MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
6mo ago
You can also see the fire alarm in that image. It's bright red and says "FIRE".
The discussion isn't about whether or not he set off the fire alarm (he clearly did) but whether he did it with the intent to prevent/delay the vote on the funding bill happening in the nearby Capitol building. That's not so clear.
Maybe Bowman will eventually admit something along the lines of “I set off the fire alarm because I was in a rush to leave the building” which is pretty bad (and probably against some law or other) but it's an order of magnitude better than “I set off the fire alarm because I wanted to stop congress from voting on a bill”, which makes him guilty of a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison as a penalty.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where), that the motive could have been to buy time to actually read the bill. Which, honestly, is a great motive.
For Bowman this doesn't strike me as a great reason to risk 20 years imprisonment, which honestly makes me think it's more likely the “I was in a hurry to leave the building” excuse is genuine.
MartianNight
2mo ago
See also this thread in the culture war roundup by @SaltCheck.
MartianNight
5mo ago
This sounds unsurprising so I'm willing to assume it's broadly correct, but if you're going to cite specific statistics like “5 years after conviction, 14% of offenders have been charged with or convicted of a new sexual offense” could you please explicitly cite the sources behind your claims?
Numbers that are so specific must come from one specific source. There is no way that there are multiple independent sources that investigated this and they all agreed the number was exactly 14%, not 13% or 15%.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I'm not here to tell you what to care about, but you were arguing with @arjin_ferman, who made a claim about what leftists actually believe; you cannot refute that by talking about their stated beliefs. That way you're just talking past each other.
Apart from that, I would still recommend that you try to distinguish between expressed beliefs and true beliefs. It's quite common for these to differ, and the difference is important. What's the point of quibbling about the letter of the law, when the judgment is not based on the letter of the law?
MartianNight
9mo ago
a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
MartianNight
10mo ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.
I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.
It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.
I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.
What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?
It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something
Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.
Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.
I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.
MartianNight
11mo ago
What do you mean, “communist”? That's present-day Russia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
MartianNight
27d ago
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?
MartianNight
1mo ago
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.
MartianNight
1mo ago
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.
MartianNight
1mo ago
If Hamas agreed to release the hostages, then there would have been a ceasefire for at least six weeks, possibly forever.
Again, how is that supposed to be an enticing offer? “Hey Hamas, we want to murder all of you, but we can't do it while you have hostages! So we propose that you release the hostages, and in return we promise to wait six weeks before we murder you.”
MartianNight
1mo ago
we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations
But then I have to press you: what exactly is this ratio, and how is it computed? How can I calculate it for various subspecies and for humans in order to verify independently that indeed, native Scandinavians and Aboriginal Australians are more closely related than any pair of subspecies of Chimpanzee?
And I have to point out that “subspecies” is a social construct too, in that the definition of subspecies is determined by biologists, who could very well define it as “subspecies are any subpopulations that have greater genetic differences than any two human subpopulations”. It doesn't tell you how to calculate genetic similarly, but it's clear that, by definition, there cannot be subspecies of Homo Sapiens, so problem solved. But of course that creates two problems:
-
That's hardly carving reality at the joints: it's plausible that there are relevant distinctions that are more fine-grained than you allow. If there really is no significant difference between human subpopulations, you have to show that from first principle, not simply assert it by definition.
-
Is this standard really being consistently applied? Again, think about the Chimpanzee subspecies. Are they really more differentiated than some human races? If biologists aren't using their own definition to determine subspecies in the first place, then appealing to the definition to assert there are no subspecies within the human race is meaningless.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Switzerland
The Swiss federal elections occurred last Sunday. The biggest winner was the largest nationalist/populist Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), which rose from 53 to 62 seats out of 200 (a 17% gain). The losers were the Greens and Green Liberals, who went from a combined 44 to 33 seats (a 25% loss). The other left wing parties remained stable (the second-largest Socialist Party gained 2 seats, but the small Labour Party lost 2).
Apart from this shift to the right, in the center, the neo-liberal FDP (think: free market capitalism with gay rights and open borders) lost seats to the conservative Christian center party literally called “The Middle”. Overall, this election strikes me as a loss for liberal left and a win for the conservative right.
None of this directly affects the composition of the federal government, due to various quirks of the Swiss political system, but it's interesting to see that even in relatively conservative Switzerland, the European trend towards rightwing nationalism is clearly visible, despite the fact that Switzerland is objectively less affected by the factors that plague most other European countries, like influx of African/Middle Eastern refugees, rise in crime, and inflation.
