Thankfully, I am not a doctor. I appreciate the rhetorical suggestion. I don't know how much I can take it, though, because these are my friends and I try not to overly offend my friends (or anyone, I guess). Like Sonya from Crime and Punishment, I have recently realized that no matter how I conduct myself, I will never be able to totally avoid offending people.
I'm like you in that I don't consider transgenderness valid at all, but I cannot really take that stance in the areas that I argue in. If they're going to wield studies and science to justify these horrible actions, someone else has to do the same to fight back against their worst excesses. I think I've made my peace with adults deciding to take hormones and wear the wrong clothing and try embarrassingly to talk like the opposite sex, though I resent having to pretend they are what they are pretending to be. But something like puberty blockers must be viciously fought in every place it pops up.
I am impressed that you are the first person to reply to this post on a forum filled to the brim with chuds.
Permanent, irreversible alterations to the body are not bad things inherently. You need to lose your baby teeth to grow adult teeth. Losing your baby teeth is a permanent, irreversible alteration to the body. Puberty is as well, but it leads to the things that are needed to continue the human race, which is important to biology. Messing with this process has a high chance of creating broken fucked up humans.
As I said in my original post, puberty blockers can cause permanent loss of fertility and permanent loss of orgasm. Jazz Jennings is the example I have seen people bring up, where both of these outcomes took effect. They also cause bone density loss. There are probably a lot of other things they do that I don't know about, or that nobody knows about, since this is all new and good studies likely haven't had the time to be created. Kids cannot consent to getting sterilized in the traditional way. Why should they be able to consent in this circuitous way? Why should such serious consequences be undertaken when simple psychotherapy can produce similar results without any of it, according to the HHS report? How am I supposed to trust the clinician has good cost-benefit analysis here when these possibilites are on the table and the medical community has made serious missteps before, such as their taking seriously Dissociative Identity Disorder (now seemingly on its way back) or, famously, performing lobotomies for hysteria? And it's all in service of making them pass better as the opposite sex as an adult when I don't even agree that that's a valid goal for anyone to undertake.
Do you not see that puberty blockers themselves are permanent, irreversible alterations to the body more than puberty itself is? What kind of evidence would you need to see to believe that?
I got into an argument on JK Rowling recently. That was mildly annoying, but then it shifted to transgender stuff in general, and the puberty blocker discussion in particular was very vexing to me. I just genuinely don't know how anyone can be okay with the idea, especially now that we know way more about it than we did 10 years ago. The dismissal of the Cass Review on the part of the pro-trans side has increasingly looked like the stereotypical right winger doing mental somersaults to any science they dislike. But I have some questions on it, there were some things I didn't have great answers to.
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What are the actual requirements for getting prescribed puberty blockers? The pro-trans tribe insists that it is a very rigorous process involving thorough checking of gender dysphoria, and it's not commonly done, despite being a readily available tool in the toolbox of clinical practice. I do not believe this after examples I have seen, but I have nothing to cite.
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Is there any actual scientific evidence in favor of social contagion playing any part in transgenderism? The pro-trans tribe claims that social contagion plays no role, and to me, it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism. I have no idea how many kids genuinely become gender dysphoric due to genetics, if there are any at all. And if there are any, I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers. How the hell did that become the default? But anyway, has The Science turned up anything on social contagion?
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Are there any actually valid critiques of the Cass Review? Pro-trans tribe will cite the Yale Law retort, then when I point out the responses to it, either holes are poked in them or they just go back to their priors that the Cass Review was methodologically bad, done by a transphobe, misinterpreted studies, and went against the scientific consensus and ruined its own credibility. Actually, they say the same about the recent HHS Report. Please show me if there are any published valid critiques of the Cass Review besides the Yale thing.
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What are the probabilities of serious consequences from puberty blockers? I brought up infertility, and the pro-trans tribe claimed that it's actually a very low chance and that it's not anyone's business anyway because not everyone wants to have kids. The latter half of that is completely inane when we're talking about life changing decisions for a demographic that cannot consent, but the former, I don't know. Do puberty blockers cause the infertility, the loss of ability to orgasm, and the complete lack of penis tissue with which to create a neovagina, or is it the ensuing hormones that do this?
Sadly, none of this will do anything to convince anyone on either side anyway. There's really no way out of this hole that has been created. Sometimes, I kind of hate this world. I really thought "don't give minors seriously debilitating life changing pills to solve a solely mental disorder" was an easy hill to stand on, but the fighting was just as vicious as anything else with the gender issue.
Edited to be slightly less angry.
Your spoiler didn't work, which is pretty bad if it's as big a spoiler as you say. Not sure why it didn't work. >!spoiler!<
Thankfully, I don't care about Orson Scott Card.
Yes, I think it is that fish. Asian carp or silver carp is what it's called here. The Illinois River is absolutely full of them and the authorities have been troubled by this fact for years. That's great advice on how to catch them, makes perfect sense. That's probably going to end up a lot cheaper than a kayak.
