This happened in Multnomah County, which happens to be a county name I know, because it's that county with the idea of spending $22 million building 300 "tiny houses" in the backyards of homeowners who agree to take in a homeless family for 5 years.
The linked article is at HeatStreet — which has an attitude that I find unappealing and where there's a Gender Identities quiz that's freeze-framed on an image that I'm not going to click on but is either snarkily or unwittingly trading in surprising phallus placement:
I'm creating a new tag — "gender privacy" — for this and yesterday's post "What a deceptive headline at The Daily Caller!"
Yesterday's post was about a teacher who, after losing her breasts to cancer, wanted to present herself as gender neutral and to say to any children who wondered about her gender: "We all have private lives, and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day." In the comments, people focused on the problem of what pronoun to use (which really is troublesome as we maintain an interest in speaking in a natural way), and I said:
I didn't take a position on the pronouns.These are questions I really want to discuss.
I talked about etiquette and decency in interpersonal relationships.
Note that this isn't a woman demanding to be spoken of as a man or raising the issue whether she somehow really is a man. This is a person who is asking for no reference to be made to her sex. It's a request for privacy about her body.
Out of simple empathy, you could respect that.
You could also ask why a person's sex is considered properly in the public realm. Why don't we all demand privacy about the body parts we cover up and demand that others cover up. If they must be covered up, why do we feel entitled to talk about them?
Also, I see an analogy to something that happened in the development of the same-sex marriage issue. Many people started to ask why the government is involved in recognizing people's personal/sexual relationships at all. Why not privatize the whole thing, get government out of marriage? Now, you might want to think about why government concerns itself with our private parts. If you want to say gender is more than genitalia, that it's a state of mind, the question of privacy is only heightened: Why should government concern itself with how we feel deep inside?
As for those pesky pronouns, we have freedom of speech. That too belongs in the sphere of the individual. We get to decide for ourselves how to speak. There are many difficult decisions here, and the government should not be solving them.
________________________
* Let's never forget what the Saturday Night Live people found hilarious in the early 90s:
The movie was a big flop, but the character had been hugely successful on SNL in many sketches.
Posts
409 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 409 Newer› Newest»Posting the entire list of Catholic scientists would take up too much of Althouse's bandwidth, so I will limit myself to listing just a few more, from the 20th century. You know, modern people who should have known better than to fall for the myths of Bronze Age goatherds.
But alas, they were, apparently, stupid:
E. T. Whittaker (1873–1956) – English mathematician who made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics
Antonino Zichichi (1929– ) – Italian nuclear physicist, former President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare[49][50]
John Polanyi (1929– ) – Canadian chemist, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for his research in chemical kinetics[44]
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) – Hungarian polymath, made contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy
Max Perutz (1914–2002) – Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry[39][40][41]
Joseph Murray (1919–2012) – Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate[35]
John von Neumann (1903–1957) – Hungarian-born American mathematician and polymath[36] who converted to Catholicism[37]
Gender confusion in a stable minority population seems to be a minor issue compared to progressive conditions including denying life unworthy (a quasi-religious/moral judgment among the twilight faithful) and denying individual dignity (common to [class] diversitists). The problems seems to be the progress of the Pro-Choice Church that is selective, opportunistic, and unprincipled, which, among its other achievements, has engaged in wars of aggression (e.g. social justice adventurism/resource capture), elective regime changes, catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform, scientific mysticism (e.g. spontaneous conception), etc.
Its an abnormality, and moreso a deficiency, regardless of how nice you want to be.
A baby born lame has a serious problem. A kid born deaf likewise, and etc. These things inhibit normal life and normal social roles. It is normal, virtuous, to attempt to fix or palliate these problems.
And we go on to mental problems, which it is also virtuous to cure or palliate. See above re anorexia or schizophrenia.
What is different about sexual problems, or this particular set of them? Other sexual problems are uncontroversially researched and treated, but not these.
Hey, everybody. exiledonmainstreet wants you to know that as long as you're willing to go to the 13th to 18th centuries for your science, Catholic dogma and authority won't be much of an impediment to your search. (Except for this really major scuffle with a guy named "Galileo", who never came up with anything important anyway). It's only when the flowering of the sciences becomes profuse - from 1850 to today, that this whole giving it up to dogma thing becomes a bit of a bigger problem. So just go ahead and keep your state of scientific knowledge confined to the era before atomic theory, relativity, molecular biology, psychology and evolution, and you'll be ok if seeking a dual career as a monk or a friar or bishop is also in your career goals. Everyone else, not so much.
Ritmo--and others--, the term 'freak' is not used today because it carries unpleasant connotations and because it is cruel. But 'divergent' physiology means the same thing. In medicine, it is sometimes called, in slang, a 'fascinoma'.
exiledonmainstreet:
It should be noted that the Judaeo-Christian philosophy recognizes and promotes separation of logical domains: science, philosophy, fantasy, and faith. The people who inherit or adopt this philosophy do not suffer conflicts of interest in the scientific domain and in cultures that recognize a separation of logical domains.
And once you have that loophole, can you confine its size using sex discrimination? The Supreme Court said no. I agree.
And the Supreme Court was wrong. And so are you.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Who cares?
The childish answer of someone who has been proven miserably wrong and who is ignorant of the history of Western Civilization and probably gets his science from Bill Nye the Science Guy.
You stated that the Greeks and Romans made more contributions to science than the Christians did. That list shows you are demonstrably wrong and so, as usual, you then attempt to move the goal posts.
Since the Christian monks collected and preserved the texts of the ancients (rather than destroying them, as Islam does) science was able to build on the Greek and Roman foundation. I don't slight the Greeks and Romans, but your bigotry and ignorance cause you to slight the Christian contribution to Western civilization.
Posting the entire list of Catholic scientists would take up too much of Althouse's bandwidth, so I will limit myself to listing just a few more, from the 20th century. You know, modern people who should have known better than to fall for the myths of Bronze Age goatherds.
You've got a real hankering here about labelling self-identified Catholics as persecuted in the modern world. Did these people seek the approval of papal authority to do what they did? It is possible of course that they published findings that had absolutely nothing to do with, no overlap with, anything that theology was even articulate and/or knowledgeable enough to even touch on. And your organization seems to have chastened itself in light of its notorious lost battles with science in such a way that now seeks to proactively accommodate, rather than battle it. But don't let that bother you. If you want to head up a new "Scientific Martyrdom" department somewhere, I heard that Bill Donohue guy's looking for a few good ideological martyrs to add to the cause of his Catholic League.
"Hey, everybody. exiledonmainstreet wants you to know that as long as you're willing to go to the 13th to 18th centuries for your science,"
I repeat:
E. T. Whittaker (1873–1956) – English mathematician who made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics
Antonino Zichichi (1929– ) – Italian nuclear physicist, former President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare[49][50]
John Polanyi (1929– ) – Canadian chemist, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for his research in chemical kinetics[44]
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) – Hungarian polymath, made contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy
Max Perutz (1914–2002) – Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry[39][40][41]
Joseph Murray (1919–2012) – Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate[35]
John von Neumann (1903–1957) – Hungarian-born American mathematician and polymath[36] who converted to Catholicism[37]
Other sexual problems are uncontroversially researched and treated, but not these.
In fact, social liberals are targeting prepubescent and adolescent boys and girls for transgender conversion therapy and indoctrination. Very similar in method and motive to what the female chauvinists did before them when they painted with broad-spectrum brushes, and especially when they ran protection rackets for political, social, and monetary progress. It was never for the children.
It's only when the flowering of the sciences becomes profuse - from 1850 to today, that this whole giving it up to dogma thing becomes a bit of a bigger problem."
Do you have some trouble reading dates, Ritmo?
Charles W. Misner (1932–present) – American cosmologist dedicated to the study of general relativity
Kenneth R. Miller (1948–present) – American cell biologist and molecular biologist who teaches at Brown University[31]
Mario J. Molina (1943–present) – Mexican chemist, one of the precursors to the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole (1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
Peter Joseph Moloney (1891–1989) – Canadian immunologist and pioneering vaccine researcher, who worked out the first large-scale purification of insulin in 1922; International Gairdner Award, 1967)[32]
Jérôme Lejeune (1926–1994) – pediatrician and geneticist, best known for his discovery of the link of diseases to chromosome abnormalities
Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) – father of the Big Bang theory
Brian Kobilka (1955– ) – American Nobel Prize winning professor who teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine[26][27]
The childish answer of someone who has been proven miserably wrong and who is ignorant of the history of Western Civilization and probably gets his science from Bill Nye the Science Guy.
It wasn't childish and no one proved me wrong on anything. Although there have been miserable dissenters and protest warriors in these esteemed, learned chat-boards to what I write. I followed up what I said with a cogent explanation of the need to divide the rational from the irrational when doing science - whether at the institutional level, social level or even within the mind of a self-professed religious guy like Fran Collins. But I guess actually knowing who he is or his importance in 2017 is not as important to you as is cutting and pasting and regurgitating a whole bunch of names that you never heard of before now but just wanted to flood the comments section with in a desperate attempt to proclaim the superiority of your sense of martyrdom. Is it a project Mel Gibson helped you with, BTW?
Bill Nye is a more reliable science educator than you, that's for sure. I won't even ask you for a source you consider more reliable for your own science education - since you probably don't have one, you don't care to be educated in popular science findings, and just wanted to revive one of your medieval theological power struggle pissing matches from centuries ago that most rational people have lost any interest in.
Its an abnormality, and moreso a deficiency, regardless of how nice you want to be.
A baby born lame has a serious problem. A kid born deaf likewise, and etc. These things inhibit normal life and normal social roles. It is normal, virtuous, to attempt to fix or palliate these problems.
And we go on to mental problems, which it is also virtuous to cure or palliate. See above re anorexia or schizophrenia.
What is different about sexual problems, or this particular set of them? Other sexual problems are uncontroversially researched and treated, but not these.
Exactly so, buwaya. But in today's world we are forbidden to see these abnormalities as
'problems'.
Just as many people with mental illness have contributed to our civilization, so have those with sexual abnormalities. And, as you say, the lame and deaf. But our culture has recently adopted a kind of gender-neutrality cult that contradicts nature. It also encourages children to identify themselves as 'gay' earlier in life than their development would warrant.
Do you have some trouble reading dates, Ritmo?
Do you have trouble seeing how much smaller your list becomes with those dates, doofus?
My, my. It must be a real problem when such an overcompensating old lover of machismo as yourself has trouble with yardsticks and other, er, measurement contests.
Those guys have a saying about scoreboards. But your habit has apparently veiled your sight from it, as a burka would.
The Muslims think they too were great scientists a thousand years ago. Which is nice. I'm glad your two groups feel you have so much in common. Perhaps you do.
Science is not empiricism.
Science, as we understand it, requires the development of a testable model, a hypothesis, to explain phenomena.
Purest empiricism does not seek to explain anything, merely to predict. Thats where most of our technology actually comes from. It may use "science" to the degree its useful in predicting outcomes ("scientific" formulas, with fudge factors and margins of error added), but empirical knowledge works on its own, through best practices and rules of thumb. Precision machine tools, for instance, the sine qua non of modern "science" (go get decent instruments otherwise), evolved, they were not derived.
"Science" in that way is a bit of a fraud. One hears of great scientists doing this or that, but the real upgrades in technology are far more due to the cumulative small changes made by hordes of humble technicians and engineers, and many of them formally scientists, but acting like engineers.
Mathematics is a different matter.
Science is not empiricism.
Without empiricism there is no such thing as science.
Science is the successful combination of empiricism with rationalism, without privileging one over the other as the philosophers are so fond of doing.
At any rate, Ritmo, your initial ignorant comment was that the Greeks and Romans contributed more to western science than Christianity did. If you are willing to acknowledge the contributions of people who lived in 300 B.C. why so churlish and dismissive of those who lived in 1300?
