It's good to have praxis chime in wherever his insights are not required.

Look at all this effort to defend Biden :starstruck:

Contesting or disputing an election is nothing. During the last presidency the legitimacy of the election was doubted with the strength of the 5 eyes, the "intelligence community", the 4th estate and the entire Democrat party, all premised on utter nonsense. So whoopidy doo, they might have to lay in the very beds they made.

Someone doesn’t like criticism of Joe Biden :rofl:

Biden goes dictator in his latest speech, the whole time hinting at using the full power of the US government against his political opponents, “MAGA republicans”, and the millions of Americans that vote for them.



It’s comforting to hear heckles such as “Fuck Joe Biden” come from the back, though.

It cannot be any other way. That’s why the “common good” is a myth and collectivism fails. No man can know what’s best for others—he can hardly sort out his own life—let alone the sum total of human beings in any given territory. No man should ever be forced to live under another man’s schemes for that reason.

Anyone who believes people have a right to such things ought to start providing them immediately. You’re violating someone’s rights when you don’t. Personally I don’t think anyone owes anyone else a living, so do not see them as rights, and especially as rights worthy of government protection.

We’re not meeting. I’m sitting alone. I’m just saying that perhaps it isn’t as social as we make it out to be. The problem with social media is how anti-social it all is. There is a severe absence of social cues, body language, proximity to others, and so on. I wager none of this would be a problem if we were all kicking it the pub, face-to-face. It’s an exercise in reading and writing, maybe tantamount to writing letters or leaving messages on a board or something, but little more than that.

At any rate we know nothing about one another. That’s why all attempts at bullying and cruelty are a swing-and-a-miss and shouldn’t be taken so personally. It’s almost cringeworthy how far they miss the mark. Their efforts could never be more than catharsis or propaganda. But to silence them is a double evil because not only does it negate their right to express themselves but also my right to read it.

In the end the final decision is left to the owners and those delegated to the task of moderation. If we don’t like it we leave, find another space, or make our own.

The inability to individuate is a key component to racism. It opens up a host of fallacies that the racist can never overcome, relegating his beliefs to a lower order of thought, and any action motivated by it to injustice.

But some things are stark, crazy obvious, staring us in the face.
Perhaps we've become immune.
Increasingly hostile and personal insults would not be acceptable in a real-life meetup.
What makes people think they can get away with it on internet forums?
Disrupting and distracting from a serious subject.

The analogy isn’t strong, here. This isn’t a meetup. There is no social setting. We’re just reading and writing in largely solitary situations, where no harm, distraction, or disruption from other members can really befall us.

This explains why people think they can “get away with it” on Internet forums. There are no social repercussions for being hostile to other members. No threat of violence, ostracism, or shame. But we’re also largely anonymous, so much so that any insulting and hostile poster is really swinging at a caricature in his own head. Thus, each insult or hypocrisy reveals much more about the offender than his intended victim. He’s fighting something of his own creation. That’s the irony of the whole thing.

More importantly, insult, satire, diatribe, are all important facets of democracy in particular, politics in general, and I agree with the mods that some leeway should be given in such discussions. To maintain a modicum of decorum without eliminating these important facets is no easy task, but to make it easier on all involved, maybe we ought to grow thicker skins.

No where have I equivocated between personal prejudice and systemic persecution. You’ve got nothing, as usual.

No one is racist until they systemically persecute someone in @180 Proof‘s clown world.

A racist and sexist diatribe, but it’s against white men so it’s cool and edgy. What difference does it make?

His prose is Lutherian. Maybe it was a dig at Luther, but maybe he thought such prose was a way to appeal to the masses.

I like what he says about the State in this one.

It’s impossible to live in a simulation because the act of entering a simulation occurs after, and never before, a state of affairs in which we already live.

“Capitalism” is a socialist bugaboo, and isn’t the mark of any one system. There has not been any regime that was not concerned with the ownership and management of capital, including the most collectivist and centralized of regimes, the difference being only that collectivism transfers the ownership and management of capital from private hands to the hands of the State.

Statism is the prevailing orthodoxy, and that’s the primary ingredient in all the shit sandwiches we’re eating these days.

Good for her. There is no problem with her partying and dancing and having fun. Politicians are mammals. The sooner critics get that through their heads the better. She should to own it and flaunt it in their faces.

One of the problems with politics is the expectation that politicians ought to be paragons of virtue, a standard which isn’t possible in any case. Such an expectation forces the politician to work towards better “optics” than policy or governance.

Hostility, snark, misrepresentation. What’s with you guys? Your bigotry knows no bounds.

