Tendo City - Den of the Philociraptor

Opinion. Your therapist is lying to you and that isn't helping anything

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 19:20:26 +0000

If I could get a little deep for a minute:
How is a coping strategy for those on hard times not ultimately meaningless. How is "how I feel" about anything pay the damn bills, or fix the damn town?

You can make me happy as a kite but tomorrow will still be tomorrow and a reflection of today.

Explain it please. That's not a rhetorical I want to know.
Shouldn't science be just a little bit better than a will it want it strategy? How does that serve the common good?

Now I don't have a better answer I don't think anyone does. But this doesn't seem it.

JK Rowling and transphobia

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 04:51:07 +0000

These tweets seem pretty innocuous to me...

What's wrong about this? The prominent belief that sex and gender are different concepts is accepted by both liberals and sociologists. We have two words to categorize women: transwomen and ciswomen. So why is it offensive to say that ciswomen have a different experience than transwomen? They're both women (gender) but have different anatomy (sex). ...and? So why is Rowling getting raked over the coals?

She expands on her beliefs in this essay: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-r...er-issues/

It's heartfelt, and most of it seems reasonable to me. The most objectionable parts seem to be:

Women deserve and are entitled their own spaces (i.e. it's okay to exclude transwomen in same cases)
We must not be too hasty to allow transwomen to enter female-designated bathrooms, dressing rooms, and other vulnerable spaces. Rowling laments that Scotland allows a person to simply declare they are a woman, to be considered one in the eyes of the law.

Rowling has a history of domestic abuse (she is traumatized by it to the point where sudden loud noises frighten her). This has instilled into her a latent fear of men, making her leery of cagey men who want to pose as transwomen, to enter safe spaces of women. Most of us liberals can agree that it's bigoted to conflate transwomen with men. This is a sticky scenario, though. Here we have a battered woman, who has a visceral reaction to a male body, and fears that a criminal cismale will potentially pose as a transwoman and invade women-only spaces and assault them.

Let's be clear: this is an incredibly rare occurrence. But it does happen: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018...der-prison

I have no figures to back this up, but my intuition is that it's less likely for a dangerous man to pose as a transwoman, than it is for a transwoman to be thrown into a group of men and be assaulted. So is this a utilitarian issue, where we have to weigh the options? As trans rights take hold, wouldn't it follow that criminals will exploit them for their own ends?

Why is it so controversial that a person's sex will inform their experience? The way I see it, if that was false, then transgenderism wouldn't exist to begin with. Isn't the central issue with being transgendered that the "gender" of your brain doesn't align with your bodily sex? So how could your biology NOT have an affect on your mentality?

As for Rowling, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I think her feelings are valid, and besides, as a man and supporter of feminism, I'm troubled by the idea of attacking a woman for her opinion. But, I can also see how her comments are problematic and transphobic. It's ironic to me that feminist activists would harass and threaten her. Surely there must be a middle-ground where feminists stand up for their transwomen members, and not outright attack another woman?

wtf I'm pro-life now

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 15:38:36 +0000

https://www.zootopianewsnetwork.com/2017...comic.html

Obviously the comic is hilarious and the title of this thread is tongue-in-cheek. I've been firmly pro-choice for years, and still am, but I WILL say that after listening to pro-life arguments over the years, I'm more sympathetic to their claims. Were there not the factor of bodily autonomy and the burden of pregnancy, I might be more inclined to agree with the idea of "do we truly know when life begins, and is it up to us to snuff out that life?"

That's the fundamental question, isn't it? When DOES life begin? Is life defined by a heartbeat? Seems to me like the heartbeat argument is spurious. Why exactly would heartbeat imply life and sentience? It's simply a mechanism to distribute oxygen and nutrients to an assortmant of organs. It seems to me that higher brain function is a better descriptor of whatever the hell a "soul" is, without getting into the distracting and problematic idea of souls to begin with. Keeping in mind that independent of the idea of "souls" (which is religious/implies life after death, and is irrelevant in this discussion), we can all agree that all life is sacred, and that in particular as liberals, we ought to be doing everything we can to promote the well-being of every living human, including robust social programs to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide health care to every citizen.

So the heartbeat argument is spurious for another reason. In 2-4 weeks after conception, we can detect a functional "heart" beat, pumping the fetus's own circulatory system. Of course, recent developments in science demonstrate that this is not a completely formed heart, but a primitive version that still hasn't fully developed. So making the claim that "the baby has its own heart" is less robust than we might think.

