The Public Discourse

A counterpoint to claims that there is an exceptionally low regret rate: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/02/60143 In short: any analysis of regret rate really needs to examine this in conjunction with the time since treatment and the lost-to-follow-up rates. Otherwise you end up with a skewed and inaccurate figure.

"In 2019, there were at least 13 minors who suffered from "serious side effects,” according to Swedish reports. One of them had developed osteoporosis - a health condition that weakens bones - after taking puberty blockers. Others have suffered from liver damage, significant weight gain and depressive symptoms." - https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/02/16/as-spain-advances-trans-right… "A pattern begins to emerge as we survey some of the best and longest outcome studies on gender transition: the longer the studies and the better the methods, the more negative the results. " - https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/02/60143/ Also, the posts by detransitioners who explain how their doctors, specifically, did not care to investigate confounding signals or perform valid surgical aftercare. And how hatefully they're treated by the trans community, without any concern for the validity of what they say. > your peer reviewed paper Their papers are failing peer review, that's the point. The "studies" they claim to have done are intentionally bad. Tavistock in the UK failed to record the sex of many of their patients. Other clinics don't follow up with patients and have reported all loss-of-contact results as positive interventions. This is what you'd expect from a field that's more concerned with returning the "progressive" answer than facts. > Since you seem to have some expertise in this area, do you have any feelings…

Edward Feser published a review of Koon's book ([0], [1]). I was struck by the number of times Feser argued that a "common sense" view of QM is the one that is "basically correct." Given the documented failures of common sense in mathematics and physics (see especially Feynman's comments in the first 15 minutes of [2]), why should anyone think common sense is a reliable metric to how things are? [0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86512/ [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/01/koons-on-aristotle-and-quantu… [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Jc75tQcB0

A side note: Robert Koons at UT Austin has just published a book in which he examines the lesser known Aristotelian interpretation of QM. Here’s a short review of the book[0] (the book is quite cheap for the genre) and a lecture Koons gave last year. [0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86512/ [1] https://youtu.be/Mf-iVHgIz3E

Opposition to capital punishment is rooted in modern sentiment rather than actual moral reasoning. We are opposed to it despite the moral justification for it. Justice has three ends, namely, retribution, correction, and deterrence[0], and in order for these to be just, they must be proportionate to the crime. Obviously, death is proportionate to murder and therefore a proportionate penalty for murder. [0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/09/4033/

Rockefeller made his fortune in the oil business. Hope this helps you understand the context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174/ >Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science

The problem with sex reassignment surgeries, is that they do not work: ”Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers." Dr. Paul McHugh, the university distinguished service professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/06/15145/

"why isn't there as much outrage over the few dozen police killed every year as there is over the nearly 2k people killed by police?" There are roughly 20k violent deaths in the US every year. Almost 10% of those are police related. That's completely unacceptable to me, having looked at the actual numbers. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/06/65309/ has the underlying sources and analysis here.

According to [1], with [2] giving similar numbers, about half the news titles about police killings should be "Police kill white man", but it seems the versions with black or latino far outnumber them. In fact, I can't recall a single news article framed that way. Is it just my media bubble? [1] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Graph-3.… from https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/06/65309/ [2] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

This was a good and amusing article from a law professor about some of the problems with speed cameras in America: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/

Articles from various perspectives with many examples within: https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-laws-are-oft… https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/europes-free-speech-apocalypse-is… https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17113/ https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/01/13/germany-is-silencing-hate-…

Yes. Kind of. Speeding tickets are generally under criminal law. However, they are in a procedural limbo where they are treated in many respects as civil. There is a concern that things like speeding cameras would not hold up under criminal law if they were significantly challenged, but to my knowledge, that has not happened at a high enough level yet. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/

> What a lot of people don't realize is that prices aren't inherently good or bad in and of themselves, they just are. If somebody else is willing to pay 20k for a diamond, that's the price of a diamond. Arguably, even the early Christian thinkers like Acquinas agree with you on this. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/08/15435/

Here is the personal account of a person who underwent the operation that confirms Dr. McHugh's views: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14905/ Apparently this was already known 10 years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth "The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective."

“you could probably match everything to a single person if you wanted to.” You could probably match it to a single car owner but I'll bet you'd have a hard time matching it to a single person purely using data without some research, and people let other people borrow cars more frequently than mobile phones. Though you probably could fingerprint someone's driving style based on starts/stop cadence, turn velocity, routes, destinations, etc. and some insurance companies may already do it. They use this data to modify their clients rates automatically, already. That's why I opted to not use my housing insurer, Lemonade, to insure my car. I don't need surveillance capitalism invading yet another part of my existence. In the case of red light cameras (https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/), I think the legal consequences are so comparatively minor that nobody bats an eye when this gets flubbed. When it comes down to this being used as evidence in a major crime, that will probably be harder and surely defense attorneys will be all over it. From a commercial data privacy perspective, it's probably enough of an edge case that their customers wouldn't care much. I think civil cases may be the more interesting venue for this inconsistency. I don't know if it's still true, but in file sharing cases, folks often didn't question the idea that an IP address could be mapped to a specific person. I'd guess this wouldn't be that much different than having a series of witnesses…

Edward Feser has written a bunch on this topic over the years: > Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. * https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174/ * http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/scientism-roundup.html * http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/07/fallacies-physicists-fall-for.… See also naturalism: > According to Robert Priddy, all scientific study inescapably builds on at least some essential assumptions that are untested by scientific processes;[15] that is, that scientists must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions would then be justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of…

As noted on metafilter http://www.metafilter.com/164565/Law-Professor-Challenges-Traffic-Came… FYI, the author is a morally repugnant conservative. He believes that a lesbian couple should not both be legally recognized as the parents of a child;[0] that Texas courts should defy the Supreme Court and further restrict access to women's healthcare;[1] and that colleges should be free to discriminate against LGBT students and employees; [2] among many other positions. He signed a statement calling on the local, state, and federal government to refuse to follow Obergefell [3] (the case legalizing same sex marriage nationally). The website this was published on is an outlet of the Witherspoon Institute.[4] The author is fanatically opposed to what he calls 'the regulatory state'. He is a far-right extremist and religious fundamentalist. [0] http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/10/18106/ [1] http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17328/ [2] http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/05/16907/ [3] https://americanprinciplesproject.org/founding-principles/statement-ca… [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witherspoon_Institute

Although McLeod is a law professor, some of his legal claims have already been disputed by Orin Kerr on the Volokh Conspiracy.[1] He has published constitutional law nonsense before, and once accused a federal judge of 'tyranny' for upholding the Fourteenth Amendment argument that succeeded in Obergefell v. Hodges.[2] It is surprising to see so many commenters uncritically endorsing his conclusions. His main complaint seems to be: > [S]everal states have created an entirely novel phylum of law: the civil violation of a criminal prohibition. Using this nifty device, a city can charge you of a crime without any witnesses, without any probable cause determination, and without any civil due process. But McLeod never explains what this actually means, and goes on to describe an ordinary criminal trial where he was acquitted after the prosecution failed to prove its case to the required standard. While the focus on the trial suggests that he is complaining about criminal procedure, the real purpose of the article seems to be to deny the legitimacy of traffic cameras as a law enforcement mechanism. The vaguely-described contractual arrangements sound concerning, but he doesn't give any supporting evidence and those contracts weren't the subject of his case. Traffic cameras are common in the rest of the developed world and can be used consistently with the rule of law. This may involve the legislature infringing the rights of accused people by shifting the burden, or reducing the…

"Israel is one of the last countries in the world where the Tender Years Doctrine is still in force, if not the last. While the clause reflects an old world order in which mothers were expected to be homemakers and fathers were breadwinners, many feminist politicians and women's groups refuse to have it amended, claiming that the time is not yet ripe for such a change and that men will take advantage of it to put pressure on women in divorce." - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/174956#.Urnmoq2Yn7c I also read with some horror this for a self-claimed feminist: "Yet under no-fault divorce, a woman can find herself essentially a single mom, drained of family resources by court costs and lawyer fees, and suddenly required to work against her will and sacrifice time with her children." - http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/05/10031/ Hopefully all the above is today a minority view, but it should not be glossed completely over. Feminists and fathers right groups should under all circumstances agree on gender equality, which mean equal time with children and equal requirement to work in an effort to support their own children.