Laurentide

Laurentide, 6 days ago

Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.

Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?

They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

Why don’t we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:

One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.

So you’re partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?

Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.

Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?

When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.

Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn’t you agree?

Laurentide, 9 days ago

I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:

I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.

It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.

Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.

Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.

Laurentide, 13 days ago

If I use my Persuasion skill to help someone think their way through a problem, is that a “mind-effecting affect”?

Laurentide, 16 days ago

There’s a novel titled Glasshouse, by Charles Stross, where members of a far future civilization sign up to live in a simulated mid-20th century town. At one point the protagonist disassembles a flashlight and discovers that it’s just a flashlight-shaped case containing a small wormhole whose other end is in close orbit around a star. No one knew how to make an LED or incandescent bulb, or understood enough about early electronic components to hook one up to a switch and a battery. It was easier to make a wormhole generator and stick it in a metal tube.

Laurentide, 16 days ago

That gay and trans people are all disgusting perverts who hate me and want to destroy everything good. My queer friends provide more emotional support in a day than I ever got from my family, the church, or anyone else inside the Evangelical bubble I was raised in.

That people in “The World” (those outside the church) are all evil or unknowingly controlled by Satan and will always try to hurt me. Textbook cult programming from the people who were emotionally abusing me.

That God is speaking directly to me through a voice in my head, except when that voice says I’m a girl, then it’s actually a demon or something. (It was likely undiagnosed DID as a result of childhood emotional neglect and repressed gender dysphoria.)

That scientists are all part of a massive satanic conspiracy to trick people into leaving the church.

Dungeons & Dragons being a satanic conspiracy. Satanic Panic stuff in general.

Lots of anti-evolution propaganda that turned out to be misrepresentations of science or complete fabrications.

That they actually believed in all that stuff Jesus said about loving thy neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and being kind to immigrants, instead of spending their whole lives voting to hurt all of those people as much as possible.

Laurentide, 16 days ago

Conservatives are still quick to suppress speech they don’t agree with, though. Their criticism of censorship isn’t a cause, it’s a smokescreen.

Laurentide, 16 days ago

My father pulled that “just ignore it” shit, too. Somehow it wasn’t the bully’s fault for attacking me, it was my fault for being such an entertaining target.

Laurentide, 19 days ago

I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

My oven uses some weird “eco-friendly” self-cleaning process that involves pouring water into it and steaming the dirt off, which doesn’t sound like it would be good for the pan. Got any alternatives? I found a Griswold at the thrift store a few years back and I’d like to be able to restore it without damaging it.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

When a friend of mine moved away to be with his trans girlfriend, my parents said it was a sign of the world’s corruption in the End Times. That’s how most Christians think, in my experience. Anything they personally agree with is God’s will, anything they don’t like is Satan’s corruption, and anything they don’t understand is “mysterious ways”.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

Hey now, that association is very unfair to wolf scrotums.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

I thought I was going deaf because I struggled to make out what people on screen were saying. Then a friend got a bunch of us together to watch a TV show that was filmed in the 90’s and I could clearly understand every single word being spoken. The problem is on the production end.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

I get what you’re saying and I wish I didn’t need subtitles, but it’s kind of hard to understand what’s going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.

Laurentide, 1 month ago

I mostly watch anime these days so I’m reading subtitles regardless. The dialogue sounds pretty clear, though; I may not know what the words mean but I can easily make out the syllables being spoken. American stuff, though… If it was made in the past 15 years then it’s probably going to be full of mumbling and too-loud background noise. I suppose it’s possible that my friends have cheap speakers, but I remember sometimes having the same issue at the theater, back when I still went out to see movies.

More recently, I’ve been watching old British and American shows that a friend has been streaming. Stuff from the 60’s and 90’s. Didn’t have any issues understanding what was said.

Laurentide, 2 months ago

I feel like the whole gerrymandering debate is missing the point. Why are our elected officials representing land rather than people? The majority of voters in my district are ideologically opposed to my existence, so they elect people who actively try to harm me. No other representatives are allowed to speak on my behalf because I’m not on their patch of land. I have no one representing my interests in the House of Representatives or my state’s equivalent. This will be true for someone no matter how you draw the lines.

It would be better to abolish the idea of districts entirely, and come up with some way to award representatives proportionally.

Laurentide, 2 months ago

• Democratize the workplace.

There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.

• News reporting must be factual and clearly distinguishable from opinion and other non-news programming.

Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called “news” would be a start.

• Enumerated right to bodily autonomy

This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which…

• Strengthened protections for minorities, including legal recognition of trans and intersex people. Something like the Equal Rights Amendment but for all minorities. Let’s explicitly get it into law that you can’t discriminate based on something people are born with.

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I don’t agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.

Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it’s almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn’t unrealistic.

Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn’t want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.

Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we’re getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don’t like tipping, wouldn’t it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?

Laurentide, 2 months ago

I’m sure a lot of white women felt uncomfortable sharing a locker room with black women when segregation ended. Comfort isn’t a good enough reason to have “whites only” locker rooms so why the hell would it justify “cis only” ones? It’s not Lia’s responsibility if Riley can only handle being around certain types of women.

Laurentide, 2 months ago

I eat two meals a day. I drink mostly plain water, with some black coffee and unsweetened tea. I cut out soda over a decade ago and sweets are a rare luxury. I can’t afford to eat massive amounts of food even if I want to. So why am I still fat?

Laurentide, 2 months ago

I’m friends with multiple women and non-binary folks who are in poly relationships, are very much not being preyed upon, and actively hate anything “patriarchal”.

Laurentide, 2 months ago

It’s also another brick in Florida’s road to queer genocide. If a gay or trans child has bigoted parents, social media is often the only way they can learn about the existence of other people like them.

Laurentide, 4 months ago

I think (hope) they’re referring to the last panel of that comic.

Laurentide, 4 months ago

Non-furries love anthropomorphic animal characters. Our culture is full of them; all cultures are. Furries didn’t invent sports mascots, Looney Tunes, the Easter Bunny, Aesop’s fables, or the Egyptian pantheon. Obviously it’s not the appreciation for talking animals that people actually hate. So why is it that, out of all the weird subcultures that exist, the one that gets the most hate thrown at it is the one centered around a love of something universal to all human cultures?

It’s because the founders of the modern furry fandom were gay and poly, and the fandom has always had an overwhelmingly LGBT membership because it used to be the only non-fetish community that openly accepted gay and trans people. All anti-furry hate is either a negative reaction to the fandom’s queerness or a deliberate attempt to attack the LGBT community by proxy.

Laurentide, 4 months ago

American Evangelicalism is a tulpamancy cult. I was raised Evangelical, sent to a private Evangelical school, and made to attend several Evangelical churches until adulthood. In all of these communities, it was universally believed that God directly speaks to each person through a special voice in their head. I was very strongly pressured to find, listen to, and obey this voice, and made to feel like I was not a “true believer” for being unable to channel it into glossolalia.

Laurentide, 5 months ago

So that turned out to be a big lie. Many streamers were banned yesterday for things that were specifically allowed under the new rules, and now those rules have been reverted.

Laurentide, 5 months ago

Is there a stereotype for arctic foxes that’s different from the one for regular foxes?