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MartianNight


				

				

				
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User ID: 1244

MartianNight


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 17 20:50:31 UTC

					

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User ID: 1244

Fortunately my real-life experience with transgender people has been reasonable too, and I don't think we would see as much pushback against genderism if all trans people were like that, but unfortunately there is a minority that isn't like that, and what's more, those are explicitly endorsed by trans activists, whose mantra is that "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". So I think it's fair to attack that idea by focusing on the people who don't particularly look or act like their desired gender and are basically ruining it for the rest.

The fundamental problem with allowing people to earn their gender stripes by performing gender roles, is that it requires accepting gender roles. Maybe people on The Motte do believe in gender roles (men must be strong and protect women and children, women must be pretty and nurture children), but feminists have historically rejected those. I think both views are defensible, but you can't have it both ways: if a woman who wears jeans and doesn't shave her legs isn't any less of a woman, why would a man who wears a skirt and shaves his legs become less of a man? What has Dylan Mulvaney done to earn the name "woman" besides dressing up and acting like a ridiculous gender stereotype, almost a parody of a woman?

Compare that with parenthood: being a biological parent does come with the expectation that you will nurture and care for your child. A deadbeat dad who impregnates a woman and then bails isn't much of a parent, neither is a mother who neglects her children. So stepparents can emulate the expected behavior and earn the recognition of being a parent, at least partly, but only because there are expectations that a parent is supposed to fulfill beyond the initial act of donating genetic material (for men) and giving birth (for women). If you define a parent as just the genetic donor (just like radical feminists define a woman as someone who just has female biology) then obviously you cannot work your way into parenthood.

But none of this really matters because trans activists don't even require trans people to behave in any particular way: "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". That's like saying "a mother is anyone who says they're a mother" but if you haven't given birth or taken care of any children in your life, you're obviously not a mother in any meaningful sense of the word. You can't discredit that argument by pointing to a group of stepmothers who take care of their stepchildren.

(By the way, I do think there is some gatekeeping for the word "mother" too. For example, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to hating on Hilaria Baldwin, and some of that is based on the accusation that she's lying about giving birth to some of her children.)

TBH her actions are exactly the kind of response that's deserved by people on google's scale who use giant monolithic algorhythmic censorship without even the possibility of your petitions being seen by a human

No, people do not deserve to be shot because the algorithm doesn't favor every creator equally (never mind the fact that the people she shot at weren't responsible for the YouTube algorithms in the first place). That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.

This wasn't a case of a person being wronged unfairly by Google, as happened in the past with people who had their accounts inexplicably suspended. Aghdam's account was never banned, but her videos were suppressed by the algorithm because they were cringe and weirdly sexual (example 1, example 2). This is exactly the kind of content YouTube discourages, partially because filling the frontpage with thirst traps doesn't fit its image, and partially because big advertisers only pay for brand-safe content. If you don't want to play by the rules, you shouldn't be on Youtube.

Whatever algorithm is used for recommendations, it will never be possible for every creator to become popular. It's no different with musicians on SoundCloud or aspiring actors in Hollywood. Any algorithm will therefore have winners and losers (including “completely random” or “newest only” feeds). There's no justification for the losers to go on a killing spree because they couldn't succeed within the ecosystem as it exists.

Before I respond to the content of this comment, have you found a place where Caster Semenya admits to being male, or do you take back your earlier claim that all transwomen recognize that they are male and therefore different from ciswomen?

This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped

Huh? You're saying if a white man murdered two black men that raped and tortured a white girl, an all-black jury would let the murderer off the hook entirely?

Kind of low effort for this forum, but I watched a news clip on twitter where CNN interviews Natalee Bingham, a friend of one of the victims, commenting on the suspect claiming to be nonbinary, saying: “That's really really offen[sive] especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a nonbinary person, because in no way, shape or form could they appear as a woman the next day, it's really offensive to even hear that, that they're playing that role."

I was just blown away by the hypocrisy. According to standard leftist rhetoric, a person's gender self-identification is sacrosanct, denying someone's chosen gender identity is transphobic, and the the idea that someone might identify as transgender or nonbinary for personal gain is rightwing fearmongering and something that never happens. Never mind the fact that Bingham based her judgment solely on how the suspect looks in his mugshots (while Bingham herself looks and sounds “transgender” at best); I thought making people's gender recognition dependent on well they “pass” was another faux pas to the LGTBQ+ community.

