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@Intelligence_06
If that is how you wish to go about it, that's your choice and I respect it, but I doubt most people will look any more kindly upon your arguments if you're being mean to your opponent (in a way that is perceived to be) undeservedly.
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Read: A Parting Gift
Howdy, homies.
Given my current situation, it's become clear that I am no longer able to expend the time and energy on this site that is necessary to properly engage in it. I intend to spend the next 13-14 months working as hard as I can on content creation for Twitch and YouTube (unless something goes wrong and I have to go on hiatus again, but let's hope for the best).
I've been making crappy videos for longer than I can remember. From an early age, almost everything I did on my computer was accompanied by a YouTube video on a second monitor or device. Now that I've taken a gap year, I have all the resources, experience, and knowledge that I could reasonably hope for. I have the opportunity to seize the target of my ambition, and, no matter how cringe it may be, I intend to take it.
Trying to get into esports in both StarCraft II and Valorant has taught me the value of preparing for failure and stifling expectations. I have a backup plan and I don't expect fame to come easily. Many will tell you that aiming for success is a bad idea, and, in all honesty, they're right. People just getting into esports or content creation should do it because they enjoy it and keep success as only a pipe-dream until you have some degree of certainty that you can achieve it.
I hope that I have contributed to this community in even a fraction of the way you have all enriched my life for the time I was here. You have all helped make me a much better debater than I thought possible. DART was enjoyable in a way in-person debating could never be. DART gives an unparalleled ability to focus on the arguments instead of focusing on my speaking ability. I truly don't think my partner and I could have become the best debate team in Peel region for several tournaments without all of you tempering my reasoning and speaking skills. If I have debated against you, I owe you my thanks for helping me.
Some notes to individual users:
- Bones, Jeff Goldblum, Intelligence_06, Undefeatable, and Sum1hugme: Thank you for the wonderful debates! More than anyone, you guys helped me learn and made my time here so much more than worthwhile.
- RMM: I can't tell if you're a narcissist or a living example of the backfire effect or what, but the style and conviction with which you write is admirable nonetheless. I aspire to emulate even half the energy you put in to every single speech.
- Novice: I am a transgender lesbian :)
- Mods: Thanks for keeping this place in check. You guys really are the unsung heroes.
There have been many debates that I lost not because of any fault in my logic, but because I forfeit (a deity does not exist), was voted against by a single, biased voter (social media checks), or made some silly mistake (belt and road initiative), but none of that matters. Yes, it made me mad at the time, but I came back after my initial absence to have fun and expand my ability to argue and write. To quote Northop Frye: "There is no such thing as a bad idea waiting for the right words."
This site shouldn't be a dick measuring contest. It shouldn't be an ego boost that allows you to feel like an intellectual. This site thrives when people use it because they want to see new perspectives, learn to argue their opinions better, discover new things, and to constantly scrutinize their beliefs to make sure they can look back on life and say that the causes they fought for were righteous and worthwhile (or at least that there was no way for you to know otherwise at the time). Not that you simply did not question what you thought you knew and hoped it was correct.
I apologize if I sound condescending or like I'm trying to lecture anyone. I suppose the nature of this post means it's only natural, but I nonetheless have never seen the value of being an asshole, so I hope I don't come off that way.
I wish you all the best. Thank you for all the ways you have enriched my life and for the amazing, thought-provoking debates! I'm sure you'll all blow me away with your argumentative abilities whenever I come back.
I'll see you all in a year's time, hopefully. Don't miss me too much, haha. I might lurk or post on the forum every now and again.
Later, nerds.
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Read: Goodbye... For Now
I wanted to give some of the most important debate lessons I learned before I go.
I've been involved in dozens of IRL debate tournaments, both in-person and virtual. I've been doing IRL debating for 4 years. I was the president of debate club at my highschool before I graduated. I have ranked among the best speakers in my province and several times have performed better than any other team in Peel region in tournaments. I say this not to brag, but rather to establish that I know what I'm talking about.
- Speeches should be 10-20% fluff and 80-90% stuff. Fluff is anything that aims to elicit an emotional reaction or summarize/introduce/roadmap/make things easier to understand; anything that does not directly add on to your arguments. If you're debating to win, framing the debate in a way that leads to people thinking you represent the moral position or summarizing things so people can easier understand/conceptualize what you mean (ESPECIALLY when looking back on your speech to vote), fluff will often be how voters/the judge will remember the debate and can easily win you the whole thing.
- Roadmap and summarize. Segment the debate as much as possible. Do not try and intertwine one point or one rebuttal with another (though your rebuttals also contributing to your arguments is fine). Knowing exactly what you are saying is INCREDIBLY important. You don't want to lose because a voter didn't understand what you were trying to say. Where possible, summarize every argument or rebuttal with logical premises that inevitably lead to a conclusion. What comes before that summary should be proving each of those premises and how they inevitably lead to the conclusion.
- During rebuttals, take your opponent's argument in its best case. You do not want to leave ambiguity where the judge can think "well, I can imagine a scenario where this argument might be able to stand up to these refutations better, so perhaps this refutation does not stand up if you took the argument in good faith." Taking your opponent's argument in its best case is advice I got repeatedly (mostly because I was bad at following it lmao). Show how, even in the absolute best case scenario with the kindest possible assumptions, the argument is still incorrect and does not outweigh your arguments. Then go on to say that "if their argument fails in the best case scenario with the kindest possible assumptions, in a realistic scenario, the argument completely and utterly falls apart."
- Don't be too harsh. That last sentence in the previous bullet point is probably not how you should do it, but it's how I'd do it. Being too harsh just makes people view your entire argument with a negative light. It makes you out to be an asshole. Take people in good faith unless you are absolutely sure and capable of proving that their argument is in bad faith/laughably incorrect. This is also advice I should have followed more.
- Mechanisms. Basically, when you say one thing will lead to another thing, how? That is what a mechanism is. You have to provide that logical bridge or else it is impossible to prove that a cause-effect relationship will occur.
