Gonna have to disagree here. The social aspect of it all is just as important of the medical aspect. While there are trans issues that are mostly medical in nature, there are equally trans issues that are more social in nature.

I’m not sure what contexts you’ve seen truscum being used in, but from what I know it’s a term used for people who insist on a medical diagnosis in order to be trans. The problem with this, imo, is twofold. There’s a long history of medical gatekeeping that enforced cisheteronormativity in order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, leaving out all other forms of self-identity (among a whole host of philosophical issues). And the second is just the lack of understanding and research of the broader medical community. Treatment guidelines are all over the place, often misguided, and usually inadequate to achieve the goals of the patient.

Truscum rhetoric often reinforces cisheteronormativity which is mostly antithetical to what being trans is about in the first place. That’s not to say that the trans community doesn’t struggle with medical diagnoses or that that’s not important, but to use a diagnosis as the benchmark of what being trans is, is usually needlessly exclusionary.

Hbomberguy makes long videos yes, but he doesn’t make six hours long videos. He still makes his points concise and presents them in interesting and entertaining ways. Only in his last video does he cross the threshold into 3 hours long videos, and in that one he even says, in the video, that there was an entire section that he wrote and edited and then cut out because it muddied the point of his video.

Maybe it’s a question of where to draw the line, but I think hbomberguy is very much not the norm for long-form content creators. And I do not appreciate having long videos for the sake of having a video be long.

I’m not trying to argue with your lived experiences here, but as a neurodivergent person myself, I don’t think that judging intent is a meaningless endeavor. Yes, it can be messy and difficult, but I do find it worthwhile to examine writing from the perspective of what the author is trying to convince the audience of. I personally don’t think that the answer is to just stop trying to interact or be understood by neurotypical people, because like it or not, we can’t avoid neurotypical people in life. Yes, I do wish neurotypical people were more accomodating to neurodivergent people but I don’t think being antagonistic is helpful. I think it’s pretty unfair to say that because you don’t like using intents, that everyone else needs to stop as well.

As for your point on the web of cause and effect, I think it’s important to remember that there often isn’t a clear cut path from A to Z. And people with different life experiences will come to different conclusions about whether A leads to C or B leads to C. If you want to communicate to others that A leads to Z, you need to thoroughly explain how you reached that conclusion rather than assuming that everyone knows that A leads to Z 100% of the time.

You say that our senses of empathy are flawed and limited but I also haven’t gotten the impression that you’re making any real effort to understand other people. I’ve tried to read your words several times over and each time it feels like you think you’re absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong. I don’t understand half the things you’ve written and you never explain them or try to present other opinions. You bulldoze through everyone else and shut down when they ask you to slow down and explain where you came from.

To be clear here, I actually sympathize with a lot of the sentiments you’ve mentioned here. But just because I feel frustrated that someone does not see things exactly the same way I do, does not mean that I can automatically assume that they’re wrong and evil and it’s okay to be mean to them.

So basically, James Somerton stole literally all of his content from other queer creators while positioning himself as the de-facto queer creator to support. And by “all his content”, it really means all his content. Every. Single. Thought. Was plagiarized from someone else’s writing. And the extremely few that didn’t revealed that James Somerton is a crazy misogynist Nazi-loving lesbophobic transphobe.

Basically, he’s a massive piece of shit who’s comically evil to a mind-numbing degree.

Not sure how old you are or how jaded by society you are just yet, but conservatives don’t come to their positions from facts and logic. They hold their positions because conservative media has fanned their fear of the unknown. Conservatives are deeply emotional, and aren’t going to be convinced by any kind of studies or data to renounce their positions.

To provide an example, the infamous 41% statistic was referenced in this study. 41% referring to the stat that 41% of trans people have contemplated suicide ever. Conservatives don’t take this stat as an indicator that “hey things are kinda fucked up. we should be nicer to trans people!”, they take it to mean that “all trans people are mentally ill psychos and shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions for themselves or exist. You can’t be mentally ill if you’re not trans and this stat proves it!”

OP, your heart might have been in the right place, but my opinion is that it’s pointless to try to convince conservatives that they’re wrong.

Well, that’s the thing. I didn’t jump to that conclusion. I can see how the way I worded it may make it seem that way though.

