OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13hr ago
I think that's just one segment of the second group.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20hr ago
Speaking of ROGD, its rhetorical use by anti-trans people is a peculiar example of a self-contradictory motte-and-bailey: usually the bailey is a stronger version of the motte, and thus necessarily consistent with it, but here the bailey ("all trans people are delusional and none of them are their stated gender") contradicts the motte ("some trans people with a specific presentation – primarily adolescent girls – are not actually their stated gender") because the latter presupposes that some trans people are, in fact, their stated gender. If you believe all trans people are delusional, why do you care about the specific etiology of the transness of a specific subgroup of trans people? The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.
I think trans people can be largely divided into two groups:
People who had an affinity for the other sex from the time they were toddlers onward. A boy who prefers dolls and dresses to cars, etc. to the point of everyone around them knowing that this toddler is behaving like the opposite sex in a somewhat obsessive way. These people I have a lot of sympathy for, even if I disagree that this means that they are the opposite sex. Dr. Kenneth Zucker mostly treated this group, and in his clinical research about 80-90% went on to become normal gay men after puberty, with the remainder going through some sort of transition in adulthood. I honestly believe most have some kind of hormonal thing, maybe their mothers took estrogen during pregnancy, maybe some other endocrine disrupter got them early on. I still think the best thing is to wait and see if the desire to transition subsides after going through natal-sex puberty, but if the only group that transitioned was this group, as adults, then I would have few qualms for transition as a medical practice.
Unfortunately, there is the second group. Mostly consists of adolescents who for various reasons started thinking that transitioning will benefit them. The RODG group. The Autogynophelia group. Autistic girls who always felt something was off but never could put it into words. ETC. There might be some hormonal issues, but most of the time it's a social contagion of some kind. For this group, transitioning is probably the worst thing for them to do. It's a harsh medical intervention for something that will typically go away after puberty and therapy. Unfortunately, this group is the largest group getting medically transitioned and contains pretty much every transperson I know IRL.
I don't think any trans person is their desired gender, but that doesn't mean that they are delusional. It really is their desired gender. It's just that desiring a gender doesn't make them that gender.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Oh that makes more sense. If she was raised in certain parts of India I could see that being a real thing.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Did she have an eating disorder and did she ever do sports?
The only way I think in the US a woman might think that boys systematically get better nutrition than girls is if they have an eating disorder which they justify to themselves as "everyone does it."
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
51%, which doesn't surprise me at all. I regularly get confused during TV shows and movies about that random guy who I thought was the same character until I saw the two of them in a room together.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Cui bono? I think it's more likely Pratt would be responsible if anything, to drum up attention to the wastelands he formerly called home.
You can filter google results from before a certain year. Add before:2019 or before:xxxx date to your search query and it will return results that have not been updated since that date.
This article seems relevant: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34641418
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19d ago
There is something about the situation that is horrifying.
Imagine two outcomes:
Outcome 1: The police arrive, notice that Nowak is not doing well, make him comfortable while they call an ambulance. He spends his final moments watching the second policeman have stern words with his murderer while the policewoman holds his hands as the world goes dark. He dies knowing that justice will be done and that he's not alone.
Outcome 2: What actually happened. Dies in an uncomfortable position being accused of a crime he didn't commit, while his murderer appears to get away with it. This seems to objectively be a worse fate, the suffering in Outcome 2 is much higher than in Outcome 1.
Now do we care about the suffering of the dying? It's not like they'll be around to complain about it! But I think that yes, most humans do care about the suffering of the dying. And it does seem the police's actions increased his suffering.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
21d ago
I feel weird getting nominated for a comment with less than 200 words, but thank you
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
25d ago
I approve of that too. Washington never had natural-born children either but I wouldn't say he had no impact on the future.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
You're going to need to be more concrete than that.
Let's say Social Security goes away before you are 65. Or even total anarchy. Are you better off with one or zero kids, or if you have four+. If you have 4+, at least one is likely to still have a fondness for you and might let you stay with them in your twilight years. If you have 0 kids you get to look forward to working until you cannot and rotting in a ditch after.
