Oysters used to be so abundant they were a poor people's food. It's hard to understand how overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction have destroyed ecosystems.
Some people think we can just pretend we're not part of an ecosystem if we pour enough concrete. It doesn't work, it just makes everything worse. A damaged ecosystem is not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to us. A flooded coastal base will soon be the least of our concerns. We need to fix damaged ecosystems and replace destroyed ones
> It's hard to understand how overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction have destroyed ecosystems.
I like to bring up the sad example of Passenger Pigeons, since they're a species someone in North America could imagine seeing--or even having a hard time avoiding--walking around in daily life at one time, yet they disappeared relatively recently, even leaving a strange linguistic hole because many people have still heard of "Carrier" pigeons.
They’re not the same as carrier pigeons. In the WWII Musueum in New Orleans you can see the exhibit about how many British carrier pigeons were sourced from Shahjahanpur, India.
> "Although a recent New York Times investigation largely corroborated Reed’s account,"
This is entirely false. The New York Times did not corroborate any of Reed's allegations of wrongdoing against the clinic, and large parts of it have been disputed by patients and parents of patients.
These rebuttals are kind of missing the point. For example:
> Claim 18: "The psychiatry services were limited and could only serve patients who were 'not too severe,' which meant that many patients were being sent to the already overburdened emergency rooms for suicidal ideations, for self-harm, and for inpatient eating disorder treatment."
> An outpatient clinic does not provide emergency inpatient care. It is normal for patients whose symptoms are severe enough to require emergency treatment to be referred by such a clinic to an ER. The NYT found patients from the Center were referred to the ER. That the ERs were overburdened, and that better options weren't often available for youth in severe crisis, is a sad reality of the U.S. mental health system. It is not something that can reasonably be laid at the feet of an outpatient service for a vulnerable group of young people that everyone agrees is at a higher risk of suicide.
> At the trainings, E.R. staff shared concerns about their own experiences with their young transgender patients, which Ms. Hamon later relayed to her team and university administrators.
> The E.R. staff, she wrote in an email, had been seeing more transgender adolescents experiencing mental health crises, "to the point where they said they at least have one TG patient per shift."
> They aren't sure why patients aren't required to continue in counseling if they are continuing hormones," Ms. Hamon added. And they were concerned that "no one is ever told no."
That is, the ER departments were getting an unexplained increase in presentations from the clinic's patients despite the treatments supposedly working well. Which really does bring into question the idea that affirmation-only treatment significantly improves mental health.
I think you're misunderstanding the article. It's analyzing the claims Reed made, specifically the ones she made in her affidavit, and whether they had been corroborated by the NYT or elsewhere. It's not analyzing the claims made in the NYT article by Ms. Hamon or by Reed. Reed doesn't mention any kind of unexplained increase in this particular claim, so the response is adequate.
Besides, the claims listed in the article are just the ones where some amount of truth has been found. If you scroll to the bottom, it has a link to the spreadsheet where you can see the author's tally of Reed's claims, including the claims where the author found no corroboration and ones where the author considers the claim to have been refuted by the available evidence (evidence which includes the third link in my previous comment, which I do recommend you read).
It's a power thing. Authorities make arbitrary changes just because they can, and exercising their power feels good. They ignore the reason people object to those changes and interpret the objections as challenges to their power and direct personal insults.
Basicly, "I'm in charge" outweighs "this is dangerous".
I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.
Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech and not a hate group while easily listing any other organization that opposes their political views as hate groups.
If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
> Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech
Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.
It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)
Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.
> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)
And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)
> I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham
Hate groups have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around (and especially since it started tracking hate groups, but even when it was just doing pro-civik-rights legal work for 20 years before that) and the US has lots of hate groups.
Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.
Same here. It's so inscrutable, I'd also assume it was just a weird-looking bench. It honestly looks goofy chained-off, like some kind of modern art installation.
I don't know any trans people who believe any of the things that you're suggesting they do. Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.
On another note, in this comment you mentioned the genitals of children and surgery on the genitals of children ten times. Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for, I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?
> Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.
Which trans people did I mention? I called out Susie Green and "Dr's" Kinsey and Money. If I didn't talk about trans people, just "doctors" and advocates, how could I be claiming anything about trans people's beliefs?
But sure, please do list out those mistaken beliefs you think I touched on.
> Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for
If it isn't happening, why not just agree with me? If it doesn't need to happen, why not support laws banning it?
> I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?
That's straight out of the narcissists prayer. "That doesn't happen, but if it does it's no big deal, and why do you care so much anyways?"
I'm a parent and this is infesting our schools. I care because I have had kids, I have been a kid, I have empathy for other people and their kids, I want useful schools, and I don't want my tax money spent hurting people.
"Advocates" is probably a better descriptor than mine tbh. Anyways, here's how I counted.
