My growing problem with the "Skeptic" or "Anti-SJW" movement

[KrazyK923]

I once looked up Blair White given I like to help out folks on r/asktransgender and it generally caters to a younger crowd than myself.

First off, I noted she isn't followed by any of the prominent transwomen in the community on Twitter. No Jen Richards, no Jamie Clayton, or Janet Mock. I'm not part of the discussion either, but keeping up with all of them is pretty worthwhile. Well, I guess she's not a serious part of the conversation then, so how is she even worthwhile? Then I clicked her video on trans youth and realized in a few minutes she either isn't familiar with or ignored WPATH (a big deal since it's the basic set of guidelines for treating trans folks), the recent guidance released by the AAP and ACOP, the work coming out of the Williams Institute at UCLA Law, and the research being done at the TransYouth Project at the University of Washington.

I can't see how she's at all good for the trans community, particularly for trans youth. She's actively ignoring what experts are saying.

Don't you see? She's good because she spouts conservative talking points! Wider audience = better? or something. I'm not sure. But it super definitely totally isn't because she just validates their preconceived notions about trans people who are too left for their taste. That TOTALLY isn't why some people on the right like her. Definitely. Totally. Obviously. Definitely. Super really. Isn't.

[Allybeboba]

I hate the lack of self awareness on the web. I see it all the time, and makes me cringe as I am a child of the internets.

Why is Tumblr, literally anything posted there taken so fucking seriously, while reddit/4chan can and do get taken as "joking", "not serious", etc in some discussions. Its weird. All 3 are essentially the same thing, but for some reason people take one of them way too seriously? An example is Overwatch and one character getting a police officer skin, I think 1 mini blog was like "fuck dis shit" and that was it

Facebook groups for Overwatch went fucking bananas that 5 people on tumblr had to audacity to fucking say anything and it went on for like 3 weeks.

Then of course we have other places were people will take fucking shit tier memes as factual assertions of political points..... my friend was on 9gag (a cess pool or normies) and holy crap. it was like the people posting there just took their first political course in community college.

Youtube is even worse because its not a fucking discussion with politics, its one guy who controls their narrative and disagreement is painted in the illogical extreme, thus making the youtuber look more reasonable by default. People for some reason nod their head and agree that the presenter is much more reasonable than the caricature of someone who disagrees with them.

It's almost as if people take this one 'seriously'.

[Video Games]

Laci Green has, via getting laid, done more to trigger the SJW community than probably the entire Anti-SJ community has ever done. If anything the mere fact that Laci Green is in a relationship with Chris Ray Gun has caused probably the biggest shitstorm of triggered butt fury from that community than anything else in years is a testament to just how vacuous and pointless that side is.

Honeslty, Laci's vagina is now the greatest Anti-SJ person on the planet right now. At least in terms of total trigger tantrums achieved.

Send help I can't find my sides

[Moralgy]

I once looked up Blair White given I like to help out folks on r/asktransgender and it generally caters to a younger crowd than myself.

First off, I noted she isn't followed by any of the prominent transwomen in the community on Twitter. No Jen Richards, no Jamie Clayton, or Janet Mock. I'm not part of the discussion either, but keeping up with all of them is pretty worthwhile. Well, I guess she's not a serious part of the conversation then, so how is she even worthwhile? Then I clicked her video on trans youth and realized in a few minutes she either isn't familiar with or ignored WPATH (a big deal since it's the basic set of guidelines for treating trans folks), the recent guidance released by the AAP and ACOP, the work coming out of the Williams Institute at UCLA Law, and the research being done at the TransYouth Project at the University of Washington.

I can't see how she's at all good for the trans community, particularly for trans youth. She's actively ignoring what experts are saying.

I haven't delt with her much apart from a few videos a while back showing she wasn't a "SJW". That is likely the main thing she is doing for trans people, right-wing/alt-right/anti-sjw/what-ever-people-want-to-call-it people are tuning in to see her discuss the basics and "agree" with her because she aligns with their opinions on most everything else. A general search for her showed she sticks heavily to being against early transition(correct me if I'm wrong), which is a sketchy time period to transition, but I haven't kept up with the recent science since I gave up trying to convince people against trans stuff using science about two years back.

Overall, she seems to be the typical youtube drama llama with a basic trans-positive outlook that might transfer over to others of her ideology with enough interactions. I do know, though, it doesn't seem to be working very well as a whole given calling trans people "libural sjw nonsense" is still pretty common.

[Dreknar20]

, but triggering regressives.

libtards commiting suicide over being triggered make me as happy as them being defeated in debate

[KrazyK923]

libtards commiting suicide over being triggered make me as happy as them being defeated in debate

Ah yes its always good when shitposting causes vulnerable people to kill themselves.

