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faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
Yes because they were part of the empire.
I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.
Chinese-Americans have been part of the empire since the 1850's, longer than Italians, Poles, or Jews.
If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?
The Romans system worked for over four centuries (taking the Social War as the starting point) far longer than any of us expect the American one to, individual cases of betrayal aside.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
1d ago
I always suggest Arch in the spirit of throwing yourself into the deep end - it was my first distro and the learning curve was formative for me. That said I just set up Bazzite for a friend who's primarily interested in gaming, and have been using Debian and Mint for my project machines. I recently migrated my desktop off a Bazzite dual boot to Debian because Bazzite's frankensteinian package management makes it a terrible workstation for me, and then I had to switch to the unstable channel because my 7800 XT doesn't have usable drivers in stable.
WRT aesthetics, I ran Cinnamon on my laptop with a custom theme that replicated the Windows XP look and feel, which was pretty fun for a while. In the last few weeks though I've been moving my machines away from Cinnamon towards XFCE, mostly because Cinnamon's screensaver is kinda broken on multiple monitors of different dimensions and i3 is a little too minimal for me. For funsies I tried NsCDE on my laptop for a few days, but it's a little too alien for my modern kek sensibilities, though I like the retro Motif feel.
I was always scared that I'd break things irreparably.
Ahh, youth. What you do is you pick up the cheapest computer (laptop, desktop, pick what suits you best) you can find on clearance and pave over it with Arch. Specifically Arch, because they try to avoid making decisions for you. Follow the installation guide to the point where the install is finished, you've got your account made, all that. Switch to a terminal, sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root, and intentionally destroy your setup. Do the installation again from the top - blow out your partitions and make them over again, the whole nine yards. Break out of the mindset of being too scared to break things, practice good data hygiene (like keeping your home directory on a separate partition/drive), and know that even if you literally delete your entire OS, you have done that before and it's not really a big deal when you can just backup your home/data directories and rebuild the whole thing from nothing. Then recognize that most breakages you'll encounter are orders of magnitude less destructive to your system than what you just did.
Then fuck around with the explicit intention of finding out daily drive your new system with the knowledge that if there's something annoying you, you can fix it. My first Arch setup on a laptop, I got distracted by solving issues with the graphics drivers and never got around to doing the whole system blowout. Daily drove that laptop for five years and I learned shitloads from doing so.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
What do you think the political solution would look like? AFAIK no other society has had to deal with trans
sun_the_second
1d ago
I'll grant you have better knowledge of your personal cohort of emigrants, but so far you have not shared how that extrapolates, and in fact are being vague enough that it could be any other country than Russia and any time period within the last 30 years. Needless to say I do not claim that the ratio of those looking for money vs. those looking for freedom of speech is the same in 2000s Estonia and 2020s Russia.
I am not aware of many emigrants from Russia who did it for money and did not bring their family, so your argument about family, job and home hardly applies.
It's easy to dismiss the anxiety-wracked youths as someone who don't really impact the country's economy upon leaving. But I'm not convinced that even the money-targeting STEMlords' decision is completely unaffected by ideological differences. Seems like there'd be less friction in moving for a 100% raise in spending power/salary if the destination country is less restrictive on your habits than your home country, and vice versa.
Additionally, the more you restrict websites registered in your country without outright hard-firewalling yourself away from the world, the more people will just stick to foreign websites through VPN rather than developing your own infosphere.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now
Experience shows this doesn't work on cultists. They just move the world end date further in the future without updating anything else. Can be done unlimited number of times. Also the public has very limited memory - all the failed world end predictions over the last 50 or so years are available, and make absolutely zero impression and present zero problem for anybody predicting world to end again. Same btw about hundreds of thousands of Gazans starving - no matter how many times those things turn out to be lies, every next time it is claimed people believe it instantly and uncritically.
PokerPirate
1d ago
I thought I had read all of Chesterton's work, but I either missed this one or totally forgot about it. Thanks for posting it!
For anyone interested, the full book (~300 folio pages) is available on project guttenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm. It starts with the very in-character line:
I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind.
The ... in @HereAndGone's quote misses some of the best lines:
Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex.
Some more gems from the first pages:
Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book.
The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.
All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.
We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.
I doubt the following still holds true:
The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.
