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@Danielle
I'm not sure but I doubt it. I think gender is such a convoluted and complicated social construct that there is bound to be confusion. There are probably a lot of people who are just more masculine and more feminine now believing they are "born in the wrong body" as opposed to accepting that they're just different from the norm. A lot of gay people probably fall into this.
There is nothing convoluted or complicated about the concept of sex/gender at all. It's just about the most simple concept there is.
There are stereotypes associated with either gender, like wearing certain clothes, being attracted to the opposite sex, etc., but a failure to conform to this stereotype doesn't mean you are actually not the gender you were born as. Nobody is born into the "wrong" body because for all practical purposes we are our bodies. Easy. The trans ideology is completely incoherent and adheres to gender roles with a rigidity that social conservatism couldn't even dream of.
People said this about homosexuality for the longest time (and still do) which is one reason I find it to be such a shitty argument. Ignorance is not a virtue. Just because something is completely foreign to you and you have never experienced it or can't understand it or don't like it doesn't mean other people's experience of it is unhealthy or invalid. ...Trans people are WELL AWARE they're not the gender they wish to be, so why would you feel the need to reiterate that to them -- because you care about them so much? I have a few trans friends and most pass, some don't. But the biggest factor is that the individual feels better presenting themselves to the world a certain way whether they pass or not. I mean this is like saying a woman shouldn't wear make-up because she doesn't pass for pretty anyway. Maybe the world still sees her as unattractive but SHE the make-up wearer feels better about herself...
This has to be reiterated because it's the truth, and despite what you may imagine is going on in their heads, the 13 year old's receiving hormones used to castrate sex offenders and getting in the pipeline for mutilation surgeries are not well aware that they will never pass. Nor are they aware of the permanent effects that the "treatments" will have on their bodies. They are constantly told the opposite of this. They are told at every turn that it is reversible, that no long term harm is being done, that they look beautiful/masculine/whatever it is they want to look like even if they don't, that they'll pass if they just keep on injecting themselves with drugs or binding their breasts, that passing will solve the multiple mental health comorbities they have. They are part of an entire worldwide community that affirms this. The entire enterprise assumes that whatever suspicion they have about their gender is correct, and seeks not to question that but to *affirm* it. The entire establishment affirms it--a teacher or coach who tells them that they are not the gender they say they are would be removed from their position of authority immediately. Absolutely none of this is done with truly informed consent.
So when you say " There should be long, tough conversations with parents, doctors and therapists to ensure a minor (if we're talking about minors only now for some reason) has a good understanding of what they're getting into." that isn't happening! At no point in the process is it suggested that the child's perception of their gender identity is incorrect, or harmful. This stuff is so new that NOBODY, even the doctors, know what these children are getting into!
Unless humanity and teenagers have done a sociological 180 I'm not aware of, kids are not going to be clamoring to desperately try and join an Outgroup that is notoriously rejected, bullied and shamed. So if someone tells me they're trans I'm not going to presume it's because the libtards put a trans character on TV.
Humanity has done a sociological 180 that you may not be aware of. As a matter of fact, being a member of a "marginalized" group is indeed VERY hip at the moment. The reasons for this are complicated and outside the scope of this discussion. But it's part of the reason that trans identification has exploded in the last few years. If trans identification WASN'T often the result of social contagion but an organic result of people being more accepting, we would see more adult people coming out as trans, we wouldn't see it cluster in friend groups nor would the increase be concentrated among teenage girls with other mental health issues, the kind who may have cut themselves in past times. 2% of a sexually dimorphic species aren't born in the "wrong" body. What's happening is pretty obvious
So then how can you sit here and talk about the long-term damage and massive regret if you say there's no research?There actually is research but I acknowledge it's fairly new. All research is new until it's not. There are studies that have looked at thousands of trans people and the overwhelming majority of those that transition have no regrets and live happier, healthier lives after transitioning. Have you found research that says otherwise?
I'm absolutely flabbergasted that your response to giving strong hormones and irreversible surgical procedures to minors when by your own admission we have no research on the long term effects is that we should go ahead and do it anyway. Most European countries are moving away from "gender affirming" care for minors because the outcomes were not good at all, the depression and anxiety that caused the issues in the first place didn't go away with transition which caused lasting and often unwanted changes.
Those studies are just surveys asking people, usually soon after they've transitioned, how they feel. It's extremely weak evidence like anything self reported is. And I've already made my position clear that I don't think a man having his penis removed and replaced with a festering wound he has to keep open the rest of his life is a positive thing just because he says it is any more than I would be happy for an able bodied person to be voluntarily made disabled, even if they wanted it. I view both of those things as mentally ill people whose judgement is impaired being failed by the medical establishment. You know what there aren't studies on? People who desist from identifying as trans. How much you want to bet they're very happy that they didn't get irreversible surgeries or destroy their hormone profile because they had a period of confusion?
There's a medical ethics question when it comes to adults. Should a doctor cut off a healthy leg? There are similar body image disorders where a patient wants a healthy limb removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria Perhaps there's no place for the government here, for adults, but these patients shouldn't be able to find doctors willing to do this because its a horrible violation of medical ethics. Opposing doing this to children is the most open and shut thing I've ever seen
I think the difference between the penis and leg example is that the penis is affiliated with gender whereas your leg is not. If someone wanted to chop off their penis to align more with societal expectations of "femaleness," that makes sense to me though it's really sad. This is one reason people should stop putting so much emphasis on sexual organs when it comes to gender. Gender is a social construct. You don't need to chop your dick off to dress or behave a certain way. But let's not pretend that conservatives are fine with men walking around in makeup and heels. The reality is ya'll are going to ridicule and condemn people for being different no matter what. That's why if I were trans I couldn't find a fuck to give about someone else's opinion if they paid me. All of this nonsense about "concern for the well being" of trans people is such horse shit. It's not caring, it's controlling.
The entire body is a holistic system, even removing a supposedly useless organ like the appendix has complications. If you don't think a penis should be a "gendered" organ than you should support discouraging people from removing it to try to conform to some imagined and unreachable ideal.