Do you really think Francis Bacon and Gregor Mendel contributed nothing worth mentioning?
What a magical view you have of science: the Greeks and Romans did some great stuff and then nothing of note (except for Galileo!!) happened until secularists sprang forth during the Enlightenment and created the Modern World, with no input from the god botherers.
And you think you don't believe in myths...ha!
"Do you have trouble seeing how much smaller your list becomes with those dates, doofus?"
Do you have trouble understanding I only posted about half the list and only picked out a few names from the 20th century? And that that list is only made up of Catholics and not Protestants or observant Jews? It would be much much longer if it were so expanded.
I could post the entire thing, but I made my point.
Your initial claim, doofus, was that Christianity has contributed very little to science. That list proves you wrong. Of course, that is unbearable to you so now you are obviously and predictably engaged in goal post moving, sophistry and your usual insults.
It's only when the flowering of the sciences becomes profuse - from 1850 to today, that this whole giving it up to dogma thing becomes a bit of a bigger problem.
More ignorance on the part of R&B. It's not the catholic church that has a problem with evolution, it is the biblical literalists. And no, Catholics aren't biblical literalists.
At any rate, Ritmo,
What do you mean, "at any rate"? If you're not willing to read my responses then there's no reason for me to read your own. You're again proving yourself to be a selective arguer/debater, which means you're not worth engaging. You're here to spew marketing propaganda from somewhere and not because you're able to actually deal with what you can't accept.
..your initial ignorant comment was that the Greeks and Romans contributed more to western science than Christianity did.
The Greeks invented the philosophy of the scientific method, as far as anyone is aware, and came up with more fundamental findings underpinning the foundations of math, physics, rational philosophy in general and the scientific method than anyone else. Anyone, any scientist can elaborate beyond that, and many have. Populations have grown, scientists have gained in number. It means you have more of them to sift through to identify those among them whose contributions rival, in terms of quality, what the Greeks of antiquity, insofar as proportional population numbers and ingenuity go, accomplished.
I never mentioned Bacon or Mendel. I also never mentioned Archimedes, or any individual Greek scientist, either. BTW, the Greeks believed in Zeus, Aphrodite, Prometheus and tons of other irrational things. The crucial difference being that whatever institutional religious offices they had or reinforced never seemed to be as great an intellectual enemy toward what they were doing as your beloved church was around the more relevant period of when modern astronomy was being developed. Greek priests were simply uninterested in and unbothered by their philosophy undertakings - at least not to the same degree. Other secular authorities might have been when it came to one non-scientist, Socrates. But the whole need to authoritatively meddle in the most socially vexing conclusions of their enterprise - that was something that the Church later sought to exemplify, as well as its successors among the social theocrats residing in red states and on these chat boards.
I submit that this woman did more for science and technology than Bill Nye will ever do:
Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M. (c. 1913 – January 10, 1985) was an American religious sister, educator and pioneer in computer science. On June 7, 1965 she, along with Irving Tang at Washington University, became the first people in the United States to earn a doctorate in that field.
Keller earned her degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her thesis was titled Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns.
In 1958, Keller began working at the National Science Foundation workshop in the computer science center at Dartmouth College, a male-only institution at the time, where she participated in the development of the BASIC programming language."
Now there's a feminist hero and a real pioneer for you Ritmo.
Your initial claim, doofus, was that Christianity has contributed very little to science.
It has. Mendel and Bacon did their thing in spite of Christianity. Not because of it. Do we now have to ascribe their toileting habits to Christianity, also? You have a real issue of confusing beliefs and/or habits with identities. Give it a rest. You are tiresome. Maybe they had Christian sleep/wake patterns, also. Christian walking paces. Every single thing about them was Christian. They even had Christian feet and Christian toenails. Christian eyeballs, in fact. Christian uvulae and Christian baking. Good golly gosh Gorsuch you're a rascally weirdo. It's like you're the kid in Sixth Sense. I see CHRISTIANS!!! A little obsessive there.
That list proves you wrong.
That list, which you posted twice, is short.
States buwaya: Science, as we understand it, requires the development of a testable model, a hypothesis, to explain phenomena.
Which is why chemistry and physics are 'sciences' and sociology and economics are not.
I submit that this woman did more for science and technology than Bill Nye will ever do:
Your submission is rejected -- not that I deny that it might be a favorite pose of yours. Science education is important - just not to you. I'm not interested in going through this person's contributions, since you aren't interested in them either. You're just switching breasts to beat and going from the Christian identity to the feminist woman identity.
Please proceed to beat your breasts without me, thank you. Although it's good to see you finally expressing that long-suppressed outpouring of testosterone you've had welling up within you.
More to the point, re technology -
Technology is far, far more relevant to the modern world, to productivity, prosperity and power, than "science".
It has fed from science, more lately, but science has fed immensely more from technology and that continues.
The structures of both are extremely different, the processes of both are extremely different. Even their psychology is different.
Anyway, historically science was nearly irrelevant until the 20th century, material progress was entirely due to those mostly anonymous drones in their machine shops and drafting lofts.
And its these people, Christians in Christian societies, that created the power of Christian Europe, not the academic scientists.
As far as science and religion go, it's engineers who made the modern world, working sometimes off the ideas from science. And for the most part, Christian engineers. The ancient Romans had hero's steam engine, that went round and round, but was never harnessed to do anything useful. Englishman Thomas Newcomen, Baptist lay preacher, is credited with making the first useful steam engine that did work. The first armored warship I know of was the Turtle, used by Koreans against the Japanese. There's a great model of it in front of the Korean Naval Academy in Chin Hae. But the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack ushered in the age of iron warships. If I started rummaging through engineering history, I could easily find hundreds of example of engineering that were first thought of by the ancients, or in the Orient, that were improved upon and actually made useful in Christian Europe and the United States. Scientists come up with ideas. Engineers make the ideas useful.
"More ignorance on the part of R&B. It's not the catholic church that has a problem with evolution, it is the biblical literalists. And no, Catholics aren't biblical literalists."
Exactly. My entire education was Catholic and the nuns taught me about evolution in grade school.
As I noted the other day, it is utterly impossible to understand Western Civilization - or to value it - if you do not know or understand the history of Christianity. You don't have to be a believer to do so. Nonbelievers like Ritmo are not only ignorant of Christian doctrine and history, they are proud of their ignorance, so it becomes impossible to have an intelligent debate with them. The religion they have invented in their minds is a cartoon and bears no relationship to the much more complex truth.
"And for the most part, Christian engineers"
Thanks for noting that. I did not mean to slight the Protestants. It's true that many of the very best in the 19th century came from highly religious Calvinist Scotland.
And then there is the class issue.
One reason science gets the credit for anything and everything, is the old bugaboo of social class. To be a scientist one had to be an educated man, or at least pretend to be. It was, eventually, a calling fit for gentlemen, as ultimately one produced documents, discussed via correspondence, often in Latin.
The engineer, however, was never a gentleman, much less the mechanic. Laying hand to metal for money was not done.
Anyway, historically science was nearly irrelevant until the 20th century, material progress was entirely due to those mostly anonymous drones in their machine shops and drafting lofts.
Renaissance architects were actually very knowledgeable about physics. Much more so than are modern architects who are more reliant on technology.
"You're just switching breasts to beat and going from the Christian identity to the feminist woman identity."
Oh, horseshit, you're ridiculous.
I pointed her out solely because in your cartoon world, a nun with a PhD in computer science from Dartmouth isn't supposed to exist. Yet she did, and made a bigger contribution than that bow-tied, smarmy, silly little TV "scientist" who teaches you everything you know about science will ever do.
Scientists sometimes came up with ideas.
But not as often as one would think.
Open a copy of Marks Mechanical Engineers Handbook (yes, it is a biblical work, for four generations) and you wont find a lot of science in it. You will find lots of mathematics, as that stuff is handy.
Re another comment by buwaya: A baby born lame has a serious problem. A kid born deaf likewise, and etc. These things inhibit normal life and normal social roles. It is normal, virtuous, to attempt to fix or palliate these problems.
Remember the controversy regarding deafness in children? There were some groups who insisted that the children were better off using sign language than getting surgery that would give them normal hearing.
Exactly. My entire education was Catholic and the nuns taught me about evolution in grade school.
As I noted the other day, it is utterly impossible to understand Western Civilization - or to value it - if you do not know or understand the history of Christianity.
We are not talking about "Western Civilization". We are talking about SCIENCE. A part of it, and not a very Christian part. The RCC I already mentioned does seek to proactively accommodate science much better than in the past, but that's because its past was embarrassing and notorious. They teach evolution, they've got their own astronomers. They feel they influenced Big Bang Theory or just like to claim it for its likeminded conclusions. All nice, all not so very controversial. Now on with that thing about believing that fertilized eggs are persons.
Nonbelievers like Ritmo are not only ignorant of Christian doctrine and history, they are proud of their ignorance, so it becomes impossible to have an intelligent debate with them.
Well, of course. DId you not notice the post subject? It's about transexuals and society's response to them. I addressed the science of this problem. You're seeking to reinsert your favorite subject of religious martyrdom into it. Is the church relevant on transexualism? If not, then again, go away. If there are breasts to be beaten on the subject, are yours really the prettiest and is there evidence to that effect? I'm not sure, but I could be proven wrong. And how any of this has anything to do with transexualism, you tell me. It sounds like it's anyone's guess. Maybe those priests and nuns are real experts on the subject. But I doubt it, since sexual blindspots and hang-ups seem to be a real problem for them even today.
The religion they have invented in their minds is a cartoon and bears no relationship to the much more complex truth.
So you tell us the non-cartoonish and truthy relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to anything useful worth understanding about the human rights (or even natural rights) of transexuals, turkey.
I pointed her out solely because in your cartoon world, a nun with a PhD in computer science from Dartmouth isn't supposed to exist.
Hmmmmm. I don't remember making that claim. But if mere existence is the criterion your after, rather than worthy notoriety or impact, then I'm glad you understand how low a bar you have there to set for yourself.
Are you enjoying your Crusade for Christian Science, today? Again, do let me know what sort of specifically Christian perspective we are supposed to consult on the topic of the thread, which in case you forgot (as you tend to), is: The human (or natural) rights of transexuals in a society that apparently finds them/their identity to be controversial.
"It has. Mendel and Bacon did their thing in spite of Christianity"
No, bonehead, they were men who belonged to religious orders, lived in a completely Christian society and saw their quest for knowledge as a way of further understanding and ordering the world God made. Their faith inspired them to look for Truth, it didn't handicap them.
Both science and engineering are important, buwaya. The value of astronomy is not dependent on space travel. The study of things for its own sake will always be important.
"Nonbelievers like Ritmo are not only ignorant of Christian doctrine and history, they are proud of their ignorance, so it becomes impossible to have an intelligent debate with them.
Well, of course."
In that case, why I am continuing to debate a proud ignoramus? It's like talking about theology with Beavis and Butthead.
Whatevs, bigot.
No, bonehead, they were men who belonged to religious orders, lived in a completely Christian society and saw their quest for knowledge as a way of further understanding and ordering the world God made. Their faith inspired them to look for Truth, it didn't handicap them.
Oh! So now inspiration is the bar, not instruction! Good to know.
In that case, I claim the chemist Kekule for being inspired to come up with the important concept of the aromaticity of cyclic hydrocarbon molecules by dreaming of a snake chasing its tail. Which if your thinking was valid, means that snakes are crucial to the aromaticity of hydrocarbons!
You are sinking to deplorably embarrassing depths. I don't know what I did or said to offend you, but you should really ask yourself if you're not just inserting your own issues into a conversation that really doesn't have much of anything to do with them.
Sexual hangups and blindspots seem to be a general problem these days.
Anyway - the RC or any other religious point of view wrt to sex is a matter of perspective. Why are you here? Whats the point of your existence? What is good, or evil, and which should you be? Etc.
