Talinn

So where's the possibility that a kid takes a puberty blocker for two weeks and then drops it, deciding he or she isn't trans? Is this a scary possibility? It seems like you have some inherent fear of puberty blockers due to the media narrative around them, not because they're inherently very bad for children. There are toxic LGBT obsessed, narcissistic weird parents that might actively want their child to be trans and try to brainwash them into becoming trans, I'm sure they exist. But they're outnumbered 5 to 1 at least by parents who abhor trans people, who frankly want to see us dead in some corner of their mind. There's real fear to the process of coming out in virtually every trans person, because they think their family will react poorly. A lot of people won't even bother coming out. The amount of hate you get for being trans frankly feels slightly higher than whatever portions of society encourage you to be yourself. Again, who is encouraging anyone to transition? If a trans child even has supportive enough parents to let them go on puberty blockers (even after extensive deliberation and thought, careful planning), chances are just as good that they'll go on puberty blockers as they'll brood in some version of depression, not doing anything about the gender dysphoria. Of course social contagion is a problem, but it's just statistically impossible that *every* trans youth who thinks he or she is trans' first impulse is "let's go to the pharmacy and make my LGBT friendly parents go get me some puberty blockers!" Something non-trans people don't realize is that it is usually a loooong process. If your mind was playing games with you and you're not really trans, chances are good that you'll stop yourself from doing real and serious damage. Because it's not uncommon for it to take 10+ years.. The very length of the process filters peoples out, not to much the money involved.

OMG the dark Crystal.. Youre too cool Emerald..

It will help in some instances, but I'm perfectly willing to cede this area to the right. I don't how much it helps the trans community in general anyway, it seems to backfire in some damaging ways. Let the schools be free of transgender stuff and don't cede another inch elsewhere. Sports are case-by-case basis.

Afraid to say that when I was in high school, and had no testosterone running Cross Country, the XY chromosomes conferred no innate advantage ...I was 17 years old and attempted to run a 5k race in under 25 minutes and could barely get to 26:00 on flat terrain (I was in Colorado so we had a variety of races, in the mountains and in the plains). The girls were running like 21-23 minutes and didn't pass out and almost go to the ambulance from trying so hard, as I did. Due to having no testosterone due to my genetic disorder I just couldn't run as fast as the girls no matter how hard I tried, but man those XY chromosomes sure did give me an advantage over them. I guess 26 minutes is a faster time than 21-23 minutes, my bad. I agree that transgender issues shouldn't be addressed in public schools, probably not even in high school. Puberty blockers are pretty harmless if taken for a short time in conjunction with no other cross-hormones, and the science will get better with this. You think of testosterone and estrogen as immense cosmic forces but they're really just substances both of which I saw firsthand and they're simultaneously not as scary as you think as they are, and more potent than you realize my man. 7 years old aren't given puberty blockers that much either. Not going to reply to your other culture war stuff because it's mostly irrelevant.

If you're yellow and you "side" with green more, then that's because they are generally more positive about things, and not just concerning the trans issue -- but any issue. They're funner to be around even if they can be a little stupid or silly. That's just how it is. It's really easy to understand how you oranges or blue think about gender because it's how I thought of it when i was 8 or 9.

At least a little rhetoric towards transgender people within society is pure red... Follow a line of reasoning within Project 2025 1) classify all transgender people as pedophiles (in one section of the document) 2) recommend sentencing of all pedophiles to execution (in another seection of the document) 3) voila, institutionalized violence against transgender people I prefer to not follow this fear-based line of speculation too closely, and there are many guardrails against this of course, but at the same time the rhetoric is there. Remember that it was only in the 1940's that FDR started the incarceration of Japanese Americans. I don't see it as likely at all, but at the same time I'm aware of history. I'd like to think of myself as a yellow-stage thinker, but in reality I have to work through some of this fear-based (sort-of) nonsense myself... + Glad there's some people like Emerald

@questionreality Society hurt us even before the 2000's, and this is the response, and if you don't think there should be a response it's because you're afraid of too much personal autonomy and think society can't handle the stress of this new idea. Trans ideology is a response, like any other ideology is, to societal structures that existed prior to our ideology. There were far more instances of the ideology being "shoved down my throat" that I should be happy the way that I was. The reason why you have to go to the internet to find the culture wars is because you don't even see many transgender people in public in the first place! Who is really shoving down it your throat unless you go online? Maybe at maximum one person asked you to call them a female name when they had a deep voice, and that's shoving stuff down your throat? Let's get real, most people like talking in public about pizza, their puppy or garden, or their annoying co-worker, not the fact that they hate their genitals. It's simply weird to talk about this stuff in public which is why everyone goes online to do it! Why should we just roll over on our backs like dogs to whatever you say a woman is? I'm not going to roll over and play dead and act like a male just because it threatens your ideas of how a society should function. You don't have Kallmann Syndrome or the makeup of my mind, and I don't think you'd be willing or perhaps able to imagine the initial conditions that create transgender people in the first place. Trans ideology does share many of the toxic elements that any other ideology has , but this is nothing special. You fixate on it more though because you think it will destabilize or hurt society. Saying it was "shoved down your throat" carries the implication that it came out of nowhere and we just decided to transify society for no reason. And further, the ideology isn't even always spread by transgender people themselves, there are a lot of other things going on. There are people who try to convert people to try to respect trans women, sure, but you're also missing the fact that media narratives concerning trans people are often inaccurate. That in short, whatever you think reality is, you're missing many pieces. I have many critiques of the trans community but you just don't understand these issues clearly.