Election results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/elections-2023--projected-results/48897354
Objective discussion of the results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/eight-takeaways-from-the-2023-federal-elections-in-switzerland/48915304
The commentary from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, arguably the most reputable newspaper of record in the country, and politically aligned with the neo-liberal center-right, strikes me as extremely salty. Archive link in German, but I'll copy/paste the Google translation (Google translate doesn't seem to work well with archive.is):
Citizens want more protection and more government - difficult times are approaching for liberals: wars, crises, high health insurance premiums. Parties that promise security won on Sunday - even if it is a false one.
The great shadow that has fallen on the world has also reached Switzerland. The war in Ukraine, inflation, geopolitical instability, refugee movements and the brutal attack on Israel are reflected in the voting results. People long for security, order and a strong state.
The Swiss People's Party promised security and won. It took her a long time to focus on the right topic. The SVP strategists tried city and country, neutrality and “gender gaga” – nothing worked. Only when they radically focused the election campaign on the issues of immigration and asylum policy did success become apparent. The first voter surveys already showed that the SVP was the only party that would make significant gains. The fact that she shamelessly mixed up the immigration of qualified specialists with asylum migration, that she scandalized a “Switzerland of ten million” as well as “foreign crime” did her no harm. On the contrary: with a voter share of almost 29 percent, it achieved the second-best result in its history.
And another party benefited on Sunday from the fact that citizens have different concerns than they did four years ago. The Social Democrats had already noticed during the pandemic that they had more success with concrete material demands than with post-material zeitgeist issues. Instead of gender equality, the SP increasingly focused on the issue of loss of purchasing power. It calls for lower rents, cheaper health insurance premiums, higher pensions, reduced daycare rates and promises simple solutions: “speculators” and the state should pay.
This calculation also worked out. While social democracy in Europe is in decline almost everywhere, the SP was able to make slight gains again. It's not much, and the gain is probably largely due to dissatisfied former voters of the Greens, but the SP is also benefiting from the trend of these elections: parties that addressed specific concerns and promised the population solutions were able to increase their share of voters .
This tendency is also clearly visible in the results from the center. Their mobilization strategy, enriched with all sorts of social-populist demands, failed. The party promises fair taxes and falling health insurance costs without explaining how such additional spending will be financed. And here too, the promise of concrete solutions worked its magic. The center only won slightly, but it won - and not only that. It achieved what had been apparent since the fall of the CS [Credit Suisse, a large Swiss bank that collapsed earlier this year]: it caught up with the liberals.
No impact on the composition of the Federal Council is expected any time soon, but elections have consequences. With two almost equally strong parties in the political center, the magic formula is coming under pressure. It states that the three largest parties should each hold two seats in the state government, while the fourth largest is entitled to one seat. But what if the third and fourth strongest parties are practically the same strength?
Under party president Thierry Burkart, the FDP [liberals] wanted to overtake the SP [socialist party], but nothing came of it. The party even lost a few tenths of a percentage point compared to 2019. In times of crisis, liberalism finds it difficult to assert itself against calls for state intervention and more law and order. The belief in free borders and free markets has suffered in recent months. This is evident in the immigration debate, in the asylum debate and in the discussion about how to deal with the defunct CS. The state also had to intervene when the big bank was taken over by competitors; the market alone couldn't fix it.
The FDP was able to more or less maintain its share of the vote, but the competition from the center and the dominance of the SVP hit the party hard. In the aftermath of the elections, party president Thierry Burkart will have to answer some critical questions: Did the party focus on the right issues and was it a match for the political parties in terms of campaigning?
Because something else has been shown in this election campaign: those who polarize win. This applies not only to the SVP and the SP, but also to the center. Gerhard Pfister copied a lot from Christoph Blocher and invented a third pole party.
The real losers in these elections, however, are the eco-parties. Although climate change remains one of the population's biggest concerns, the two parties apparently do not have the confidence to develop concrete solutions. Voters have determined that the Energy Strategy 2050 has failed. Progress in climate protection can only be achieved if compromises are sought across party lines and if green dogmas such as the ban on nuclear power plants are abandoned.
