MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Not to mention less accurate. The average Democratic office-holder lives in a woke bubble where "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a correct description of the local usage of the word "woman". I do not think the GOP has a widespread alternative meaning of "stole" and "thieves" which would make @anti_dan's proposed response a true statement when parsed as conservatalk.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
Wouldn't that cause a problem in the lab by making the "alcohol" immiscible with water?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
17hr ago
"Ethanol" in a school chemistry lab is probably meths - the duty on drinkable pure alcohol is pretty high, even if not marketed for drinking. Adding 5-10% methanol makes the alcohol too toxic to drink and therefore unattractive to drinkers. We were all warned about this in no uncertain terms before doing an experiment with the stuff.
In the UK, they don't add anything additional to meths to make it unpalatable, so ocasionally tramps and suchlike posion themselves by drinking it. Meths sold to the general public as a fuel/cleaning product is died purple to discourage accidental drinking. But a school science lab is going to be using "industrial methylated spirits" - i.e. an ethanol/methanol mix with nothing else added to it that could affect the chemistry. (Of all the chemicals in my school lab, this was oddly the only one they needed a licence to buy).
I'm not sure about the situation in the US.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
With the increasing dominance of expresso-based coffee (paradoxically partly driven by Starbucks), Starbucks is actually one of the best places to get decent drip coffee. At least in London, any of the other major chains will just serve you an Americano without warning you, and the good independents will check you are okay with Americano before serving it.
Paris used to have a culture of decent drip coffee, but I'm not sure if they still do. The last few times I was there I was with kids in a way not conducive to serious coffee exploration.
"What is a woman?" is a question about the meaning of words, not about the world. And "We should, where possible, use words in a way which avoids hurting people" is a good (though in my view insufficient given that it makes it impossible to talk about sex-specific medical issues in non-technical language) rational argument for using the word "woman" in a trans-inclusive way - see any of the multiple Yud essays on this point, or Scott's "The Categories were made for Man"
There are a lot of insane transactivists who think that "What is a woman?" has an objective scientifically correct answer which includes transwomen, but you don't have to agree with them to avoid cancellation.
Given Hobson's choice on the issue, I would rather defend pro-Palestine in front of a hostile audience than TWAW*, but I would rather defend TWAW than a blatant lie like the MAGA position on the 2020 election.
* My actual position on this issue is that Israel is almost certainly the lesser evil, but I don't take sides in evil-vs-evil conflicts where I don't have a stake.
More options
Context Copy link