He didn't say anything about preaching his ideas about gender to the masses. I'm fairly sure he's only referring to the situation where youre alone in your room thinking about gender, as it relates to personal development. Why do you always think we're trying to convert everyone? I don't actually go to elementary schools to convert anyone to be trans, no matter how many times the right says I do.

I think few people want to transition to a "trans-woman" which, for the majority of people is code or cipher for a lesser kind of woman, or even worse, a mentally confused man. (Some people are capable of some nuance to the extent where this label would be fine, but they're in the minority.) If you bake a batch of cookies, you don't eat half baked cookies, and if you transition, you don't want half-baked results. That's why I don't tell anyone I'm trans except online, because to too many people you're just a half-baked woman. Sports -- I've heard different standards brought up. And everyone is different. I heard of some swimmers' association say that you can't compete if you had finished male's puberty. So what if I had finished male puberty 30, 40, 50 , or is 60% too much? I don't know what percentage of it I completed, but I have Kallmann Syndrome and I took testosterone to start it when I was 17, stopped after a little while , then switched to estrogen. I did grow some after taking some testosterone so suppose I tried to compete. There would probably be bickering to say I did complete male puberty, that I undersold how much I took testosterone. In reality it's obscure & hypothetical how much male puberty I did complete, and this is just one of the many examples of how obscure and arbitrary this whole debate can get. You can take it on a case by case basis, but of course on the internet facts always get distorted, and then when you hear a crazy absurd case, that will get all the attention on the internet while all the other trans athletes that compete relatively fairly and normally get a shoe in the face because of that absurd case. Teaching about transgenders shouldn't probably be done in schools. It's well intentioned but probably only backfires, leading to more social contagion of the idea (which is a problem, though likely exaggerated by the right), and it leads the right to go ballistic that they're brainwashing people, which just makes people loathe us more. Also practically speaking being "prideful" about your trans status is only useful in the first stage to give you a confidence boost to complete the transition, or if you're unable to "pass" as a woman in most or all situations, after that it's useless, so the schools in a few instances celebrating pride is just not pragmatic in my opinion. Because outside of these two situations, "pride" is mostly useless and you try to forget you're trans as much as possible because you're just happier if you're really good at bullshitting people about this and hey I'm honest about that.

Trump said his presidency was the greatest 4 years ever, then says Biden immediately destroyed his legacy and now we're in the worst 4 years ever. If he's president for another 4 years, then speculatively, it should be possible for Democrats to ruin it again in 2028/2029 according to this logic ...

I really loved the book series The Wheel of Time as a lens to understand the Nazis. There's a group of villains in these books called the Forsaken. All the Forsaken are based on the Nazis. Our heroes in this story have heard horrific stories about these people on account of their terrible deeds in the distant past, and they have a mythic reputation. But they haven't met them in person, and when they do they are struck by how normal, banal, unremarkable, and in some cases how cowardly and inept they can be. There were thirteen Forsaken to showcase the variety in the Nazis. They are not all equally competent and they don't all think or act in the same way, but they are all still quite dangerous. (And I really like WoT's analysis that some Nazis will eventually be forced to do laundry and normal things and they will be seething and pouting about it)

I didn't mind any of it except that one person on the left where you can see possibly testicles hanging down. That's excessive. Put some clothes on. That's just my bias though.

I hope Kamala picks Mark Kelly too. Everyone in Tucson loves Gabby Giffords. In 2011 everyone here was praying for her to recover, even people living under a rock felt it back then. Having a vice president that has gone to space also sends a message of hope and optimism. Having a campaign that has a theme of space exploration could be a winning strategy because the Democrats in this country wants to move beyond this petty Trump bullshit and what better person to pitch than an astronaut?

He's walked out of interviews before.