I never once said “all that matters is biology”. You’ve been hostile, snarky, talking about Trump. You’re trying to blame me for your intolerance towards my views and it’s not working very well.

It makes no sense to refuse a biological perspective in a debate about the divergence between biological sex and perceived gender in transgenderism. It is even spoken about in the first post. At any rate, wherever an identity misidentifies, the biology is paramount. A quick examination of it can confirm what is the case, that is if truth is still a concern.

It isn't even remotely believable to you that a biological man could be a woman?

No. The distinction exists at the cellular level and begins at such an early stage in development that any change to it is impossible and irreversible.

I think according to your own view a sex change would just mean that a man becomes a woman or vice versa, and it sounds like you wouldn't accept that as valid.

I don’t believe a sex change actually accomplishes any change in sex.

But I have every right to have my newborn son mutilated. Or I could get a tattoo of a dick on my face. Both are permanent biological measures.

If you can provide me with some serious science that says that people who take such measures regret it by and large I might agree. You claim to be in favor of freedom; you should be in favor of someone's right to remedy such issues. Children? I don't think so. But adults? Definitely.

You would block transgender people from getting the treatments many of them want. That's definitely a preventative measure of sorts.

They can do what they want. I would not block transgender people from these treatments.

What would you consider to be the defining characteristics of a man? Serious question.

Y chromosomes, testes, a prostate, a penis, spermatogenesis, and so on.

The fact that someone identifies as something else is not enough for me to believe that they are indeed that thing. That’s my problem.

There is no doubt that people feel dysphoria with their own bodies and are ill-suited to the expectations society holds towards them. These people exist, and if they need to dress and act like the opposite sex to find comfort, they should be allowed to do so without cruelty and discrimination towards them. I don’t mind playing along, at least in some respects, but at some point a moral line is drawn, for instance when we are treating this mental incongruity with very biological measures, like chemical or surgical castration, the results of which there is no turning back.

I don’t have any answers, but it seems to me a view that affirms biology rather than amputates it leaves room for those to come to terms with themselves as they really are.

The point being we seem to have two strains of not entirely consistent progressive liberal thoughts going on here: (1) gender roles and gender expression should not be designated by biological sex, and (2) transsexuals should be able to express themselves by the gender roles traditionally assigned to them by their biological sex.

There is an effort to distinguish between gender and sex while at the same time equivocating between them. Hence refusing to define “man” or “woman” in biological terms while at the same time trying to appear like a man or woman. On the one hand it’s not so much about biology or sex but on the other we’ll surgically remove and fashion male and female sex organs and make sure you have the appropriate hormones. There is no end to these problems.

The key, I think, is to abandon the word “gender” in such discussions. If we think along the lines of “sex” there is little room to hide behind these equivocations.

And when archeologists dig up his bones and see the male skeleton, what then?

I could give two straws about any “social reality”. Social reality thought the sun rotated around the earth. If you want to call people with testes “women” then that’s fine by me. But by the same token I’m going to call people with testes “men”.

I cannot deny that.

So you should not be force or coercion not to play against the under 10's

.

I don’t think you should force people to play with you, but if someone wants to organize a game between men and women, and everyone involved wants to play, then there is no reason to be bothered by it.

I cannot say that eliminating the demarcation between men and women’s sport is fair play, though. The disparity of sport performance between the sexes is inescapable. Wasting energy in combat and sport are some of the few activities males excel at. We’re primates, after all.

The limits for me are force and coercion. Let people be and all is well.

I’m not against dress-up and pretend, nor would I tell people what to think and believe. But I won’t easily conform to someone else’s belief in the same manner.

I disagree with that. But I love your phrase “galavanting flesh”. I’m going to use that one, with all credit to you, of course.

So why pretend the person is both male and female? The reality appears to be the biology, while the denialism remains in the sphere of identity.

The people of Wyoming booted her out. I won’t lose a wink over it.

A trans woman is a biological male, then, according to your formulas.

I love it. She lost to someone I never heard of, despite being coddled and fawned over by the legacy media, despite being a war monger and torture defender.

Fair enough. You accused me of denying reality, so I just wanted to know which reality I was denying. You could easily point me to one shred of evidence of human males producing eggs but won’t, for whatever reason. I suspect you don’t have any.

If simple human biology has no place in a discussion of reality and gender, I apologize.

It didn’t. Hence your failure to quote someone properly.

It’s like a bloodline.

That was the dictionary, actually. So you think a male can produce eggs?

Of course your rationality left out the most relevant parts. Brilliant.

So you don’t associate females with the sex that can give birth to young or produce eggs?

Why do you always misquote me by removing much of what I said?