I want to avoid making this all “boo outgroup”; I know that Bingham doesn't speak for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and maybe others disagree with her views. Still, it's baffling to hear her say so casually the same things that would get a cishet male or radfem woman cancelled. I can somewhat respect the leftist view that self-identification is always valid, even if I personally disagree with it, but if the real rule is more along the lines of “we can question other people's gender identity but you can't”, then I have even less respect for the people pushing this ideology.

The first paragraph is false, they have been offered numerous peace deals with self-rule. Turned them down.

Not true. In Oslo, the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and accepted only limited self-governance for Palestine, but it was Israel that reneged on the deal, once they realized that it would require actually withdrawing their occupation forces from Palestinian territories.

As long as Palestinians demand is the removal of Israel then Israel has a valid claim to fully evict Palestinians.

Again, see the Oslo accords, where the Palestinian leaders agreed to recognize Israel in exchange for partial autonomy in the Palestinian territories, but Israel reneged since they realized they can just keep occupying Palestinian land indefinitely without any repercussions.

So it's clearly not true that all Palestinians want total destruction of Israel, and aren't willing to compromise. That's just a lie spread by Zionists because it makes it easier to justify occupying Palestinian territories indefinitely.

You are really making it sound like they are just Nazis. Nazis too could have just had Germany but wanted other peoples land and more.

The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is a little awkward but there is some truth to what you say: just like Germany could thrive within its 1938 borders, Israel, too, could thrive within the 1947 borders, but just like Hitler felt the Germans were entitled to a larger country, Zionists believed that the Jews had a god-given right to rule Jerusalem and the West Bank, and since they had the military power to take them by force, they decided to just take Palestinian lands by force.

It was mostly uninhabited land. In 1922 a total of 757k people live in Palestine Mandate of which 78% were Muslim. Nobody living there today can claim ownership on what was essentially abandon land.

That's more than twice the number of people living in e.g. Iceland today, and I doubt anyone would call Iceland “uninhabited” or “abandoned”. And by your own admission: there was no significant Jewish presence in that area either (166k by your count) so it's not like the Jews have a better claim to the entire territory.

Nice writeup. Unfortunately not a lot of discussion yet so let me add some random comments:

And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.

Depends on what you call “novel”. A lot of the problems are based on well-known algorithms like path finding, Josephus problems, etc. And there is quite a bit of repetition of concepts between years as well. So I think LLMs and humans alike benefit from being having the previous problems in their data set.

There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.

(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)

ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.

True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?

It's probably the same reason why ChatGPT does so poorly at writing longform fiction. It has no idea how to construct an overarching narrative because the planning, rewriting and editing necessary is invisible to ChatGPT; it only sees the finished output.

I think coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) will be able to fill this gap by observing how humans actually develop code.

Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).

True, and I agree with your subjective assessment that the problems aren't any harder this year, but I'd add also that the leaderboard is not really representative of the overall participant base. People on the leaderboard are the top 1% of all solvers (let alone participants), and they have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, a problem that requires dynamic programming is easy for them (but hard for most casual programmers), while the top 1% still need more time on problems that require lots of of careful reading, convoluted input parsing, tricky edge cases, etc.

I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs.

Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?

I agree that Ukraine is fairly conservative at the moment, but the question is: for how long? Euromaidan was essentially Ukraine pledging allegiance to Western values. That was the cue for Russia to invade!

This can conservatively be interpreted as “Ukrainians turned away from Russia because they wanted economic growth similar to Poland after joining the EU” but it can also easily be interpreted to mean “Ukraine is now lost to the globo-homo neo-liberal monoculture of which liberal feminism is a fundamental part”. The fact that Ukraine receives the majority of its support from America, and within America from the pro-feminist Democratic party, rather than the Republican party that has the Christians and conservatives, doesn't bode well. I can easily imagine that the Ukrainian women that fled the country end up decrying the toxic masculinity of the men who chose to fight and die for their country (like American liberals would), rather than praising them for their service to their homeland (like American conservatives might).

Does this work? https://search.pullpush.io/

Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do.

On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.

(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)

That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox

Yes, but he's still the smallest of the five people, smaller even than the only other female. The point is: most transmen aren't that masculine, even not the ones hand-picked by trans-advocates, not to mention obvious women like Elliot Page.