Yeah that's true but also remember that in the context of his original statement, "puberty blockers are essentially sterilization drugs". This is strictly not true, at least not entirely. There's evidence to suggest that if you take a puberty blocker for a few years, and then decide to not transition, your fertility is completely unaffected. The body will in most cases attempt to correct for the drug after you stop taking it, as long as the HPG axis is working correctly. While the discussion around trans issues can be at times complicated, I think that people misrepresent the facts around this issue for drama..Sterilization is very scary to people and even the slightest threat to sterilization makes people run around in circles screaming. And for good reason, but they need to think about this issue more carefully. There should be more research to investigate this, but the fact that most Americans ingest plastic and other garbage in their body, and they're still alive should speak to some of the resilience of the human body. Going on a puberty blocker (and nothing else) for a year or two to resolve identity issues probably won't kill anyone..If we eliminate the other issues affecting fertility in the U.S. , such as poor diet, there's probably even less risk to fertility. We know that sperm counts have been dropping forever, and frankly it's easier for them to blame us transgenders than their cheeseburger. I'm being used as a proxy for blame for this plastic cheeseburger. Alea jacta est the die is cast.....

A little off-topic but here's a pretty well-edited video on Musk.. with a slightly horror-esque / meta commentary .

Also, nobody is pointing out that, in all likelihood, when he says he was "tricked" into signing papers for puberty blockers, it's likely that he had one phone in his ear while signing, trying to get to the next thing in his relatively fast-paced life... I've transitioned. The vast majority of doctors in this process do not force anything down your throat, they help you along in a process with your own consent in a professional, non-flashy way. Maybe there are a few "woke" doctors. But I cannot see them being anything but in the small minority. They get paid to do it by their local hospitals. They do not roll out a carpet for you to transition, they do not throw parties for you every time you engage in this process. (In fact in many parts of the country doctors actively try to resist you in this process, although some of that is healthy and normal since the processes are new.) In the case of a parent signing something for their child, you should read the paperwork and not blame the "woke-mind virus". The paperwork for some of this stuff can be very long and thorough. I can understand that transitioning is a new phenomenon. But I don't believe for a second that if he had read his paperwork properly, he wouldn't suffer the way he did. Musk is a terrible father. He has 10 or more kids as I believe. Shifting blame from his failure as a father to the media to misrepresent the system is just irresponsible.

This lines up with how I experienced Twitter when I revisited the site a little, in the past few days. I created a new account and saw constant right wing messaging, even after blocking a few right-wing voices and "liking" one or two left-leaning voices. Maybe I just didn't interact with the platform enough to change my feed, but it shouldn't so heavily be favored to right wing accounts when you first make an account. I had also read a tabloid news article that claimed that users were having trouble in following Kamala Harris' account.

I genuinely think she enjoyed serving as vice-president and I think you can see a little bit of that, more actual joy - plus she's generally around more decent people than Trump so she seems happier than him lol (it could just be me though). It's just that the political discourse is filled with so much filth and perception of filth that people can't imagine that she actually enjoyed anything - right wing discourse makes you think nobody, and especially not women , could ever laugh in Washington D.C. . .. They can't project a worldview or modus operandi of people in Washington D.C. outside of what's been told to them about these people so they just assume the laughter is fake.

After the Winds of Winter gets released most likely.

Ideonella sakaiensis has the ability to break down some components of plastic from what I understand. Waiting earnestly for a probiotic based on it to possibly enter the market.

Wished more people would work in a FDA-regulated manufacturing job for a year or so, might open their eyes a little about how the distribution of medical devices, drugs, etc. actually works. If the "eViL bOaRd members" "don't care" about the quality, safety and efficacy of the products, then why in a blue-collar job manufacturing the things, are you disciplined for not following quality regulations and Good Manufacturing Practices - GPM? Built these from 2015-2018. Trust me - the FDA actually has an influence on medical manufacturers. The FDA does audits on these manufacturers, and so the manufacturers always try to be on their best footing regardless of what internet memes about them say. They're too busy pumping these things out to care about the "FDA being corrupt". The FDA being around actually causes a positive feedback loop within the company. And the people on the ground care about quality too. Why? Partially because they cared about what they make, partially because the board members indirectly told them to. Also, there's a vast "hierarchy" of people that work on the quality of these products. The board members don't use a magic wand to will the products into existence. It's a long chain of events by many different players.

Yes of course, it's frighteningly easy to just jam to music for hours and do light contemplation or introspection, or just mental masturbation philosophizing, thinking you're being meta. But it's not heavy duty stuff; the real challenge is to get that long-term inner peace from non-music sources. So while I love my music, I do feel a little ambivalent about just how rewarding it is to listen to, and you never really did "much" in a sense. Though it's good to just relax sometimes of course.

@Leo Gurabans when?

Basically you can infer that without vaccinations, the "green" line, would go astronomically high and break the graph had vaccines not been administered (alongside other public health measures like masks & social distancing).