karaddin

When you're point blank ignoring the most straight forward explanation for what you're seeing, and using that dismissal to conclude the medical professionals treating these kids are obviously doing a bad job, then it looks a lot like you've picked your conclusion before you've started and are trying to manufacture that conclusion.

It's entirely possible to continue with your original plan after taking time to think about it. And it's not just about time to think, it's about avoiding unwanted changes until they're allowed to take the hormones they need - hence my point, if the argument was that they should skip puberty blockers then that would actually follow. There's a very simple explanation for your last point - going on puberty blockers is not actually easy or minor, social transition on its own is already a highly confronting thing to do. Kids that wind up actually getting puberty blockers are mostly those that actually need them. It's evidence of the process working somehow being twisted into saying the opposite.

In a demonstration of what you're talking about, it didn't even warrant a mention in the Guardian piece that I read.

I read a guardian piece discussing it and I think this is the primary criticism, but as you said it's not as straightforward and simply insisting we can't treat people until those studies exist. It did have a comment about puberty blockers not being demonstrated to improve psychological health in the one or two studies of those that it accepted as of sufficient quality but that's fundamentally missing the point - their purpose isn't to make things better but to prevent things getting worse, and a finding of unchanged would indicate to me that they're doing their job. There was some other discussion of the value of puberty blockers for trans boys given a later hormone induced testosterone puberty will override the first estrogen based puberty which I think is a reasonable question to ask but that the choice is ultimately up to the person in question. It conceded that it is preventing irreversible changes in trans girls but that it also needs to be balanced against damage to fertility - again a reasonable concern to raise but once again the individual is the only person that can actually make that decision, and undergoing puberty you don't want isn't the "neutral" outcome. There was another comment on puberty blockers with the conclusion not following from the prior statement at all to the point that I wondered if it was a misquote by the guardian: Unless the argument is "puberty blockers are an unnecessary delay and we should proceed to actual hormone treatment" that just doesn't follow at all. On the whole I suspect a whole lot of people are going to trumpet the headline that this review is essentially debunking trans health care when that isn't what it's saying. My biggest reservation after what I read is that it's not really understanding quite how severe the cost of inaction can be which really hampers waiting for additional research.

This last episode was fucking superb. No notes other than

Yeah, "you bombed our consulate in a 3rd country" is pretty solid grounds for retaliation as these things go.

Saw a few articles about Iran being about to retaliate against Israel over the Damascus Consulate bombing which is depressingly foreseeable. I really hope that doesn't prompt further escalations.

Lol well I give up. I assume it would have gotten more play time in the last 18 hours if he actually said it so I'm going to happily file it under incorrect hearing/claim.

Replying to my own question after listening to it with better headphones and I think he said "magic" which makes a lot more sense to say to someone on the campaign trail lol. Even if his face wasn't selling the appreciation for the sub-par singing. Definitely sounds like a "gi" sound rather than "go".

I saw this claim that Biden calls someone a f***** in this video which I'm pretty skeptical of. I can't quite make out what he says, but despite my opinion of him not being the highest - homophobic slurs are not what I expect from the man even ignoring the politics of it. I'm inclined to assume that he's either saying something else that has a similar sound in the middle, or it's a deep fake. If it's actually real I'd be more inclined to it being another indicator of cognitive decline than sincere slip of homophobia. Anyone got a more concrete read on it?

That seems an entirely reasonable concern and one I'm inclined to share. When imprisoning someone we should really be asking if society is actually served by derailing their life prospects and removing them from their families and communities and if the answer is no we need to find a better way to mete out justice. On the matter of hate speech the goal should be to protect the targets of the hate speech and prevent the continuation of the speech, not punitive retribution. It would take very extreme cases that are going to make me think they warrant time in prison. Things geared more towards removal of platforms to spread the speech for a period of time would be moving in the right direction from prison time, but that's a not even half baked thought that came up while writing this reply.

Yeah, the white cop in the Met is extremely unlikely to have faced a history of professional and personal discrimination against him on the basis of being white. That removes any of the "loading" that can accompany being called white. I also said context matters, a white cop in Japan being called white would be an entirely different thing, but your characterization of my position would say that I'd deny racism could be present there. But yet again we're talking about reasonable person in a court of law, I can personally think the cop is a thin skinned prick that should have ignored it and still accept that the behavior matches the legal definition of the crime and that a guilty verdict rendered as a result of a trial would be legitimate. I would still vote guilty were I to be on the jury for such a trial if the instructions and evidence support it being the case despite my personal feelings. I didn't bring that case up to relitigate it when my primary point from start to finish was questioning what's going on with the resourcing when that takes 2 years to process, and BFC provided the answers I was looking for. I brought it up now as another example of the reasonable person test which you'd previously thought was fine and good when yet now you're acting like it's a new and radical idea.

