The Refuge of the Toads

Old subthreads
Brive1987
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Posts: 17791
Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2013 4:16 am

Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66241

Post by Brive1987 »

Lets not forget RW's ringing endorsement from just last year.
The Slymepit, in fact, is a forum that was created specifically to host hate speech directed toward me and other feminists after National Geographic refused to allow blogger Abbie Smith to host a discussion about what a cunt I am on their servers. For the past several years it has served as a place for misogynist atheists to gather and circlejerk over how much they hate me, PZ Myers, and other outspoken feminists.
Actually fairly accurate with the exception of the NatGeo bit. She just needed to move on from that to "why".

Basement
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66242

Post by Basement »

katamari Damassi wrote:
CaptainFluffyBunny wrote:
Easy J wrote:I can't be moved by this weak sauce after Elsye. Becca doesn't pack the gear to tweet on that level.
It is easier for me to suppress my gag reflex when Watson does it, and bonus, no poopy talk. :hankey:
I got bored a couple of weeks ago and checked out Elyse's facebook. She and her merry band were tearing into some guy whom Elyse was messaging with and he dared to message this: "I see in your profile that you do sexwork. I think that's great, but I wanted to let you know I'm not looking for anything transactional." For reasons unknown to me, that made him a misogynist and all around terrible human being.
I think he dodged a bullet. Elyse's tantrum probably saved him from a future rape accusation.
Was "some guy" named Richard Carrier?

Brive1987
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Posts: 17791
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66243

Post by Brive1987 »

Brive1987 wrote:Lets not forget RW's ringing endorsement from just last year.
The Slymepit, in fact, is a forum that was created specifically to host hate speech directed toward me and other feminists after National Geographic refused to allow blogger Abbie Smith to host a discussion about what a cunt I am on their servers. For the past several years it has served as a place for misogynist atheists to gather and circlejerk over how much they hate me, PZ Myers, and other outspoken feminists.
Actually fairly accurate with the exception of the NatGeo bit. She just needed to move on from that to "why".
Oh and the categorisation of "reasonable robust criticism" as "hate speech". Circle-jerk is a bit exclusionary as well.

And umm ...... Oh well.

:hankey:

ConcentratedH2O, OM
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66244

Post by ConcentratedH2O, OM »

Brive1987 wrote:Com and rayshul's makeup sex will be legend.
The perfect pussy and the perfect dick.

AndrewV69
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66245

Post by AndrewV69 »

John D wrote:
the presidential election was not a fair and open democratic election; its results as they currently stand, illegitimate.
Some of your facts are wrong Matt. Regarding the Michigan issue, 88k ballots with no presidential vote is somewhat high, but not considering how shitty both candidates were. There is also some evidence that a few votes were messed up in Detroit, but the count was only off by a handful at most. Not enough to effect anything. Also, (and I just learned this myself) all Michigan ballots have a paper backup. You can't hack this. It is not sensible to think the Michigan recount would result in a Hillary win.[/quote]


Suggest you and Matt read these:

From Slate and Scholar's Stage and perhaps this one as well also from Scholar's Stage

AndrewV69
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66246

Post by AndrewV69 »

Whoops, quote fail. Can not be arsed to go back and edit. Suck it up y'all.

Really?
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66247

Post by Really? »

Looks like PZ has finally heard of Real Peer Review, that Twitter account that laughs at fake scholarship.
Here's a recent example they've posted, just for fun.

CommanderTuvok
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66248

Post by CommanderTuvok »

Really? wrote:Looks like PZ has finally heard of Real Peer Review, that Twitter account that laughs at fake scholarship.
Here's a recent example they've posted, just for fun.
Even PZ is forced to admit "some of those papers are terrible". I wonder what PZ makes of the Sokal hoax?

Really?
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66249

Post by Really? »

PZ goes MRA in a post that opposes a baffling essay by Ron Lindsay, who asserts that male circumcision shouldn't be of concern to humanists.
A not insignificant percentage of humanists and secularists are strongly opposed to male circumcision, to the point of wanting to ban it. The vehemence of their opposition is not warranted by the evidence regarding the effects of circumcision: it is not medically necessary, but it is not harmful (assuming appropriate analgesics are used) and it provides small benefits.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/e ... humanists/

PZ response:

http://archive.is/rIYRO

Surprisingly, the Horde is pretty reasonable about the issue. More reasonable than Lindsay.

Here's PZ's post in which he mentioned Real Peer Review.

http://archive.is/LQg9l

Lsuoma
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66250

Post by Lsuoma »

katamari Damassi wrote: She and her merry band were tearing into some guy whom Elyse was messaging with and he dared to message this: "I see in your profile that you do sexwork. I think that's great, but I wanted to let you know I'm not looking for anything transactional."
Dicky!!!

Lsuoma
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66251

Post by Lsuoma »

Lsuoma wrote:
katamari Damassi wrote: She and her merry band were tearing into some guy whom Elyse was messaging with and he dared to message this: "I see in your profile that you do sexwork. I think that's great, but I wanted to let you know I'm not looking for anything transactional."
Dicky!!!
Bah.
:nin:

DrokkIt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66252

Post by DrokkIt »

Dave wrote:
I know. How desperate do you have to be to want to see BeckyBoo's boobies?

"follow me on snapchat for HOT DISAPPOINTMENT"

Tigzy
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66253

Post by Tigzy »

DrokkIt wrote:
Dave wrote:
I know. How desperate do you have to be to want to see BeckyBoo's boobies?

"follow me on snapchat for HOT DISAPPOINTMENT"
Becky's boobs have already been on display for all to see:

http://i.imgur.com/YwylP7D.jpg

DrokkIt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66254

Post by DrokkIt »

Tigzy wrote:
DrokkIt wrote:
Dave wrote:
I know. How desperate do you have to be to want to see BeckyBoo's boobies?

"follow me on snapchat for HOT DISAPPOINTMENT"
Becky's boobs have already been on display for all to see:

http://i.imgur.com/YwylP7D.jpg

Bravo, fine sir, bravo *tips dedora*

Mr. X, Indeed
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66255

Post by Mr. X, Indeed »

Tigzy wrote:
DrokkIt wrote:
Dave wrote:
I know. How desperate do you have to be to want to see BeckyBoo's boobies?

"follow me on snapchat for HOT DISAPPOINTMENT"
Becky's boobs have already been on display for all to see:

http://i.imgur.com/YwylP7D.jpg
So many neckbeards.

free thoughtpolice
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66256

Post by free thoughtpolice »

Putin/Trump joint news conference held with 2 Japanese journalists:
[youtube][/youtube]

Old_ones
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66257

Post by Old_ones »

NoGodsEver wrote:New rule: anyone who is fooled by Trump has no right to question anyone else's intelligence.
I like it.

Sunder
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66258

Post by Sunder »

DrokkIt wrote:
Dave wrote:
I know. How desperate do you have to be to want to see BeckyBoo's boobies?

"follow me on snapchat for HOT DISAPPOINTMENT"
If I had a snapchat account I think I'd delete it just to be safe.

InfraRedBucket
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66259

Post by InfraRedBucket »

Latest from ThunderF00t: Sarkeesian violating tax rules? Well they got Al Capone that way eventually.

[youtube][/youtube]

Wild Zontargs
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66260

Post by Wild Zontargs »

esr (Eric S. Raymond) gets to say "I told you so":

Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!
It’s now just a bit over a month since Election Day, and I’m starting to be seriously concerned about the possibility that the U.S. might become a one-party democracy.

Therefore this is an open letter to Democrats; the country needs you to get your act together. Yes, ideally I personally would prefer your place in the two-party Duverger equilibrium to be taken by the Libertarian Party, but there are practical reasons this is extremely unlikely to happen. The other minor parties are even more doomed. If the Republicans are going to have a counterpoise, it has to be you Democrats.

Donald Trump’s victory reads to me like a realignment election, a historic break with the way interest and demographic groups have behaved in the U.S. in my lifetime. Yet, Democrats, you so far seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Indeed, if I were Donald Trump I would be cackling with glee at your post-election behavior, which seems ideally calculated to lock Trump in for a second term before he has been sworn in for the first.

Stop this. Your country needs you. I’m not joking and I’m not concern-trolling. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the denial of reality have to end. In the rest of this essay I’m not going to talk about right and wrong and ideology, I’m going to talk about the brutal practical politics of what you have to do to climb out of the hole you are in.


We need to start with an unsparing assessment of that hole.

First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.

Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.

That center is far to the right of what you would prefer. For that matter it is rather the right of where I would prefer – but facts are facts and denying them isn’t going to help. You Democrats need to think about what it takes to be competitive on a continuum where Fox News is barely right of center, Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch liberal, and as near as I could tell the politician who actually nailed the psephological center in 2008 was none other than Sarah Palin.

If you do not do this thing, you will continue to lose.

Again, I emphasize that I am not issuing an ideological prescription here. I am not arguing in this essay that the present Democratic platform and strategy is wrong in an abstract moral sense, but rather that that it has become suicidal practical politics. Trump has dynamited almost every connection it had to winning elections, and smarter Republicans than Trump will take the lesson going forward.

Before I get to suggesting some changes, I want to point out that the results of the dominance Republicans have already achieved are going to make your problems even worse than they look now. Those problems don’t end with not having a farm team. State-level control means the Republicans will largely determine redistricting in the 2020 census. Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.

I also need to point out that you shouldn’t count on Republican failure to save you. Yes, I know Democrats tell themselves Republican “hard right” policy actually implemented will alienate so many voters that they’ll come running back to your party. But you also thought Hillary was inevitable and how did that work out for ya? Trump’s popularity has risen as his program becomes clearer. You need to be positioned so that you can cope with outcomes other than catastrophic disenchantment with Trumpian populism.

