MaeBorowski [she/her]

I just know that my liberal The Guardian-reading parent is going to see this article and think “Ahh, so that explains why Mae has been telling me Biden is even worse than Trump and that North Korea isn’t actually an evil hermit kingdom, even though I know it is. She’s fallen in with these Trump supporter commies. It’s so sad she thinks she’s on the left when horseshoe theory is obviously correct.”

Hinkle being a communist is a psyop. Everyone who benefits from smearing communists and muddying the waters as to what communism even is, like to call him that. And so they do.

Yeah, this is silly (and fun) but avoids the real problem of course. The question can be like you said, “which came first, the chicken or the chicken’s egg?” And for those that still want a literal answer, wikipedia says:

If the question refers to chicken eggs specifically, the answer is still the egg, but the explanation is more complicated.[8] The process by which the chicken arose through the interbreeding and domestication of multiple species of wild jungle fowl is poorly understood, and the point at which this evolving organism became a chicken is a somewhat arbitrary distinction. Whatever criteria one chooses, an animal nearly identical to the modern chicken (i.e., a proto-chicken) laid a fertilized egg that had DNA making it a modern chicken due to mutations in the mother’s ovum, the father’s sperm, or the fertilised zygote.

As an alternative, though it’s a bit more of an ungainly mouthful, I like: “which came first, the first species to lay an egg or the egg of the first species to lay an egg?” That one is a bit harder but you might still be able to tease out an answer. That way I think it gets a bit more into the problem of qualitative vs quantitative when you do (which is partly why I say below that this is related to the problem of the heap). Of course it’s really meant to be a philosophical problem anyway, and in that sense, it remains a paradox. It’s a way of making an analogy for a “causation dilemma” and gets at the idea of infinite regress and the paradoxes that brings up. It’s also related to the sorites paradox or the problem of the heap, which actually is an element discussed in Marxist (more because of Engels) dialectics.

How can a biological male, who was never a female, know the feeling he feels is that of a woman?

How can a biological male who was never a different individual biological male, know the feeling that he feels is that of another man? He can’t! He’s never been another man, only the individual that he is. So he can never know that the way he feels “as a man” is anything at all like how another man might feel “as a man.” However, since as a social species we have empathy we can make reasonable assumptions about how other people feel, in part based on what they say they feel, and no less so because they have different bits between their legs than if they have a different color of hair.

None of us can unambiguously know what it is like to be another person. This is an obvious truism. The way you’re trying to use it to draw this arbitrary line between what people can know about their own feelings, but only as determined by what kind of genitalia they were born with… it’s gross. And whether intended or not, bigoted. People of any and all genders can have empathy for anyone else of any and all genders. We can also know how we feel internally when society around us sees us as we feel we are, versus how we feel internally when society around us sees as as what we feel we are not. The former is good and affirming. The latter is painful and dejecting.

Their biological mechanisms have also been studied and partially understood by science. “Gender feelings”, not so much

Btw, there has been scientific research on transgender issues. Famously, there was a great trove of it that was burned by the Nazis in Germany. You know those infamous book burnings? Yeah, that was transgender scientific research. Fortunately, there has been a lot of other valid scientific studies done since then, too. All of it confirming the things people in this thread have been trying to tell you, even when you call it “fickle” or insist that your society isn’t empathetic enough to ever accept (which I categorically reject.)

It’s easily falsifiable and therefore much harder to definitely call it an observable material concept.

This may be a bit of a nitpick, but you have this backwards. Falsifiability is a prerequisite for any kind of hypothesis to be scientific. If a hypothesis, theory, or model is not falsifiable, what that means is it can never be shown to be wrong (false), and so it is fundamentally not scientific. And in this case, it is the difficulty (the impossibility, even) of falsifying what a person says they’re feeling that puts statements like that on shaky ground, scientifically speaking. Having to take someone at their word is not “easily falsifiable,” it is unfalsifiable, and that’s where the problem lies. If someone says “I feel sad today” then there is virtually no way we can ever prove this statement false: hence it is unfalsifiable. However, given the understanding of that caveat we do scientific studies all the time that involve the subjectivity of a person’s experience, even as a focal point. From the efficacy of depression medication to the polling done in order to sell more products/candidates, countless scientific studies still rely on people self reporting their feelings. The subjectivity just has to be recognized and factored in as part of the study.

In short, the unfalsifiability that is inherent in dealing with human experience doesn’t suddenly make it impossible to study human experience. We just have to control as best we can for things like bias in self reporting and recognizing and taking measures at eliminating reasons participants may have for saying things that aren’t accurate about their experience, and including relevant error margins.

The excuse they’ll use, which actually does has some truth to it, is that bathrooms that get used require upkeep like cleaning, TP, water/electricity, etc. The poor widdle businesses need to recoup their losses. But even with that aside, requiring people to pay in order to do something that everyone needs to do can bring in more money. Like if a person needs to go, especially if it’s urgent, are they going to grab the nearest product and pay as quickly as they can so they can get to the damn toilet, or are they going to run to the next establishment (or more likely in burgerland, get back in their car and drive to the next establishment) that probably also requires them to pay to piss? On top of all of that, it’s a way to discourage unhoused people from existing in the vicinity and “driving away customers.”

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There’s a huge difference between telling everyone regardless of their circumstances that they need to “live that lifestyle” and recognizing how problematic your advocacy of the opposite of “that lifestyle” is on a show where you have significant influence. The constant unironic stanning of Chic Fillet and Mcdonalds and drooling over chicken tendies, all without any examination is why I stopped my patreon support and eventually stopped listening.

I’m certainly not getting any wiser going through these conversations on repeat and I don’t think anyone else is, either.

I bet a lot of lurkers are, including me.

I wish more of our team would disengage.

I wish for the opposite. It’s always funny to watch these people fume and sputter when they are faced with dissent instead of the clapping seals they’re used to. And I do learn a lot from what hexbears and lemmygradians say even when they’re talking to someone unwilling to be educated.

Yeah, nothing humane about the people who make up the instance where every user says that food, housing, and healthcare are human rights and should be made accessible to every human being, period. The one that loudly shouts the fact that trans rights are human rights and has provided one of the best safe spaces on the internet for trans people (as the large percentage of trans users that make up hexbear will themselves tell you). The one that frequently has mental health check-ins for their users and offers support to them. The one that uses its mutual aid comm to give real life material support to comrades in need. Nothing humane about them at all, no sirree.

Talking about hexbear here, but lemmygrad is almost as based.

The city and the feeling of the controls were very fun, no denying it, I guess I just have a very low tolerance for ultra pro-cop narratives. I also haven’t watched capeshit for almost 10 years. :shrug-outta-hecks:

Glad you like it though.

The copaganda in Spiderman was so atrocious it was hard to get past it and enjoy the swings.