Do you think Kerr was targeting the officer because he was white? Of course she wasn't, she was a belligerent drunk and he was a police officer responding to an incident - she verbally lashed out at the person who was in the right because they were acting in an antagonistic manner to her in that moment. An individual on their own might fear violence against them for any number of irrational reasons, but if that were the case it would have been true regardless of calling him white. Now as it happens it seems likely that that belligerent behavior was also criminal and BFC is obviously a far better judge of that than I am, and the outcome will include the application of the reasonable person test - something with plenty of precedent in both Aus and UK legal systems. Not something new and radical which was the actual point under discussion.

Lol that's not even close to what I said, but agreed - let's not go into it.

I failed the reasonable person test? Damn, didn't realize I'd ever been called upon to render legally binding judgement in a court of law - here I was giving my own personal opinion on a message board. And I failed it while expressing that I'd accept the outcome of the trial and acknowledging we don't have all the facts available too. If my deficiencies which haven't even been addressed via instruction from a judge can fail the poor reasonable person test so dramatically then the legal system must be unworkable. Or maybe you're being overly dramatic to serve your argument, it happens to the best of us.

The "reasonable person" test isn't exactly a new concept, it literally came up a few weeks ago with the Sam Kerr thing.

Damn that war/post war peak for the Tories is going to be looming for a long time haha. Current numbers for them are 172k and 90k for the LibDems - seems pretty much the same for the Tories and plateaued off for the LD after a gradual increase in the mid 2010s. So the same picture across the main parties, broadly stable membership with a temporary spike for Labour brought in by Corbyn that didn't stick around long enough to become part of the institution.

Yup ^ that context is certainly useful, I wasn't claiming to have it all - just that superficially it looks bad. And personally I would have viewed swelling membership as a good sign and this as a correspondingly bad one, but one that with the context indicates there was no long term gain in popularity and the pre-Corbyn numbers are indicative of the actual level of involvement the general public has in the labour party. Out of curiosity do you have the numbers over time for Tories and LibDems? I had a quick look but was only seeing the current membership, not historical data.

She's not just a scientist though, she's the scientist that left pure theoretical research to pursue venture capital and start her own company, and someone doing that does have to worry about how they are presenting themselves because it directly impacts how much money they're able to talk people into giving them and how much control they have over it - and the character clearly managed to wrangle a lot of control. Instead of immediately declaring it a problem, the fact she's not investing all her time in just the science is actually part of her characterisation. ETA: Whoops missed there was another page, this reply was written as at the end of page 7.

Liff is inferring that membership in a political party as being a bad thing. I think in this case you were judging the people that are members of the Labour party but i also thought your reaction was missing Spocky's point - regardless of whether you like like or agree with the members of the party, a collapse in the membership to ~50% of their previous membership is not a good sign for the health of the party. I'd think the same about the members of the Tories even though I think they're mostly a bunch of twats. If you were seeing a departure of one group being replaced by another group you'd have more room for complexity, but these parties rely on member volunteers to do a shitload of the work of running a party. And losing numbers like that would make me worry about a party split.

These spoiler boxes in the last day are all book spoilers not show spoilers right? Could you please precede spoiler boxes with "book spoilers" or "show spoilers" just so it's explicit? It's got me considering reading the books so I'd rather avoid concrete spoilers for now.

From what I've been reading just now it's not even human error, a power failure causing loss of steering control at exactly the wrong time - 1min earlier or later and it would have been fine. Whether there was cut corners on maintenance leading to the power failure will take longer of course. The only upside is the middle of the night leading to few people being on the bridge.

I saw people speculating comment based on book titles below

Huh, nice point there

Just want to make it clear in case it wasn't - I had that disclaimer about the hate for her in case I was coming across overly confrontational and may have been projecting frustration from that into the reply to you, definitely didn't get that vibe from your criticism. I think that stuff with Auggie broadly comes down to flaws of the character that are part of their characterisation rather than flaws in the writing of the character. Saul has plenty as well but for some reason they don't seem to bother that group on Reddit in quite the same way. All that said: