what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore. Taking Estrogen and blocking testosterone has a huge effect on how fast/strong/athletic someone is. I feel like that should be the key point of discussion, but somehow always gets burried under other, kind of less relevant subjects (for example I dont think it matters that up until now no trans woman has really won anything significant, as that could always change in the future).
Testosterone and estrogen are not magic substances that eliminate bone density, preponderance of type II muscle fibres, favourable tendon insertions and all of the other athletic advantages conferred upon males in the womb. I have experience with women who take steroids for strength sports and I am not exaggerating when I say they could be out-competed by 17 year old male high school students with proper coaching.
You also forgot to mention height. I am lgbt and I was a college athlete. In my sport it's common for middle school age boys to be better than some of the best women. It's not hateful to speak the truth.
I think both of these points are two sides of the same coin. There's an athletic advantage that most transgender women will have over most cisgender women, but there's also an athletic disadvantage that most trans women will have compared to cis men.
i.e., unless something fundamentally changes about how leagues are divided, there's going to be perceived unfairness in sports.
As long as things are unchanged, I think the real conversation boils down to who we prioritize: cis women or trans women.
> what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore.
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
There is no way a man would ever compete in women's sports.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?
The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
Why would the israelis prefer to deal with PIJ through some temporary disarmament?
Anyone who listens for a bit to israeli mass media will soon be convinced that anything but the extermination of the palestinians is not enough. This is why they bulldoze everything archeological that does not play into zionist myth making. This is also why apartheid is common in local politics in Israel, and why the zionist guerillas and later IDF systematically destroyed the homes and property of the people they displaced, long before the appearance of Hamas.
As I usually do, I'd also like to remind that the zionist movement is mainly a movement of christians.
>before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.
It has been going on for a century or so. It is also a crime of occidental states. One could also argue that Palestine, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and more places are in interconnected violent processes, where the 'axis' of Israel, the US, UAE, UK and allies are perpetrating heinous crimes without any semblance of accountability.
For much of that time frame, the Soviets were also meddling in the Middle East. That the middle east conflicts were themselves part of the Cold War rather than something unrelated, is knowledge that has gone forgotten in the West, I think.
Less genocidal federation? That is quite the claim.
The Soviets starved millions of people to death, in order to secure their control. All that help was then built on the backs and blood of those victims. At least let's be honest about that much.
If you're going to go pre-20th century, Russia has the dubious distinction of having waged the most "total" recorded genocide in history, the Circassian genocide.
Just because you haven't heard of Russia colonizing doesn't mean it didn't happen just as much. It just wasn't where the other imperial empires were. How else would one city come to a rule a continent-sized territory? A big difference is, they didn't keep records of such things. People picture Siberia as an empty wilderness and have no idea that rich societies once lived there.
I don't agree with this logic. It implies that people who use Google, Bing and a million other products made by US-based companies are supportive of the huge amount of attrocities commited or aided by the United States. Or other countries. It feels very odd to single out Russia's invasion of Ukraine but to minimize the Israeli genocide of palestinians in Gaza, the multiple unjust wars waged by the United States all over the world etc.
It's often fairly easy to find US government-centric news and criticism with Google.
But as one counterexample: The end of the US penny was formed and announced not with public legislative discourse, nor even with an executive order, but with a brief social media post by the president.
And I don't mean that it's atrocious or anything, but I wanted to see that social media post myself. Not a report about it, or someone's interpretation of it, but -- you know -- the actual utterance from the horse's mouth.
Which should be a simple matter. After all, it's the WWW.
And I've been Googling for as long as there has been a Google to Google with. I'd like to think that I am proficient at getting results from it.
But it was like pulling teeth to get Google to eventually, kicking and screaming, produce a link to the original message on Truth Social.
If that kind of active reluctance isn't censorship on Google's part, then what might it be described as instead?
And if they're seeking to keep me away from the root of this very minor issue, then what else might they also be working to keep me from?
There certainly is a huge army of people ready to spout this sort of nonsense in response to anyone talking about doing anything.
Hard to know what percentage of these folks are trying to assuage their own guilt and what percentage are state actors. Russia and Israel are very chronically online, and it behooves us internet citizens to keep that in mind.
Never agreed with this logic. For a lot of people (anyone that does political activism of some sort for example) the threat model can be a lot more nuanced. It might not be Mossad or the CIA gunning for you, specifically, but it might police searching you and your friend's laptops or phones. It might be burglars targetting the office of the small organization you have and the small servers you have running there.
Yep. While there might be some use cases for his ultra-simplistic "Mossad/not-Mossad duality" - say, convincing Bob Jones that "b0bj0nes" is not a great password - it's 99% fairy tale.
And even if the CIA/Mossad/NSA/whoever is "interested" in you - this is the era of mass surveillance. The chances that you're worth a Stuxnet level of effort is 0.000000001%. Vs. 99.999% chance that they'll happily hoover up your data, if you make it pretty easy for their automated systems to do that.
Also worth noting that Mossad/CIA/etc. are not monoliths. Maybe you got a top agent assigned to you, but maybe your file is on the desk of the Mossad's version of Hitchcock and Scully from Brooklyn 99.
> Yep. While there might be some use cases for his ultra-simplistic "Mossad/not-Mossad duality" - say, convincing Bob Jones that "b0bj0nes" is not a great password - it's 99% fairy tale.
Honestly, the oversimplification here reads to me more like something Bob Jones could use to justify not caring about "b0bj0nes" not being a great password.
I was thinking, "Bob, stop making excuses about how it's hopeless, and you'd need a 'U0hBNTEyICgvdmFyL2xvZy9tZXNzYWdlcykgPSBjNGU2NGM1MmI5MDhiYWU3MDU5NzdlMzUzZDlk'-level password to be safe. That 'b0bj0nes' is so easy that a bored kid might get it in a few dozen guesses, and you need to change it to something better."