So, what can you do?

The most obvious thing is that you have to stop contemptuously dismissing the largest single demographic segment of the American electorate. Because believe me, they noticed. So did their wives and children.

This has larger implications than you may yet understand. It’s not just that you need to take any Democrat who uses the phrase “angry white men” out to the woodshed and beat him or her with a strap until he/she wises up. The whole apparatus of racial and ethnic identity politics is turning in your hand, reversing (like your old-media dominance) from an asset to a liability.

(Just to drive the point home, the gender card doesn’t work any more either. Trump is a feminist’s worst nightmare. He won anyway. He came close enough to winning the entire female vote to trigger bitter post-election denunciations of American women in general by feminists – which pretty much epitomizes the sort of reaction that isn’t going to help you.)

Your best plausible case is that the minority groups you counted on passively fail to add up to a winning coalition, as they did this cycle. Your worst – and increasingly likely – case is that white people now begin voting as something like an ethnic bloc. This is, after all, how you’ve been teaching other ethnic groups to play the game since the 1960s.

You will not prevent this development by screaming “racism!”. Here’s a hot tip: people you dismiss as retrograde scum will not, in general, vote for you. In fact, one of the things you Democrats most urgently need to do is banish “racism” and “sexism” from your political vocabulary.

While these words point at some real problems, they are also a trap. They lead you to organize your political pitch around virtue-signaling, exclusion and demonization. That, in turn, can be successful (though repulsive) politics when it’s used against a minority to mobilize a majority or plurality. But you’re in the opposite situation now. You were trapped by your own privilege theory. You demonized a plurality of American voters, and in return they gave you Trump.

If you continue to do this, you will lose.

It is irrelevant whether an actual plurality of American voters actually are as racist and sexist as you think. They don’t think they are, and they’re fed up with being hectored about it. This isn’t 1965, and your ability to tap into a substratum of guilt by white people who deep down know they were in the wrong is gone. What that same move brings up now is resentment.

Speaking of virtue signaling, another thing you need to give up is focusing on peacock issues (like, say, transgender rights) while ignoring pocketbook problems like the hollowing out of middle-class employment.

Again, this advice has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of individual peacock issues and more with a general sense that the elites are fiddling while Rome burns. For the first time since records have been kept, U.S. life expectancy went down during the Obama years, led by a disturbing rise in suicides and opiate addiction among discouraged unemployed in flyover country. A Democratic Party that fails to address that while it screws around with bathroom-law boycotts is willfully consigning itself to irrelevance.

Many of Trump’s “pro-working-class” policies are objectively terrible; a new wave of trade protectionism is, for example, bound to have dire long-term consequences. But that doesn’t matter, in a political competitive sense, until you Democrats have something to answer him with.

Right now, you have nothing. You have less than nothing, because your instinctive solution repels the Trump plurality. They don’t want welfare, they want jobs and dignity and a modicum of respect. (And, just as a reminder, not to be dismissed as retrograde racists and sexists.)

Now we need to talk about guns.

This is a more particular issue than I’ve touched so far, but it’s one that cuts straight to the heart of the self-alienation of the Democratic Party from the political center.

Again, I’m not going to address the rights and wrongs of gun policy here, just its practical political ramifications. A quarter century ago Bill Clinton – who is as shrewd a practical politician as has ever operated in the U.S. – warned his fellow Democrats that pushing gun control was a sure way to lose more voters than it gained. They ignored his advice and got shellacked in the 1994 elections.

Today voter support for personal firearms rights is at an unprecedented high. This is revealed both in polls and in the wave of state-level liberalizations of concealed-carry laws. One of Trump’s most popular first-hundred-days promises is nationwide concealed-carry reciprocity. From the fact that gun control was slow party suicide in 1994 we can deduce that it’s even worse practical politics today.

And yet, the Democratic Party line is still hostile to gun rights, and less than six months ago its leaders and captive pundits were talking up Australian style gun confiscation.

If you continue to do this, you will lose.

The Democratic line on gun policy is a perfect symbol of everything that has become disconnected about the party. It reads as corrosive disrespect for middle-Americans who like their firearms, think of themselves as a nation of armed citizens rather than cowering subjects, and use their guns responsibly. It reeks of class warfare, urban elites against flyover-country proles. It’s disempowering, not empowering. It is, in short, a perfect focus for anti-Democratic populist anger.

Here’s what I’ve been building up to:

You Democrats don’t just need to reform your gun policy, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present policy looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.

You Democrats don’t just need to reform your rhetoric about racism and sexism, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present rhetoric looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.

It’s all of a piece. You’ve forgotten how to be the party of the people. Trump was the price of that forgetfulness. Now, you need to relearn it, for all our sakes.

The alternative is that something like the Republicans, or possibly worse, dominates American politics for the foreseeable future. I don’t want that, and you should fear it more than I do.

So get your act together now.

Service Dog
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66261

Post by Service Dog »

A fact I had forgotten just jumped-back into my head: in the US, far fewer women than men-- are elected to political office.
And this disparity is due to far fewer women than men RUNNING for political office. You can't win, if you don't run.
In races where women DO run... the women are disproportionately-likely to be elected, over men.

Misogyny in the ballot box a difficult thing to believe matters-- given that voters usually choose the woman offered over the man.

And it doesn't reflect well on Hillary Clinton that she couldn't win, despite the advantage female candidates enjoy.

Service Dog
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66262

Post by Service Dog »

A fact I had forgotten just jumped-back into my head: in the US, far fewer women than men-- are elected to political office.
And this disparity is due to far fewer women than men RUNNING for political office. You can't win, if you don't run.
In races where women DO run... the women are disproportionately-likely to be elected, over men.

Misogyny in the ballot box a difficult thing to believe matters-- given that voters usually choose the woman offered over the man.

And it doesn't reflect well on Hillary Clinton that she couldn't win, despite the advantage female candidates enjoy.

free thoughtpolice
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66263

Post by free thoughtpolice »

Stormy weather:
SAM_4503.JPG
(1.37 MiB) Downloaded 221 times

Old_ones
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66264

Post by Old_ones »

InfraRedBucket wrote:Latest from ThunderF00t: Sarkeesian violating tax rules? Well they got Al Capone that way eventually.

[youtube][/youtube]
I suppose one of the hazards of politicizing literally every goddamn thing in the world, is the danger that you will forget that your tax code does not view everything human beings do as inherently political. IANAL, but I somehow doubt the IRS will buy the "your requirement that we be non-partisan is meaningless because everything is inherently partisan" defense.

ROBOKiTTY
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66265

Post by ROBOKiTTY »

On a totally unrelated note, what are people's Internet speeds, and how much do you pay for your Internet?

35 Mb/s download, 5Mb/s upload, cable, uncapped. $52 monthly after taxes. I think it's a ripoff, but it's a good deal here.

Mr. X, Indeed
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66266

Post by Mr. X, Indeed »

50 down, 20 up, cable, uncapped, around $116 or so.

[youtube][/youtube]

pro-boxing-fan
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66267

Post by pro-boxing-fan »

free thoughtpolice wrote:
pro-boxing-fan wrote:I don't care about hipsters and douche, im gonna do what 90% of people buying an ecig do with it, try to stop smoking. Its an incredible tool for smoking cessation.
Kovalev was robbed. :(
I had Kovalev winning by 1 point, the knock down being the winning point. Close decision, always controversial in some way but nothing out of the ordinary. Far from a robbery.

[youtube][/youtube]

CaptainFluffyBunny
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66268

Post by CaptainFluffyBunny »

free thoughtpolice wrote:Stormy weather:
The attachment SAM_4503.JPG is no longer available
Very pretty. I envy the sea view, but I do have the woods. This critter was watching the chickens at dusk. Crappy cellphone pic
owl_watching.jpg
(1.92 MiB) Downloaded 198 times

Really?
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66269

Post by Really? »

pro-boxing-fan wrote:
free thoughtpolice wrote:
pro-boxing-fan wrote:I don't care about hipsters and douche, im gonna do what 90% of people buying an ecig do with it, try to stop smoking. Its an incredible tool for smoking cessation.
Kovalev was robbed. :(
I had Kovalev winning by 1 point, the knock down being the winning point. Close decision, always controversial in some way but nothing out of the ordinary. Far from a robbery.

[youtube][/youtube]
Instead of talking about the stupid election, we should spend more time on the Pit sharing videos of fights and debating the results.

comhcinc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66270

Post by comhcinc »

Really? wrote:
Instead of talking about the stupid election, we should spend more time on the Pit sharing videos of fights and debating the results.
I can do that. How about this?

[youtube][/youtube]

Or better yet this?

[youtube][/youtube]

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66271

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

I'm fucking back off to the mountains!

CaptainFluffyBunny
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66272

Post by CaptainFluffyBunny »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I'm fucking back off to the mountains!
Keep an eye out for French Bigfoot.

Really?
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66273

Post by Really? »

comhcinc wrote:
Really? wrote:
Instead of talking about the stupid election, we should spend more time on the Pit sharing videos of fights and debating the results.
I can do that. How about this?

[youtube][/youtube]

Or better yet this?

[youtube][/youtube]
oh god no. Those are like watching Christopher Hitchens debate an Orbiteer. They can't win by any objective measure, but they can writhe on the ground and claim pussy victory.

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66274

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

CaptainFluffyBunny wrote:
Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I'm fucking back off to the mountains!
Keep an eye out for French Bigfoot.
We do have the Dahu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahu

Not exactly the same, though.

Basement
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66275

Post by Basement »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:
CaptainFluffyBunny wrote:
Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I'm fucking back off to the mountains!
Keep an eye out for French Bigfoot.
We do have the Dahu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahu

Not exactly the same, though.
I'm an American. In America we have a giant fucking gorilla-caveman that can rip people's heads off. In France, you have...the Dahu, a retarded deer. Ooops, didn't mean to trigger you - a handi-capable deer.

comhcinc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66276

Post by comhcinc »

Really? wrote: oh god no. Those are like watching Christopher Hitchens debate an Orbiteer. They can't win by any objective measure, but they can writhe on the ground and claim pussy victory.
Well I mean if they let him Piper would have knocked the shit out of Mr T. Piper was a golden gloves champ.

In the other match Inoki was a bad man but if I remember correctly he was pretty much not allowed to grapple with Ali and he wasn't foolish enough to stand there and get punched by him.

Have you ever heard of the Milo Savage vs Gene Lebell match from 63?
The first MMA Fight in the US[edit]
In 1963, LeBell became involved with a challenge by boxer and writer Jim Beck to the practitioners of Japanese martial arts. Beck claimed that a boxer could defeat any martial artist in a straight fight and offered $1000 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Beck engaged in abundant trash-talk.[5]

Encouraged by Ed Parker,[4] LeBell accepted the challenge and travelled to Salt Lake City to meet Beck. To his surprise, he learned his opponent would not be Beck but a higher regarded boxer, Milo Savage, who had a background in amateur wrestling. An agreement was reached for the match to last five rounds, each lasting three minutes. The boxer's side demanded a stipulation in which the smaller and "out-primed" Savage could use any type of punch, while the judoka could not kick, in the apparent belief LeBell was a karateka. An additional stipulation prevented LeBell from attempting tackles or takedowns under the waist.[4] In return, Savage offered to wear a judogi with special fingerless gloves. However, on the day of the match Savage appeared wearing a karategi instead, which is much tighter and harder to grab. The Savage camp claimed they did not know the difference.[6] Also, according to LeBell and other sources, Savage's gloves contained brass knuckles [5][6] and he had also greased up his gi with vaseline to make gripping it more difficult.[5] The unusual stipulations convinced LeBell the Savage camp, far from being ignorant about martial arts, was training Savage in judo in order to defend against LeBell's throws.[5]

The match took place on December 2, 1963. The combatants were initially cautious, with LeBell being first in pressing the action by attempting to throw Savage down. The boxer stopped the move and LeBell aggravated an old shoulder injury.[6] LeBell tried several techniques through the second and third rounds and was successful in taking Savage down but Savage kept defending, both standing and on the ground, in a very technical manner, seemingly confirming LeBell's theory about his opponent's judo training.[6] Savage even attempted to sweep the judoka in one instance.[6][7] Nonetheless, LeBell got mount and had the opportunity to execute an armbar but he opted instead to seek a choke, concluding that Savage wouldn't surrender to a broken arm.[8] Finally, he performed a left harai goshi in the fourth round and landed on his opponent, getting a rear naked choke. Within seconds, Savage was unconscious and LeBell declared the winner.[6]

The loss by Savage, the hometown favorite, caused the crowd to react violently. Bottles, chairs, and other debris were thrown into the ring. To prevent a full-blown riot, hometown hero and rated professional boxer Jay Fullmer (brother of boxers Gene and Don Fullmer) entered the ring to congratulate LeBell. The judoka and his team showed their sportsmanship by helping to revive Savage using kappo, as neither the referee nor the ring doctor knew how to resuscitate him. Despite this, a man tried to stab LeBell on the way out and he had to be protected by the professional wrestlers who accompanied him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_LeBe ... _in_the_US


Here are some highlights.

[youtube][/youtube]

Oglebart
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66277

Post by Oglebart »

MarcusAu wrote:
Really? wrote:
Becky has always been essentially a camgirl who doesn't give up any of the goods.
I mentioned a couple of pages back that I think she is straying into findom territory.

Her relationship with her patreons is like a piece of shit that hates flies.
Ha, I like it, nice metaphor!

With the recent increase in output to pay the rent - I predict associated depression issues and decreased self esteem.

And I'm not even getting much shadenfreude (sp) from it.
Really? I am, you're not trying hard enough!

Also while we are sharing folk legends, here is one from my neck of the woods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_Hands

feathers
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66278

Post by feathers »

Really? wrote:Looks like PZ has finally heard of Real Peer Review, that Twitter account that laughs at fake scholarship.
Does RealPeerReview ever state that all gender studies are bunk? If not, Peez is building another strawman here. Apart from the massive ad hominem, that is.

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66279

Post by MarcusAu »

I'd be interested to hear just which of the gender studies PZ has a problem with. With other criticisms he does not mind being specific, but here he seems content to keep things as vague as possible. It's self serving to say the least.

Aneris
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Rogue One

#66280

Post by Aneris »

I saw Rogue One in the midnight premiere. I’m a total Star Wars fan – so take this into account. TLDR version: This is the best Star Wars film since the 1980s but also the darkest episode yet.

Below a long, safe, entirely spoiler-free review with some ranting. It leaves JJ Abrams’ take completely in the dust, in my opinion. I'm not in the majority apparently, as Rotten Tomatoes gives it a good 88% against 92% for Abrams' SW7. I still have to hunt down why, but think they are mistaken. But even 88% consensus is good.

Rogue One, directed by Gareth Edwards, creates that special Star Wars Magic and had me immersed like no other film in recent times. Our whole group found it “intense” and the one non-Star-Wars-fan friend found it “good”, and she has no interest in the universe at all, so this translates to “amazing”.

A bit of ranting about the previous installment to set the scene. JJ Abrams SW7 used up his screentime to introduce a few new characters but offered little new; enjoyable while it lasted, yet somehow vapid. His big trick was hitting the reset button. He already failed to appreciate the design of Star Trek, and it was visible in Star Wars, too. He’s a good director and certainly can do blockbuster flicks, but he doesn’t understand design (though I stress, being a director is super hard, and chapeau for that). He could pave over his weakness with massive help from the member-berries nostalgia department and by relying on copy and pasting elements that already worked before. He even needed to revive McQuarrie’s designs, which I liked, but I now feel he didn’t do it for some clever reason, but because he just doesn’t understand the design language to come up with new things.

Abrams could retell the monomyth (partially), but missed the serial adventure. He was capable to hit the tone in parts of the story, but everywhere else he failed. His villain design was hamfisted and (to me) didn’t work. He didn’t understood how George Lucas used references and weaved them together, and missed most of the interesting ingredients that make Star Wars. Remember in the Origional Trilogy the droids, seemingly sentient beings, lined up as slaves and how the good guy secures them with the equivalent of a slave collar. This tells you a lot about him and this galaxy. I feel such qualities of storytelling are often overlooked or under-appreciated. People might not notice it, but Luke “grows” too when he accepts his tinned companions as friends. No need to waste dialogue to call this out. I only scratch the surface, but there’s a reason why it’s such a beloved franchise.

Abrams was also not able to convey the political situation and other things Lucas did with a few strokes that are just enough to give you an idea. Abrams pulled his “mystery box” stunt by barely mentioning things that was essential, yet left it as vague loose ends. In the end, he told an implausible scavenger hunt story that destroys every progress made until Return of the Jedi. Consider what Lucas brought across in the establishing shot alone, massive arrow shaped battleship consuming a small freighter. How Leia, white, complains to Vader, black, that she was on a diplomatic mission, and he replies that the democratic structure was just disbanded. Lucas shows technicians, infrastructure, routines. Pay attention, and you see little (and little new) in Abrams’ Star Wars. Many critics I’ve read seem to not appreciate the craft that went into original Star Wars and are too occupied with surface, and hence they rave about a diverting, yet ultimately empty rollercoaster ride. But now onto Rogue One, which shines in comparison.

Unlike Abrams who thinks he needs to “update” design in terrible and hamfisted ways (e.g. the terrible Apple inspired “duck troopers”) or needs to copy-paste, director Gareth Edwards understands its design and expands it in plausible ways. You don’t want to see a redesigned Star Wars, and not a familiar one, but you want to visit a place that exist in a certain way and see new things in it. Edwards’ Rogue One is not just used and grimy, and doesn’t just satisfy the surface. You have a sense of place and purpose that was missing for a long time. Pay attention to such things as infrastructure that is seen briefly. There’s transportation, places have a purpose and you get a quick idea of their history. They aren’t just set pieces as Maz's odd "fortress" in Abrams's film.

[youtube][/youtube]

Edwards doesn’t waste time, and yet manages to convey a lot, like Lucas did. A lesser director would have picked teenage characters with modern haircuts, and Abrams was awfully close to this. Edwards goes with the times, and there’s a diverse cast, yet again knows where to stay true to the original. The characters are plausible, have bad haircuts and even sport moustaches, as it should be. I loved this. He shows a lot of new things that are extensions just as Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi showed us new things (again, where Abrams failed almost completely). You’ve seen a tank in the trailer, for example. But there’s gear, technology and all that, and he manages to be both faithful to the Original Trilogy, without also copying the technical limitations of the 1970s. You see this in interface screens and such things, which are properly retro, and yet look like they belong into that universe.

Sense of place was terrible in SW7, where planets looked near identical and Abrams didn’t know how to convey they travel someplace. As such his characters rather beamed somewhere instantly (or so it felt). Edwards, again, in spirit of Lucas knows how to bring across they are actually go places and it takes some time, without wasting screen time. He places dialogue there and characterisation, just as Lucas did (how much poorer would Star Wars be without the banter about the Force between Obi Wan, Luke and Han Solo, or without the romance while repairing the ship).

The Force spirituality also feels right in this one. There's a location and hints of a religion of sorts, and of course it's a bit of trick, when you look at the characters: but it works. Again, superior to Yoda rehash and the implausible story of walking into a cellar and finding Luke's saber there (or Midiclorians).

And so it goes in almost every department. Abrams has silly scenes with the stormtrooper taking his helmet off and this boring moment with Captain Phasma complaining about him. This was not just a failed attempt to recreate a mysterious character like Boba Fett, but the whole scene also made the “First Order” (the Empire reboot) seem incompetent. It just cheapens bad-ass characters and what’s meant to be a tyranny when the top bad-ass ask some grunt soldier to go to a check-up, and then walks away. Later Phasma personally and manually powers down some shields and gets thrown in the trash. Abrams had lots such nonsense, that wasted time for little gain. I understand that it "rhymes" with Boba Fett, who gets thrown into the Sarlacc, it is still dumb to do it this way. Kylo Ren murdering the village was hamfisted and not plausible, especially as you learn about his character.

Rogue One also has rhymes and inversions. Some obvious, like the viallain being dressed white and his troopers black, some more subtle (hint: has to do with breathing). I felt this was done in a good way, doesn't distract and yet adds something for fans.

I might be alone in this, but I also found characterisation a lot better in Rogue One. The SW7 cast are great and fun, but Abrams sacrifices everything for them. Edwards shows characters with a few precise strokes, they also change and grow. You will see one example in the first few minutes, and that’s masterful.

The villains do villainous things, and appear plausible (within the Star Wars premise, of course). They have heated arguments, too, and there's rivalry. It might be yet another tiny thing, but Abrams had sacrificed this for some silly “mystery box” mentions, or cut it entirely to streamline his scavenger hunt story. In Rogue One, characters try to accomplish things, personalities clash, and a lot is brought across. I mention this often, but original Star Wars has this enduring quality because every minute of screentime works in several ways. Rarely does it do just one thing.

Rogue One also has fanservice and citations, of course, and there is one scene that seems too similar to what we’ve seen before, but it is plausible and follows from the story. Most references are Easter Eggs and of the type that make sense when you’re dealing with a consistent universe.

Overall, Star Wars: Rogue One is fantastic new addition to the Star Wars universe. But be warned. This isn’t a family film. It perfectly fits and plays five minutes before the 1977's debut, but has considerably less lighter swashbuckling adventure than you're used to. It has comic relief and likeable characters and all you’d expect, yes, but don’t expect rope-swinging saber-duels and romance.

Thematically, and in some other ways, this is the darkest of all Star Wars films, but faithful darkness in style of the Original Trilogy, not bizarre comical-yet-brutal stuff of the Prequels. Star Wars was never light kids entertainment overall, with genocide, tyranny, slavery, torture and dismemberment. It’s a harsh and dark universe reigned by terror, and a design aesthetic shaped by war, which is often times creepy (from bug-eyed or spider-like droids to creatures that are about as cute as crustaceans and cephalopods).

In conclusion. Star Wars fans will see it anyway, and the only ones who might be disappointed are those who expect lightsaber entertainment for kids. That’s not it. Those who aren’t into Star Wars at all and want to see some light fun should stay home. You’ll see the darkest, but also best Star Wars film since the Original Trilogy took you away into a a galaxy far, far away.

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66281

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

So, no Jar Jar?

ROBOKiTTY
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66282

Post by ROBOKiTTY »

Found this exchange on Reddit.
So I have to wonder - how is the Republican party so good at making outrage?

They constantly talk about Benghazi and e-mail leaks when Hillary campaigns and people lap it up, but something like this comes up and nobody bats an eye.
Here's an interesting part from a reply.
Fervor. There is something cultural about a large part of the republican party that acts with so much outrage so passionately everyone hears about it.
I think this reveals an insightful difference between the Republicans and Democrats. Mainstream Republicans are somehow able to constantly go on the offensive and not oversaturate people's tolerance. Mainstream Democrats are always on the defensive. On the other hand, American SJWs would be Democrats who have adopted a similar strategy as mudslinging Republicans. Nonetheless, they fail to make their vitriol stick. Why is this? What's a good explanation?

I've heard one proposed explanation out there, but I don't buy it. The idea goes that it's because the intended targets of conservative propaganda tend to give more easily into confirmation bias and gobble up any narrative that fits their preconceived worldviews, while a larger number of liberals are generally more skeptical, so right-wing SJWs prosper while liberal SJWs get torn apart by their own. If this were back in 2004, I might've accepted that explanation, but now I think it's too convenient and too self-congratulatory.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66283

Post by Kirbmarc »

Apparently over at FTB some people think that the idea that "it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex" is supported by evidence (!!). PZ himself crows that a certain "Siobhan" debunked Peter Boghossian's argument, in a recent interview in Areo Magazine, that gender studies are spewing bullshit. The "debunking" is actually a series of strawmen, word games, and redefining outliers as the norm, as part of a non-existent "sex spectrum" which somehow would falsify sexual dimorphism on biological bases.

Here's Part I of a thorough critique of a blog post by Siobhan, titled "Peter Boghossian: “Critical thinking” apparently means “pretend this field of study doesn’t exist”.
Siobhan wrote:Hands up: Who thought atheism needed another arrogant atheist douchebro who cloaks himself in rationality and then proceeds in a spit-flecked rant rife with fallacious reasoning to tell us we are irrational about stuff?
Passive-aggressive poisoning of the well, once again. Wonderful start.
Peter Boghossian raves about “Gender studies professors” who “are pumping out complete bullshit” in Areo Magazine, producing something resembling less of an argument and more of a rancid onion. And for some fucking reason, I’m feeling masochistic enough to peel back the layers of entitled manbaby whinging. Tears to ensue.
Why are SJWs unable not to include swearing or insults in the posts, when they whine that mean words are incredibly harmful if they're directed against them?
One would think that an example of critical thinking would explicitly identify the premises of a presented argument, compare peer-reviewed literature to see whether the premises are accurate, and use formal logic to determine if the conclusion is sound. But Boghossian’s rant is devoid of any particular specifics–aside from quoting one of Jordan Peterson’s critics–and on top of that he has the gall to represent himself as some kind of model freethinker. The problem is that the sort of freethought that lacks any resemblance to reality is the sort of “freethought” we’d expect to see from mushroom-tripping hippies reacting to psychedelic phantoms rather than what’s in front of them.
More raving and ranting and passive-aggressiveness.

[I'm skipping a quote from Boghossian's post]
This is the tremendous irony: Boghossian’s not wrong, at least on the nature of critical thinking. Knowing what ought to falsify a belief is the cornerstone of rationality. But then he’s completely incapable of actually examining the various positions he brings forward in support of his conclusion that gender studies don’t “have a dialectic” and that they’re not “truth seeking enterprises.” This is just literally seconds after he demonstrates the weakness of inductive logic. Then, having abandoned his own principles of reason, he goes on a rant about how The Left™ has abandoned reason!
Do I detect some projection here? Boghossian's claim is that gender studies aren't falsifiable. This is what Siobhan should address, not whether Boghossian's claim the gender studies aren't falsifiable is falsifiable.

Imagine a dialogue like this:

Boghossian "Astrology isn't falsifiable"

Siobhan the astrologer "No, your belief that astrology isn't falsifiable is what is not falsifiable!"

If you think that this is dishonest, and that Siobhan the astrologer should have addressed Boghossian's claim by offering an argument as to why astrology is falsifiable, I'm glad you agree with me.
So let’s apply Boghossian’s own model to his feverish screed and then have an honest evaluation as to whether Boghossian ought to be considered The Paragon of Rationality.
"Feverish screed". Nice rationality you've got there.
The sheer number of weasel words should be an immediate red flag for a rationalist engaged in specifics. “Post-truth,” “the side that entertained” “Post-Modernist” are all extremely loaded terms. Post-Modernist is the only one defined by the interviewer, as “discouraged objective truth,” which I suspect we could ironically apply to Boghossian as we watch him take the bait. Aside from that, I would recognize a question like this and refuse to answer it altogether with a statement to the effect of “that’s a lot of loaded terminology and it’s unclear what you actually mean. Could you be more specific?”
Boghossian later adds comments which make his argument specific, but Siobhan focuses only on the first question in the interview, to make it look like the terms are meaningless instead of addressing the criticism that Boghossian makes.

Anyway, Boghossian says that left bears considerable responsibility for Trump's victory. Here Siobhan shows her weasel words and loaded terminology:
Care to define “The Left” and “considerable”? From my perspective, even the Democrats are right-leaning. Maybe a strong epistemology won’t take for granted the relational meaning of Left because not everybody has the same Centre from which to lean left?
The part in bold is why Siobhan is a relativist and very much "post-truth". It's evidently clear that Boghossian is adopting the terminology used in US elections to talk about US elections. In US politics the Democratic Party is "the left". Siobhan's opinion on the Democrats doesn't really matter. If Boghossian had discussed politics in the '30s in Soviet Russia "the left" would have meant something different, of course, but the contextual meaning here is pretty clear.

Siobhan plays word games to avoid addressing Boghossian's claim. This, as we will see, will be a constant in the rest of the post.

