eating our own tails. It reminds me of mock debates in high school classes where nobody could ever win and indeed determining the truth of the matter wasn't even the point.
But then, maybe that's just my pathological obsession with data.
And I could point out sacred cows on the right that are just as nebulous. You talk to me about the value of "Christian Morals," "patriotism," "respect for the military." Yet I try to take you seriously nonetheless, and avoid things that I know would trigger you.
I think you're right about the BLM protests. As far as I can tell, the consequences have not been good. The crime wave in America, although still historically not that bad (things were worse in the 80s and early 90s), was not shared by Canada, Mexico or the EU as far as I can tell. I'm fairly confident I've said as much to you before, although maybe it was gattsuru or someone else, I'm not sure. From my perspective, every debate inevitably makes it way to the BLM protests because the easily available evidence around increases in crime is on your side and you want to just keep scoring the same point over and over again.
So, at least so far as your conversations with me go, how do you want to handle that? I can sympathize with your perspective and it seems like it has been self-destructive.
That being said, there are some problems with your narrative. Namely, the increase in violent crime and murders weren't restricted to black or urban neighborhoods. How do you draw a line between urban BLM protests and people in almost completely white rural counties murdering each other more often? I don't think the data is available yet, but I'm curious to see if there was a proportional increase in white and black perpetrators, suggesting some other factor.
Insofar as you insinuate that the BLM protests were orchestrated by democrats, I'm less on board. They were certainly involved, white liberals were definitely present at the riots, democratic politicians sympathized with the protesters. At the same time, I'm skeptical that a counterfactual world where white liberals said 'Hey, I know that cop killed your boy but he was on drugs and actually police help you on net' or facebook, twitter and the NYT actively censored stories about George Floyd would have stopped black Americans from rioting.
It's not clear to me hat you mean by this. Are you suggesting that from your perspective, conflict is rational and desirable? And what do you mean by conflict?
I agreed that the inner cities were likely worse, but I disagree with your characterization of opioid addicts peacefully dying in their bedrooms without any crime or damage to society. That's largely based on discussions I've had with friends from these areas, although I can't find any actual data supporting that, so who knows. Maybe you're right and these people studiously follow the law and are good members of society right up until they overdose on fentanyl. Maybe their drug dealers scrupulously stop at red lights, and people suffering withdrawal who can't afford a score are too morally righteous to rob that house down the road to buy more drugs.
From 1999-2006 prescription ODs went up 3x (3500-10,000) while total ODs slightly less than doubled (19k-30k). From 2014-2016 synthetic ODs went up 5x (4000-20,000) while total ODs went from 52,000-60,000. I'm not surprised that the latter got more attention.
Whether the former got any attention I suppose is hard to say since google trends only goes back to 2004, and is unfortunately relative. I could search for news articles from the time, but that's not very quantitative either. I'm not sure how we'd settle that question.
You're right that prescription opioids were a big issue in the mid 2000s though, I was thrown by the different y-axis scales.
There's a reason China affirmative actions the fuck out of their minorities. Having a permanent underclass, along racial lines or otherwise, does not seem like a particularly stable social structure to me. Nor a desirable one. I'm willing to trade some inefficiencies in the economy for welfare.
You said:
You also go on to say:
I pointed out that black Americans are doing better in states with blue governance than red governance. So relatively speaking, if Blues fucked the Blacks, did Red politicians in Mississippi and Arkansas and Missouri double fuck the Blacks? You're not responsible for Chicago, but it's also pretty clear that if we elected Republican leaders in Illinois and they enacted similar policies to other Red states the outcomes for Blacks would get worse. So...the conditions are not good on an absolute scale, but it's rich to criticize Chicago when states that you control are doing significantly worse. You skated past this argument in your response.
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