Sweet seems we agree then that a cost to exercise a right doesn't matter if it's for the public good. Let's get those voter ID cards.

yes teaching children with proper discipline is EXACTLY the same as hitting women. Truly, you are one of the great thinkers of our time.

Ya, you're all correct. Current younger generations obviously show a complete understanding that poor actions might carry ramifications...

Let's continue with the completely coddle kids experiment...it's working so well for us.

The overwhelming discipline, and respect exhibited by the recent generations that grew up without spanking is a great example of how great it works out.

If we keep finding classified docs at the homes and offices of all those in washington, this draining the swamp thing is going to go a lot faster than I had thought possible.

not a surprise that Clown doesn't have the facts right - #19.

There have been female M&M characters for quite some time. People's reactions were to the changes they made to the female ones. And, no, they're not getting replaced with all male ones. What f'n fever dream were you having when you typed #19?

alt headline: worlds oldest woman title handed down

#164

You really think it's more likely that she's been a tormented soul her whole life and being raped it was got her mentally right?

or

She was a happy kid who got raped and is now suffering from that trauma?

Which one are you going to all in on?

#145 you might have a point if it were teens who showed no autistic signs start to exhibit them in their teens. But that's not the case.

#148 and you have no idea how much of 180 degree her personality took after being sexually assaulted. To pretend that investigating that trauma deeper before affirming her gender identity change is somehow wrong is laughable. It just proves people are more invested in party lines than peoples actual care.

the irony of offering that up on this site wasn't lost on me.

#139 then maybe don't piss into the wind and try to have a reasoned discussion with those that are willing.

the anecdote is there to help visualize the main point.

Cases have risen too fast to account for actual cases. That means there are children who are coming to these conclusions out of need for something, but whatever they are suffering from it isn't gender dysphoria. Separating the real cases from the others can't happen if the only and first way of dealing with everyone is with gender affirming care... again first and only. I'm not saying affirming care isn't needed.

For this debate to go anywhere there what is even being discussed needs clarification.

1. Does gender dysphoria exist? - yes.
2. Has the rate of children self diagnosing gender dysphoria inexplicably risen well above expected values - yes?

I doubt anyone has a real issue with gender affirming care for those that are actually experiencing gender dysphoria. The issue for me is that we have this spike in cases, which seems to point to an outside social contagion. At the same time there is this push to only accept gender affirming care as the first response. This seemingly means then that we are ignoring a large number of kids who are indeed suffering, but not from gender dysphoria but who need help to distinguish what it is. Jumping directly to gender affirming care for those kids is only going to hurt them furher.

To those about to knee jerk answer, recall that I said there are indeed genuine cases and those should receive affirming care. The problem is that we are calling figuring out who is genuine and who has some other issue they are suffering from and reaching to this incorrectly for an answer.

I'll offer a case in point. Good friend of my son, female, call her Jane. Dated boys all through highschool. Senior year she was sexually assaulted. Immediately began to dress differently, much more darks and loose fitting. She has a friend who is a lesbian with they/them pronouns. Jane now decides she is a lesbian too, and begins dating her friend. They eventually break up, as Jane has met another girl, who identifies as boy, and uses they them pronouns. Jane realizes now that she is actually a boy. Jane has started binding their chest, and has asked to be called Anakin. Anakin(Jane) is now dating this new person.

I've known Jane their whole life, and they were very much a happy girl this whole time. To ask Anakin now they never were. Through therapy they've come around to exploring that their actual discomfort came after the sexual assault and their desire to want to not be Jane the person who endured that trauma, and not wanting to attract male attention. If Jane/Anakin had only been met with affirming care, they most likely wouldn't have done the therapy that is starting to uncover their real issue, allowing them to being real healing.

So we really need to distinguish actual dysphoria and those that are caught up in this rapid onset spike in cases.

Can't wait to see how the above point gets twisted around.

#14 welcome to the cesspool this has become.