For the highlighted bit, yes, it's true that I wouldn't want my son to wear high heels and makeup. Philosophically I do believe that people should generally strive for a masculine or feminine ideal. Most conservatives would agree, I think. But the strength of that opinion isn't comparable at all to the opposition to irreversible hormone treatment and surgeries. The big differences are that high heels and makeup are completely reversible and aren't objectively harmful like cutting a permanent wound into your body is
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@rbelivb
When you say "false" or "not possible" I can demonstrate, and have in debates with Bones, that these are purely ideological statements.
It’s not an ideological statement anymore than stating that the sky is blue is an ideological statement. It’s a statement of fact. The logical conclusion of the trans ideology is going through with the surgery which doesn’t do what it purports to do. The penis is not made into a vagina but instead becomes a festering wound that the body tries desperately to heal. These “doctors” that cut off teenage girls breasts and harvest skin and muscle from their forearms to make a fake penis with an artificial urethra make a mockery of the very thing the patient aspires to. It never, ever makes a man into a woman or a woman into a man, what happens is the destruction of the body. It’s literally ghoulish body horror. All of this is because “You will never be a woman” is the truth. We need to discourage people from walking down that path even if it hurts some feelings.
As for your statement that "nobody in this thread" has denied that "gender ideology" arose organically - the point is that your solution is to somehow just prove the new forms of expression related to gender "false" and return back to some default understanding of gender roles from the 1950s or whatever.
The solution is to tell the truth, which is not socially constructed but based in reason and science. If an alien species came and investigated humanity they would classify us as a sexually dimorphic species and would lump everyone into the same categories that the supposedly archaic gender binary does.
As coal and I demonstrated its actually the gender ideology itself which conforms to archaic gender roles with an intensity that social conservativism wouldn’t even dream of. No conservative would dare suggest that a dominant pantsuit wearing “girlboss” type is potentially a man because she doesn’t want to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, or that a man who wants to paint his fingernails isn’t a man. Or that breasts are not an important organ in the female body, but are merely sex toys. It’s the gender ideology that suggests this, in defiance of the reality of sexual dimorphism. Like I said in an earlier post, making your son into a eunuch because he’s a little feminine is something I could see some barbarian khan from the steppe doing, it has no place in the 21st century. There are only two genders and someone can express themselves however they like—but giving mentally ill kids drugs that block puberty, ensuring a boy never fully becomes a man, giving opposite sex hormones that used to be used to castrate sex offenders, giving girls drugs that sterilize them, cutting off the genitals of children—all of these things are abominations.
My understanding is that the forms of personal expression are related to the economic and technological environment, so you can't just impose the forms of social cohesion characteristic of the industrial nation-state, onto the internet environment. In that case what you are imposing is not the real thing, but merely a symbol or mirage, a simulacrum of the traditional forms which is precisely what conservatism is today. The internet is not "false" or illusory, it is just a different form or structure of social integration which is different from the industrial one which gave rise to the nation-state, the nuclear family and so on.
I don’t get the point you’re trying to make. I agree that the rapid spread of the trans ideology is a pathology that largely came about because of social media and the internet. That doesn’t make it a good thing, and that doesn’t make it something that is irreversible. I have absolutely zero doubt that it is going to be reversed and these type of “gender affirming” medical interventions will be viewed with the same revulsion as lobotomies. You’ve yet to make an argument for why the gender ideology is a good thing
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@Ramshutu
It doesn’t matter that vulnerable people people were lied to, and used as a political prop - we’ve already established from families separation, and pretty much every conversation on immigration that illegal immigrants aren’t really people.
They are people, but they’re people almost nobody in the country wants to live around or spend enormous amounts of resources on. Republicans are willing to admit that. Democrats are not willing to admit this even though their actions show that they privately agree and if anything view this influx as a form punishment to republicans for being naughty. If enormous low skilled immigration is such a strength and diversity is something so valuable these places should have been paying border states to bring these people up in the first place.
Now I could be wrong, and feel free to correct me if I am, but I haven’t seen you or anyone on the left railing about how Biden’s border disaster has led to horrific deaths such as the 50 that boiled to death in a trailer. Or the nearly 1000 who have drowned. Or the tens of thousands who have been robbed, raped, beaten, or otherwise exploited by the human trafficking rings that are flourishing due to the administrations policies. The only posts I’ve seen from you were basically mocking republicans last year for thinking there was a border crisis, and arguing that Trumps policies didn’t fix it (I disagree but still doesn’t absolve Biden for letting this go for 18 months.) Where’s your outrage over the fact that this is happening at all?
Weird that your outrage about “trafficking” people comes only after a stunt that makes your side look unbelievably bad and hypocritical. “Trafficking” people across borders is okay when used as a bludgeon to punish your enemies, or it’s just something to sweep under the rug if your preferred administration doesn’t have the moral courage to protect the border. But if someone you don’t like does even a thousandth of what Biden has been doing for a year and a half you get angry. And that’s purely for moral reasons and has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with this being an extremely effective stunt. Just spare me the phony outrage. You don’t want these people any more than some redneck Texan does, but at least he has the moral courage to admit it and supports policies that keep them from trying to come in the first place.
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@Double_R
Exactly.What Desantis did was the political equivalence of taking a shit on your neighbors lawn. The fact that you and every republican here saw that and thought “that’s why that guy should be president” is the entire point of this thread.
Nice to know that you think migrants are the equivalent of excrement lol. If this is the comparison we’re making, it’s only after your neighbor has shit on your lawn thousands of times and you doing so reminds the authorities that they have the power to do something about it
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Republicans already won that debate. Biden is underwater on immigration by anywhere from 20 to 30 points depending on the poll (rightfully so.) Republicans lead on border security by double digits in every poll.
