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@zedvictor4
Though more to the point, assuming the influence and authority to limit another user's participation is a tad egotistical.
All I did was ask a question about if there’s any appetite to address a user who everyone agrees is a net negative to the site and the answer appears to be no. If you think that’s egotistical just say so instead of being passive aggressive
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Three polls came out today:
CNN Republicans +4
NPR Republicans +3
Quinnipiac Republicans +4
I’m seeing a trend here. All of these polls overestimated democrats in 2020 but we can’t be 100% sure that will happen again. Quinnipiac in particular changed their methodology and now gets more realistic results
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@RationalMadman
Obamacare was actually a pretty reasonable reform to make the American system of employer sponsored private healthcare work a little bit better. The problem is it’s a terrible system. Absolutely nobody designing a society from scratch would do it that way. I’m convinced universal healthcare in the USA would be an unmitigated disaster though so I don’t know what should happen
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@ILikePie5
Dark Horse race is Washington Senate. I think it’s a Democratic Hold but a very close victory by Patty Murray. Somewhere around 3% would be my guess
I think that one is really overhyped tbh, it could be close but I think R’s have a pretty firm ceiling in that state around 46-47% that won’t be enough to win
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Since I was duly elected Vice President, this makes me President
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@Greyparrot
I'm not sure democracy can survive the kind of election meddling that installs people in opposition primaries based on how much money is spent solely to thwart the choices of the voters. Some serious election finance reform has to happen before everyone sees through the charade the Oligarchs operate under.
Ultimately the primary voters chose to install those candidates, meddling or no. But it’s still a pretty nasty tactic especially when at the same time you are saying these people who you are helping win are an existential threat
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@ILikePie5
After that atrocious debate performance by Fetterman, I think Oz wins by 3+. Oz also does better in Allegheny and Philly suburbs because he’s positioned himself as a moderate like Toomey
It’s hard to see Fetterman winning after that debate. Normally normies don’t care about debates at that level but it was such an atrocious performance that I know apolitical people have heard about it. It made me feel sad to see. He simply cannot be an effective senator, if the situation were reversed I don’t know if could pull the lever for someone like that despite being a political hack
Nevada is a definite GOP flop. I did a class project on this race and if Hispanics defect by a 5% margin to Laxalt compared to 2020 Trump v Biden, Laxalt eeks it out. Combine that with independent leads for Laxalt, lower African American turnout, and a greater percentage of white turnout, Laxalt wins by 2+.
I meant to say flip lol. Nevada looks solid. It’s been fools gold for the GOP in the past but I think it gets locked down this year
I agree. I think it’ll be within 1 point, but with the Libertarian now gone, it’s gonna get a lot closer. Kelly is also spending like 7-8 times more than Masters which is usually a warning sign for incumbents. Kelly also is winning by far less in the polls compared to 2020 cycle against Sinema.
Kelly is leading by about 2% and the polls were off by about 2% in Arizona in 2020. Obviously we can’t just assume the exact same polling error is going to happen again but I think the environment carries Masters over the line. I have a theory, and we should be able to puzzle out if it’s true soon, that polls are undersampling Republican leaning college educated whites bc progressive educated whites are so enthusiastic about talking about their politics that they swamp that demographic a little bit when pollsters call. If true that will matter a lot in a state like Arizona. same thing with Texas, all the polls are showing Abbott leading but 6-8% but I would genuinely be extremely surprised if he won by less than double digits
Surprisingly, I think Walker wins without a runoff. There are a couple of reasons. African American turnout has been trending down as a percentage of early vote. Kemp at the top of the ticket will have coattails for Walker. Currently there are a lot of undecideds in the race that will heavily break for Walker given in the national environment.
Yeah the black % of the vote drops every day and of course Election Day will be much whiter/conservative/magaish. If Georgia didn’t have their dumb special snowflake runoff thing I would feel better about him but I think a lot of Kemp voters will be willing to hold their nose for him to flip the senate, but if the senate has already been flipped they will probably stay home. But it’s certainly possible he will squeak by with 50.2% or something.