This line might make a handful of white-nationalists upset:
I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Except most trans teens seem to not want to be taken seriously as their chosen gender, they seem to want to be something other than their real gender- that’s basically the conclusion of Irreversible Damage. These trans folks are not attempting great conformity with the roles of their chosen gender.
cheesecake_llama
1d ago
This is much less of a problem now that basically everything is posted on the arXiv.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
two terrible optics choices of either force feeding them or letting them starve to death
This only works if the prison guards are the good guys or at least try very hard to pretend to be ones. Otherwise neither of those options are a big problem for them. Case in point: Putin murdered Navalny in prison (not by hunger but same point stands) and what happened? Absolutely nothing.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Out of all suicidal actions in furtherance of Hamas cause, this is one of the least harmful I think. Should be encouraged.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
I dislike the phrase "social contagion", which assumes that being trans is a negative and it's bad for it to spread.
You have this backward, I think--the phrase social contagion emerges from the conclusion, not the other way around. The phrase "social contagion" refers specifically to the vector for an illness. If we accept the "mental illness" model of psychology, then mental illness that spreads via social exposure is a "social contagion." To the best of my understanding, it is pretty well established that e.g. eating disorders exhibit social contagion. So, apparently, does suicide.
If gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then it's not a social contagion. But also: if gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then there's not really any good argument that insurance companies should be required to pay for treatment. (I know Scott Alexander has written about this, though to the best of my recollection he tends to be a bit allergic to drawing the obvious conclusions on trans issues, possibly because of his geographic bubble.) So gender dysphoria ends up in this weird superposition where trans advocates want it treated as an illness when that means they get money, but definitely not treated as an illness in any other context.
There are a variety of definitions out there for "mental illness" but the usual one is something like "a psychological condition that interferes with participation or satisfaction in ordinary, every day life." The standard goal of treatment is to eliminate that interference, but the sociological angle is that "ordinary, every day life" is a culturally constructed and often moving target. So yeah--dying your hair or getting a tattoo could indeed be a matter of "social contagion" if it interfered with everyday life--people who engage in extreme body modifications that make them mostly unemployable, for example, can probably even now be fairly described as suffering from a mental illness, possibly acquired through social contagion. But the more serious we are about pluralism, the harder it is to say what "ordinary, every day life" entails.
I don't think "the pro-trans tribe" would deny it if the name people used for it wasn't something which implies it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted.
The people who think transsexuality is (or is at least substantially) a matter of social contagion are generally agreed that it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted. Which, if it is a mental illness, seems like a fair assessment. Again, if it's not an illness, then related treatment is purely aesthetic, and very few people think health insurance or national health programs should cover body aesthetics (even when looking prettier seems likely to e.g. alleviate your depression).
But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.
Do you have a source for this? My understanding has long been that Rowling is totally fine with neopronouns, social transition, etc., and is indeed quite supportive of trans ideology in almost every context, far more so than e.g. a religious conservative. Rowling just doesn't think males should be permitted to compete against females in athletics, or placed in prison with them, or allowed into female-only shelters, or the like. Basically she has the classically feminist view that males, as a class, are dangerous to females, as a class, in ways that warrant giving certain unique recognition and advantages to females, which transsexuals born male are not; whether they are individually harmless is irrelevant to their continued membership in the suspect class. But if a male wants to put on some womanface and call himself Tina, Rowling seems happy to "yaass queen" him--just so long as he doesn't go flashing his penis in the girls' locker room.
sockpuppet2
1d ago
The "Miranda Warning" includes the right to counsel: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/miranda_warning Immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal, but perhaps Miranda Warnings should also be required, inasmuch as Fifth Amendment rights also apply.
falling-star
1d ago
IDK man, every girl I've been with has enjoyed the info dumps. I think if they think you're cute they're down for the excited babble.
sockpuppet2
1d ago
Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim.
What does this mean?
The previous administration turned a statute requiring it to deport aliens convicted of a specific list of crimes into a purely advisory suggestion, and BenGarrison here keeps insisting we just need to change the statute to require it more, bro. Or is that not what you're talking about?
Did they play games in court, in order to do so (e.g., dragging their feet, after being court-ordered to deport a criminal, or misleading the courts about the status of aliens), or were they just willfully lax about enforcing the law?
I think they gave up somewhere in the mid-1960s, where Woodby v. INS turned the statute's "reasonable, substantial, and probative evidence" into "clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence". Whatever patience there might once have been for the process arguments fell apart when the same judges and advocates have skipped over them in contexts involving citizens facing criminal charges.