Let's get back to brain activity. Can science determine whether a fetus is a life based on how advanced its brain is? Does this mean that patients who are comatose, with little-to-no detectable brain activity, are not alive? More to the point, does this render their life no longer sacred? Are they no longer afforded the dignity and sanctity of a functioning human being? How much brain activity can make this distinction? What about those with major brain disabilities, low IQs, or brain damage?

Can science answer these questions? Using science to determine what life is worthy of dignity has problematic backgrounds. In the name of science, eugenics has been advocated, determining that humanity as a whole would progress if we culled out races that were considered of natural lower intelligence. Many prominent thinkers (possibly including Darwin?) believed that "negroids" were naturally inferior than whites, and used junk science (now debunked) to justify their attitudes towards Africans.

Keep in mind that I fall back on the sanctity of bodily autonomy, and that women have inherent reproductive rights (as important as any other civil right). I may be projecting, but I assume the same is true of the other (all 4 of you) other regular posters up in this bitch. So I think it's interesting to explore alternatives to what we believe and contemplate them. I'll further assume that no one here believes that life begins at conception, that terminating first-trimester fetuses is cool and good, and that terminating a late-term pregnancy (let's go extreme and say 2 weeks before delivery) is bad and and wrong.

So exactly where do we make that cut-off? Noted obnoxious-but-admittedly-sometimes-effective-rhetoricist Ben Shapiro makes the argument that you can't rigorously define that cut off. Let's say we define it as viability outside the womb, which I think is a good starting point. Does this mean that simply a week or a day before we meet this criteria, it's suddenly okay to abort the fetus? What's so important about that one week? You can continue moving the goal posts until you come up with a window so small, that it's better to simply disallow abortions altogether. Maybe life really DOES begin at conception? (Narrator: it doesn't.)

But the goal posts thing is obnoxious because you can also apply it to other gray areas of a timeline, such as the age of consent. Hey, it was a week before her 18th birthday, so is it really statutory rape? Come on, she's 17, she's ready, you can't tell me that one year would make a difference, she's mature for her age, a lot of them are having sex by 17 anyway so who cares? And come to think of it, 16 isn't that far away from 17, etc.

So we can agree that a cut-off is important somewhere. But there's always the lingering doubt: can we TRULY be the judges of whether life is real and legitimate at any point during the pregnancy? Isn't it better to err on the side of caution? Isn't it more compassionate to assume that the fetus's life is as important as any of our own? Isn't it problematic to "play God", even if you don't believe in such an entity?

DISCUSS, or just laugh at the Zootopia comic.

Should police expect a certain level of threat to their own life?

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 05:52:56 +0000

This is going to be contentious, I'm putting it right out there.

The recent rash of "Swatting" (as well as general responses by police to situations around the nation) have really made me think about a few things. I think we all recall that 80's and 90's cop dramas showed how dangerous law enforcement is, and how criminals always have the advantage, and no one wants their loved ones getting that phone call. However, I think maybe it's time to consider a different side.

Many have already argued that police are using too much force and escalate their responses too quickly to reasonably determine a threat. The counter is, these days, that this is the ONLY way for police to stay safe, precisely because they can't possibly know who's going to be a threat to them.

I'm starting to think maybe the correct solution may just be, and I know this is terrible, that police should "suck it up" and accept that they may lose their life at any time. I intentionally put that in the worst way possible. To put it another way, the job of police officer, sheriff, what have you, has always been one that's dangerous, and probably a lot more dangerous in the past, and yet the basic protections citizens were promised FROM such officers were still put in place, knowing all of that. Everyone's so afraid of death these days, of an officer getting gunned down in the line of duty, that perhaps we've forgotten that the job of police officer is, um, "supposed" to be very dangerous. That's the price you pay when you decide to protect the innocent. I wonder if it's just irrational to be someone who wants to stay a police officer and also demand that they be able to escalate things in a way that could easily result in hurting those they've sworn to protect, basically making whether or not the person they kill in any one incident a complete unknown to them before they take it to that point. The only reason "Swatting" works at all is because police are taking what they feel is the necessary precaution of not tipping off the party in question one bit so they can stage their attack with the element of surprise. Maybe the ONLY way a police force can work well without endangering the citizens they're supposed to protect is if they are forced to not take these escalation precautions, to be forced to leave themselves open to attack again and again, night after night, for the sake of preventing oh so many wrongful deaths by police action.