TLDR version: when you’ve already won the debate on the merits, which republicans have, the way to win on the issue further is to raise its salience. That’s exactly what Desantis did. Far from an empty gesture it helped to shift policy by winning votes
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@Double_R
So if republicans were about policy, what would this have looked like? Well, the debate here is over the southern border and whether we as a country are doing enough to stop the flow of illegals/migrants into our country.
Republicans already won that debate. Biden is underwater on immigration by anywhere from 20 to 30 points depending on the poll (rightfully so.) Republicans lead on border security by double digits in every poll. The last president, a Republican, faced a similar crisis of bogus asylum claims being used as a mechanism to enter the country illegally and worked with the Mexican government to implement policies that stopped the flow of migrants, which Biden repealed on day one. This invasion has gone for 18 months now despite repeated pleas for help from border communities. The administration hasn’t lifted a finger to solve the crisis, the most they’ve said about the issue was when they slandered border agents with patently false accusations last year.
The invasion is occurring because fundamentally the people in charge of the Biden administration do not believe that the US has a right to a border/has the right to say no to people who want to come in, and they are willing to pay a political price to have an open border. What DeSantis did was send a provocative message that brought the issue back to the forefront before the election. When you’re trying to win voters “owning” the other side is important! It’s not fair to say Republicans don’t care about policy when they actually implemented policies that fixed the issue last time they had power for the duration of their reign. The point of what DeSantis did was remind voters of that
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@Best.Korea
If birth rates keep going the way they’re going the Koreas may be reunited fifty years from now, under the Kim dynasty
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@rbelivb
Because the modern changes in the concept of gender are a phenomenon of the internet. I don't think psychological institutions or small groups of college students are actually what is causing this issue, and even if we removed them from the picture, this would not re-stabilize gender roles in society. People are being exposed to a new wave of technologies that allow them to express themselves in a more open-ended way, define new categories and so on.
I agree with you, but this isn’t actually making an argument. Something can be new and driven organically by social media while also being maladaptive and ultimately false and harmful. The problem is that all of the institutions are going along with and encouraging behaviors that cause youth to sterilize and/or mutilate themselves in the pursuit of something that is not possible.
The conservatives are attempting to reify the phenomenon into a problem of some marginal group of radicals who are supposedly imposing these ideas on the rest of society - it is not going away so easily.
Nobody on this thread has done that really. There have been excellent arguments laid out by multiple posters explaining why they think the gender ideology is very very bad and you haven’t attempted to respond to them. To be frank, you’ve now made five posts on this thread and I have zero clue what your actual opinion is other than you don’t like conservatives and believe that gender ideology arose organically
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@bmdrocks21
Then why are we seeing this transgender issue flare up when gender roles are at their weakest? After decades of feminism essentially trying to make women be men: working, not bearing children, trying to make women act dominant and aggressive, hookup culture. Why is it just now that people are feeling like they have to pass as a ‘woman’ whatever that means anymore?
It’s similar to second generation immigrants getting really defensive about “cultural appropriation” while people actually in those cultures couldn’t possibly care any less. Eventually a culture can become so hollowed out that only the physical trappings remain, causing those to be guarded jealously. Culture is a giant iceberg and the physical stuff is just what’s at the surface
Similar thing with gender. The people most susceptible to this (young urban liberals) are some of the most culturally deracinated people of all time. Separated from God and nature and non online human society to the point that even their conception of gender relies only on the type of physical trappings that could be visible on an instagram post. An odd teenage boy wants to experiment with wearing dresses or painting his nails? He must not really be a boy since boys don’t wear dresses, girls do. In reality those behaviors are the tip of the iceberg and even someone who doesn’t act like a man at all still has more male traits than female traits, they’re just less obvious. Certainly they’d be better off as an intact man with some weird behaviors than a man with a festering wound where his penis once was. This is intuitive to psychologically healthy people but unfortunately the impulse of liberalism to deconstruct absolutely everything means we have to waste time explaining it
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Turning your son into a eunuch because he has some feminine traits is something I could see some barbarian khan from the steppe doing lol
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@rbelivb
If we wanted to address the risks it seems obvious that one necessary step would be validating the concept of nonbinary, or other genders, or validating non-traditional concepts of what a woman can be - this way trans people would feel like they could identify the way they want to without inward pressure to conform to a traditional idea of what a woman is through medical interventions. The idea that the trans and nonbinary genders are invalid is a major factor pushing people toward trying to "pass".
I agree with the bolded part. Back in my day (I’m not even 30) we had a thing called “Tom boys”…a girl who was really into fishing or wanted play football wasn’t encouraged to take drugs or cut her breasts off, she was just a slightly boyish girl. Theres nothing wrong with that. It’s the gender ideology itself that says (in a very sexist manner imo) that non conformance means there’s something wrong with you that must be fixed. In a way it affirms traditional gender roles with a severity conservatism doesn’t even dream of.
I don’t agree that there are more than two genders. But if calling someone “xir” would keep them from mutilating themselves I would be happy to do it. But I think it’s quite the opposite. Right now there are hundreds of thousands of minors either on drugs or on the pathway to surgical mutilation soon, a number that has exponentially risen with the onset of gender ideology. But I’m to believe that affirming this ideology would make this go away? No. Telling the truth, that there are only two genders and they cannot be changed, there is no post transition promised land but instead you become a mockery of the thing you aspire to be with a destroyed body at the end, is what stops this.
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@Avery
I'm looking through stats and figures and I'm just not seeing this "marginalize[d]" tribalism. People still view race as their most important self-identifier. People still vote for the Black guy if they're Black. You get the odd White Progressive who has been totally brainwashed into buying 'anti-racism' (read: anti-White), but most other people haven't abandoned their racial in-group. It doesn't take much for a couple of tribalistic people to fly a couple planes into two buildings and cause utter chaos, too, even if most people are seething online.Also, this is compounded by the issue that they groups being let into America are a net drain on the economy. At some point, even after quick-cash like fracking and cutting funding for nature trails and parks, America is just going to run out of money. Printer can only brrr for so long.All this simply can't last.
