• 10 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: January 6th, 2025

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  • Your criteria exclude much that is useful. For example, scientific studies that confirm theoretical predictions or replicate previous results, which are both essential to good science. Your emphasis seems to be entirely on challenging established understandings and institutions and shaking things up, but if that’s the only thing you respect as not “drivel”, you just end up pushing contrarianism. Sometimes it’s valuable to agree, or to come to consensus. Sometimes it’s valuable to delve into the subtleties of an existing way of understanding the world. Sometimes it’s valuable to explore how others already understand the world, while keeping quiet and not asserting anything of your own until you are well steeped in it. Not everything needs to be shaken up or disrupted all the time - to look only for this is the unwisdom of hubristic tech bros and conspiracists.













  • botched gender affirmation surgery that left him with a mangled useless sex organ

    I keep hearing this around here. Is there any actual reason to think it’s true?

    Even if the bit about the surgery is true, it’s a very reductive explanation of issues which clearly aren’t new in his life. He was brought up by far-right parents and his father apparently showed him no love. He has been poisonously insecure all his life, only now he has the power to inflict his psychological troubles on the world. Ever since he got financially lucky in the 1990s, he has had the money to buy influence and pay people to do what he wants, so he has never become equipped to deal with people as equals and has all kinds of issues and insecurities around power. He discovered early that, while he had trouble making friends, he could make an impression on people by being edgy and controversial, and has never managed to move beyond this into a more mature persona.

    I feel like saying “it’s all because of his wonky penis” trivializes how profoundly this man’s life has messed him up, and how many complex factors are at work in his psyche. It also implicitly insults anyone else who doesn’t have “normal” genitalia.