- Go through every debate as though it is of personal relevance to you. Treat every speech with the conviction and certainty you would treat it if you were falsely accused of murder and were speaking to the jury if there was no chance you could lose and now all you have to do is bring it home. To speak fluidly, with passion, and with full belief in your arguments will win debates more than anything. It's like fluff if it was intertwined throughout the entire speech. Speaking in a poetic, assured tone psychologically leads to people thinking you know what you're talking about and it sticks with them a lot more than a monotonous series of quotes and bullet points.
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@DebateArt.com
Slight issue with the site: Firefox considers the 'receivers' box for comments and forum posts to be a login box and will give me the option to auto-fill my login information with a drop-down menu just below the receivers box. This makes it impossible to click on any username auto-complete (like how if I typed in 'bone', I could click and select 'Bones' rather than having to type the username exactly).
It's a minor inconvenience, but I wanted to present it anyways.
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@Intelligence_06
You very well may be correct that it's pure chance. I would still guess that it's pure chance leading to a snowball effect because, even though the focus of the site is on debates, if leftists are less inclined to post on the forums because it's mostly rightists, it perpetuates the fact it's mostly rightists. But I'm mostly just guessing, honestly.
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@rbelivb
If I had to hypothesize, it's for the same reason furries are mostly left-leaning and weebs are mostly right-leaning: pure chance leading to a snowball effect.
If the site just so happens to have a majority of right-leaning users at its inception by chance alone, left-leaning users will be less inclined to join and more likely to be pushed out. Neither debate.org nor DART has anything that is intrinsically more attractive to any section of the political spectrum.
Echo chambers suck, but you can't blame people for wanting to be in like-minded groups.
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@Intelligence_06
I think a no-vote debate shouldn't result in any change in rating. A tied debate that has one or more votes could result in an appropriate change in rating.
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@secularmerlin
Capitalism is inherently self destructive if not regulated. Every company wants to lower wages while increasing costs, and when you make it impossible to afford to buy houses or diamond rings, instead of admitting a systematic flaw, they'll say Millennials/Gen Z 'killed' their business'.
Landlords are leeches. Neo-liberalism is delusion.
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@Reece101
It's time to play: person who isn't a scientist uses the simplest possible explanation so they can claim to have the answer to a question that has been studied for thousands of years in order to win internet points.
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@Intelligence_06
I'm unsure what PF stands for, but I am pretty experienced when it comes to IRL debate tournaments.
The flaw in your argument (I apologize if I'm missing anything) seems to be that you're assuming all humans are completely rational actors with perfect knowledge and complete information.
Moreover, the benefits and deficits of most resolutions can't be boiled down to "if the quantity of people who engage in it is greater than those who abstain from it, the resolution is more beneficial than not and therefore the on-balance nature of the resolution is satisfied".
Stakeholders are a very important element. If you can point to more groups the resolution helps than your opponent can point to people the resolution harms (assuming the benefits and deficits are of equal magnitude), then if the resolution boils down to if the benefits outweigh the deficits, you've won, but that doesn't necessarily always involve if one camp has more people than the other.
On the resolution of "fossil fuels production should cease immediately" (just something random, not an actual resolution I've debated), the number of people directly involved in the production of fossil fuels is a fraction of the population. It therefore then can't be said that because 99% of the world doesn't produce fossil fuels that the resolution should fall.
If you can prove that the aggregate benefits/harms outweigh the contrary, you've won not because the resolution is about a fight over the number of people who stand to gain or stand to lose, but because the relative goodness/badness of choices are weighed on which choice is better (and better is defined by leading to the best possible life for as many people as possible). Your argument then becomes not one of debating, but of the nature of making any choice at all.
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@Lemming
A dog is alive, yes, but dogs are put down frequently if they are violent. This is viewed as sad, sure, but few would say it's morally deplorable or anywhere near the same level as if you killed a child with anger issues. This is for all the same reasons as the cow example I gave earlier.
I'll admit to the word 'alive' being misleading, but I felt as though it was clear given the context. If this is not the case, I apologize. Yes, braindead humans are alive, but they do not possess person-hood anymore. They cannot be a human because they cannot 'be' to begin with. A psychopath and sociopath both still experience emotion and/or consciousness enough so that they possess person-hood and are entitled to the rights and moral considerations therein.
Pro-lifers may believe that a fetus is a human and not just the possibility of a human, I would just disagree with their definition. When it comes to why killing a human is bad (this is not a question, it obviously is bad, just regarding the reasons as to why that is actually the case), I can see not see any reason that applies to a fetus beyond a belief in the soul or the inherent value of life. The soul argument is purely pseudoscientific and the inherent value of life argument would mandate never eating a vegetable or eating an animal or stepping on grass (since fetuses are no more alive than those are). I suspect the reason that the latter is uncommon is because anyone who believes in it logically must learn to photosynthesize or starve to death.
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@Lemming
While I understand how you could have this interpretation, by my definition, those who are mentally challenged are definitely still alive. Mentally challenged people still experience consciousness and sentience and experience emotion and are deserving of the ability to continue the life that they have begun.
If a human could not experience consciousness or complex emotion for whatever reason and was certainly never going to ever again, then they are not alive. This is not applicable to mentally challenged people.
A pro-lifer sees the possibility of a human and wishes to protect that, yes, I'm simply expanding what is, all the same, a possible human life and showing the logical conclusion of believing we must protect possible lives. Forcing women to have babies for as long as biologically possible is self-evidently deplorable and tyrannical and it naturally follows from the logical principles that pro-lifers use to justify protecting an unborn child.
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@Greyparrot
The essence of being a human is consciousness, sentience, thought, creativity, curiosity, etc... The reason most people think killing cows for food is acceptable whereas the same for humans is deplorable is not just because they're another species, but because they possess no higher brain function. If a cow could speak and tell you about their dreams to make a better world, I know very few who would be comfortable with their slaughter. A cow may experience simple emotions and some modicum of consciousness, but for while they may be alive, there isn't much living that can be done with naught but a desire for food and warmth.
A fetus does not experience any of these things. A fetus is not even alive for a significant portion of pregnancy. A fetus does not experience personhood because they are as alive as a carrot in the ground: a collection of cells that forms something bigger that consumes energy and grows larger, but experiences nothing meaningful. They can not be a human because they cannot 'be' in the first place.
"But it is a human that is soon to be. By killing them, you are killing a life that would have happened." Well, perhaps we should force every woman over the age of 12 to carry a child for as long as is possible and carry all of them to term. After all, if you didn't do this, you'd be preventing lives that would have happened if you did. Thereby, refusing to force every woman to give birth from puberty to menopause is murder just as much as abortion is.
To call abortion murder or a fetus a person is just systematic misogyny disguised as concern for children from conservatives who will kick them to the curb the second they leave the womb.
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@secularmerlin
While I could do my usual spiel about how trans women are women, let me instead propose an alternative:
Depends. Which definition is the most useful given the context?
In 99.9% of contexts, including medical care and in social situations, to define someone based on their chromosomes is not the most useful definition. It is, in fact, occasionally very unhelpful (ex: times when a cis woman is born with all the sex characteristics of a woman but has male chromosomes).
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@DebateArt.com
Does this site have ads? I don't think so, since I don't see any even in an incognito tab without my adblocker.
This might be strange, but, if not, I would advocate putting some banner ads on the site. Just some minimally annoying stuff to help pay for the site's continued development. It's completely reasonable to expect from any website and I think the creator of a site like this deserves that income.
I'd suggest on the side of the debates and forum pages.
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@Username
Debating not only requires confidence, but I would argue that it inherently leads to confidence. When I joined debate club in 9th grade, I was VERY bad at public speaking. I have autism as well, so back then I was still trying to figure out how to act properly in social situations with people who were adults (sometimes it's hard to keep in mind that 9th graders are still literally children).
By 12th grade, me and my partner were going to provincial tournaments and scoring as the best team in Peel (a region near Toronto that encompasses several million people). I've had success in public speaking outside of debate through streaming and other events, and that public speaking is a direct result of learning the skill from debate. It wasn't that my public speaking skills and confidence led me to debate, it's that if I wanted to be good at debating, it necessarily required that I be capable of having those skills for at least a dozen minutes or so at a time.
This is why I think formal debating is such an important skill. It not only teaches logical reasoning, but it gives you the ability to put yourself out there with the confidence that, even if your opponent is smart as hell and vehemently disagrees with you, you can still come out on top. It gives you the ability to say that you both might be right, especially considering there's a good chance you're arguing for a position you don't agree with. Debaters then have a much greater ability to assure themselves that they can put themselves out there in many situations, whether that be business or their personal lives.
Those drawn to debate, like myself, are those who don't want to fit in and want to disagree for the sake of better understanding, reaching a compromise, or just being right. Those people will unavoidably lean towards having personalities and lifestyles that likewise don't fit in.
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@TheUnderdog
Conservatives have played the "just because it worked in other places doesn't mean it will work in America" card for hundreds of years longer than I've been alive. It also works in America 95% of the time anyways.
Society slides to the left as its GDP per capita and quality of life increases. The right has always been the ones pushing against progress (e.g. monarchists, anti-abolitionists, corporatists, the list goes on). Throughout history, major moves to the left like the abolition of slavery or the Magna Carta are considered milestones of progress that were incredibly good for society. If the right hypothetically got their way, I think we'd all think that'd suck.
Conservatives have fought against progress and fought for upholding current injustices for millennia. Even if I had no other reason to be a socialist, why should I expect it's any different now?
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@Wylted
I'm studying computer science right now. When I reach a certain level of proficiency, my plan is not to use a strategy, but to develop my own automated trading algorithm.
Using the 'balance of power' metric (strength of buying and selling pressures), upon the balance of power value exceeding or falling below a certain value, I can determine how the price is likely to fluctuate/buy when it begins to go up, sell when it begins to go down (with a small time grace period). Some calculations by hand have shown that this strategy is likely to work, but I'd obviously run the program as if it was buying or selling before I actually put in any money to see if it works.
I'd also plan to set aside enough money from each transaction to offset the carbon produced by said transaction (which is A LOT. Like, $10-15 worth) by donating it. I think cryptocurrency is stupid as shit, but I'm not one to pass up an opportunity to make money.
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@RationalMadman
I am not saying this to demean you but it is so obvious that barely any source has even mentioned or investigated it. If you encourage a person who loathes their male or female body to artificially mimic the opposite sex (not gender, sorry but it is sexual characteristics and hormones), they end up concluding that they were correct to have hated their original body.
Sure, but if you don't have any scientific evidence for this, then I have no reason to believe you.
I am not your psychiatrist or able to respond to something this sensitive without risking personally triggering and hurting you, emotionally. I will not engage in your personal struggle here because I cannot possibly avoid risk of accidentally bullying you as you will be very sensitive about it. I also am not sure how physical your transition is, it is the physical one my gripe is most ardent with.
I appreciate your concern, and I'm not saying that sarcastically. It's rare that people will tread lightly regarding sensitive topics, so I commend you for that! Nonetheless, you don't have to worry with me. It's not something that bothers me to discuss.
Very solid point. What happens is that when it is continually proven that enabling the dysphoria ends in significant rates of sadness, anxiety and other mentally distressing tendencies and/or disorders, the trans community deflects this as being due to transphobic bullying and attitudes, never to the trans person's therapy and recommendation to transition having been insufficiently treated and understood.
I apologize, but I don't particularly understand what this means. Again, I have to ask for a source since I've given you 10 of them that shows transgenderism does the opposite of what you're saying it does. There's nothing we have to deflect, the statistics of pre-transition and post-transition happiness speak for themselves.
Furthermore, often they suffer but not quite as bad as before as they often get simultaneously prescribed meds and therapies for their other mental conditions at the same time as the transition is recommended. This means the rates of dissatisfaction would be much worse if we had a control group that did not transition to compare the group that did to (with other treatments being either identical or very similar).
I don't necessarily think this is true, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say that if this is the case, then yes, that's a bad idea. There's a reason WPATH guidelines for transition surgery require that there are no other mental conditions that adequately explain one's gender dysphoria and are not properly treated before they undergo said surgery. I am skeptical of this being the case because it's the philosophy that every psychiatrist should follow, and I'd need to see evidence before I could seriously consider that this is a problem. This did not happen in my case, at least.
Regarding rates of dissatisfaction, well, again I need a source. I can't just take your word based off your own intuitions and beliefs in the face of all the evidence that shows people who start to transition, regardless of their circumstances, age, race, medical history, mental illnesses, etc... are happier and have better life outcomes after their transition than they did before their transition.
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@TheMorningsStar
And once again we see non-affirming therapies for gender dysphoria compared to conversion therapies for sexual orientation when that is one of the clearest false analogies in existence. Why does the pro-affirmation crowd insist on making this comparison when it is so clearly false? My guess is because it makes it easier to criticize non-affirming therapies when they have no actual evidence to support their BS views.
I find it hilarious you say this and then don't mention a single non-conversion therapy, non-affirming alternative. I find it even funnier that you think I'm implying all non-affirming treatments for gender dysphoria are conversion therapy even though I didn't say that, I just specified non-conversion therapy when challenging RMM for an alternative.
I'm just gonna link this here, since we have 'no actual evidence.' If you wanna talk about if a trans person can become the sex they identify as, that's a debate I'm happy to have as well! Claiming we have no evidence and I'm basing my views off of nothing is blatantly disingenuous and is more 'BS' than anything I can do.
You don't compare a body dysphoria to a sexual orientation, you compare it to other body dysphorias. When you do that... oh, wow, would you look at that. In other body dysphorias non-affirmation is the norm? Who would have guessed! So, when you actually compare it to something appropriate the opposite conclusion is reached? Really makes me feel more strongly that the reason it constantly gets compared to sexual orientation is done for dishonest reasons.
Let's take anorexia as an example: during recovery, an anorexic is not affirmed in their desire to starve themselves to death to be skinny, but that does not necessarily mean that they are wrong in their desire to lose weight; the problem is that they are taking it to an extreme. Often times a part of anorexia recovery is shifting the perspective from losing weight to being healthier and changing their approach from an extreme that will never lead to happiness or health to a moderate approach to exercise and health that will improve quality of life.
All other body dysphoria's are treated in a certain way? Cool. That doesn't matter if it doesn't work for gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is evidently different in the sense that anorexia and body dysmorphia stem from entirely different feelings: the desire for control, the feeling that something about oneself is bad, and the belief that one is not physically attractive. Gender dysphoria has nothing to do with thinking one's body is unattractive and everything to do with feeling their physical characteristics do not represent their identity. Trans people don't believe that being a man or a woman is bad, they just don't personally want to be one.
Affirming body-dysmorphia or anorexia leads to people dying and/or hating themselves. There's no positive outcome because they will always want to lose more weight or look differently. Both of these disorders have nothing to do with one's identity. Affirming gender dysphoria through transgenderism does lead to positive outcomes and is an amazing way of preventing people from committing suicide and an even better way of making people love their bodies as is proved in the sources of the link I proved above.
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@RationalMadman
Not at all. It enables the hellish dysphoria's hold on them with an iron vice grip. They now learn they were right to hate their body and sex.
Source? I'll give you a dozen that shows the contrary.
Extrapolate all.functionally equal treatments given to people with similar bodily dysphoric mental disorders; the anorexic, the bulimic, the 'I am so ugly I should cut myself and die' depressed/BPD'.Then, mixing instead meds and therapies for them, tweak it towards helping the dysphoric person learn the real difference between sex and gender and do not let them fall victim to conflating the two. They should love their sex, be as a feminine a male and as masculine a female as they naturally are.
When you can show me the peer-reviewed, scientifically sound studies that shows your method outweighs the current methods of treating gender dysphoria, then we can have a conversation.
You seem to like to draw this comparison between anorexics, suicidal people, and transgender people. I was both anorexic and suicidal once, both before my transition began. The difference here is that anorexia and suicide both not only have the potential to kill you, but the logical conclusion of both does not lead to happiness. On the contrary, transitioning has an incredibly low rate of regret, greatly increases quality of life, and significantly reduces the chance that a trans person will commit suicide or suffer from depression.
1. "Patients Report High Satisfaction with Sex-Reassignment Surgery" https://www.issm.info/news/sex-health-headlines/patients-report-high-satisfaction-with-sex-reassignment-surgery/
2. "Trends in suicide death risk in transgender people: results from the Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria study (1972–2017)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317390/
3. "Psychosocial Adjustment to Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Qualitative Examination and Personal Experiences of Six Transsexual Persons in Croatia" https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/960745/
4. "Long-Term Follow-Up of Adults with Gender Identity Disorder" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-014-0453-5
5. "Long-term Assessment of the Physical, Mental, and Sexual Health among Transsexual Women" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23553588_Long-term_Assessment_of_the_Physical_Mental_and_Sexual_Health_among_Transsexual_Women
6. "What does the scholarly research say about the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being? " https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/
7. "Fact check: study shows transition makes trans people suicidal" https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-check-study-shows-transition-makes-trans-people-suicidal_n_15483.htm
8. "Mental health and gender dysphoria: A review of the literature" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26835611/
9. "Sex-reassignment surgery yields long-term mental health benefits, study finds" https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/sex-reassignment-surgery-yields-long-term-mental-health-benefits-study-n1079911
10. "Transgender surgery can improve life for most, study confirms" https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321258
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@RationalMadman
Popular consensus is irrelevant to me.
You can oppose transgenderism's approach to gender dysphoria without being transphobic. To be transphobic is to treat trans people worse than cis people. As long as you put in the bare minimum effort to affirm a person's gender (because, even if you consider it a charade [I don't, but I digress], it's undeniable that it spares trans people from the hell that gender dysphoria can be at least regarding their interaction with you).
I don't see why you oppose that view. Even if we accept that trans people can't actually change from their sex assigned at birth, which I don't accept, who cares? I'd challenge you to give a better treatment for gender dysphoria that doesn't amount to conversion therapy, since we already know that doesn't work.
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@TheUnderdog
You're operating under the assumption that, because Obama wanted to push America to the left, he would also want to push France to the left. This assumption is unfounded; if Obama believed Obamacare was the ideal system of healthcare, he would change the current system of healthcare from complete privatization (which means he pushes it to the left) or from universal health care (which means he pushes it to the right).