That’s my point though. People can be walking around with all that rage-envy and still for the most part not do a thing about it because of mass affluence. If there was a sustained economic/technological collapse that led to the return of Malthus the country would collapse overnight of course.
Where we disagree is that the system can’t last. Unfortunately I think it very much can and will. The US has enormous economic advantages and rather than stagnating our industries in important fields like aerospace and technology are pulling away. Our agricultural sector is thriving. The dollar is pulling away…the US economy looks a whole lot more stable and prime for growth than anywhere in the EU or China that’s for sure
Hispanics do have a surprising amount of White DNA in them, but yeah it's not the smartest term.I do agree with the rest of what you said here. Even more promising is that Conservative Whites are breeding at above replacement rates, so if the in-bound immigration borders were shut for 50 years, most of the white lib genetic would simply die off.But I think we'll see large-scale violence before then. It's way too hard to predict what and when exactly, but there are too many explosive elements for there not to be a boom.
The death the white majority has been exaggerated. It’s been greatly diminished of course but there’s kind of this insane one drop rule going on where someone like Ted Cruz is not white, or a person with one Mexican parent whose genotype is like 80-85% European is not white because they have brown hair and brown eyes. And normie white Americans and second generation hispanics don’t have that many cultural differences and vibe pretty well. It’s not believable to me that a race war is going to break out between these two groups of people. But it’s telling that leftists seem to believe that these groups do hate each other that much and support mass immigration anyway. Truly a sick and hateful mindsets these people have
As far as the widespread violence thing I’m really skeptical. There’s already ubiquitous low level political violence from the left and I only see that spreading/escalating is if the right started doing the same thing. Biden has at least twice now threatened to bomb his political opponents and said you can’t fight me because you don’t have planes. He’s completely opened the border, destroying a key component of national sovereignty. He personally tried to take away the livelihoods of tens of millions of people. Inflation is at 8.5%, meaning the vast majority of people are noticeably poorer now than when he got in office.
Despite all this, it looks like Republicans will barely limp to an anemic victory this November and may not even take the senate. Now the polls could be wrong. But I’ll believe widespread violence from the right is likely when there’s almost 100% voter turnout in rural areas, when almost 100% of working class whites are voting,etc. Voting can’t solve all your problems but it’s certainly a hell of a lot easier than actually committing violence. If many aren’t even doing that…The truth is that despite all their tough talk few conservatives are ever going to stick their necks out. Symptom of mass affluence. When you’ve got a paid off house, half a million in your 401k, and a pension you’re not going to be fighting a civil war
What’s actually going to happen is things will get much much worse before they get better. The Kyle Rittenhouse of the future isn’t going to get a fair minded boomer judge who yells at the prosecution for being dishonest. He’s getting a judge that excludes exculpatory evidence for the defense and allows hearsay for the prosecution. But in the long term though liberalism is a genetic death sentence. And technology is probably going to solve even more of our problems the further in time we go
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@rbelivb
Of course something like detransitioning is a conversation that should take place, but it is a very sensitive topic which should be discussed by qualified and unbiased people, not conservatives given that they are constitutionally incapable of acting in good faith.
The one acting in bad faith here is you. The “right wing” people in this thread have been having a substantive discussion on the issue, whereas you have made three posts entirely worthless posts now claiming that we shouldn’t talk about it and accusing people of being in bad faith for doing so.
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@Best.Korea
I always hated psychologists and psychiatrists. They seem to be used by US government to justify harmful decisions.Even today, they give drugs to toddlers.Also, they are meddlers.Most people dont understand the dangers of meddling into other peoples private lives.I wouldnt call psychology or psychiatry a science.It’s just a modern form of whichcraft.
Yeah the rush to medicate for all things is a big problem. Psychological drugs have helped a lot of people and so has therapy but for a lot of people who are depressed, especially men, the root cause is a bad diet, lack of exercise, and lack of sunlight…the body is crying out for help and the drugs are putting a bandaid over it
And giving kids drugs as much as we do is obscene. Maybe not every kid has ADHD and school is just fucking boring?
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@bmdrocks21
He isn’t a pedophile. He’s an Irishman. Capable of making good and soulful work but also a degenerate, very common for the emerald isle
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@bmdrocks21
However, I would hesitate to throw all the blame on the psychology community. Many medical fields, especially those less based in concrete facts like psychology, are highly susceptible to public pressure. In fact, public pressure was a large driver of homosexuality’s removal from the DSM and popular sentiment in the years prior was part of the reason it was included in it.
The newer the field the further away from the scientific method it is. Look how piss poor nutrition science is (remember the food pyramid lol.) Psychology is an important field but it’s such a deeply complicated one that yeah everything needs to be taken with an enormous grain of salt. Theres few fields where you should “trust the experts” less
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@Danielle
I would also point out that every surgical procedure comes with risks. We've all heard the horror stories of plastic surgery gone wrong, yet people don't spend so much time and energy (especially in politics or the media) looking to shame or persuade people not to get nose jobs or butt lifts. Making your titties bigger is perfectly fine if not encouraged, but chopping your titties off is something that is everyone's business and mission to rail against apparently.
Should 14 year old be allowed to undergo breast augmentation surgery? What age should children be allowed to purchase alcohol? Join the military? Purchase a firearm? Adopt a child?
My problem is with children who were very clearly groomed and manipulated into doing irreversible harm to their body. There’s an ethical debate about to be had about if doctors should remove healthy organs (there are people out there who want an arm or leg removed, I wouldn’t respect any doctor that actually did that) but between consenting adults isn’t my business. The “mind your own business” line of thought ends when it comes to children.
This applies to everyone and everything. Look at the people with Trump avatars, Trump clothes, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers, Trump manicures, eating Trump cheeseburgers at Trump themed fast food joints, etc. A lot of things consume people's entire personality: their hobbies, sports, politics, their job... so what?
