karaddin

Weird, here I was under the impression that if you're engaging in unethical/corrupt practices, the response was of the profession was meant to be disbar you not act like a fraternal order of whatever closing ranks to defend a cop that just murdered someone.

Given you think puberty blockers are dangerous we don't agree on what's harmful and what's reasonable.

Chiming in just to say it's the state of the world that's causing me distress, being involved in this discussion just makes me fixate on that. It's not you. The reason I care about her opinion is just because she has an enormous platform and her position as a friendly children's author is an opening to sway the opinions of a lot of people that don't think about this much at all, but can be swayed to support harmful policies because they're superficially reasonable. I'd love to not give a fuck like I did before she started talking about this. ETA: Argh bumped post button early, editing to finish it

Unusual request but can a mod temp ban me for a few days? This is not actually healthy for me and I'm going to feel compelled to be involved. If it's out of my hands I can just fuck off and look after myself.

Then what the fuck are we doing in this thread? I'm calling her credibility as a good faith actor into question to ask that people consider the possibility that she's not being open and honest with what she actually means. Why are we talking about this if anything that calls her good faith into question is irrelevant anyway? Can we only talk about how terrible it is that people are mean to her? If you don't care what an author of children's books thinks, why on earth would you listen to hours of a podcast about that? Just to bemoan how terrible the woke are? Wish I could have that sort of distance on the whole thing. Instead of feeling like the goal posts are being moved this just feels like being told halfway through the game that there isn't actually a goal, nothing could be said to sway opinions if that's how you feel about it. HoI - the descriptor could be both accurate but also used with the ulterior motive. In this case I'm not sure it was, I don't know that she's involved in any trans activism beyond that counter protest and even that could have been about the Nazi association rather than trans activism. You could refer to her as a counter protestor, since that's what she was actually engaged in at the relevant point in time. But when you're also lying on two other occasions in the same sentence (male and violent) I don't think you're too hung up on honesty.

I don't think the reality of slurs can be neatly encapsulated into a single sentence. In a void your sentence is correct, someone insisting something is a slur doesn't make it so, but similarly it's entirely possible for someone to use a slur in ignorance of it being a slur and that ignorance doesn't wash it away. It's complicated. Can you please bring the scepticism to the other side of this argument because they seem to be getting an assumption of good faith that isn't extended to woke. You don't see how blatantly lying about what the image you're sharing is doesn't indicate bad faith? The context of the first tweet is that a cis woman who was protesting Posie Parker poured tomato soup on her, which was immediately framed as horrific violence by "trans activists" (making sure to associate trans with the "violence"). He is laughing at the idea of tomato soup being violent and Rowling is then using the cropped image to make it seem like he's laughing at a man choking a woman*. I'd like to repeat that it was a cis woman who did the souping. *Which is itself an image with a lot of implicit associations around it, conjuring up domestic violence and the kind of men that do that. It's remarkably efficient for dishonest messaging

So I decided to look for something from her feed that hadn't been mentioned yet. This tweet Features a very selectively cropped photo of Posie Parker with her own security's hand on her neck being framed as "male violence against women [commited by trans supporters]". The purpose of this tweet is to discredit counter protestors at a rally for someone who had welcomed the support of Hitler saluting, swastika and iron cross wearing neo Nazis only a couple of days earlier in another city. Either JK is a useful idiot being played by Posie Parker and her friends, or she's knowingly engaging in incredibly dishonest argumentation because she feels "the cause" warrants it. I personally don't think she's an idiot. This isn't a smoking gun saying that she hates trans people, but surely people can at least incorporate shit like this into the context of the conversation.

It's literally an acronym for a description of their policies. Are you still going to accept it's a slur if someone just says the whole thing rather than the acronym? If I'm trying to use a pejorative for them I'm going to call them transphobes or bigots or something worse than that. TERF describes who they are and communicates where they position themselves, ie they're coming at this from a feminist framing. You feel like you're viewing everything from a "woke" source far more sceptically than you do the opposite. Also loving the reliable line from HoI that you can't ever take context, a person's other comments or any other subtext into account when judging what someone means, just the explicit semantic meaning of the words they use in complete isolation.

I think what I find frustrating about this whole "debate", and to be clear this is springboarding off your post not directed at you, is the way that it treats "hate" as though its not just the only thing being delivered but is actually the only thing possible. I'm a trans person right here, in this actual iteration of the debate happening on this forum. I'm not hating on JKR, I'm not asking anyone to hate her. I'm asking for people to accept that this is filled with bad faith argumentation that obfuscates its true meaning behind reasonable sounding complaints and requests, this extends from random people on the internet all the way up to Jo herself. I would love for something to get through to JKR and change her mind, and I wouldn't truly give a fuck about any kind of penance - simply replacing the current harm she's doing with a neutral influence would be enough. I don't believe that's actually in the realm of possibility, and certainly not something I can bring about, so I'm not going to waste my time or emotion trying/hoping for it to happen, but it would be pretty easy for her to prove to the level I require if it did. Just change her public statements on the matter, done! But in the absence of that we're left with the reality that the world is a colossally shitty place for trans people right now. The hint of things improving gave a lot of us enough of a nudge that the subconscious blocks on accepting ourselves were blown off, and now the cynical politics is amplifying blow back against us because they lost the fight on gay rights leaving even very privileged individuals like myself in precarious mental health and a hell of a lot worse for those less fortunate. This argument is absolutely attempting to strip away basic rights, look at certain US red states which are already moving to outright ban health care at all. That's an end point we see and fear.

Glad we're on the same page here as I certainly don't think all trans people are activists either. I sure as fuck wouldn't call Caitlyn Jenner one, but it may shock you to know I also wouldn't call myself one. I was explaining what people like Posie Parker mean when they refer to "trans activists".

@The Anti-Targ I saw your comment to Raja recently about Auckland and affordability etc in the UK thread, but it really hadn't sunk in how bad it is Auckland being worse than Melbourne is not what I expected. Also 3 cities from Aus+NZ in the top 10 seems excessive given the size of our populations.

Trans women are women maps perfectly fine to real life until a bunch of people cynically use us as a political wedge. My being trans makes no difference (relative to if I was a cis woman) to literally anyone in my life, even including my wife. Policing bathrooms doesn't make cis women safer, it results in an awful lot of trans women just withdrawing from public life... Which is pretty much what I've done. Instead you get women harassing other cis women believing them to be trans, and in plenty of cases it's actually just men doing the judgement and harassment instead. There aren't enough trans people to actually "flesh out" the paranoia, so it just hurts other women instead. Policing sport is once again not justified by the miniscule number of trans people even trying to be involved, and isn't even consistent unless you start applying the same tests to all women and excluding those who just happen to be genetically blessed. Prisons? If you're looking to protect women inmates your best starting point would be looking at the guards, there is more of a conversation to be had there but I think much like the sport situation simply lumping is into a single basket and excluding us is not logically consistent or reasonable. None of this would even be high profile issues without the political theatre though.

It is so fucking soul destroying to see the umpteenth iteration of an argument with more and more people teetering away from supporting you primarily because the argument has become increasingly toxic and that association gets attached to you, even though 99% of the people involved aren't even trans. And that toxic discourse was intentionally spiked by people aiming for exactly this outcome because they know it works. To some of the earlier comments in the thread, it's impossible to point to comments that will be accepted as transphobic when the person asking for examples will only accept an explicit statement of "I hate trans people" - nothing else will actually fit their definition of it. Personally I think the response to protests at Posie Parker's tour of the colonies is some of clearest examples of the TERFs engaging in bad faith behaviour. Cis women show up to protest, their actions get described as violence by trans people against a cis woman. Her own security's actions get creatively cropped to look like theyre the protesters and them manhandling the cis women protesters is proof of trans violence. Also to an earlier comment, all trans people get defined as trans activists - our mere existence is activism to these fucks.

Part of the problem is that it's not just the capital cities anymore, everything within even a few hours of Sydney is now grossly overpriced - higher than Sydney prices were 15 years ago. I grew up in the Southern Highlands and regular houses are clearing a million now. And it's a snowballing problem - more and more areas get sucked into the inflating bubble. Australia also has terrible rental protections which make renting miserable rather than just inferior and that's gotten far far worse in the last few years too. Not to mention real estate agents doubling as data brokers with all the unnecessary information they demand to presumably sell, and tripling as marks for hackers to get personal data without anyone even realising there was a hack.

You're actually observing the same reality as the rest of us where a lot of things are generally good, but clearly some things are very much not. And in those cases, the systemic issues just keep getting more entrenched. I don't know how anyone can look at housing in Sydney and not see a ticking bomb for large scale social unrest if it's allowed to continue and that's not good for anyone that plans to still be alive when it happens. But at every turn the top priority is preserving value of property as investment over ensuring people have homes to live in, and any attempt to reprioritize gets smacked down. Large chunks of our print media being wholly reliant on property advertising for they're business model doesn't help there either.