Boghossian then shows the hypocrisy of "social constructionist" post-modernists by pointing out how they abandon their relativistic premises when talking about empirical data or morality which support their political preference.
Boghossian seems to be implying that “Post-Modernists” engage in this particular bit of hypocrisy. But without a specific frame of reference–an actual individual with actual statements–there’s no actual information here. “This happens.” Okay, but what does that actually mean? “Hypocrites exist” is hardly a revolutionary statement. Does Boghossian mean to imply that hypocrisy is a monopoly of The Left (relative to the unspecified Centre)?
Boghossian NEVER said that. He pointed out how "social constructionism" and relativism are incompatible with a precise political ideology which praises relativism when it's not applied to its principles. He never talked about "hypocrisy" and never said that it's exclusive to the left. Siobhan carefully constructs a strawman here, but the misrepresentation of what Boghossian said is pretty blatant.
It is not sound logic to reject a sphere of thought because some of its adherents suck at advocating for it. After all, if that were the case, I wouldn’t be an atheist just because Robert G. Ingersoll advances limp-wristed nonsense in its name.
Boghossian has instead argued:
Premise 1 — This particular person is a Relativist.
Premise 2 — This particular person is a hypocrite.
Conclusion — All relativists are hypocrites.
No he hasn't. He really hasn't. He has said that many who profess to be relativists really aren't when it comes to important decisions or their favorite ideas. He hasn't said anything about ALL relativists. That's another strawman argument.
If all relativists were consistent in their position, sure, they wouldn’t mind accepting care from witch doctors over doctor doctors. Some do though–they usually die. You could say a great deal about those kinds of relativists but they are, at least, internally consistent. Nonetheless it means Boghossian’s observations on relativists are false, stepping aside the question of whether or not relativism is a worthwhile philosophy to embrace.
Those people aren't the ones that Boghossian is talking about. He never said anything about "all" relativist. What he said is:
And it’s obvious that people don’t believe this relativism stuff fully because if they were sick they would go to the witch-doctor instead of the hospital. And relativists would confine anybody they wanted to any kind of life. I once tweeted something like:
“If you’re really a relativist, then take a vacation in Aleppo,”and it pissed off a lot of people. But it’s true.
He never said that there aren't any consistent relativists who do go to the witch-doctors (and die). He said that a lot of people who claim to be relativist really aren't when it comes to something they care about. Siobhan is really reaching here.

Anyway, this is weak sauce, word games and strawmen. Let's get into the real meat of the argument. Boghossian calls Nick Matte's drivel that "it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex" for the drivel that it is. Siobhan thinks that:
Boghossian has some ‘splaining to do, then, on why the otherwise apolitical field of biological development gives us such observations as:
Siobhan here cites a Nature article titled "Sex redefined: The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that."

The article isn't a scientific paper. It is a simplification of a series of scientific studies, and the conclusions that Siobhan cites aren't those of the scientific papers. But let's read it anyway:
Nature wrote:A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male1.
This is fascinating, but doesn't prove that there is no such thing as sexual dimorphism in humans anymore that the existence of He PingPing proved that the average adult human is shorter than 80 centimeters.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
"Some people" have several different forms of disorders of sex development. How many people? "Some researchers" say that it could be 1 person in 100, which sums up all different disorders of sexual development and isn't really all that much, even if true. Certainly not enough to say that sex is "redefined". After all trisomy 21 alone affects 1 person in 1000, and yet we don't say that the number of chromosomes is "redefined" by it.

Who are those researchers, and what do they really say? There's a link in the footnotes. Let's read the abstract:
Mammalian sex determination is the unique process whereby a single organ, the bipotential gonad, undergoes a developmental switch that promotes its differentiation into either a testis or an ovary. Disruptions of this complex genetic process during human development can manifest as disorders of sex development (DSDs). Sex development can be divided into two distinct processes: sex determination, in which the bipotential gonads form either testes or ovaries, and sex differentiation, in which the fully formed testes or ovaries secrete local and hormonal factors to drive differentiation of internal and external genitals, as well as extragonadal tissues such as the brain. DSDs can arise from a number of genetic lesions, which manifest as a spectrum of gonadal (gonadal dysgenesis to ovotestis) and genital (mild hypospadias or clitoromegaly to ambiguous genitalia) phenotypes. The physical attributes and medical implications associated with DSDs confront families of affected newborns with decisions, such as gender of rearing or genital surgery, and additional concerns, such as uncertainty over the child's psychosexual development and personal wishes later in life. In this Review, we discuss the underlying genetics of human sex determination and focus on emerging data, genetic classification of DSDs and other considerations that surround gender development and identity in individuals with DSDs.
This isn't evidence of "redefining" sex, or of a lack of sexual dimorphism, or of the fact that the sexual binary is a "social construct". This is evidence that sometimes the process which creates sexual dimorphism fails due to genetic lesions which produce anomalous gonads or genitals. Intersex people deserve care and respect just like people affected by trisomy21, but this doesn't mean that their existence implies that they're the norm and that it's impossible to tell apart two sexes on biological basis, no more than the existence of trisomy21 implies that there's a continuous "spectrum" of the number of chromosome 21 in humans, from zero to theoretical infinity.

(Part II coming soon)

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66284

Post by AndrewV69 »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:So, no Jar Jar?
That was the last Star Wars I watched. Something about that character turned me off completely.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66285

Post by Kirbmarc »

Part II of a rebuttal to Siobhan's ""Peter Boghossian: “Critical thinking” apparently means “pretend this field of study doesn’t exist”.
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
The fact that some of the millions of cells in our body might not have the exact same DNA of those who determine the development of our genitalia and other sexual characteristics doesn't mean that those sexual characteristics don't exist or don't cluster around a binary. Some people might be truly "intersex" (i.e. presenting both male and female genital characteristic), but their number is hard to estimate, and it certainly doesn't suggest that there's a "spectrum" to sexual dimorphism. Also there's no precise reference for the claims in this paragraph.

This is far from conclusive or even suggestive evidence that "it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex" like Nick Matte argues for.

Sexual dimorphism is based on evolutionary pressures for reproduction, which don't classify individuals as a genetic level but only care about the apparati which produce sperms and ova.
These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”
Intermediate and fringe cases don't falsify the idea of a dicothomy anymore than really tall women or really short men falsify the statistical account that women are on average shorter than men. I think that the Nature article isn't completely honest in presenting the problem of definition of sex to assess fringe cases as something which "doesn't fit well" with "binary terms".
That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not. Five weeks into development, a human embryo has the potential to form both male and female anatomy. Next to the developing kidneys, two bulges known as the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing: the epididymes, vas deferentia and seminal vesicles. At six weeks, the gonad switches on the developmental pathway to become an ovary or a testis. If a testis develops, it secretes testosterone, which supports the development of the male ducts. It also makes other hormones that force the presumptive uterus and Fallopian tubes to shrink away. If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither. The sex hormones also dictate the development of the external genitalia, and they come into play once more at puberty, triggering the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair.
The sentence in bold just made the rest of the article completely useless for supporting SJW ideas on the non-existence of the gender binary. Problems in hormonal development may affect some individuals but again this doesn't falsify the fact that the "two sexes" are "physically different", which is what really matter when we talk about "biological sex".
Changes to any of these processes can have dramatic effects on an individual's sex. Gene mutations affecting gonad development can result in a person with XY chromosomes developing typically female characteristics, whereas alterations in hormone signalling can cause XX individuals to develop along male lines.

For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene3, 4, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males.

By the turn of the millennium, however, the idea of femaleness being a passive default option had been toppled by the discovery of genes that actively promote ovarian development and suppress the testicular programme — such as one called WNT4. XY individuals with extra copies of this gene can develop atypical genitals and gonads, and a rudimentary uterus and Fallopian tubes5. In 2011, researchers showed6 that if another key ovarian gene, RSPO1, is not working normally, it causes XX people to develop an ovotestis — a gonad with areas of both ovarian and testicular development.

These discoveries have pointed to a complex process of sex determination, in which the identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules (such as WNT4) in the networks can tip the balance towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. “It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it's a balance,” says Eric Vilain, a clinician and the director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's more of a systems-biology view of the world of sex.”
Again, fascinating, and it's interesting that there's a process of feedback between different genes rather than a straightforward influence of XX vs. XY chromosomes, but what does this mean for those who think that the "gender binary" is a "social construct"? Nothing. When genes interact normally the gender binary is produced. It's when there are extra copies, or disruptions of process, or fragments of a chromosome, or genetic lesions, that the relatively rare "intersex" individuals are born (many of which only show differences between genotype and phenotype, not phenotype of both sexes).

It's very interesting to see the different ways through which errors might happen, but this doesn't falsify sexual dimorphism anymore than other genetic anomalies in chromosomes falsify the fact that humans have 46 chromosomes. In order to falsify dimorphism you'd have to argue that there aren't clusters of characteristics which group into two camps on a statistical level due to evolutionary pressures. Fringe cases of people who possess some but not all of those characteristics aren't "redefining" sex anymore than polydactilic people falsify the general assumption that normal human have five fingers per hand.
According to some scientists, that balance can shift long after development is over. Studies in mice suggest that the gonad teeters between being male and female throughout life, its identity requiring constant maintenance. In 2009, researchers reported7 deactivating an ovarian gene called Foxl2 in adult female mice; they found that the granulosa cells that support the development of eggs transformed into Sertoli cells, which support sperm development. Two years later, a separate team showed8 the opposite: that inactivating a gene called Dmrt1 could turn adult testicular cells into ovarian ones. “That was the big shock, the fact that it was going on post-natally,” says Vincent Harley, a geneticist who studies gonad development at the MIMR-PHI Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne.
This isn't evidence that the "balance can shift long after development is over" and "identity requires constant maintenance". The researchers actively deactivated genes. This doesn't prove that "identity requires maintenance", anymore that deliberately deactivating the genes responsible for development of melanin in a black person would prove that "blackness requires maintenance".
The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.

Conditions such as these meet the medical definition of DSDs, in which an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal or gonadal sex. But they are rare — affecting about 1 in 4,500 people9. Some researchers now say that the definition should be widened to include subtle variations of anatomy such as mild hypospadias, in which a man's urethral opening is on the underside of his penis rather than at the tip.
I don't think that's a valid approach. CAIS people are genetically male and anatomically mostly female, but again they're outliers, very rare (and often infertile). Men with mild hypospadias are genetically and anatomically man, no matter their penis anomalies. There's no "spectrum of variations", there are many different anomalies and disfunctions grouped together to artificially form a scale. The vast majority of people fit in the sexual binary, and even those who don't have perfect alignment in the cluster of characteristics present in one pole or the other lean mostly towards one pole or the other.