Again, the “so what” is that we are talking about literal children who are making a mistake. I care about vulnerable people. I feel really bad for someone who destroys their body before they’re even in their 20s. Do you honestly believe that 2% of a sexually dimorphic species are people born in the “wrong” body? Because that’s the current percentage of youth that identify as transgender.
It’s true that many obsessions can go overboard. That’s why we shouldn’t encourage unhealthy fixations, especially in children. What especially grinds my gears about it is the big stigma about telling the truth, which is that they will never be the gender they wish to be and will never pass. Harsh but true. Love requires being harsh but honest
It's always so weird to me that people bring this up as if there are not transition forums chock full of people crying tears of joy and talking about how transitioning was the best thing that's ever happened to them, cured their depression, made them feel whole, made them feel seen, made them feel validated and changed their lives for the better. Apparently we're supposed to pretend those people don't exist even though they account for the overwhelming majority. "Hey did you hear about the 2% of people with regrets?!" doesn't seem like a great talking point, and yet it's brought up by anti trans people constantly despite being such a bad point.Even if you found a study that said 15% of people regret transitioning it would still be a really weak point to bring up in opposition. If I was suffering from gender dysphoria and subsequently severe depression to the point of being a high suicide risk, and I knew 85% of people that transitioned had their lives significantly improve, I would take that chance and you would be an idiot not to. Hmm death or mastectomy death or mastectomy... killing myself or getting new implants... hmm decisions decisions...
There isn’t really much of any evidence on post transition outcomes for children since this began in earnest very very recently. Like the past five years. These drugs and surgeries have long term irreversible effects. Where is the harm in discouraging minors from transitioning before they can make decisions? Don’t you remember what it was like to be a teen?
But it’s true that I have a bias because I have a philosophical objection to the entire idea. If a male patient is fixated on being a woman, has his healthy penis removed and replaced with what will be a festering wound the rest of his life, I don’t think that’s a positive outcome just because he reports that he’s glad it happened. Not any more than I would think it’s a positive outcome that someone who wanted their healthy legs removed got their wish. In both cases I view their decision making capacity to be stunted by mental illness.
Wow are you gonna join the #FreeTheNipple and pro breast feeding in public campaigns because boobs are solely for functional use? I dare you to tell your future daughter that it's okay for her to walk around topless as a teenage girl because tits are just for food lol. I kid. But to me this is just as useless as saying that it's pointless to dye your hair because the only purpose of hair is to insulate the body and conserve heat. It may be true from an evolutionary standpoint, but it is a fact that how people physically present themselves to the world conveys a lot socially and impacts how the world treats them + their own self-esteem.
You’d be surprised. I don’t think women should go around topless because I think it’s good and healthy that parts of the body have a mystique/sexuality to them but there isn’t anything inherently immoral about it. If you really think about just about any part of the body other than genitals aren’t inherently sexual. In china back in the day men fetishized bound feet while public breast feeding was common
But no, that isn’t at all the same thing. Dying your hair doesn’t destroy its function. Breasts are sexualized (and I think that’s a good thing) but their primary purpose is as an organ and not as a sex toy. Not accusing you of anything and I’m not about to get on a social justice high horse but how is that not insanely sexist to say that a part of a woman’s body is so much a sexual object that who cares if it’s damaged or destroyed in the pursuit of looks
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@Sidewalker
Those wacky white supremacists with their black and Muslim candidates!
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@Sidewalker
To win back the senate you need racist Trumpers to come out and vote for a black man in Georgia, and a Muslim in Pennsylvania, not happening.
It’s probably happening
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@Greyparrot
The Democrat's contradictory message of welcome, not really welcome, to a sanctuary state isn't helping.The chaos surrounding this event shows exactly why Democrats have no real immigration policy. Regardless of the incoherent chaotic messaging, the people flowing over the border are aware of one truth. As long as Democrats are "in charge," they can live as Americans without actually having to be American.
When it comes down to it, the point of immigration is to turn Texas, Arizona, and Florida blue and to a lesser extent to provide cheap servants. The revealed preference is that nobody wants to live around dirt poor migrants, but only certain people have the power to do anything about it. And those same people are the ones who vote for the policies that cause the migrants to make the journey in the first place! Not a good look at all
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@Sidewalker
That was the intent, and you guys were screeching about Democrats having an emotional meltdown before anyone had even reacted, thats how conspiracy thinking works, independent of the real world.But hey, a lot of people are going to have a strong reaction to human trafficking as a political stunt, Desantis was counting on that, he was also counting on it giving you guys an erection, apparently it worked, now go take a cold shower, the real world isn't nearly as dramatic as your conspiracy world. .
Yeah I can tell this event clearly had absolutely no emotional impact whatsoever on you lol. I’m definitely living in a fantasy land, calling a rich lib vacation spot having to spend a whopping 24 hours dealing with 0.001% of what border communities have had to deal with for a with for the last 18 months “human trafficking” isn’t at all indicative of an emotional response. The stunt definitely didn’t bring Biden’s disgraceful border crisis back to the forefront. Liberals don’t look like “migrants for thee but not for me” hypocrites at all. I’m so owned right now
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@IwantRooseveltagain
That’s a lie. I saw the news reports about the 50 who died in a tractor trailer. You’re a liar.
There’s a difference between something getting coverage briefly and getting the wall to wall emotional meltdown DeSantis’s stunt caused
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@ILikePie5
So people in Martha’s Vineyard didn’t want to help the children? WowAlso, let me get this straight. They’re flying kids to Nashville and Chattanooga. But how do kids get from Chattanooga to Nashville if that’s where the facility is? By bus. How moronic do you have to be to believe that lol.
and it’s not like these people just materialized from the ether. They were lured here by Biden’s fucking insane semi open border policy. Around 1,000 migrants (that we know of) have died including 50 who were cooked to death in a trailer left out in the sun. And many many others have been raped, assaulted, beaten, robbed, during their journey. It’s a lot of suffering just to eventually get a (rightfully) denied asylum claim. It’s supposedly more fair and kind to have people go through that to maybe be an undocumented third class not even citizen/servant at the end instead of just having a secure border that doesn’t lure them over in the first place.