It feels like it should be paired with a reputation system for each of the gangs, I've always acted like there is one anyway and try to keep it non-lethal with the Valentino's for example. There's one gig in particular that Dakota sends you on to free a guy from a Militech border camp and says not to kill anyone (because the guy hiring you works for Militech), and that's definitely a gig you shouldn't be getting if your V is known for always going in loud and kicking in the front door. There are also some pretty clearly sign posted spots where you would have been able to qualify for some gigs from other factions, the TCs if you leave the bosses alive after the coup at Clouds, Militech with Meredith etc.

Ignoring the other parts of the conversation to say it's this right here. If you want your kids to truly internalize that they have bodily autonomy, then you need to demonstrate that to them by respecting it even when they're just being a little shit. Absent actual danger, or a genuine medical issue, if they say they don't want something then you listen to it. There's absolutely no harm done by asking a kid if they can have a hug. The job of parents is teaching kids, this is part of that teaching. I'm going to beg your indulgence here, it's specifically about JK and reactions to her comments not actually the rally/counter protest in NZ. Also I'm not trying to kick that argument off again, merely sharing for amusement.

Sorry I'm still half asleep so this is going to be a terrible explanation but... Watsonian = looking at the writing choices etc from inside the story, things like "the character could never have done anything else given who they have been established as". This perspective works for looking at Joel's decision to kill them all and save Ellie Doylist = looking at the writing choices from the meta story perspective, so in this case knowing the author wanted to create maximum conflict for the player then the cure would have worked even if the science looks a little flimsy from inside the story In an ideal world the author manages to align these perspectives perfectly, the pursuit of this is one of the things that's really bogged Martin down over the last few books, but judging things from one perspective can really hamper enjoyment when the author makes a decision that skews heavily to the other one.

I actually did mean to concede that whether the show did an effective job of communicating the situation is certainly a fair argument, I'm just talking about what I think was meant to be the question at the end - stand-in daughter or humanity. Like many, I'm also viewing it with the context of already knowing the story from the game which is going to colour my interpretation of that scene in the show and Joel's subsequent lie about it. My view is that murdering the Fireflies is subjectively correct, but objectively wrong whereas the lie is wrong from both perspectives

I believe it was intended to be 10 episodes before the first two were merged, which I think was the right call. But I do think it could have used another episode or two in the back half. I honestly don't understand coming at this from the perspective of trying to analyze the science of the "cure". It just doesn't strike me as a conflict point that makes sense to look at with a watsonian lens, if the Fireflies are obviously wrong and chasing a pipe dream then it takes any tension and moral conflict out of it, Joel is clearly in the right to fight and protect Ellie from this deranged group. But if the hope for the cure is real, suddenly you've got that juicy conflict of picking family over the world - a conflict you have Druckmann explicitly talking about in the quotes provided by Ripp, and that they wanted to force players into the non heroic (ie selfish) choice. So from the Doylist perspective it just seems black and white to me. The cure would have worked, Joel might rationalize it away as it wouldn't have but deep down he knows it would have and it doesn't actually matter for his decision, he made the only choice he ever could have made. Arguing over the efficacy of the cure just seems like engaging in exactly the same rationalizing Joel would be doing.

Yeah this one definitely hurts. On top of the other projects mentioned he's also Zeus in the new Percy Jackson series which had also finished filming

They also act like slightly increasing the tax rate on super above that level would cap their retirement savings. You're still able to put more in, and you still have millions in other assets if you're making enough money to have that much super. You're going to be fine. They all like to see it as a nest egg for their kids when the entire point of it is to fund their own retirement and be used up, kids inherit whatever other estate you've got left.

I saw Bolt was screeching about Albo being more "dangerous" than Whitlam. This is why there's not much point in running from the left wing, it doesn't matter how little you do the hysterical right wing media will still act like you're building communism again (for real this time).

The strategy is essentially hoping that people won't feel the need to vote liberal and feel bad about it if Labor is "we've got the liberal party at home". But the thing about the "we have x at home" meme is that people don't tend to want the thing that's at home. People that want liberal party policies normally want the people that believe in them and consistently want to implement them, not the party that cynically adopts them chasing the voters.

Yanking this post from Kalbear in the other thread, but not sure if he's across game spoilers so dropping the mention from it: I think when this happened in the game it stunned me enough to not really analyze it any further than that, but this makes me really how perfect it is as a set up for Joel's decision at the hospital. Having been worn down to caring about Ellie as another daughter he had lost too much getting her there to go on without her afterwards, so he does what he needs to do to avoid ending up in the same situation as Henry. The individual acts are different, but especially game Joel has killed so many people - his soul is well and truly sold, and we know he couldn't handle losing another daughter even before it all begins. No real point to this, just appreciating what an excellent job Henry and Sam does preparing for what's to come.