ondoyant

ondoyant, 5 months ago

if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven’t been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can’t afford to own.

ondoyant, 5 months ago

mineral (especialls potassium, which is quite hard to get from diet) supplementation

taking potassium supplements without being monitored by a medical professional is not recommended. potassium supplements are known to cause bowel lesions, and if you don’t have hypokalemia (low potassium in blood), taking extra potassium can give you hyperkalemia, which can cause serious heart arrhythmias. you probably don’t have hypokalemia, its rare to get it from having too little potassium in your diet, so if you’re taking a supplement without having seen a doctor about hypokalemia, you are genuinely at risk of hyperkalemia, excessive supplementation is a known cause of the condition.

to anybody reading, please don’t take any supplements without talking to a doctor first. vitamin and mineral deficiencies can affect mood and general well being, but so can most medical conditions. unless you’ve taken a blood test, and are sure that the problems you’re experiencing are because of a vitamin or mineral deficiency, taking supplements inappropriately can expose you to risks that are difficult to anticipate if you don’t have a medical education.

If you find yourself just getting tired, anxious and racing heart from caffeine, that is a sign that you are deficient.

this is also not true. caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant. like other stimulants, it will increase your heart rate. feeling anxious when taking stimulants is a very common side effect. fatigue after caffeine wears off is also an extremely common side effect. the solution to feeling these kinds of side effects isn’t to supplement an unrelated vitamin, it’s to reduce your caffeine intake.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

appealing to existing harms being done in the world to justify more harms is not really a compelling argument. we have done a lot to mitigate the risk of car travel, and there are plenty of people who see the damage cars do to people and our environment and advocate for better transit solutions that are less likely to harm people. the reality is they could have done more, saved lives, by limiting the spread of the disease more than they did. they didn’t, and their failure to act responsibly can and should be criticized.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

they’re saying that plotting future hopes on a graph is both impossible and undesirable. we can’t just assume that things will get better unless there is provable evidence that it will, and we definitely can’t just make a dotted line going back to pre-industrial CO2 levels because we think someday we will solve this problem with technology that doesn’t currently exist.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

that’s such a wild thing to say lol. if you’re looking at the world and it seems self-evidently simple, you are missing something.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

that isn’t what the linked article says lol.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

you know, i’ve felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that’s ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i’m not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

this is just not a well founded assumption. humanitarian aid was going into Gaza, and was being distributed to the people there before Israel cut off the supply. you’re trying to engineer a false dichotomy, where the only solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused in part by the denial of necessary resources is more denial of necessary resources. like, just think for like a moment. Hamas has a surplus of resources to supply their own forces. they aren’t reliant on humanitarian aid. not allowing food and other resources to get into Gaza only negatively affects the civilian population, and does very little to harm the supposed actual target of this indiscriminate violence. like, even if nearly all of it was just taken by Hamas, the quantity that remained would almost certainly still help innocent people survive this conflict, and that’s a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

but whatever, i bet you’ll just move the goalpost again. we cannot act based on what Hamas “should” be doing if they were acting responsibly. Hamas isn’t taking responsibility for the death and destruction being waged against the Palestinian people, they aren’t providing the resources they have, they aren’t distributing them to those who need them. and seeing that situation, we should act to prevent the suffering of these people who are not being served by the government that is supposed to represent them, instead of actively preventing aid from reaching into the region.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

the fuck are you on about?

ondoyant, 6 months ago

maybe i’m just not smart enough for this, but the idea of free will as a concept has always seemed pretty poorly constructed in the first place. like, what would it even mean to have the will to act freely while existing conditional to your environment? we are placed into chaotic and uncertain circumstances, and have evolved the ability to navigate those circumstances through cognition. simple as that. there is no future that is “pre-determined” for us to follow, just chaos that we must navigate through until we die. i feel like the idea was kind of borrowed from theology and we’ve been ruminating on it ever sense, but its just never been a very compelling thought to me. like, of course our decisions are shaped by our environment and physiology, how else could it possibly work?

i feel like, for the people who argue for free will, its kind of like arguing for the existence of an afterlife. they’re motivated to continue advocating for it because it seems scary not to have it, but nothing about the way we work requires us to be able to make meaningful decisions that are out-of-context to our conditions, just like nothing about how we work indicates we continue to exist outside our physical conditions. if we free willed ourselves to do something that wasn’t constrained by our physical bodies, the stuff we know about the world, and the immediate sensory input we’re receiving, that would look like fucking magic or something, and if it is constrained by that stuff, then its just another word for cognition.