TAKE THAT PC CULTURE! Haha #rekt maga!

[Techno-Druid]

libtards commiting suicide over being triggered make me as happy as them being defeated in debate

I'm sorry but you find pleasure in someone committing suicide then you're probably a pretty deplorable human being.

[Deleted]

I didn't think I'd ever meet a human being crazier than me

So im the craziest youve ever seen? You can actually sense a domesticated western liberal, that lives in the basement. Never seen anyone crazier than me, you know thats more of an insult towards yourself yes?


Anyway address my statements. Why am i crazy, Because i want a contract to be uphold by all sides, and not just us?
Or cos my answer to an agression is violent, like it should be by the laws of nature? Your answer would be then to submit, let yourself be beaten and cucked?

[GreenGoldSharpie]

Don't you see? She's good because she spouts conservative talking points! Wider audience = better? or something. I'm not sure. But it super definitely totally isn't because she just validates their preconceived notions about trans people who are too left for their taste. That TOTALLY isn't why some people on the right like her. Definitely. Totally. Obviously. Definitely. Super really. Isn't.

Herein lies why I don't actually bother with youtube or online politics all that much. In an arena where everyone has a platform the loudest generally win. It's particularly annoying these days when the trans community is specifically talking about violence and access to healthcare needs while the right debates our pronouns and identities for some odd reason. I just don't hear the things the right constantly harps on going around the community. It's odd, and even moreso when you consider trans folks have been the subject of any number of medical and psychological studies going back for almost a century.

Hell, Hirschfield was experimenting with hormone replacement therapy when the Nazis burned his library to the ground. We're talking long established stuff that is apparently being rehashed because a bunch of folks realized we exist.

[KrazyK923]

I just don't hear the things the right constantly harps on going around the community.

Well then that would mean they're spouting a bunch of unfounded, fearmongering, bullshit to push a political agenda.

But the right has never been known to do that. So I donno what it could possibly be!

Honestly its just a fear of anything that isn't the norm. Us gays are right along there with you guys in terms of medical and psychological studies. And still these days we have a bunch of fucking idiots saying that we're like going around in packs trying to convert people into being gay. There was a dumbass on this very website saying that stupid shit a few weeks ago in a thread.

[Slybak]

This is the first time I ever heard those two labels to describe the same group of people.

It started when Rebecca Watson made an off-hand comment about how it was lame for someone to proposition her at 3AM in an elevator after a skeptic conference, and a bunch of 8 year olds who somehow got stuck in the bodies of adult men - including Richard Dawkins - completely lost their shit and told her to be glad they weren't forcing her to wear a burka or cut off her clitoris.

I peaced out of the whole "rational" community after that. It's full of rubes whose only commitment to skeptical inquiry is that it makes them feel less like rubes.

[GreenGoldSharpie]

I haven't delt with her much apart from a few videos a while back showing she wasn't a "SJW". That is likely the main thing she is doing for trans people, right-wing/alt-right/anti-sjw/what-ever-people-want-to-call-it people are tuning in to see her discuss the basics and "agree" with her because she aligns with their opinions on most everything else. A general search for her showed she sticks heavily to being against early transition(correct me if I'm wrong), which is a sketchy time period to transition, but I haven't kept up with the recent science since I gave up trying to convince people against trans stuff using science about two years back.

Overall, she seems to be the typical youtube drama llama with a basic trans-positive outlook that might transfer over to others of her ideology with enough interactions. I do know, though, it doesn't seem to be working very well as a whole given calling trans people "libural sjw nonsense" is still pretty common.

I don't think she's that useful, honestly. Trans communities are experiencing a rash of "I'm not going to pass and I should not even try and nor should you!" venom from non-transitioners. Most of them are young, many are lost, and increasingly they're unnerving a community that often caters to people just beginning to transition since most of us tend to drift away after transition. People like that are a big part of that problem since she uses "passing" as validation and misgenders and abuses those who don't.

She's really bad for a young youtube audience of trans people.

But, I can happily point out that early transition has largely been codified. WPATH (I'm sure the coming update will do so more extensively) lays out some basics, but the AAP and ACOP paper recommends its path, which involves social transition (no medical intervention) until puberty, puberty blockers until 16 or so, and then HRT if the adolescent is persistent in their desire to transition. All under the care of well trained therapists and doctors, of course.

A recent UW paper shows that kids who are supported and allowed to transition don't show any quality of life differences from their peers, too.

