sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.
It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
Using "gender" to refer to this instead of "gender roles" or "gender stereotypes" conflates it with the idea of "gender identity". The idea of "gender identity" claims that people have some inherent deeply-rooted "true" gender separate from both their bodies and what societal roles they fulfill or stereotypes they match. This then comes with a whole set of ideas about "misgendering", about "deadnaming" if the non-binary identification accompanied a request for a name change, etc.
Note that actually basing it off gender roles would be completely different, for one because it would be based on society rather than the individual. Nobody advocates calling every woman in the military "he" even though the job is a male gender role. Similarly someone might believe in stereotypical correlations such that he's surprised to see a female programmer of a white NBA player, but that doesn't mean he thinks those people are actually becoming male or black, not even partially.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
A majority reject the following: DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?
Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.
Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:
Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.
Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.
Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.
Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.
Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.
Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.
Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.
Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack
I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Is that your real objection? If it was instead a serial killer who you believe doesn't have any particularly inaccurate beliefs about his victims, but simply enjoys killing people and has been hunting the person you're hiding as his next target, would you tell him the truth or would you come up with a different excuse for why it's acceptable to lie?
It seems like probably the real reason you don't tell the truth is simply that if you do it'll result in someone's death and no real gain, just adherence to the "don't lie" rule. But if that's your reason then just say that's your reason, rather than obscuring it behind excuses specific to the situation.
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that concluded it was probably a mixture of glue with cornstarch and baking soda (multiple sets of ingredients can do the same thing) that expands into a carbon foam when heated. It pointed out that there are now commercially-available coatings that use the same principle but are more durable/practical for long-lasting coatings, they're called "intumescent coatings", though their performance is held back because they're applied in a thinner layer.
I don't have a link to the blog post but looking at Wikipedia it links a youtuber who also seems to have replicated it. He also has some followup videos using different ingredients to make it and trying it for different things. If you want to see the commercially-available intumescent coatings for comparison this video shows them in action at 7:44. Though from what he says apparently they activate at a higher temperature, at least for the ones he tested. Intumescent coatings: A review on recent progress might be of interest.
Edit: Watching the youtuber's second video he discusses commercial intumescent coatings. Also this video from a manufacturer has some good footage in them in action.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
"Bowdlerize" has had strongly negative connotations for more than a century. And that's despite the fact that Bowlder's editions were meant for children, rather than trying to push them on everyone or replace the original.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.
In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience). Female characters are a publishing requirement at plenty of manga magazines, and not for ideological reasons. Here is a relevant extra from the comedy manga/anime D-Frag, which ended up with a main cast that looks like this. The same is true for anime-style videogames, in particular gacha games which have an emphasis on character design. Even aside from the subsets of Japanese/Japanese-inspired media doing their best to tile the universe with cute girls, plenty of stories from times and places unconcerned with feminism have gone out of their way to incorporate female characters into roles like "warrior" which would realistically be all male, from ancient myths to modern fantasy.
If a subset of modern western characters like the female Captain Marvel aren't appealing to men, perhaps it is because none of the people involved with creating them designed them to be. That doesn't mean they can't be "strong" or whatever, female anime/manga characters are varied and include those with nearly every kind of "strength" imaginable, both the kinds of strength primarily associated with men and the kinds that aren't. But it does mean they shouldn't be designed by people who view "making a strong female character" or "making sure not to incorporate misogynistic tropes" as primary goals in character writing, which often takes precedence over concerns like making the character likable or interesting. Indeed, most of those strong female anime/manga characters were written by people who have probably never encountered a phrase like "strong female character" in their lives, let alone having them as important categories shaping how they think about writing fiction.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
You're comparing diagnoses per year for those 6-17 to number of children. You have to multiply the yearly figure by 12 for the whole time period. The U.S. population 6-17 is apparently 49,466,485, which would put the percentage who end up with gender-dysphoria diagnoses before the age of 18 at 1.02%.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Not all randomized control trials are blinded randomized control trials. All you need for a randomized control trial is to randomly assign a group of patients that gets the treatment and a group that doesn't. As far as I know, no long-term randomized control study of gender transition has ever been conducted, in either children or adults.
Non-RCT's are if anything even worse than euphemisms like "moderate-quality" make them seem, reading something like Scott's ivermectin post might help give a sense for it. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
No, it's way worse than that, the high/moderate/low quality ratings were based on the cited meta-study and seem if anything too lenient. Reading the meta-study, many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed", they made no attempt to measure psychological outcomes to determine whether suppressing puberty actually provided any benefit. This is the supposed single "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. And then here are the detailed explanations of why they considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Your summary of the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest is good, and illustrates some of the video's overt misrepresentations, but I'd note there is also dishonesty through omission. GG uncovered a lot of cases of game journalists engaging in undisclosed conflicts of interest, alongside other complaints like sensationalism and ideological witch-hunts against developers. For instance, very early on they discovered that Kotaku's Patricia Hernandez had repeatedly given coverage to both her friend and former roommate Anna Anthropy and to her former girlfriend Christine Love. Hernandez is now Kotaku's editor-in-chief. This image was circulating days before the Gamergate hashtag was even coined. (The expansion of the scandal beyond Grayson/Quinn is part of why people were eager to jump on the Gamergate hashtag when Baldwin coined it rather than continuing to use "Quinnspiracy", other hashtags were already being brainstormed and various strawpolls posted in the days prior to Baldwin's tweet.)
The articles on Deepfreeze are a decent summary from the GG perspective, with the one titled "Unfair advantage" being the one focused on personal conflicts of interest.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
This is just "The Pyramid and the Garden". People aren't good at properly adjusting for the level of cherrypicking and degrees of freedom possible when you have thousands of people scouring a large world for evidence matching their pet theory.