That password should include symbols too! Without symbols, each character is one of 62 values (sticking to ASCII letters and digits). Including symbols makes it much harder to guess passwords of a given length. Even better would be Unicode letters, digits, and symbols, even if you stick to the Basic Multilingual Plane.
Best would be non-text, binary strings. Since I already use a password manager, I don't really need to type passwords by hand. But I do understand most people prefer text passwords that could be entered by hand if necessary.
Except that's exactly what the Mossad will be expecting us to use, for our uber-secure password! By eschewing symbols and binary, we are actually meta-out-smarting their ultimate giga-quantum nuclear crypto cracker.
Or: This is Bob "Dim Bulb" Jones we're talking to. KISS, and maybe we can convince him to upgrade his password to "iwantacoldbeernow".
Sorry, your password does not meet complexity requirements because it does not contain at least one of each of the following: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numeric digits, nonalphanumeric symbols.
Yeah it's extremely immature, even within police agencies there's a huge variation on their ability to perform digital forensics. Furthermore, just because the feds don't like you for whatever reason doesn't mean they're going to deploy their top-of-the-line exploits against you, or detain and torture you, or whatever magic voodoo bullshit the author thinks the Mossad can do.
the maximalist false dillema of "all or nothing": either it's a super-poweful super-human agency and you can't do anything, else any half-measure is fine
The idea that average people can't handle incremental improvements like a password manager, MFA, full disk encryption, etc is unhealthy infantilization of people who are entirely capable of understanding the concepts, the benefits, the risks they address, and appreciating the benefits of them.
Most people just don't care enough until after they're hacked, at which point they care just enough to wish they'd done something more previously, which is just shy of enough to start doing something differently going forward.
It's not that normies are too stupid figure this out, it's that they make risk accept decisions on risks they don't thoroughly understand or care enough about to want to understand. My personal observation is that the concept of even thinking about potential future technology risks at all (let alone considering changing behavior to mitigate those risks) seems to represent an almost an almost pathological level of proactive preparation to normies, the same way that preppers building bunkers with years of food and water storage look to the rest of us.
I do understand the concepts and exactly because of that I doubt I myself would be able of airtight opsec against any determined adversary, not even state-level one. I think it's humility, you think I infantilize myself lol.
I do use password manager and disk encryption, just for case of theft. Still feels like one stupid sleepy misclick away from losing stuff and no amount of MFAs or whatever is going to save me, they actually feel like added complexity which leads to mistakes.
The third mode is enabled by scale of data and compute. If enough data from enough sources is processed by enough compute, Mossad does not need to have a prior interest in you in order for you to fit a profile that they are interested in.
Anyone else see all the drones flying over a peaceful No Kings assembly?
I agree with the idea behind the paradox of tolerance, I just find the idea of this being only applied to a chinese-owned company because of things china does somewhat hilarious. America does much worse so its clearly not about morals or anything like that. I really wish that the discussion would more outwardly become "we're banning tiktok because China is our competitor in international geopolitics" so we can all move on with our lives and stop having these dumb discussions.
I find it interesting that you mention this offhand because I've been very seriously noticing this type of prudishness in a lot of gen z and younger gen y people and its begining to manifest as old style homophobia
Gen Z is weird. Most young people are very accepting of LGBT peoples but stuff is starting to turn around back to homophobia now that transphobia is Hip And Cool again (thanks J.K. Rowling[0]), because many feminists are invalidating transgender women in the name of equal rights. Transphobia breeds homophobia. I worry sometimes what will happen if young people too become trans-exclusionary feminists but thankfully it's unlikely such a thing could occur. Young people are more open-minded now and discovering they're transgender themselves.
I should add that I'm not quite sure exactly how the trend of homophobia that you speak of is hitting younger people. I haven't noticed a shift backwards in real life or on-line. If you're referring to social media homophobia you should realize that "zoomer humor" is radically different from typical humor and many kids will sound like a deranged homophobes/racists/sexists until you realize that they themselves are gay/black/female and are making jokes at their own expense. That being said, ask before assuming they are or aren't joking.
[0] - I'm not sure about the legitimacy of Slate as a publication but a brief skim of this article makes me think it hits on everything relevant in the controversy (if you don't already know about it; it's semi-common knowledge nowadays): https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/jk-rowling-trans-me...
how is that a good comparison, when you're given puppies you are being made responsible for living creatures, If you're given a bunch of code you can literally just drop it.
Is this a real book someone wrote? Incredible to me how you can call yourself an economist and just write basic observations and conclude they are the root cause of everything without even taking a cursory look at the history of things.
It's kind of like how you can read a post on the internet that mentions two economists and draw any kind of conclusions about the work they've done without even taking a cursory look at it.
I would imagine the book contains a bit more justification for its arguments than what was presented by the person you are responding to.
What makes you believe that the author just "wrote basic observations and concluded they are the root cause of everything"? Most ideas are easy to dismiss when you assume that a blurb posted to HN is all there is to them.
For real, all I want is for us to go back to the time where you could pop off the back cover of your phone by at worst unscrewing some screws, and the easily replace the battery.
Then maybe Apple wouldn't need to send out a backdoor patch to underclock old devices. People that still want the long battery life the device had on purchase could go out and purchase a new battery (or attempt to force Apple to give them a new one) - those folks that are fine being tethered to a power outlet can choose to ignore the shortening battery lifespan. Either way, it'd move the decision into the hands of the consumer instead of Apple making that choice for you. And don't forget that Apple did get into trouble over their stupid underclocking "We hope no one notices that we don't allow people to repair things" patch.
