OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/
The city's human resources department is also conducting six other investigations into current and former staff, officials confirmed to IndyStar.
The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."
I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I have two pairs of Thursdays and once they are broken in they are comfortable and will last for a long time. They have a line of leather sneakers with sheepskin interior lining: https://thursdayboots.com/collections/mens-sneakers-low-top
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
Well, in most Western democracies its the exclusive conjugal union of two adults,
I don't think I noticed what you meant by this the first time. Two adults can only have a conjugal union if they are of opposite sexes. They can only have their organs work together and perform the action that produces offspring if they are of opposite sex. That is what is meant by conjugal union. I don't care that many countries are using an absurd definition of marriage. I don't believe in "gay marriage." Whatever they are doing, it's not marriage as the word is understood by myself and everyone in history before the last thirty years. It's like "Trans-women are woman" to me.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
Firstly, the original question was how, as a Christian, someone could reconcile Jesus' teachings with being against Gay marriage. So the conversation from the start was religious.
Second, I don't see the distinction in my response. If the couple is not religious and never chooses to have sex, it's the same. They are married because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage. (even if they never want to)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
How would you feel if two asexual people got married and didn't have a kid through intercourse or adopt?
This would closely resemble a Josephite marriage, which still has the potential of one of the partners saying, "I feel called to have sex now" and then the other partner owes the marriage debt. It works because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I'm not the person you asked, but Jesus seemed to encourage sexual abstinence for those who could not handle the consequences of His strict teaching on marriage:
The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
It's not very clear to me what the connection between loving your neighbor has to do with the definition of marriage. Marriage simply is the exclusive conjugal union of a man and a woman, open to life, vowed till death do them part. It is a vocation, one of the schools of love that only some people are called to. A vocation creates the conditions of heroic self-sacrifice, so obviously not everyone can do it.
Even from a non-Christian sociological perspective, there is no reason to have a codified sexual-partnership without the potential to generate children. This used to be widely acknowledged and uncontroversial.
Bertrand Russell wrote, “But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” He continued, “it is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution.” Renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed that “the family—based on a union, more or less durable, but socially approved, of two individuals of opposite sexes who establish a household and bear and raise children—appears to be a practically universal phenomenon, present in every type of society.”
I once had a long discussion on this and still stick to what I wrote here.
That is the common canard, but when the issue is studied this is not the majority of cases:
The most common reasons for delay were that it took a long time to make arrangements (59%), to decide (39%) and to find out about the pregnancy (36%).
We can also find statistics embeded into other studies. This one was testing the effect of a drug duirng late term abortions. As part of the information gathered, Dr. Hern reports:
Pre-operative estimates of fetal age ranged from 18 to 38 menstrual weeks. Follow-up contact was obtained with 51% of all patients. Seventy six patients (6.3%) had a history of previous cesarean section, and 20.8% (N=250) of all patients sought assistance because of a diagnosed fetal disorder.
Both quotes align with all other studies I have found:
Why does this matter if it's only 1% of abortions? 1% of abortions is still 15,000 of deaths a year at a developmental age where they could have possibly survived outside the mother.
Compare that number to the 16,651 of people who are murdered by guns a year and you can understand the moral outrage that some people have. If approx. 15,000 gun murders causes a well-spring of laws, activism, protests, movements, then surely ~15,000 abortions of fetuses that share the same gestational age as the kids in the nearest NICU are also cause for the same.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
Perhaps your acquaintances are just better at quietly getting rid of it. I never announced my pregnancies until the 2nd trimester because I didn't want to miscarry and have it turn into a Thing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
It's like I've attacked a religious belief of yours by citing very well-accepted stats.
About 5% of women make an enzyme that breaks down the hormones in birth control faster. This might explain a perfect use failure. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/genetics-may-explain-why-birth-control-doesnt-always-work-for-some-women
Condom failure rate was described by gattsuru better than I can.
These effectiveness numbers are so well known in my circle I hadn't even thought to cite them, but I assure you the Guttmacher Institute is not Christian propaganda. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-effectiveness-united-states
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
"Perfect use" condom is 2%, "Perfect use" Pill is .3%. Even "properly used" contraception means that there are thousands of women winding up pregnant from "perfect use." But how many people in a high school class are going to use it perfectly? "Typical use" is 14% and 7% respectively.
Things that are 100% like sterilization are unlikely options for teenagers. I suppose now IUDs might be more available.
I guess the idea is that, with education, "typical use' rates will go down? If so, my sex ed class covered explicitly how to put on a condom, the importance of taking a pill every day and that a single missed day means that the woman is more likely to get pregnant for the next month. Etc. They went very deep into the failure modes of each.
The biggest problem is that "Sex Ed" was one week. How many of your classmates on the internet are claiming that they never learned about the Vietnam war in school, or segregation, or whatever, when you remember very clearly that these topics were covered? I would prefer for Sex Ed to be a weekly thing all throughout Middle and High school.
Teens and young adults are going to fuck before getting married.
I didn't. My parent's didn't. My grandparents didn't.