[Dreknar20]

I'm sorry but you find pleasure in someone committing suicide then you're probably a pretty deplorable human being.

being like seeing people they don't like get hurt

Its some basics of humanity you should have learned in kindergarden

[Teleros]

May I ask how the anti-SJW crowd doing the same thing will stop the left from decrying every conflicting opinion as “racist” or “sexist”?

Doesn't matter if the SJWs keep at it or not, TBH. People are already getting sick of everything being racist or sexist or w/e, so those words have already lost a lot of their power. But whereas anti-SJW types usually have the brains and knowledge to come up with new and informative kinds of rhetoric, all the SJWs can do is double-down and keep screaming the same tired old slogans. If triggering SJWs with talk of the Trumpenreich ever gets old, it won't be long before something just as good replaces it.

Especially since many (not all or even most) Anti-SJW YouTubers show little conviction pushing individuals who hold views which may actually be definitely racist or sexist?

Well, I don't think you're going to get Undoomed telling everyone to go watch Richard Spencer or something, but that doesn't mean they can't do other stuff. Sargon of Akkad loves the #FreeKekistan stuff and Pepe memes in general, for example.

Caucasian as a term was used by early anthropologists as a categorization to group humans groups that displayed common traits such as straight noses, smaller mouths, and longer skulls. It encompassed most of the Europe and the Middle East alongside of North and the Horn of Africa all the way to Northern India.

However, the term largely became archaic after the mid-20th century due to a shift in focus from phenotypical characteristics to a genetic basis (i.e. Tracing the pathways of human evolution through Mitochondrial DNA and comparing the relatedness of different isolated groups through that).

Sure, but it's still a useful term, as is "white" or "black" or whatever.

And science is all about precision, that is why different scientific fields are always expanding and evolving.

Kind of, but regardless, you see ordinary people using simplified versions of more precise scientific terms and concepts all the time ("theory" is a good example of this). If I say "a white man attacked me", only the most pedantic twit is going to say "nuh-uh, race doesn't exist, blah blah phenotype blah blah alleles blah blah..." - everyone else will know what I'm talking about.

To give perhaps the most obvious example, the "white race" may not technically be a race or subspecies or whatever, but just about everyone knows what it means. Ie, people with white skin who hail (originally, in the case of, say, Americans) from Europe. Whatever the differences in various genes, it works as a label.

It also works on at least some cultural and genetic levels. White Europeans share many common cultural norms, or did until very recently (Christianity being the most prominent one), and clearly share at least some genetic traits that are not normal elsewhere in the world - their particular skin colour being the most obvious one. A quick googling reveals that white skin may have evolved twice - once in Scandinavia and another time in people that migrated to Europe from the Middle East, FWIW.

Of course there was genetic drift, but the genetic drift between Eurasians and Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania is extremely small compared to the genetic diversity found in Africa.

If nothing else, humans have been around in Africa for so long, and the environment there is so dangerous (and thus conducive to both evolution and isolation), that it makes sense that there's the most genetic variation there.

I brought that point up because many justify genetic isolation in order to support the concept of biologically rooted races that could be accurately divided into black, white, asian, etc.

Humans did not directly evolve from Graecopithecus, it's not even in the genus Homo.

The problem with evolving from Graecopithecus - or even placing it in the evolutionary tree accurately - is that there's just so little evidence for it, whereas there's a wealth of evidence for the "out of Africa" theory. I agree it probably isn't the common ancestor of chimps & humans, as some scientists think it may be, but it still would be amusing if it did turn out to be the case, and the "out of Africa" theory was wrong.

There's always the possibility of some of our evolutionary pre-Homo path taking place in Eurasia. Alternatively, Graecopithecus could have been a descendant of an African hominin that branched off into the Balkans with little to no future evolutionary lines indirectly leading down to the evolution of the genus Homo.

Exactly.

Plenty of women worldwide are being held back by archaic traditions, especially in many Middle Eastern, Central Asian, African and Southeast Asian countries.

No argument from me on this count.

I do not deny any of this. Yet this does not conflict my original statement, that being that we should try to live egalitarian lives, trying to hold everyone to similar standards.

"Similar" standards I can get behind, I think. It's when people start wanting too much equality that things get really unpleasant, if history's any guide.

In fact there's more to gain from a scientist completely disproving climate change than scientists supporting it.

In terms of fame, and in theory, yes. In terms of funding and a career, absolutely not. There are enormous, trillion-dollar interests at stake, so saying "nah, you're all wrong" is going to piss off... basically the entire planet's political, media, and financial elite. That's a scary amount of opposition, and Mark Steyn's book documents plenty of cases of people staying quiet for fear of their jobs.

That the thing about science, it doesn't give a shit about money or political leanings, it only cares about offering up logical explanations of how the natural world functions.

I've no problem with any of that. However...