The gains of the SVP and the losses of the Greens are causing the party political majority in the National Council to move more to the right again. However, that does not automatically mean more bourgeois politics. Liberalism is emerging from these elections weakened, and personal responsibility counts less than ever. The world is burning and there is great uncertainty: parties that demand something from citizens are not in demand. Those who promise security win. Even if it's a wrong one.
MartianNight
8mo ago
The problem with your reframing however, is that fighting typically implies killing others, even if you are not at risk of getting killed yourself. So if you are a humanitarian, even if you "win", you lose. In other words, the correct choice is obvious only if you don't care about other people's lives.
Imagine a different version where an enemy army is about to attack your village, intending to kill all who stand in its way, but leaving others unharmed. But the enemy isn't reckless. If the village fields a large enough army in its defense, the attack will be too risky, and the enemy will call it off. In that case, the status quo is maintained without any bloodshed.
In that case, just like in the original scenario, it would make sense for you to join the defense if all of the following hold:
- You believe some people will choose to fight regardless of the odds.
- You care enough about those people to risk your own life to help save theirs.
- You believe it's likely your army will reach the critical size necessary to avoid bloodshed.
The rest is just squabbling about probabilities: how much of a risk would you be willing to assume for a chance to save someone else's life?
(By the way, I always hate it when people declare their own point of view as obvious. Even if you are right, you aren't obviously right. And before you say “well, it might not be obvious to a dunce like you, but it's obvious to me, a very intelligent person!”: in my experience there is little correlation between people who declare themselves to be highly intelligent and who are able to demonstrate their intelligence. For example, there are plenty of people who, at least at first, insist that in the Monty Hall problem it's “obviously” pointless to switch.)
MartianNight
10mo ago
I think it's also simple demographics: FtMs are mostly anxious/depressed teenage girls, while MtFs are a mix of terminally online losers and older men with successful careers (Kaitlin Jenner is a prime example of the latter, arguably Rachel Levine too).
So for someone like Joe Biden, if you want to promote an openly transgender but still qualified person, you probably have much more MtF than FtM options.
Also I've noticed that a lot of passing FtMs, like Buck Angel for example, actually seem critical of a lot of ideas the trans movement is pushing (e.g. Angel opposes giving MtFs free access to women's bathrooms, arguing for unisex toilets instead). It's probably because as women they understand that women don't want to compete against Lia Thomas, don't want to be locked in a cell with Karen White, don't want to wax Yessica Yaniv's balls, and don't want their six-year-old daughter exposed to male genitalia in a women-only spa.
It's probably quite hard to find mature FtMs who are willing to fight for the right of MtFs to invade women's spaces, and that's the front of the battle currently.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I really doubt that has much to do with it, since crime tends to concentrate in high-population areas.
For one obvious counter example, Canada's population density is 90% lower than the US, and they have 30% fewer cops than the US, yet crime rates are significantly lower. There are other factors involved too, obviously, but I don't think there is much evidence for the thesis that the need for police officers scales by area rather than population.
MartianNight
10mo ago
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.
MartianNight
10mo ago
You tell me. You told me that transwomen never pretend to be ciswomen. I mentioned Semenya because she is a male (or at least nonfemale, if you think her disorder disqualifies her from being a regular male) who against all objective facts insists she's the same as ciswomen. Objectively, Semenya should be competing with other males, because she is genetically and phenotypically male. She isn't female in any way except the fact that she was incorrectly assigned female sex at birth, and these are facts she continues to deny to this day.
The trans activist motte is that “womanhood” is separate from being male or female. But then the bailey is that all privileges that have been granted to ciswomen based on their female biology must also be extended to transwomen because “transwomen are women” and distinguishing between ciswomen and transwomen based on their biological sex is bigotry.
This doesn't make sense in any of the main debates around gender. We have women's sports divisions because males are stronger than females because of biological differences; therefore it makes no sense to include trans-identified males in the women's division. If we did, males would win both divisions and biological females wouldn't be able to compete, which was the whole purpose of introducing a women's division in the first place.
MartianNight
10mo ago
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.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Palestinians don't just want peace, they also want independence. We both know that if Palestinians turned Jew-loving overnight, released their hostages and laid down their arms, what happens next is not that Israel withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather that Israel will conquer the entire country (as Netanyahu has already said he intends to), and Palestinians will live under Jewish rule forever.