Obama's stated beliefs and the policy changes he implemented, if implemented in France, would represent pushing France to the right side of the political spectrum because they are currently further left than Obama's beliefs.
Yes, pushing the top marginal tax rate from 3% to 5% represents pushing the tax rate to the left of the political spectrum, but if that same politician believes it should be 5% and it's currently 10%, by lowering it to 5%, he pushes the tax rate to the right of the political spectrum. That's all that I'm saying. Just because a politician wants the tax rate to go from 3% to 5% doesn't intrinsically mean they also want it to go from 10% to 20%.
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@TheUnderdog
All of the major things that occurred under his administration that I can recall off the top of my head already exist in Europe, some a few steps further (like how instead of Obamacare, France just has free universal healthcare). So if you take the current state of affairs in France, consider anyone upholding the status quo to be a centrist, and consider how Obama's policies and administration are a regression/a conservative perspective relative to what already exists, he'd be on the right.
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@TheUnderdog
Think Obama. He'd be centre-right in France, I think. I'm not that knowledgeable about him (I was literally 12 years old when he left office), but from what I know of his policy, it seems like a fitting comparison.
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@TheUnderdog
These things are only far-left to an American audience, and even then, not really. Most of these positions are supported by everyone except conservatives (gun control, opposing the death penalty), and some supported by everyone except the far-right (medicare for all) in the EU and the commonwealth.
Even if we accept Le Pen supports Putin, as an actual member of the left, I can assure you that that position is one of the furthest things from the left I can imagine.
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@n8nrgmi
Trans men can have children because they have reproductive organs and this fact does not negate the fact they are men.
If you don't think trans men are men, that's a different debate entirely, but it's one I'd be happy to have.
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@DebateArt.com
I think we need to limit the amount of new debates a brand new account can accept/create. It happens far too often where a new account will accept/create ten debates and then wastes the time of the one who created or accepted the debate by never logging onto the platform again after a week.
Maybe something like until you have actually completed a full debate or your account has existed for two weeks or even a month you can only have 3 debates that are active/waiting for a challenger?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Is that really true? There is only one way to be violent through the medium of the internet and that is to send agents to use violence in real life. The only way to do that is to doxx.If you preclude doxing violence does not seem to be possible.
While I understand what you're saying and you're right, it's basically just adding one more step into the process. It goes from harassment --> violence to harassment --> doxxing/acquiring information --> violence.
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@ILikePie5
Again that goes back to the point of, “I think you’re going to harass someone who does care.” How can you or the mods predict the future?
"The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour." James Kelley, Ph. D.
Wylted has been contributing positively for a decade. Whether that be playing mafia or debating.
Wylted called me slurs a half a dozen times and most of his forum posts were him posting conspiracy theories that were either antivax or antisemitic. Calling his contribution 'positive' is either delusion or allegiance to his insanity.
Again, you cannot predict the future and it is grounds for abuse of power. If a cop thought I was going to abuse my wife and he arrested me preemptively, that’s wrong.
You don't need to predict the future to say that someone being left to fester is probably something that we might want to avoid just to be safe. It's ground for abuse of power, sure, but that's true of every power. That's why we have ban appeals and more than one mod.
That is false. Are hecklers bad people. Are the people who followed Sinema into the bathroom bad people? No. They are fighting for their beliefs. Even the mods admitted there was no malice here.
Hecklers are not harassers. A group of multiple people following a woman with no means to defend herself even as she asks them to leave her alone to argue with someone just trying to go to the bathroom is a bad thing to do. It still doesn't make them harassers. Repeatedly doing this to a worse degree constitutes harassment. If 'fighting for your beliefs' requires harassment, your beliefs suck.
The fact of preemptively censoring someone brings the site to a dictatorship. How would you feel if the mods thought you were harassing me right now and banned you.
This isn't preemptive censorship. We're talking about censorship of harassment that has already occurred. If the mods thought I was harassing you, that'd be bad, because I wasn't. Recall I said it was a hypothetical where we had 100% certainty. Moreover, I'd probably submit a ban appeal. If it didn't go through, well, that sucks, I guess.
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@ILikePie5
If we could, in a hypothetical scenario, say with 100% certainty that someone was harassing another person, but the person being harassed did not care about it for whatever reason, it's still justified to ban them for harassment. Here's why:
- Somebody willing to commit harassment against someone who doesn't care is capable of harassing someone who does care.
- The kind of person who harasses others is almost without doubt a toxic individual who can only contribute to the site's general culture in negative ways.
- A harasser given the opportunity to fester is a time-bomb of violence waiting to happen if they are not cut off from interacting with their victim.
- If we know that somebody, beyond a reasonable doubt, has harassed other people, they're a bad person and they deserve to be deplatformed. People like that deserve to be treated worse than other people because of their conduct.
- It is not the responsibility of the site and its users to bear the burden of a harasser's conduct and to try and 'help' them in any way. Harassment to the point of being a ban-worthy offence is self-evidently morally incorrect and that fact shouldn't need to be taught.
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@Bones
To copy-paste what I said to thett3:
'Woman' is a gender identity.Any conditions for womanhood beyond identifying as a woman are, at best, pointless technicalities.
The guy in the video arguing that trans activists can't even define the terms they use is complaining that trans activists aren't going to willingly commit a logical fallacy by trying to assign a set of characteristics that, if one has it, they are a woman, and if they don't, they aren't. For all the posts addressing thett3 I've made in this thread, I've shown why there is no characteristic(s) that determine that. Could I give you a general overview of what typically is seen in those who identify as *insert entirely subjective noun/identifier here*? Sure. Doesn't mean everyone who identifies as that has all of those characteristics. Moreover, the only concrete definition of that identity is that it's someone who identifies with that identity and then you can say those with this identity (typically but not necessarily) have/are this this and this.
With stuff like womanhood, the only condition is identifying as a woman. Having a female sex is more complicated, but that's not equivalent to being a woman and, again, it's different for everyone. Read through the posts addressing thett3 I made as to why I believe trans women are females in terms of sex.