I think it’ll be within 1 point. Hassan is unpopular and Schumer actually spent money here to boost Bolduc in the primaries. Latest poll has Bolduc up by 1 point. Especially with undecideds and Sununu at the top, I think it’ll be a nail biter like 2016.
Maybe. I know he was up in that poll and it was a good poll in 2020. But it’s just hard to see happening. I’ll say this, I think there’s almost no circumstance where this is seat 51 for Republicans, if they win here it’s either #53 or #54
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Posted in another thread but an extreme example of how much this can change a population over a not that long period of time:
An example of what Yassine is talking about:
My wife’s grandfather and mine were born in the exact same year almost a century ago. Hers was a devoutly religious Catholic who had ten children and mine was your average pretty secular, urban dweller. Hers currently has over 60 living descendants, over 10x as many as mine.
Their parents were born about the same time in the 1890s. My grandfather was an only child so my great grandparents have the same number of descendants as he does. My wife’s great grandparents had five kids who all had five or more children each except for one who became a priest. Idk how many total descendants they have but it’s probably close to 150-200. Of course not all of them are Catholic or religious at all or conservative but that sort of trend still represents a massive genetic change
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An example of what Yassine is talking about:
My wife’s grandfather and mine were born in the exact same year almost a century ago. Hers was a devoutly religious Catholic who had ten children and mine was your average pretty secular, urban dweller. Hers currently has over 60 living descendants, over 10x as many as mine.
Their parents were born about the same time in the 1890s. My grandfather was an only child so my great grandparents have the same number of descendants as he does. My wife’s great grandparents had five kids who all had five or more children each except for one who became a priest. Idk how many total descendants they have but it’s probably close to 150-200. Of course not all of them are Catholic or religious at all or conservative but that sort of trend still represents a massive genetic change
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People are mad at Yassine about this thread but he isn’t wrong at all. No matter what you think of them as ideas, the worldviews and lifestyles held and practiced by most people in the west are evolutionarily not competitive. If you hate religious conservatism and “backwards” social ideas getting outbred by those people like 2-1 should be a serious concern
The only area where he’s wrong is that this revolution is probably going to come to the Islamic world as well but I really don’t know enough about it to say.
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@Avery
I don’t think it was planned but the evidence for a lab leak seems to be getting stronger as time goes on. It was always plausible on its face. A novel virus shows up in the exact same city as a lab which studies and engineers that exact type of virus. It’s certainly possible for a coincidence like that to occur but just looking at it from a high level it seems much more likely that the virus would’ve emerged from one of the other tens/hundreds of thousands of wet markets in China rather than the one that happened to be right next to the lab.
The behavior of everyone involved has been extremely suspicious. It’s beyond obvious that the scientific establishment doesn’t want to look too closely at what happened because they fear the potential backlash which is very disappointing in a field that’s supposed to prioritize truth above all things. The fact that people were censored for suggesting it came from a lab is very bleak
Side note: it was always very funny to me that “no no no the virus didn’t come from a lab it came from the disgusting food those filthy Chinese eat” was the establishment approved “woke” explanation lol
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Yeah the democrats spent tens of millions of dollars supporting “election denier” Republicans in primaries. I don’t want to hear about “threats to democracy” from them ever again
This type of stuff shows clearly what the actual beliefs of the people running the Democratic Party are. They don’t view “election denying” magatards as a threat and expend serious resources to prop them up
On the other hand, I’m honest about my beliefs. I genuinely do view the hard left—the people who are woke/anti-white, want to make toddlers wear masks, are in favor of releasing thousands of felons from prison and de-facto legalize petty crime like in San Francisco, want to give mentally ill teenagers hormone blockers etc—I think of these people as a serious if not existential threat who have done and will continue to do serious damage in the future. I would absolutely support a generic establishment democrat over a true believer any day of the week. The leaders of the Democratic Party when faced with this choice in reverse chose to prop up true believers from the worst segments of the GOP
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frankly the user in question violates the rules anyway since he constantly insults people. I found like two dozen posts of him calling people idiots, or morons, or dummy’s, or some other grade school insult just in the past week. I am much less concerned with insults than spam though. I don’t want him banned from the site I just don’t want to have to wade through his Facebook feed to read anything about politics
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@Greyparrot
I wonder just how much money the Dems secretly funneled to Oz to get him up there. Primaries are so corrupt this year.