Anyway, I didn't want to get caught up in discussing individual cases. I'll grant you that some well-passing transmen exist, but I think they're the minority. My argument more broadly is:

  1. The average transman doesn't truly pass a man, and the average transwoman doesn't truly pass as a woman (arguably less so). So the argument that swapping transmen and transwomen is worse for women because now they suddenly share the bathroom with many more male-looking people isn't true: at best you're replacing male-looking men with male-looking women, which is sort of a wash.

  2. But the more important argument is that regardless of visual passing, transmen are much less likely to harrass or assault women than transwomen are. That's why it's better for ciswomen to share the bathroom with transmen than with transwomen.

I don't think enumerating exceptions to the rule invalidates this argument.

How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow?

I often wonder if people raising this question are disingenous. It's phrased as if the idea of sex-segregated spaces is a crazy far-out utopian idea, like universal basic income. In reality, all bathrooms in approximately the entire world worked like this throughout the entire 20th century, using the same mechanisms used to enforce most norms: through a mix of social contral and legal consequences.

Did you see the video of the Wi Spa where a male pervert enters the women-only section of the spa, so one of the women there goes to complain, and the employee at the desk can't do anything about it because in California it's illegal to kick male creeps out of women's spaces, and the only male patron who weighs in on the matter says "How can we know if the fully grown man with a penis isn't a woman?"

In the 90s, this scenario literally would not have happened. If a convicted sex offender entered a woman-only nude space with his dick out, all women present would scream at the top of their lungs for the pervert to get out. Employees would rush in to demand that the offender leave. Men would gather angrily at the door, ready to help escort the man out of the building, but careful enough not to trespass themselves. If necessary, the police would be called to take the man into custody.

Moreover, everyone knew that this is what happened to men who violated this social norm. That's why this type of crime was actually relatively rare.

Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?

No, of course. But first, I don't see how putting transwomen in women's bathrooms solves this problem, since a woman that is willing to pepperspray a masculine looking woman will obviously do the same thing to your average non-passing transwoman.

Second, I think some of this paranoia is actually fueled by genderism. In the past, if you saw a masculine-looking person entering the women's bathroom, you'd assume it was just a masculine-looking woman, because who else would someone use the woman's bathroom? Today, you can no longer assume that because males entering women's spaces is stunning and brave, actually. This puts gender nonconforming women under suspicion in a way they wouldn't be in a society that strictly enforces sex-segregated spaces.

Third and finally, let me explain how this sort of situation should be handled. If you're a woman who sees a man enter the woman's room, you first say “Excuse me sir, this is the woman's bathroom?” In 90% of the cases, he will look shocked and say “Oh, my mistake! I must have entered the wrong door” and leave. If it's actually a woman, then she'll say “Excuse me, but I am a woman!” In the case of someone like Rain Dove you can tell from her voice that she is speaking the truth, so you say “Oh, my mistake!” and that's the end of it. Now imagine you don't believe her because the "woman" is actually Karen White wearing a bad wig who couldn't pass for female in his wildest dreams.

Then you escalate the situation by finding a person responsible for the space, e.g. a security card in a public mall, the bartender, the office manager, etc.. You tell them there is a man in the woman's bathroom. They join you and ask the perpetrator to identify themselves. If they refuse, they are again asked to leave, and if they refuse, the cops are called.

All of this depends on government-issued ID to accurately label a person's biological sex. In the current world, all western countries have removed this label. This should be reverted. My (actually serious!) proposal is to list biological sex and socially desired sex separately, so we can still be polite by addressing transwomen as Ms So-and-so while separating them from women where sex matters.

The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.

I don't think there are sources that can show this. Not in the current world where:

  • Transwomen are a tiny majority, so even if they are significantly more likely to misbehave in bathrooms, you would need a lot of data to show that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (actually it is, but only to a small degree, hard to get to p<0.05 that way). And that's before accounting for confounders. If a creepy male starts using the women's room and women stop going there, does that show he's not causing any problems?

  • You can't use crime statistics because the police is not even allowed to accurately register the biological sex of trans offenders, so while we could collect this information in a systematic way, gender activists ensure this doesn't happen (you might wonder why gender activists oppose this if they believe the results would be favorable to their cause?)

