488 Comments

If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers as to who better recognizes and sees through sophistry, is more comfortable considering,and better understands, the arguments of the opposing side, etc… my money would be on the lawyers (I’d take a Bronx based slip and fall attorney over Masha Gessen).

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True, lawyers are trained in Cicero's exercise - need to know the opposing case to know their own - BUT by the same measure, I'd assume the lawyers are lying 50% of the time on average, and that I may not know which.

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In the American system lawyers are *supposed* to engage in a degree of sophistry on behalf of their clients — they are ethically bound to be zealous partisans. So in the context of a legal case, everybody knows (or should know) to take their arguments, framing, etc… with a grain of salt. However, that practice, both in doing and in dealing with the other side doing, tends to make them competent at seeing through such things in other circumstances.

A lawyer who isn’t good at recognizing and dealing with such things will suffer immediate negative consequences and won’t be a lawyer for very long. That does not seem to be true for writers/journalists—you can thrive with a combination of pleasing prose and positions flattering to you target audience. (A typical story by an activisty “journalist” with its emphasis, omissions, selective citation and quotation, adjectives, etc…comes across as a poorly written brief to an attorney, but a warm and comfy blanket to somebody that agrees or is sympathetic to the journalist).

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Mostly agree, Joe.

But just as there is a winnowing of lawyers who fail to successfully and zealously engage in sophistry AND/OR fail to see and appreciate the apparent (to jury/judge) strengths of 'both sides', there is a winnowing of writers in the interactive forums of critical readers, such as this.

Smart readers, such as yourself, choose where you browse.

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Smart readers are a tiny fraction of the market for monetized attention. Small enough to be irrelevant to large media organizations outside of specialized press.

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Exactly why this 'under the radar' forum is a pleasure, for me.

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True, but I also feel like I often see that zealous mindset carry through with lawyers on other matters once they've taken a side. Maybe they'll be different with their personal friends, but in any kind of public forum I notice lawyers speak more like they're arguing a case in court than ever trying to honestly assess both sides or be willing to concede points to the side they don't broadly agree with.

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Yep. The thing I find tedious about so many lawyers on sites like this is they seem to think that learning a certain narrow skill of argumentation makes them automatically experts on any topic even if they just learned about it 5 minutes ago. It’s also tedious how say tax or corporate lawyers will pontificate about constitutional law because they took one course in constitutional law 30 years ago, and this makes them an expert.

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I mean, that’s just people on the internet. Practicing lawyers (as opposed to media people with a JD) are probably among the least offensive in this way in my experience. The smart ones at least know not to walk into a field of land mines because they are professionally trained to avoid exactly that mistake. But give a EE or a VC startup guy a running start, and he’ll plow through bad, ill-informed arguments to defend prior similarly ill-informed positions.

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Lol this comment is so trying to be clever I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to say.

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Lawyers have to be able to argue either side of a case.

Journalists used to be able to see all sides of an issue too but that went away in 2016 with the "Journo-list" campaign by major mainstream media reporters to sink the Trump campaign.

It only took 10 years for journalism to be considered a disreputable profession.

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Eh…my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession, partly because the historic norm is that of partisan journalism where it was widely understood that the journalists themselves were propagandists.

There was a move away from that to a degree, which led both to more accurate reporting and more misleading reporting (journalists were able to cloak their biases with the objective reputations of their orgs) and over the last 30 of years we had a move back towards the older model.

What happened since Trump was mostly more organizations and journalists spending their “objective” reputational capital aggressively by being more nakedly ideological and partisan…leading their reputations to decline…

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"my understanding is that journalism was historically seen as a dishonorable profession"

Not mine, for example, if you read Orlando Figes' account of the Russian Revolution, "A People's Tragedy", you'll see how diplomats valued foreign journalists in Russia for their in-depth knowledge of Russian politics.

Any foreign diplomat who values American journalists for their knowledge of US politics today is delusional.

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“JournoList” was from 2008. Slack channels have replaced Gmail groups.

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The important thing about journo list was not whether they used gmail but that journalists from most of the major media had virtual meetings every week to coordinate their messages and attacks on the Trump campaign.

It was an unheard of lack of objectivity and professionalism.

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They did it to coordinate against Hillary in 2008 and not Trump.

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In 2016 ... quite so. This comment section is infested with lying right wing trolls who seem a lot more interested in Nate's standard use of Gessen's preferred pronouns than in his substantive arguments.

