All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Dalak]

The Week included a paragraph about a nonbinary teenager taking hormone treatment, so nonbinary individuals would count as transgender or experiencing gender dysphoria.

With Shrier, I noted an article that she wrote where she referenced the different gender categories, so it doesn't appear she's misleading anyone by including them in larger statistics about social changes. If you have an objection to the lack of evidence in her book, what incorrect evidence are you referring to?

You seemed to have an incorrect view that females who identify as trans boys will consistently seek gender affirming care , and that females who identify with different categories (like nonbinary) will never go for medical interventions, but that's just not the case. Some people identifying as agender/nonbinary/genderfluid feel that it requires further treatment or surgery. Meanwhile, some people identifying as trans boys don't want further treatment or surgery.

I understand a view that many people are identifying as genderfluid or agender or whatever new category as an affectation that they'll grow out of (this is quite similar to bisexual erasure) that they currently use to be more interesting. I don't share this view, nor would I insist on specific writers having this particular understanding.

As I pointed out after you misrepresented my complaint as with the GLAAD definition, my actual and consistent complaint with The Week was how they lumped AMAB individuals as well as those who hadn't revealed how they were assigned at birth under "girls" aka AFAB to cause controversy. You still haven't addressed that except by misrepresenting my position.

I am not very surprised you are claiming you cannot remember a question you responded to (But didn't respond to with proof from the book) earlier this morning, as this is your standard operating procedure.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Florida's new higher education bill has had its text released and its as nightmarishly bad as you'd imagine.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bil...Text/Filed/PDF

Here's a thread breaking down just *how* censorious and fascist it is.

https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/sta...70290745790464

Good Lord. If Florida didn’t have sunny skies and warm weather year ‘round, educators and students would flee the state in droves. If this **** isn’t authoritarian to the gills, then I don’t know what qualifies.

[Dalak]

Good Lord. If Florida didn’t have sunny skies and warm weather year ‘round, educators and students would flee the state in droves. If this **** isn’t authoritarian to the gills, then I don’t know what qualifies.

I haven't been here 3 years and I'm already planning how I might leave this state.

[Tendrin]

Good Lord. If Florida didn’t have sunny skies and warm weather year ‘round, educators and students would flee the state in droves. If this **** isn’t authoritarian to the gills, then I don’t know what qualifies.

Don't worry, though. All those conservatives who decry slippery slopes when liberals try to do ... anything .. and what not won't breathe a word about the creepning Orbanism in their own party.

[CaptainEurope]

I haven't been here 3 years and I'm already planning how I might leave this state.

There might be a real "brain drain" from Red states to Blue ones. Parents don't want their trans kids to kill themselves, black academics will want to be free to work. I guess FL will continue to vote Republican for decades to come, but might lose a few seats in the House after the next census.

[useridgoeshere]

Given the election results, it's no surprise DeSantis is super-emboldened. He won pretty much everyone except Black and young. Guess who are the folks he's now screwing over the most. This is what the majority of Florida voted for. Even those who chose not to vote chose this by default.

[Catlady in training]

On the anniversary of Russia's attack on Ukraine, a temporary art installation placed an actual Russian tank destroyed in the battle for Kyiv outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.

That tank looks great.

This is how a Latvian MP said what must have been on everyone's minds (at least I hope) at OSCE assembly in Vienna.
https://twitter.com/RihardsKols/stat...540553217?s=20

[InformationGeek]

Oh hey WBE, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma you used to profile.... apparently he retired due to long term effects of COVID. How fitting due to him fighting COVID preventions.

[Catlady in training]

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the start of russia's terrorist war in Ukraine and the genocide they are commiting. I'll just say: Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!
Ukraine will win this unjust war, because no other options are acceptable. (And hopefully, russia will face a total economic collapse along with that.)

Anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine marked around the world – in pictures

[Catlady in training]

Regarding the never-ending discussion about transphobia, let me ask you a question, Mets. You like to often pose questions about what should be the general approach rather than in a specific situation. So, I would like to know, do you think that when discussing some topic that will mostly impact a selected group of people instead of impacting everyone in a comparable degree, should we treat everyone's opinion with equal weight? Does the opinion and experience of someone who has lived through the reality of what people are talking about, lives it every day and will have their entire life impacted by the result, or the expertise of someone who has studied the topic for years and is continually educating themselves and talking to dozens of people with first-hand experience, does it compare with the opinion of someone who doesn't have any personal experience with the topic, refuses to listen to people who do and is drawing mostly from one source that several people have flagged as misleading? Not to mention, someone whose life won't even be affected either way.

Let's put it into a different example. I don't know what field you work in, but let's imagine if we were discussing something that you work with on a daily basis and you consider yourself to be skilled and practised in it. What would you say if some of us who work in completely different fields and have practically no education or experience in said topic, started to put forward our opinions that you can immediately see are complately uninformed and after some digging it's obvious that they are based on the work of someone you know to be either just as uninformed or intentionally misleading? Wouldn't it be frustrating if everyone who entered the discussion afterwards would treat all our arguments as having equal weight, regardless of how much experience and data is behind them?

[ed2962]

Maybe I don't get out enough, but I had no idea he was such a racist scumbag:

‘Dilbert’s’ Scott Adams: ‘White people should get the hell away from Black people’

I pretty sure some years back he was on Twitter trying to defend sexual harassment.

[Tendrin]

Scott Adams has been very bad for quite some time now.

[Mister Mets]

As I pointed out after you misrepresented my complaint as with the GLAAD definition, my actual and consistent complaint with The Week was how they lumped AMAB individuals as well as those who hadn't revealed how they were assigned at birth under "girls" aka AFAB to cause controversy. You still haven't addressed that except by misrepresenting my position.

I am not very surprised you are claiming you cannot remember a question you responded to (But didn't respond to with proof from the book) earlier this morning, as this is your standard operating procedure.

The math checks out, especially since females are more likely than males to identify as trans.

I pointed this out a while back.

https://community.cbr.com/showthread...=1#post6032471

There might be a real "brain drain" from Red states to Blue ones. Parents don't want their trans kids to kill themselves, black academics will want to be free to work. I guess FL will continue to vote Republican for decades to come, but might lose a few seats in the House after the next census.

We'll see. Florida's population has been growing significantly, to the extent that it surpassed New York as the third most populated state.

1923 was the last cycle in which did not gain congressional seats.

[Mister Mets]

Regarding the never-ending discussion about transphobia, let me ask you a question, Mets. You like to often pose questions about what should be the general approach rather than in a specific situation. So, I would like to know, do you think that when discussing some topic that will mostly impact a selected group of people instead of impacting everyone in a comparable degree, should we treat everyone's opinion with equal weight? Does the opinion and experience of someone who has lived through the reality of what people are talking about, lives it every day and will have their entire life impacted by the result, or the expertise of someone who has studied the topic for years and is continually educating themselves and talking to dozens of people with first-hand experience, does it compare with the opinion of someone who doesn't have any personal experience with the topic, refuses to listen to people who do and is drawing mostly from one source that several people have flagged as misleading? Not to mention, someone whose life won't even be affected either way.

Let's put it into a different example. I don't know what field you work in, but let's imagine if we were discussing something that you work with on a daily basis and you consider yourself to be skilled and practised in it. What would you say if some of us who work in completely different fields and have practically no education or experience in said topic, started to put forward our opinions that you can immediately see are complately uninformed and after some digging it's obvious that they are based on the work of someone you know to be either just as uninformed or intentionally misleading? Wouldn't it be frustrating if everyone who entered the discussion afterwards would treat all our arguments as having equal weight, regardless of how much experience and data is behind them?

Anecdotal evidence could be considered, but this should be done carefully.

