I’m probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.
I also don’t think that has any bearing on people’s right to choose.
As a member of the LGBTQ community, I fully agree.
I’ve believed that we are a mix of nature and nurture for as long as I can remember, and it stands to reason that sexuality is a part of that. I also think the vast majority of people are far more sexually fluid than they would admit due to cultural stigma. Not everyone is bi, but I do think there’s a bell curve.
That said. I do also believe that people are born the way they are and the nurture aspect is more of a determining factor for how they express not who they are. I was raised and socialized as a straight male but realized in my 30’s that I’m queer and non-binary. Realizing that put so much context to the struggles I had growing up on a Christian environment and solidified for me that this is who I am, despite how I was nurtured. But had I not gotten out of the religion, I’d have never changed and just silently suffered and struggled until I died. My expression wouldn’t have changed who I am, only how I acted.
You can believe what you want to believe, you didn’t say it in a hateful way at all.
I’m curious about what your opinion would be of trans people going through HRT though. When starting hormone therapy you are warned of potential changes to your sexuality. I am transfem, and prior to transitioning I was bi. Since starting HRT, I tend to have an aversion to men sexually and am more lesbian aligned now.
I guess that is fluidity and environmental factors, but biological factors even still.
Other people meanwhile experience the opposite effect (which is what I expected) or none at all.
I don’t know about transitioning, other than I probably would have thought I was trans if I’d been born later. I’m glad I wasn’t told I’d have to go through surgery and hormone replacements to be what I truly am. I was able to define my gender for myself.
But I don’t think anyone can judge another person’s choices like that. I just look forward to the day when people are allowed to freely make choices about how they live their own lives. I don’t think either political side is terribly flexible. (Though certainly, the right is far more rigid.)
I’ve seen too many people ostracized for changing their minds about being trans or changing their sexuality by people they thought were open-minded friends. Or people hated on for changing their faith by those who pretend to follow a loving God. It’s painful all around. We shouldn’t have to agree with someone on every point to celebrate and adore them.
Just wanted to pop in here and say: no one is being told they have to go through surgery and hormone replacements to be who they are. In fact, things are changing in the opposite direction. There used to be laws requiring physical surgeries to be able to legally change one’s gender but those have mostly been removed.
The options are there and are becoming more widely available and easier to access for those who want them. They are major life choices that aren’t taken lightly. I can tell you right now, if you weren’t trans then, you wouldn’t be now either. You would be suffering and begging for treatment, not stumbling into it out of mere curiousity.
It’s not curiosity. I never felt like my gender. I’ve always been a fish out of water, and been extremely uncomfortable in my body. The way trans people describe feeling is how I’ve felt for the majority of my life.
But in the years since, I’ve come to terms with who I am and what my body is. I no longer feel the need to make it be anything other than what it is.
Not op, but I went a bit through HRT, then desisted (primarily because of financial issues, then because I didn’t identity with the opposite sex anymore). IMO transgenderism is understandable because many gender norms seem socially constructed, but transexualism (including HRT and surgeries) is a mental disorder or a maladaptive coping mechanism or immaturity leading to people not actually understanding and not accepting their bodies function, and I believe social contagion is true. It is pretty concerning minors are allowed to HRT since they bodies including their minds didn’t fully develop yet (which goes until age ~24). There’s a ton of detrans who regret going through transexual procedures.
I am transfem, and prior to transitioning I was bi. Since starting HRT, I tend to have an aversion to men sexually and am more lesbian aligned now.
I don’t think this has anything to do with you going through HRT. It just shows how your natural hormones and nature are still strong enough to do what is natural. It’s just immaturity; time went and you matured, even with HRT. Most natural women are actually attracted solely to men in comparison.
I tried searching for scientific articles but didn’t find a source on this 1%. Could you share a scientific source on this?
suggest social contagion isn’t a thing either.
I don’t see how they are causally correlated. I just say from personal experience… that if I wasn’t exposed since my pre-teen years to LGBT I would likely never think transitioning was a thing and as such would not have pursued that. Today I see it was just a waste of time and money trying to transition.
almost 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries
Also, it’s pretty crazy they’re doing this on teens and crazier that their parents are allowing that. Like, do you really think teens have the maturity to comprehend what are the consequences of this in the long term? I don’t think so even if some doctor gives them a paper to read, just as I was given.
It’s not thought to be genetic otherwise it would be heritable and its clearly not. It would also have self extinguished before too long if it ever got a foothold in the first place.
It’s likely a construction issue having something to do with something that happens in the womb rather than to do with the blueprints.
I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can’t see it. I’ll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that’s a talent or anything special, but my point is that I’d starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I’ve also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can’t see the god damned things.
i’m rather convinced that stuff like ADHD and autism was at least co-opted by evolution (if not outright created by it) because tribes with a certain percentage of it had an advantage.
For example ADHD seems great for foraging, that provides the stimulation that is desired and the ability to completely lose track of time is pretty nice to stave away boredom from trudging through the forest for hours on end;
and autism is pretty obvious in how a defining feature is having special interests that you LOVE doing and get extremely competent in.
I myself have autism and i have no doubt that in a hunter-gatherer tribe i would have been having a blast creating tools and stuff like wicker baskets and trying to improve them as much as i can.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more ‘community’ based
The male alpha wolf - It’s how the western world has been organized for centuries so it’s easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don’t have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds …blogspot.com/…/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.htm…
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren’t more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence
Surprised you didn’t get downvoted here. It’s like if you tell people science is done by humans and humans arre flawed people flip out and call you a science-denier.
Our bias tells us we can confidently assert such simple statements, but the truth is, unless we spend an agonising length of time understanding the most insignificant and asinine facts, we NEED biases to understand the world.