Cold as it is, I think maybe this is the only way the police can work, have EVER worked, and if any officers aren't comfortable with these risks in the name of a safer pursuit of justice, they should turn in that badge and retire right then and there.

This is probably the worst thing I've ever said.

Is there a problem with automation replacing human workers?

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:18:28 +0000

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technolo...ood-robot/

It seems a job that provides a major source of income for a huge number of Americans (in fact, most of the people I know work in fast food or other similar service jobs, sad as that may be). It is already starting to happen. The nearby grocery stores have already started rolling out "do it yourself" shopping lanes, where the customer scans in everything themselves (the implementation is still a little wonky though, as I have to have everything on a scale for some sort of badly thought out security reason, see if you can find the problem with such a way to prevent theft). I can easily envision not just a future where ALL the checkout lanes are replaced in this manner, but one wherein the entire way stores function is changed, so that everyone just lines up in a front "lobby", punches in their orders on one of several touch screens, and the rest of store, basically converted into a giant vending machine, delivers everything to the front area while you wait. Basically, it'd have almost no human employees.

The specifics are all that's new, this trend has been going on since before we were born. Ever been to a full-service gas station? (Shut up, weird animal person from Austin riding an old-time bicycle, we're talking about real people here.) At a certain point, gas stations all decided that fueling a car had become so easy that there was no point hiring someone just to put gas in the car, and thus the dangerous midnight "I'm just going to put the pump in and hurriedly dash back into the relative safety of my car" gas run was born. Entire careers have disappeared numerous times ever since they started "bringing in computers to improve productivity". Of course, there are many cases where an "automated" approach has done nothing but hurt the consumer as well as the employee. Automated help lines have risen quite a bit, but how many people have ever actually had their unique issue handled by the automated help line? At this point, I speak in garbled nonsense until the computer just gives up on me and connects me to an actual human being.

I've gone more left than the supposed "left" party in America, but on this issue I think I disagree with the general consensus. On the one hand, I can certainly appreciate the total loss of one of the few reliable jobs someone who's down and out can get. As these low level positions vanish, a significant margin of Americans will have no skill set they can fall back on, and even if they did, the pool of available skillset requiring jobs is too small to accommodate everyone. It's a grim future that threatens to completely overturn the extremely recent reduction in joblessness in America (and the world over, once others start adopting these practices). This can't be ignored. Allow me to ignore it for a moment to talk about something else now.

I'm more or less deaf to the idea that companies should be allowed to pursue profit for it's own sake without any ear towards human suffering it causes, so let's get that out of the way. No, my issues with taking the "protect the jobs from innovation" run a bit deeper, a bit more conceptual.

Basically, the biggest problem with keeping human employees around to do a job that can be done better and cheaper by a machine is just how that must make that employee feel. At any point that employee ever screws up, a boss has the perfect "you're only here out of CHARITY" argument, a constant degredation of their worth as a person and a constant reminder that the ONLY reason they are there is out of a sense of pity, that literally everything they are doing in their work shift is utterly meaningless and useless by ANY metric you can come up with, because it ALL can be done by machine. It's the sort of degradation one might feel being forced to break rocks in an old timey prison, or being made to clean a floor using only a tooth brush in some army movie. You know, pointless "busy work" just so the person can say that they are technically "working". That, to me, is the worst possible fate, the kind Greeks made legends about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus Now hear me out on this, I'm not saying it's better for these people to starve to death on the streets than doing mindnumbing and pointless labor. I'm all for charity, and government sponsored charity at that. I'm just saying let's just go all-out on the charity thing because this half-way point only gives the illusion of providing workers a secure job, and worse, it deprives most of these workers of the time and energy they could devote towards a real skill-based job. (As to why I keep sounding like I think people are too good for this sort of work, well, I do, because ALL MY PARENTS AND TEACHERS growing up kept ramming the warning of "You don't want to be stuck in a dead end job flipping burgers, do you?" at me, so yeah, thanks previous generation, now my generation really DOES think this job is terrible and beneath our dignity, because you TOLD us it was, so don't go crying on fox news about it when it's your fault we think that!) What I'm suggesting is that if technology progresses to the point that entire service industry jobs are outright replaced, this isn't a bad thing IF we are the kind of society that decides that being jobless is a condition that SOCIETY should help fix. I'm saying that Obama's recent initiative to have state sponsered 2 year collage is a good start, and providing homes for people until they can provide for themselves is even better.

