US Politics: Time to Stock Up

[Darth Richard II]

30 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Oooh....that language fees like quite an escalation coming form you, and I like it.

Completely agree, and I hate being compelled by these awful people to being conspiracy theory guy.  Would they try to keep it a secret if Trump was sick?  100% they would.

I said this in the the other thread but I keep picturing a bunch of scientists looking at his blood under a microscope going "Wait a min..Trump doesn't have the virus....he IS the virus!".

[Darth Richard II]

57 minutes ago, DMC said:

Some other examples beyond the two issues identified are mentioned here.  I don't want to post them.

He's a piece of shit.

[sologdin]

they get apoplectic about someone questioning if a biologically male athlete is actually a woman or not

first, equating the strident disagreement of one's interlocutors with cerebral hemorrhage is not the best way to engender a belief that one's contributions are in good faith. second, it's not 'biologically male.'  these artificial abstractions need abolished.

 

he IS the virus

or they discover he's one of david icke's transdimensional telepathic reptilians.

[Paladin of Ice]

5 hours ago, Triskele said:

I occasionally go to the right wing sites out of curiosity.  Townhall right now has multiple headlines referring to it as the "Wuhan virus."  I wonder why.  

 

5 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Right wing babies aren't comfortable unless there is a foreigner to blame for their troubles?

I'm pretty damn sure that this is the next step for Trump and the right wing to try to come out on top of the PR issue over the virus and it has been handled. First off, associate the virus with damn foreigners, especially the damn Chinese. Check.

Next, make sure you blame foreigners for the virus ever reaching the us in the first place. Trump's speech talked about both Europe getting hit with the virus because they shut down traffic from hot spots and then it was infected people from Europe who brought it to the States. So as far as his base heard, "those damn Eurocommie idiots got infected because of open borders, then they spread it to us. The only reason we have this problem is because of damn leftist foreigners!" Check.

Stoke the racism and xenophobia among the right wing base, promise harsh, dramatic action cracking down on something, and get a rally round the flag/leader effect going. And the crisis is certainly not being allowed to go to waste, I've already seen the concern trolling from right wing media personalities and online comments asking if we really want more disease bearing, unhealthy immigrants coming into the country during a time like this.

Stuff like that will just be the start of where the Republican political class would like to go with all this.

[sologdin]

foreign virus was the concept behind anti-jewish pogroms during plague years. fuck trump, the plague, and the neo-fascists.

[karaddin]

Puberty blockers are thoroughly researched and used without any hesitation on cis kids when magically indicated, but suddenly they're treated as scary, radical and like they're making irreversible changes. All they do is buy time and prevent trans kids going through the irreversible and traumatic changes of the wrong puberty. You might think they're wrong out of ignorance, but the solution to the is educating yourself like AOC clearly is. 

It might seem like "obvious" common sense that trans women would have an advantage in sport, but that's also not borne out by the scientific evidence or the results in sport. Trans women on hormone therapy or after surgery tend to have lower testosterone than cis women, and lose any extra muscle mass etc that comes from that, often winding up with a harder time building muscle mass not less. 

AOC is educated and genuinely progressive, so naturally she supports human rights.

[Darzin]

Joe Rogan is a representation of the working class. This is not an endorsement of Rogan but if you are going to claim your movement, is a "working class movement" and not a movement of college students and underemployed graduates, people like Joe Rogan have to be acceptable cause the average working class dude and his opinions is a lot closer to Joe Rogan then they are Bernie Sanders or AOC. I'm not saying they need to adopt all of his positions but if he is an unacceptable supporter it's going to be tough to build a working class movement.

[BigFatCoward]

3 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Joe Rogan is a representation of the working class. This is not an endorsement of Rogan but if you are going to claim your movement, is a "working class movement" and not a movement of college students and underemployed graduates, people like Joe Rogan have to be acceptable cause the average working class dude and his opinions is a lot closer to Joe Rogan then they are Bernie Sanders or AOC. I'm not saying they need to adopt all of his positions but if he is an unacceptable supporter it's going to be tough to build a working class movement.

Yeah, too much of the left is prepared to be idealistic in opposition forever, the right will sell their souls to the devil for power. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

@Pecan

The "biology" argument is pretty much false anyway.  There are ciswomen with naturally high testosterone levels, as well as intersex women, so if you're going to start drawing a line based on a binary model of biology you're going to be discriminating against some women from the get go. 

20 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Joe Rogan is a representation of the working class. This is not an endorsement of Rogan but if you are going to claim your movement, is a "working class movement" and not a movement of college students and underemployed graduates, people like Joe Rogan have to be acceptable cause the average working class dude and his opinions is a lot closer to Joe Rogan then they are Bernie Sanders or AOC. I'm not saying they need to adopt all of his positions but if he is an unacceptable supporter it's going to be tough to build a working class movement.