The fact that the media went crazy when 50 migrants showed up to a rich lib vacation spot but had absolutely nothing to say about the 50 that died one of the most horrific deaths I’ve ever heard about was disgusting. shows where their priorities actually lie…It’s literally all on Biden, 100%. He has so much to answer for
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@ILikePie5
Republicans would benefit from having a few psychologists to tell them inherent biases humans have. The principal being framing
Yeah you win elections by increasing the salience of the issues your party wins on instead of changing minds. Hopefully RDS can do something similar to keep abortion off the radar as much as possible going into the midterms. Republicans do have some good political moves though. Unlike dems they seem to realize that spring and and summer advertising is worthless and save all of their powder for the fall campaign when voters actually start paying attention, which is why Dems always dominate summer polling only for their to be a "surge" for Republicans at the end
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The point of the stunt was to change the national conversation from abortion (an extremely weak issue for republicans) to Biden’s border disaster (a very strong issue for republicans.) From that perspective it’s been a wild success
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@Avery
I think the march of technology has already rendered tribalism to be much less relevant than it could be. I really don’t think a country like the US could exist in the Malthusian hellscape that was pre Industrial Revolution life (most people have absolutely zero clue what things were like in stagnant zero growth societies where every single niche was filled but that’s a different thread.) As soon as something bad happened like a famine the various groups that hate each other would relish the opportunity to fight about it. Nobody wants to admit it—see the endless retarded “We grow all your food and produce all your oil!” Vs “we pay the taxes for your infrastructure!” Country vs city bullshit—but at the end of the day there are extremely powerful economic incentives keeping New York City and somewhere like Oklahoma in a union. Without technology enabling almost immediate exchange of goods and the economies of scale and other economic terms I’m not smart enough to know the names for that make both places richer there would be no reason for places so different that low key hate each other to be in a union. This is without getting into any of the race/ethnicity stuff.
One thing I think about often is how Hitlers philosophy of lebensraum was already obsolete by the time he came to power. Obviously agricultural land and territory are still important but they aren’t the end all be all. Germany came to dominate continental Europe anyway despite sacrificing a generation of young men and having millions of Germans ethnically cleansed from places they’d lived for centuries. In a way the entire war was fought over false assumptions and the failure to realize that created a lot of lasting harm. I think a lot of modern politics is like that. We are fighting over these issues that probably aren’t going to be relevant very soon. Unless we hit a wall technologically things will change in ways we can’t really anticipate. To actually answer your question human psychology is tribal since that’s the state our ancestors were in for like 190,000 years so I don’t think technology can eliminate it but it can continue to marginalize it. If technology ever advances to the point it can eliminate tribalism and other negative aspects of human nature, that would be full trans humanism imo like your asking and we would’ve transitioned into something else. But is that type of change possible I’ve got no clue. I see a future of people seething at each other online and then not ever doing anything about it because they don’t want to go to jail
The groups that seethe at each other in 50 years probably won’t be the exact same ones that exist now btw. For example in the states liberals love to gloat that “non Hispanic whites” (one of the dumbest terms ever) are losing their numbers in the USA. But if you look under the hood what’s happening is that Hispanic people are becoming more like normie white people culturally through assimilation, and phenotypically through intermarriage, while white libs are self genociding through South Korea tier birth rates. Just another example of how some of the stuff we’re fighting over is kind of dated 20 or so years in the past
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The more I think on it, the more it strikes me that even suggesting to a child that being born into the “wrong” sex is even possible is deeply insidious. This idea can be very seductive to people who feel they don’t fit in or are going through some kind of trauma, and they can easily find themselves deep into a rabbit hole that offers some temporary catharsis (and importantly a lot of social validation) but causes them lasting harm in the long run.
The whole concept offers the idea of salvation once you reach the promised land of being socially accepted as the opposite sex and physically passing. If only you can accomplish this, all of your problems will go away! And the thing is—THIS WORKS! For a time. The project of reengineering the body to look totally different will snap a depressed person out of their malaise. It will get them connected with people all over the world going through the same thing, it will provide them with a form of social capital in the form of an “oppressed identity” and some drugs can cause euphoria or have other psychological effects.
But what’s actually happening under the hood? These transitions aren’t harmless. Instead what’s actually happening is that the individual is destroying their body, often sterilizing themselves and ensuring they’ll never have children or causing lasting damage such as unwanted body hair or permanently changed voices. In extreme cases surgical mutilation occurs at an age where an individual is not allowed to buy a beer, own a gun, have sex, or even drive a car.
All of this is in pursuit of an impossible goal. We are all familiar with the “You Will Never Be A Woman” copypasta—as brutal as it is, every word is true. Very few if any actually manage to pass, and those few that do will find to their dissatisfaction that it didn’t actually solve all of their problems after all. In extreme cases, the desire to change sex consumes the entire personality and these people cease to exist for any reason other than to be transsexual. Many of those who detransition discover with horror that many of the changes to their bodies are permanent. De transition forums are chalk full of girls crying their eyes out over their permanently deep voices, their anger that they’ll never be pretty again, the tragic realization that they will never be able to have children…and their cries fall on deaf ears except to supposedly hateful people like me.
As an aside I’ve seen the pro mutilation people (including a monstrous surgeon) say “it’s okay to remove a teenage girls breasts because if she wants them back later we can just put them on.” This gets back to my point that at its root this ideology is actually incredibly sexiest. Uh, news flash, breasts are organs not sex objects. Sure you can get fake tits but you’ll never be able to use them for their actual purpose of nursing an infant and your body (a holistic system) will forever be missing a piece
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@coal
The more I think on it, the more it strikes me that even suggesting to a child that being born into the “wrong” sex is even possible is deeply insidious. This idea can be very seductive to people who feel they don’t fit in or are going through some kind of trauma, and they can easily find themselves deep into a rabbit hole that offers some temporary catharsis (and importantly a lot of social validation) but causes them lasting harm in the long run. Particularly because these same ideologies define gender roles in an extremely rigid and frankly rather sexist manner. If you instead of being tall, broad, deep voiced, sports loving or love outdoors/guns/ other “manly” things, constantly horny for women, square jawed, don’t care about clothes… if you’re something different…perhaps you aren’t really a man? Or maybe just less of one?