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lol I know. It’s interesting how many bad faith right wing nut jobs are on Nate’s comment section whenever he posts anything.

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My father, who was born in 1933, was a photo-journalist. In the late 1970s/early 80s he was already starting to watch, with a depth of disgust that was uncommon in him, as journalism started swirling the drain. It hasn't been in just the past 10 years. The degradation has been happening for a long time, or, as Pseudonym Joe says below, maybe from forever.

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LOL. Your comment makes it evident that you have never been able to see--or care about--all sides of an issue.

The night before the election the NYT's front page was completely covered with articles about Hillary's emails, in line with the rest of the MSM for months. Trump received billions of dollars worth of free media. If the media had wanted to sink his campaign they would have, much as they did to Kerry's and Gore's.

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Unlike the very reputable law profession.

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Right, lawyers don’t represent themselves as the fourth estate, there is much justified suspicion of lawyers trying to argue you into something, and whether in the role of lawyer, hack, or politician they are rightly distrusted and pilloried ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rOAl8EYlz1s ).

The question of whether a poisoner better understands and identifies poison is different then whether you should accept a glass of wine from them.

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If I had to wager between journalists and lawyers seeing through sophistry my money would be on none of the above or journalists. Sorry but I’ve just seen way too many lawyers who completely overrate their argumentative and analytical skills.

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I would take a reporter over a "journalist" any day.

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I am defining a journalist as a reporter, and Gessen is for the most part very good on Russia and Russia related matters which Gessen covers.

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When you compare the worst in the camp yes of course. But I guarantee, absolutely guarantee, that the dumbest, worst journalists you've seen are much worse than the worst lawyers.

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I really, really really doubt that in part because there are so many more lawyers out there. The problem with lawyers is even the worst ones often have a real arrogance to them that just compounds their shortcomings. (The people you see on Fox News and the like for the most part really aren’t journalists.)

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Okay if you play the no true Scotsman canard, of course you can twist what you were saying into being true. Have fun with that.

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You're the one twisting. The No True Scotsman fallacy (not "canard", a word you don't understand the meaning of) doesn't apply here. Angus is *by definition* a Scotsman, regardless of what he puts on his porridge. But no way are the ideologues and political operatives at Fox "journalists" by definition. Fox itself claimed in court that they are "entertainers" and that no rational person would believe that their opinion mongering is factual.

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First, take your semantics and shove them. This is an unhelpful "akshually" comment through and through. Everyone calls them journalists. They're journalists. They're bad, but you don't get to say they're not Scots, when everyone refers to them and treats them as Scots.

I have a feeling we're talking about a different group of people anyway. I was thinking more along the lines of Michael Hobbes, who absolutely calls himself a journalist.

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LOL, I don’t think I’m being overly pure by saying I don’t consider opinion writers journalists. Opinion writers with the exception of people like say a Paul Krugman when he’s writing about economics are really just better positioned people than people commenting on social media platforms. I am defining journalists as being people who are actually doing what one would consider reporting, and I’d even include people like tech writers who are reviewing gadgets or food critics who are actively going to restaurants to write about them.

I don’t think this distinction is overly pure or hard to understand.

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Is Paul Krugman a journalist or not? Oh you think he's good so that's what makes him a journalist?

Would you consider a janitor who's bad at cleaning toilets actually not a janitor? Sure he gets paid for it, but he's not actually doing it, so he's not a janitor? Freaking boring semantics, dude, good luck with that

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I'd take Marcia Clark and Chris Darden over Masha Gessen... read into that what you will.

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LOL, that says a lot more about you than it does Gessen. There seems to me to be a huge muddle in terms of the response to the situation in Gaza right now, and many peole are taking Gessen’s position on Gaza across the political spectrum. Unlike say abortion, there doesn’t seem to be clear, obvious positions on this topic. (And I am saying this as someone who for the most part disagrees with Gessen on Gaza though at the same time there are lots of parts of me that is on Gessen’s side.)

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Better call Saul.

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Seeing you use "they/them" pronouns for a person makes me lose some respect for you as a truth-seeker. Using incorrect pronouns just because someone suffers from a delusion is not what a truth-seeking person would do.

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Pronoun debates aren't relevant to Nate's argument, so who gives a shit?

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I give a shit. Truth matters, always. Masha Gessen is a woman.