True ermaphrodites are rare and play no significant role in reproduction. There's no such thing as a "third sex", with equal representation and equal evolutionary importance as males and females.
But beyond this, there could be even more variation. Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. “Biologically, it's a spectrum,” says Vilain.
This is an ideological, not a biological claim. The binary cluster is well-defined, and outliers don't produce a continuous variety of gradual changes but several different rare disfunctions and anomalies. There's no "spectrum" anymore than anomalies in the number of fingers create a "spectrum" of the number of fingers.
Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb11. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.
Yes, that's an anomaly, but a) it's incredibly rare and b) it's not one that created a "third sex" or "fluidity". The man was biologically male, with a penis, testes, and produced sperm. The fact that he presented an anomalous womb (likely due to a genetic or hormonal defect) didn't make him a woman.
Studies of DSDs have shown that sex is no simple dichotomy. But things become even more complex when scientists zoom in to look at individual cells. The common assumption that every cell contains the same set of genes is untrue. Some people have mosaicism: they develop from a single fertilized egg but become a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups. This can happen when sex chromosomes are doled out unevenly between dividing cells during early embryonic development. For example, an embryo that starts off as XY can lose a Y chromosome from a subset of its cells. If most cells end up as XY, the result is a physically typical male, but if most cells are X, the result is a female with a condition called Turner's syndrome, which tends to result in restricted height and underdeveloped ovaries. This kind of mosaicism is rare, affecting about 1 in 15,000 people.
Again, genetic anomalies and embryonic anomalies produce rare conditions (which often, but of course not always, lead to short lives/infertility). How does this falsify sexual dimorphism, again?
There is a second way in which a person can end up with cells of different chromosomal sexes. James's patient was a chimaera: a person who develops from a mixture of two fertilized eggs, usually owing to a merger between embryonic twins in the womb. This kind of chimaerism resulting in a DSD is extremely rare, representing about 1% of all DSD cases.
Again, intriguing and fascinating, but it doesn't tell us anything on the alleged "incorrectness" of saying that biological sex exists.

End of Part II. Part III is coming soon.

Kirbmarc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66286

Post by Kirbmarc »

Part III of a rebuttal to Siobhan's "Peter Boghossian: “Critical thinking” apparently means “pretend this field of study doesn’t exist”.
Scientists are now finding that XX and XY cells behave in different ways, and that this can be independent of the action of sex hormones. “To tell you the truth, it's actually kind of surprising how big an effect of sex chromosomes we've been able to see,” says Arnold. He and his colleagues have shown17 that the dose of X chromosomes in a mouse's body can affect its metabolism, and studies in a lab dish suggest18 that XX and XY cells behave differently on a molecular level, for example with different metabolic responses to stress. The next challenge, says Arnold, is to uncover the mechanisms. His team is studying the handful of X-chromosome genes now known to be more active in females than in males. “I actually think that there are more sex differences than we know of,” says Arnold.
This is actually evidence of MORE differences between the sexes on biological level. In the paper which Siobhan has cited as evidence of a lack of differences between the sexes due to biology.

How can I put it....EPIC FAIL.
Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up. True, more than half a century of activism from members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has softened social attitudes to sexual orientation and gender. Many societies are now comfortable with men and women crossing conventional societal boundaries in their choice of appearance, career and sexual partner. But when it comes to sex, there is still intense social pressure to conform to the binary model.
This has nothing to do with the genetic anomalies you discusses before, unless you're claiming that those genetic anomalies have also a significant influence on behavior, which actually is an argument for, not against a biological basis for sex AND gender! If "trans people" are actually tied to genetic anomalies and are "outliers" who have both male and female biological characteristics this means that behavior and identity (even gender identity) is dependent on biology, not on a social construct!
This pressure has meant that people born with clear DSDs often undergo surgery to 'normalize' their genitals. Such surgery is controversial because it is usually performed on babies, who are too young to consent, and risks assigning a sex at odds with the child's ultimate gender identity — their sense of their own gender. Intersex advocacy groups have therefore argued that doctors and parents should at least wait until a child is old enough to communicate their gender identity, which typically manifests around the age of three, or old enough to decide whether they want surgery at all.
I agree that surgery on babies if not necessary to save the baby's life is probably unnecessary. But if the "ultimate gender identity" is the "sense of their own gender" it's interesting to ask oneself where does this "sense" come from: is it innate (and so likely of biological origin) or "socially constructed"?
This issue was brought into focus by a lawsuit filed in South Carolina in May 2013 by the adoptive parents of a child known as MC, who was born with ovotesticular DSD, a condition that produces ambiguous genitalia and gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue. When MC was 16 months old, doctors performed surgery to assign the child as female — but MC, who is now eight years old, went on to develop a male gender identity. Because he was in state care at the time of his treatment, the lawsuit alleged not only that the surgery constituted medical malpractice, but also that the state denied him his constitutional right to bodily integrity and his right to reproduce. Last month, a court decision prevented the federal case from going to trial, but a state case is ongoing.
This case is actually evidence that gender identity isn't "socially constructed". If MC's identity were "constructed" once he was operated and turned into a female anatomically-wise MC should have developed with the "identity" of a woman. After all MC was now "presenting" as a woman, so society should have constructed MC's identity as female, right? Why did MC identify as male, then? Maybe it's because of some innate (read: biological) factor.
Doctors and scientists are sympathetic to these concerns, but the MC case also makes some uneasy — because they know how much is still to be learned about the biology of sex19. They think that changing medical practice by legal ruling is not ideal, and would like to see more data collected on outcomes such as quality of life and sexual function to help decide the best course of action for people with DSDs — something that researchers are starting to do.


This is a fairly sensible position. But this isn't what the SJW trans activists want. They want surgery to be done as soon as the child expresses or seems to express a sexual identity which doesn't seem to match with the characteristics of their body. They want to argue that there's no such thing as a biological sex and so gender identity is a "spectrum" of forever-changing personal identities instead of behavioral mechanism of biological origin (through likely not as straightforward as we used to assume).
Vilain, Harley and Achermann say that doctors are taking an increasingly circumspect attitude to genital surgery. Children with DSDs are treated by multidisciplinary teams that aim to tailor management and support to each individual and their family, but this usually involves raising a child as male or female even if no surgery is done. Scientists and advocacy groups mostly agree on this, says Vilain: “It might be difficult for children to be raised in a gender that just does not exist out there.” In most countries, it is legally impossible to be anything but male or female.
Well, MC expressed a strong male identity, didn't he? What makes Vilain think that the best course of action is raising an intersex child as a "gender that does not exist out there"?
Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”
No, biologists haven't shown that sex is a spectrum, this is ideological drivel. Biologists have shown that the genetic process which leads to sex is more complicated than we thought it was and that plenty of things can go wrong and create anomalies. Also transgender people and intersex people aren't the same thing. Conflating them is more ideological bullshit.

As for a "dream" where a person's gender or sex is "irrelevant", that's an ideological utopia. All the research presented in the article shows that sex has a biological origin, and that sexual dimorphism might even extend to the influences of chromosomes on, say, responses to stress!
So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.


More ideological drivel. The fact there might not be a single parameter that takes over other parameters doesn't mean that parameters don't cluster around two poles. "Gender identity" also seems to be influenced by certain parameters.

Vilain is heavily virtue-signalling here: his work shows that biological sex exists (and that it's influenced by a complex, fascinating mechanism) and here he says "durr, durr, there's no single parameters which is the one which defines sex, so it's all about what you feel". Drivel, and unworthy of a scientist.

Back to Siobhan:
why don’t men menstruate?
They do.
No, they don't. Trans men are biologically or at least anatomically women. Their identity doesn't influence their bodies.
Why don’t men have babies
They do.
Thomas Beatie was, anatomically and biologically, a woman. Again here we're conflating personal gender identity with biological processes, which is ideological drivel.
Why are there no women on professional football teams?
There are. (For the other football, too)
Boghossian is a bit unclear here. He should have said "why do men outperform women at football on a regular basis?" and then talk about upper-body strength and other statistical biological differences between the sexes.
The tremendous irony of a man blissfully unaware of what actual human sex determination entails accusing “gender studies” as lacking a dialectic and being an enterprise that avoids truth. If the premise about discrete biological categories such as “male” and “female” is untrue, might that not unravel a fair number of observations made about gender under such paradigms?
The tremendous irony of someone who hasn't read or understood the article she cites (which supports the existence of biological sexual differences) who lectures a man as "blissfully unaware".
What’s “real” is that gender essentialism is founded upon an untrue premise and thus renders invalid any reasoning about the nature of gender predicated in the belief of discrete categories.
Sexual dimorphism exists, sex has a biological origin, and pointing at outliers to invalide statistical differences is idiotic. Learn to actually sit down and examine your sources, Siobhan.
Siobhan wrote:
Boghossian wrote:A friend of mine is a physician and she told me an interesting story. She had a guy to come in to see her who was born biologically female who transitioned to male. Who by every indication looked like a male — beard, the whole thing. And he came in because he had a yeast infection.
Does Boghossian build off this observation? No. It’s a flippant insert which is then promptly discarded. All I conclude is that yeast is not particularly concerned about whose vagina it infects, only that the environment is suitable.
How delightfully dumb. The moral of the story is that that yeast doesn't care about this person's "gender identity", and infects this person's vagina nonetheless.
Siobhan wrote:
Boghossian wrote:Now you can go around denying reality all you want, but isn’t it funny that we only deny reality in regard to some things and not other things.
Wait, the rationalist is now arguing that it is better to deny all reality than only some of it? Am I on acid?
No, you're only stupid (maybe willingly so). Boghossian is simply reiterating his point: biology matters just like the rest of reality, you can have a personal "gender identity" but yeast doesn't care about it. So Boghossian asks himself (and the reader) why should we acknowledge "gender identity" based on personal self-identification but excluded other forms of relativism. And if we reject relativism, shouldn't we reject "gender identity", too?
So which is it? Do people form demonstrably false opinions because they believe they have the evidence to substantiate it or do they not actually believe in demonstrably false opinions?
You lack internal consistency and you’re lecturing about internal consistency!
Again, you're pretty thick (maybe intentionally). Boghossian argues that those people don't actually believe in a consistent way. They believe the bits they want to believe, since they think they got evidence (like you do), but don't really carry the consequences of their beliefs to their logical conclusions.
Yes, because your judgement on misinformation can clearly be trusted
Clearly more than yours, since you don't seem able to critically read the article you have posted to corroborate the idea that "it's not correct to say that there is such a thing as biological sex" and you accept its ideological conclusions at face value, instead of bothering to properly assess the evidence.