More fundamentally, if the service industry goes entirely self-automated, and the food production industry follows, we're at stage one of reaching a post-scarcity economy, and that's a good thing. What's better than the charity I suggested above? Producing technology capable of providing for everyone's needs so they don't NEED to worry about starvation, and are thus free to pursue career paths that'll actually provide them some real job satisfaction. I'm suggesting that artificially limiting this progress is just keeping everyone a slave to money, and I'm all for a technological future where money itself dies because it no longer serves it's purpose (trade isn't needed if everyone can have everything).

The American people are idiots

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 07:42:06 +0000

Evidence: This year's election.

Moldbug

Thu, 22 May 2014 09:05:09 +0000

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouth...chiavellis

Quite horrible worldview overall... great article, though!

Marriage equality is unstoppable.

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 02:00:56 +0000

It seems like, every week, there's another state with its discrimination statutes being struck down. My current state of Kentucky is now making its baby steps, as it now has to recognize same sex marriages from outside states. My former state of Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage has been struck down by a federal judge (and the new Attorney General is refusing to defend the ban).

This is pretty amazing. It looks like the homophobes are losing the war, not just battle after battle.

xkcd nails climate change deniers

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 21:05:17 +0000

Doesn't make you just want to smack someone when they say that?

ABF was right about everything.

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 06:29:27 +0000

I spent a long time here being ABF's nemesis in matters political and religious. Kinda stopped for awhile as this place has entered vegetative coma.

In the time since, I've come to understand that I was wrong about almost everything. Much of my conservative stance came from my father feeding me a steady stream of Rush Limbaugh growing up, and then Fox News a little later on. I took all that shit at face value and it came to define my views on politics and religion well into my adult life.

Once I was on my own and far away, and I started living life on my own (read: I got to know what being poor was like), it all started to ring hollow to me. I was doing my best to pull myself up by the bootstraps, and to my credit, I never did resort to taking government assistance, but it was only myself and my girlfriend, and a lot of the time, we paid rent and utilities and went hungry. It made me realize that, had we ended up with a kid or two, or had anything gone wrong, such as a layoff or some sort of injury, we would have gone from poverty to disaster.

That had a sobering effect on me, and in the years since, my worldview has transformed almost entirely. I have rejected Christianity, and all religion. I have gone from someone who might have once embraced the Tea Party to a far-left liberal who opposes conservatives (and the Tea Party in particular) in all ways. My support for the Iraq War and President Bush, my opposition to gay marriage and religious freedom, my contempt for the poor, are all things that cause me a lot of regret these days.

To put it more succinctly, ABF was right about almost every topic we argued. So, this is my way of throwing down all the towels and conceding every one of those debates. I voted for President Obama last year and watched his victory with deep pride. You and I are pretty much soul brothers now.

The fiscal cliff

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:19:42 +0000

The clock is a-tickin' for the lame duck Congress to take action.

The Senate passed a bill to extend Bush-era tax cuts for 98% of families while raising taxes on families with incomes over $250k/yr. Obama said that he will sign it once it is passed by the House.

Speaker Boehner is outraged, but some House Republicans are softening up to the measure. Assuming all House Democrats vote the bill up, they will require at least 26 Republicans to defect in order for the bill to pass. I think they might be able to accomplish that. It's all a matter of bringing the Senate-passed bill to a vote in the House. If passed, the bill is projected to reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade.

Boehner does not believe in raising taxes on anyone, even the upper 2%. He feels that we should instead cut government entitlement programs such as medicare and medicaid for the disabled, the elderly, and the poor. 56% of Americans support the Democrats' proposal. Obama has expressed a willingness to put even his 2010 healthcare law on the table for budget cuts.

Open your eyes, Boner. Your approval rating is abysmal, whereas the president's approval rating is at its highest point in over three years. You cannot pretend to be the voice of the American people when the only people you're looking out for are the wealthiest 2%, all while trying to cut off benefits to those who really need them: the disabled, the elderly, and the poor.

So... what will the House do? The ball is in their court.

Warning: this thread contains a long rant about politics

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:08:49 +0000

This whole faux-outrage over the Benghazi attack perfectly encapsulates why I gave up on the Republican party. After 9/11, it would have been easy for Democrats to jump atop the rubble and condemn Bush for allowing such a terrible attack on American. For not knowing that something this big was coming, for not putting more effort on fighting terrorism in his first 9 months, for not doing MORE. But they didn't. In part, obviously, because they didn't feel like committing political suicide, but also because I think they respected the President's right to respond to this crisis, with both words and actions. They let the President be the President.