The point of understanding we have biases is to think more critically about which ones are most obviously wrong.
It’s got to be Dark Matter. So many astrophysicists have spent so much time thinking about this stuff and all they’re really sure about is that there must be much more matter in the Universe than we can see, and yet we never actually seem any closer to knowing what it is. In conjunction with Dark Energy it just leaves the layman with the awkward possibility that maybe our model of The Universe is just fundamentally flawed somehow.
I think that eiher, we fundamentally misunderstand gravity at a quantum level, and we are seeing all of the matter there is, but can’t anyway calculate gravity with our current understanding of it, or, we fundamentally misunderstand how time, gravity, and space interact.
My mum has a severe bad back and she had to go on a fortnight physio retreat thing. There were a couple of people there that had a mild back problem, went to a chiropractor and ended up with severe chronic pain. Ill never forget that and have never been to one because I don’t see it as worth the risk
Vague memories myself but I think I also remember a friend having it and would also be fair to call it related to something like civilization or master of Orion as a 4x type. Would have to go check it out again to see if I’m right or just mixing memories with other games we played around that time.
You might be misunderstanding the problem, though. “Traveling” is relative. It absolutely is not impossible to arrive somewhere faster than light traveling in “normal” 3D space would. For example, 3D space itself is a medium, not an absolute thing. A medium can always be manipulated.
It also depends on how you are measuring time. From the perspective of the light, all travel is nearly instantaneous. It’s only from our perspective that it appears to take a long time.
For everyone else, yes, but for you, no. The faster you go, the more time dilation affects your own experience of time. If you were to travel 1 light year at the speed of light, it would be instantaneous for you, but a year would pass for everyone on Earth.
A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don’t remember its name and I’ve never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
Sorry, I missed one more critical detail there… This game was in space! Played on a 2D, wraparound surface, with a top-down perspective, but it was definitely in space.
The fighters were fast and cheap but weak and could only shoot lasers.
The bombers were slower but tougher and could fire missiles. (Missiles could also be scripted, come to think of it. And if you made them stop, they turned into mines)
The fleet ships could manufacture other ships. You only have a single fleet ship at the start, but as time goes on, you can build more. …if you haven’t spent all your resources on building fighters and bombers.
I have that - Nixta? My sister outlaw gave it to us for Thanksgiving. It smells like caramel corn. I tried it with bourbon, Tuaca, and lemon but the corn flavor was lost in there.
Malort starts off horrible and gets worse. I’m convinced that it’s somehow undergoing chemical processes and decaying into more awful chemicals once it interacts with the inside of your mouth.
I bought it on my honeymoon and now I’ve got the absolute worst flavor I’ve ever willingly put in my mouth sense-associated with one of the best times on my life, so that’s lots of fun.
I keep this as well, almost exclusivly to torment friends and family. I feel like it tastes like a used wodden clog that somehow got turned into a drink. I dont think its that bad, but I do enjoy playing up its legend.
The fellas and I have a gaming weekend once a year. Someone always has Jeppson’s on hand for punishment. Last year you could earn points for drawings every few hours and drinking a FULL shot of Jeppson’s would always get you a bonus entry. The bottle never emptied after 3 days of 20+ lads, it’s that bad.
I don’t think it’s totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You’re meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.
I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.
Pisang Ambon, banana liqueur, I tried it in a bar in Spain, really liked it, and bought it. But what do you do with Banana Liqueur in your house? Nothing mixes well with that. Occasionally I sip it, but I've had it a decade and drunk maybe a third.
I was in Salzburg back in 95 with a HS exchange program. We were traveling around and having a great time. That day we went up to the castle kinda near closing time. The entry booth was unmanned so our group walked on in.
We walked around, saw lots of the castle and the views over the city were enchanting. Most of our group left, but about six of us were still in the castle later. It turns out they close and lock the main gates once all of the tourists are out. Since we didn’t get tickets in, we apparently went uncounted and got locked inside.
On my my buddies came running up to me as I was sitting on a battlement being morose (summer fling issues) and declared with alarm “we’re locked in!” so I jogged to the gate with him.
This is pre cell phone and we weren’t great at German. I told him to rally the rest of our stragglers and stood by the gate to think of how to get out. As the group was walking down the path to me, I heard keys jangling outside the gate.
After a moment the smaller postern door opened. Standing outside was a kid about 13 years old with a sack of groceries. I said entschuldigung and blocked the door open. Our group all piled out through the gate and ran off down the road while the kid just stood there looking shocked.
That was the first time I accidentally got locked in a castle in Europe. They’re remarkably effective at keeping people both in and out, both are issues I’ve had to deal with at various times.
Not as often as I’d like, but it’s happened a few times in my roaming the world.
I also had this short stint as an illegal immigrant in the UK. No one (not even me) noticed that my passport was expired before I entered the country. The dumb part was that it was noticed as I tried to fly home, but my home country changed the rules a couple of weeks before then to only allow valid passports back. So… I couldn’t immediately go home and I didn’t have a valid visa in the UK.
In an unrelated face, did you know that embassies often close at 3pm? That’s really early when you’re racing from Heathrow on the Tube and around London trying to get a valid passport for a flight the next day.
MLK was killed by the US Government/with Government warning and approval not because of his policies on race, but because his message was getting (though somewhat always had been) socialist/anti-capitalist, and between the historic fear of slave revolts, the new fear of communist revolutions, and the monied business interests not wanting to cede any power they ended MLK to prevent potential calls for a social revolution.
Boost. One-time cheap payment to get rid of ads. No subscription like Sync (which is otherwise also a great app; it was not subscription based when it was available for Reddit).
Sync has a one time payment to get rid of ads as well. The subscription is for cloud services, if you want that stuff. I didn’t, so all I paid for was to remove ads.
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