ondoyant, 6 months ago

i wish i didn’t have to see dudes who wanna legislate me out of existence in prominent government positions. it fucking bums me out.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

okay. lemme burst your bubble, then. trans people aren’t gonna unanimously decide of their own volition that they don’t deserve a place in sports for a variety of reasons, ranging from the ideological to the personal. sorry, that isn’t going to happen, and your personal understanding of what is or isn’t important to “realizing oneself as a particular gender” is irrelevant to the lived experience of the people who disagree with you about that. and so your next steps are fairly clear. you either allow trans people to do what they choose to and address problems as they become relevant, or you try to force them to comply with your vision of competitive sport at a time when trans people are virtually absent from competitive sport, and align yourself with the legislators pursuing that agenda.

oh, whoops! you just made common cause with the bigots trying to erase trans people from public life! weird look, for somebody who’s “all for trans rights”.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i mean, no, that’s ahistorical. historically, the reason they are “split” is because men didn’t let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn’t want them to be the same thing. it wasn’t some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

as far as i can tell, the claim that most female athletes are cisgender is mostly a refutation of the political motivation, that trans women are dominating women’s sports, which is a common refrain in much of the legislation around this topic. the reality is that trans people aren’t winning any prominent competitive sports, in part because they are such a small minority of athletes.

i would honestly doubt this is something we could get a very conclusive study out of, if only because there isn’t a very huge sample size of competitive trans athletes that exist to be studied, and the ones that are there objectively haven’t been winning very many awards. nor do i think this needs to be adjusted by population. competitive sports are not a random sample, they are the self selected group of the most physically fit people for a specific task. the fact that trans women aren’t breaking records for competitive women sports, despite being in the self selected group of the women most fit for the task at hand, does say something on its own without the need for a more in depth statistical analysis.

There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels

i mean, maybe read your sources a little more? two of them are about the effects of dosing testosterone in “normal male” subjects, which is not generalizable to women, or to endogenic testosterone, or to the effects of HRT for either transfeminine or transmasculine people, and the middle one is an overview of testosterone’s role in exercise in both men and women which says this in the abstract:

Findings on the testosterone response in women are equivocal with both increases and no changes observed in response to a bout of heavy resistance exercise

which directly refutes your stated claim. equivocal is a synonym for ambiguous. the effects of testosterone on resistance exercise in women is explicitly recorded as inconsistent according to the article you’re citing.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly.

oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women’s soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women’s hockey team.

that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i’m not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn’t historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.

in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women’s sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can’t perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men’s soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don’t. exhibition matches aren’t newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

if you can’t conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women’s sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about “women’s sports” as a concept is silly.

you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren’t relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn’t even give that dude’s name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?

why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don’t value women’s sports, so you’ve scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don’t look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can’t conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don’t look like you is firmly a you problem.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.

the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.

i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches

i’d be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn’t deeply rooted in misogyny. are you sure that isn’t at least partly a post-hoc rationalization for a practice that has a lot of cultural inertia?

Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.

i’d recommend looking into the Paralympics if you want to see what sport, and even competition, without that kind of value judgement can look like.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out.

explicitly my argument is speaking about the way we construct sports as an activity, not sports as industry. the people for whom sports defines one’s life path are firmly the minority of people who do sports. and like, the laws we’re talking about aren’t affecting trans people’s ability to do professional sports in most cases, because those professional organizations aren’t under the jurisdiction of anti-trans state laws, they’re almost exclusively impacting children playing sports in school or for regional competitions. if you aren’t interested in engaging with the argument as it exists, and with the people who are primarily affected by laws that prevent trans children from doing sports with their peers, i’m not interested in talking further on the matter.

So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.

because the trans population is not “exploding”. that’s the current moral panic going around, but the visibility of trans people in media, especially right wing media, vastly overestimates how many trans people there are. there are more trans people who are out, but its still like less than 2% of the population. of that population that are athletes, even less, and there are close to no trans athletes competing at the high level you insist this conversation must primarily address. segregating trans people into their own divisions would mean trans people don’t get to play, because there aren’t enough people who are trans and doing sports to make that happen. your solution is to marginalize trans people out of the sports everybody else plays, and that sucks.