As you note, this leads to making it seem like a pathology if people deviate from a norm. A boy who wants to kiss other boys or a girl who wants to play football aren’t secretly a girl or a boy respectively because they deviate from a norm. Indeed every single cell in their body tells the opposite story. Trying to brute force that body, which began differentiating from a blank slate into their given sex literally at the moment of conception, into something different just destroys it in the end.
The reality is that we all have one body, if we have a “soul” or anything that transcends the body on this Earth it’s tied up with our physical presence and cannot escape. If someone feels like they (whatever that means in an abstract way that isn’t tied up to the body) should’ve been born as a man/woman (although again what that would actually mean is that SOMEONE ELSE was born and not them)…tough luck unfortunately. Gotta make do with what you have and come to terms with yourself as you actually are. Deliberately turning children away from self acceptance and towards an ideology that harnesses their worst impulses in the service of their own destruction is horrifying. There will be a reckoning and these people will be unable to answer for their crimes, in this life and the next.
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@ILikePie5
Very cool. I love Indian politics myself. It would be impossible for a guy named Stalin to win in the United States. It just fascinates me.
not India but imagine this guy lol
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@Vader
The opposite speaks for itself, if a black man has views that are not of the Liberal agenda, the left excommunicates them WORSE than anyone on the MAGA side
When Roe v. Wade was overturned virtually all of the hate from liberals on my social media was directed towards Clarence Thomas and to a lesser extent Amy Coney Barret, even though Alito was the one who wrote the opinion
Anecdata but I am pretty sure it's representative
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I’m not too worried about outsourcing. The demand for 100+ IQ labor grows by the year and has for a long time, and at the same time the countries outsourced to are rapidly developing and rapidly aging.
Current uproars and black swan events have obscured things somewhat but the old paradigm is quickly coming to an end. The hordes of people willing to work in factories overseas or look for bugs in code 12 hours a day for peanuts is dwindling. I actually think 20-30 years from now will be an excellent time to be a young person, the demand for labor will be insane
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@Lair77
A lot of fresh graduates don’t like work from home and I can see why, it’s almost impossible to build a reputation or connections that are useful in a career if you never actually meet anyone. Then there are other groups, like parents with young kids, who will have WFH pried from their cold, dead hands lol
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@Tejretics
My life’s priority -- after giving it a lot of thought -- is to do as much good as I can in the world (subject to the constraint that I live a reasonably comfortable life). I’ll admit that this is, in part, selfish: doing good gives me a lot of joy (and I’m not unique in this respect, research often finds that people who dedicate their careers to trying to do good end up happier). I’m pretty heavily influenced by effective altruism.
I’ve always thought the “you’re selfish for doing good things because you enjoy it” thing championed by Ayn Rand was a little too cyclical. Like okay sure someone might enjoy working at a soup kitchen or feels good about doing it…that just makes them a good person. There’s a little too much focus on mental state which is always a black box for other people instead of action.
I’d probably particularly like to work on improving animal welfare, development economics, or -- if I’m convinced there’s a way for me to tangibly help make progress on this stuff, which seems hard for any one person -- the regulation of AI and biotechnology.
I go back and forth on the latter two between being a hardcore technologist and a reactionary Luddite lol. But ultimately I come back to that for good or for ill that technology is coming. It’s worthless to fight the inevitable. But I agree I’m pretty scared of what could happen if it’s not done correctly. Especially biotech stuff
I agree with you an animal welfare. Factory farming is an abomination and it’ll be remembered that way. I have no doubt. The demand for meat is pretty much insatiable and I don’t see that culturally changing but I’m hopeful there are some changes that could be made. Almost all farms used to have flocks of animals that would graze on fallow fields and refertilize them, now it’s just monoculture and chemical fertilizers. Could we slowly revert back to that without causing mass starvation I’ve got no clue
Where do you see the world in 50 years generally?
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You’re an atheist, how shocked would you be if when you died it turned out a religion was true? Which religion do you think is most likely to be true?
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@Greyparrot
Alex Stein seems like a massive asshole lol. I only know of him from a few videos where he’s screaming at congressmen/women while panting like he just ran a 5k and a YouTube debate where he showed up drunk and derailed the whole thing
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On your profile your “life’s priority” is “other.” What is that other and what drives your motivation for it?
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@Tejretics
The biggest difference, though, is the prominence of debates about God and religion declining a lot. On DDO, the Religion forum was the largest, by posts and threads, by a country mile. Debates about whether God exists, as well as about specific tenets of religions, were happening all the time. They still happen on DART, but I think it’s declined quite significantly, probably because of the general decline of atheism-related discourse.
Yeah it's weird how people kind of collectively agreed to disagree on religion. Don't hear about it at all anymore, and when it is talked about its usually respectful
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“Let’s starve millions of seniors to death and deny them medical care because a rich liberal vacation spot had to deal with 0.001% of what border states have had to deal with for the last year and a half”
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If this account isn’t a troll he’s just a complete psycho seething with near genocidal hatred of the folks across the aisle lol
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Liberals legitimately have more sympathy for a hardened violent criminal than they do for an ordinary person who utters a racial slur once during a heated confrontation. Sick ideology!
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@Vader
It does seem like there is an endless cycle post WWII of:
Leftists feel bad for criminals, pass laws that make things easier on criminals. Criminals respond by committing more crimes. Leftist lose elections because people are being victimized by the criminals they're easy on. Leftists rebrand as "tough on crime" and win, change laws. Leftists feel bad for criminals...
