aaa
8mo ago
as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers
Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth
(...)
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.
(...)
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
aaa
1yr ago
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
aaa
2yr ago
Hold on, that list is bullshit. Do you think any intervention aimed at reducing school shootings would prevent: "A sheriff's deputy teaching a vocational law enforcement class accidentally discharged his weapon, grazing a student"? I count 10 legitimate school shootings in that list, and I'm being generous. If it went from 10 to 5 in a year would it be noticed? I don't know, I would have to look at what the variance is, but probably not. Maybe if the effect was that large and all happened in the same year, you'd be able to tell.
aaa
2yr ago
You are in a social media bubble that is motivated to hunt down and amplify any vaguely suspicious death. A retired child actor that hasn't worked in 20 years, seriously? Do you think you would have heard of his death in any other circumstance? Anyway if we are going by celebrity deaths only we can look at wikipedia categories:
There you go, we have now proven COVID-19 excess mortality as well as vaccine's safety and effectiveness in the stupidest way possible.
PS. I don't know of any way of tracking the number of "collapses" that lead to hospitalization but not death in celebrities, as far as I know nobody is keeping track of that.
aaa
5mo ago
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality
I wonder if someone's going to dig up that one issue of the sandman with the transexual to cancel him. I haven't read it in 15 years but if I recall correctly it had something along the lines of "moon magic won't work for you, YWNBAW".
aaa
6mo ago
Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.
The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.
Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.
The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.
aaa
8mo ago
TIL that religions removed by centuries and thousands of kilometers from christianity worshipped satan because some internet christian believes their mythology is actually real.
aaa
1yr ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?
Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.
aaa
1yr ago
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
aaa
1yr ago
this or something close to this might be right
Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.
aaa
1yr ago
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is already religious: you are already prepared to believe on faith that the gospels are a historical account. Many miracles would have only a few witnesses, so it is not surprising that they would not be recorded by historians (there probably were many false accounts of miracolous healers at the time and it would get lost among the fakes). But some of them are so huge and public that they couldn't escape notice.
As far as I am concerned I only believe (1) and partially (6) of that list with any certainty. There's too much conjecture in this part of history, if this standard of proof was applied uniformly we would believe in the existence of the philosopher stone too.
aaa
2yr ago
What is the difference between supernatural and natural. Given some phenomenon X how do you classify it as natural or supernatural, under the assumption that you believe X to be truly occuring?
IMO when you talk about certain things being supernatural you are already at least halfway to the position of the non-believer. In many formulations gender is a metaphysical object.
aaa
2yr ago
Interestingly minnesota prohibits drinking to minors of 21 and piercings and tattoos to minors of 18, without the consent of a parent or guardian.
aaa
7mo ago
It's because conservatives live in rural areas, close to their extended families from which they receive millions of dollars in free child care.
aaa
7mo ago
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline
Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.
The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.
aaa
8mo ago
I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?
aaa
1yr ago
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
aaa
1yr ago
If you were in the marketing department at AB and someone said “hey, why not send a one-time promotional can to this influencer that she’ll only market to her (highly woke) progressive following and that our core audience will never even hear about?” what would you say to convince them of how badly things would go?
"He doesn't have a highly woke following he's a lolcow, hate-watched by a following of alogs. Just read the comments on youtube and then imagine what they would write if this topic wasn't heavily censored. This marketing campaign will only be seen by TERFs and chuds, the best you can hope from it is that it will have zero impact."
"What's an alog?"
But really, I think they knew what they were doing. If you spend enough time on the app formerly known as twitter you start developing a reactive mind, you do/say/think things just to maximally own the libs/chuds. Somebody in marketing just thought "what can I do in my line of work to own the chuds today? I know they seem to hate this Dylan Mulvaney person, I'll sponsor them".
aaa
2yr ago
It's maddening that all statistics about this are self reported. We're talking about a demographics that takes prescription drugs, we should be able to know the exact number within a small margin of error.
aaa
2yr ago
The arian heresy is the most common non-mainstream christian belief. And for good reasons: many early christians didn't believe it, it's based on the flimsiest of biblical interpretation, it's basically incompatible with some metaphysical understandings of god (unmoved mover etc) and just plain bizarre.
I wonder if it didn't simply win because it's a civilizational tier shit test: getting people to hold absurd beliefs is a good way to insure that they are politically loyal.
aaa
2yr ago
Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin
Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.
The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.
China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.
That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.
aaa
2yr ago
Haven't read the book, however a couple of notes on your summary:
Seeing as there is not a better place for it, I thought I’d wrap up by going over what Joyce calls “gender-identity ideology” (GII). This is how trans people are encouraged to think and rationalize who and/or what they are
About this The Socio-Medical Construction of Transexualism (1982, Billings and Urban) is interesting:
Since the reputable clinics treated only "textbook" cases of transsexualism, patients desiring surgery, for whatever personal reasons, had no other recourse but to meet this evaluation standard. The construction of an appropriate biography became necessary. Physicians reinforced this demand by rewarding compliance with surgery and punishing honesty with an unfavorable evaluation. The result was a social process we call "the con." An elaborate and well-informed patient grape-vine, indirectly facilitated by the Erikson Educational Foundation's patient services, conveyed tips on each clinic's evaluative criteria and on "passing":
Unlike the old medical saw that claims the last time you see a textbook case of anything is when you close the textbook, we began to see patients that appeared to be nearly identical - both from a subjective and historical point of view. (....)
Soon it became conspicuously and disturbingly apparent that far too many patients presented a pat, almost rehearsed history, and seemingly were well versed in precisely what they should or should not say or reveal. Only later did we learn that there did and does exist a very effective grape-vine (Fisk, 1973:8).
In many instances, the con involved outright deception. For example, a physician warned the Fifth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium in 1977 to watch out for a male-to-female post-operative transsexual posing as the mother of young, male candidates in order to corrorborate their early socialization accounts of ambivalent gender cues and over-mothering. More often, the process was less direct. Fisk (1973:9) acknowledges "the phenomenon of retrospectively 'amending' one's subjective history. Here, the patient quite subtly alters, shades, rationalizes, denies, represses, forgets, etc., in a compelling rush to embrace the diagnosis of transsexualism."
Regarding the Matrix, it's interpretation as an allegorit for transgenderism is almost certainly a retcon. Judging from the recent Matrix Revolutions it even seems that likely only Lilly embraced this retcon.
It doesn't even make much sense within the context of the movie, it only works if you don't think about the details at all. What is your "real" gender, the one of the body in the pod, that you were born with, or the one expressed by your mind, inside the simulation? No. The Matrix was a kung-fu movie foremost, it had a basic gnostic framework and its main theme is the existence of free will.
As for dualism, describing it like this:
This view is especially tempting in the modern age, because most of us understand the analogy of a computer: a piece of hardware upon which any software might run. If operating systems are gender, then you can run Linux and Windows and Mac on the same machine without issue or even anyone complaining.
is extermely reductive. Dualism has a long history in western thought and is, for the most part, entwined with christian thought, which requires it for its theological views on afterlife. This is actually one of several points where its hard to reconcile woke-thought with the metaphisical materialst worldview (= the new athists).
aaa
2yr ago
This significantly downgrades the probability that it was a honest mistake the first time. I'm still going to wait for more information before believing that it's a fetish, instead of some other retarded motivation. We don't even know if this one belonged to a woman, let alone looked like it belonged to a woman.
(if you want to steal bags you do it at bars and restaurants in tourist areas, like all other thiefs, not in an airport)
It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?
For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.
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