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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Australia's conservative government announced plans Friday to double university fees for humanities students, in a bid to push people into more useful, "job-relevant" courses like maths and science.
Under the proposal—which critics panned as an "ideological assault"—the cost of degrees like history or cultural studies will rise up to 113 percent to around US$29,000, while other courses such as nursing and information technology will become cheaper.
Education Minister Dan Tehan—an arts graduate with two advanced degrees in international relations—said the government wanted to corral young people towards "jobs of the future" to boost the country's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you are wanting to do philosophy, which will be great for your critical thinking, also think about doing IT," Tehan said.
The plan would help pay for an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and for cost cuts for courses like science, agriculture, maths and languages.
[...] "I'm an arts graduate and so is the minister for education so I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that we're completely unemployable," said opposition lawmaker Tanya Plibersek.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @01:31AM (16 children)
Publicly claim there are only two sexes, women and men are not physically equal, and feelings never override facts, and you'll find out how free thinking your free-thinkers really are.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @01:54AM
The extra genders only exist in your paranoid delusions and confused feelings. You're trying to institutionalize violence against all women. Your kind demands from all women, "papieren bitte."
At gunpoint where you've passed bathroom laws.
Those are the facts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 22 2020, @01:16PM (14 children)
The first is incorrect, and there is plenty of genetic and somatic evidence to prove it. The second is true but trivial, and only your strawman acedemics would say such a thing. The third is demonstrably false as any sociologist, primatologist, psychologist, and a fair number of med students can tell you.
Say these things, and you *will* get shouted down, for exactly that reason. "Free thinking" does not mean "my ignorance is just as functional, adaptive, important, and acceptable as someone else's knowledge." Get that through your skull.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @03:00PM (11 children)
There are people who are born deaf or blind.
Do we then conclude that Homo sapiens is not a being who depends on his or her sense of sound and sight?
If people can be born with an extra finger, then why do we say people have 5 fingers on their hand?
The arguments about homosexuals and transgenders are that any exceptional individual invalidates the general premise. This assumes we count an aberration or malformed individual as representative of the species. If this is true, then we must do away with the concept of malformation or defect altogether. We are moving this way already.
They removed homosexuality as a disorder from the psychiatric manual. Trangenderism (gender dysphoria) is still in it, but how much longer before political pressure causes that too to be removed? The politicians have spoken...
The liberal world has done all it can to dissociate sexual intercourse from reproduction.
It's no coincidence that acceptance of homosexuality as normal has grown. The purpose of sex organs is for pleasure, they say. Therefore there is nothing defective in being sexually attracted to the same sex, since you can pleasure each other. Trangenderism is far nuttier than simple homosexuality since many of the transgender people mutilate their own bodies to conform to their diseased mental self image.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @11:07PM
Transgenderism and gender dysphoria are not the same thing. You can be transgender without having gender dysphoria and vice versa. Since you don't know that basic fact, it illustrates the understanding you have of the rest of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:09AM (7 children)
You know you're talking to the site's resident lesbian right? :)
You're also missing the point, and I suspect deliberately: nature "intends" certain things, but because nature isn't conscious and its replication mechanisms aren't perfect, errors happen. Yes, I am fully aware that I am technically an error and my germ line ends with me, *and I do not care.* The point is that nature isn't moral or even truly intentional. Mistakes happen. Am I "normal?" No, but neither am I some sort of evil existence. I just am.
You seem to be following a very zero-sum line of thinking here, and it's one I've seen people trot out when the subject at hand is race, sexuality, ethnicity, just about anything. It looks to me like you're assuming that tolerance and lack of bigotry means you will necessarily lose something, some status or privilege or power. Why make that assumption? This world is absolutely huge; there's enough room in it for everyone so long as we aren't hurting other people. And the word "normal" pops up a lot. What is "normal" to you, and why does "abnormal" in itself necessarily mean bad?