That being said, in hindsight I think my Sex Ed was trying to encourage oral. They went deep into dental dams and things.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I'd be ok with everyone receiving the program I got in High School. It was a lot like the described:
First it went into the social aspect of sex. I remember they had a gotcha icebreaker task where they asked everyone what the first step to having consensual sex was out of a list. The answer was "eye contact." They talked about how intercourse took place after a sequence of events, (eye contact, conversation, seclusion, etc) which a person could get out of at any time by being vocal and making a choice to get out of the sequence.
A lot of "if you are pressured into having sex, here are some trusted adults you can go to."
Then went into the most common contraception methods available to teenagers, but actually read the warning labels on every box. Explained that none of them were fully effective at preventing STDs, not even condoms. None of them were 100% effective at preventing pregnancy.
Described economic and social status outcomes of pregnant teenage mothers. That pregnancy and childbirth changes you hormonally and "you don't really want to be like your mom yet, do you?"
We had to make posters describing STDs, symptoms and treatments. Presented them to the class.
I would call it abstinence-first education. It explained contraception thoroughly. The problem is, once you explain contraception thoroughly, it doesn't deliver on all the goods that abstinence can. Over a population, it is effective. As individuals, a 5/100 risk of pregnancy each year is still a lot of sexually active pregnant teens.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I don't exactly respect Tim Pool's political commentary, but I respect him a lot as a person and take this as a demonstration of how easy it is to be caught up in accusations of foreign influence, spying, etc.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I mostly mean for the past few centuries, does it have impact now?
Now we have birth control and secular women who don't have kids, so it's a different bottleneck today.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I wonder if we would see a difference between countries that were Catholic for longer periods of time, and the percentage of women who genuinely want kids.
I say this because Catholics are more likely than Protestants to encourage women to live in celibate communities, and this would give women in the second group a way to select out of the gene pool.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I will not.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
I do think a realistic assessment of health ought to look at happiness a fair bit more, though. I was never going to reproduce for a variety of reasons, so I think it's totally reasonable to trade that off for happiness.
Yes, happiness is a component of health. It's just not a component of the health of a reproductive system, which is what is under discussion here.
show some respect for people of faith.
I respect Truth, and I'm sorry but this conversation has mostly cemented my belief that many trans people have a very tenuous grasp on reality and equivocate between concepts in order to justify themselves to themselves.
(I am a very spiritual person myself. I worship the Way, the Truth, and the Life.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
It's an unsourced reddit post, but this person claims the names of the hostages were being circulated a couple days before the bodies were found. There were rumors of a rescue mission: https://old.reddit.com/r/2ndYomKippurWar/comments/1f660pm/the_6_hostages_bodies_found_in_gaza_have_been/lkyth9t/
Honestly, if they have a functioning vagina from birth (not a weird amalgamation of penile tissue and intestines sewn into a gaping hole that needs to be prevented from healing over) then I am comfortable calling them a woman. It's clear what direction their body would go. If it would take modern medicine to determine that their reproductive system doesn't work, they belong to the sex they appear.
We're talking about a magic person, so it's hard to specify what I mean by "direction." But I imagine that such a person either has ovaries or could receive an ovary transplant in a way a man could not. Their body would naturally make the hormones to stimulate the follicles and bring forth an egg. This egg could be fertilized by a motile gamete that had a straight path through the vagina. This conceptus would find a home in a uterus.
If you only have to bring one thing to health to make the female reproduction system work, then it's obviously the female reproduction system. A male reproductive system isn't a defective female reproductive system and vice versa.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
Your body is not healthier. You have lost some biological functioning that you had before.
Yes, there are soooo many health risks to cross-sex hormones. A FtM balds because of their testosterone. Do they take Finistrade? Finistrade is risky to women, do the same risks apply to this person?
But I don't even have to get on the weeds on this, the increased risk to cancers, blood clots, heart attacks, etc. The mechanism of transition itself purposely damages the reproductive system. It is by itself unhealthy.
Now, it may be the case that cross-sex hormones are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria, maybe the only effective treatment after a certain threshold (I much prefer treatment that would make someone's hormones more like their natal sex if they are being treated before the age of 16, and have seen evidence that this works better.)
I am not against treating trans people with cross sex hormones.
But there is a difference between getting a hormone treatment to treat your mental illness and trying to make everyone else in society believe your mental illness.
I am 100% against cosmetic surgery except where it restores functionality, like nose jobs to breathe better and skin repair for burn victims.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
We use this way of classification all the time, you are swapping disease with biological classification willy-nilly and that is what is confusing you.
Blindness is a disease, not a biological classification. A blind person still belongs to the human species, which is a sighted-species. A blind person still belongs to a sighted-species. Their blindness is not a sign they are a member of a different species, it is evidence they have a health problem.
A woman is a human who, if her body is not producing large gametes, has a health problem that requires explanation. A male body does not require a disease to explain why it's not producing large gametes.
Your counterfactual world where you have XX chromosomes requires you to not exist. It requires a completely different person to have been conceived and born.
The counterfactual worlds that I am using are all, "if the same organism was healthy." It is something that happens every day, some organism in a disease state becomes healthier.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
Do you think trans people are a different phylum?