  • Academia is heavily politicized and genderism is one of those topics you are not allowed to objectively research. As a result, we cannot use academic sources to prove or disprove anything.

In short, I don't think you've seen compelling evidence that disproves the claim that transwomen are more dangerous to women than women (and transmen) are. I think you've seen a paper that said something like "we compared the number of reported incidents in inclusive bathrooms at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, populated entirely by highly-paid academics who value their jobs, with the numbers from the non-inclusive bathrooms at a Texas truck stop, and we didn't control for the myriad confounding variables that make that comparison meaningless, but we are going to conclude anyway that The Science™ shows inclusive bathrooms benefit women".

If you think I'm wrong, please cite the actual source you are thinking of. I'm sure I can poke one or more holes in it along the above lines.

On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repetitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most common arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”

It would save me a lot of time but I'm not sure if it would actually change anyone's mind.

I'm starting to think you're trolling me, but in the interest of assuming good faith, I'll say for the third and final time: the question isn't whether he had the intent to set off the fire alarm but whether he set off the fire alarm with the intent to stop the vote.

The obviousness of it being a fire alarm speaks to intent

It only speaks to an intent to set off the fire alarm, not an intent to disrupt an official proceeding. The question is: why did he set off the fire alarm? Three options:

  1. He mistook the fire alarm for a door release button.
  2. He thought triggering the fire alarm would allow him to open the door, so he could get to the Capitol building in time for the vote.
  3. He thought triggering the fire alarm would cause an evacuation of the Capitol building which would mean the vote would be postponed.

You can say the obviousness of the fire alarm makes option 1 unlikely (and I mostly agree) but it does not prove option 3 over 2.

As to the rest of your post, the real issue here is that only the left receives this much charity from the legal system and the mainstream media.

Yes, that's a problem, but that doesn't prove the intent of Bowman.

Maybe it makes sense for the Republicans to assume the worst because when it came to the January 6th protesters the Democrats assumed the worst, but here on this forum we are not active participants in the culture war, we're only discussing it. I think the Jan 6 protesters were judged much too harshly, but I'm also willing to entertain the notion that Bowman is just a dumbass who was in a rush (option 2), rather than a man intent on undermining American democracy (option 3).

I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.

The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!

If she's intersex, she is definitely not a woman.

In reality, Caster Semenya is a male with 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (I had to google this), which very woke and pro-trans Wikipedia defines as (emphasis mine):

5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D) is an autosomal recessive condition caused by a mutation in SRD5A2, a gene encoding the enzyme 5α-reductase type 2 (5αR2). The condition is rare, affects only genetic males, and has a broad spectrum.

5αR2 is expressed in specific tissues and catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT plays a key role in the process of sexual differentiation in the external genitalia and prostate during development of the male fetus. 5αR2D is a result of impaired 5αR2 activity resulting in decreased DHT levels. This defect results in a spectrum of phenotypes including overt genital ambiguity, hypospadias, and micropenis. Affected males still develop typical masculine features at puberty (deep voice, facial hair, muscle bulk) since most aspects of pubertal virilization are driven by testosterone, not DHT.

So in every way that matters for the purpose of participating in sports, Semenya is male. I don't think it's reasonable to say that a male with a disorder of sexual development becomes eligible to compete with women. It might be different for people with disorders like CAIS, but obviously Semenya is a genetic male with a male-typical body and male-typical levels of testosterone. She has never acknowledged any of those facts, and neither have you.

Semenya identifies as a woman despite being genetically and phenotypically male. That makes her transgender, by definition.

If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.

Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).

What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.

Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:

You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.

Thanks for posting this. I had been curious what Mottizens thought about this. I pretty much concluded that the US did it, because they're the only party that has both the capabilities to do it, a good reason to do it, and doesn't suffer serious negative consequences from it.

For the "US" argument, I was surprised you didn't mention this video where Joe Biden threatened to shut down Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine.

I think people here understand the importance of following through on threats. If you don't, your future threats are no longer credible. That's important to the US, not just in regards to the recent nuclear threats made by Russia, but also in regards to the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, with Biden promising military support. The US needs to demonstrate that it's willing to follow through on its promises, and the US sabotaging Nord Stream is just following through on a threat Biden made earlier.

Honestly nothing else makes sense to me, but I'm willing to hear other sides to the argument.