And for whatever this is worth, I didn't wake up one morning and go "you know a strict vagitarian diet sounds like a good idea." My mother told me, when I came out to her in junior year of high school, that she'd suspected since I was *four.* How that works is a bit of a mystery. Apparently I kept saying I wanted to marry various Disney princesses?
Anyway, one of the best arguments from personal experience I have for this is I knew I was liked girls before I knew what gay was. We all got "the talk" in my family early on, and I'd always assumed I'd get married to a man and have babies because This Is A Thing Which Is Done (TM). We weren't told about gay people, though. I had no idea that was a thing until age 12, and even then I thought it was something that only applied to men, a choice they made, and something they did purely to spite women, kind of like an extended "eww, girls have cooties" thing.
Going from childhood to adolescence, I kept wondering why I didn't feel the things for boys my friends and my sister apparently did, but just chalked it up to being a late bloomer, not helped by being very shy and very deaf. I also figured that feelings for other girls and women, real or fictional, which in hindsight were *very* obviously attraction were admiration or aspiration or even jealousy. The concept of same-sex attraction between women as its own thing was simply not on my radar. At that point, I thought *everyone* whether male or female wanted to hug and kiss and touch women as a matter of course (because they're so pretty!), and that eventually every woman started feeling some nebulous urge along the lines of "it's time for a family" and started a relationship with a man based purely on pragmatic terms. I figured things would continue on as they did before afterwards, just with a family involved.
Actually learning that 1) first off, no, most girls do NOT want to touch and kiss other girls, especially not on the lips, no, not even best friends, 2) "gay" is a thing that happens to women too, and 3) I was not in the least interested in boys was very jarring. The realization hit around 9th grade when I realized I was feeling things for a close friend that matched descriptions of a woman falling in love with a man to the letter, and caused no small amount of internal angst. It took me almost two years of frantic research and questioning before I realized what I was.
Does this help at all?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:01PM (6 children)
No hatred towards you for being gay.
I even supported gay marriage.
I support letting people live their own lives.
What I do not support is the slippery slope of normalizing the idea that any gender related idea a person may have is normal and to be promoted especially to children. The transgender thing is off the charts crazy as is encouraging parents to mutilate the bodies of their pre-pubescent children irreversibly. Gay acceptance led to gay promotion led to promotion of what I just said. Transgenderism in particular is mental illness, and it's now state sanctioned. Pure politics, not science.t
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:51AM (5 children)
I admit I'm looking at trans* issues from an outside point of view, but having three separate FtM friends, *all* of whom are doing much better living as men, I have to disagree with you on this. Those three are also three of the nicest men I've ever met and we still keep in regular contact.
Why this fixation on "mutilating" by the way? I can't help but think when you say transgender you are explicitly and exclusively referring to trans*women,* and have some kind of residual castration fear driving your thinking. Also, from what little I know about this stuff, kids who think they might be trans* get puberty blockers, not surgery, don't they? I'm under the impression that you have to be at least the age of emancipation to get surgery done.
Finally, please consider that most of the anti-trans* arguments you're using here, in particular the "it's mental illness" one, are the exact same things deployed full force against plain old gay and lesbian people not so very long ago. I realize sexual orientation and gender identity aren't the same thing, but given the scope and intent of those tired old dehumanizing "arguments," the difference becomes mostly academic.
That "gay promotion" thing is especially telling, as it's loaded with projection. The kind of people who trot that one out usually follow on with "brainwashing!" and "adults twisting vulnerable little kids' miiiiiinds!!1111one" (as you did up above), as if this is something like religion. The irony is palpable there, as religious indoctrination is precisely the kind of abuse you're screaming about and inflicted on children by adults in precisely this manner.
And why not get to know some of these people? I came dangerously close to being a TERF in college and frankly have not had too many positive experiences with MtFs, but I do know a few and listening to them and their stories has changed my thinking somewhat.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:30PM (4 children)
Is the question one of mental illness or of what should be indulged? I mean, not even really playing devil's advocate how would you define a mental illness? One of the most normal definitions would be something that impairs your normal functioning as a human. And what is our normal functioning? Well literally the only reason that humans persist is because of reproduction. Homosexuality does not preclude this but it does greatly decrease the chance of successful procreation. And so in my mind homosexuality is a mental illness. So I think the question is one of indulgence or not.