I've certainly never heard of "technoplankton" and none of the fishing threads I looked at on reddit seemed to have any inkling of anything like "technoplankton". Perhaps Americans don't catch this fish much and don't know how to catch them? Do you make technoplankton yourself or do you buy it? What do Russians think of the fish? The people here (rural Midwest) think it's a trash fish. Man, glad I made the original post, how fascinating.
I unfortunately do not own a bow. I do own a shotgun, though. Can you use shotguns on the river, I wonder? I wonder what kind of ammo you'd use for it. Birdshot would be my guess, since it probably wouldn't take so much of the fish if it was far enough away, but I don't know if it's illegal. Where did they use the bow? On the banks or were they in a boat of some kind? If boat, what kind of boat?
For sure, I had to edit it once already to update that it may not be a culture war thing since it was a settlement for a larger suit. Apparently the Biden administration resisted harder, but I don't know if it made more sense to resist at that point than to settle, especially for an administration that would really want to avoid the optics such an outcome would bring. I'm not much of a lawcel.
I see mixed things about them outside of that thread. In real life, the sentiment is quite negative. There's some movement to rebrand them "Copi", but there was a stand at the state fair selling them and they did things like mix them heavily with potato stuff or crab rangoon mixture and then breaded them so you don't even know what they taste like. What a waste of money, and it wasn't even good, just greasy and salty with no winning flavor to save it. Really put a damper on the whole visit. I am just really interested in dirt cheap protein that the State wants gone. I am interested in hogs for the same reason, but I don't live in hog country, unfortunately.
Do any of you fish? I'm not sure if anyone can answer this question since it's probably niche even for fishermen. I live about an hour away from the Illinois River and I am sympathetic to the plight of the Illinois River's Asian carp problem. I am also very curious about what the bastards taste like and I won't accept the colloquial answer of "they taste bad, don't bother". I participated in a Redneck Fishing tournament one year where people sign up to get on motorboats that stir up the water and catch them with nets when they jump, which was quite thrilling. I'd guess thousands of pounds result from that every year, but I didn't ask if I could take any home; I think they were sent to a meat plant to get turned into dog food.
As far as I know, they're filter feeders. I possess no fishing equipment and I have only fished once in my life in some relatives' pond when I was 10 or so, and we tossed the fish back in that case. What's the cheapest way for me to fish Asian carp? A motorboat is out of the question, but a fishing kayak might not be, though I don't know how smart that would be on a big river like the Illinois River. These are big fish we're talking about, and capsizing is within the realm of imagination of a bunch of them smacked you on a small boat. Ideally I would be on the banks, anyway.
I am impressed you are unfamiliar with this shooting.
The shooting took place on January 6th, 2021, during the riot; the officers were positioned to guard the House chambers. I don't know if there were any House members inside those chambers, but the police apparently thought they would be in danger if the rioters broke through, and there was no other place for the officers themselves to retreat to. The door that Babbitt broke through was to the Speaker's Lobby which led to the House chambers. Ashley Babbitt was the only direct homicide of the day, and she has become something of a martyr since then on the right wing. Her family started a suit for $30 million based on wrongful death and it was just settled today for $5 million.
I'm pretty late to the party on discussing the Ashli Babbitt shooting, but I now get my chance, because the Trump administration is going to pay $5 million to her family. (Archived link.)
I once discussed January 6th with a conservative in real life, and his stance was that the Ashli Babbitt shooting was an example of police brutality. He said that she was issued no warnings at all before being shot, and she wasn't directly threatening anyone's life. Taking a look at the footage, I don't know how she would have been warned at a volume that she could hear, and any of the police with rifles would have been jeopardizing their own safety and the safety of the other officers to lower their rifles and physically restrain her. I think the barricaded door and the cops with guns trained on the entrance should have been enough to signal that breaking through would be a bad idea. Given all these circumstances, I think that awarding $5 million to her family is a stupid thing to do. Add it to the pile of other conflict-theory-esque actions that make this presidency a seriously mixed bag for me. regrettable. Sometimes settlements are the cheapest thing for suits.
Languages are ultimately useless, until they aren't. I think any of the three would be a good choice. Japanese would probably have a lot of the same benefits as Chinese, and it would open your kid up to working in neat liberal democratic Japan instead of crazy and bad and oppressive China (or Taiwan, I guess). There are a lot more admittedly insular Chinese speakers in America that could be spoken to, but Japan puts out a lot more cultural output, providing something you might actually want to use the language for.
I guess part of the consideration here would be that Spanish is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, and Japanese and Chinese are not.
That first link goes to the 2nd page of your most recent posts. Is that what you intended? It will mean that if the post you wanted users to look at was there, it won't be there later as you make more posts.
I like reading car arguments, so I appreciate your input.
I live in a rural area and don't really have any public transport options. Cars are a must in rural areas. I've gotten in arguments with former college peers who were arguing that cars could be eliminated even in the countryside, which was a really bad take to me. However, I have to wonder. When I go grocery shopping, I typically have multiple pretty heavy bags. How do you handle grocery shopping on bikes, public transport, or on foot? Do you just take a ton of trips? What about if you were transporting something else heavy? I wanted to take a portable grill up to someone else's house to grill this weekend, but that kind of thing is only "portable" if you have a car, really.
