This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”

I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.

I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.

Archie, gopher, wais, Usenet, Telnet, and ftp were the internet at that point. The www was basically a guy with a fan page for the hobbit and someone who gave a virtual tour of MIT.

I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.

What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.

Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?

Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.

So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.

Do Americans hate us? The only people I’ve been verbally and physically assaulted by have been Americans.

So are you saying that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians aren’t transphobic, or that we should go Gaza on Texas?

There’s entire branches of research on this, but I think one of the easiest ways to approach it for starting out is to think of the word “womanly.”

having or denoting qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with or expected of women.

I would strike the word “traditionally” from that definition since we’re talking about a comparative and differential analysis and concentrate on the “qualities and characteristics” part. Although most people in the US today wouldn’t think of it this way, imagine the perception of a woman army officer commanding male troops in 1845. You can take the same approach when looking through history or across cultures. What roles, qualities, and characteristics are associated with “women” and how do they differ and evolve?

There’s some complexity when you get into the details - indigenous cultures change when they come into contact with, say, colonialism, and the people who studied them might themselves be observing through their own prejudices. History is replete with examples of British colonialists being unable to properly deal with things like the egalitarian democracies of the northern indigenous peoples or the matriarchal social structures. Picture the used car dealership where the salesman still insists on engaging with the man even though it’s the woman buying the car.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, and semiotics is the study of symbology. When we’re talking about these things, we’re talking about how the ideas and symbols associated with the idea-token “woman” differ.

The reason why this is important is that this is the crux of the transphobic argument. Their argument is cultural, not biological (although like I said, even their biology is sketchy).

I think a great study that includes cross cultural anthropological analysis of the role of women, as well as politics and economics, is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

Lemmy is small enough that “brigading” doesn’t feel entirely appropriate. Maybe “platooning?”

In any case, we know from other sites that downvotes increase the probability of getting more downvotes, and nasty comments increase the probability of getting more nasty comments. The same goes for upvotes and positive comments. It’s just social dynamics. Some subs on reddit existed almost exclusively to call out other subs, but I think that Lemmy’s user base is small and spread out enough that it’s not a major contributing factor in voting.

I think it’s mostly just people scrolling along, running across a hot take, and interpreting it according to the voting.

In any case, I would suspect that people would be more impacted by hurtful comments than downvotes.

Robert Earle Parry (June 24, 1949 – January 27, 2018)[1] was an American investigative journalist. He was known for his role in covering the Iran–Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985.

Just some additional additional context.

I kind of close with that thought. A “good idea” in evolutionary biology is one that leads to reproductive success. Obviously, it’s possible to have so much reproductive success that you overrun the carrying capacity of your environment. That doesn’t happen as often when we’re looking at them in their natural environments - because species and environments co-evolve, and so each adaptation has time to be matched by other adaptations.

It’s always tempting to look backward through time and interpret a direct causal development from the bow and arrow to industrial manufacturing and spaceflight. But we can see by looking at all of the different societies and cultures around us that any particular path isn’t dictated by the human brain per se. The Yanomami and the Yoruba are populated with people exactly as intelligent as in any other human society. They are adaptable and clever, but never developed mass manufacturing or rocket technology. There are countless other civilizations that arose, gained a high degree of sophistication and power, and then disappeared while others have survived.

I do not believe in free will. That means I believe in strict causality. If you wanted to argue that the development of modern western political economies are a direct result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment itself was a direct result of the world of ideas that came before it, you’d find a sympathetic ear (although I do believe that determinism is different from predictability, and that this complex system we call our society is more complex than any individual just as a human is more complex and less predictable than an ant).

In any case, it’s possible the “lethal mutation” that might lead to our demise (along with a good swath of the rest of life on earth) might have been a techno-cultural mutation rather than a biological one.

Those are very good questions. First, I was distinguishing between multiple types of intelligence, rather than ranking them. However, there are several aspects of human intelligence that we’d probably be justified in saying something like “By these metrics, humans are more intelligent than any other species on the planet.” Those include the sophistication of technology, the amount and complexity of of information exchanged between persons, the ability to learn, and so on. Other animals can learn through accident or experimentation and adopt a new behavior. Some even exhibit social learning, as when a troop of baboons learned to wash their food by observing the matriarch, who had discovered it on her own. Most other species have languages, whether vocal, visual, or chemical. But most learning occurs over evolutionary time rather than at the individual level, and most of those languages are fairly hard coded.