TL;DR: Saying that there is a "spectrum" in biological sex requires cramming all Sexual Development Disorders (SDS) together and ordering them on an ideological "scale" of biological sexes, instead of focusing on the fact that they're malfunctions and anomalies in a system which produces sexual dimorphism and might have create more differences between the two sexes that we expect. Trying to link transexual people to biologically "intersexual" (in itself a very loose definition) is pure ideology, and so is trying to justify the idea that "it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex" by pointing at outliers due to genetic disorders, as if those exception somehow falsified the mechanisms which produce sexual dimorphism.

TL;DR on the TL;DR: Siobhan and PZ Myers, and to a certain extent even Nature, confuse ideology with science, then claim that science supports their ideology. Boghossian's criticism of gender studies is spot on.

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66287

Post by MarcusAu »

AndrewV69 wrote:
Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:So, no Jar Jar?
That was the last Star Wars I watched. Something about that character turned me off completely.
Keep you controversial opinions to yourself.

Kirbmarc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66288

Post by Kirbmarc »

ROBOKiTTY wrote:Found this exchange on Reddit.
So I have to wonder - how is the Republican party so good at making outrage?

They constantly talk about Benghazi and e-mail leaks when Hillary campaigns and people lap it up, but something like this comes up and nobody bats an eye.
Here's an interesting part from a reply.
Fervor. There is something cultural about a large part of the republican party that acts with so much outrage so passionately everyone hears about it.
I think this reveals an insightful difference between the Republicans and Democrats. Mainstream Republicans are somehow able to constantly go on the offensive and not oversaturate people's tolerance. Mainstream Democrats are always on the defensive. On the other hand, American SJWs would be Democrats who have adopted a similar strategy as mudslinging Republicans. Nonetheless, they fail to make their vitriol stick. Why is this? What's a good explanation?

I've heard one proposed explanation out there, but I don't buy it. The idea goes that it's because the intended targets of conservative propaganda tend to give more easily into confirmation bias and gobble up any narrative that fits their preconceived worldviews, while a larger number of liberals are generally more skeptical, so right-wing SJWs prosper while liberal SJWs get torn apart by their own. If this were back in 2004, I might've accepted that explanation, but now I think it's too convenient and too self-congratulatory.
I think that a more plausible explanation is that Mainstream Republicans, Mainstream Democrats and SJWs appeal to very different socio-economical niches.

Mainstream Republicans have a strong appeal with non-college educated men and women, especially (but not exclusively) white ones, both in the working and in the middle class. They preach a narrative based on shared American myths (rugged individualism, a modern version of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the "American dream") which are very popular among many rural and working class communities. The idea of the self-made man, which through hard work and luck/divine grace betters his economic and social position is very widespread in the American society. Churches approve of it (for the most part) and meritocracy and the benefits of market are part of the American collective political DNA.

Of course this narrative doesn't match the actions of Mainstream Republicans (which tend to be corporativist and pro-lobbies) but it's an easy one to swallow, and it generates easy outrage at perceived betrayal of American ideals. Republicans aren't all equal (libertarians and conservatives tend to be heavily divided, to say nothing of the Religious Right) but they identify a common enemy in the "Big Government". Republican mudslinging always comes with accusations of wanting to restrict the freedom to believe in the religion of the American Dream in the name of interests of foreign or elitist lobbies.

Mainstream Democrats, on the other hand, have a strong appeal with working class non-whites, with urban communities and (to a lesser degree these years) with unionized workers who feel cheated by the system. They're a hodge-podge of people from different backgrounds and with very different beliefs, to a much stronger degree than the Republicans, who are united only by their dislike of the practices of the GOP.

This includes minorities alienated by the GOP's support for cutting welfare and by the closeness of white identity politics movements to the Reps, workers who think that the system screwed them and want protection for their jobs and better deals and intellectual and social élites who live mostly in the cities and thoroughly reject the "American Dream" as a narrative in favor of other narratives.

The SJWs appeal mainly to the latter group. They present themselves as skeptics of the narratives of meritocracy and hard work, and propose instead a narrative of "Patriarchy" and "white supremacy". Those narratives are mainly diffused through higher education and so are limited to a minority of people in the US. They're the dominant narratives in certain parts of the country, but those parts are very insular and detached not just from the Republicans but from many mainstream Democrats as well.

TL;DR: The "left" isn't less effective at mudslinging because it's more skeptical, it's because it's more élitist and appeals to less people. Most average people tend to be more conservative than the leftist élites.

deLurch
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66289

Post by deLurch »

ROBOKiTTY wrote:Found this exchange on Reddit.
So I have to wonder - how is the Republican party so good at making outrage?

They constantly talk about Benghazi and e-mail leaks when Hillary campaigns and people lap it up, but something like this comes up and nobody bats an eye.
Here's an interesting part from a reply.
Fervor. There is something cultural about a large part of the republican party that acts with so much outrage so passionately everyone hears about it.
I think this reveals an insightful difference between the Republicans and Democrats. Mainstream Republicans are somehow able to constantly go on the offensive and not oversaturate people's tolerance. Mainstream Democrats are always on the defensive. On the other hand, American SJWs would be Democrats who have adopted a similar strategy as mudslinging Republicans. Nonetheless, they fail to make their vitriol stick. Why is this? What's a good explanation?

I've heard one proposed explanation out there, but I don't buy it. The idea goes that it's because the intended targets of conservative propaganda tend to give more easily into confirmation bias and gobble up any narrative that fits their preconceived worldviews, while a larger number of liberals are generally more skeptical, so right-wing SJWs prosper while liberal SJWs get torn apart by their own. If this were back in 2004, I might've accepted that explanation, but now I think it's too convenient and too self-congratulatory.
Let's see.

Benghazi - Fox news has been ranting about that forever. And I pretty much ignored that and didn't care because it smelled too much like a political smear attack because they expected Hillary to run for president. It was carried by all of the mainstream conservative news channels & all of the conservative shock jocks. But if you check around on social media, how many people did you really see talking about it? I don't think it went very far.

Emails - That investigation went on longer. Enough evidence was presented to the public to pretty much show Hillary had fucked up, and she was being treated with a double standard. And then you have the DNC email hack. Bottom line, the public was shown evidence, and the storied carried beyond mainstream media.

"Putin personally involved in US Election Hack" - The dog isn't going trot because all we have are unnamed sources vouching. Remember, the public tends not to trust the media much anymore. If they don't show some hard evidence, the public is more likely to view it as partisan politics being played out by the media.

TedDahlberg
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66290

Post by TedDahlberg »

Kirbmarc wrote:Speaking of local folklore, this is the most famous monster which is part of the old wives's tale in Switzerland: the Krampus. I believe that there's a recent American horror movie about it.

Basically it's a monster that looks like a cross between a goat and a man, and is said to kidnap the children who have been naughty at Christmas.
I just started reading a new book about it which seems quite promising; The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. It also seems to deal with other, possibly related (I haven't gotten to those chapters yet) folklore such as Frau Perchta, the Wild Hunt, companies of ghosts and so on. Makes nice Christmas reading.

Suet Cardigan
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66291

Post by Suet Cardigan »

Lsuoma wrote:
katamari Damassi wrote: She and her merry band were tearing into some guy whom Elyse was messaging with and he dared to message this: "I see in your profile that you do sexwork. I think that's great, but I wanted to let you know I'm not looking for anything transactional."
Dicky!!!
Elyse does sex work?

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b112/ ... ebleed.jpg

http://images.memes.com/meme/556397

Kirbmarc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66292

Post by Kirbmarc »

There's far more evidence that the English language doesn't really exist that of the reality of the "gender spectrum".

Don't believe me? First consider that regional and local variations of the English language exist in any area where English is the language of the majority of the population. Then consider the existence of English-based creoles, many of which (like Singlish) include words and structures from English and unrelated languages (like Mandarin Chinese or Malay).

Consider also the high number of English loanwords and calques in other languages, which has lead many to postulate the existence of "proto-creoles" like Spanglish (Spanish with significant influence of English) or Japanglish (same thing for English and Japanese) as socio-cultural minority languages. Consider also the reverse, the high number of loanwords and calques in several varities of the English language from other languages (mostly from Spanish and Native American languages in the US, from French and First Nation languages in Canada, from Aboriginal Languages/Maori in Australia/New Zealand, etc.). Consider also the huge amount of latinates (calques and loans from Latin) and the influence of French, Nordic Germanic languages, Celtic languages, etc. on the development of English.