Could you please elaborate on this?
oats_son
1d ago
Top quality comment, you put a lot of work into this. Yes, during my argument, it was seriously proposed that there wasn't any real difference in health outcomes between the usage of blockers for precocious puberty and the usage of blockers for gender affirming care purposes, since you're blocking puberty either way. I actually didn't know that that's the actual medical reasoning, that's insane. Blocking puberty to get it to happen at the right time is a much different case than blocking puberty from happening at the right time. The advocates should be the ones doing the work, and things would not have progressed this far if they were. There also would not be nearly so many advocates in that case.
sockpuppet2
1d ago
This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.
Don't have the state capacity, or haven't tried? What has been tried?
I can't see how Chinese students in particular are involved in the latest Israel/Gaza 'terrorist support' fiasco.
If "terrorist support" is the genuine motivation, why revoke Harvard's ability to sponsor any international student?
oats_son
1d ago
Are you suggesting that society should ditch any notion of gender and accept every way of gender presentation so that passing is no longer necessary? How likely do you think that would be?
sockpuppet2
1d ago
No, I object to the government excluding human capital we'd otherwise poach, especially if we're in a de facto Cold War with China. Prior to the Nazis expelling and marginalizing Jewish scientists, Nobel Prizes were predominately won by German scientists/institutions; since WWII, Nobel prizes have been predominately won by US scientists/institutions. China has a lot of brains and, therefore, a lot of brainpower - we should be trying to get their best and brightest. Also, money - if Chinese families want to subsidize Americans' education, let them. By all means, screen for CCP connections, but don't emphasize "Chinese" over "CCP!"
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I contend that what they want is to be taken seriously as their chosen gender, and a lot of trans teens who currently seek medicalization do so because they think it will improve their chances of that. If the two were successfully decoupled, far fewer would want it.
KolmogorovComplicity
1d ago
The best policy is probably to a) maximally leverage domestic talent, b) allow foreign STEM students, but require that they be selected purely on the basis of academic merit and set up incentives such that almost all of them stay after graduating, and c) issue work visas on the basis of actual talent (offered salary is a close enough proxy).
That's not what we've been doing, of course. We have, instead, been deliberately sandbagging domestic talent, allowing universities to admit academically unimpressive foreigners as a source of cash, letting or sometimes forcing actually impressive foreign students to return home after graduation, and dealing out H-1B visas through a lottery for which an entry-level IT guy can qualify.
Against that backdrop, there's probably quite a lot of room to kick out foreign students and still produce a net improvement by eliminating affirmative action and tweaking the rules on H-1B and O-1 visas.
sodiummuffin
1d ago
What are the actual requirements for getting prescribed puberty blockers?
I think there's a lot of clinical discretion so it varies. I remember reading news articles about some prescribing them after a single appointment that you could try to look up, and here's an extreme example in Canada from a couple years back, where the "Gender Pathways Service" advises family doctors on prescribing them before a single appointment with a specialist:
“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.
If they're willing to do that presumably they are also willing to hand them out readily themselves.
What are the probabilities of serious consequences from puberty blockers?
Copy-pasting the last comment I wrote regarding the state of the evidence for puberty blockers:
Puberty blockers both lock children onto the transgender pathway (making them largely equivalent to prescribing HRT in actual outcome) and have very serious and poorly-studied medical consequences of their own, including potential damage to brain development. In children the "watchful waiting" approach used to be standard, meaning the children were not given any "gender-affirming" medical or social intervention, just treatment for whatever other psychological issues they had. Did they continue to want to transition into adulthood or did their gender dysphoria desist on its own? Some studies on this were conducted, and according to this meta-study and this blog post the desistence rates they found ranged from 61% to 98%. If you just add the figures from the studies listed in the linked study it would be an overall desistence rate of 85%, or 80% for the studies listed in the linked blog post. By contrast 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38). The lack of any randomized control study makes it difficult to be sure, but this seems indicative of a very strong "lock-in" effect.
The lock-in from social transition also seems very strong even for children not on puberty blockers (and may be a large part of the lock-in associated with puberty blockers), with this study finding the persistence rate of "binary transgender identity" to be 94% 5 years after social transition. The study mentions that persistence was less common for children that were transitioned before the age of 6, which significantly affects the results because they were 124 of the 317 children in their study, but still 90.3% compared to 96.4% for those 6 or older. 5 years isn't really long enough to know long-term desistence of course, but the explosion in rates is recent enough that it would be difficult to do much longer.
Meanwhile regarding the side-effects of puberty-blockers themselves there is very little high-quality evidence (e.g. randomized control trials in humans that track the things you want them to track), and essentially none for using them to avert puberty entirely rather than stop precocious-puberty for a few years. But this randomized study in sheep seems to indicate permanent damage to brain development:
The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.