This site used to have some interesting debates and discussions.

Now it's just a race to see who can shout someone down with accusations of racist, bigot, transphobe, etc...

#26... Are you that you dumb? I said it could have been a contributing factor to what killed him.

He didn't die of eloctrocution, or overdose... it will turn out to be a heart attack or something along that line. It then will be attributed to the tazer, or the drugs, or a combination of those perhaps with other factors.

But no where have I said he deserved to die... He definitely wasn't murdered.

#24 wanna take another stab at that, because what you wrote is barely coherent.

What we knew, he was tazed and died.

What we now know, he had drugs in his system, probably a contributor to his actions after starting out pretty well with an office who was rather polite to him.

What we don't know yet... an autopsy, and where there other contributing factors, possibly more than the tazing, that caused his death.

But we know you won't care about that, you've already gotten what you wanted, a white cop and black man. No facts will matter to you beyond that.

And lets be clear, no one killed him for resisting arrest. He died after, not even during, resisting arrest.

#19 you seem to have no problem rationalizing resisting arrest

#14 you could tell he was just itching to pull his weapon and mow him down. Did you hear the way he offered to get him some water, savage .

So the discussion is already of to immediate jumping to conclusions.

I've had to sign numerous ones, but have never worried myself with them much as they are pretty much useless in MA.

The lack of an ability to discern the difference from a violent activity and a physical one with strategic nuance lets me know all I need to about some of this crowd.

#7 tell me you know nothing of a sport without saying it outright.

you just sound like a-------

Reading the links you have posted in #25 sycophant... reading them in totality I don't think they quite make the case you think they are making.

One was more an opinion piece that loosely pulled facts together, but really didn't address the issue of comparing masks wearing regions to non wearing regions.

One then compared Kansas which had regions without mandates and some with. Those with had a lower infection rate, but stated...

"Carroll cautions that this was not a randomized, controlled study and there could have been other factors at play (such as more physical distancing in social situations and fewer large gatherings) in the counties that were enforcing masks."

Also, this was a mandate vs no mandate. The other article you post states:

"Epidemiological studies often use government mask mandates as a proxy for mask wearing. However, the existing literature on the relationship between mandates and actual levels of mask wearing has shown surprisingly weak effects. For example, studying US states, ref. 22 failed to find a statistically significant relationship between mandates and subsequent wearing, while other studies found postmandate increases in wearing of just 13% (23) and 23% (24). Betsch et al. (25) find a 40% increase in wearing after local mandates in Germany, but no other study finds a comparably large increase. Given that the link between mandates and wearing is surprisingly weak, it is likely that the link between mandates and transmission is difficult to detect. Three additional factors lead us to suspect that a link between mandates and transmission would be difficult to detect. First, introducing a mandate is a coarse, one-off event that necessarily loses signal by not tracking day-to-day changes in mask wearing. We also have fewer data on mandates: Less than half of the regions we study enforced any mandate during the study period. Second, past studies treat mandates as a binary on/off intervention that is fully implemented at a single point in time. However, modeling the effect of mandates as an instantaneous change in the reproduction number or mortality fails to capture changes in wearing behavior following the announcement of a mandate but before its enforcement (21). Nor does it account for gradual change in behavior after the implementation of a mandate. Finally, the circumstances of mandate policies are highly heterogeneous, both in terms of the preexisting level of voluntary wearing at the time of implementation and in terms of how exactly they are defined, enforced, and complied with. Consequently, averaging the international effect of mandates based on coarse data is unlikely to provide a useful summary of heterogeneous mandate effects. Importantly, these arguments point to the link between mandates and transmission being difficult to detect, not that it is absent."

A lot to unpack there... but basically it weakens the link to mandates being a good proxy for mask wearing.

Seems we really should be comparing large geographical areas, with long timeframes mask mandates. This would remove a lot of the issues raised and cautioned by the authors in your relevant links.