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@thett3
This is like saying we can't say humans have ten fingers because a small minority are born with eleven fingers or because others lost one in an accident. Very few people are anatomically perfect, but we know what human beings look like.
Well, you see, the difference here is that 1 in 50 people are born with chromosomes that don't align with their sex[1]. Many people will have their reproductive organs or breasts removed, or will have their estrogen suppressed, or will have a lot of body hair, etc... If being born with 11 fingers had half the prevalence of cis people who lack multiple of the attributes one would expect of their assigned sex, then yeah, you wouldn't be able to say that. Using this same example, a person is a human being regardless of how many fingers they have because their fingers are irrelevant to their humanity.
With respect to those sex/secondary sex characteristics the relevant consideration is that most cis women have *all* of them while trans women have none, and have to brute force their bodies with chemicals or surgeries into coming anywhere close. That right there should tell you something.
"Have to brute force their bodies with chemicals or surgeries to coming anywhere close." I don't know how to tell you that a trans woman taking estrogen (after having bottom surgery) will get exactly what a cis woman gets from estrogen. This isn't a 'close' situation, it's an identical one in all ways that matter. You say brute force as though it's an exercise in futility when it really isn't.
"Trans women have none" is just wrong. Trans women often share the following with cis women:
- Breasts
- Muscle distribution patterns
- Fat distribution patterns
- Neurological patterns
- Similar hormone levels
- Recurrent periods (excluding the blood and some of the cramps, trans women experience the emotional effects and some of the physical effects of a period the same way a cis woman does due to cyclical hormonal levels[2])
- High pitched voices
- Voices that are spoken in head resonance
- I could go on for a while, but I'm writing this before I go to bed, so I'll leave it at here for now.
Unless you think these things just don't matter for some reason, then I have literally no idea where you got the idea that trans women have 'none' of the characteristics typically assigned to the female sex.
If your statement was factual the highlighted bit is what it would mean. But the statement is incorrect. We can guess with a high degree of accuracy a LOT about a person simply by knowing if they are a woman or a man--ESPECIALLY on the things trans people are concerned about, like breasts or facial hair because we are a sexually dimorphic species. There is a distribution of values on many thousands of characteristics that differ between male and female individuals. I'm sure there is a man out there in the world who is otherwise anatomically typical who for some reason has breast tissue that produces milk but it would be the height of silliness to say that because like 0.0001% of men have something that like 99.99% of women do "man" and "woman" aren't meaningful concepts other than how we choose to define them. If an alien came down and studied humanity they would come up with the same division of sex we did, and would put virtually every individual in the exact same category that we do.
The two examples you give (breasts and facial hair) are literally two of the main things that hormone replacement therapy change and cause trans women to become identical to cis women in this regard. Your entire argument also completely ignores the existence of intersex people in its entirety in spite of the fact they represent between 0.1-2% of the population.
"With a high degree of accuracy" okay, sure, I'm not disagreeing with you there. You can say that a female PROBABLY has all the sex characteristics that most females have and you'll usually be right, but none of the individual characteristics are the switch that determines if someone is a woman or not a woman; it's a gradient from male to female and trans women can land exactly as far towards the female side of the gradient as a cis woman could.
If you want to argue that chromosomes are what determine if someone is a woman or not, then no, aliens wouldn't come up with the same concepts of sex we did, because there'd be half a dozen sexes if not more (people don't only have XX and XY chromosomes). Chromosomes are irrelevant and, in the example I gave with a woman living as a woman for 50 years only to discover she has male chromosomes, it's ridiculous to say she's not a woman on any grounds other than a meaningless technicality.
No, gender affirming care is the equivalent of conversion therapy... The fact that gay men report molestation victimization rates as children around 10x that of straight men pretty much shuts the door on any argument that the environment can't impact ones sexuality, at the very least sexual trauma or first experiences can in many cases. But I would definitely agree that by the time almost anyone is able to express their sexuality it's immutable and can't be meaningfully changed, so conversion therapy is just damaging.
I mean the incredibly high satisfaction rates with gender-affirming care pretty much shuts the door that it's at all comparable to conversion therapy (too lazy to type it all again. Check comment #52 https://www.debateart.com/debates/3104-allowing-transgendered-athletes-mtf-to-compete-in-athletics-against-biological-females-is-unfair and https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/6621-questions-for-transgenders-trans-ideologists?page=1&post_number=19).
Gender is a totally different beast. Sex is immutable from the day you're born.
I would disagree for all of the characteristics a trans women achieves through transition.
Universally. The trans ideology argues that gender and sex are separate but like... My big issue with the trans ideology is that it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. Look closely at what you wrote..."their outward presentation not matching their identity." What's this "outward presentation" based on? The sex characteristics of cis women or men...which come purely from biology.
Yeah. The outward presentation based on sex characteristics (usually. Some don't choose to transition at all even if they do identify as trans). Like all of the sex characteristics a trans person can achieve through hormones and surgeries leading to incredibly high transition satisfaction rates.
So the identity is fundamentally rooted in an immutable biology that is opposite to what the person has, but if they claim the identity they have just as strong a claim to it as anyone else.
While I still don't believe it's 'immutable', yeah. They do. Sex is irrelevant to gender identity. Even if you don't believe trans women can become women in terms of sex, that's not really what I've been talking about.
Instead of futile attempts to change the sex of confused children and teenagers we should focus on providing them with a positive self identity based in reality as it is, and not how they wish it was. If an adult still wants to take opposite sex hormones or do an operation...well I have my thoughts on if that's ethical. I don't think surgically removing healthy organs is medically ethical--but at least it's between consenting adults.
Most adults can't even access transition surgery. It took me 3 years to get access to testosterone blockers. Trans people, especially in the US, will have to visit half a dozen doctors, psychiatrists, experts on transgender care, etc... and spend thousands of dollars to have access to trans care. People who come out as trans once they're older than 14 years old overwhelmingly continue to identify as trans into adulthood, but even still, I know tons of trans people and not a single one has gotten any form of gender affirming care before 16 years of age (except for one guy who got puberty blockers when they were 15, but that's not even gender affirming care).