Yeah the democrats spent tens of millions of dollars supporting “election denier” Republicans in primaries. I don’t want to hear about “threats to democracy” from them ever again
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@RationalMadman
@Vici
@Avery
I don't see how you could be for removing their threads, if you're in favor of freedom of speech.
you are limiting free speech if you do this
Make better threads, first amendment advocate.
I don’t view this as a freedom of speech thing at all. My issue with freedom of speech online has always been people getting censored simply for having an opinion that goes against a narrative, no matter how well reasoned or respectful they are. I don’t think telling a user that they can’t make the website their personal Facebook page in a way that destroys it for other users is a violation of any sort of valuable speech. That seems like the entire purpose of moderation
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@PREZ-HILTON
Trump actually did save the party but he is a problem in some scenarios where people just don't want to support the candidate who is openly calling for revolution and spouting conspiracy theories as is the case for many Trump backed candidates who have taken the Republican ticket lead
He did his job, which was to clear out the Bush, McCain, and Cheney wing of the party. Now his job is to quietly recede into the background except for making endorsements of good (meaning not just people who suck up to him) candidates in the primaries. I was one of his biggest supporters but there are much better options at this point
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@PREZ-HILTON
The debate I saw a ton of clips from it and it was very sad. I felt sorry for fedderman and hope if I ever get into politics, the people close to me care more about my health than they do using me to obtain power. Just so you know, I would vote Kim Jong un over Dr. oZ, but not fedderman
Yes, I felt extremely badly for him too. Even knowing that he’s a soft on crime crypto-communist who would be a rubber stamp for a president I hate I couldn’t help but feel a lot of sympathy for him as a person. But seriously he can’t be a senator. I’m a partisan hack (in my voting not my words) and if the situation were reversed I don’t know if I could pull the lever for him
You are right about Biden perhaps being sharper than his worst critics are saying, but it's no mystery that he isn't in charge of the Whitehouse and that it is run by committee.
oh yeah his administration is run by extremely online millennials and he doesn’t exercise that much authority—see how frequently he says something only for the “administration” (who apparently is whose actually in charge and not the duly elected president) to immediately walk it back. And he probably is starting to go senile or at least lose many IQ points to old age when he didn’t have a whole lot to begin with. But people were acting like he was on deaths doorstep. Both of the last campaigns charlatans on the right hyped the debates up as if the Democratic candidates would perform like Fetterman did and they just didn’t. It was bizarre to see it finally actually happen
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@SirAnonymous
If the Republicans were running decent, or even mediocre, candidates, I think they would flip 4 or 5 seats. But that would require getting rid of first-past-the-post in primaries, which favors candidates with no broad appeal but a very strong narrow appeal.
Yeah the quality of their candidates this year is shockingly bad. With 8.5% inflation and a very unpopular president they should be running away with the senate instead of it being close
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@PREZ-HILTON
Yeah Oz is a transparent fraud which is why I thought (although I don’t know if I posted it here) that he was going to lose but after seeing the clips from their debate it’s hard to imagine fetterman winning because he’s actually not well. Republicans tried to imply that Hillary and Biden were on deaths doorstep and they simply weren’t. But Fetterman hasn’t even recovered to the point where he can even process spoken word. He can’t be anything other than a complete rubber stamp vote right now
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@ILikePie5
I think Oz narrowly holds PA for Republicans, I think republicans flop Nevada and I think Masters crawls across the finish line in Arizona. The first and last race will be much closer than they should be due to candidate quality. I think Georgia goes to a runoff that Walker loses and I could be wrong but I don’t think New Hampshire is any closer than five points in the end. 52-48R
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@Sidewalker
So this thread, is this what you call high effort, did you put a lot of thought into it?
No, and I haven’t made a solid post in a long time because I know it will be buried under a mountain of spam. Go take a look at the politics section, is that really what you want? Why?