You'll generally find all the ethics the old religions teach were largely about helping to ensure successful reproduction paired with a stable society. Each and every person that was born was a benefit to these societies. Now a days that's no longer so true, and in many cases each person born is an increasingly large burden on society. And while I think there is obviously a divide between gays and normal folks on a variety of levels, that divide is not inherently especially destructive beyond a possible gender imbalance in society if homosexuals are not roughly evenly spread between the genders. And so I see no problem with indulging it, though I would not encourage it.
Transgenders? Many transgenders want to try to pass as the gender they adopt. I think this is generally going to be destructive in many ways. There are obviously immense differences between a man and a woman beyond what can be changed with a bit of hack and slash and drugs. And there are numerous other issues. For instance when somebody is looking for a partner, what are they looking for? I mean not at first but in general you are looking for somebody who you may eventually raise a family with and carry on both your genes with. It's not just to find some place to stick their dick. With transgenders this is not possible. And so their "passing" could be quite disruptive to society. But their not passing is also destructive to society. This [youtube.com] video is almost like a skit from some comedy show. Except, it's real life. Indulging transgender stuff requires pretending that some guy who is clearly is a guy, is a woman. It's sort like an enforced game of The Emperor's New Clothes. That's not cool.
There is also the issue of the individuals themselves. People who claim to be transgender also frequently have numerous other mental illnesses - ones where calling them mental illness is not so 'edgy'. They also have extremely high rates of drug abuse, suicide, criminality, and other issues. The typical argument against this is that that's because they're not accepted by society yet this runs into two problems: (1) the same is also true in countries where they are generally much more accepted and (2) you don't see anything on a remotely comparable scale from the countless other groups that have been socially ostracized throughout history, including homosexuals. And on just a personal level, I've run into quite a lot of transgenders in the software world and, to keep it short, those guys are mostly just awful and very screwed up people. There are also a disproportionate number of transgenders that then immediately race to compete against women in physical sports, where they tend to dominate them in a plainly absurd fashion. See: Fallon Fox [wikipedia.org]. Goes transgender, decides to become an MMA fighter at the spritely age of 38, starts crushing with minimal training and was headed for the top echelons until women started refusing to fight him. In sports such as weight lifting, trans are now dominating.
It's because of these considerations (among many others) that lead me to believe that transgenders should of course be treated as a mental disorder, but what really matters - one that is not indulged.
---
And similar to the above poster, I'm referring exclusively to mtf's here. The vast majority of trans are mtfs (which again is further indicative that there's something unusual going on here) and, to my knowledge, I've never met a ftm.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:37PM (3 children)
All this boils down to "I think trans* people are icky" with a thin layering of what may be characterized as a secular approximation to Catholic natural-law theology. That's...weak. Oh, right, and some whataboutism concerning transwomen in sports, and a denial that FtMs exist because you haven't personally (that you know of!) met any.
My hypothesis about why there seem to be fewer transmen than transwomen out there is that 1) it's a lot easier for a woman to pass as male than the other way around (see "Sweet Polly Oliver" for historical examples) and 2) society seems to have somewhat less of a problem with butch women than femme men. I would bet there are a lot of stone butches out there who are actually FtM but settled on that because it's "close enough" and a lot less dangerous. Similar to how I don't wear pride symbols and just kind of let everyone assume I'm straight in public because I'm femme.
Regarding sports...well, I'm not a sports fan so on the surface of it I could not care less. But isn't the obvious solution just doing hormone testing for every athlete, and if anyone's above a certain testosterone level, disqualify them? Ciswomen can end up out of range too, just so you know.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @06:47PM (2 children)
I'd look more to Stoics than the Catholics. When one starts declaring a human title, such as kings, to have a distinct place in the natural order of existence, you've long since lost the thread. But in any case I'm not sure how you git icky as a synopsis out of that. My early experiences with trans were incredibly positive and that stuck with me for years. My views changed over time entirely due to to experience and research.