A photoshoot for a fashion company reuses a "legal documents" prop from the shooting of a television drama as "office documents", the same company sells fashion that is vaguely leather-daddy inspired and didn't segregate it from photoshoots with children, and you conclude that "we are ruled by satanic pedophiles". (And they are deliberately embedding evidence about this in fashion photoshoots for some reason.) If you lived in a tribe of a few dozen people and happened to personally notice two coincidences like that about a single person, maybe that would be reason to be suspicious. But you don't, you live in a society of hundreds of millions where thousands of people spend time hunting down and broadcasting stuff like this for your perusal. As a result this doesn't even really tell us about Balenciaga's marketing department, let alone "society". But people's brains don't adjust like that, so give them a few coincidences like this and they'll either come to believe false things or dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. And then the ones who do the latter are still vulnerable to the same mistakes in reasoning when packaged in ways that don't register as "conspiracy theory", especially ones spread by mainstream media sources.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.
The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
An obvious but unmentioned reason for 4900 people to text the number is that they wanted to see if doing so would provide a continuation of the joke. Texting the message didn't provide an automated response, but it easily could have, and trying it out lets you see if it does. The same way that, for example, when Grand Theft Auto marketers spread around phone numbers of in-game business/characters, the vast majority of the people calling those numbers did so because they wanted to hear a funny answering-machine message, not because they thought they were real.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's impossible not to Notice that the battlelines between HBD and race denial in the 20th century largely broke between Protestant Darwinists (Madison Grant, E.O Wilson, Charles Murray, Samuel Morton, James Watson, etc.) and Immigrant Jews (Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Eric Turkeimer, etc.).
Steve Sailer literally invented and popularized the term "human biodiversity" in 1999. He wasn't the first to independently invent the term, Jonathan Marks did in 1995 and wrote a book with it in the title, but the current meaning associated with HBD is from Sailer. If you're going to claim he's secretly jewish, that's at least one name for you to add to the pro-HBD side.
Last week, after some token Holocaust worship and virtue signaling against anti-semitism on Twitter
Why doesn't this part contain a link? Is it because it actually refers to Nick Fuentes trying to start some sort of internet slapfight with Steve Sailer and his fans compiling tweets from years ago where he does stuff like mentioning Ashkenazi jews having a higher IQ or incidentally refers to the Holocaust being bad? But you didn't want to talk about your post in the context of the campaign by the Fuentes "groypers", and "isn't it shocking that if you search through Steve Sailer's tweets it turns out he's anti-Hitler" would be a weird thing to post, so you try to present it as if he recently started tweeting about anti-semitism apropos of nothing? This sort of thing, where people summarizing something carefully elide most of the story to fit a pre-selected narrative, is pretty annoying.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.
GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I thought this was about a different study which went around months ago, in which a modified COVID-19 strain caused a 100% fatality rate in humanized mice. So I was going to point out that according to the same study stock COVID-19 had an extremely high fatality rate as well, so it said more about the mice than the virus. But looking it up apparently it's a different recently-published study about a pangolin coronavirus:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.574008v1.full
It sounds like a lot of things cause 100% death rates in humanized mice without nessesarily meaning that much regarding humans. Note that in this case 100% means they infected 4 mice and all 4 died.
Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.
It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:
If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.
https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268
I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
They have a portrait of Stalin hanging in their office and gave thanks to Marx and Engels during their VGA award acceptance speech. Maybe some part of it is ironic and/or they're like the portion of /pol/ who like to use Hitler and the swastika as edgy symbols despite not being neo-nazis themselves, but it's not as straightforward as just being anti-Soviet anarchists.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10.
Note that these mice are much more vulnerable to COVID than humans, in the same study 100% of the mice infected with wild-type COVID died. It would presumably still be a worse variant than anything going around now, but not 80% fatality levels of worse.
Since SARS-CoV-2 causes fatal infection in K18- hACE2 mice3, we leveraged this situation to compare the animal survival after viral infection. In agreement with the results of body-weight loss and clinical score, WT and Omi-S caused mortality rates of 100% (6/6) and 80% (8/10), respectively. In contrast, all animals infected with Omicron survived (Fig. 3c).
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The second frames Zelensky as a conduit for his people's will. ... The average age of the fighting man is over 40.
What's with the way people use this point? Ukraine is engaging in a deliberate policy of recruiting older people because they don't want to kill off their younger generation. The minimum age for conscription was 27 until they lowered it to 25 in 2024. This is bad enough when people are using it make some "Ukraine is running out of manpower" point, which true or false is not supported by them recruiting people of the ages they are deliberately trying to recruit. However it seems even more ill-suited to make your current argument: if it's a mistaken policy, then it is one that if anything panders too hard towards the will of the people.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
Speaking of tech company censorship: Youtube deleted a video from pharmaceutical company Aytu Bioscience about a proposed technology for using UV light inside the lungs, which they released a press-release about a few days before Trump's comments and was developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai who had been working on it since 2016. Their Twitter account was also suspended for a little while. (I wonder if there was any internal discussion about that the Twitter Files journalists could look up?) Given the timing it seems very likely it was what Trump's comment was referring to (or at least the part of the comment mentioning light), it was probably mentioned to him in one of his regular coronavirus meetings. Youtube deleted the video because a New York Times reporter reported it to them:
He also wrote a NYT article about it in which he talked to a Youtube spokesperson, which confirms the removal was intentional rather than purely automated. You'd think that if nothing else Youtube would have sufficient double-standards favoring credible institutions to not censor pharmaceutical companies talking about research they're involved with in cooperation with Cedars-Sinai, but apparently not.
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