I think you'd need to offer some evidence to claim that Rogan is a better representative of the working class than AOC.  Rogan is a celebrity actor, comedian, sports personality, while AOC was working as a bartender only a few years ago.  This idea that Rogan is the working class one here seems based on subjective aesthetic perceptions.

ETA: as a working class guy I have very little knowledge of Rogan beyond News Radio and knowing he has a podcast in the vein of Howard Stern and is a DMT advocate.  I'd also posit that your average working class person is more concerned with healthcare or economic security than they are with the legality of DMT sources.  The vagaries of sports rules may be of interest to the working class, but are not unique to them by any means.  

That being said, Sanders was wrong to promote the Rogan endorsement.

[Heartofice]

13 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Joe Rogan is a representation of the working class. This is not an endorsement of Rogan but if you are going to claim your movement, is a "working class movement" and not a movement of college students and underemployed graduates, people like Joe Rogan have to be acceptable cause the average working class dude and his opinions is a lot closer to Joe Rogan then they are Bernie Sanders or AOC. I'm not saying they need to adopt all of his positions but if he is an unacceptable supporter it's going to be tough to build a working class movement.

He might seem a 'representation of the working class' but that isn't really his audience. I mean the guy has the most popular podcast on the planet, those people aren't just a bunch of factory workers and miners. One of the reasons he and others are so popular is because much of the positions on the hard left are really not that popular with a lot of people, and I think there wasn't really a place for people who didn't agree with them to go, outside of Fox news or something. 
 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Also can we not be dropping N-bombs in here, even in quotes?  Seems really unnecessary.

[Ran]

9 hours ago, Pecan said:

I read this article a few minutes ago and I'm wondering if someone can help me understand why AOC is so concerned about Joe Rogan's opinion on these two particular points of trans rights. Specifically, Rogan has stated publicly on his show that he is opposed to puberty blockers for younger kids and that he doesn't think that biological males should be able to compete in sports as women.

I recall when the Sanders endorsement debacle happened that my Youtube feed popped up with a video from Rogan reacting to it all, and in particular he touched on the part I've bolded. It's more complicated than what was painted, because it had to do with a very specific situation. I've linked it from when he gets into it,  (TL;DR: The transwoman MMA fighter had not disclosed she was trans and absolutely brutalized her first opponents before it was revealed; if she had been up front about it and women still chose to  fight her, he would not have had an issue, but he felt her dishonesty had endangered her opponents needlessly):

So just putting that out there, as far as what Rogan was accused of vs. what he said he means on the specific topic of transwomen in sports.

4 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

Because there's no evidence that transwomen (don't call them biological males) have an inherent advantage over ciswomen.

This isn't really true. The science is complicated but the fact is that there are some actual biomechanical differences between adult male and adult female bodies that current gender affirmation techniques can't effect and which have actual effects on athletic performance; there are differences in pelvis structure, femur structure (which means more angular rotational force applied to the knee compared to men, and a consequent higher incidence of certain types of injuries to female athletes vs. male athletes), bone density, and so on. Going beyond the skeleton, men have more robust tendons, denser muscle fiber, more muscle nuclei (which remain even when testosterone is suppressed), more lung capacity, larger hearts, and so on. Some of these things are effected by suppressing testosterone to varying degrees and some aren't at all.

Of course, some of this could probably be greatly mitigated in transwomen if they began before adulthood with puberty blockers and such, reducing the irrevocable effects of male maturation, and presumably the same with transmen who began to transition before puberty to some degree. But so far I think most transathletes transitioned as adults. Sweden's Karolinska Institute did a small study published this month in the The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism using twelve transgender individuals (not athletes, though, they admit) and found that transmen gained significantly more muscle mass and strength over the course of the regimens, but that transwomen on the other hand only lost a relatively small amount of muscle mass (leaving them still with substantially more muscle mass than non-trans women and transmen) and actually appeared to lose no strength or even gain a little strength (probably an effect of having repeated the exercises over time). Full paper (pre-print version from September as the published version isn't available without an academic subscription)  here. 

I think when the science is all said and done, athletics and sports are likely to have to develop handicapping systems to level the ground that surgery and hormone therapies aren't able to entirely do. Each sport would have to tailor things based on the specific mix of their sport, -- endurance, lower or upper limb strength, explosiveness of effort, etc.

 

 

 

[karaddin]

At the higher up thread posts

I guess people like me should just accept we don't deserve equal human rights then and not ask for politicians to protect us then? Since you think it's so damaging to the cause of the left to actually stand up for ourselves.

What's the fucking difference if the left is going to throw us under the bus as.

