Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I thought the downsides of gas and conventional electric stoves were well-known.
Gas stoves cause indoor air pollution (I believe this is what the aforementioned media circus was about) and require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad? And they require either a network of gas pipelines, which are an additional bit of infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained (and they tend to explode), or distribution in individual tanks, which is very wasteful. Induction just needs the existing electrical grid.
Conventional electric stoves are extremely inefficient, so they waste a lot of energy. And they are horrible to work with, it's basically a human rights violation. If conventional electric stoves are Americans' perceived alternative to gas, then I can understand the overreaction to the mere suggestion that gas stoves might be banned. In fact, in that light, it was probably an underreaction.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.
Frankly, no supposed harm of stoves is likely to convince me that adults shouldn't be able to choose what they do or don't want to cook with.
What about the children who live in the same household? Indeed, children are the ones most affected by pollution from gas stoves.
If it's not clear, I was actually mostly joking when I suggested banning gas and conventional electric stoves. Did anyone take my claim that using conventional electric stoves is "basically a human rights violation" seriously? I was slightly in favour but I didn't really care. A complete ban is well beyond the Overton window anyway. I have now changed my mind and am slightly against it unless it can be demonstrated that they are 100% safe for people with pacemakers (and metal fragments!). Presumably this question will come up if a ban becomes remotely plausible. If it is a real danger, politicians will want to avoid being responsible for cooking someone's grandpa.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
What kinds of pans? What's wrong with ferromagnetic pans?
See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
A large part of the anti-trans side, such as the religious people you mentioned, wouldn't accept Jane as a woman even if we had magical-level medical technology.
As for those who do accept that medical technology currently cannot make Jane "actually a woman", but it might be able to do so in the future – and I am assuming you belong to this group – I have to ask: what is a woman? What medical procedure would Jane need to "actually" become a woman?
Is it about external appearance? In that case, Jane can already easily get very convincing breasts, and it is my understanding that a convincing neovagina can also be created, though this is more complicated than breasts. The neovagina wouldn't be able to provide lubrication for sex, but we're talking about appearance.
Is it about reproduction? Medicine isn't very close to allowing trans women to get pregnant, but if this is needed for a woman to be "actually a woman", then plenty of cisgender women who are unable to get pregnant would also be excluded.
Is it about genetics and chromosomes? Now we get into various intersex conditions, and again we risk excluding cisgender women, or even including cisgender men.
P.S. Note the complete absence of trans men in your comment, and their near-total absence in the broader debate. To me this indicates that concerns about trans women are not fundamentally rational, but that they are the result of some sort of deep-seated emotional concern about purity, or about women's safety (the latter indicative of a misandrist view that men are inherently dangerous). If there are people here who believe trans men aren't actually men, I kindly ask that they also provide the criteria for distinguishing men from non-men.
Tarnstellung
8mo ago
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. (...) And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
- I don't deny that trans women can have an advantage and that it may be reasonable to exclude them from participating in a women-only sport. But it is strange that people's views on this particular question seem to align perfectly with their views on trans people in general. In principle, it should be possible for someone to support treating trans people as their preferred gender when there are no externalities, but to exclude them from women's sports. The entire argument about women's sports is self-contained and irrelevant to the broader debate about trans people.
- I am not aware of a single case of a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. If it happened, I expect the anti-trans side would publicize it heavily.
- The one case I am aware of where a trans prisoner was placed in a women's prison and impregnated a woman involved consensual sex. The safety of other prisoners was not endangered. It may still be desirable to prevent that kind of thing, but it is very different from sexual assault. And if preventing that is your goal, it doesn't follow that trans women should be excluded from women's prisons. A few years of HRT, or an orchiectomy/sex reassignment surgery, will suffice.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
This comment is an excellent demonstration that the claims from the anti-trans side of this or that being "natural" or "unnatural", and therefore objectively right or wrong, are just an attempt to rationalize their own completely subjective aesthetic preferences. How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc., while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Yes, the evidence is weak. That is precisely what the authors of the meta-analysis meant by:
The strength of evidence for these conclusions is low due to methodological limitations
If you look at the "Discussion" section, you will note that most of it is dedicated to pointing out problems with the studies under review. The article also notes that de Vries, 2014 has a "serious" risk of bias and the other three adolescent studies have a "moderate" risk of bias, and of the 20 studies they looked at, only three have a "low" risk. All of this means that further research is needed (it always is), but based on the evidence we have now I think it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a working hypothesis that puberty blockers and hormone therapy are beneficial.
Your points about self-selection among participants only imply that doctors should exercise care when choosing which treatments to administer to whom. Clearly some patients do benefit from hormone therapy, therefore the therapy should not be banned.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Schools in other countries don't need armed security.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The assumptions are:
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The marginalized groups really are marginalized. In your example, this would mean you have a significantly larger amount of money than me.
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We're looking at this dispassionately, from behind a veil of ignorance. Of course the group that benefits from inequality would support inequality. I usually cringe at this saying because it's so frequently abused by the left, but it does apply in this case: when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
It's worse in the very trivial way that it leaves a whole lot of the population fighting dice that are incapable of rolling in their favor. Yes, it actually feels quite bad to know that you automatically lose any tiebreaker no matter what for something you have no control over to fight a disparity you had no hand in.
I thought of this, but given that these situations are very rare, I don't think it really matters that much.
Besides, if the "marginalized" groups really do face a disadvantage, then they themselves may "feel quite bad" about their their own chances. If members of both the overrepresented and underrepresented groups adjust their beliefs rationally, the total amount of "feeling quite bad" should remain the same (that is, of course, an enormous if). It really is just levelling the playing field, unlike quotas or double standards.
and of course there is the other factor which is that I have literally zero faith that the people making these choices are actually not rounding everything down as to what counts for qualifications for people with my phenotype and rounding everything up for qualifications that count for people like Brinton before they declare that several candidates are of equal qualifications. I have seen the faces of this kind of person when they see an unrepresented minority in a prestigious position.
The current ideology does support affirmative action beyond what I consider justified, but they are pretty explicit about this. They're not pretending to only use identity as a tiebreaker and then secretly adjusting twice. If (another tremendous if) the belief that affirmative action is only justified in the narrow circumstances outlined above became widespread, I would expect people to implement it fairly.
I will admit that, given the magnitude of the ifs, this is mostly an intellectual exercise. Maybe I would be better off just supporting total identity-blindness, lest narrow affirmative action slip down the slope into wokeism. Not that it matters much, given that the world is already well past that point.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The cleavage site, important for how the disease develops, is unlikely to emerge naturally without other changes to the genome - yet this is what happened. It was probably done artificially by the Ecohealth people who were asking for money to do just that (the US turned them down for the initial grant a few years prior to COVID but they could've found another source of funds).
You go from "this is unlikely to happen naturally" to "it was probably artificial, and I know who did it!". That looks like a huge leap to me.
Are you an expert on molecular biology, epidemiology, etc.? I'm not. I'm getting most of my information from this Wikipedia article, checking out the references, googling. My impression is that the investigation of the lab-leak theory was initially hindered when Trump endorsed the theory, which made it part of the culture war, but now it's back on track: it's no longer a taboo topic, people are looking into it and there's a healthy discussion going on, which should eventually produce some kind of consensus.
Tarnstellung
8mo ago
Off the top of my head there was the Loudoun County affair. Of course the trans activists went on to declare that the rapist wasn't really trans, it was just a guy in a dress... which I guess they didn't really think through.
Apparently the rapist didn't identify as trans. I think it's fair to say that someone who identifies with their gender at birth is not trans. I don't think this is a no-true-Scotsman, as @jkf claims (I assume you are both referring to the same case).
More importantly, however, he didn't enter the bathroom to find a random person to assault – he already knew the victim and had had consensual sex with her in that bathroom previously, and the meeting that resulted in the assault was also pre-arranged:
But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.
Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. “The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,” Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, “He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.”
So this is nothing like what anti-trans activists claimed would happen.
That already sets you against the current batch of trans activists, which demand self-ID.
Yes, but it also sets me against the current batch of anti-trans activists, who claim all trans people are just perverts and none of their claims should be taken seriously. I think there should be some standards to prevent people identifying as trans in bad faith, but no one on the anti-trans side is arguing this. They're all saying that all claims of being trans are illegitimate.
That said, there hasn't been a valid argument provided for putting trans people in the opposite-sex facilities.
If I understand correctly, you're asking why trans women should be put in women's prisons and trans men in men's prisons. Beyond the arguments that it makes them feel better when their gender is affirmed, there's a case to be made that a trans woman who passes well is in real danger in a men's prison. A passing trans man in a women's prison is not as endangered, but the women there would probably be uncomfortable with his presence.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Dishonest fearmongering is the order of the day, and as I alluded to previously, it is the prevailing philosophy of those with power and influence in America. Are you actually opposed to dishonest fearmongering, or do you simply object to the outgroup enjoying its benefits?
This website exists specifically to enable intellectually honest discussion. The fact that the rest of the world is full of dishonesty is irrelevant. It's not acceptable here.
If you're killed by someone that the government had the power and even the obligation to remove from the country, but decided not to, then the government has played a role in your murder. That's an element that simply doesn't exist for the Gacys.
This is irrelevant if your actual probability of getting murdered didn't increase.
Most groups in the world have lower violent crime rates than American natives, because the American native crime rate includes the absurdly large black crime rate. Disaggregation by race would tell a different story, albeit not one that people prefer to hear, since in the popular imagining an American "native" is just some cornfed Southern good-old-boy, and there's a great audience waiting to eagerly believe such people are more violent than one's cherished client groups.
The breakdown of the native crime rate is irrelevant. Letting in immigrants with a lower crime rate still makes the country safer overall.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
How big is the harm overall? From an outside perspective, things seem to be working fine. Is there a possibility the field will converge on a smaller number of standard refrigerants?
It seems the replacement refrigerants are being replaced because they contribute to global warming. I would expect that once ozone depletion and global warming are dealt with, there won't be any reason to introduce new refrigerants any more.
Edit: Is the danger from hydrocarbons theoretical or are they actually regularly exploding or catching fire?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I would be worried about violence if I got into an altercation with Buck Angel.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The hormones they're being given at least exist naturally in humans. All humans have both estrogen and testosterone. It's just the levels of each being altered in trans people. This is apparently unnatural. But giving people synthetic chemicals that don't exist anywhere in nature is apparently "natural". This is absurd.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
What is objectionable about that book? A boy dressing up as a princess doesn't seem any worse than other make-believe that children engage in.
Tarnstellung
8mo ago
This technically qualifies as "a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom", but it is nothing like the hypothetical situation anti-trans activists warned about. For one, it was not a sexual assault. My comment said "assaulting" rather than "sexually assaulting", but the claim has always been that women would be sexually assaulted, by a pervert who is or claims to be trans.
More importantly, the fact that it happened in a bathroom isn't relevant because it had none of the characteristics of the stereotypical bathroom assault. The debate is focused on bathrooms because they're enclosed spaces where a victim may be alone, which makes them uniquely dangerous. The typical hypothetical bathroom assault scenario involves a woman, usually understood to be a random woman unknown to the assailant, who is alone in the bathroom with the assailant, who has followed her in or was waiting for her. This is dangerous because she can be cornered with no way to escape and no way to call for help.
But this case is nothing like that. The victim was with a group of friends who saw the entire thing. The fight was presumably stopped as soon as possible (apparently the friends tried to intervene but were unable to stop the fight; presumably they called someone who could). The perpetrator and the victim already knew each other, and the incident started as a verbal altercation when the perpetrator approached the victim and escalated into a fight. This exact scenario could have played out anywhere. It had nothing to do with the reasons why bathrooms are claimed to be uniquely dangerous and why bathroom bills are claimed to be necessary.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
OK, pacemakers are the only good argument against the ban I've seen so far. The only research paper that I can find is this one from 2006:
Conclusion: Patients are at risk if the implant is unipolar and left-sided, if they stand as close as possible to the induction cooktop, and if the pot is not concentric with the induction coil. Unipolar pacing systems can sense interference generated by leakage currents if the patient touches the pot for a long period of time. The most likely response to interference is switching to an asynchronous interference mode. Patients with unipolar pacemakers are at risk only if they are not pacemaker-dependent.