Considering the scale of the questions asked, and the nature of the answers, tends to put the matter of sex or personal proclivities of any sort in perspective. And the perspective is that one persons urges, loves, hates and appetites don't amount to a hill of beans. You have enormous obligations, and if your personal crotchets get in the way, well, priorities.
It's like talking about theology with Beavis and Butthead.
Says the follower of a theology as ignorant of sexuality as Beavis and Butthead are!
Christianity certainly does not preclude scientific inquiry and accomplishments. In view of history, only an ignorant fool would think so. The Bible is a spiritual guide, not a scientific treatise. The trouble with unbelievers is that there is no spiritual realm and no code of morality to keep science both ethical and humane.
Whatevs, bigot.
RELIGIOUS LIVES MATTER!
ROFLMAO.
Someone took too many notes at (and much inspiration from) the BLM spectacles.
You're interrupting the wrong speech, burka jane.
My high school yearbook was called "Munhinotu"
I'm not kidding.
It stands for M—Multnomah, UN—Union, HI-High (School District), NO—Number, TU—Two.
Not "Tu" as in thou, but "Tu" as in "deux" argh...
And now you know the rest of the story...
The trouble with unbelievers is that there is no spiritual realm and no code of morality to keep science both ethical and humane.
Sam Harris has a strong and credible dissent from this. Burka Jane Mainstreet above might find it "bigoted" (in her BLM-inspired way), but it's a serious one.
The idea that conventional religious institutions are necessary for whatever spirituality or "code of morality" can keep other human endeavors ethical and humane is highly contestable. Most review boards receive no theological input whatsoever and do a fine job of overseeing those concerns.
Astronomy would be completely impossible without, to start, precision machining. All those telescope equatorial mounts!
Just getting all those precise gears - for a hundred ton mechanism... Add radio, electrical engineering, casting glass, etc. and etc.
Without all this there would be no astronomy at all post-1790. Or probably earlier. Do the guys at Corning glass who figured out how to make the blanks for Mount Palomar get credit? Nope, they served, retired and died. Nobody named some other giant telescope after them (as they did for Hubble).
Ritmo, you're the pigeon who shits all over the chessboard, knocks over all the pieces and declares victory.
Nah. I won this exchange by exposing your boundless ignorance of both history and religion.
I know you can't be a graceful loser and can never admit you are wrong, so you vomit up numerous stupid word salads, move the goalposts and lie - and then you strut around like the sad douche you are proclaiming victory.
"Yay! I Ritmo, have hereby won this thread because I, Ritmo, have said so."
Right. You go on believing that, little buddy.
Ethics boards (and I have some experience) assume some community standard of behavior (I wont call it ethics) without poking into the principles thereof. Harris cant generate a non-culturally determined ethics. Or at best he and his ilk spew much ink and flee any actual judgement.
A Chinese Sam Harris would almost certainly come up with rather different conclusions, as would an Islamic Sam Harris.
Which is why I asked you some time back about foreign ethical systems.
Most review boards receive no theological input whatsoever and do a fine job of overseeing those concerns.
Why do most physicians refuse to perform abortions? Is it because the procedure destroys life? Who claims that a 'fetus' is a living human being? Not you, I'm sure. To you, a fetus is just a clump of tissue to be extracted and destroyed. Or used for experimentation. Christians of most denominations are outspokenly against such procedures. Without Christians, there would be no controversy. In fact, without Christians, there would be all kinds of human experimentation and the old, the mentally ill and the physically disabled would be eliminated as unproductive, as the Nazis did.
The problem here as in so much else is that the identity here is subjective. There is no objective way to determine gender identity other than the way that worked for pretty much every generation up until the present - look under the hood and classify based on the physical parts.
Pronouns are meant linguistically to be a simplification to avoid having to say the name of the noun again and again. There's a reason that pronouns are relatively limited in number, because a shortcut is only a shortcut so long as it is relatively easy and quick to apply and everyone understands what is meant. The multiplication of pronouns really means more the end of pronouns, as the inability to know who matches what pronoun gets to be impossible.
Someone I know who rolls their eyes at this idea claims that they sexually identify as a helicopter anytime this subject comes up. Obviously they're not a helicopter, but exactly where does the line get drawn between what someone physically is and what they mentally claim to be? The physical evidence says the mental claim is wrong, and once upon a time society took the physical evidence to be the truth.
I remember the recent story about the transgender teen who was getting all broken up at the fact that guys didn't want to date him once they found out he had a penis. He didn't really seem to get that the guys in question wanted an actual female with female biology, not a guy dressed up as a female, that there really is a difference between the two, and that it's not all about him and his desires.
The bottom line with any transgender is that they remain biologically what they were born as. Bruce Jenner can have all the plastic surgeries and hormones pumped into him that he wants, the cells are still XY and from a scientific perspective, it would be reckless malpractice to treat him as if he were a biological woman or to treat him as a woman in any kind of scientific study.
mockturtle, witness the Dutch and Belgian euthanasia laws:
" Who would ever have thought ten years ago that Belgium would be offering euthanasia to mentally ill prisoners instead of providing psychiatric treatment? Even Distelmans, himself responsible for euthanising the deaf twins and the transsexual Nathan Verhelst, has expressed concern, stating: ‘Surely, we are not going to carry out euthanasia because we can’t offer an alternative?’ Apparently they are."
A 41 year old Dutchman recently put down like an old dog rather because he was an alcoholic who couldn't quit and it made him unhappy. So much for limiting the practice to those with terminal, painful illness.
It won't be long of course (and might be happening now) that patients are pressured into taking the lethal injection rather than remaining alive and taking up the state's precious resources.
Post Christian, secular Europe is intent on committing suicide and it's doing so in more ways than one.
My dad was raised on a farm. I'm talking farm as in the city was half a days drive or ride away. Everyone had 160 acres back in those days.
When I was a kid, we had a dog named "Peaches" (my Mom named her).
Anyway, she got knocked up, and when she was about to birth her puppies, my Dad came in with a meat cleaver. I didn't know what that was for, as I always just assumed the birth canal was adequate to the task.
Anyway we got four puppies. My Dad looked over each one real good, and one of them had a bad leg. I mean it was not a good leg. Dad took it to the cutting board and chopped its head off and put the remains in a paper sack.
"A defective puppy is like an ice cream cone without any ice cream." He said.
Cool, so we watched the new puppies for awhile and then Mom called and said dinner was ready. As I was eating a piece of fried chicken, my sister said:
"Mon poulet goûte comme une tête de chien !"
We all laughed at her joke... Dad and Mom just looked at each other. They knew my sister was going to be a troubled girl later in life.
Etienne reports: We all laughed at her joke... Dad and Mom just looked at each other. They knew my sister was going to be a troubled girl later in life.
And, was she?
"The bottom line with any transgender is that they remain biologically what they were born as. Bruce Jenner can have all the plastic surgeries and hormones pumped into him that he wants, the cells are still XY and from a scientific perspective, it would be reckless malpractice to treat him as if he were a biological woman or to treat him as a woman in any kind of scientific study."
That's exactly it. And I find it funny that many of the same people who carefully read food labels for preservatives, shun GM food and wouldn't dream of eating a non-organic egg are just fine with trannies pumping hormones into their bodies,even when they are teenagers who are interfering with the natural process of puberty by doing so.
"The trouble with unbelievers is that there is no spiritual realm and no code of morality to keep science both ethical and humane."
Says some of the very believers and traditionalists who treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human. Is that ethical and humane? Where did they learn to treat other humans in such a way? Church? I doubt it. I think there are people who stand behind the cross and feel safe throwing stones from that vantage point at the ones they have labeled as "abnormal". I've met atheists that are more empathetic and decent than some "believers".
Post Christian, secular Europe is intent on committing suicide and it's doing so in more ways than one.
So true, buwaya. And we don't want to follow suit. As health care resources dwindle and an aging population booms, there will, indeed, be encouragement toward the 'final solution'. The elderly and disabled will be made to feel guilty for using up space and resources.
"Says the some of the very believers and traditionalists who treat the transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human."
Who says that, Inga? Provide a quote.
Saying that a man is a man not a woman is not "treating them as less than a full human."
Is telling an anoxeric that she is correct in her perception that she is fat although she weighs 95 lbs. humane or kind?
Your "kindness" will end up killing people and making the already confused and unhappy more so.
Says some of the very believers and traditionalists who treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human. Is that ethical and humane? Where did they learn to treat other humans in such a way?
Can you provide an example, Inga, of Christians treating homosexuals and transgenders as 'less than a full human'? You are relapsing back into Unknown territory now.
"So true, buwaya."
That was me, not buwaya, although I don't mind being mistaken for a man who is a wise and always interesting commentator.
"As health care resources dwindle and an aging population booms, there will, indeed, be encouragement toward the 'final solution'. The elderly and disabled will be made to feel guilty for using up space and resources."
Yep. And people like Inga will applaud the murders and tell themselves they are being compassionate and humane in doing so.
Of course, that's until Inga finds herself on the receiving end of it. "But I don't want to die yet!" "Oh, c'mon, stop being so damn selfish!"
" You are relapsing back into Unknown territory now."
I knew the "kinder, gentler" Inga wouldn't last very long.
That was me, not buwaya, although I don't mind being mistaken for a man who is a wise and always interesting commentator.
Sorry, Exiled! I knew it was somebody wise and interesting. ;-)
Says some of the very believers and traditionalists who treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human.
Silly Inga. It is believers and traditionalists who treat the transgendered and homosexuals as fully human moral agents, responsible for their behavior.
Beings that are not human have no moral responsibilities. They cannot make moral decisions.
It is people like R&B who treat the transgendered and the homosexuals as beings whose behavior is a result of some congenital condition they are powerless to overrule.
R&B wrote:
Science is the successful combination of empiricism with rationalism, without privileging one over the other as the philosophers are so fond of doing.
The essence of science is the repeatability of an observation. Bacon's original idea was that the natural philosopher should observe and record only. By making an experiment repeatable, you removed the subjective factor. Looking for causality only came later, with Diderot IIRC.
"" You are relapsing back into Unknown territory now."
I knew the "kinder, gentler" Inga wouldn't last very long"
As the box of wine gets lighter, the bug eyed bitch lets the mask slip.
I did have a good chuckle at the assertion that "Inga" was a meta figment of peoples of imaginations. I didn't know figments could whine about not getting disability payments.
Also, Bitchmo got served, although is fundamentally incapable of admitting it, even to himself.
Althouse wrote: Why not privatize the whole thing, get government out of marriage?
The word "privatize" is problematic, since it has pointed political meaning. It implies that some other, private, entitity takes over the issue.
I might write "Why not individualize the whole thing, get government out of marriage?"
But individualizing everything doesn't answer the complications of the public space.
Would you like to explain how these comments reflect Human decency and empathy? I'm not seeing it. Also, I've heard much worse offline and online here at Althouse and elsewhere for all the years I've been a reader and commenter here and other sites.
Blogger buwaya said...
"Back in the day "freaks" were so unusual that it was fashionable for royal courts to collect blacks and dwarfs, as status-symbol servants."
Mockturtle said...
"Such people are to be pitied, not celebrated. They are, in fact, freaks."
Achilles said...
"It is merely a tool of the left to destroy as much of the fabric of American society as possible and a bunch of big government people on the right to try to tell people how to live."
Angel-Dyne said...
"These are the sorts of "deep questions" that begin to be aired in public when adult society has been degraded to a open-air dorm room for spoiled post-adolescents, with growing numbers of social and emotional pathologies."
" tranny-palooza"
Lewis Wetzel said...
"They hate their torment, and they hate God, but none of them hate their sins, or regret them."
The comments I listed above drip with judgment and misunderstanding what these people are going through, again not a shining example of an empathetic, decent, thoughtful people, who respect others privacy regarding their own bodies.
Why do most physicians refuse to perform abortions?
