BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Can't pretend I'm particularly familiar with the specifics, but to be clear, I do think it is absolutely possible, and indeed likely, that there are situations where a genuine advantage is present, and I think the line really needs to be drawn by each individual sports body.

I understand the idealism of wanting there to be no real restrictions, but you need some regulations, if only to prevent the bad-faith asshole who decides to identify as a woman for the day of a competition. As time passes and more studies are done, we'll be able to draw more evidence-based lines that more accurately balance accessibility and fairness.

My only real point here is just to say that this phrase "biological/scientific male" is way way messier than a simple binary category like that might suggest. A huge amount of tissues in the body of some level of sex differentiation, and that differentiation also varies a lot based on the stage of development that their exposed to hormones. A trans person isn't going to change their skeleton with hormones, but there are other things that do meaningfully change to get closer to the other sex. A trans woman's breasts, for instance, are genuinely just as "biologically female" as any cis woman's.

It's worth noting that "scientifically a male" is genuinely a more complicated phrase than it might initially seem at first, because trans people generally do more than just socially transition, changing their name and clothes. Sex differences are primarily mediated through sex hormones, and radically changing one's hormonal profile, as happens with hormone therapies, causes very real biological effects. A trans woman, while being stronger than your average cis woman, will lose a meaningful amount of muscle due to the lack of testosterone (and will also generally develop better cardiovascular health, again due to the lack of testosterone). Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it's not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn't necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.

The federal government only has authority to regulate under a certain set of defined powers. To cite the 10th Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

This is saying that any power that isn't explicitly granted to the federal government is instead held by the states. So, there are things that would be unconstitutional for the federal government to do because that power is reserved for state governments. This gets murky nowadays because that list of federal powers is interpreted very broadly (the power to regulate interstate commerce particularly, which is now said to apply to essentially anything that might plausibly affect the economies of multiple states), but the legal principle is still there.

Washington Heights in NYC, at any rate, is physically high in elevation, and it's not a particularly fancy area at all.

Sure, but I think it's not unreasonable to make some kind of distinction between serving in the armed forces or government of the literal Confederacy and the events of January 6th. At the very least, the entire existence of the Confederacy was de jure illegal, as was any non-trivial engagement with its government. Amnesty was granted as a matter of political pragmatism, not of law.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that Trump being barred from assuming the Presidency again is absolutely a good thing, without reservation. My concern is what might happen after that can of worms gets opened.

Even if you think this argument is sound - and I'm not strictly opposed to it - I think it's probably wisest to tie this condition to an actual relevant criminal conviction in a court of law. You really don't want the precedent of any random judge or bureaucrat being able to just casually disqualify a candidate by excessively stretching some words, unless you want some random GOP election official deciding that Joe Biden actually engaged in insurrection by illegally taking office after stealing an election.

I see you take the 'thing I don't like' approach. Send my regards to the rest of Lemmygrad if you would.

I'd just add that 'Zionism' means many different things to many different people. To some, it's advocating that all Palestinians be forcefully removed from the region in support of the creation of a kind of Greater Israel. To others, it's the mere acknowledgement that Israel is a thing that exists and that all Jews should not be forcefully removed from the region in support of the creation of a Greater Palestine.

Depending on who's using the term, it's essentially either "thing I like" or "thing I don't like", and I wouldn't read very much into it over examining actual specific policy.

For population-level studies, particularly over time, BMI is perfectly fine. It's not as if the general population of America suddenly all became big boned or extremely muscular.

It seems that that may have mostly been a guise for how much the Freedom Caucus personally hated Kevin McCarthy more than anything.

You have to remember, these people don't actually have principles or goals.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911338/unity-ceo-steps-down-developers-react

The guy at the top actually just got booted, if you care.

You're not gonna do shit.

But by all means, light a torch and see where that gets you. I'm sure it'll be really far.

It really needs to be contextualized that, compared to essentially all other countries, the economic recovery the United States has experienced is far far better. That doesn't mean that people's pain right now isn't real, but a lot of these issues are global in scale, and leaders across the entire planet have been having much harder times. There isn't a "economy gooder" button on Biden's desk that he can press.

Doing good things is good, actually.

And the strong history if being against gay marriage and abortion.

And following this "strong history", I'm sure he appointed a pro-life Justice to the Supreme Court and vetoed the Respect for Marriage Act.

Oh wait, no he didn't.

And the doing nothing to address the codification of Roe v Wade

Please identify the pro-choice majority in Congress that you're apparently confident existed at some point since January 2021. I'll wait.

And the standing against cannabis legalization so we can keep jails full of peaceful poor people.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/presidential-proclamation-marijuana-possession

Biden actually pardoned all federal convicts of marijuana possession. You can apply online at this link if you know anyone. He also began the process for re-classifying marijuana as Schedule III, though there's a lot of bureaucracy to get through so that's slow.

You have to keep in mind that borrowing money from the Treasury but then not paying it back is also known as "printing money", and is one of the single most direct drivers of inflation that exists.

If you borrow ten billion dollars but then pay it back (with interest matching the inflation rate), then the net amount of currency in circulation is essentially the same. If you just print that money instead and never pay it back, then you have ten billion more dollars in circulation representing the same collective economy, meaning that every dollar must be worth less.

And refusing to pay back loans from private US investors would immediately tank the government's credit worthiness, making it much more expensive for the government to ever borrow money again and thus causing a substantially bigger problem.

I've been told that if your protest isn't disruptive, it's not really a protest, so I'm sure everyone here will be fully understanding and supportive of this guy for standing up for his beliefs /s

Fuel can be used to power rockets.

Trump won West Virginia by nearly 40%. A Democrat is not winning this seat.

Like him or not, Justice Jackson wouldn't be on the court if it wasn't for him. The billions in climate action and infrastructure wouldn't have been passed. Extensions to COVID relief and unemployment in early 2021 wouldn't have passed. A 300 billion dollar corporate income tax increase wouldn't have passed. An 80 billion dollar budget increase for IRS enforcement wouldn't have passed. Medicare drug price caps wouldn't have passed.

Yes, he's incredibly annoying, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot prioritize some personal distaste over the vast amount of objectively good things that have happened because of this annoying ass coal baron from West Virginia.

I think a nontrivial amount of people are essentially incapable of dealing with even a minute amount of social awkwardness or guilt and functionally cannot bring themselves to hit the zero button, so they'd rather complain about having been made to make the choice rather than accept the fact that they have zero willpower.

Maybe this makes me a selfish ass, but honestly, that doesn't bother me very much. If those people want to help subsidize my own purchases, I'm not gonna complain about it.