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After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

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Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#161
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost no word in this is true. Blockers are "reversible": You stop taking them. Their primary effect is a delay of puberty during use , nothing more drastic. "Activists" push them because the negative mental health effects of forcing trans children to go through puberty before they have a chance to decide as adults whether or not to fully transition are severe and debilitating, and it's shockingly immoral to try to…

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> Yeah, it’s shockingly immoral to not give children drugs that have existed for something like 0.01% of human existence.

What is the argument here? Drugs haven't existed for long, so it's okay to prevent people from using them? I'm sure we can all agree it would be shockingly immoral to steal cancer drugs from a patient, even if it is natural development.

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#162
post #84

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Provide the evidence, you'll quickly find that it doesn't support the claim. No children (prepubescent) are given surgeries, a tiny minority of 16 year olds are able to receive top surgeries but the vast majority can't even get hormones until late teens.

> a tiny minority of 16 year olds are able to receive top surgeries And this is supposed to be an argument for "it never happens"? You don't see a problem with confused girls who are still coming to terms with their bodies having medically unnecessary surgery to have healthy organs removed? And yes, some of them are regretting that when they grow up. Some of them are even willing to speak up. But I'm sure you will no…

Did I say "never" or did you just put that in quotes to pretend I did? Surgery is extremely rare and largely seen as unethical. Again, except for circumcision, which is downright common and often literally forced on children. Where's the outrage? Cisgender women get breast implants before 18 through similar channels and in greater numbers. Where's the outrage?

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#163
post #109

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As a very rough rule of thumb, if it comes in pill form, it's probably not surgery.

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Hormone blockers are frequently prescribed to children to prevent precocious puberty. This practice is extremely well supported by research and considered safe and reversible through decades of observation. But unlike transgender patients, hormone blockers are given to children with symptoms of precocious puberty without the child's informed consent. Where's the outrage?

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#164
post #138

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> What's you explanation then for why literally nobody cared about adult trans people just a few years ago? Because it’s an invented political scapegoat, just like countless others. Trans people were out and about 10 years ago and nobody gave a shit. I’m from a small town in Appalachia and my grandma had a trans friend that was out and open 30 years ago. They stopped by when I was a kid and we treated her as a normal…

> Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry. Again, no. It's only when they started telling children it was a good idea to sterilize themselves. Just don't do irreversible damage to children, it's that easy. Find other shibboleths to identify good communists that don't involve chopping bits off kids.

I don’t think communist countries have a higher rate of trans people. Blaming random, irrelevant things on communism is a hallmark sign of believing media fear mongering.

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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You're the one who is trying to rope different arguemnts into the discussion here. That some people you detest who argue B also argue A is irrelevant when it comes to arguements for/against A.

Nope. In case you haven't noticed we're replying to an article about "moral panics". Somebody upthread pointed out that there is currently a moral panic centred on transpeople. Politicians talking about "demons and imps", banning drag shows and "eliminating" trans identity or introducing the felony offence of having the wrong books in the classroom are examples of this phenomenon. Despite the OP's denials, this phenomenon is very much in evidence; the scientific research concluding the net harm of any and all forms gender-affirmative care recently criminalised by the same politicians isn't (and even if it existed, that still wouldn't mean moral panics over transpeople didn't exist)

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#166
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as you can see, even Hacker News is not immune to this latest moral panic. Sadly, once a moral panic starts, it's nearly impossible to stop. It has to destroy an egregious number of innocent lives before society finally comes to its senses, at which point the panic slowly fizzles out.

I'm a bit surprised at how often it seems to come up in random comment threads. The atmosphere here feels increasingly unwelcoming lately. Or maybe people feel like they're just having abstract, hypothetical intellectual discussions. But when I read these threads, it just feels like signal after signal that I no longer fit in or have a place here.

I too have noticed some quite transphobic attitudes on HN over the past year or so. It's been a bit shocking at times.

I have considered emailing the admins to state my concerns, or creating an account here to add another voice to threads when things start heading in that direction - but ultimately it seems futile as transphobia seems to have ramped up everywhere recently. It's scary.

Of all the wonderful trans people I know in the real world, very few are getting the medical assistance they need. Those people are fortunate enough to pay for private care, and even then the level of care they are getting is barely acceptable. My other trans friends are approaching their 30s and still on waiting lists.

Many things presented as fact in this thread do not line up with my experiences of trans issues and the wider LGBTQ community. In my opinion many users on HN are truly insightful about tech and programming, but utterly heartless when it comes to social issues.

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#167
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Hormone blockers are frequently prescribed to children to prevent precocious puberty. This practice is extremely well supported by research and considered safe and reversible through decades of observation. But unlike transgender patients, hormone blockers are given to children with symptoms of precocious puberty without the child's informed consent. Where's the outrage?

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Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#168
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The murderer was tried and convicted. Society did not back him. The criminal justice system did not back him. 2. More unarmed white people are killed by police than unarmed black people. So are whites the oppressed group? ( 3. Bringing up George Floyd as "proof" for wokist ideas is exactly evidence for a moral panic, because it appeals purely to emotion with complete disregard of and in contradiction to the actual…

Your dunning-kruger is showing 1 the conviction of chauvin was an outlier event that took exceptional circumstances to achieve. The point you prefer to avoid is how rare this is. 2 is in bad faith. Your country is majority white. 3 is begging the question. How's this: your social bubble thinks Chauvin should be exonerated, and your bubble is in a moral panic that the uppity n* are getting their way. 4 typical yankee…

If your primary response is ad-hominems, it's probably not the other person that's out of rational arguments. Needless to say, those ad-hominems are completely wrong where they make factual claims. Comically wrong, even. Of course being completely wrong when you are utterly convinced that you are right ... hmmm.. Dunning-Kruger?

Anyway: if the evidence you provide for is a single instance, that's already really really bad. It gets a lot worse when that single instance actually shows the opposite of your claim, and you then go on to claim that that instance is the exception that...proves the general rule?

Surely you should be able to easily come up with better evidence than a contradiction of your claims? At least if your case is so incredibly bullet-proof? Or is it so bullet-proof that it doesn't actually require evidence?

Why would that be? Maybe because its "proof" is emotional, not factual?

Anyway, we can agree that just looking at overall population statistic may be too simplistic, though it is hands-down no-contest than using a single example, never mind a single example that contradicts the claim.

A more nuanced approach is probably needed. So when you look at police killings relative to percentages of the population, you do get somewhat higher relative numbers for blacks than whites, though not nearly as dramatic as people think.

So triumph, right? Well, not quite.

Because just like absolute numbers are not quite the right measure, neither are raw numbers relative to population. For example, my chance of getting shot by an American cop is pretty much zero. But that's not because I am white, but because I don't actually live in the US. Race has nothing to do with it in this case. So if you want to determine if the police are disproportionately shooting a particular group, you need to take actual police encounters into account.

And once you adjust for that, the numbers come up a wash (something like 29% vs. 31%).

https://web.archive.org/web/20151016220309/https://www.nytim...

Of course, you can argue that police encounters are skewed because of racism, but it turns out that crime is also more prevalent in the black community, and pretty much in-line with the encounter numbers.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf

But let's assume for a second that it's true. Even then the charge that police somewhat over-police high-crime areas doesn't exactly have the same emotional impact as "racist police on a killing spree of unarmed blacks".

And of course, you can now go back and look at why the crime rate among blacks is significantly higher, and you might come up with relative poverty as a potential answer. And if you looked at that a bit more closely, you would see that adjusting for socio-economic status actually levels out not just the crime figures, but ALL of the other numbers so far.

So it isn't a race problem. It's a poverty problem. It turns out that poor white people can be killed by the police with just as much impunity as poor black people. And, and this is important, with far less press coverage. Even though (absolute numbers again) many more (poor) whites get killed by the police than (poor) blacks, those cases do not get reported.

And so you are looking at a simple case of availability bias as one of the cause for this particular moral panic.

Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#169
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> Stop parroting the propaganda which we are all perfectly familiar with and educate yourself You're at least the second person to say "do your research" rather than offer up some evidence. In my experience, that's the mark of a conspiracy theorist. But I could easily be wrong. Have you got any papers on puberty blockers that support your position? > Yeah, it’s shockingly immoral to not give children drugs that have…

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Re: After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Suspected homosexuals" and proven hypocrites who hurt LGBT people with their rhetoric and actions are two vastly different things. Precision is important.

No, it is the very same thing in the case of this list. Precision is important. Protesting that one's cause is noble would be missing the point of the quote entirely. Everybody who has ever made lists thought they were doing it for a worthy cause.

They are not suspected to, they have been caught in consensual acts, they were caught red handed to be hypocrites.

A gay person isn't a hypocrite for being gay, a gay person condemning and harming other gay people is a hypocrite.

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