1. "cutting a boy's penis off is an appropriate treatment for liking dolls" - Not a position held by trans people or allies. We support the rights of transgender and cisgender people to be as gender-non-conforming as they like.
Note re: "transed her son because her husband wasn't happen with his 'girly' interests" - Having seen the talk she gave that you are referring to, she made no claim of the sort. Also, 'transed' is not a word that describes a coherent concept that exists.
2. "why does he then need further intervention to be that girl" - Nobody needs any interventions to be a girl. "Girl" is just a label.
3. "a child who wants to be a girl totally needs to lose his dick and the parents are Nazi's if they question it" - Advocates do not believe this. Trans adults can have SRS if they want it but it's not "required" for anything and it is not offered for children.
4. "Where is the research showing that children come up with 'gender dysphoria' without adult prompting them" - Most transgender adults were once transgender children. It's quite common to see them say on twitter, tumblr, etc. that nobody told them about gender dysphoria when they were young, and that they had to create their own vocabulary for it when they tried to explain their feelings to their parents.
5. "these are the words they'd use and the interventions that they'd have asked for without 'therapists'" - This one is just confusing. Of course they wouldn't use the same words and independently develop the same medical treatments we have now.
Note re: Money and Reimer: Money was influential in early study of transgender people, but it's important to note that this does not make him an "advocate". Reimer was not transgender, and it always confuses me why anti-trans people think what happened to him supports them. He knew he was a boy, others ignored him, and he suffered greatly as a result, in many of the same ways that transgender people suffer when they aren't allowed to decide their gender for themselves.
Note re: "Why isn't the much more likely explanation - that these adults are pedophiles" - This is not a more likely explanation.
6. "Where, without an adult telling them that a sex change is a real thing is possible for them to have, do you have children asking to be surgically changed to look vaguely like (ie, cosmetic only) the other sex?" - Children generally do not ask for SRS. Apart from that, I'm not sure what your point is here?
7. "How many children, without weird homophobic parents, want their genitals surgically modified?" - This is pretty clearly a reference to the conspiracy theory that transition is a form of gay conversion therapy. Like many conspiracy theories, it's really stupid. Homophobes are generally transphobic as well. Many trans people were asked "why couldn't you just be gay" when they came out to their parents, showing that they see being transgender as worse than being gay (not that they would have approved if they were gay either). Also, only about a quarter of transgender people describe themselves as straight, compared to about 90% for the general population, so if it were a form of gay conversion therapy then it would probably be the most counterproductive form yet devised.
Note re: "explain why wanting to be a dinosaur doesn't warrant surgery but wanting to play with dolls does" - (This is a duplicate of #1, but to reiterate: ) Transgender and cisgender children have every right to play with whatever toys they want, regardless of what gender they are marketed to. It's the transphobes who say children should only play with toys that match their gender.
Note re: "why not just agree with me?" - Because you are wrong about many, many, many things. There's more than this that you're wrong about, but if I listed everything you were wrong about and gave long-form sourced arguments in rebuttal, it'd be a full-time job, and I'm not doing one of those unless I'm getting paid to do it.
The problem is that tearing it down would be a huge embarrassment to everyone involved, especially if it was closed due to safety. Leaving it SBNO indefinitely makes it an eyesore, but lets them avoid assigning blame like a demolition would force them to.
I don't quite understand, though - is there a certain length it needs to exist before it can be torn down without judgement? The article mentions the Dubai Pearl, which broke ground in the early oughts finally being demolished.
Admittedly, I don't know as much about the individual emirates as I could, but Dubai seems like the most reckless of the bunch. The Palm, the (World) Islands, it seems like they're just throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks. I wouldn't touch anything there with a ten foot pole, investment-wise.
>> certain length it needs to exist before it can be torn down without judgement?
It comes down for scrap the day after the last creditor gives up trying to get a return on their investment. So long as a foreign investor is holding onto their note, unwilling to sell for pennies on the dollar, the project will remain in perpetual limbo. But eventually all the property rights will be bought back by whatever prince started the cycle. Then it can be pulled down and a new eyesore commissioned.
"A bit like" is underselling it. It is that. Occasionally, I politely ask people objecting to the term "cis" what word they would prefer I use instead. I've had people directly tell me I should refer to cis people as "normal".
Another, much more interesting response I've gotten multiple times is that I should use "man/woman" instead of "cis". Which implies that transgender people either don't exist, or don't belong to either category.
Even by the standards of 2000 years ago, Caesar was at best controversial (in the view of many Romans at the time, he essentially destroyed the country) and most of the emperors were widely loathed (note that it was a position with an extremely low life expectancy; they tended to be assassinated).
Some people think we can just pretend we're not part of an ecosystem if we pour enough concrete. It doesn't work, it just makes everything worse. A damaged ecosystem is not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to us. A flooded coastal base will soon be the least of our concerns. We need to fix damaged ecosystems and replace destroyed ones
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