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When I wrote the data conversions for the National Cancer Institute's SEER dataset and the NACCR cancer registries in 1992, it was necessary to preserve a 5 valued sex field, to accommodate the various genetically ambiguous (ie, NON BINARY) tissue types information that had different implications for metastatic risk in the context of various cancers.

Being ignorant of a fact, should not suggest to you that you are correct about it...

We don't know about Masha, and that's her business.

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Mark, I just don't believe this. No medical organization in 1992 would have ever thought there were 5 human sexes. (And no medical org does now either; they're just too afraid to say so.) Are there certain X/Y chromosomal abnormalities that affect fractions of a percent of the human population that might be convenient to keep track of in the same data field? Sure. But that doesn't mean there are 5 sexes for humans. The fact that we recognize these as "abnormalities" simply affirms the basic sexual binary of all mammals.

I really can't believe this is a serious conversation in our society. Functional adults don't need to have "the birds and the bees" explained to them.

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Here is the most recent data from NAACCR on the "Top five Most Commonly Diagnosed Cancers in North America by Sex, All Races":

https://www.naaccr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-sex.pdf

As you can see, there are only two sexes reported, male and female.

Yes, there can be tissue abnormalities that disguise sex and maybe those need to be tracked in some circumstances. But what fraction of people have such tissue abnormalities? And is Masha Gessen one of them? I would bet a large sum of money that she did not decide she is "nonbinary" by having an assay of a tissue sample.

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Here are the 2023 SEER coding instructions for Sex, p. 76

https://seer.cancer.gov/manuals/2023/SPCSM_2023_MainDoc.pdf

Code the sex (gender) of the patient.

Code Description

1 Male

2 Female

3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)

4 Transsexual, NOS

5 Transsexual, natal male

6 Transsexual, natal female

9 Not stated/Unknown

Definitions

Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual

phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as

X0/XY mosaicism.

Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.

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MarkS, I don't guess you want to know, but I would like to tell:

As I recall from 32 years later, NACCR indeed had a much simpler coding for Sex, perhaps: male/female or male/female/unk or something that you might consider equivalent and BINARY. I was CDC lead for the NAACCR project for CDC for an interval in the early 90's. But it was NCI's SEER ( and perhaps ACoS'd NCDB) that had a 5 valued Sex field (and perhaps more, for Unknown or Missing).

In an adjacent post below, I've provided the citation, link, and coding from the 2023 coding manual and it is now 7-valued, including 'Other', and 'NotStated/Unknown'. I can't be certain if this is unchanged from 1992, but looked to my 70 year old eyes as though they have ADDED a couple Sex values.

When Bernie Sanders got his first bill passed ~1992 (for a National Breast Cancer Registry; in final passage it may have had other names on it, he was a freshman), the way I implemented the bill was to visualize and build the data infrastructure for a US full population Cancer Registry, for ALL cancers and all cancer data, as, within the margin of error, it was roughly just as hard and expensive to do for ALL as for breast alone, and would do a LOT more good.

In addition to:

a) the then (~1988) new shoe-string NAACCR population based registry you noted (I was the second CDC project officer managing the funding, think Ron Aubert did it 1989-1991 or so) and

b) the high-end, high detail high cost but limited scope NCI-SEER (point: Jennifer Seifert) population registry, there was

c) a third major cancer registry, a hospital-based registry used largely by the American College of Surgeons to stage cancer and to accredit hospital cancer surgery programs for quality of care, called then and still, the National Cancer Database, ACoS-NCDB (point: Herman Menck). But it was not population-based.

Also, there were several large (multistate) commercial cancer registries systems (CASURNET, by Barry Gordon out of CA and academic/non-profits? (Rocky Mountain Cancer Data System) by Larry Derrick - a good Mormon out of Utah!, and the Kentucky Cancer Registry (tobacco funded!) point persons: Tom Tucker and a wonderful young redhead tech guy, forgetting his name.

The tech leads of these largest/strongest extant cancer registries supplied the core DB technicians for the 1st national population - based cancer registry, at CDC, which I was charged to pull together to implement Bernie's first Bill.

At the time, there were literally HUNDREDS of other small, often hospital specific and simple, cancer registry systems in the US. So once we had the consensus DB hammered out among the 'big boys' & Jennifer ~1993 we invited 120 of them to Chicago for a meeting to learn about the first US call for cancer data, and by late 1993 or 1994, CDC had a first draft data of a National Population-based Cancer Registry.