In humans the best we have seems to be this study in which a 3-year course of puberty blockers in girls with precocious puberty is associated with a 7-point reduction in IQ from what they scored before beginning the puberty blockers. However without a randomized control trial and/or a longer-term followup it is difficult to know if this is meaningful, which is why I mentioned the sheep study first.
The NHS's independent review mentions a similar concern:
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.
This all seems completely backwards and the opposite of the precautionary principle. A treatment as far-reaching and poorly-understood as preventing puberty should not be adopted as standard practice without conducting the research required to know if it is safe and effective. It should not be critics of the treatment looking through sheep studies and comparing desistence rates between different studies to find indications that it causes brain damage and treats gender dysphoria worse than doing nothing. It should be advocates having to do randomized control trials showing it actually improves outcomes relative to no treatment and that the damage to brain/bones/etc. is minor enough to be worth it. (In the U.S. it doesn't have to pass FDA approval because it's an off-label usage of drugs approved for precocious puberty. Unsurprisingly the trials conducted for that have little relevance to the way it is used for gender dysphoria, and frankly seem pretty questionable even for precocious puberty.) Instead it might be difficult or impossible to get ethics approval for such a study, since you're denying a now-standard treatment, particularly if you actually do it properly by advising your control group to not socially transition either. Since Sweden, Finland, Norway and the UK have in recent years advised against most or all usage of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, hopefully someone in one of those countries will be able to conduct a proper randomized control trial?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Damn. Well, personally I'd either campaign to put him, and the person that gave him the license in prison, or I'd shoot the mofo myself.
This is a recipe for never getting married, because the kind of guy who enjoys nerdy infodumping considerably outnumbers the kind of woman who enjoys listening to nerdy infodumps.
Your wife doesn't have to share your interests, be your best friend, or anything like that; that's what your male friends are for. She needs to be good at the sorts of things a wife should be good at.
No, because you can just go down to the store and buy fish oil for 30$? Not to mention eating fish oil isn't progress, we've been doing it for I don't know how many years. Lovaza is different in that it is manufactured in a GMP facility, with GMP protocols and supported (I presume, I don't follow the fish oil literature) by expensive clinical trials. Maybe you don't care when it comes to fish oil, but you probably care that your hideously complex chemo drug is both 1) effective and 2) safe.
Would the libertarians paradise where drug manufacturing and prescription was completely unregulated, and savvy consumers learned which manufacturers were reputable and which drugs were efficacious by word of mouth be better than what we have now? No idea, although it's worth noting that we effectively had that paradise in the era of snake oil salesmen and sulfanilamide killing over 100 people. We had thalidomide, we had SV40 contaminated polio vaccines, and other incidents I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it's reasonable to question whether the FDA in it's current state is net positive and how it can be reformed, but I'd wager that the vast majority of the 'FDA delenda est' crowd have no idea why this fence was built in the first place.
As some other anecdata, if you like, until recently many Chinese people prized medicine (and other goods!) manufactured in the USA. Largely due to the regulation and processes you dislike.
Difficult for me to comment as I'm about up to date on epipens as I am on fish oils, but the rejection seems pretty opaque. Are you confident that the entirety of the issue here is the FDA just sitting on their application/dragging their feet, or were there actual major problems with the design?
What does 'theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator' mean?
Regardless, at the end of the day you face tradeoffs between safety and cost. The ideal number of pharmaceutical recalls/killed patients isn't zero, but it's hard to say what the optimal number is.
If you're curious, the Chinese have significantly deregulated. They also use a lot more 'phase zero' clinical trials that allow smaller biotechs to get clinical data much more easily and, as a result, are on a trajectory to wreck the US biotech ecosystem in the next 5-10 years. That said, I'd bet they've had some nonzero number of patients in clinical trials develop serious adverse events that were kept hush-hush in a way that's impossible to do in the USA.
Well, he appointed an HHS secretary (who oversees the FDA) who fucking hates the pharmaceutical industry. As far as I can tell, the twin north stars of RFK Jr. are 1) pharmaceutical companies are evil and 2) COVID was manufactured in a lab and facilitated by NIH money. I don't think he's a man who wants to maximize the number of drugs large pharma companies can get approved. They've also (as far as I can tell) entirely cut off government grant money to at least Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and others which probably isn't optimal for progress. He's threatening to block government scientists from publishing in top medical journals and is instead promoting his personal weird one. Biotech in the US is probably dead in the water, and the future is Chinese.
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