Why do most of them refuse to remove hangnails, or perform endoscopies, or invasive cardiovascular procedures? Because each one of these is the realm of a specialist. I'm really surprised how much you could learn about medical practice, as someone who works in science. Also, I'm sure the controversy aspect plays a role. Could another answer be, because they don't want to be shot up like George Tiller by one of your right-wing wackos? That's a job hazard worth considering that other specialists get to avoid. You run the risk of confusing social opprobrium with moral conviction. No one wants to get trampled by a mob. Doesn't mean they agree with the mob. Wouldn't the political right in America understand something like that? We can go back to tons of examples historically where people disagreed with and/or secretly acted/rebelled against the day's morals, only to have to wait centuries after their deaths to be vindicated. Nothing new here.
"Says some of the very believers and traditionalists who treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human."
You know what group of believers and traditionalists treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human? Muslims. Homosexuality is illegal in every Muslim country and in some of them, gays are thrown off roofs. Somehow I haven't noticed gays and lesbians crowding into Muslim owned bakeries to order wedding cakes. That's because they know that they might be putting their lives into their hands when they try to force Muslims to bake cakes for them. With Christians, they get to feel the sadistic delight of ruining other people's lives and businesses.
Inga, of course, is in favor of letting more Muslims and their enlightened culture into this country. They would have so much more compassion and love for the Bruce Jenners of this world than Christians do.
"You know what group of believers and traditionalists treat transgendered and homosexuals as less than a full human? Muslims."
Yes, so why emulate them?
The comments I listed above drip with judgment and misunderstanding what these people are going through, again not a shining example of an empathetic, decent, thoughtful people, who respect others privacy regarding their own bodies.
They just need someone to hate and/or look down upon. That's the role of the right in society: To act out society's hatreds and delineate its divisions. If you ask them to be rational, it's a lost cause. The whole history of the political right was as a rebellion against Lockean liberalism: The idea that reason can improve the human condition. They hate that. Their European forebears centuries ago actually had decent alternatives: Institutions. But America was not built upon any of those institutions, so our right-wing suffers from a sense of political orphanhood. It is an alienated disease in a land that was built on the rationalism of the European enlightenment and rebellion against arbitrary institutions and authority: Like the British monarchy. Conservatives here at that time would have been Tory loyalists, and had to figure out what severed institutions to grope for in a land that never built them from time immemorial, but only on rationally designed bases. Even our form of government was rationally designed. As such, American conservatives are at war with the very idea of America and what it was founded upon.
Lewis Wetzel said...
"They hate their torment, and they hate God, but none of them hate their sins, or regret them."
I was talking about the damned souls in Dante's Inferno, you ignoramus.
It's literature, a real book, an epic poem written almost 700 years ago. You can look it up.
Nah. I won this exchange by exposing your boundless ignorance of both history and religion.
So now the standard is that being a cut-and-paste bot like mainstreet makes one a winner of all the internets. Interesting.
I know you can't be a graceful loser -
LOL. See above.
- and can never admit you are wrong,
Not when you can't provide a statement I made that was wrong. And misunderstanding my statements doesn't make your accusations against them right.
so you vomit up numerous stupid word salads,
Translation: You think being illiterate makes the text you can't read, wrong.
move the goalposts and lie -
Feel free to blame the extinction of the dinosaurs on me also, at any moment.
Inga, look up Velasquez, "Las Meninas"
And Alexander Pushkins great grandpa.
mockturtle said...And, was she?
Probably was more a Saint than I. But you may know how parents worry about their daughters.
Lewis, I didn't read every single comment of yours. I actually skip over the majority of your comments, as your formatting of your comments make them a pain in the ass to read. Try using a space between paragraphs. I did see the quote and thought you were directing it toward the people we are speaking about. It was an innocent mistake and you don't need to be a jerk about it, but maybe you can't help yourself.
It is people like R&B who treat the transgendered and the homosexuals as beings whose behavior is a result of some congenital condition they are powerless to overrule.
It is only natural and logical to do so, because I treat the cisgendered and heterosexuals the same way.
If you disagree and are not tran or gay, then please inform me whom or what organization it was that taught you to be cis and straight.
I never saw an instance of this stuff being learned behavior. But if you have, please enlighten.
Inga said...
Would you like to explain how these comments reflect Human decency and empathy? "
"Decency" does not mean applauding and approving delusions. Nobody is suggesting that they be killed or imprisoned (which is what would happen in a Muslim country).
Your "kindness" Inga is actually cruelty. As I said, it is not kindness to tell a 95 lb. anoxeric that if she feels herself to be fat, she is. You are saying it is kind to humor people with disturbed body images to believe a lie.
Is this fair?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/transgender-teenage-wrestler-wins-texas-state-championship-052028510--spt.html
This is not the first instance of this and it won't be the last. Guys who are mediocre athletes when competing against their own sex are finding that they can now compete against women if they say they are girls. Suddenly, they're not bad athletes any more, they're brave pioneers! Winners!
Perhaps you'll feel differently when you see men winning the women's competitions during the Olympics and thus rendering the whole category of "women's sports" meaningless.
Harris cant generate a non-culturally determined ethics.
I don't think that's what he's trying to do.
"I knew the "kinder, gentler" Inga wouldn't last very long."
I try to not interact with this person, but I am going to point out that this person expects respectful discourse from others while being possibly one of the most hateful commenters on Althouse. I would say that displays an inordinate amount of hypocrisy and self delusion.
...got served, although is fundamentally incapable of admitting it...
I got served? What? A steaming pile of bullshit?
I rejected the service. I sent the dish back. The waiter needs to tell management to fire the chef and hire someone who actually knows how to cook.
"Critics are scrutinizing mixed martial arts (MMA) competitor Fallon Fox, after the transgender fighter gave her opponent a concussion and broke her eye socket.
Fox defeated her opponent, Tamikka Brents, by TKO at 2:17 of the first round of their match. Brent’s eye injury resulted in a damaged orbital bone that required seven staples.
In a post-fight interview this week, Brents told Whoa TV, “I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life.”
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not, because I’m not a doctor,” she stated. “I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life, and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right. ”
Fox’s “grip was different,” Brents added. “I could usually move around in the clinch against…females but couldn’t move at all in Fox’s clinch.”
What wonderful progress, Inga! A man now gets awards and applause for beating the crap out of women!
"...got served, although is fundamentally incapable of admitting it...
"I got served? What? A steaming pile of bullshit?
I rejected the service. I sent the dish back. The waiter needs to tell management to fire the chef and hire someone who actually knows how to cook."
---------
TTR,
No one ordered the Poo Poo Platter, did they? Lol.
Yes, so why emulate them?
3/26/17, 6:43 PM
Nobody is emulating them, Inga. Who is arguing for imprisonment or execution of gays?
I'm trying to be civil but it's difficult because you seem incapable of logical thought.
You want to let more Muslims in. Why?
Yeah, Ritmo, you got served.
But hey, I'm done with you. You're boring - an utterly conventional thinker.
No one ordered the Poo Poo Platter, did they? Lol.
Well, no one goes to right-wingers for answers. So their mouths rendered useless, their hands' writings ignored, they just spew stuff out of their asses instead, and call it "reality" and "good advice."
You're boring
So are you. And you're OLD.
But some of us are better at not confusing our entertainment needs with how we gain information. Ritalin, much?
- an utterly conventional thinker.
Oh no! Reality is conventional! Run from it, Forrest! Run! How can we live within reality when we need to fantasize our way to a different "convention?!!!!!"
Right wing dilemmas = Unnecessary dramas. These people will create a drama out of Newtonian physics. BORING! BORING!
Dumbass! Hahaha.
mainstreet honed her penchant for creativity through Cut n' Paste class at the country's best parochial schools.
She got slapped on the wrist with rulers whenever she copied and pasted the wrong answers.
They told her to be more creative. There is no originality in actually getting the answer right.
"I try to not interact with this person"
You try to not interact with me because you can't construct a rebuttal to any point I make. All you do is piss and emote.
TTR,
Well, there's no accounting for "taste", I guess they relish it and eat it up and think it's nourishment. I'm thankful to Althouse for introducing this subject and calling them traditionalists, which is possibly more respectful than they deserve. It's good to know she sees this as a privacy issue as well as a decency issue. It was good to see this side of Althouse again.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"As for the teacher who sued, I think there's a big question of fact about the harassment she complained about: Were other people in the school just speaking naturally and the word "she" came up or were they deliberately giving her a hard time, bearing down on the "she" and trying to make her feel like an outsider? I don't know, but it makes a huge difference. There's legal doctrine that talks about whether what's going on is "severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive." I chose in writing about that teacher to call traditionalists to the values of etiquette and interpersonal decency."
"So are you. And you're OLD. "
Mid-50's. Happens to everybody.
What a great argument though. "You're OLD!"
A really compelling rebuttal.
LOL.
You try to not interact with me because you can't construct a rebuttal to any point I make.
Point of order! Point of order!
It is not a "point" to vent meaninglessly. Or to copy and paste long tracts of irrelevant lists.
Religious Lives Matter! Catholics Can be scientists, too!
Wow. Really entertaining, original stuff there. Also, straw men that no one ever attacked.
But if you must be a martyr, it must be a priority to fantasize an attack, I suppose.
I remember Renée Richards, a male-to-female trans tennis player who sued to play on the women's tour. 'She' was granted permission by the NY Supreme Court. I expect golf and other sports will become havens for trans athletes wanting to up their chances of success. Women's sports are doomed.
A really compelling rebuttal.
It wasn't a rebuttal. It was an explanation for your addled baby boomer's mind's inability to reason, or to separate entertainment from information.
Your generation has a lock on irresponsibility. It inflicts its boredom into our political and social lives and needs to be reprimanded.
Just think of me as you would one of your teachers. Just with a better sex life and healthier emotional outlook. ;-)
"As I said, it is not kindness to tell a 95 lb. anoxeric that if she feels herself to be fat, she is. You are saying it is kind to humor people with disturbed body images to believe a lie."
Inga ignores that because she can't come up with a response that isn't her usual load of poo-poo platter.
Nothing to say about what will happen to Title IX if men who say they are women start competing in women's sports. Yay! Let's have more men beating the crap out of real women atheletes! It would be so unkind to deny them the opportunity to do so.
"If you disagree and are not tran or gay, then please inform me whom or what organization it was that taught you to be cis and straight."
Again with the anti-science stuff. Didn't you read the APA stuff I quoted?
What causes a person to have a particular sexual orientation?
There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
Repeated, with emboldening:
Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
I have no memory of learning most of the behaviors I exhibit. Or choosing them. Neither do most people.
I don't like mayonaise. I have no experience of learning not to like mayonaise. It must be inborn! Some hormonal thing! I have no experience of learning to be right handed! It must be inborn!
The handedness thing is a great analogy, R&B. In any large group of people, some people are left handed. But in cultures which discourage left handedness, fewer people are left handed. Weird, huh? Nature or nurture?
In any large group of people, some people are left handed. But in cultures which discourage left handedness, fewer people are left handed. Weird, huh? Nature or nurture?
Obviously a combination. If I'm not mistaken a minority of all people will be naturally left-handed, but less so if forced to be right-handed. Not uncommon.
The APA is too political an organization for me to conclude much from a single one of their many mealy-mouthed pronouncements to the world.
This thread is a perfect illustration of how normally intelligent people on both sides and some dumb people skip past empathy and critical thought and go straight to "The other side is stupid and evil."
Then spend several hundred comments talking past each other.
One side needs to realize it has been one way for over 5000 years, and the other side needs to realize that in modern culture we have the wealth and societal space to accommodate previously marginalized people.
Eventually the smarter people in here will realize the goal is to divide people, not to actually help the marginalized.
The APA is too political an organization for me to conclude much from a single one of their many mealy-mouthed pronouncements to the world.
So much for science.
Eunuchs were not shunned from Christianity, as is clearly shown in Philip's baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch, who was an important official in the court of Candace, queen of Ethiopia. [Acts Chapter 8].