Fast-forward to 2012 and you have the Republican candidate for President harping on the current president in the zero hour. It's been followed up by a conga line of outrage and consternation that Obama didn't use the right verbiage or that maybe he actually sympathizes with the killers and doesn't want this latest incident to turn the public eye on the campaign to slaughter Americans abroad [no one's said this, of course, but does anyone doubt the implication is there?]. Fox News and Tea Party doesn't respect the President and they don't respect his right as the duly-elected leader of this nation of respond to incidents like this. That's hardly anything new, as this has been their modus operandi for 5 years. They have the nerve, after two years of publicly-declared obstructionism, to pin the problems of the nation, the slow speed of the recovery, on the President and his party, who "just aren't willing to cooperate."

It's not enough to disagree with the President, it's not enough enough to dislike him. They hate him, hate him all the way down to his guts. He's a terrorist-sympathizer, an unworthy foreigner, a disgusting Communist, who doesn't understand what's so great about America and is doing his hardest to push through bills that will tear this country apart for his own amusement. He's not just wrong, he's EVIL. Mitt Romney's first day will included repealing every single piece of major legislation that Obama passed over 4 years in office. They want him gone yesterday, they want every shred of his existence expunged from history as soon as possible. They want everything he did to be either swept away or poisoned. And it makes me sick. I'm tired of hearing this on TV, I'm tired of my family spouting these lines they heard from Rush, Hannity, and whatever blubbering gob of flesh the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are pushing in their faces and their ears in as many venues as possible every second of every day.

In a better world, responsible mainstream media would point this out for what it is: a barely-concealed propaganda campaign to use whatever line of attack, whatever outright lie or misconception of the truth to undermine the President and make you, too, hate his guts just as much as they do. It's painful to watch this actually WORK, especially when a quick search on Google shreds these lines to bits with ease. But they won't do that, because the popularity and power of Fox News and right-wing media has forced an absurd "fair and balanced" approached to every story. You can't call out lies and hypocrisy from one individual, it's got to be a problem with both sides. Every story has to be couched in illogical mealy-mouthed PR-speak. "Some say this, but other say that." And it makes me sick. I hear it every single day, those little lies that dig under the skin of some members of my family and propagate the hate against the President. It does no good to bring up those easily found facts, because then I just become the Democratic mouth piece who doesn't understand what's wrong with the President and why he ought to go away as quickly as possible. It doesn't work, it never will, and it makes me sick.

I hate the Republican party, the Tea Party, Fox News and right-wing radio for what they've reduced members of my family to. And I won't vote for a Republican in a national election until it finally stops. But it won't stop, and thinking that quietly weathering the 2012 storm, will finally put an end to this madness is foolish. It won't stop, it'll only be that much more shrill the next time. Think 2012 is bad? Just wait until 2014 if the Democrats win in Congress or the Presidency. I want it to go away, I desperately want a return to at least some manner of decorum, at the very least, but I don't really believe it will. So having said that, I'm stocking up on Pepto Bismol, because it looks like I'm going to be feeling sick for quite a while.

A very informative graphic

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:10:50 +0000

Someone put together an interesting image. Of those who are "skeptical" of global warming, many have looked at figures presented to them for certain periods of times, noting that during those small periods average global temperatures have gone down. However, the long view shows that these are temporary and slight compared to the steady climb.

This graphic is "snarky" but accurate. Sometimes temperatures go down a little, but not enough to stop the overall trend.

Fortunately, lately most have begun to accept that global warming is real. They just don't believe it is caused by humans. To that I say there's good reason to believe humans are the cause, but even if they AREN'T, even if this is an entirely natural global warming, should we not STILL want to reverse it? 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. That's "natural", and as a consequence basically a prediction for humanity. However, I say if we are able to, let's take the reigns of ecology and try to prevent that. Let's do our best to "freeze" the planet in it's current state to prevent our extinction if we can. If humans aren't the cause of global warming, we have a daunting task of finding out what IS responsible and stopping it (my bet is Omicronians). If humans ARE responsible, our task becomes magnitudes simpler, but still difficult and necessary.

Science smacks god in the face

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:49:01 +0000

Stems cells were used to make female sperm
In theory allowing 2 females to reproduce.

Link

Way to go Egypt...

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 21:43:04 +0000

So am I the only one who sees the irony in that here we have a film that portrays Muslims as violent and unstable and the response from a country is to prove every point in the film with gusto? Maybe the film isn't so completely crazy after all?