But there were many steps. First, I/CDC called a series of meetings of the tech guys to make sausage.

The way you make a single master/national DB out of multiple non- compatible DB's has a LOT of steps, requires a LOT of knowledge about how people have interpreted data entry instructions over the years, in a lot of places, a knowledge of the periodic publications and needs for consistency of coding over time, and is painstaking nerdy work, but generally one wants to do a lossless join and merge to the extent one can. But sometimes one can't.

Back to SEX

One indeed wants a single sex field populated for every cancer case in the DB / in the US. So, if the various incompatible extant registry systems were collecting:

1) a two valued Sex char (M/F), where M = male

2) a two valued integer field (1/0) where 1= male

3) a two valued float field (0./1.) where 0.=male

4) a two valued text string (Female/Male), where Male =male

5) a three valued integer field (1/2/0) where 2=male and 0=missing or unknown,

etc.

Then, to put all the data in one database without discarding any, if one has at least one 3 valued field, one MUST have at least a three valued Sex field in the lossless merge. One needs to keep track of how to 'recode' the M, 1, 0., Male, and 2 from the respective sources into a single consistent code representing the Sex concept 'male' as defined in the data coding manual, when the data are merged into the master DB.

So the situation circa 1992 was similar to the above for nearly ALL cancer registries' Sex fields, most were either 2, 3, or perhaps 4 valued (with meanings of male, female, missing and/or unknown). Note: to put this hypothetical example of a 4 valued field into a 3 valued DB will lose data, technicall - it will lose the distinction between 'missing' and 'unknown'. This difference may be meaningful at the local source level, since a missing may indicate more research to be done, but unknown might suggest one completed the due diligence and this is as good as it gets. But at a national level one may not need to preserve such distinction, and one might decide to merge missing and unknown into a single code. I don't have my records, and don't recall the consensus for Sex in the CDC call for data. These, and many such judgements were made by a CDC organized technical committee with representations as above.

But for the case with NCI-SEER (and perhaps ACoS-NCDB, since both were much more intensive and specific systems than all the rest), I recall specifically that 'Sex was a 5-valued field'. Today it is 7-valued.

Within a 1 year of funding by Sander's Bill, we hammered out operationalizable consensus standards for a close-enough to loss-less merge of targeted ('reportable') cancer data nationwide from over 100 systems.

Then we developed software (EDITS - Exchangeable-edits, Data-dictionary, and Information Translation Standard) to simplify and automate the re-coding of disparate systems' codes for meaning (in a reliable and documented way) into one standard format. The recode logic was written centrally, and used by all systems as part of their submission. Many systems quickly change to national standard on their own for simplicity. Last I checked, 30 years later, CDC was still using (regularly updated versions of ) EDITS for this facilitation of standards and cleanly edited submissions.

Think this was a nice example of building a national system that did not step on smaller scale commercial cancer registry interests, and it was done more quickly than anyone hoped. But it took much longer to get quality data entry on the ground at each clinical surgery facility.

But to recap, NCI-SEER standardized on multi-valued Sex data over a generation ago, and it was the gold standard acknowledged by ALL the other US cancer registry systems, except for the competition with the ACoS' NCDB, a peer system but engineered around clinical cancer surgery quality control instead of population-based epidemiology.

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You could add that during test trials for the Covid vaccines, results were reported for only two sexes.

Any other sexes should have been prohibited from the vaccine until adequate trials had been conducted. Except trans-nuts never believed their own BS so the male/female vaccine results were good enough for them.

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Here are the 2023 SEER coding instructions for Sex, p. 76

https://seer.cancer.gov/manuals/2023/SPCSM_2023_MainDoc.pdf

Code the sex (gender) of the patient.

Code Description

1 Male

2 Female

3 Other (intersex, disorders of sexual development/DSD)

4 Transsexual, NOS

5 Transsexual, natal male

6 Transsexual, natal female

9 Not stated/Unknown

Definitions

Intersex: A person born with ambiguous reproductive or sexual anatomy; chromosomal genotype and sexual

phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. An example is 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, also known as

X0/XY mosaicism.

Transsexual: A person who was assigned one gender at birth based on physical characteristics but who self-identifies psychologically and emotionally as the other gender.

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Yes, exactly. The intersex/DSD category is 0.018% of all people:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/

The other categories you list are purely internal mental states: "self-identifies psychologically and emotionally".

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Sorry, you don't believe that Masha Geshen is one of these microscopically rare intersex cases. Stop gaslighting.

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Calling someone by a name they don't like has got to be the number one stupidest fucking definition of "truth-seeking".

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When the name is in service of a lie (that a person has "transitioned" from one sex to another, which is flatly impossible for any mammal), then refusing to use the name is indeed "truth seeking".

To enhance my argument, I will follow your lead by adding the word "fucking". That makes the argument so much stronger!

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Humans do all sorts of things that no other mammals do, so that's not really surprising or interesting. It's one of the nice things about having invented surgery and drugs. One can only imagine what kind of surgeries and drugs my cat would elect to take. Oh wait, I suppose we did give our cat a surgery. We neutered him. Conveniently altering his hormones and ending his sexual-dimorphic behaviors.

Anyway, it's just very pedantic. There are real truths to seek, and they don't generally involve obsessing over names.

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Humans cannot change sex, period. That is the truth.

A thousand years from now, if anyone digs up your bones, your true sex can be readily determined by chemical means, no matter what drugs or surgeries you may have had. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8967324/

But people who cosplay with drugs and surgeries as having changed sex impinge on the rights of the vast majority to single-sex spaces, places, events, competitions, etc, which have been a feature of every human society ever.

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How do you know? Have you given them a physical exam?

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They were examined at birth.

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That doesn't answer my question, but at least you used the correct pronoun. You say you care about truth but clearly you don't, you're entirely ideologically driven. The truth is that Gessen's preferred pronouns aren't relevant to the substance of Nate's article (or even to whether Gessen is a woman ... a socially constructed non-scientific term), and his use of them in accordance with standard journalistic practices is even less relevant to the arguments he is making. (It's actually hilarious that you right wing trolls are accusing him of not being a truth-seeker on an article in which he castigates Gessen and "excesses of the left".)

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Using obfuscating language is a form of lying.

Like George Carlin’s treatise on “real chocolatey goodness” meaning “no fucking chocolate.”

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"They were examined at birth"

It shows the incredible progress in scientific education that even a layman can examine a newborn baby and within 5 seconds, predict with great accuracy if 20 years later that baby will have upper body strength 20% above or below the population average.

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No progress needed, a glance at the genitals of a baby at birth will successfully sort into two groups, one of which will have (on average) upper body strength at least 20% greater than the other. These two groups are called "male" and "female". This sorting algorithm has been known and successfully used for thousands of years.

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I give a shit because using plural pronouns when referring to an individual is confusing and breaks the concentration of anyone who was taught proper grammar. Virtue signaling by using plural pronouns distracts from Mr Silver's message.

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It's not a "virtue signal" to refer to someone how they like to be referred to. It's standard practice. Deliberately eschewing it just reads as being insulting and contentious on a topic that Nate is not currently interested in arguing about.

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It's not confusing to intelligent people ... or honest ones; Nate's use of Gessen's preferred pronouns is standard practice among journalists and other decent people, not "virtue signaling" which is actually what all you right wing trolls are doing by whining about it.

P.S. sociopathic garbage blocked

(and complaining about "in order to alter power dynamics in a society" is right there with

"Jews will not replace us". Choosing pronouns in line with one's gender reality is marginally and tangentially related to resisting the power of bigots and other awful people.)

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Alternatively, it could also be seen as a post-modern attempt to blur the lines between established truth and "perceived truth" in order to alter power dynamics in a society. Some of us are sick of this shit.

And if you're a public person, and you have problems with being "misgendered" or "mispronouned" by others, you can always shut the fuck up and nobody will say anything about you.

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"they" as third person singular has been in use since the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

It's hilarious that these ignorant right wing bigots are attacking Nate for following standard prescribed usage (https://style.mla.org/using-singular-they/) while completely ignoring his substantive arguments, which include castigating Gessen (unfairly, IMO).

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I find the singular use of “they” very confusing. I once changed my mind about buying a book after reading that the main character was referred to as “they” throughout. I’m an old lady. And I suspect I’m not alone in that feeling.

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No, you're not the only ossified person.

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If nobody gives a shit, then why not call her by her birth gender instead of playing along with these silly games? After all, as you said it's not relevant and nobody cares.

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To be fair, calling out pronouns when they are irrelevant just because you can't have basic human respect for another person is something that trash would do.

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I have basic respect for all people, including the delusional. But I do not refer to someone who falsely believes he is the King of England as "his majesty", and I do not refer to someone who falsely believes she is "nonbinary" (no one is "nonbinary") with misnumbered plural pronouns.

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"I have basic respect for all people..."

The rest of your statement suggests this to be false.

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His "king of England" point is a good one. Either someone IS the King of England of he isn't. Similarly, either someone is a man or he is not. His own perceptions don't change anything. And under no circumstances can a person be plural, so "they" makes no sense at all.

I knew someone growing up who insisted (in all seriousness) that he was an 800 year old dragon. I knew someone else who got so caught up in D&D that he sometimes lapsed into his wizard character in real life. Would you foster these delusions in the name of politeness?

In reality, I did not know either a dragon or wizard. And that's the key. It's not about politeness; it's about whether reality exists.

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"And under no circumstances can a person be plural

"Brian, surely you know that the King of England persecuted Quakers in the 1600's (my ancestors) for addressing him with the singular form 'thee' and 'thou', instead of the royal plural (which was REQUIRED) 'you'? For religious reasons, Quakers reserved use of the singular 'you' for God. One of the many reasons Philadelphia was founded by William Penn, a Quaker. In English today, we still have the expression, 'the royal we'. Look it up.

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:-) I will gladly accept that the senior member of the royal family of a country may be addressed as plural, Mark.

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The hilarious thing is that you think Gessen is a man. And "they" has a long history of been used as a singular pronoun ... you right wing trolls are simply ignorant.

P.S. I'm pretty sure that Slaw is a sociopath and a bigot.

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I am pretty sure Gessen is a woman.

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If you accept that a lot of transgenderism is driven by mental illness are you really doing them any favors by indulging their delusional beliefs?

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"f you accept that a lot of transgenderism is driven by mental illness..."

But only terrible people think that.

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Or you could maybe look at substance abuse, criminal charges/convictions, mental illness, suicide rates, etc. among the trans population and think for yourself.

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So, science is "terrible" now? No. The medical term for it is "gender dysmorphia" and it has been documented in psychology for over 140 years. Or, in other cases, as Katze below points out, it is merely silly people jumping on a virtue-signaling bandwagon to score cheap points at the expense of others.

In addition to science, we have English language grammar and syntax, according to which "they" refers to plural individuals and is therefore not applicable to an individual. An individual who wants others to refer to themselves as "they" is as silly as a person who wants others to refer to them as "your majesty". Shall I insist that you identify me as a golden unicorn from middle earth name "Der Fuhrer"?

Silly slippery slope, isn't it.

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Gessen isn’t mentally ill. She’s just jumping on a stupid bandwagon.

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Gessen was on that "bandwagon" before there was a band.

DJ Mc is right ... right wingers and transphobes are terrible people. Also stupid.

P.S. What is the lunatic troll below talking about in re multiple names with the same IP address? That's not me, and he has no way to know what people's IP addresses are.

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Apparently your reading comprehension is poor.

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No, it's perfectly fine.

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Are you sure?

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Great, then please call me "your royal majesty", since I self-identify as the absolute ruler of the world, and you have to respect that.

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Respect has to be earned. People should treat each other with basic courtesy but indulging their delusions and neuroses isn't basic courtesy.

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*basic human respect* is earned by being human.

But you do have a point ... you and other right wing trolls have earned no respect.

P.S. This bigoted trash's rejoinder is an example of why ... we disrespect mass murderers for being mass murderers, not for their gender identity--respect for the latter is basic human respect; the former is not.

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Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler and Sean Penn are all technically human.

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Not a universal call.

I 'indulged' my patients' and my peers' delusions and neuroses day in and day out, formerly, both as a health provider and as a public official, & both as a matter of courtesy and of practicality. Enjoy some forums where that isn't professionally required, but it can still have a useful effect most anywhere.

For instance, I don't think one can be very successful in establishing a conversational bridge to the 'other' party, without being prepared to indulge a modicum of delusions up front. May go both ways.

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Gessen's non-binary status is not delusional or neurotic. I can't say the same about all these right wing trolls whining about Nate using Gessen's preferred pronouns according to standard practice.

P.S. In response to the stupid sociopathic bigoted ignoramus who asked "Standard practice according to who [sic]?" ... every style guide.

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Yeah, Jibal, was somewhat surprised. :)

And, wondered if one of them was perhaps sincere, if a bit unable to process new info.