No, but a phylum is one biological classification. Sex is another.
A human whose heart has stopped working does not change phylums.
A human whose sexual organs have stopped functioning does not change sexes.
A human embryo that does not yet have a heart is in the phylum chordata.
A human child who does not yet have the capacity to bear a child is still female.
An imagined bionic human who no longer has a heart would still be in the phylum chordata.
A post-menopausal woman who no longer has a functioning uterus is still female.
The idea that someone can change classification is a Trans idea. It is not universal. I am specifically countering your objections that a woman with a hysterectomy or a post-menopausal woman is a different gender. They are not because sex/gender does not change. They have the qualities of their sex at some point in their lifecycle.
You are making a mistake that you think everyone thinks like you. You believe that you have changed sex/gender, and therefore whatever definition someone has for sex/gender allows for change.
In humans, there are four potential sexual categories (though only three in reality.)
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Body produces large gametes in reality, or would have produced large gametes if health was obtained.
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Body produces small gametes in reality, or would have produced small gametes if health was obtained.
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Body produces neither small gametes or big gametes, and there is no obvious direction where health would go, even if Miracle Healer Jesus touched them. (Happens, though much rarer than the intersex statistics show, even a person with CAIS and XY chromosomes can become pregnant.)
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(This category has never happened in a human) Body produces both small gametes and big gametes at the same time or at different times in the lifecycle.
What's funny is that there is a tradition of intersex people naturally transitioning and this being accepted in Christianity (below is a repost of a previous AAQC):
...Emperor Justinian's Digest of Roman law incorporated the statement of Ulpian, "The question has been asked:—according to which sex are hermaphrodites to be treated? but I should say on the whole that they ought to be treated as having the sex which predominates in them."
...The theologians of the School of Salamanca consider the case of a predominantly male hermaphrodite who has been ordained to the priesthood, licitly or illicitly, in whom the female sex has begun to predominate on account of ageing. They say "by reason of the changed sex" this person could no longer validly consecrate the Eucharist; the priestly character would remain in the soul, but would now be in the soul of a person not capable of exercising orders, just as a priest who has died can no longer consecrate the Eucharist. Considering the case of a woman who, "nature itself breaking out," is spontaneously transformed into a man, which they say Pliny the Elder testifies is not only possible but has in fact happened, the Salmanticenses say this man could be validly ordained, but unless the matter can be hidden, it cannot be done on account of the astonishment and scandal to those who would see someone they had known as a woman ministering at the altar.
So there is some discussion where someone who can perform the male role in sex can be a priest, even if they haven't always been able to perform the male role in intercourse.
However, that's a natural development of an intersex person's body. It's interesting that they talk about "nature itself breaking out." I don't think orthodox Christians will ever encourage someone to artificially change their sex, or believe that artificial changes are sufficient to actually change sex. If gender is in the soul, than it is the form of the body - the blueprint for what a body does on its own power.
I am perhaps more open than some of your interlocutors, at the least my philosophical and biological assumptions are very different. I still think you're a man, one that has become very sick. Restoring you to health would not involve you growing large gametes naturally and bearing children, it would involve you creating sperm and a mechanism to impregnate a woman. That is what is written into your body, the form of your body which you struggle against.
I know you believe that one day we will have control over these things, and there will be no difference. I believe that your sex is written into every cell of your body and is impossible to change, wherever medicine goes in the next century. Maybe through very artificial and mechanical methods will you approximate what my body does as easily as breathing, but that would not be the same as changing the powers of your body, you would be relying on a power outside you. The Abolition of Man and all that.
I know you wish it was one specific thing that defines sex, and then it would be something you could obtain for yourself (even theoretically, in some distant future) and then you have it. But sex isn't a thing a person possesses. It is one of the things a human person is.
The equivalent to changing heart conditions would be to go from a infertile to fertile, which happens all the time without changing sex. I'm not convinced you understand me and I don't know any way to be clearer.
We do have categories for female too young to be fertile - girl. But going from girl to woman is not a change in sex/gender, just a change in age. And going from infertile to fertile is not a change in sex/gender, just a change in health.
Do you not know what a bitch is or are you being cute? I would never call a woman a bitch, we are different species.
Edit: it's like you are claiming that someone with heart disease isn't in the phylum Chordata. A disease does not change a classification.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10mo ago
That seems to be an attempt to make others adopt your frame that it is possible to change genders. If it is not assumed that it is possible to change genders, then it explains quite handily why a pre-pubescent or post- menopausal female is still considered a woman, and a post- castration male a man.
In biology there is always a "when functioning properly" attached to descriptions. A heart pumps blood "when functioning properly." A kidney filters waste "when functioning properly." A female organism produces large gametes at the species-appropriate point in the life cycle "when organs are functioning properly." Reproduction is generally only applicable at certain times in an organism's life cycle, but a bitch that isn't in heat is still a bitch.
I am going to ask The Horrible Question. How do you know that the device you're reading this text on, right now, hasn't had a similar sabotage from China or [insert boogieman here?]
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