From where I stand, having kids is more upside than down. Sure I could afford more things without them. But I had the time of my life playing fetch with my 3 year old yesterday. I
I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't have kids. I have taught two little humans how to read. And for one of those humans it was a hard slog, I had to keep changing programs every year, trying to make an inch of progress at a time. I researched, I made schedules and lesson plans and sat down every day with a book and my girl and I persisted.
There's the mental cocaine of having your toddler call you "mamma." But there's more than chemicals. There's the concerted effort to help someone every day become a good adult human, and whoever you are it takes all of you. If you're good at research it takes research. If you're good at meal prep it takes meal prep. Whatever your thing is, you pour it on your kid and it's satisfying. It's climbing Everest, it's running a marathon, it's what life is for, the challenge you are supposed to be doing. The school of love you need to be a whole human being.
If the word society is tripping you up, just do it for yourself.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
Agreed. But I would say that people need to pursue these goals, not just expect them to happen. I think most people get the "job" thing. People go to secondary school, study long hours, go to residency, internships, put in a lot of time and effort into getting the right credentials and getting the right job.
The same amount of effort needs to go into getting the girl. And not just dating, but actually discerning marriage with the girl. It shouldn't take more than a year to learn enough about each other to see if you can actually be spouses, and if at any point you think you can't be spouses then break it off.
For some reason people take this part of their lives unseriously when in hindsight it's the cornerstone of all other joys in my life.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
You're not caught in traffic, you are the traffic. You don't have an obligation to "society" you are society and you have an obligation to yourself.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
If we all are to die right now in a flaming meteor, then ok. Society doesn't matter that much to you.
If you hope to grow old and die peacefully at the end of a lifespan as long as you can achieve, then you want to have stability as you grow older and weaker. This means able-bodied people younger than you who have been inculcated in a community that values taking care of the weak and elderly. This means having children and educating them.
So that's the selfish case.
The less-selfish case I guess is that human lives are one of the most precious resource in the world, consciousness is rare, sapience more so. A universe without anyone to observe it would be tragic and absurd.
Stable societies produce happier outcomes, better lives for these sapient Earth observers. If you think life sucks, the better thing to do is make it less sucky instead of abandon it, creating more suffering in the interim as society collapses.
My real reason is just that I found someone I loved. And because I loved him, I loved the world. I loved the world that could make such a person, however fucked up his life had been. In my husband I saw that the awfulness of the world cannot mar the beauty of a human soul. And I liked him so much I wanted more of him - more people like him. And he thought I was a good thing, too. He thought it was good I exist and because of that I began to come around on the idea myself. And if it was good that I existed, and it was good that he existed, then it would be great for there to be more people like him and like myself.
And so I embarked on this mission: to make more people who have the best qualities of us both, who are coached on their weak-points by the two people who can empathize the most with them.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
I think the problem is we assumed that the fertility rates would arrive asymptotically at whatever replacement was for the infant mortality of the future/present time, but fertility rates did not stop falling. They were only reversed for a short time by the baby boom before falling again at around the same rate.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
If you are on TheMotte and had the attention span to read the above comment without using GPT to summarize, then please have children. Have as many as you think you can manage and then one more on top of that.
Smart people should build things. What are you building? Code? A 401k? How about a human being? Imagine building one of those. Then stop imagining and get on it! It should be at least as important to you to build a human as it is to build a portfolio.
If you don't like children, ok. But you've never met your children. The children who will be like you and the person you love the most.
It's going to involve sacrifice. Ok, so does everything else worth doing in the whole world.
When smart people stop building things, society collapses. And the best, most important thing a smart person can build is other smart people.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
I have an officially Level 2 Autistic kid who reminds me a lot of myself at her age... but I have not been diagnosed.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Our director is a very un-PC guy who takes people out to the bar, drops $300 of alcohol on them, and then yells at them. It's definitely not "remember daughter's wedding anniversary" kind of relationship management. He calls everything he doesn't like communism.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
You have to be a real person to them. They have to feel like they're disappointing a real person if they mess up or take too long. You can't just be a customer where a failure is just a business problem, it has to be personal.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I don't want to give too much away here, but I PM at a company that makes stuff in the US, with an annual revenue for just this product line in the 10s of millions. Our success largely comes from being in a small Midwestern city and forming relationships with dozens of local small-medium fabricators. The kind of relationships where we invite them out to baseball games, when our parts are ready we drive a truck out to them, we stop by every once an a while with something that shouldn't have passed QC and point out to their faces what went wrong, etc.