Ran - yeah my skeleton is different, doesn't do a fuck of a lot of good though. Show me trans women dominating any sport in a way that hasn't happened with an unusually gifted cis woman. Sure as fuck wasn't Fallon Fox, who unsurprisingly received a shit load of bigoted abuse. Also love the idea that "brutalized their opponent" isn't what every MMA fighter is functionally trying to do, and can't happen with a gap between two cis athletes.

People aren't homogenous, and there are some people with natural advantages over others whether. 

[BigFatCoward]

11 minutes ago, karaddin said:

 

Ran - yeah my skeleton is different, doesn't do a fuck of a lot of good though. Show me trans women dominating any sport in a way that hasn't happened with an unusually gifted cis woman. Sure as fuck wasn't Fallon Fox, who unsurprisingly received a shit load of bigoted abuse. Also love the idea that "brutalized their opponent" isn't what every MMA fighter is functionally trying to do, and can't happen with a gap between two cis athletes.

People aren't homogenous, and there are some people with natural advantages over others whether. 

Hypothetically, if society moves to be more tolerant and supportive and there are more and more trans people who feel safe enough to he who they wish to be, and suddenly sports are dominated by trans athletes, where would you stand?

[karaddin]

I'd have a lot more time for the discussion is it was based in an actual observed trend than when it's primary use is as an "acceptable concern" to use as a dog whistle.

But that's so far off in the hypothetical future that I'm sure comprehensive research on all the effects will have been done, in the here and now? If you buy into that concern enough to spread it as a concern then best case you're being used to perpetuate the propaganda of those who hate us.

The sport rules mean nothing to me, and while my account as an individual is anecdotal I'll share it anyway. With the same level of activity before and after transition the amount of weight I could comfortably carry for longer than "pick it up and put it down" dropped by a factor of about 4x or more. After a bit of a reduction from that point I dropped to the point I can barely carry more than 2-3kg in a bag on either arm with shopping. The impact of the hormonal changes on my muscle mass was enormous.

[Gorn]

Contrary to what many on the right believe, the left doesn't have a Political Correctness Pope who sits on a throne in a vegan cafe in Brooklyn and decides what is dogma and what is heresy. Reasonable people can disagree on things like relative advantage provided by differences in bone density in women's MMA without being transphobes.

However, context matters. If the same person has said a bunch of objectively offensive things without regretting them or apologizing for them, it's reasonable to say, "yeah, that's a transphobe".

[Ran]

59 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Ran - yeah my skeleton is different, doesn't do a fuck of a lot of good though.

Are you an athlete who competes in sports where skeletal differences have measurable impacts on performance? I'm guessing no. 

 

59 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Show me trans women dominating any sport in a way that hasn't happened with an unusually gifted cis woman.

Rachel McKinnon broke the world record for sprint cycling for the 35-39 age group, twice, two years after taking up the sport in which most competitors had been competing for a decade or more. She was not an elite national-level male athlete prior to her transition. At average performance she herself admits producing about 15% more power than her best competitors, with bursts that are nearer to 20% higher than the burst of female competitors. Notably, her performance compares poorly to elite male cyclists but is beyond the range of any female cyclist. 

Quote

People aren't homogenous, and there are some people with natural advantages over others whether. 

Yes, which is why handicapping systems are the only fair course.

59 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Also love the idea that "brutalized their opponent"

She broke the skull of one of her opponents. I don't think anyone should be making light of this. It was a complete mismatch in performance. It'd be like putting in a middleweight against a lightweight, in terms of the musculo-skeletal difference even when the weight groups are the same. And in this case, this was a fairly low-level, low-skill event. She was eventually beaten because she was outskilled by someone much more skilled as a fighter, not because she was outmuscled.

[karaddin]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

He broke the skull of one of his opponents. 

I'm not interested in getting into it any further, I read as much on Fallon Fox and MMA years ago when she first came out, but this misgendering seems like it might be a Freudian slip? Thanks for showing where you stand.

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I'm not interested in getting into it any further, I read as much on Fallon Fox and MMA years ago when she first came out, but this misgendering seems like it might be a Freudian slip? Thanks for showing where you stand.

Absolutely a slip, and I apologize for it. If you want to take it as evidence of "where I stand"  rather than evidence that these things can be difficult when you're talking about complicated issues in which someone's past as a man actually does matter, I can't stop you from feeling that way, but you'll note everywhere else I identified her properly.

[butterbumps!]

Is there handicapping for being the cis offspring of elite, accomplished athletes?   Or cis athletes who happen to be born with talent and bodies extremely geared toward athletic competence?    Or cis kids whose parents are able and willing to invest money and time into elite training?   Or cis adults able to do the same?  Even if one accepts the premise that trans women have inherent advantages in terms of athletics (which I don’t believe to be universally the case), aren’t there just a lot of other factors that provide inherent advantages in athletics?