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@Mharman
Yeah I don’t think we need to overthink a policy tbh. This community is quite small and right now there’s a specific individual who is to a large extent ruining it for everyone else. It can be dealt with on a case by case basis. The site leadership needs to tell him to knock it off
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Is this another example of your stimulating, intellectually minded threads?
Why don’t you do something interesting for once and make a prediction about next week?
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I know for a fact that they are
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I just did, she is very proud of mommy’s special little boy
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Oh boy, here’s another gem. You are so right , we really have been missing your great content on the politics forum.
Thanks! The OP is not quite as interesting or rigorous as deranged rants about magatards or wanting to starve seniors to death for living under a governor you don’t like but the compliment is appreciated
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@Vader
I guess I’ll have to start snitching on him whenever he insults me/others in the hopes of getting him banned then. I don’t think Roosevelt should be banned at all I just think he should politely but firmly be told to stop clogging up the website with low effort spam. The community here is small enough that you can deal with situations on a case by case basis
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@IwantRooseveltagain
This last thread you posted, is this an example of the content you think “intelligent people” want to see?
Well not everything has the intellectual rigor of “There is no compromising with MAGA Republicans. They are today’s slave holders”
Your predictions about a pill to end obesity is not very interesting to me and I predict few others, especially “users of merit”
That says more about you than me lol. Serious weight loss pills are already on their way and it’ll be a very interesting transition to go from close to half the population being obese to a healthy weight within a decade or so
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Could anyone seriously imagine a potential user of any merit whatsoever seeing the politics section right now and saying “oh yeah I want in”
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@SirAnonymous
On the other hand, I agree with you that there should also be more substantive topics. Though I find myself agreeing with RM that, if you don't like the current threads, starting your own is a good way to achieve that goal.
Go skim my old threads. Some of them are low effort or whatever but in the good ones the OP takes like 30 mins to an hour to write. It’s not worth the effort if it’s just going to be immediately buried under a dozen spam threads that have already driven off anyone intelligent. I don’t have to poast here, there’s a reason I haven’t in months because why would I? If people think the politics section is better off with hardly any posts from people like me, Danielle, double_r, ramshutu, bbmrocks, Morningstar, RM, oragamo when he isn’t just copy pasting MSNBC etc and instead be 90% low effort posts from people like Roosevelt and Greyparrot when he’s trolling that’s fine but that’s how you get a death spiral
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Please list your three best sources for news.
A guy with a frog avatar, a guy with an avatar of the hispanic kid from the magic schoolbus, and of course I subscribe to the New York Times
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@Sidewalker
Maybe you could try not reading the threads you don't want to read.I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the site isn't going to start censuring threads based on whether you like them or not.
Threads like “Republican Senate candidate in Nevada is literally a bastard” and “There is no compromising with MAGA Republicans. They are today’s slave holders” are of zero value. It’s true that I don’t have to read them, but since they are crowding out everything else I increasingly find myself not reading anything on this site at all. I seriously doubt I’m alone. If the owner and mods of this site are okay with that it is what it is, but if I were in charge I would try to clean it up a little
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@SirAnonymous
I’m not a fan of the Republicans but I really dislike the Democrats so I’m rooting for the GOP. I also really enjoy watching the competition. I actually took the day after the election off work lol because I know I’ll be up all night
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@RationalMadman
It’s just hard to see the point of posting on this site when I have to scroll through dozens of threads with vitriolic sub 90 iq “analysis” before there’s anything worth reading. I hate rules more than almost anyone else but at some point things become unusable
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Based on the spending and early vote Dems seem to be collapsing in Florida, New York, and California which other than Florida I wouldn’t have expected. Those are all enormous states so if true it’s possible they are holding up okay elsewhere. It would be weird if that collapse didn’t impact neighboring Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada but it’s possible
Example of some of the seats Dems are rushing to defend: https://twitter.com/allymutnick/status/1587154699538546688?s=21&t=GM7pXrFD7QF6D8cvhEf9Hg
Big caveat: the spending of both parties indicated a blue wave in 2020 that never happened. The parties have access to better information that the rest of us but they can still be wrong