About 50% of our success is that persistent and somewhat masculine relationship management. Flatter when they do well, reward when they do sufficiently, call out to their faces when they do badly. Call them cowards if they look hesitant. No matter what, never go a month without taking over the phone or in person. Solicit their input if they think there's a better way to fabricate what you're after. Oftentimes ignore their feedback, but in a way that shows you considered their input.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona,
It's heavily implied in the Old Testament that the pagan gods are either the guardian angels of their entire nation or demons. It really isn't all that hard for me to accept.
Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day?
You are misunderstanding. I can still point to plenty of proposed healings of blindness that are recent. The point Dr. Duffin is making is that as diagnostic criteria became more objective and instrumentalized, the more those aspects were required. Cures of illnesses that were not diagnosed with those criteria before the cure were thrown out.
Also, re:resurrection, did you see her section on how resurrection miracles turned into heart miracles due to advances in scientific understanding of death?
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I think we agree on a lot. I didn't become Catholic because of miracle claims, but as a Catholic I am able to accept miracle claims into my worldview. It doesn't hurt me if a miracle claim turns out to have been natural causes, a deception, or something in between - both of those explanations make sense in my world view. But I also am able to accept situations where it really does look like the laws of physics were violated somehow. And once I allow for that, there do seem to be a lot of credible miracles tied to Catholic saints or what is called "Vindicatory" miracles surrounding Catholic claims.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Yeah, the winning combo for Total War is to have the women in manufacturing and food production so men can fight. If we want this to be "drafted' as well out of a sense of fairness then that's fine, there can be separate female draft where if your number gets pulled you move to a potato processing facility in Idaho (if you don't have a kid under 2).
Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.
Actual people's medical records are not going to be available online in the clear. I'm sorry. If you're a doctor/researcher you can request them. Does the Church need to digitize more? No question there. Maybe in 100 years a lot of the original copies of witness testimony will be searchable online. They are working on it, but due to the age of the documents and the fact that many are handwritten it is being done with great care.
For the Catholic Church to recognize a miracle healing in modern times, there needs to be objective criteria indicating the disease before the healing, the healing needs to be spontaneous, and it needs to be complete, no remission.
- The 1st criterion is that the disease is serious, of unfavorable prognosis.
- Secondly, the disease must be known and listed by medicine.
- Thirdly, this disease must be organic, lesional, that is to say that there are objective, biological, radiological criteria, everything that currently exists in medicine; which means that still today we will not recognize cures of pathologies without specific objective criteria such as psychic, psychiatric, functional, nervous diseases, etc. (this does not mean that we cannot cure these diseases
- Fourth, there should not be treatment to which healing could be attributed.
- The 5th criterion concerns the moment of healing itself: healing must be sudden, sudden, instantaneous, immediate and without convalescence.
- Finally, after the healing, there are still two criteria: it must not simply be a regression of the symptoms but a return of all the vital functions, and finally, that it is not simply a remission but a healing, that is to say, lasting and definitive.
The existence of objective medical records indicating a disease that can be measured by outside instruments, and then the instantaneous reversal of the disease which is long lasting, is objective criteria and cannot be dismissed as "human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory."
This is an interesting article published by an athiest medical historian who studied the Vatican archives for three years. Dr. Duffin notes:
What diseases were healed through the intercession of saints? Cancer, orthopedic, and neurological illnesses were steadily prevalent in all time periods, but later cases demanded ever-more-stringent proof of diagnosis with, for example, tissue pathology in cancer, X-ray films in orthopedics, and imaging scans or nerve-conduction studies in neurology.
