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Here is a little debunking of some of these 'sex is a spectrum' articles that quite often get thrown around, some of which has been posted here. The general point is that, as Ran pointed out, they rarely actually say what people want them to say. https://archive.is/20230804090357/https://charlesarthur.medium.com/those-sex-is-a-spectrum-articles-debunked-30af029e376 And

What kind of delusion must Tory leadership contenders have to want to become the PM now?

Two things about the Hollard family: Ser Jon Hollard the Steward was wed to Lord Denys's sister and died with his wife, as did their young son, who was half-Darklyn. Robin Hollard was a squire, and when the king was seized he danced around him and pulled his beard. He died upon the rack. I know the possibility is raised on Robin's wiki page, but to me it reads as Jon's young son was squire Robin for sure. And not only did he fight, but he struck first, taking Lord Darklyn's good-brother and master-at-arms, Ser Symon Hollard, and a pair of guards unawares, slaying them all - and so avenging the death of his Sworn Brother, Ser Gwayne Gaunt of the Kingsguard, who had been killed at Hollard's hand. Since both Jon and Symon were Denys' goodbrothers, they must have been brothers.

Israel is the tail that wags the US dog. Such is the irreplaceability it knows it is in the mind of the US political class it can act with impunity even to the detriment of the USA and Israel. It is as a willful and petulant child and the USA is an indulgent and negligent parent.

Leadsom 'Houchen win a testament to a conservative government'. What are all the other results then? These fucking people.

Neither of these two individuals would survive PMQs, whether as PM or as opposition leaders, without looking like complete fools who are out of their league. Neither of them can boast of strong performances in Parliament as it is.

I really enjoyed Discovery Season 4… I’m enjoying… Season 5. Commander Raynor is a fun addition and he points out the… over familiarity… of Discovery’s crew can be problematic.

What you find perplexing about science here is what I find absolutely amazing. It's something that I have always loved about biology, nature, and life on our planet: it's weird and strange. Our fundamental understanding of our world is not as simple as we make it out to be. Life does not conform to our "conventional" understandings, which are not always as longly-held as we project them into the past. The more that we learn about life on our planet through science, the more that it challenges our own assumptions about ourselves as humans. Sex, reproduction, and gender are no different in this regard. I think that the gamete binary doesn't really explain how that gender works anymore than XY and XX chromosomes explains male and female. In school, we often learn incredibly complex science but at an incredibly superficial, if not false, level of understanding simply as a way to communicate and introduce basic ideas for advanced science. Then you learn that there are men with XX chromosomes and women with XY chromosomes out there and that there are other combinations than just these two. And I think that the disgustingly dehumanizing temptation here is to sweep all of these individuals under the rug and label them as "freaks" or "abnormalities." However, none of this is really something that is necessarily apparent to us because the truth of the matter is that we aren't evaluating the "maleness" or "femaleness" of a person based on chromosomes that we can't see. I don't know what my own chromosomes look like. I also don't know what my gametes look like. There is a lot about me as an individual on a scientific level that I mostly infer from outward appearances or what society is telling me is normal. Much like chromosomes, gametes offer only an incomplete understanding of "male" and "female." The problem with how gametes are often used in this discussion, particularly in regards to gender, is that they are not the complete picture. There is more to a person's sex or gender than their gametes and chromosomes. I suspect that for most people, genitalia was and still is probably how most people were initially identified as male or female at birth. There are people we would conventionally identify as "women" or assign female at birth because doctors and parents would see female genitalia but once puberty hits it turns out that these women produce male gametes. I think that there has been a strong desire by some people in society to continue seeing gender and sex in a binary because that's what they know. They know "male" and they know "female." They have words for this. They don't have words for how complex the science really is. They have religion and society telling them that there are "males" and "females." Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This binary is easy to understand, and there is a strong desire to keep it that way for a variety of reasons - and let's be frank here - including transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Much as the earlier article that I linked says... No one, including transphobes, was talking about trans people in terms of gametes twenty years ago! Why are they talking about it now? Because gametes are the new warfront by which a woman becomes defined as a woman. Congratulations, women, out there! What makes you a woman are your eggs. It astonishes me, but also cynically not, that the desire to exclude transwomen from being women is so strong that people want to erase a hundred years of feminism that sought to liberate women from this sort of reductionistic understanding that defines women in terms of their reproductive faculties. So for me, the value of seeing sex-as-spectrum is explaining why and how so many people, whether they realize it or not, do not necessarily conform to the social binaries that we have constructed in society around sex and gender nor should they necessarily be expected to conform to those binaries. I would like to think that scientifically understanding the complexity of sex-as-a-spectrum helps us further the cause of gender equality on society because none of us are as male or female as we may think that we are. I think that it helps further reproductive rights for all individuals in society. The scientific value of sex-as-spectrum helps us explain human reproduction and human genetic variance. It helps us explain why these two people who may otherwise look male and female by our conventional understandings can't make babies. It also helps us develop better social and medical healthcare for all individuals. It helps us explain evolutionary changes and adaptations in humans. There are possibly a variety of traits that we have acquried in our genetic code that were derived from "unconventional" reproduction somewhere in our past as humans. If you don't know where sex-as-a-spectrum gets us in terms of our scientific understanding, my recommendation would be to look at what academic resources are out there because this is an issue being talked about by biologists, medical researchers, and obviously gender studies academics who are all interested in sexual development, gender, and reproduction.