I'm a teacher in New York City. I don't think this should mean that I get to tell anyone here discussing education issues to shut up because I know more about it than they do.

An individual's lived experience can be meaningful, but it's possible to draw the wrong conclusions. Someone may not realize the way their experiences don't match another's (For example- If I'm happy with my salary and benefits, this may not apply to someone in a different state.) Individuals can be mistaken. Imagine all the reasons you would be skeptical of anecdotal evidence coming from someone on a different side than you on a key issue.

It would be wrong to use only one source. That's definitely not what I'm doing. I've used multiple spources.

While I'm interested in the big picture and the meta questions, I do try to focus on the specific situation. In my arguments with Dalak, I'm focusing on the very specific question of whether two sources are intentionally misleading. Anecdotal evidence won't resolve that question.

If I saw people saying things that were really uninformed about education or about another topic I'm familiar with, I would try to find some reliable source that explains the issue and link that. If someone is legitimately misleading, I'd try to find sources to demonstrate that. A key distinction is that if I am saying that someone is completely misinformed or intentionally misleading, I had better be able to back up that claim. It's an allegation that shouldn't be made lightly. If I make that argument incorrectly, it would make me seem less reliable. At the very least, I've demonstrated that I'm a poor communicator and have wasted people's time with my own blind spots (and specialists can definitely have blind spots.)

Sometimes it seems a narrower question is a proxy for a larger topic. But this can lead to people rejecting inconvenient facts and digging in.

If anyone is wrong on a point, we should all be welcome to point out the mistake, and bold the section of the post in which they say something that's obviously incorrect, and explain what the truth is. The responses tend to be vaguer and less useful.

[Tendrin]

Being trans is a lived, internal experience in a world that treats a non-cis outcome as a tragedy and a travesty. Trans people ought to be supported, and as we can see, the data we do have indicates that when they are treated and able to live their lives as the people they actually are, the regret rate is ... literally lower than *any other kind of medical procedure*. Study after study has shown this -- but of course we have people who want to tell us that we need to protect minors from being trans using anecdotal data and singular affidatives to cast aspersions on the entire field, attempting to defund and ban gender studies as in Florida, and guys like Mets up here who are 'just asking questions' that never seem to stop when study after study shows that entire theory behind Shrier's book and the need to slow-walk or stop gender-affirming care for minors is dead wrong.

And, as I stated well over a year ago, they are already in the process of attempting to erase trans *adults* too.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar said it well:

MY TAKE: About 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender. So, why all the fuss over such a small segment of society? Because, although the group may be small, the stakes are huge. The first step in marginalizing a group and justifying curbing their rights is to identify them as a small and therefore powerless group outside the mainstream. However, most marginalized groups can be designated as small in relationship to others: Jews, Muslims, Latinx, LGBTQ+, the elderly.

What we need to always be aware of is that how we treat any one marginalized group is how we will treat all of them—given the chance. There is no such thing as ignoring the exploitation of one group hoping they won’t come for you.

https://kareem.substack.com/p/hannit...admit-lying-to

The term ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ (ROGD) was coined in 2016 to describe an alleged
epidemic of youth coming out as trans ‘out of the blue’ due to social contagion and mental illness.
The term reflects a deliberate attempt to weaponise scientific-sounding language to dismiss
mounting empirical evidence of the benefits of transition. This article offers an introduction to
the theory of ROGD and its history, presents a detailed critique of the empirical and theoretical
claims associated with the theory, and highlights structural concerns with the ROGD discourse.
The article argues that claims associated with ROGD, including assertions of declining mental
health and degrading familial relationships following coming out, are best explained by the leading
ROGD study’s recruitment of parents from transantagonistic websites against a background of
growing visibility and social acceptance of trans people. ROGD theory is best understood as an
attempt to circumvent existing research demonstrating the importance of gender affirmation,
relying on scientific-sounding language to achieve respectability.

https://www.florenceashley.com/uploa..._dysphoria.pdf