There is nothing new under the sun. But the party that's doing this facing future electoral problems is pretty scant consolation for the victims. It's truly shocking just how much sympathy a lot of leftists have for criminals, and how little they have for ordinary people
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@coal
It's about the nature of the conversation anyone is necessarily having, to the extent they're discussing so called "white privilege." Is the outcome desired, to give more power to the state to be more barbaric to more people, if only the degree of barbarity is similar from group to group? I should hope not.That's why the conversation needs to change. All this discussion about so called "white privilege" does nothing to solve the underlying problems that create the metrics we say illustrate the trends. But solving the problems seems like it might be more productive. Or at least trying to do so.
This has always been my problem with the white privilege narrative too. I think a lot of it is BS but the parts that are real would be better termed as “black oppression”—like it’s good that bad things aren’t happening to white people even if they shouldn’t be happening to anyone. It’s not a “privilege” to be treated justly. But the language as it stands exists to demoralize whites and drive further division. Not a coincidence!
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@IwantRooseveltagain
That’s bullshit.you said we are a Christian-British country and that was from Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So right from the beginning of settlement we were distinct.
83.5% of white Americans (blacks unfortunately being in bondage at this point) were of English ethnicity in 1790. The remainder were mostly Scottish, German, or Dutch along with a smattering of Irish Protestants. The country as a whole was around 1% Catholic.
There were less than a million immigrants total between 1790 and 1840, and around half of these were Northern European Protestants. Yes, there were distinctions between these different groups of British people, and some states like Pennsylvania had large German or Dutch populations. But the differences between that version of America and the one that came immediately afterwards with millions of Catholics, Jews, people from all over the world…a lot bigger than the differences between groups of Englishmen! The Know Nothings were reacting to a cultural and civilizational change that was very, very real. The country went from a British ethnostate with a few culturally similar minority groups to a true melting pot in the span of a few decades
I don’t know what ethnicity you are but it is likely that when your ancestors came here nobody who was already here welcomed your family. Irish, French, German, Italian, Greek - they were all shit own and told to go back home by the people who were already here.
Most of my ancestors were here prior to the American revolution, although some were among the people the nativists were complaining about. Doesn’t mean I can’t assess it objectively. I’m not even saying that immigration was a bad thing, just that it did change the country significantly
Ya, if real Americans had been able to keep your family out of this country we would be a lot better off today
Well that’s not very nice!
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@IwantRooseveltagain
There is no difference between a settler and an immigrant other than who got there first.
There is a difference in the sense that there was already the ethnogenesis of a distinct American ethnicity by the time mass immigration really kicked off around the ~1850s or so, of people of extremely similar cultural backgrounds whose families were largely in the US for several generations at that point. The point being that the immigrants the Know Nothings worried about actually were different and actually did change the country--the history behind your post is totally wrong
And who invited you and your crazy Catholic ancestors to this country?
WASPs who made a mistake. Although most of the ancestors I have the 19th century nativists wouldn't have liked were Jewish, not Catholic
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@Greyparrot
Most people are really bad about having even a rudimentary theory of mind for people in the past but I’ve noticed that hyper partisan people (like the OP) are by far the worst. If you struggle to conceive of historical people as anything other than 21st century Americans with different fashions their beliefs and actions seem so baffling that it’s hard to view them as anything other than caricatures.
Almost everything that happened in history makes sense, even if the logic behind actions is often twisted, misinformed, selfish, or short sighted, when you take into account the full context and the material conditions at the time
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@IwantRooseveltagain
This post shows a complete ignorance of the facts on the ground at the time.
The Catholic Church in the mid 19th century actually was an existential threat to the republic. If the pope had called for an insurrection against the American republic, a large percentage (probably a majority) of catholic immigrants would have sided with the pope and not the republic. Just because this didn’t happen doesn’t mean the concern wasn’t valid, religion back then was a completely different ballgame than the window dressing that exists now.
In addition, the waves of immigrants from the mid 19th century onward did permanently change the country. Whether or not this was a good or bad thing is just as subjective a question as whether or not immigration driven cultural changes today are good or bad. But make no mistake, the changes absolutely happened.
America pre 1850 was not a nation of immigrants, it was a nation of settlers, it was overwhelmingly native born Protestants of British origin with a smattering of other Northern European Protestants and only about 1% catholic, almost all of whom had families present in colonial America. The very small foreign born population at that time was mostly from culturally similar backgrounds (again, overwhelmingly English speakers of British origin, a few other Northern Europeans) This began to change mid century with waves of Irish and German immigrants followed by a deluge from southern and Eastern Europe which formed the famous Ellis Island “melting pot” immigrants we often think of. These waves of immigrants changed the self conception of the country dramatically, changing it into something quite clearly different culturally and politically.
I say this as a practicing catholic and someone who has some ancestors that came to America post 1850s. This post is very misinformed. If Trumpers = know nothings I would say they have some valid points!
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@Vici
The question of Gods existence is something that’s never going to be resolved. If the God that exists is a personal God who chooses not to reveal Himself and end the question once and for all why would we assume that our puny minds could ever override this divine decision. The way I view it the world is filled with hints or “Easter eggs” about God but never enough to definitively answer the question. That’s the point of faith which wouldn’t be worth very much if we could prove God existed with a syllogism
Every mind is unique. I’ve always believed in God, just more or less strongly depending on the time, but in the last few years I’ve become much more religious and confident that God exists. But I know pretty much for a fact that the train of thought that led me to that conclusion wouldn’t be convincing to a lot of people. Not because it’s stupid but because I’m my own person. If a person opens themselves to God He will come in the way that makes the most sense to them. I guess some people might find God through a syllogism or something but not very many. No disrespect but youre pretty much wasting your time and would make more progress winning people over to faith by being a positive influence in your community, helping people, basically living your faith than poasting online
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@Lair77
See this thread, which contains discussion of the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the topic. You can search return on investment by school and by major
The short answer is yes it is worth the cost provided that the student is able to graduate and that the student chooses a good major. A fairly large number of programs even at elite institutions have a negative ROI whereas even the least competitive schools have degrees that pay handsomely. choice of major > all else
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