Trans people are happy when they transition and are not particularly happy when they don't. Even if they can never be the opposite sex, if giving off the illusion of being the opposite sex and having the same appearance as the opposite sex makes a consenting adult happy, I don't see any problem.
What do you make of the huge increase of teens identifying as trans?
We stopped murdering trans people, mostly. And also started giving would-be trans people the knowledge of what it means to be trans and that other people are like them.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
It's not possible to debate that, it's a matter of pure definitions. You either agree on the definition or you don't, if you don't there is no point using the word to communicate.
That's true of basically everything? If their definition of 'sex' and my definition differ, it's completely possible to debate which is the more useful or reasonable definition.
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@thett3
I do not agree with the notion that there are biological features inherently attached to the gender you were assigned at birth that permanently designate you as one sex or the other--a view backed up by experts. If that's something you want to do a debate on, I'd be happy to.
If someone with XY chromosomes, a beard, a penis, adams apple, a deep voice, who dresses like a man and engages in stereotypical male behavior and hobbies can self identify as a woman (and that person can under your ideology) and we MUST respect it than the entire concept has no meaning. It doesn't convey any information. So I don't see why it would be that important.
Even if you don't think it's important ( I think it is, but that's not important at the moment), my argument is that a trans woman identifying as a woman can only give you as much information as a cis woman identifying as a woman. There's a lot of biological attributes that women typically have, such as:
- Breasts
- Specific muscle/fat distribution patterns
- Reproductive organs
- Higher pitched, head resonating voices
- XX chromosomes
A woman can get her breasts removed and still be a woman. A woman can take estrogen-blockers to treat an estrogen-dependent cancer, thereby losing the muscle/fat distribution typically seen in females, and still be a woman. A woman can have her uterus and/or ovaries removed and still be a woman. A woman can have a deep voice and still be a woman. A woman can have every aspect typical of female biology and live fifty years while identifying as, being perceived as, living as, and, in all meaningful ways, being a woman only to discover at age 50 that she has XY chromosomes. In every way that means anything, she's still a woman.
Even though all these attributes are typical, a cis woman who doesn't have one or more of these is still a woman. The only concrete thing we can take from someone identifying as a woman, then, is that their gender identity is female. This is true of both cis females and trans females; if the only thing you know about someone is their gender, you can't derive anything from that info with certainty other than their gender identity. If, to you, that means that gender identity is meaningless rather than genders being meaningful in spite of the fact they have varying expressions, then that's fine. That's not what I'm speaking about.
You can try to attach definitions to subjective labels if you want. I'm choosing not to because those labels mean different things for different people. Do they have a set of common attributes and common meanings? Sure. That doesn't mean everyone using that label has/has to have all those attributes nor that their use of the label means/has to mean all those things.
Identity is indeed innate, which is why it's something most people do not question at all. A person being so fixated on their identity being "wrong" isn't a mark of good health. That's why I get so enraged at "gender affirming care" for confused young people who need to be brought into a positive self identity instead of having damage done to them chasing the impossible.
A trans person isn't fixated on their identity being wrong, a trans person is fixated on their outward presentation not matching their identity. What you're describing is conversion therapy, and we learned fifty years ago that that doesn't work.
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@thett3
You seem to place rather more emphasis on it than that.
I apologize, but I don't quite see what you mean when you say this or if it's relevant to what you're saying. I don't mean that sarcastically, just genuinely unsure.
Where does gender identity come from?
No different from every other aspect of one's identity, I can't answer 'where' it comes from more specifically than just the brain. Nobody can. Gender might not mean the same thing or look the same for every person, but it is innate.
'Woman' is both used to refer to a sex and a gender identity. It is my opinion that, in every meaningful way, a trans woman can reach the point their sex is indistinguishable from a cis woman; I believe I could make a convincing argument for that belief. I believe I could make a convincing argument to prove that sex is irrelevant in terms of if any given trans woman is a woman or not because it's irrelevant for any given cis woman. I believe I could make a convincing argument to prove that gender is an aspect of one's identity and is innate.
For all of the reasons in the paragraph above, I believe it's just a label one uses to identify themselves and cannot reasonably be said to be more. Where identity comes from or why the identity is innate? Can't say.
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@thett3
'Woman' is a gender identity.
Any conditions for womanhood beyond identifying as a woman are, at best, pointless technicalities.
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@3RU7AL
I would fully agree with all you said in your reply to my post.
Retweet
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@TheUnderdog
Okay? I am male-presenting and that neither changes my identity nor bothers me.Also, I've seen some of your Twitch. You don't look nor sound like a woman.
I'm happy to debate you on this in a debate.In order to make this claim, you need a definition for the word, "women" that doesn't contain the word, "women" in it. Currently, the definition is, "Someone with XX chromosomes".
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@AceDebatesStuff
Trans women are women.
Free-market capitalism is inherently flawed.
Piracy is morally acceptable in some instances..
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@RationalMadman
I'm glad to hear that voting has improved somewhat since I left. I suppose that, on a site as small as this one, there are some elements that can only be as good as the community makes them.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Debaters more than anybody wish to feel that they're right and their opponents are wrong. Even with the competitive spirit, however, I have found it to still be a very great avenue for improving ones logical/speaking skills and fostering objective discussion.
To win or lose a debate doesn't matter, it matters if you learned something or taught someone something, but unfortunately there's no metric for learning--only for winning and losing.
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@Lemming
I suppose I do sometimes expect too much of myself when it comes to turning the other cheek. Nonetheless, even if one could not describe my actions/feelings as immature, I would personally describe them as not characterizing the maturity I strive to embody.
I've missed you, Lemming. It's good to see your style of response once again.
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@thett3
I'd be willing to take pro on this debate if I saw the debate rules. The definitions are way too important to accept a debate without knowing exactly what they are.
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@thett3
Biden: C+
Trump: F-
Obama: B+
Bush: F-
Clinton: C?
Bush: D
Reagan: F
Carter: ???
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Howdy, homies!