Huh, I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest. I just accepted it as a fact through osmosis that Japan generally hadn't apologized for anything and that schools generally don't go over their past wickedness in detail.
I appreciate your Japan facts. I'm still learning Japanese, though my motivation has been wavering lately. I could probably hitch onto some family friends' plans to visit later this year, if I wanted to, but I don't know.
After seeing the kind of moral browbeating you get when you cannot let 150 year old sins go, I'm willing to say that Japan ignoring its multitude of war crimes is the next best thing after having not done them at all. I don't think they're likely to do it again, so I don't know what the purpose of such guilt would be.
Certainly, Western nations are unique in acknowledging their own crimes, but it seems that these acknowledgements have been put to effective use by anti establishment types who hate the country and want it to die, or at least want the ruling class to go away so that they can be in power.
I guess truth is a fleeting thing for me, sadly. If one side acknowledges it, and the other side acknowledges the other side's ugly truths and then totally ignores its own, then truth must be disregarded. "The first casualty of war is Truth" and all. Koreans are in an even riskier position because of their proximity to such a hostile regime.
I don't really understand how you can characterize South Korea as being on the way up whereas Japan is rapidly declining. Japan is older at median age 49 vs South Korea's 45, but 45 is still pretty old. They both have similar economies with similar awful work cultures and similar face cultures. Spaces are clean and well designed in both. Technology is cutting edge in both. What outdated traditions are suffocating you in Japan? Are you sure that outdated traditions aren't suffocating you in South Korea? There are some things worse than outdated traditions, like shudder kpop...
I don't know what to tell you, man. My mini portable grill that I dug out of the garage of a relative that they let me have for free doesn't have bottom vents. It's Char-Broil and it looks like this, though it doesn't have any ash tray or anything on the bottom, just solid on the bottom. Your comment makes me paranoid enough to check extra carefully that it's entirely closed on the bottom once I get home.
I did not parboil, in fact, the brats were from frozen. I will have to try the par boil. The onions part of that sounds good, and it makes me wonder if the Oktoberfest brats that I love so much were created with a method similar to this, as some of them had great onions.
There's clearly a lot of benefits to charcoal. I like that they're generally more portable with less moving parts and are significantly cheaper. Generally, I want to emulate the American Dream by grilling away from my wooden porch on some grass. Also charcoal can get a lot hotter. Apparently that's the best way to do wok cooking if you don't have a proper wok burner like a restaurant would. Maybe the best way to do pizza if your oven doesn't like to get up past 500 degrees. Also you get to play with fire, which does a lot for morale.
The grilling went great. The brats especially benefited a lot from the smoky flavor imparted by the charcoal. Maybe it's just because I didn't cook them as hard as I usually do, but they seemed a lot juicier as well. I had recently cooked the same kind of brats in the oven, using the broiler to char at the end, and it really was a world of difference. Chicken thighs also turned out really well. Pork loin was good, but I don't know if it was better than in the air fryer.
The grill itself is kind of horrible. There are no bottom vents, so if you want to put the lid on, you start smothering the fire (I did it anyway to get some indirect heat after searing). Some ways through the cooking, one of two points the handle was attached by detached. And of course, the darn thing is horribly small, meaning you can only cook a few things at a time, meaning the cook took kind of a long time. Two-zone charcoal seemed to work, despite its size, and despite my not really being able to get an even amount of charcoal on an entire side. Maybe should have left it in the chimney for a little while longer, because some of the charcoal wasn't really lit if it was away from the hot corner.
I like that I can throw random sticks I find in my yard into the fire. I don't know the consequences of this behavior, other than making it get a lot hotter for a minute or so. If I had a larger grill, I'd definitely be doing fajitas on it. Or longer cooking time things like potatoes or chicken leg quarters.
Also I swear that that tiny grill is still way better than the propane three-burner Expert Grill from Walmart we've got. Burners so far apart, I doubt the thing keeps heat very well, and I feel like I can barely sear on it at all. Maybe I should give it another try sometime, maybe I'm wrong. It certainly can keep a lot more food on it.
I'm glad someone finally posted it, but I would not say that it's flown under the radar. TracingWoodgrains also saw it yesterday pretty quickly.
If disparate impact was a part of the Civil Rights act, and if it's been upheld by the Supreme Court previously (I thought it had), how can it be eliminated with an executive order? Is the hope that it gets adjudicated by the courts and eventually stricken down?
Yes, because it is a harm being deliberately inflicted on minors by the medical establishment that has permanent horrible consequences like infertility, plus generally being considered freaks for the rest of their lives. There's a reason that despite the low occurrence of incidents, people care about the Catholic Church having members of the clergy molest children and then shuffle them around without being prosecuted. Teens getting into car accidents, or kids dying in pool accidents are problems that are hard to solve, but deliberate actions from officials in respected establishments based on strategies are much easier. That goes for the Catholic Church, that goes for doctors, that goes for police department policies on restraint with chokeholds. Thanks for posting some statistics.
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