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If his approval follows the same pattern as Trumps it will recover to around that number by November 2022, and on the higher end. Maybe 45-46%. There’s no telling if he will follow Trumps pattern but Trump was also at an all time low around this time in 2017
This take has NOT aged like fine wine, Biden’s approval is still stuck around 42-43%
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Been meaning to make a follow up poast to this one and maybe will, but if you look at the latest poll crosstabs in the few that ask the question and Republicans have opened up a substantial lead among parents with children under 18. This isn’t too big of a surprise to me but I’ll be interested to see if it holds up
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Final call bros, place your chips I say
52-48R senate
235 R house
Generic ballot R + 3.5
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I get my news from sources far more reliable and respectable than OAN, thank you very much (anonymous people on twitter)
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@RationalMadman
I was going to the other day but knew it would just get swamped by spam
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@Greyparrot
@IwantRooseveltagain
Time to hang up the hat boys, leave the thread poasting to true midwits such as myself
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The politics section is completely unusable right now, it’s pure low effort spam from IWantRooseveltAgain and Greyparrot. I’m also not a fan of Oragami basically copy pasting MSNBC but he doesn’t do it as much as these two
Greyparrot sorry buddy <3 u but the low effort threads are a problem
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Question for abortion advocates: assuming the story is true, would it have been better that the child was never born in order to spare the mothers PTSD?
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It depends on the point of view. From a certain point of view (mine) not only did she want to kill her child, she would willingly deny that child a mother and has “ptsd” because she had to take partial responsibility for her actions. In the other view, the leftist one, nothing at all matters but choice. Nobody has an obligation they don’t want to their child, or to a family member. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to kill your child in the womb simply because you don’t want it, or letting your child grow up without a parent and feel unwanted by their own mother because “choice” is valued above all else and duty/obligation/family etc don’t matter.
I don’t really get worked up about abortion discourse because I think it’s strongest advocates are often telling on themselves when they act as if this is completely normal and acceptable or that something like late term abortion is okay. Of course they would probably think I’m telling on myself when I express my views. There’s no issue where the belief systems that motivate the positions are more irreconcilable I think
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So great that this is happening in our country! Conservatives sure are evil for opposing it
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@Greyparrot
They’re quite open about what a cash cow it is! The entire thing is so disgusting and shameful
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@Danielle
Interesting. I'd like to read about these outcomes - can you share?
I missed this. In the UK, the NHS shut down its main “gender clinic” because it found insufficient medical evidence supporting the idea that the puberty blockers and other drugs pushed into the youth were beneficial, and because the focus on gender overshadowed and failed to address other preexisting mental health issues. This came after the clinic, the sole “gender clinic” in the UK received around 5,000 referrals in 2020 after a decade of only a few hundred a year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11057813/Controversial-Tavistock-gender-clinic-children-shut-damning-report.html
Of the 9,000 children who were “treated” here over 1,000 families are already joining a lawsuit: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tavistock-gender-clinic-to-be-sued-by-1-000-families-lbsw6k8zd
Citing insufficient evidence of any benefit combined with the permanent and potentially dangerous side effects associated with puberty blockers/opposite sex hormones, AND a concern in the sudden rapid rise in “trans” youth Sweden drastically cut back who was allowed to access these, al but banning them: https://segm.org/segm-summary-sweden-prioritizes-therapy-curbs-hormones-for-gender-dysphoric-youth
Finland is still allowing hormone treatment in extreme cases but has curtailed it for the vast majority along with a blanket ban on surgeries: https://genderreport.ca/finland-strict-guidelines-for-treating-gender-dysphoria/
Need I go on?
Basically the medical leadership in these countries saw the exact same red flags that I see and acted on them. If only our own government were so wise
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@Danielle
Consider that 1 in 20,000 men have no Y chromosome. About 40% of men also lose Y chromosomes as they age. Does that mean they are no longer men? If not then being a man seems to be predicated on things other than chromones. And people would say maleness even more so than being a man is about way more than chromosomes, because maleness is about gendered stereotypes and gendered constructs in a society (not just having a dick) that dictate how people perceive males or experience males or interact with males. There's more to add here re: post modernism but eh it's a lot.