Who said the APA is the spokesmodel for science? It's a single organization that is necessarily political and interested in a very human events sort of field that is in a state of scientific infancy as part of a medical profession that relies on imaging and laboratory values of a sort that psychiatry cannot collect for its sense of empirical objectivity and data sources. That could one day change, but until then it's too subjective to be as robust a field as one would hope, and too interested (as it should be) in seeking to protect the rights of ill people who are close to society's chopping blocks of financial discrimination, social ostracism and inaccurate moral judgements to focus on successfully advancing the objective stuff. It doesn't mean it's useless, just that it's a bit more hamstrung than it should have to be.
I also don't think we should end women's sports like this. This woman broke all previous lifting records by a long ways and completely dominated the competition.
17 year old on steroids wins state and goes 52-0 because she is transitioning to male but rules wont let her switch.
The goal here by the right seems to be to ignore the issue and pretend these people don't exist and/or have feelings.
The goal on the left seems to be to fuck as much shit up as possible and ruins as much fun as they can.
I honestly don't believe that the sufferings of any homosexuals shown in Dante's Inferno. The sexually incontinent, yes. They were in one of the higher levels, tossed about by winds eternally, never finding rest, this supposedly being an expression of their inability to govern their passions.
In the Inferno, the movements of the damned souls are random. They move, but they don't go anywhere. In purgatory their movements are ordered, all the souls moving in one direction, but not resting.
"Who said the APA is the spokesmodel for science?"
They write the DSM. In 1973 the APA removed homosexuality as a diagnosed mental disorder. Without the APA, no gay rights (how can a mental disorder be the basis for a civil right?)
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
The APA is too political an organization for me to conclude much from a single one of their many mealy-mouthed pronouncements to the world.
Is the NOAA too political?
Just curious.
So all science is now encompassed by the APA?
That's called the fallacy of composition.
So what if they made the right call on homosexuality/gay rights? You're just corroborating what I said about its necessarily political agenda. Fighting for patients' rights is hard enough for medical physicians to do. When it comes to shrinks, there's a whole barrage of stigma to fight against on top of all the conventional access issues, which are even themselves way worse for them.
mockturtle said...
Eunuchs were not shunned from Christianity, ...
But I certainly hope the people who made them Eunuchs were.
"I was talking about the damned souls in Dante's Inferno, you ignoramus.
It's literature, a real book, an epic poem written almost 700 years ago. You can look it up."
Ah, cut Inga some slack. Her idea of literature for the ages is probably "Our Bodies, Ourselves" by the Boston Women's Collective.
She's not real up on books written by old dead white guys.
Doesn't seem to be Ritmo's thing either.
I'm not sure how much sense it would make to call NOAA political. I think it's definitely political for the Trump administration to say that NASA shouldn't be monitoring earth, any more - so there's a deliberate attempt to stop accumulating the data that is useful to understanding climate, which is hard to justify on an objective, non-political basis. When I talk about the APA, it should be clear that we have an organization that is part of medicine, and therefore the Hippocratic Oath, that has to countenance its patients' social needs in a way that makes political challenges more difficult and harder to avoid.
I think commotions over emails are overblown. There's data, and there's presenting data in a way that your audience understands. Each audience has different challenges when it comes to achieving that understanding. If there's a major disconnect between how scientists are interpreting the data, and how the lay public interprets it, I don't think there's any controversy in honing your message to achieve the same impact that it does with the more knowledgeable group.
She's not real up on books written by old dead white guys.
Doesn't seem to be Ritmo's thing either.
Some were important, but not the ones you like: de Tocqueville, Locke, Plato, Lavoisier, etc., etc., etc.
But those of us who don't confuse entertainment with information like being on the cutting edge of things and don't mind staying current with the way recent advances tend to be more, er, (I think "exciting" was the word you used) in pushing the envelope. I ain't no intellectual necrophiliac. I'm sure some corpses are fascinating. Living bodies, moreso. Esp. when it comes the intellects contained within them.
Who do you think has the best science on homosexual behavior, R&B? The American Astronomical Society? Geez. Talk about expert shopping.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
So all science is now encompassed by the APA?
There are a lot of P's in American ____ Associations. Not terribly creative people I guess. Psychology or Physicians?
But I certainly hope the people who made them Eunuchs were.
Achilles, Jesus mentioned that some are born eunuchs, some made eunuchs by man and some by their own volition [often translated as meaning celibate].
That's true there are a lot of P's in that. Psychology is the answer, but my bad because I was assuming it was psychiatry. So what I said goes even doubly so given how much less invasive psychology is allowed to be in contrast to even psychiatry.
The APA might be one of the best authorities on homosexual behavior. Remind me what was the point, though? They don't have a monopoly on molecular neuroscience or behavioral endocrinology though, that's for sure.
"Sigmund Freud said, “Each of us experiences our own present naively.” We do not see deeply or clearly into the potentially injurious forces around us. We can float along, wondering why we feel bad. There may be one or more persons in our lives who leave us feeling icky, drained, frustrated, and less able to face the day. We might call these people difficult, troublesome, stress-inducing, or to a greater or lesser degree, toxic people.
People with toxic characteristics cannot protect themselves without injuring others. They are mostly terrified by and attacking shadows in their own minds. Their core personalities are fragmented, not strong enough to do the fair and honest negotiation with you, so they are devious and manipulative. They will cut corners in honesty to avoid what they cannot face."
https://drdillard.com/toxic-people/
I'm not sure how much sense it would make to call NOAA political. I think it's definitely political for the Trump administration to say that NASA shouldn't be monitoring earth, any more - so there's a deliberate attempt to stop accumulating the data that is useful to understanding climate, which is hard to justify on an objective, non-political basis.
Come on man.
The point of the scientific method is to challenge and support. Nobody says the NOAA isn't a scientific organization. What they are doing is pointing out they faked a bunch of data in a report to achieve a political goal and are government grant supported.
The government has pretty clearly chosen sides and gives grants to people who show more global warming, and therefor we need more government regulation of CO2. Conversely to come out with any degree of skepticism means an end to grants and your career. This is clearly obvious.
It should put the fear of god into any real scientist that the State is clearly seeking a political answer from the scientific process. To emphasize this point their funding is now going to be wiped out because of a political result.
R&B, I am looking for scientific proof that sexual orientation is a congenital condition. You were blaming it on hormones or something earlier in the thread.
Inga, I'm sorry you have identified yourself as 'toxic'. Perhaps there is an antidote.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
The APA might be one of the best authorities on homosexual behavior. Remind me what was the point, though? They don't have a monopoly on molecular neuroscience or behavioral endocrinology though, that's for sure.
You said the APA was too political, which it may be, and I was wondering what the line was on "too political."
Science has always been corrupted by politics. We were doing a better job with that until the government got involved in funding science. For the sake of science it is clear we need to get government out of the funding of it.
Mockturtle,
It may be you that the article describes. Your snarky comment is a hint at that. Are you in competion with Exiled now? Not pretty.
Lewis Wetzel said...
R&B, I am looking for scientific proof that sexual orientation is a congenital condition. You were blaming it on hormones or something earlier in the thread.
!!!!!!!
Are you saying people are choosing to feel messed up? I understand the goal of understanding how the body works and why some things happen. But what policy/political question does this answer?
We should be trying to help people have a better life. WTH does Dante's inferno have to do with it anyways? God I hate this subject.
The government has pretty clearly chosen sides and gives grants to people who show more global warming
As they should. The precautionary principle applies to any public health risk and in the instance of AGW, the stakes are too high to presume equal harm from being wrong about its correctness as a theory or incorrectness as a theory. Just as there is a lengthier checklist to go over when readying a 747 as opposed to doing the same for a go-cart. The stakes are higher for getting it wrong. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to censor their activities and even less to yank all their funding. They are just fossil fuel shills and almost always are - unconscionable given that CO2 reversal can't be done once it's put in there and committing its harms.
Faked data makes a bigger impact than you presume, you are I'm pretty sure misinterpreting how data is presented. If data was actually faked you'd be reading about it in something other than THE DAILY MAIL - which is a tabloid publication. American conservatives don't seem familiar with the distinction between the better news sources and their many look-alike tabloid wanna be's when they go to the British press. And this despite the fact that the British press has a political fragmentation about it that conservatives here would dream of.
You said the APA was too political, which it may be, and I was wondering what the line was on "too political."
It's subjective.
Science has always been corrupted by politics.
Maybe but I don't think the APA can be made less political. I don't think psychology can be made less political. These are disciplines that are intractably linked to individual and social behavior, which politics seeks to regulate.
The autism-vaccine hoax is a case that you need to look at if you want to talk about malfeasance in science. It was debunked, acknowledged as such, took untold numbers of labor and studies, and still people (lay people, of course) believe it. That's how real hijinks play out, when they happen. This is not a way to characterize anything that's happened with investigating AGW, however.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
As they should. The precautionary principle applies to any public health risk and in the instance of AGW, the stakes are too high to presume equal harm from being wrong about its correctness as a theory or incorrectness as a theory.
I strenuously disagree. The earths climate has been warmer for 95% of earth's history. Also all data shows that humans flourish when climate is warmer. There is a much larger mass of land in the northern hemisphere that will become irrigable and habitable for humans should things get super crazy. In addition the CO2 cycle has a natural buffer when temperature/CO2 levels increase as plant respiration increases and plants grow faster. i.e. more food.
Mockturtle,
It may be you that the article describes. Your snarky comment is a hint at that. Are you in competion with Exiled now? Not pretty.
Sigh! Alas, dear Inga, I shall have to ignore your pointless and idiotic comments just as I did those of Unknown [of course you are one and the same, as the absence of Unknown clearly testifies]. But not to worry. There are plenty of other heartless, snarky bloggerheads you can irritate.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Maybe but I don't think the APA can be made less political. I don't think psychology can be made less political. These are disciplines that are intractably linked to individual and social behavior, which politics seeks to regulate.
Lets just be safe and keep politicians and bureaucrats out of it. They tend to be the worst of us.
I strenuously disagree. The earths climate has been warmer for 95% of earth's history.
Greater than 99% of which was a time in which human beings were not only not alive, but not farming and building civilizations along its coasts. Are you doing this for the people or for the planet? Remind me.
Also all data shows that humans flourish when climate is warmer.
Too broad and generic a statement to make sense of. Doesn't seem true. Civilization has been fine and way more competitive in temperate climates, especially just preceding industrialization and everything after it.
There is a much larger mass of land in the northern hemisphere that will become irrigable and habitable for humans should things get super crazy.
You are presuming conditions for and consequences of scales of terraforming that are a trillion times more speculative than anything having to do with what we actually know and can even study about the basics of AGW.
In addition the CO2 cycle has a natural buffer when temperature/CO2 levels increase as plant respiration increases and plants grow faster. i.e. more food.
This is just crazy talk. Yields are finite no matter how much CO2 you provide. Any food shortages today are not really due to lack of production. Any way you look at it, space is limited. The best idea is obviously the simplest one, and that would be stacking arable lands vertically into human structures.
Please do Mockturtle. You seem to think you're dealing with someone who will tolerate your insults, think again. You've proven yourself to be on equal footing with Exiled. So yes, don't address me and I won't be tempted to verbally smack the crap out of you. OK? Deal.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
The autism-vaccine hoax is a case that you need to look at if you want to talk about malfeasance in science. It was debunked, acknowledged as such, took untold numbers of labor and studies, and still people (lay people, of course) believe it. That's how real hijinks play out, when they happen. This is not a way to characterize anything that's happened with investigating AGW, however.
I am not sure what goal the anti-vaxxers had. They just seem dumb to me. I don't sense anything malevolent hiding in the bushes.