All these are real phenomena, thoroughly documented, and lead to perfectly viable varieties of English which are understood and spoken by millions of people, not to isolated outliers of non-efficient or less efficient forms of English which are products of failures in the mechanisms of language acquisition. According to this preponderance of data we could argue that the English language isn't real, it's a spectrum of words and structures which rejects the binary attribution of a word or of an expression as either English or non-English and that mutual intelligibility is also a spectrum (just think about the many differences between Standard US English and Standard British English, to say nothing of the more local dialects) and so is unreliable, too.

Since there's no preponderant parameters which defines English then if someone claims to be speaking English we should defer to their identification completely, even though they might not be intelligible by other self-identified English speakers.

Of course this doesn't happen, and while the evidence here suggests a relative large room for developments in the English language, and an inherent non-objectiveness as to whether a word is part of the English language or not people can't simply invent a new English word and force the entire world to accept it. The mechanism which lead to the adoptions of neologism are social in nature and depend on a variety of factors, but no linguist worth their salt would argue that there is no such thing as a mechanism through which people recognize whether a word is part or not of the English language (even though this mechanism isn't perfect and it's localized).

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66293

Post by MarcusAu »

Langua-fluidity I can see, much more so than gender-fluidity.

Gender seems more likely to break, if bent (if you'll pardon the expression) too far.

Aneris
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66294

Post by Aneris »

Kirbmarc wrote:
ROBOKiTTY wrote:Found this exchange on Reddit.
So I have to wonder - how is the Republican party so good at making outrage?

They constantly talk about Benghazi and e-mail leaks when Hillary campaigns and people lap it up, but something like this comes up and nobody bats an eye.
Here's an interesting part from a reply.
Fervor. There is something cultural about a large part of the republican party that acts with so much outrage so passionately everyone hears about it.
I think this reveals an insightful difference between the Republicans and Democrats. Mainstream Republicans are somehow able to constantly go on the offensive and not oversaturate people's tolerance. Mainstream Democrats are always on the defensive. On the other hand, American SJWs would be Democrats who have adopted a similar strategy as mudslinging Republicans. Nonetheless, they fail to make their vitriol stick. Why is this? What's a good explanation?

I've heard one proposed explanation out there, but I don't buy it. The idea goes that it's because the intended targets of conservative propaganda tend to give more easily into confirmation bias and gobble up any narrative that fits their preconceived worldviews, while a larger number of liberals are generally more skeptical, so right-wing SJWs prosper while liberal SJWs get torn apart by their own. If this were back in 2004, I might've accepted that explanation, but now I think it's too convenient and too self-congratulatory.
I think that a more plausible explanation is that Mainstream Republicans, Mainstream Democrats and SJWs appeal to very different socio-economical niches.

Mainstream Republicans have a strong appeal with non-college educated men and women, especially (but not exclusively) white ones, both in the working and in the middle class. They preach a narrative based on shared American myths (rugged individualism, a modern version of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the "American dream") which are very popular among many rural and working class communities. The idea of the self-made man, which through hard work and luck/divine grace betters his economic and social position is very widespread in the American society. Churches approve of it (for the most part) and meritocracy and the benefits of market are part of the American collective political DNA.

Of course this narrative doesn't match the actions of Mainstream Republicans (which tend to be corporativist and pro-lobbies) but it's an easy one to swallow, and it generates easy outrage at perceived betrayal of American ideals. Republicans aren't all equal (libertarians and conservatives tend to be heavily divided, to say nothing of the Religious Right) but they identify a common enemy in the "Big Government". Republican mudslinging always comes with accusations of wanting to restrict the freedom to believe in the religion of the American Dream in the name of interests of foreign or elitist lobbies.

Mainstream Democrats, on the other hand, have a strong appeal with working class non-whites, with urban communities and (to a lesser degree these years) with unionized workers who feel cheated by the system. They're a hodge-podge of people from different backgrounds and with very different beliefs, to a much stronger degree than the Republicans, who are united only by their dislike of the practices of the GOP.

This includes minorities alienated by the GOP's support for cutting welfare and by the closeness of white identity politics movements to the Reps, workers who think that the system screwed them and want protection for their jobs and better deals and intellectual and social élites who live mostly in the cities and thoroughly reject the "American Dream" as a narrative in favor of other narratives.

The SJWs appeal mainly to the latter group. They present themselves as skeptics of the narratives of meritocracy and hard work, and propose instead a narrative of "Patriarchy" and "white supremacy". Those narratives are mainly diffused through higher education and so are limited to a minority of people in the US. They're the dominant narratives in certain parts of the country, but those parts are very insular and detached not just from the Republicans but from many mainstream Democrats as well.

TL;DR: The "left" isn't less effective at mudslinging because it's more skeptical, it's because it's more élitist and appeals to less people. Most average people tend to be more conservative than the leftist élites.
Left and Right are fairly even in the USA, and the Democrats obviously won the presidency a few times. Both sides have elites who differ from the flock. You certainly meant it differently.

In my view, the difference is the personality types under “Right Wing Authoritarianism”. See a review on Altemeyer's work on WEIT. I shared it often, and made a public bookmark: http://www.bit.ly/authoritarians

One possible explanation is that Right Wingers are overall more loyal, hence classical authoritarian, and as such they get away with mudslinging and it doesn't taint their own team as much. It doesn't matter if they were wrong and some story falls apart a day later. The left is notoriously infighting and this might create a climate where they have to be more careful how to conduct themselves. The same dynamic might also lead to the now excessive virtue signalling on the left. But I'm purely speculating.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66295

Post by Kirbmarc »

MarcusAu wrote:Langua-fluidity I can see, much more so than gender-fluidity.

Gender seems more likely to break, if bent (if you'll pardon the expression) too far.
Yes, of course. My point was that Nick Matte's idea that it's not correct to say that there is such a thing as a biological sex is like saying that there is no such thing as the English language, only with far, far less evidence in support of Matte's claim.

SJWs seem to think that the existence of outliers and genetic anomalies in humans somehow is evidence that sexual dimorphism is a social construct and that there's no biological content to sex. This is FAR dumber than saying that English doesn't exist. And yet their ideology is poisoning science writers, at least, if not actual researchers. The Nature article that I've talked about claims that intersex form a "gender spectrum" (very inaccurate, and tendentious), that transgender people are on the same "spectrum" as intersex people (demonstrably false) and that the only valid identity is self-identification (ideological drivel).

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66296

Post by MarcusAu »

Oglebart wrote:
...
MarcusAu wrote:
With the recent increase in output to pay the rent - I predict associated depression issues and decreased self esteem.

And I'm not even getting much shadenfreude (sp) from it.
Really? I am, you're not trying hard enough!
It just seems more sad than funny.

However, she has had more opportunity than most, and her current situation has hardly left her destitute. So I don't know why I should feel more sympathy for Watson than any of the others out there who have worked hard, and actually have the knowlege and talent to say something interesting. (And that's not taking into account the influence she has had online and on the conference circuit).

I think even now she could turn her situation around and recovery at least to an extent.

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Re: The Cover Girl of Virtue Signalling

#66297

Post by BarnOwl »

Aneris wrote:
Virtue Signalling has some problems as a concept, but Danielle is clearly the covergirl for it, and overdoing it. Here we have a pin, a BLM print, Bernie Sanders tattoo and everything on Twitter. Notable are the empty slogans and symbols that supposedly stand for something, but in practice are nothing more than tribal markers. It seems those who are susceptible most who don't know who they are, and who are disoriented by our times. They're afraid to formulate their on ideas and are very much like Right Wingers who want to fit in. As written previously, these are their Sunday clothes to go to church, where they want to be seen; it just plays out on Twitter.
Recently one of my colleagues and the department chair engaged in academic Virtue Signaling through an e-mail exchange, during which they made sure to hit Reply All for the whole department. I'm going to work on grant proposals over the holiday break and need to access the BlahBlahBlah from home. "Oh I always work on grant proposals from home every weekend and throughout the night 24/7, and as long as you do X, you can access the BlahBlahBlah from home." But what if I'm working on my grant proposals on Christmas Day? "Oh it will work fine. I've even worked on grant proposals while I was having a colonoscopy." Etc. Etc.

I was tempted to bring up Virtue Signaling, but then I decided I didn't want to have to explain it. :roll:

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66298

Post by MarcusAu »

Go on and say it BarnOwl - you didn't want to enact the labour.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66299

Post by VickyCaramel »

CaptainFluffyBunny wrote:
Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I'm fucking back off to the mountains!
Keep an eye out for French Bigfoot.
That's an actual thing now. Along with bigfoot in the UK, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.

The state of Bigfoot research is thus: Bigfoot is mostly nocturnal and is very skilled at keeping 50-100 yards from humans while keeping vegetation between them and the researcher. As you seldom glimpse them for more than a second, and the time it takes to spot, recognise, bring up a camera, aim and take a picture takes longer than that... and that even good digital cameras are not all that good at that range, it is a waste of time trying.

The new approach is to "Go and see", where you go out in the woods and just have the bigfoot experience. This has put the focus on the sound and structures left by bigfoot. As directional sound recording equipment is expensive, most recent research focuses on documenting structures.

This is actually very interesting because in America they are finding some very interesting tree/stick structures which are hard to explain. People in Europe have found similar structures and attributed this to Bigfoot, while I have been out in the woods to 'go and see' and found these structures taken this to mean they are not evidence of bigfoot.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#66300

Post by BarnOwl »

MarcusAu wrote:Go on and say it BarnOwl - you didn't want to enact the labour.
I've used that phrase to describe a lazy student, and then had to explain what it meant.

My research colleagues don't get out much. Probably because they're always working on grant proposals. I, on the other hand, am teaching Millenials (many of whom are SJWs) for hours each day.

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