I don't know what that means TBH.
Having exhausted the scientific literature, I tried the next best thing: Reddit. There are anecdotal reports from people with pacemakers cooking with induction and people with pacemakers who were told by their doctors not to cook with induction. No reports from people with pacemakers who tried cooking with induction and died.
Edit: And what about people who have embedded metal fragments that can't be removed? I guess my ban isn't a very good idea after all.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I personally believe the US election was rigged. It's already been admitted by the media, they only use the word 'fortified' instead of rigged. I'm sure everyone is aware of that article.
I am not aware of that article. Could you link it, please?
What exactly were these people doing, if not projecting influence and power such that Biden would be elected? Is that not rigging?
Groups "projecting influence and power" to get someone elected is called an election campaign. It's part of every election. What is the dividing line between legitimate campaigning and "election rigging"?
If you can quietly threaten that there'll be riots, suppression, endless legal warfare, against officials who don't use their leeway to come to the correct procedural/administrative conclusions, is that not rigging?
I doubt many people were going to vote for Trump but ended up voting for Biden because they were afraid of riots.
I'm not sure what you mean by "suppression".
Trump, having lost the election, is now the one engaging in "endless legal warfare".
What "career implications" would there be, for which officials, and for what kind of "procedural/administrative" decisions?
Rigging involves everything from stuffing votes, ballot harvesting, procedural manipulation to media manipulation.
My understanding of the word "rigging" only includes ballot stuffing and similar practices such as destroying or just not counting certain ballots. I believe this is the common understanding of the word, and broadening it as you do is a motte-and-bailey.
I hadn't heard of "ballot harvesting" before. Having looked up an explanation, it doesn't seem to be inherently fraudulent, but it probably does make certain kinds of "rigging" as described above easier. Do you have any reason to believe ballot harvesting had a significant effect on the outcome of the 2020 election?
I'm not sure what you mean by "procedural manipulation".
If by "media manipulation", you mean biased media coverage, then yes, that clearly did happen, but I don't think many people would classify it as "rigging". If biased media coverage is a form rigging, has there ever been an election that wasn't rigged?
A more expansive definition would include education and demographic policies, which do not favor the right.
Wouldn't that encompass literally all of politics, given that obtaining votes is ultimately a politician's biggest concern and any policy they implement or support is designed to increase their chance of re-election?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
My view might be summarized as "clothing is personal preference, hygiene is non-negotiable".
What are your principles and standards? Anything unusual is automatically bad? I guess that is less subjective.
Although, if your political beliefs are close to those of the average Mottizen, consider how unusual they are in universities, big companies and other significant employers in the current year.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I was going to say that candidate 2's poor hygiene makes him less qualified, in the broad sense, but then you did it for me! Our disagreement here seems to be on how bad not bathing is as compared to wearing unconventional clothing.
I think the convention that men mustn't wear dresses is arbitrary and pointless and a man should be allowed to wear a dress if he so wishes. Very dress-like garments have been normal for men to wear in many cultures, so there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Even if you consider it ugly, that's just a personal preference; I consider leather jackets ugly, yet I don't think this justifies discrimination against people who like wearing them. Brinton is only inconveniencing people if they let themselves be inconvenienced, like a wokeist who chooses to be offended at everything.
Poor hygiene, however, should not be socially accepted, in my opinion. Of course that depends on what "poor hygiene" is: someone may say that, yes, poor hygiene should be unacceptable but only bathing once a month isn't poor hygiene. For the purpose of this discussion, I am using "poor hygiene" to refer specifically to what candidate 2 is doing.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
You haven't provided an argument as to why civilians need easy access to guns for a society to be free. You are just asserting that this is the case.
Tarnstellung
8mo ago
This incident "happened in a private bathroom at a residence". Bathroom bills don't cover private homes and could not have prevented this.
Addressed here.
Having posted this I have to admit I sadly don't trust the media to report on this topic in good faith.
Certainly not the NYT or WaPo, but there are plenty of media organizations with an anti-trans editorial stance. They would surely publicize any such cases.
There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?
Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.
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