She goes on to report:
Further to my surprise, the Vatican does not and never did recognize miracles in people who eschew orthodox medicine to rely solely on faith. It strives to consider the latest in medical science; it does not want to be manipulated by the wiles of sensationalists or the aspirations of the gulli- ble. Virtually all healing files referred to the treating physicians by name, even if they did not testify in person. Only two complete files of physical healings made no reference to physicians: both were from the mid-1750s in the cause of John of Kanty (d. 1473).34 Doctors crowd these records.
The increasing medicalization of the Western world is evident. From 1800 forward, and across the complete transcripts that I have examined, the average number of doctors making an appearance in each record increases from approximately two to seven. The trend is apparent when expressed either by year of canonization (as shown in Figure 2) or by year of cure. Prior to 1800, the opinions and actions of physicians were described by nuns, monks, or priests; perhaps greater credence was given to witnesses in holy orders, or possibly, doctors were uninvited or unwilling to testify. By the late eighteenth century, however, attend- ing physicians were routinely summoned to give in-person descriptions of the illnesses and the care they had delivered. Even in the earliest records, medical men were mentioned, whether they testified or not. The same was true for other health providers, including dentists and midwives.
New technologies appear in the Vatican records soon after their invention; the aforementioned Wassermann test, elaborated from 1901 to 1906 to identify syphilis, was used in this 1929 case in its capacity as a “scientific fact,” equated with venereal disease.46 Medicalization is appar- ent in the doctors’ words and deeds recorded in many other files. For example, the stethoscope, first publicized in 1819, was used for diagnosis in a miracle worked eighteen years later.47 Three cases had been healed of respiratory ailments in that eleven-year interval where no stethoscope was used; following this miracle, the diagnosis of most heart or lung problems entailed auscultation as a matter of course. A thermometer was used in an Italian woman cured of postpartum fever in 1881.48 Similarly, as tubercu- losis waxed in importance throughout the nineteenth century, the failure to demonstrate Koch’s bacillus to confirm the diagnosis was prominent in medical reaction to a cure effected in 1885, only three years after Koch’s discovery.49 Photography appeared in a file from 1889.50 X rays together with fluoroscopy appeared in the miracle files less than five years after Roentgen’s famous demonstration.51 Blood pressure measurements soon followed.
Also she found many records of proposed miracles being rejected due to insufficient diagnostic criteria:
Testifying in 1908, a Corsican doctor justified his failure to order a bacteriological examination on the pleural effusion of a forty-nine-year- old nun during her illness three years earlier; he was forced to the abject admission that his diagnosis of tuberculosis had been merely “clinical.” With the benefit of hindsight, the three expert colleagues refused to believe that the nun’s ailment, though “grave,” had been tuberculosis and, therefore, beyond a natural cure.62 This disputed healing was not decisive for the pro- cess of Theophilus of Corte (d. 1740); more evidence was needed.63
This is a funny anecdote:
In 1834, a professorial expert criticized his more humble colleague’s use of bleeding some nineteen years earlier in the care of a middle-aged woman with fever; perversely, the supposed medical error made the cure all the more remarkable in his expert (but anachronistic) eyes: not only had the woman recovered from her illness, she had also managed to survive her doctor’s backward treatment.
How severe are these illnesses that are getting miracle claims?
In 1937, an expert physician claimed (quite wrongly at the time) that X-ray-proven tuberculosis was “axiomatically fatal” in the face of any treatment, whether natural or supernatural; he pointed to the patient’s 1926 recovery to insist that the treating physician’s diagnosis of tuberculosis must have been wrong in the first place.
I recommend reading the whole report, it's quite fun and full of interesting things. But the point is, the records are being kept in a complete form, the information gathered is as concrete as possible, reviewed by experts in the fields, and much different from some random rumor that could just be hearsay.
It's the "somewhat obsessive way" part that makes it more of a disorder than just an interest in areas forbidden to their gender.
But, when this group grew up with therapy to both accept that they liked these stereotypical girly things but that didn't make them a girl, and to slowly expose them to more masculine pursuits, the vast majority just realized they were gay men by adulthood. The 20% who still felt like the opposite sex I feel bad for, there might be something genuinely wrong with them.
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