There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?

the only way you’ve proposed to “include” trans people in sports marginalizes them and prevents them participating with their peers, all in service of a a fear that changing the rules to be more inclusive would push out “biological women” in some hypothetical future you think is inevitable. but the reality is, there is no actual proof that allowing trans people to participate as they see fit would actually lead to the outcome you’re describing, because in many cases, they have been participating and have not been sweeping the competition.

in any case, nobody who advocates for restructuring sports away from the gender binary sees women being pushed out of sports as a desirable or even achievable outcome. the idea that we would change the rules towards a policy which does such a thing and not continue changing the rules until we arrive at a more equitable and inclusive outcome is a fantasy, almost entirely sustained by right wing reactionaries fear mongering about social change. nobody actually seriously considering the inequities of modern sports is blind to the physical differences between men and women’s bodies, and they, again, are not proposing a flattening of sporting events into a single category containing all people, just a diversity of categories representing the diversity of the human condition, and allowing people with similar bodies to compete against each other without strict delineations of gender. unless you genuinely believe that all male athletes can outperform all female athletes in all sports, which is a vast overestimation of human sexual dimorphism, there is room for co-ed competition that accommodates people according to their individual skill and strength, rather than according to whether or not they have the right genitals.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

Only because a women’s division exists where she can shine. In the open division she would not be good enough to gain any fame, and be just as forgotten as Karsten Braasch.

hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.

Because people like you keep arguing that women can compete in the open leagues, and we only have women’s leagues to segregate them from the men. This is not true, women are perfectly free to join the NBA and compete against them men, but at that level of competition they would just lose.

i’m not arguing that women can compete in open leagues, im disputing the assertion that women’s leagues only exist to segregate them from men. no. there are quite a few reasons women’s sports exist in the form they do today, and a pretty big reason was sexism. ignoring the long history of female exclusion from sports leaves you blind to the modern realities of sexism and misogyny in sports.

I value women’s sports far more than you do, because I understand their need to exist. Without them female athletes would not win in the majority of sports.

hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.

you can confidently assert that women wouldn’t have a place in sports if we did things differently all you want, but… uh, we don’t do things differently, have never done things differently, and if it were up to you will never do things differently. women’s sports and men’s sports are segregated, and have been since women started to do sports. there was never a time when women and men did sports together, and it was later decided that women just couldn’t compete. the assumption was that they couldn’t, even before women started to have professional sports, and honestly before we even had a solid scientific understanding of human sexual dimorphism. the idea that women’s sports came out some rational notion of fairness is wrong. its simply not what the historical arguments against having women in sports ever were.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

that still ain’t a job. your aunt and uncle didn’t work to renovate that house because the renovation would pay their bills, they did it so they can own a nice property and rent it to other people in perpetuity. all the money they make is gonna come from them owning something, not doing something.

My other uncle in law is only a landlord because he inherited the property.

ah yes, the hard hard work of inheriting land. he isn’t being forced to be a landlord. he could just sell the land he isn’t using.

the problem people have with landlords isn’t that they’re “money hungry corporations”, its that they’re leeches, holding land they aren’t using so that they can suck money out of people who don’t have any land to hold, in large enough quantities that people who want to have their own land to use for their own life can’t find any, cuz its all bought up by fucking landlords. being a landlord means taking from people who have less than you, and you only ever get in that position by having more wealth than most people ever have.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i’m an anti-capitalist. i have a systemic critique with the systems of power which allow people who own things to acquire wealth on the basis of that ownership. billionaires are products of the same system which allows uncle landlord to impose rent on people who have no other option but to rent, because their obscene wealth comes from the exact same mechanism of ownership.

even if we didn’t have billionaires and corporate ghouls buying up every piece of property, and it was instead all owned by nice old uncles and aunties, the actual practice of owning land you aren’t using so people who need land have to pay you for it to live is still morally bankrupt, and is likely to reproduce new billionaires and corporate ghouls as those uncles and aunties consolidate their excess land into investment firms and property management companies to maximize the economic output of the land they own. the problem isn’t that billionaires exist, its that our economic system is set up to funnel resources towards the people who start out with the most resources.

i’m not saying that him selling the land is a good or morally preferable option, either. i just found the notion that a person is only a landlord because they inherited land a silly argument. there’s plenty of things you can do with land that isn’t renting it.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

“killing civilians is always reprehensible” as a moral statement has nothing to do with the mechanics of conflict. i’m telling you what i believe. giving room for acceptable civilian casualties in a moral framework provides a ready made justification for bad actors, that so long as they present a situation as looking enough like the acceptable kind of civilian casualty then its fine that an innocent person was killed.

i am taking issue with the rhetoric of acceptable casualties. no. there are only casualties, and they are all horrific. rhetoric that is not an explicit condemnation of war can be used as a justification for it.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i don’t think anyone should have a war at all. there, are you happy? i’m frankly uninterested in litigating what hypothetical circumstances under which it might be okay to kill a civilian.