Does the same thing apply to scientists?

While Antarctic ice caps are increasing, the Arctic has seen a drastic decrease in ice.

There's about 30M cubic km of ice in Antarctica, and only about 1/1000th of that in the Arctic*. Under the circumstances, what happens in the north is far less important than the stuff in the south.

Anyway, the trend for Arctic sea ice is slightly negative**, but frankly in both cases we have a severe lack of long-term data. Oh sure, we know that vikings farmed in Greenland and stuff like that, indicating a much warmer climate, but the secretive sods still haven't shared their medieval satellite data with us :P . More seriously, as THIS article points out, we only began satellite measurements in 1979, and 38 years is borderline useless for climate trends. Oh sure, said article notes about how the Arctic was seemingly easier to sail in during the first half of the 20th Century, but there's no numbers to work with. It's a bit like sunspot trends - you need a lot of time to build up a decent amount of data, and we don't even have half a century's worth.

Under the circumstances, worrying about a tenth of a percent of the ice in the Antarctic seems a bit OTT. I expect what we're seeing (bearing in mind that I am sceptical of catastrophic man-made climate change) is just part of a natural cycle, and that whatever impact we're having on it is very minor.

*Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet / https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/a..._ice_sheet.htm
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/proje...volume-anomaly

**Links
https://wattsupwiththat.com/referenc...l-sea-ice-page

[GreenGoldSharpie]

Well then that would mean they're spouting a bunch of unfounded, fearmongering, bullshit to push a political agenda.

But the right has never been known to do that. So I donno what it could possibly be!

Honestly its just a fear of anything that isn't the norm. Us gays are right along there with you guys in terms of medical and psychological studies. And still these days we have a bunch of fucking idiots saying that we're like going around in packs trying to convert people into being gay. There was a dumbass on this very website saying that stupid shit a few weeks ago in a thread.

Man, they recycle, don't they? Heh. The converting people into "the lifestyle" thing is so old and churchy.

[Moralgy]

Herein lies why I don't actually bother with youtube or online politics all that much. In an arena where everyone has a platform the loudest generally win. It's particularly annoying these days when the trans community is specifically talking about violence and access to healthcare needs while the right debates our pronouns and identities for some odd reason. I just don't hear the things the right constantly harps on going around the community. It's odd, and even moreso when you consider trans folks have been the subject of any number of medical and psychological studies going back for almost a century.

Hell, Hirschfield was experimenting with hormone replacement therapy when the Nazis burned his library to the ground. We're talking long established stuff that is apparently being rehashed because a bunch of folks realized we exist.

It is an easy target that is easily condensed into a tweet. Honestly, I doubt they even give a shit that the research is over a century old at this point, they will still just keep screaming "damn liburals want men in womens restrooms". To relate it to Blair White, she is just going to be the one "okay" trans person cause she agrees with them on everything else, and the same will go for anyone else that agrees with them. Idk about others, but I really wouldn't want to be the figurehead of a movement that would instantly hate me for something unrelated to my opinions if they disliked my opinions.

[Dreknar20]

Ah yes its always good when shitposting causes vulnerable people to kill themselves.

good

Couldn't give even the slightest fuck of such a sad sack of shit who would do that

Not like we have a shortage of people.

[KrazyK923]

good

Couldn't give even the slightest fuck of such a sad sack of shit who would do that

Not like we have a shortage of people.

What an empathetic and totally not sociopathic human being.

lol. I'm glad you've revealed your true self. Don't cut yourself on all that edge. I guess I understand your boner over Garrosh now.

[Sky High]

good

Couldn't give even the slightest fuck of such a sad sack of shit who would do that

Not like we have a shortage of people.

#alltdatedge

[GreenGoldSharpie]

It is an easy target that is easily condensed into a tweet. Honestly, I doubt they even give a shit that the research is over a century old at this point, they will still just keep screaming "damn liburals want men in womens restrooms". To relate it to Blair White, she is just going to be the one "okay" trans person cause she agrees with them on everything else, and the same will go for anyone else that agrees with them. Idk about others, but I really wouldn't want to be the figurehead of a movement that would instantly hate me for something unrelated to my opinions if they disliked my opinions.

Well, I guess if you have no moral qualms about it you could make a lot of money?

Either way, you're right. I used to debate trans issues on Facebook. I heard the same 5 or 6 arguments across the entire space, and they're all easily countered. It just didn't matter because the next time it'd be the same.

Ended up running into a TERF and decided to quit for good on the issue. It's going to play out as it's going to play out, and we'll likely win the same way LGB folks are. We tend to pop up in friend circles and families, and folks just have to deal with it on a personal level instead of a political or social issue.