Yes, exactly. Medicine is progressing very quickly and I don't understand where these people get this idea that modern science is fake.
We have big and complex problems, sure. Yeah we're taking a stab at more complex issues, like anxiety and depression. Which, might I remind everyone, had a solution of "idk lock them up I guess" until about 40 years ago.
Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common. Queer theory, for example, isn't like NASA creating cordless power tools for the people, or discovering the benefits of grooved pavement for space shuttle landings.
It is eminently clear to anyone with their head on straight that technical research will lead to a positive return overall. You are correct that the specifics about how inventions come about can be random.
Here[1] is a queer theory journal. Let me know if this is going to help us accidentally discover a new industrial process that feeds more people or saves lives in some other way. You don't need to have precognitive abilities to correctly dismiss this drivel and save everyone a headache.
> Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common.
That's a lot of words when you could have just said that you're against individualism and personal freedom.
Given the rather direct connection between Alan Turing dying because he was persecuted for queerness, this seems to be a rather odd angle to argue; there seems to me to quite a bit of evidence that queer studies might significantly reduce things like suicide rates [1].
It's also rather irrelevant: queer studies doesn't get very much funding to begin with. One estimate I found placed research "on sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) populations" at 0.8% of the NIH budget, the majority of which went to HIV related research [2].
Which all really seems to rather disingenuous given that the funding cuts that are currently taking place are across the board: "The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut" [3]. This includes massive cuts at NASA, to the point that many current and future missions are in danger of being canceled:
"This would result in the cancellation of a number of high-profile missions and campaigns, according to the new documents. For example, Mars Sample Return — a project to haul home Red Planet material already collected by NASA's Perseverance rover — would get the axe. So would the New Horizons mission, which is exploring the outer solar system after acing its Pluto flyby in July 2015, and Juno, a probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016." [4]
As a result of these cuts we are literally going to know less about Jupiter. And you're off on some weird gender studies tangent.
BMI is an excellent metric for measuring your own body. Its fantastic. Its not perfect, but considering its two numbers, its amazingly useful and a super easy way to quantify how unhealthy you are. If you are not currently using Body fat percentage, and know what yours is at this exact instant, you should use BMI instead.
Here's a perfectly correct general statement: Any effort spent telling average people to not use BMI makes society less healthy. Average people are not getting BF% measured when you tell them not to use BMI. They are just ignoring all metrics and eating potato chips instead.
I disagree with its use personally. There are many, many people whose BMI is in the 'Level 1 obese' category, but they're carrying around extra muscle not fat. Muscle is anywhere from 12-18% denser than fat. Also, DEXA scans are incredibly cheap (~$50) these days.
I do agree with your general statement about its use.
There's no reason NOT to use it, generally, just recognize that it has severe limitations when applied to the individual. Notably, effects of training and exercise on health using BMI as any sort of baseline or incremental figure of merit.
This is true of so many rules of thumb. The fact that something doesn’t work in all cases does not mean that those cases that it identifies as problematic can be ignored.
Spend less than you make is another one - sure there are edge cases where that is not appropriate. But in most cases, it is, but most people arguing that it doesn’t apply to them are they very people to whom it should apply most strongly.
These food deserts are exclusively caused by completely unjustifiable crimes committed by those lower income people. They aren't stealing bread, rice, beans, vegetables. They are stealing flat screen TVs and destroying their local Walmart.
Food deserts only exist where the negative cost of being burglarized has managed to exceed the large income of fulfilling humanity's third most basic need besides air and water.
middle class has shrunk only because the upper class has expanded. Every American citizen living with property taxes is n missed payments from homelessness. unhoused is a misnomer, especially in this context of losing your home.
surgical in this sense means only blowing up the bus stop instead of leveling 6 blocks with a MOAB. Your feelings about safety are supposed to be negatively affected by a bomb. Whether that bomb is a precise or strategic bomb is immaterial.
In places like Gaza, "surgical strike" often means "only" blowing up the support pillar of an occupied multi-story apartment complex in the middle of the night.
Whether we believe the lies of the Israeli government is also not quite related to the topic of Surgical vs Strategic Bombing. Clearly Gaza has been subject to the latter though.
Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver.
If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.
If you put a man into a game of finding the best person out of 10,000 women, you're going to find the man at the championship. This isn't a per capita or population scale thing. Competitions are intensely personal games.
Sports are a big part of American culture and smugly ruining them with nonsense makes Americans mad. This is not difficult to understand.
Testosterone levels fluctuate more on a minute by minute scale with such activities rather than a day by day scale. We should ban exogenous testosterone use, and we already do.
Men and women are not the same. They are a distinct, binary grouping. One cannot measure up to the metrics, characteristics, etc of the other. Women have their own sports leagues because of this. Men do not have exclusive leagues, its illegal in most western countries anyway under discrimination laws. Women just cant compete at these levels though. Thats not a moral judgement but a plain reading of the facts.
As far as the incoming remark about "controlling what high school students do in private with each other", I will rather present you with a question:
Should we make it impossible for thousands of girls to get a gold medal, XOR allow 1 person, born a male and currently pretending/presenting as a woman, to dominate the competition? This is the actual, real life decision that leagues of all kinds must make, from football to chess.
Sports governing bodies in the UK are rapidly rewriting their policies to stop these men from competing in women's sports, after a recent Supreme Court judgement ruled this amounts to unlawful sex discrimination against women. So hopefully this ongoing insult to all the women who've worked so hard to compete in their sport of choice will soon be over.
That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.
This is a morally correct and minimum acceptable response. Leagues must admit they were wrong (probably impossible), and mail out letters and trophies (trivial).
These governing bodies need to Do Better. They need to work on themselves.
Because the left never cared about the rules, except to circumvent them when in power and to use them as a way to prevent the other side from making meaningful progress when not.