The answer is definitely yes for the second question, with the eusocial animals like ants and bees being the obvious examples. The queen is not the “brain” of the colony. She is more like the reproductive organ. The brain emerges from of all the ants collectively interacting with each other and the environment. I agree with EO Wilson that humans are also eusocial, and so by extension carry out collective computation - information processing and learning - at the social level using what we might think of as an emergent brain layered on top of your individual brains.

Evolutionary biologist here. I think it’s highly unlikely.

It has taken about 4 billion years for intelligent life to have appeared on our planet (if you include the earth forming part), or 3.5 billion years (if you include when life first formed) to get our first “intelligent life.” By intelligent life here, I’m talking about technology in tool using and civilization building, to be clear. It’s a label I’d apply to our many of our ancestral and most closely related species. I believe much of life on earth is intelligent to the point of having things like theory of mind (the knowledge that one is a thinking individual interacting with other thinking individuals), including some birds and octopuses. The birds and octopuses part is important because it means that ToM evolved multiple times independently. That means that a) it’s a “good idea” (it has potentially significant adaptive value) and b) it’s possible to discover it along multiple pathways. Take eyes for example. Last time I looked, we believe eyes have evolved independently at least 24 times. They also exist at every stage of complexity and in a very wide variety of forms, and even something as as simple as being able to tell light from darkness has value.

However, in that 3.5 billion year history, intelligent life evolved exactly once, from a single line of descent. Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea. We went from being relatively unremarkable hominids to being the dominant life form on the planet, for better and for worse. Evolution is not moving all species to intelligence. Humans aren’t the point of evolution, any more than sharks or jellyfish are the point of evolution.

When such a manifestly good idea only evolves once, from a single line, the conclusion is that it’s pretty difficult to evolve. It might require a chain of preliminary mutations, or a particular environment. Being hominids, for example, we can make tools and carry fire, which dolphins and octopuses cannot. Of course, there are other hominids out there who do not do those things, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Depending on where you want to start the clock, they’ve been around for about ten times longer than modern humans - about 400k years, give or take. And the technology and civilization part has only been around for the last tenth of that, and has to evolve along its own, non-biological selection - and even those things differ wildly between different places and cultures. And even will all that, it’s become increasingly obvious that this might be a terminal mutation as the very drivers of our short term success may lead to our extinction.

I believe that extra-solar life probably exists. Whether it exists as bacterial mats or multicellular life, whether it’s discovered its own form of photosynthesis or has some other way of gathering life from its environment, whether it draws a distinction between its informational (eg, dna) and physical components - I have ideas but obviously no data.

In any case, that’s why I don’t believe that anyone has ever seen an extraterrestrial-origin ufo. I don’t believe the universe ever was nor will ever be teeming with civilizations.

All of that said, though, we’re dealing with an n of 1. We can make the best inferences possible based on what we can observe, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong tomorrow. I’m a sci fi nerd - I want there to be aliens. Even the discovery of a bacterial mat would revolutionize biology.

Evolutionary biologist here. I’d argue that, in the same sense as we see homosexuality in animals, we see trans animals.

Some animals physically transition - there are fish that will change their physical gender based on the current gender mixture in their local environment. Some behaviorally transition, with males taking on female roles. Sometimes a whole species is trans - like the female hyena developing male appearing genitalia.

Sexual orientation in the animal kingdom is not strictly analogous to that among humans (which has a much stronger social construct), and the same is true of gender (that is, human gender is a social construct). Because the range of adaptations are so diverse and so widespread, I’m very sure of the fact that they have different causes from each other as well as from humans, but the same is true of animal sexuality.

Externalized costs to subsidize profits for fossil fuel companies?! In my grocery cart?!

All too often, taking the “evil” path in RPGs just locks content. Most of the NPCs end up against you and you lose side quests rather than getting additional ones to compensate.

I think the Elder Scrolls games did well with the Thieves’ Guild and Assassins. There was a fair amount of content that was unlocked, and depending on your playstyle (and how much you roleplay in single player RPGs) you could still do major quest lines.

It’s just that, after decades of playing computer RPGs, I will tend to default to an Alison type character until I get the lay of the land.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.