I doubt it, for one. Many 18 year olds I know are as capable and mature as folks twice or three times their age. Can we just stop bashing young folks for a bit?

I love the ludicrous mental gymnastics Stark haters do to try to justify and spread their hatred of the Starks, to no avail.

Well, yes. Unless nobody signs him, even if he gets a minimum, he'll still make a plural amount of million given his tenure. But he's on a max contract now, which is probably close to twenty times that. There's a lot of room for adjustment.

Baratheons tried to overthrow Aegon V , they were defeated, the king arranged the marriage between Lord Baratheon and Rhaelle Targaryen. The Starks destroyed House Greystark because they rebelled against them, Tywin destroyed House Reyne and Terbeck for the same reason, Taegaryens as rulers were far better than the other lords, but Targ haters try to rehabilitate the Others, it's useless to talk to them

Okay enough with the RPG jokes !

If the things she said, and the tone she took, wasn't so common, I would think the same.

Watched The Fall Guy tonight with the wife, and we both enjoyed the hell out of it. So many little sight gags, movie history references, clever photography, and only two scenes that I'd have tweaked in the whole movie to improve the pacing a touch, otherwise a very good fusion of comedy, action, and a tinge of romance, and with some bangin' needle drops on top of it all.

Traffic's a pretty annoying one, in the rpg of life. Also, not being able to respec easily. F'n annoying, that.

Her argument was so bad and so alienating, that its hard not to think she was an agent provocateur.

It's a bad argument, I'd say it is counter productive as to what she wants to achieve. It might play well with a certain far left progressive who will also respond well to her comments about femininity being policed by white women. For the majority of people I think she is just leaving them very confused. If she wanted to say 'I want to be considered as a woman and not discriminated due to my gender identity, and for all intents and purposes I wanted to be treated as a female', then saying 'I am a biological female' is really just using the wrong language to get there.

No, not really. The point about fiction is that it isn't history: that's why it's Toranaga and not Tokugawa, so Clavell could tell a story, as a modern author, for a modern audience, without being bound by the history. We tell such stories, even if they are based on history - heck, even if they are history - for modern purposes: to make comparisons to modern society and reflect and learn from those. Trying to think like a historical Japanese noble might be instructive for a modern reader as a thought exercise, but it's not the moral standard a modern reader should adopt.

Foden voted Football writers player of the year, hard to argue with.

Let's get the record straight before anyone gets too twisted up about this: Here's the Trevor Noah interview, and the comments that we're all referencing are at 2:57. This is just a bad argument, and getting hung up over my humility, or lack of same, is a derailment tactic. However, it is a good example of the level of discourse we often see on this topic. We don't talk about ideas; we scrutinze each other for hints of the foolishness/hypocrisy/bigotry/whatever we are sure must motivate what we are saying. That said, I will concede that I was gently mocking Ivy, and no matter how bad her argument is, that wasn't very humble of me, so accordingly I have removed that part of my comment. Hopefully, we can try to discuss the actual argument and not what I said about it.

I think what she said was that all her identification papers say she was female, and she was made of "biological stuff" and therefore she was a biological female. I think that highlights a problem with language. Her other point, which I think creates part of the problem was that she said, and I'll paraphrase 'It's a simple issue, it all boils down to whether you think transwomen are female and real women or not'. The issue there is that it's not simple. It's not simple at all. We are having arguments over language as to what 'real women' are, whether biology has any bearing at all and to what extent. As Ran pointed out, being trans can be a whole variety of things and can encompass a vast array of individuals who will have been through various stages of transition, or none at all. This all becomes really pretty relevant when it comes to women's sports. But apparently we are being told that it is simple. She then goes on to, for some reason, compare it to racism, but that's just another signal of the type of argumentation being displayed. I don't think making sweeping generalisations about people is helpful, and forcing people to use language which is vague and non specific is also unhelpful.

Definitely not on the same level as France. France is one of the main global players. Israel is a strategic ally as well, though it doesn’t hold as much sway.

Such as? I quit Discovery because of the bathos, every character relationship seemed fraught with melodrama. It was very soapy. SNW is generally lighter with this stuff, more adroit at it, and basically just more actual fun. Also more coherent, narratively.

I doubt we can, but, for the sake of the thread, I'll modify my original post so we can move away from a discussion of Just How Humble Trackerneil Is.