381–390 of 410 posts
This is a really dumb article, starting with this example. Singal is not anti-trans and never has been. He wrote critically of methodologies used by key papers that are cited in support of affirmation in youth gender medicine. That is it, and all it ever was. For that he was canceled. Ridiculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a de novo principle. It's pretty basic evidence based medicine: if a treatment has negative side effects, there needs to be significant evidence of positive outcomes to justify this treatment. What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
Talking with you is very difficult when you continue to conflate various claims and stances that are logically distinct. OP said: >>> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born? Asserting this as an ethical principle leads to absurdities. That’s all that occurred here. > What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine int…
> While European health authorities aren’t instituting bans on treatment, currently minors in six European countries—Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France and Finland—can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only if they meet strict eligibility requirements, usually in the context of a tightly controlled research setting. (Italics in the original)
Read through your quotes carefully:
> The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.
And how many of such cases were granted? This could be a de facto ban, if no such cases are granted.
> issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.
Again, how many new patients are being put on blockers after this recommendation?
You're trying to spin this false narrative that patients with gender dysphoria are still being prescribed puberty blockers as normal treatment for GD. This is not the case. Even though the legislatures in these countries haven't banned the treatment, effectively nobody is getting puberty blockers for childhood GD in these countries.
Actions speak louder than words. You can split hairs about how "recommending" the discontinuation of puberty blocks is not ban. But at the end of the day, what unambiguously true is that the vast majority of patients who are prescribed blockers in the US would not be prescribed blockers in these countries. If you have actual stats on the number of new patients prescribed blockers in these countries in 2025, by all means share it.
Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly. I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a ba…
> I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent." Not only that, but also having a globally (eventually) consistent view of every conversation from every server. Unlike the "message passing" model used by email and ActivityPub, this means that every server has to carry all the traffic of the whole network (i.e.,…
What I'm realizing, perhaps as an old timer -- projects like this seem to utterly forget the concept of "layers," despite, you know that being the whole internet, OSI and whatnot.
I remember having the idea that even this exact use case, air-quotes "twitter", could be done by simply layering something over email, e.g. you shoot an email to "posty-instance@myserver" or whatever and then some central-ish thing posts that to a public feed or whatever.
So much unnecessary reinvention.
This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually? Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized…
There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of these are acceptable/unacceptable to you? - posting about saying it "with a hard R" - posting TikToks of yourself yelling "dirty clanker" at delivery robots on the street - posting TikToks of yourself saying it in a sketch where you're a waitress in the South in the 1950s - replying to people with prosthetic robot arms calling them "half clankas" Cause those are all real. It's the internet, you should assume…
Computers aren't people. Don't know how to clarify this any better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note this word is actually a one-off joke from Star Wars, but the reason they're saying it is that you can say it with a hard R. The other words are worse.
I don’t believe this is true. The sort of people to use this slur are the ones supporting DEI and BLM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a good point. If we analyze this article called “Tolerance Isn’t A Moral Precept” with the understanding that it is arguing under the assertion that it actually is a moral precept and then imagine in our minds an enormous number of people that have no concept of “clear and present danger” at all, it is very troublesome indeed. In a vein that has very similar relevance to the article and discussion at hand, th…
"clear and present danger" is a concept used by the legal system to define when speech is or isn't legal, and the bar used is generally fairly high. Still, we usually deploy a jury or a team of judges to determine this in order to really be sure to get it right. It is not something that is easily defined in an objective sense. "clear, specific and concrete danger" is something that may be a better set of criteria. If…
Now, once you consider that the people that I’m imagining are nearly-spherical but covered in spikes and all of them are in the bottom of a big slippery bowl, you can see how they’re always causing harm to one another. Also in this scenario they can only communicate in grunts and as such they rely on me - the dungeon master judge - to resolve conflicts through a complex legal system that I made up. Sadly I am powerless to do anything about the spikes or how slippery the bowl is, so you can guess how that works out.
To all the people that talk about a “social contract” I say “put that in your pipe and smoke it”!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point. Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system. The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Blues…
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
It's like stack overflow for teams. Isn't that useless? Why not post on stack overflow? Because this is your stack overflow, for your organization. Stack overflow for teams isn't a competitor or alternative to stack overflow, it's a different use case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always was. It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer jus…
It's shockingly common for people to cite Twitter and Bluesky posts as evidence of what the average American of political party X or Y believes. I do not understand how they came to be so deluded.
I don't need to go find loonies. I can get on Twitter or Truth Social and get it from the horse's mouth.