And that passage is part of my point. The title makes it seem like being poor will make you more likely to be trans, while the study itself in fact says the opposite. That there are a number of different explanations for their observations, and that one shouldn’t draw the conclusion that being poor makes you trans. The title of the article is clickbait at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.

title is some crazy unsubstantiated clickbait, and the article itself is a massive nothing burger. Basically, there are more trans people recorded in the poorer parts of the UK, and they generally have poorer mental health than cis people. Which is entirely unsurprising and unhelpful at this broad of an analysis.

To be clearer, the distinction I’m drawing is that the title implies causation when all the study is is a correlation. “There are more trans people in poorer areas” is not the same statement as “poor people are more likely to be trans.”

ah, yes. because respecting someone’s identity and being willfully evil by refusing to are exactly the same things, yup. Brilliant deduction there, sir Watson!

Freedom of speech my ass. You just want to be an asshole without facing the consequences.

Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven’t checked other browsers) there’s a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it’ll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.

Yeah. You’re absolutely correct in that the two parties aren’t remotely equal. I guess my comment stems from the frustration I feel seeing democrats constantly trying to “take the upper road” while conservatives block anything the democrats do on principle. They’ll take a thousand concessions to get bills passed and even when the democrats are in power, somehow still don’t manage to enact very meaningful change.

So when I see the democrats slip up sometimes it feels like they undo whatever little progress they managed to make with all the conservative bad faith actors.

Democrats 🤝 Republicans

Fucking the poor. The only point they have in common.

Am i mistaken in believing that cloud computing naturally lends itself to only having a couple of big players in the space? The whole point of the technology is to have someone else do the hosting for you, and the people doing the hosting win out by economies of scale.

This would be a different conversation if they found evidence in the software that it was throttling smaller competitors, but without any more information this seems like a lot of nothing?

Y’all do my eyes deceive me or is the “L” using the lipstick lesbian flag instead of the sunset?

I mean that’s fair enough but this article is specifically talking about how conservatives specifically use these tricks in this specific scenario. Which the author implies can be generalized to how these tricks are used in in other areas of discourse.

But let’s not mince words here. The entire conservative platform is built on ignorance and misinformation. Sure, misinformation can happen in other places too but the techniques the author analyzes here are part of the standard conservative playbook.

Okay that makes more sense. I do think that “online dating is awful” is a very different statement from “well it used to be good but now it sucks” and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

As for your opinion itself, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don’t think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.

That’s not what the original comment said if you read it at all. The commenter was making the point that okcupid was pretty good before it was enshittified. There was no direct judgement about whether the world is better with or without OLD. And the subtextual judgment seems to be positive or at least neutral, so I’m not sure what you actually have a problem with.

Not sure if OP actually read the article but the title of it is clickbait. The author of the article is not trying to actually say that the single problem of society is single-parent families or anything like that. The article mostly goes into how conservatives will present some pretty banal data but then sneak in some normative assumptions of how things should work to make a conservative conclusion. This author is illustrating this point by specifically using a book about the data of single parent homes that makes the conclusion that we need more two parent households.

Imo was a pretty good read and probably one I’d show to someone who’s a moderate or a fence sitter, but it was nothing new to me. The author pretty cleanly lays out several of the tricks conservatives like to use to make it seem like their batshit crazy and bigoted ideas aren’t actually batshit crazy and bigoted.

I mean let’s be real here. Did anyone expect the NYPD (or any PD, for that matter) to actually put all their offenses on display? The NYPD in particular is among the worst of all the PDs in the country.

I found this mostly to be a satiric nothingburger that doesn’t make any meaningful observations at all.

Based on the title I expected it to go a little bit deeper into how “AI” technology will destroy society if it doesn’t get regulated, but instead it was just a couple of short quips about how some of the big tech companies nowadays have changed what life looks like nowadays.

I felt like I was reading a boomer say “get off my lawn! Kids these days…” without any additional nuance or context.

Maybe you could prod them by asking them questions designed to highlight their unconscious biases? Assuming that they’re not a malicious actor of course and actually genuinely trying to learn and expand their worldview.

I do think it’s important to determine whether the person you’re arguing with actually cares to grow and learn or if they’re just trying to start fights with people and “win” arguments with comments that take a lot of nuance to address. In the cases where they don’t care, don’t waste your breath on arguing with someone who’s sole purpose is to make you angry. They don’t care about your nuanced answer.

I forget how the original phrase goes, but someone once said that these people use language as a toy to play with, while the reasonable person uses it to justify their actions.