Men and women as groups have different distributions on hundreds of thousands of traits, there is not just one thing that makes you a man or a woman. I've had this argument with people before but it basically means you can't define anything at all. Basically no humans are anatomically perfect. An example I gave is that I am missing a joint on my pinky toe that most other humans would have, it cant flex upward. If we were drawing an anatomically perfect human the joint would be there. It would obviously be absurd to say I'm not a human because I'm missing one part of the human body. Similarly, a women who is XXY or a man who loses his penis doesn't change their sex, they just vary from the distribution in a more obvious way because on these traits its less of a distribution and more of a binary. It's one of the most simple concepts in the world, even animals understand sex and gender. We've just outsmarted ourselves
With all due respect how do you know this? Do you know anyone that's transitioned? I'm willing to bet that you don't know a single person that's trans and you're cherry picking second-hand stories or minority examples that get amplified online by right-wingers excited to say "See I told ya they would regret it!" whenever they come across one. I've never met a trans person that did not have long and hard conversations with their family and doctors. Every single one of them saw a therapist. Even with accepting parents the majority of the world does not approve and trans people have a lot of explaining to do. What is giving you the idea that tough conversations aren't happening with them? Because of celebs posting she/her on twitter? Hollywood isn't real life.
Anecdotes are worthless but I do know two people from high school who now identify as trans. In both cases they struggled with anxiety and depression before deciding to transition and in neither case is the transition particularly convincing. It's pretty obvious that it hasn't solved their underlying mental health issues and just makes people sad but they're afraid that doing anything but enthusiastically affirming their ideas about gender would hurt them further. Which I understand because I would do the same thing.
This really isn't that complicated at all so I don't feel like I need to do some kind of personal odyssey into the trans community to figure out what's going on. Facts:
-This has exploded in popularity recently and there has never been a hint in human culture or science previously that 2% of the population needs to change their bodies drastically
-The overwhelming majority (often 100%) of youths visiting "gender clinics" have multiple mental health comorbities clouding their judgement
-There is a large warm and accepting community that these often very anxious/awkward/isolated youths can join, both in real life and online
-This trend has an unfortunate ideological angle to it. Nobody in a position of authority wants to repeat the mistakes of the past, so they overcorrect and aren't critical enough
-Transition is difficult and rarely as successful as advocates make it out to be (the children are not informed of this)
-The treatments are not reversible, patients will be left with deeper/higher voices the rest of their lives, excess/lack of body hair, poorly developed genitals, poor bone density, patients are not informed of the irreversible nature of the treatments. I know this because trans advocates in favor of this argues that it is in fact reversible! You can just get fake tits if you lose yours after all
-Transition has not been documented to solve the mental health problems ailing these youth
-Peer countries are universally moving against "gender affirming care" with a rapidity almost unheard of in medicine
Conclusion: The trans identification is not the root of the problem. Giving these kids hormone treatment or surgeries is barbaric
Explain to me how it's VERY hip to be trans and how people's lives improve overall as the result of claiming to be trans. Are you gonna say that they get a lot of 'likes' on social media as if we're supposed to discount all the vitriol and death threats they get on social media and in real life? Are you gonna say that experiencing kindness and support by some is supposed to override all the hate and shame from others? 90% of people surveyed have said they have no interest in dating a trans person (I'm confident the real number is much higher). I could go on but I don't want to put words in your mouth and make assumptions. So if you don't mind please tell me why it's great to be trans. Explain it to me like I'm 5.
I think your opinion is influenced by what you may have experienced as a youth. But the world has changed drastically. I can't think of anything LESS cool now than being homophobic. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that for the overwhelming majority the amount of love and support they receive for "coming out" far outweighs any hate they may get from people they probably didn't like before and now have the power to punish. For many who are awkward, don't fit in, have mental health issues, it's the first time in an extremely long time they've gotten positive attention and the first time they've ever had a close clique of friends. For others, the phenomenon of kids identifying as trans or nonbinary clusters in friend groups, this is very well documented. It's absolutely a social contagion--you even admit in this argument that it's incredibly unlikely that 2% of people are born into the wrong body, but this is the current % of youth who identify as trans is. If they aren't actually in the "wrong" body doing things to that body that can't be undone is a serious issue, especially at a young age before they can give consent to things like sex or drugs.