With AGW though it is different. If the AGW people were serious they would be pushing nuclear power. Thorium Salt reactors use a fuel that is being thrown away as waste material, produces waste product at the end that is not radio-active, and can literally be turned off on weekends. We didn't go that route in the 60's-70's because we needed nukes. Today though we could have that technology up and running with some effort and it would be a base load power source.
But we don't. We have Solar and Wind which are pure cronyism. Wind is intermittent and sucks. Solar will not work until storage and transfer is more efficient. We need to be developing those technologies not implementing them.
No the real goal of AGW is to take over the lifeblood of the modern economy and hand it over to bureaucrats and politicians. Otherwise known as Hydraulic Despotism. And I believe it is very much malevolent.
Greater than 99% of which was a time in which human beings were not only not alive, but not farming and building civilizations along its coasts. Are you doing this for the people or for the planet? Remind me.
1) The Earth is in an ice age, called the Quaternary, that began 2.5 million years ago.
2) The Earth is also in an interglacial, an interval of global warming during an ice age, called the Holocene. The Holocene began 10,000 years ago. Without it, there would be a pile of ice a mile high on top of Chicago right now.
3) Modern man first appeared 200,000 years ago. For all of man's existence the Earth has been in an ice age.
4) For the first 195,000 years of human existence, man roamed around in small tribes of hunter-gatherers living in caves and picking lice off of each other.
5) Finally, as the Earth warmed, man discovered agriculture. This lead to surplus, which led to specialization, which led to civilization, which led to History.
6) All of human history and civilization have happened during, and may have been caused by, global warming.
7) The population of the Earth is currently an an all time high. poverty and hunger are at all time lows.
Global warming is good for humanity, not bad.
"Sigh! Alas, dear Inga, I shall have to ignore your pointless and idiotic comments just as I did those of Unknown [of course you are one and the same, as the absence of Unknown clearly testifies]."
Yes, Inga's short-lived "niceness," which is a bullshit act, disappears once she's asked some hard questions and is asked about the consequences of her fake "compassion" - like female athletes getting bones broken by men who are now legally able to compete against women.
Nah, that's too hard for weak-minded Inga so instead she comes up with a Freud quote. Inga, I thought feminists didn't care for Dr. Freud because of "penis envy." Freud also thought homosexuality was caused by mothers. Share some of those quotes, genius.
Your brain is what is toxic. It's marinated in lies and hypocrisy.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
This is just crazy talk. Yields are finite no matter how much CO2 you provide. Any food shortages today are not really due to lack of production. Any way you look at it, space is limited. The best idea is obviously the simplest one, and that would be stacking arable lands vertically into human structures.
I grew a lot of marijuana. One of the things growers like to do is supplement CO2. I think it is stupid for a variety of reasons but you learn about how plants react to higher CO2 levels. Plants respire during their autotrophic phase(daytime). As CO2 and temperature and light intensity go up they use more CO2 and grow faster. In the end at least with pot at 1500ppm and 88 degrees pot plants and most other plants like them reach peak respiration and growth.
Pot likes 72 degrees though and quality goes to shit if it gets much above 75 towards the end. People who supplement CO2 and keep temperature down at 72 degrees are wasting a lot of money.
The anti-vaccine people had plausibly legitimate concerns since there used to be mercury used as a preservative. But that's stopped and rates still increase, which is another reason to dismiss the hoax. But they are not rational or informed.
Nuclear is a fine alternative in terms of availability, but there's nothing wrong with concerns about waste and poor site design/siting when you get Fukushimas, etc. There are ways around waste that invoke national security concerns though, such as reprocessing. These are trade-offs. Thorium is incredibly interesting and I don't know why more headway isn't made with it.
Wind and solar are both becoming more competitive. The problems with intermittency are real but don't invalidate its advantages. The way around intermittency is smarter grids, maybe more localized, private/consumer-based networks, and ultimately storage media. I now just realize you hit on all that. We sort of agree, then.
Your last paragraph is too conspiratorial for me to respond seriously to. I think the motives you ascribe to others I've seen in fossil fuel execs, honestly. I could tell you why, but if you are too intent on just believing that concern for the planet, its ecosystems and byproducts/externalities is more nefarious, I don't know what to tell you. I could ask you to look at what's happening in Alberta's tar sands projects though, and ask you how you think there is anything sunny and optimistic at all in a landscape as disgustingly bleak and destructive as that.
" I won't be tempted to verbally smack the crap out of you"
Ha, Inga the Bitch emerges from her lair to snarl at mockturtle. Inga, the neurotic little toy poodle pretending to be a Rottweiler. mockturtle is far smarter, better-read and much wiser than you are.
You can't verbally smack the crap out of anybody. You're neither smart nor witty. And you can't order people not to address you.
I will mock and make fun of you as much as I want.
1) The Earth is in an ice age, called the Quaternary, that began 2.5 million years ago.
2) The Earth is also in an interglacial, an interval of global warming during an ice age, called the Holocene. The Holocene began 10,000 years ago. Without it, there would be a pile of ice a mile high on top of Chicago right now.
3) Modern man first appeared 200,000 years ago. For all of man's existence the Earth has been in an ice age.
4) For the first 195,000 years of human existence, man roamed around in small tribes of hunter-gatherers living in caves and picking lice off of each other.
5) Finally, as the Earth warmed, man discovered agriculture. This lead to surplus, which led to specialization, which led to civilization, which led to History.
6) All of human history and civilization have happened during, and may have been caused by, global warming.
7) The population of the Earth is currently an an all time high. poverty and hunger are at all time lows.
Global warming is good for humanity, not bad.
The thinking employed here suffers from an inability to understand proportions. The warming in which we live is good enough. I know of few cases in the natural world in which there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. Are fertilizers good? They're creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mississippi. Is oxygen good? Not when you want to avoid damaging a premature babies sight. How about sugar? We need it to live. Ok, but try living with a blood glucose of 800. Processing food makes it more convenient. And easier for marketing geniuses to convince management to load it with the least healthy stuff that will appeal to as many Americans as it takes to trick their fat/sugar-seeking instincts to kill themselves with. Hey, people like nicotine. It makes them alert! Etc., etc., etc. Wow. Those poisonous animals sure are pretty and brightly colored!
Achilles said...
. . .
Are you saying people are choosing to feel messed up? I understand the goal of understanding how the body works and why some things happen. But what policy/political question does this answer?
. . .
If I didn't say "people are choosing to feel messed up," than that was not what I was meant.
People do all kinds of things. Sometimes they feel bad as result, some times they feel good. People don't choose to go to jail, and they are unhappy in jail, but that does not mean that they had no choice but to go to jail.
People are all messed up.
If homosexual behavior is congenital (and even self-identifying as a homosexual is a behavior), then what other behavior might be congenital? Thievery? Selfishness? Violence? Violence towards women?
How about philanthropy and selflessness? If that behavior is inborn, and society values philanthropy and selflessness, aren't those people born superior to those that aren't particularly philanthropic or selfless?
Once you start down the road of believing that behavior is inborn, you get to a very bad place very quickly.
The worst thing about Hillary's "deplorables" remark was that she said that these "Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" people were "irredeemable." Not salvageable. They could be nothing else.
When Romney talked about the 47% who paid no income taxes, he was talking about an economic condition that could change. Hillary talked about her "deplorables" as though they were damned.
The warming in which we live is good enough.
Perhaps...but humanity has flourished when it was significantly warmer. They used to grow grapes in England and farm in Greenland. The MWP could not have been caused by man.
When the Little Ice Age hit...the world's population plummeted, and European civilization collapsed. we didn't cause it either.
What does this tell us? The world's climate operates independently of man, and man does better when it is warm, and worse when it is cold. In twenty years the Left will be demanding that the government take steps to warm the planet as the current sunspot cycle really kicks in.
Homosexuality has been a human variiable since the beginning of humanity. Of course ancient humans didn't choose it, considering it could've meamt their death. Muslim homosexuals don't choose to be gay in their repressive societies, as it's extremely dangerous. It's ridiculous to assert thos is a choice.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Thorium is incredibly interesting and I don't know why more headway isn't made with it.
Is answered partially by:
Nuclear is a fine alternative in terms of availability, but there's nothing wrong with concerns about waste and poor site design/siting when you get Fukushimas, etc. There are ways around waste that invoke national security concerns though, such as reprocessing. These are trade-offs.
The other is there is probably less room for graft. It is between Miniature Thorium reactors and a future generation solar power that will lead to basically free/infinite energy.
Wind and solar are both becoming more competitive. The problems with intermittency are real but don't invalidate its advantages. The way around intermittency is smarter grids, maybe more localized, private/consumer-based networks, and ultimately storage media. I now just realize you hit on all that. We sort of agree, then.
Wind just kills a lot of birds. If you are looking to harvest that sort of energy why wouldn't you go tidal? It is dumb. I am pretty sure there will be arrays in orbit that follow the earths path around the sun of self repairing solar banks within a few decades. For that matter Humans are going to live in space stations that are on the same orbit as earth before long too. Not sure why we are bothering with Mars at all.
Your last paragraph is too conspiratorial for me to respond seriously to. I think the motives you ascribe to others I've seen in fossil fuel execs, honestly. I could tell you why, but if you are too intent on just believing that concern for the planet, its ecosystems and byproducts/externalities is more nefarious, I don't know what to tell you. I could ask you to look at what's happening in Alberta's tar sands projects though, and ask you how you think there is anything sunny and optimistic at all in a landscape as disgustingly bleak and destructive as that.
The thing about the tar sands is they were gross before the mining began. They are suffused with tar. Hopefully when they are done there is no tar left and things can actually grow there.
As for the motives you don't want to accept not much to say. You ascribe evil intent to petro companies. Why does working in government make someone good? I see a bunch of busybodies who want to control my life, take my money, and spend all their time telling me what to do while handing my money out to wealthy people like T Boone Pickens who support and donate money to them.
One of the reasons I like to use the "handedness" analogy to sexual orientation is because right or left handedness turns out to be difficult to measure. They have physiological measures of thumb size, etc, and they have tests like seeing which hand a subject instinctively reaches with, and they have self reporting.
But these test don't always agree, and the extent to which they agree seems to be dependent on culture, time period, and even the sex of the subject.
How do they even measure sexual orientation? Self-identification doesn't work because a guy who says that he is a straight arrow today might decide that he is queer tomorrow (or that he was always queer and didn't know it).
Look at Jan Wenner, married with three kids, divorces his wife of 28 years and takes up with a much younger male model. WTF? You can't go by behavior -- prisons are full of men who do not identify as homosexuals having sex with other men. Some of these prison guys probably have more sex with men than some self-identifying homosexuals.
Perhaps...but humanity has flourished when it was significantly warmer. They used to grow grapes in England and farm in Greenland. The MWP could not have been caused by man.
Wow. Grapes. Neato. Not sure how that translates into better across the board. It's not like AGW skeptics are interested in picking some "ideal" amount of warming. To do that they'd have to pick the CO2 level they want, which they seem adamantly opposed to.
Fertilizer is good for plants. How much more, and more, and more, and more, and more, would you propose overfertilizing your crops? Maybe it would be fun to overfertilize them to the point of burning them out.
The corals are bleaching, the seas are overfished. Much of the warming goes first into the oceans, where life began and on whose bounty we rely. When the day comes that the only edible seafood is jellyfish, you will regret it. Mark my words.
And the great majority of trans gendered people don't choose it either. There have been so many interviews and documentaries that speak to the sufferering and turmoil these people (and their parents) experience, even at a young age.
Inga said...
And the great majority of trans gendered people don't choose it either. There have been so many interviews and documentaries that speak to the sufferering and turmoil these people (and their parents) experience, even at a young age."
They are disturbed people. They deserve help - real help - not applause as they mulitate their bodies and pretend to be something they are not.
Your compassion is a sham and a lie.
This thread is why Trump won.
I have no problem with tidal. Why assume that? Birds are now a concern for AGW challengers? Tar sands exploitation involves cannons to scare the birds off, it's that bad for them. Other countries put reflectors on the windmills and blades to improve visual precautions.