It's been about half a year since I logged onto this site. I apologize to all the opponents whom I forfeit my debates with; it was not respectful of my opponent's time/effort and I accepted the debate upon the assumption that I would see the debate through barring any extenuating circumstances. Nonetheless, I hope you all have been doing well since I've last talked to you all.
I left for a few reasons, but they all contributed to a simple fact: I was mad.
- At the time I made the decision to leave, half of my debates were accepted by a brand new account that either immediately forfeit or presented an argument that was so self-evidently fallacious that it was insulting. I put a lot of effort into the debates I did, and to see that effort being awarded a metaphorical slap in the face made me not want to participate at all.
- I had 3-5 debates at the time I decided to leave that were in or had finished the voting process. 3 of those 5 were forfeits where I won by default. 1 of the 5 (the one regarding social media checks) had a single vote against me that seemed to me, at least at the time, like it made absolutely no sense. The last of the 5 (the one regarding FPTP voting) had 2 votes and was tied, and one of the votes also seemed to make no sense at all, seemed to flagrantly ignore all rebuttals I made, and seemed to just ignore the entire point of the resolution. I won't name names, and I'm also not trying to say they're an idiot or they were wrong or anything, I'm just saying that nobody likes to lose for what they perceive to be an unfair reason. This site does not have enough voters for the law of big numbers to apply, so a single voter making an unreasonable vote can sway a debate's vote, especially in situations where said voter is the only voter.
- I've had some very good debates on this site, but I have had some questionable ones as well. My first debate involved Wylted literally using slurs during his intro and then forfeiting after I spent a week crafting my first speech. Another one of my debates involved Fruit_Inspector presenting a single case where my arguments did not apply and trying to claim victory in a debate with a resolution I specifically said was a general resolution. In another one of my debates, and I won't specify which because I think they were being fully reasonable and I was just babyraging, constantly claimed I had some logical flaw in my case that I either did not understand or simply felt didn't exist.
It was for all of these things combined that I decided the time I was investing in DART was not being respected. And I do want to emphasize that I was being a baby and I got mad that I wasn't winning or was not being given the treatment I believed I deserved. Even if I 'should' have won, it doesn't matter. I debate for fun, and it's not like the results count for anything other than a d*ck measuring contest. Even if the time I was putting into debates was being rewarded with forfeits or non-sequitur arguments, I should have just used it as practice and been proud of making a good case regardless of my opponents. That is the philosophy I will be following moving forward.
I might not be as active anymore since I'm very busy, but I'm glad to be back, and I hope you guys are glad I'm back as well! I hope this site continues to thrive well into the future, because, without it, I wouldn't be able to have fun, well-researched debates online as I have on here.
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@DeadFire27
If you'd genuinely like to play daily, that can be arranged. Perhaps 30 minutes would be better, then, but if you want to do rapid games, that's fine.
Just let me know when (in EST), I'm free pretty much any time of the day since I use a laptop at school..
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@DeadFire27
Oh, so you were who sent me that friend request then, I see.
I'm about 1400 MMR on chess.com, but I might(?) be at about the equivalent of 1550 MMR on lichess. I usually play 10 minutes.
I'm about 1400 MMR on chess.com, but I might(?) be at about the equivalent of 1550 MMR on lichess. I usually play 10 minutes.
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@Mesmer
Just like I predicted, you turned an isolated incident of a White police officer using too much force against a Black person into 'systemic racism'.
The killer of George Floyd said it was apart of his training. No officer at the scene stopped him for an insane amount of time despite his pleas.
Philando Castile went out of his way to declare his firearm. It was later said that police are trained to liberally use their firearms.
Jacob Blake was shot 7 times despite not being violent (according to bystanders), not having a weapon, and not doing anything wrong in spite of the fact police could've very easily used a taser and had done so minutes earlier.
When Breonna Taylor was murdered, a policeman blindly shot an assault rifle into the house.
Eric Garner, Elijah McClain, do you want me to keep going? Even if I agree the number is only 48, which you say as though it is anything less than an annual killing spree, which it isn't, I still think that maybe the police could use their non-lethal tools more effectively with regards to unarmed black people when they have tasers capable of completely immobilizing a person and are literally trained for months to do this.
I could present to you a thousand instances and you'd still tell me it was 'isolated'. The part that makes it systemic is that this happens to thousands of black Americans and an incredibly small number of their killers face persecution, with the exception of George Floyd, who's murder caused nationwide protests and riots for months and we still weren't even certain Derek Chauvin would face jail time. The very system that is supposed to hold them accountable for the actions that disproportionately impact black people to an egregious degree chose not to do so. Not turning on body cams, planting drugs or weapons on people, using excessive force, the list of things that police officers routinely get away with that we make no attempt to persecute them for or enforce rules to prevent these actions goes on, and on, and on.
Having a taser doesn't count as 'unarmed', but to be honest, I don't think murder should be the first option when there's several non-lethal places to shoot first and it's literally part of their job to be good at shooting things. I tell you that perceiving someone as 'violent' doesn't warrant ending their life, and you give me an example of someone shooting an officer with a taser. Even if it made sense, you know damn well that's not what I'm talking about.
And what of the parts that don't result in death? The fact black Americans are more likely to be pulled over, more likely to be harassed, less likely to be listened to by police, more likely to be perceived as violent? Black Americans are put through egregious, inhumane, and horrendous situations for the very crime of their race as the result of failing to keep in check the power of racist police officers. That's what systemic racism is.
Congratulations, America! You ended slavery (ignoring how the British did it first) 'worldwide', and yet somehow that manages to be a) completely irrelevant to what I'm saying and b) even more irrelevant because it took you until the 1960s-1970s to acknowledge that black people deserve the same rights. Well done for refuting the thing I said about slavery (which I definitely said and if you ctrl+f you will definitely find me mentioning slavery [sarcasm])
There are more options than 1. Let the (potential) criminal run away or 2: Murder them. Police are paid $60,000+ a year to understand that, and yet it seems they choose to forget much more often with blacks than with whites (28% of police killings in 2020 happened to blacks despite the fact they're 13% of the population).
Try harder to justify your loyalty to the police state next time.
Try harder to justify your loyalty to the police state next time.
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