Suspect they have a volitional religious delusion regarding modern language, combined with an un-American intolerance of difference, and an unsociable in-capacity to control their desires to try to make others to conform to their own blind faith... by... wait for it... trolling!!

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Standard practice according to who?

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Maybe it's just the company that you keep but the people I interact with on a daily basis are remarkably delusional free. At least if they're not they don't feel inclined to reveal that.

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now that's a bloomin' delusion, if I ever saw one! ;)

- not everyone picks up on them, guy -

but we've all got them, and thinking we don't, is one of the most common

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Let me rephrase that then: for the vast majority of the population those delusions are not crippling and do no lead to a radically reduced quality of life.

When you're looking at a population that is far more likely to be criminally charged, go to jail, undertake treatment for substance abuse or mental illness or just plain kill themselves--that's clearly not the case.

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Your comments and your substack content are pure delusion.

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Was there an argument or a point in your post?

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How do you talk to religious people?

Do you go way out of your way to point out that they are delusional every time you interact with them?

Do you refuse to call them by their religious identity-- Christian, Muslim, Hindu-- etc. even though they're all just insane in the same way?

No, you just ignore whatever silliness they have and move on.

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I'm an atheist. As long as they leave me alone I am more than happy to return the favor.

It is when religion intrudes into the public sphere (prayer in school) that we have a problem. Telling people what pronoun to use is the exact same thing. In fact, I would say woke is a new religion.

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They are similar in type but not magnitude. Imo, someone asking you to call them by their imaginary name is nothing at all like being forced to bow before their invisible fairy.

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Both sound crazy to me. Male/female isn't imaginary. It all boils down to denying reality.

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"Pronouns aren't worth fighting about. They really aren't."

Since your preferred pronouns can apparently be self selected what's to stop you from choosing a racial slur?

Look, it's a big and diverse country. It's filled with people who believe that the center of the planet is hollow and populated by lizard people. The country is tolerant of craziness because Americans are tolerant and easy going in general.

But the unwritten rule is that you can be crazy and eccentric but you don't get to drag everyone else into your craziness. Choose whatever pronouns you want but don't expect me to play along. That's your crazy. I'm busy over here doing my crazy and I don't have the time.

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There's a tiny handful of people in the world that have earned my respect. Everyone else? Frankly I couldn't care less.

In addition if anyone interprets the simple act of describing reality as a personal attack that's a sign of a fragile personality and a weak mind. In other words, someone not suitable for respect.

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It's not about politeness or respect for the person. It's about respect for reality.

15 years ago, we heard a modification of this same argument in the "how will your neighbor's gay marriage ever affect you?" The answer: ask Jack Phillips. That's why it matters. Because we've seen many times what starts as "please be polite" very quickly morph into "salute you flag and bake the cake of we'll bankrupt you, bigot!"

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Bringing up gay marriage in terms of something you view as radical and unpopular is telling far more about yourself than anyone or anything else.

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The current Speaker of the House spent his career fighting against gay marriage because he believed it would destroy America…even he’s moved on and decided to be a productive member of society and not continue to fight the good fight as he believes.

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Technically he's not talking about gay marriage per se so much as the drive to force everyone to accommodate gay marriage. That's a barrier that the USSC was not willing to cross.

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I'm not sure using the Supreme Court is the best argument for you, since they are plenty happy to cross the barrier of open bribery. So barriers are clearly only an issue when they want them to be.

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"Bribery". Hoo boy.

Anyway my point is that the USSC to a large extent is an expression of mainstream opinion. Most people don't see gay marriage as a big deal (as compared to thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread) but simultaneously most people don't think a Christian baker should be forced to cater a gay wedding.

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If you really can't understand the similarity in responses there, you are very deep in precisely the kind of bubble that Nate is trying to shake people out of.

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LOL, given how popular gay marriage is acting like gay marriage at this point it’s about as radical as vanilla ice cream which I suspect would actually poor worse than gay marriage.

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Gay marriage isn't "popular" I would argue. Instead it's just Americans deciding to mind their own business.

For the flip side try asking people if somebody who identifies as a Christian should be forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay marriage, for example.

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The combination of irony and cognitive dissonance in this reply should be crushing like a black hole.

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Ad hominem attacks are the sign that you have no argument or point to make.

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DJ Mc is right ... you people are terrible, and in so many ways.

None of the virtue signaling comments by the right wing culture warrior trash here have anything to do with Nate's arguments.

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