You ascribe evil intent to petro companies.
Well, there's a good reason for that. They lie. No company is as accountable to the public at large as an elected government that must be rechallenged every 2 to 6 years. The best AGW research came out of Exxon Mobil in 1980, before they changed their "PR" strategy. They are now employing the same firms that spread the lie that cigarettes were harmless, apparently before they got their pants sued off for lying. There is a mission that researchers have in the government; civic virtues aren't dead - contrary to what you might have read. Corporations only have values beholden to money and their shareholders, and Gordon Gecko had the last word on that. Greed may be good for making money; it's not good if you want an honest organization accountable to the things that money can't yet buy.
This thread is why Trump won.
This thread had nothing to do with manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania. You California-based Republicans need to take your culture war elsewhere.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
The thinking employed here suffers from an inability to understand proportions. The warming in which we live is good enough. I know of few cases in the natural world in which there is no such thing as too much of a good thing.
So how much warmer will the planet get if CO2 goes to 500ppm? 600ppm? 2000ppm?
What percentage of that warming is ascribed to humans? 50% 100%? 120%?
Why are there still glaciers on Everest? I was told those would be gone by now. I was also told there would be no more snow in New York. Al Gore was certain we would be in an Ice Age caused by 3 massive super storms caused by the Atlantic Ocean desalinating and flipping all of the cold water to the surface. I was promised a decade of hurricanes and tornadoes. I still see a glacier on Rainier every time the clouds go away temporarily.
I think we will do better if it gets 5 degrees warmer than if it gets 2 degrees colder. I think we should aim at 2 degrees warmer just to make sure. One thing is certain is that an ice age will lead to millions of deaths. And fuck shoveling snow off the roof. That sucks.
"Inga wrote:
It's ridiculous to assert thos is a choice."
If it is behavior, it is a choice. People aren't animals.
If a person thinks people are animals, they have no reason for complaint if they are treated like an animal. What could be more appropriate?
Really, Aristotle settled this millennia ago. Not all choices are equally easy to manage. We are incentivized to make some choices. A person who smokes has a much harder time choosing not to light up than a non-smoker. This doesn't mean that smoking is not a choice.
There have been so many interviews and documentaries that speak to the sufferering and turmoil these people (and their parents) experience, even at a young age.
Their pain and suffering isn't the issue. We agree they are in pain. he issue is, you want to allow these disturbed individuals to mutilate their bodies in a futile effort to end the pain.
Would you say we should let emo kids cut themselves? Should we let anorexics to starve themselves? Of course not...we get them therapy to deal with the problem and discourage them from hurting themselves. Indulging their sickness does no one any good. Research clearly shows that gender reassignment does not increase happiness or end the pain.
Wow. Grapes. Neato. Not sure how that translates into better across the board.
Did you miss, or just ignore the "The population of the Earth is currently an an all time high. poverty and hunger are at all time lows. " part?
It's not like AGW skeptics are interested in picking some "ideal" amount of warming. To do that they'd have to pick the CO2 level they want, which they seem adamantly opposed to.
Oh no..you're the alarmist. You have to tell us what the "correct" temperature of the Earth is, and why?, first.
Why are there still glaciers on Everest? I was told those would be gone by now. I was also told there would be no more snow in New York. Al Gore was certain we would be in an Ice Age caused by 3 massive super storms caused by the Atlantic Ocean desalinating and flipping all of the cold water to the surface. I was promised a decade of hurricanes and tornadoes. I still see a glacier on Rainier every time the clouds go away temporarily.
I don't know what you read but what we see now is just as strange and disruptive.
There are ecosystems that we rely on regardless of what you think engineering can terraform. They have less leeway to play with. If you think the Sixth Great Extinction is no problem, or hyped, I'll have to doubt that one.
Conservative Christian parents with transgendered child.
PEARLAND, TX (WPVI) -- Kimberly Shappley is as conservative and Christian as they come.
It was her child who, at just three years of age, would challenge her faith and rock her to the core.
For Shappley and her family, it all began with a hair bow.
"I want a bow like Daisy," her then-three-year-old son Joseph Paul begged of her. Shappley knew the big red bow, ponytails and princess dresses were things almost every little girl wished for. However, these weren't for a daughter -- Shappley reminded herself these were the requests of her son.
"Please mommy," Joseph Paul would plead with her.
His desire to dress in little girl's clothes is a secret Shappley has kept from the outside world since Joseph was just a toddler. As an infant, she put him in blue clothes. As a toddler, she made him do what shes says is 'typical boy stuff,' like fishing, playing football with his siblings and throwing little boy's birthday parties.
"We tried to make this kid be a boy," said Shappley. Still, Joseph kept seeking out what the girls had and, by the age of three, he was telling everyone he was a girl.
A devout Christian, Shappley prayed while Joseph made shirts into skirts and begged to wear girls underwear -- and asked his family to call him by the name of "Kai."
"This hasn't happened overnight for us. I am a Christian and I love the Lord," Shappley said as she struggled with her son's requests.
The gravity of her son's pleas became almost too much to bear when she heard Kai praying to die.
"I overheard Kai praying and asking the Lord to please take Joseph home to be with Jesus and I realized Kai's begging the Lord to let her die," Shappley said through tears.
As a first step down the path to understanding Kai's situation, Shappley bought girls underwear for Kai, though it took her three trips to the store to finally purchase them.
"When Kai came home that day and opened the drawer and saw princess panties, she fell down on the floor with the panties, crying and thanking me that this was the best day ever," Shappley said.
Shappley sought out more help, turning to pastors and her faith. Her hope was that her young boy would act like one.
"So Christians are not gay, OK, that's the mindset that I had."
Shappley said faith leaders reassured her God doesn't make mistakes.
"Christians are not going to have a transgender child, because as a Christian, that goes against everything that we read in scripture," she said.
Feeling alone and isolated, Shappley dug into social media for help, finding a secret underground Facebook network of more than 2,000 other Christian mothers with transgender children. Shappley says she found support in the stories of other mothers who had faced criticism, some who had even been threatened by those who had vowed to take their children away or kidnap them.
"We knew that, at some point, if someone found out that our child was transgender, that you could put our safety at risk," Shappley said.
Despite all the risks, acceptance has helped Shappley and Kai. She says her daughter is now thriving.
As for Shappley herself, the Facebook group for Christian parents of transgender youth was just the beginning of her journey to understanding and accepting Kai. Now five years old, Kai will soon enter the public school system in Pearland at the same time schools throughout the country work to meet the demands of an Obama administration directive that says transgender students are to be treated no differently than any other students.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Well, there's a good reason for that. They lie.
So does NOAA. So do government employees and politicians. "You can keep you doctor." "Benghazi was caused by a video." Corporations get sued when they lie. Politicians get reelected and bureaucrats seem to be impossible to fire.
No company is as accountable to the public at large as an elected government that must be rechallenged every 2 to 6 years.
How many people at the EPA lost their job over the Gold King Mine disaster? (The answer is 0)
Additionally corporations must voluntarily get customers to buy their product. So your accountability line s crap.
The best AGW research came out of Exxon Mobil in 1980, before they changed their "PR" strategy. They are now employing the same firms that spread the lie that cigarettes were harmless, apparently before they got their pants sued off for lying. There is a mission that researchers have in the government; civic virtues aren't dead - contrary to what you might have read.
"Civic virtues" are what one side of the political spectrum agrees with now. Everyone is evil it seems. And they employ evil "firms."
Corporations only have values beholden to money and their shareholders, and Gordon Gecko had the last word on that. Greed may be good for making money; it's not good if you want an honest organization accountable to the things that money can't yet buy.
This is absolute garbage and you know it. Shareholders are people. People that are infinitely more moral than the average congress critter.
Did you miss, or just ignore the "The population of the Earth is currently an an all time high. poverty and hunger are at all time lows. " part?
I ignored it. That's due to industrialization and public health, it's not without its own destructive set of problems, and has nothing to do with this idea of CO2-enhanced agricultural yields. Maybe less droughts/famines - but that's also occurred for different reasons.
While I think gays might indeed be "born that way," the question remains how exactly does that happen?
There was a study done at Boston University in the '90's. Out of 161 gay men, each of whom had either an identical or fraternal twin on an adopted brother, 52 percent of the identical twins of men who were gay were also gay, as compared with 22 percent of fraternal twins and 11 percent of the adopted brothers. However, the same researcher did a similiar study in Australia and found the chances of an identical gay twin having a gay brother was only 20% and nearly zero among the fraternals.
My question is why isn't it 100 percent among identical twins? They are biological clones. Could it have been caused by some sort of trauma in the womb? And if it is prenatal trauma, doesn't that make gayness a sort of birth defect? We know what happens to babies with birth defects in Inga's Brave New Pro-Abortion Post-Christian world, don't we?
I suspect these twin studies are not happening much these days for the same reason studies of gender differences are not - they might lead to inconvenient conclusions.
Oh no..you're the alarmist. You have to tell us what the "correct" temperature of the Earth is, and why?, first.
The one we've been living with for 10,000 years. Why? Easy. It's the time we've had agriculture, which gave us civilization and everything else and those are the things that we need to preserve. As well as the earth's ecosystems in as undisturbed a state as possible. Because I subscribe to the radical notion that we need the nature we evolved to cohabit the planet with, and not the other way around. You guys seem to assume that all of nature is expendable to us, unless proven otherwise. Experience with previous great extinctions shows the opposite. That's the problem with great extinction events. You can't pick and choose to be a species that has no need for any of the others - even if you're the one killing them off.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
I don't know what you read but what we see now is just as strange and disruptive.
There are ecosystems that we rely on regardless of what you think engineering can terraform. They have less leeway to play with. If you think the Sixth Great Extinction is no problem, or hyped, I'll have to doubt that one.
Sixth Great Extinction infers there have been 5 others. The "strange and disruptive" you refer to is Weather. There have been all sorts of weather events.
What you are failing to do is show any evidence that Humans are causing this, or that smashing the US economy by giving control of it to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats by giving them control over petroleum products would change anything.
Ok, now you're getting sidetracked Achilles. Starting with the beginning on NOAA when you haven't even bothered to get me a better source on them than "The DailyMail" tabloid.
Try harder. And try listening to actual investors on what their motivations are. And stop confusing product availability/desirability with anything to do with how it's made/produced. Those are easily decoupled things.
and has nothing to do with this idea of CO2-enhanced agricultural yields.
Really? Scientists disagree with you.
What you are failing to do is show any evidence that Humans are causing this
Ok, I'm done. Time's up. Like when the cat starts nipping, you put it down. I will not play the game of providing evidence for the man who knows that he will never accept any evidence that will change his opinion. You can be shown video footage I'm sure of all the polar melting and you will deny it. Time's up. Go argue with someone who enjoys the childish never-ending game of, "But why? But why? But why? Daddy, you never answered my last 'why?' But why? But why?"
Blogger exiledonmainstreet said...
While I think gays might indeed be "born that way," the question remains how exactly does that happen?
There was a study done at Boston University in the '90's. Out of 161 gay men, each of whom had either an identical or fraternal twin on an adopted brother, 52 percent of the identical twins of men who were gay were also gay, as compared with 22 percent of fraternal twins and 11 percent of the adopted brothers. However, the same researcher did a similiar study in Australia and found the chances of an identical gay twin having a gay brother was only 20% and nearly zero among the fraternals.
Suppose it's like this:
Some people's sexual orientation is congenital.
Some people's sexual orientation is learned.
Some people choose their sexual orientation.
Sexual orientation is fixed in some cases and fluid in other cases.
Now you have a problem because you made homosexual orientation a protected class based on the notion that this thing called sexual orientation is like race -- it is not the result of a choice, it is congenital, and it can't be changed.
A three year old is allowed to pick his gender? What idiotic media dreck you eat up. Ah, yes, a little boy who wants to play with dolls must be a transsexual. His body will be flooded with estrogen and other hormones that halt his normal development - all because of a decision he made at 3.