By the way: I think you should split up point 6 between Poland and the Baltic countries. Poland is different from the Baltic countries in that Poland, like Russia, but unlike Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, has a gas pipeline from Russia, so it has a direct economic interest in sabotaging Nord Stream, which was created by Russia specifically to bypass countries like Ukraine and Poland. I also feel like Poland is a little bit better equipped in the military sense, so if any of those countries would have done it, it would have been Poland.

Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?

This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?

Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?

Can you please just summarize the whole thing for people who aren't in the know and aren't motivated to watch a 15 minute video?

The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.

So at least one person on the left (cautiously) believes him enough to honour his request to be addressed by the relevant pronouns.

I don't think you can conclude that they believe he is sincere. It seems more likely that they are willing to humor an obvious troll to cement the rule that everyone's preferred pronouns must be respected. If they make an exception in his case, it becomes clear that the rule is not absolute, which raises the question: who gets to decide who is truly trans and therefore deserving of their personal pronouns? It's better for them to insist that the rule is set in stone and accept the occasional troll as the cost of doing business.

It also reminds me of how Black Lives Matters supported Jussie Smollett even after all the evidence came out that proved his story was a hoax: “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”

Does the black professor writing this actually believe Smollet is the more credible party here? I doubt it. But throwing their support behind an obvious liar just because he's black reinforces their rule that all black people must be believed over the police all the time.

I guess my overall point here is that “woman” isn’t some mysterious reified category. Like many words for humans, it includes three facets: biological, behavioral, and relational.

I don't think I follow you. Yes, there is a biological definition for both "woman" and "mother", that is clear. Genderists reject biological definitions of women, though.

Then it comes to behavior: it's clear there is some behavioral definition of "mother", or rather "parent", where "mother" refers to a parent that's also a woman. What's the behavioral definition of "woman", though?

Finally, relational: I have no clue what you mean by that, neither in reference to mothers nor to women.

So please, define these terms.

Based on this explanation, the kids were 100% in the wrong, and the nurse 100% in the right. They might not have been trying to steal her bike and make her pay the lost fee, but they were still entirely at fault for the whole interaction.

The entire point of public bikes is that anyone can reserve them. When the kids returned the bikes they no longer had a claim on them and the nurse had every right to try to rent one for her own use. That she was pregnant and came off a 12 hour shift doesn't even have anything to do with it: the boys had not rented any of the bikes, and did not want to rent any of them at this moment, which meant they had absolutely no justification for stopping the nurse from renting one.

their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx

This is a pitiful excuse. First, that's not her problem in the least. Second, this has an obvious solution: the final guy just waits until someone else returns another bike.

Even if you accepted that there were only X bikes and X+1 people needing to get home. Shouldn't one of the healthy able-bodied teenage boys walk home rather than the obviously heavily-pregnant nurse?

In conclusion, according to your version of the story, the boys were selfishly abusing the system. This is why we can't have nice things: assholes want to benefit from the system (free rides), but don't want to play by its rules (after a certain amount of time, you either start paying or return the bike so someone else can rent it).

What evidence is there that they thought a black actor was the best fit for the part?

What does “best fit” even mean in this context? Most faithful depiction of the original character? (Clearly not.) Most likely to win an Oscar? (Considering their progressively racist policies, probably yes.) Most likely to appeal to the fans of the original movie? (Probably not.) Most likely to gain media attention? (Probably yes.)

So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.

The Oslo Accords ended because of suicide bombings and the start of the Oslo Accord.

Yes, Hamas tried to frustrate the peace process, but so did Orthodox Jews. You conveniently forget to mention that the PM of Israel was assassinated, not by Hamas, but by a Jewish extremist.

This was the moment where moderates on both sides should have stood their ground and enacted the two-state solution. But Israelis didn't want to do it. They reneged on their promise of withdrawing from Palestinian territories.

This of course completely destroyed the support Palestinian moderates had among the people, because it made it clear to the Palestinians that the Jews cannot be trusted and cannot be bargained with. Israel drove Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. And of course that's exactly how people like Netanyahu like it: the more extreme Palestinians are, and the more they support Hamas, the easier it is to justify killing Palestinians and annexing Palestinian lands.

Sorry you are just behaving in bad faith.

Don't throw baseless accusations around. I'm arguing in good faith, and if you are too, you should be able to support your position with arguments, instead of personal attacks.