The sports topic I mentioned because I think it's interesting but because it also mirrors so many aspects in society. They already do testosterone testing, and men are only allowed to compete against women when their t-levels are below a certain point. Do you know why people on PCP seem to have super-human abilities? It's kind of neat. The drug can't just suddenly give you strength you weren't already physically capable of. You, even a female, already have more than enough bone and muscle mass to basically destroy yourself. You can easily lift things heavy enough to break your bones or engage in sufficiently strenuous exercise to rip your muscles to shreds. The reason you can't do that is because your brain forces your body to stop at what it deems a safe threshold.
All PCP does (in this regard) is turns off that threshold detector. Suddenly you can leap from several stories and keep running, a broken leg or two notwithstanding, take on multiple guys with ease, and more. This [youtube.com] video shows what one guy can do when on PCP. Getting hit by two tasers simultaneously, baton to the thigh, a pile pepper spray straight to the eyes? Nothing. And the cops know what's up - the reason they jump about 5 feet back anytime he starts resisting. He could easily break any of them like a twig.
The point I make with the above is that it's not so easy to determine what makes one person (or gender) what they are, even in the most obvious fashion of physical ability. There are obvious things like bone density, testosterone levels, musculature, etc but there is also equally obviously other factors that result in the sum whole. Recent research [sci-hub.tw] (published in BMJ, sci-hubbed to remove paywall) indicates that the men will retain, relative to women, a significant portion of their previous physical ability. But do you really need research to show this? Trans make up some ridiculously small percent of competitors yet they are dramatically over-represened as a world champions in an increasing variety of sports.
Should we continue to allow men to participate as women it's likely that real women's sports will die and be replaced by men. I don't think that's good for anybody. Women's sports were introduced to encourage and enable women to participate. Now that invitation is going to gradually be replaced because we want to allow men to call themselves women. I mean this is *stupid*. And I think this has analogs to every area in society. Men pretending to be women is socially destructive for negligible, if any, gain.
--
As for FtMs. I never suggested they didn't exist. Obviously they do, but they are going to have a negligible if any negative impact on society. Women, in general, are the ones treated by society as needing a helping hand. As one slightly bemusing example women already outnumber men in universities by a ratio of about 3:2, yet you'd be labeled all sorts of stuff if you ever suggested we need to get more men into universities. I'd also mock people suggesting as such. And we generally continue to preach the need for getting more women into universities. *Shrug*, just how we're wired. If women are happy giving up the little perks and joining the other side, then more power to 'em - I'm sure I'd enjoy having a beer with them.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 26 2020, @01:45AM (1 child)
This may be one of the most :bro: things I've ever read 9_9
So in a nutshell, you're worried about sports, and you think women have it pretty sweet compared to men. What is it like to have that much money and that little life experience that you can say stuff like that with a straight face?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:04AM
Now if you think that's an accurate representation of what I said, then clearly we're both wasting our time here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:22AM (1 child)
Says the tightly circumcised protestant. Ermagherd, genital mutilation! Except the one I have a fetish for is ok!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:58PM
You are hearing voices in your head and seeing things. Sounds like schizophrenia.
But since you brought it up, all my sons are uncircumcised -- a conscious decision on my part.
There is nothing wrong with a healthy body.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:19AM (1 child)
The second is not trivial at all, at least not if you listen to a lot of women. They claim they need protection from males, need safe spaces, are afraid to walk down the street, are too fearful to speak out for themselves, etc... because any random male can dominate them at any moment. Then those same people tell everyone that sexual differences don't matter and bringing them up makes you sexist. You can't have it both ways. It's either a problem or it isn't, it can't be both.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:40AM
Why do we not have a -1 Rapist mod?