All armed conflicts can be resolved peacefully if one side is willing to give up all of their claims. But would you suggest this in any other conflict? Should the Ukrainians hand their country to Putin for the sake of peace, at the cost of their freedom? Should Taiwan give their country to the CCP? Should America have accepted British rule instead of establishing their independence?
And let's be clear: the source of the conflict has nothing to do with whether Palestinians love or hate Jews. The inhabitants of all surrounding countries hate the Jews just as much as the Palestinians do, but Israel is not occupying them, because Israel does not want their land.
The reason Israel is occupying territories like Jerusalem and the West Bank is that the Jews consider those part of their God-given holy land. It doesn't matter whether the citizens living in that land love or hate the Jews; the Jews want to conquer that land either way.
MartianNight
5mo ago
For people unfamiliar with Dutch politics, it might be interesting to compare these polls with the political compass (the horizontal axis denotes economic left/right policy, vertical axis socially progressive/conservative policy).
(For the logos: the butterfly represents the Animal Rights Party (PvdD), the seagul Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), and the Greek building Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD)).
The current elections are interesting because a large number of party leaders stepped down before the elections and have been replaced with “fresh” faces. Meanwhile, the political landscape has not shifted all that much.
As you mentioned, the historically important Christian Democrat party, which was in decline for a while, has now been almost completely replaced by two new parties: New Social Contract (NSC) lead by Pieter Omtzigt (himself a former Christian Democrat) and the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) lead by political outsider Caroline van der Plas (whose party was at one time leading in the polls, but has gradually declined almost to insignificance for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
Meanwhile, the Labour party (PvdA) and Green party (GL) have merged into a single moderately progressive/leftwing party (uninspiringly named PvdA/GL) lead by former Labour-party Foreign Affairs Minister and European Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
The key to understanding current Dutch politics lies with the VVD, the quintessential (neo)liberal party that supports globalism, open borders, low taxes, minimal environmental protections and less regulations for businesses. Their voters consist mainly of the “haves“ in society: wealthy people, high earners, business owners, home owners, pensioners; people who are happy with their lives, do not favor income or wealth distribution, and do not feel especially threatened by globalization or immigration.
The VVD has been part of the government for the past 13 years. The main reason for this is that despite being economically right-wing, they are quite flexible when it comes to social issues, which has allowed the party to form coalitions both with conservative Christians and with progressive liberal parties.
In terms of coalition building, based on the current polls, there is an obvious three-party coalition of PvdA/GL + NSC + VVD. While these parties cover a broad part of the spectrum, the combination isn't as far-fetched as it might seem: PvdA and VVD have governed together in the not-too-distant past (two cabinets between 1994 and 2002). Adding a third party would seem to complicate things, but on paper, Omtzigt's NSC is ideologically somewhere in between the two, so it feels like it should be possible to include them as well, though much depends on how flexible Omtzigt turns out to be: if Omtzigt insists on social conservatism, and the VVD insists on economic rightwing policy, then together they have nothing to offer PvdA/GL: the VVD's past success has hinged on yielding progressive topics to their left-wing coalition partner to secure the economic right-wing policy they really care about.
It's worth noting that historically, a coalition between PvdA and VVD has hurt PvdA much more than VVD. So it's unclear if they will dare to go for it again this time.
No other coalition seems immediately viable. It's probably best to wait for the election to see where the chips fall.
MartianNight
8mo ago
The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.
MartianNight
10mo ago
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.
MartianNight
10mo ago
Okay, I see what you mean here, and I agree that you can become a member of a group by virtue of being recognized as such by your peers. After all, words have meaning only by virtue of people using them to refer to things; if everyone agrees you are a woman you pretty much by definition are one.
But from the fact that there doesn't need to be a rigorous definition of “woman” to be recognized as such, it doesn't follow that any definition will work, and that self-identification is enough. There is practically no noun where you can become that noun simply by self-identification. Am I an artist if I say I am? Am I a genius if I say I am? Am I a greengrocer if I say I am? Am I a nice guy just because I say I am? Am I a black person just because I say I am? Am I an American just because I say I am? All of these things come with some expectations, and although you can quibble about the details, pure self-identification doesn't work (I can't be a Chinese person born in China to Chinese parents that hasn't been in America in my life and meaningfully claim to be American).
In short, even if you cannot define what a woman is, exactly, it's clear that “anyone who identifies as a woman” isn't it.
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.
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:
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.
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).
More options
Context Copy link