Gee, Inga, if your son decided at age 3 that he was an airplane, you'd get out a stepladder and cheer him as he jumped off the roof.
Let's see how Kai is doing 15 or 20 years down the road. I doubt it will end well. But you won't know or care and neither will the reporter who wrote that ridiculous piece of shit.
Lewis W. wrote:
"Suppose it's like this:
Some people's sexual orientation is congenital.
Some people's sexual orientation is learned.
Some people choose their sexual orientation.
Sexual orientation is fixed in some cases and fluid in other cases.
Now you have a problem because you made homosexual orientation a protected class based on the notion that this thing called sexual orientation is like race -- it is not the result of a choice, it is congenital, and it can't be changed."
I think you are probably right. My point was that even with those who were "born that way" the science is a bit more complex than the glib lefty bumper sticker crowd would have you believe.
The one we've been living with for 10,000 years.
We haven't been living with one temperature for 10,000 years. The earth has been getting warmer since the beginning of the Holocene, and there have been periods where it was warmer (MWP) and colder (little ice age) than it is today.
Why? Easy. It's the time we've had agriculture, which gave us civilization and everything else and those are the things that we need to preserve.
We din't get those things until the beginning of global warming, and as the earth has continued to warm those things have improved.
As well as the earth's ecosystems in as undisturbed a state as possible.
Why? That is unnatural...nature is about change.
Because I subscribe to the radical notion that we need the nature we evolved to cohabit the planet with, and not the other way around.
We evolved to live in a world much colder than today, and things have gotten better for our species the warmer it has gotten.
You guys seem to assume that all of nature is expendable to us, unless proven otherwise.
Yep..just like every other species on Earth. Do you think beavers do environmental studies before they build dams?
Experience with previous great extinctions shows the opposite.
What great extinction has humanity experienced? All of the great extinctions happened before we appeared on Earth...should we feel guilty about them also?
That's the problem with great extinction events. You can't pick and choose to be a species that has no need for any of the others - even if you're the one killing them off.
Strawman. What if we are interfering with nature by preserving species that are supposed to go extinct?
What you are failing to do is show any evidence that Humans are causing this
Ok, I'm done. Time's up. Like when the cat starts nipping, you put it down. I will not play the game of providing evidence for the man who knows that he will never accept any evidence that will change his opinion
OK..what would convince you that AGW is a hoax?
0 for 2, Pedro.
OK..what would convince you that AGW is a hoax?
Um, going up to the north pole and watching all that previously melted ice re-freeze into what it was despite continually increasing CO2 rates as measured in Mauna Loa etc.
Yep, I'm pretty sure that's the simplest way to prove it wrong, easily fulfilling any falsifiability criterion.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
"What you are failing to do is show any evidence that Humans are causing this"
Ok, I'm done. Time's up. Like when the cat starts nipping, you put it down. I will not play the game of providing evidence for the man who knows that he will never accept any evidence that will change his opinion. You can be shown video footage I'm sure of all the polar melting and you will deny it. Time's up. Go argue with someone who enjoys the childish never-ending game of, "But why? But why? But why? Daddy, you never answered my last 'why?' But why? But why?"
Of course you are done. Because you can't show anything. The entire AGW argument is built on 50ppm more CO2 in the atmosphere.
50 parts per million more CO2. We could even stretch that to 100 ppm more! You know how little that is if you think about it. Plants will grow slightly faster. There is no there there. Once you get past the burn the deniers stage and actually engage AGW falls apart and you descend into the childishness of your post.
If you understood your arguments better and the theory of AGW you would know that most of the warming comes from more water vapor in the atmosphere. But strangely enough during the summer every year we don't go into a positive feedback loop death spiral and explode.
Um, going up to the north pole and watching all that previously melted ice re-freeze into what it was despite continually increasing CO2 rates as measured in Mauna Loa etc.
You weren't paying attention. I didn't ask about global warming. I don't care about global warming because it is a natural process we cannot effect and is beneficial to humanity anyway.
I asked about AGW..or supposed man made global warming.
My position on climate change relies upon the actual geological record of Earth's climate, and observed data.
The alarmists' position climate change relies on manipulated data that they are unwilling to share that are based on "observed" data that no longer exists. (or so they tell us)
You guys seem to assume that all of nature is expendable to us, unless proven otherwise.
Yep..just like every other species on Earth. Do you think beavers do environmental studies before they build dams?
I do know that landowners have been taken to court and have had to prove they didn't build the dams, but that the damn beavers did.
A few years back a college student using the latest imagery available from space did a study of east coast rivers and what needed to be dome to return them all to their wild state. And discovered there wasn't any possible way to know what their wild state was. Any place a river was shallow enough to throw rocks across to step on- pre-European arrivals were doing it. Beavers have been building dams. People noticed stillwater areas had better fishing, so they threw rocks in to create more stillwater areas. Flooding changed water courses. If you go to Niagara Falls and view the video on how fast the landscape changed with the water release that created the falls- it's fascinating. And as a BTW- if it weren't for human intervention, the fabulous Niagara Falls, enjoyed by many as a great tourist attraction, would by now be the Niagara rapids. Even with human intervention, the falls keep retreating. Water is relentless. If a large part of the water flow above the falls wasn't diverted into power generation, the falls would retreat even faster. I suspect my great grand-children won't be able to view Niagara Falls as Niagara Falls.
The county I live in now used to be swamp. Pretty much the whole county. That's why "free land" was given to civil war veterans here. It's now incredibly productive upstate NY farmland. From great human effort. The government wants to turn the whole area back into swamps, only now using the PC description- wetlands.
Humans have been geo-engineering the world to make it better and more convenient for humans before the words geo-engineering the world existed.
Of course you are done. Because you can't show anything. The entire AGW argument is built on 50ppm more CO2 in the atmosphere.
50 parts per million more CO2. We could even stretch that to 100 ppm more! You know how little that is if you think about it. Plants will grow slightly faster. There is no there there. Once you get past the burn the deniers stage and actually engage AGW falls apart and you descend into the childishness of your post.
If you understood your arguments better and the theory of AGW you would know that most of the warming comes from more water vapor in the atmosphere. But strangely enough during the summer every year we don't go into a positive feedback loop death spiral and explode.
Hi! My name is Achilles and I can't decide if more warming is an absolute good or if it just isn't happening. And I sure can't see what's happening in photos returned through Google by typing "Glacier photos before and after". They're really difficult to interpret. Maybe if my friends at the tabloid publication Daily Mail tell me what to think then it will align with my pro-Exxon Mobil, pro-Phillip Morris, paranoia of government beliefs. What is certain is I will be really slippery by refusing to ever define a scenario in which I will accept the data and conclusions, even though there are scientifically literate supporters of the theory in this chat-board who are happy to provide a criterion for what they think could falsify the relationship as it is understood. But I don't have to do that. It would be too responsible for me and way harder than just saying, "Money and Big Company good, sustaining planet bad!"
Seventy years ago, plate tectonics was a controversial theory. When incontravertible proof arose that Europe and North America were definitely moving apart (the ridges on the ocean floor), some scientists still refused to believe in the floating plate theory.
Instead they thought that the Earth was growing, swelling like a balloon.
I don't care about global warming because it is a natural process we cannot effect
Apparently your spelling is a natural process that you are powerless to "effect" (sic), too. Dumbass.
Put a plastic bag over your head if you think you can't "effect" the heat that surrounds your head.
Do you think beavers do environmental studies before they build dams?
This wins the prize for world's dumbest rhetorical question, because you don't even know how beneficial a beaver dam is to river life.
Show me when a human-built dam led to the flourishing of the life around it. Well, assuming you care enough to want to know the answer.
You denialists are all a bunch of liars. Here's the short answer: You don't care. You don't give a shit what the outcome is.
Just stop pretending that the evidence or reasoning means anything to you. Your job is simply to disrupt whatever you find, at least when you don't know enough to know how to control it.
Just very paranoid, untrusting people.
Now, return back to the topic of the thread. Trannies have nothing to do with AGW.
Apparently your spelling is a natural process that you are powerless to "effect" (sic), too. Dumbass.
?????????
effect: cause (something) to happen; bring about; a change that is a result or consequence of an action or other cause
Go have that sentence reviewed by someone who actually gets paid to write, for a living. You don't even know the difference between the words "affect" and "effect."
It doesn't matter to you. You could say down is up and black is white. Your entire reason for being is to deny and oppose things that you can't control. In this case, an admission that you fucked up what you wanted to write.
You don't even know the difference between the words "affect" and "effect."
I know I used the word effect correctly.
0 for 3, Pedro.
Yer OUT!
I know I used the word effect correctly.
Ok. So what's the difference between the words "effect" and "affect".
Maybe it's something beyond all human control.
There ain't no problem with a natural cycle that humans can't solve!
You affect something to achieve change.
You effect a change.
Gahrie did use the word correctly. To use 'affect' would work, too, but the meaning would be slightly different.
Oh, big difference.
Silly me. I thought one of those was a noun.
How things change when you want to get off the hook for using the wrong word.
As I said, if you believe it's social, and that the right amount of persuasion could convince you to be homosexual or transgender, then there's an experiment we can try out for you to prove it. Just let us know when you'd like to sign up.
3/26/17, 2:02 PM
TTR,
Are you saying that, for instance, if I were to pump enough semen into Rachel Maddow, and /or give her enough orgasms through PIV sex (could mix it up a little for variety's sake), that she would change teams?
...Ahem, I'll be in my bunk...anyway, I'd try that experiment, given legal immunity. For some reason I find it hot when pretty girls dress butch.
Also, you spoke of leprosy. We shunned lepers because they were dangerous, or were thought to be dangerous, and there was no cure. Now that there is a cure, there is no need to shun or isolate them. But my understanding as of the writing of James Michener's Texas was that armadillos are still often slaughtered, or culled, because they are carriers of leprosy. Is there a cure for homosexuality? It would seem a fine thing to discover one. Should that be rebelled against, as some deaf activists evidently rebel against cochlear implants?
Actually, Ritmo, both affect and effect can be verb or noun. Look it up.
Lowered lights affect my ability to see.
My eyes effect my ability to see.
Can doesn't mean should. Any decent writing manual will explain why.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Do you think beavers do environmental studies before they build dams?
This wins the prize for world's dumbest rhetorical question, because you don't even know how beneficial a beaver dam is to river life.
Show me when a human-built dam led to the flourishing of the life around it. Well, assuming you care enough to want to know the answer.
I can show you a few around here. They hold the water back in the fields until planting season, and the ducks and other waterfowl stop in to rest and eat as they travel. Probably one of the few places where goose crap does some good as it helps fertilize the fields. Also probably raise the nitrogen level in the water to some awful EPA disapproved number. Then the water is released in a controlled manner to the Erie Canal to avoid flooding it, while filling it from it's winter low.
Got a few other low dams, 2-4 feet, that I've noticed driving the country roads. Probably most were built in the 1800s. They create small ponds used by deer and for fishing. Probable original use was for water supply. Now everyone is on well. I haven't observed any being used for agriculture or anything else.
A beaver dam is always useful to beavers. No so useful to grazing animals who's grazing land was just covered by water. Also not so useful to fox and coyote. Useful to waterfowl. Not so useful to land nesting birds. And beaver dams have been known to flood human housing subdivisions. The critters can build pretty fast. And flood farmer's fields. Natural isn't always good.
Bad Lieutenant said...
Is there a cure for homosexuality? It would seem a fine thing to discover one. Should that be rebelled against, as some deaf activists evidently rebel against cochlear implants?
Actually, there is a debate that if homosexuality is gene related and detectable in utero, would that be a legal reason to allow an abortion? Apparently, a large proportion of the people who are really incredibly pro-abortion for any reason whatsoever think that's the one abortion reason that should be outlawed.
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