There is at least one survey with 28,000 trans people that checks in with them every few years. The one I'm thinking of has been going on for over a decade though I'm sure there are others. But you're shifting goal posts here in a really obvious way. Self-reported feelings are the ONLY way you can know someone's feelings (maybe until we get further along with brain mapping). Think about how ridiculous what you're saying is: that we can't tell people are really satisfied because we can't trust them, yet apparently we can trust them when they say they're NOT satisfied. That's a little convenient don't you think?
In addition to the studies Bone's posted, and the fact that this is not about *children* (the majority of whom desist and must be very thankful they didn't transition) this misses the point. You should expect little different from asking someone "Hey, do you regret that irreversible thing you did as a result of your obsessive fixation?" Not only is it difficult for anyone to admit a mistake was made, if the fixation still exists and importantly if the ideology is wrong and their opinions on what they needed was always just as wrong as the people who want their legs cut off, asking them how they felt about it misses the point entirely.
If I had to develop a study it would focus on overall wellbeing. Does the patient have a broader circle of close friends post transition? Have their other mental health issues improved (if they are there at all big red flag)? How is their physical health, has the transition improved that (spoiler: never) Did the transition/surgery make their day to day life drastically more difficult, for example how painful and difficult is it having to keep a wound open constantly or dealing with migraines from exogenous hormones? For people whose families accept them, has their relationship improved at all post transition? Are they doing better professionally, do they report higher work satisfaction, etc. How are they spending their spare time, are they engaged in fulfilling hobbies now that they can finally live their life the way they want, or are they spending even more time posting online about being trans. Are they actually "satisfied" or is it a case like I made in my initial post where the person is so fixated on being a transsexual that it consumes their entire identity.
Once again if there are no studies about these people then how are you making objective claims about them? I actually know someone that identified as trans but doesn't anymore. She never expressed interest in transition to me - she was already pretty butch. I have so many questions for her and others for sure. But the fact that she never went through with a transition only bolsters my point that those who do go through with such a life altering process are probably as sure as they can be barring some type of psychological disorder. I acknowledge that a lot of people who claim to be trans are just deeply confused. But those people don't invalidate all the rest.
How sure were you of ANYTHING when you were 13??? My God. We aren't talking about mature adults here
If a 14 year old consents to sex with a 45 year old teacher, are you good with that? Just expressing their sexuality, right? Teenagers, especially young ones, are famously difficult to manipulate and well informed
What on earth gives you the impression that I would oppose something just because it's new? By that logic we would have no advancement in medicine, science or culture. Mr. Wright are you really going to defy gravity with that airplane? Ms. Bridges are you really going to be the first black girl in an all white school when we don't know the consequences of integration? Mr. Jenner do you really think we should inject ourselves with smallpox to get rid of smallpox with this so-called "vaccine?"I don't accept that because there is little research on something that it should never be tested or researched going forward. That is the antithesis of what I believe. If someone is desperate enough to volunteer to be a pioneer with a risky surgery they believe could save or significantly improve the quality of their life, that's their prerogative after consulting about potential risks. If they're wrong they will have to live with their decision just like everybody else on this planet that regrets an irreversible decision.
You are comparing man conquering the skies to medical experimentation on mentally ill children. You should reassess this take
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@Greyparrot
Yeah, what's going on is very scary and dystopian, and the tragic part is that it's so preventable. It's a really unfortunate confluence of circumstances that the current teenage "Cry for help" fad also coincides with an intense culture war/identity politics issue which causes people to engage in motivated reasoning. When someone is starving themselves or cutting themselves it's obvious somethings wrong, but now we are actually leaning into the "Cry for help" behavior and saying its good. There are some people who are actually trans, if that's possible, in the sense that the identification is organic and long lasting and probably inescapable, but it's a much much tinier number than what we are seeing now among kids. I'm glad I live in a red area of a red state
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