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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t even go as far as to group people into tolerant vs intolerant binaries. Everyone is intolerant about something. Everyone has boundaries. You wouldn’t just let someone walk into your house and start using your toothbrush. But that’s not very controversial!

    One of the biggest issues with tolerance vs intolerance debates is the unequal burden of tolerance. When it comes to housing, this is reflected in the classic NIMBY vs YIMBY debates. Many many people complain about NIMBYs but are actually NIMBYs themselves: they just want someone else to bear the burden. For example, they may be pro-early-release for a sex offender while not wanting that sex offender to live in their neighbourhood.

    This applies to all kinds of issues. People may be pro-immigration but are they pro-giving-up-their-job to a (lower paid) immigrant? Probably not.

    We as a society were much more tolerant and welcoming towards immigrants before we put all of our social welfare programs in place. In a society with no minimum wage, no social programs, and few/no regulations to limit housing development, there is no cost to immigration because immigrants have to claw their way up from the very bottom. That was how the big cities in Canada and the U.S. were built: by immigrants who choose to come here (fleeing brutal oppression and lack of opportunity) and make their own fortunes.







  • The original comment was “insects are not meat.” That’s it! That’s the whole claim you’re trying to defend. It’s like saying “chickens are not meat.” So they’re vegetables then?! It’s a ridiculous claim!

    There are different senses (or uses) of the word meat. One sense, the narrowest one which butchers use when they talk about separating whole muscle from skin, bones, and other tissues, is the one which you are insisting is the only true definition. Another sense, the broader dietary one, classifies any product or byproduct from an animal as meat, including the whole unprocessed carcass.

    Since the original claim was simply the unqualified statement “insects are not meat”, I am claiming the freedom to use the broader dietary sense of the word to show how ridiculous that statement is. You, by your insistence on the narrower sense of the word, are the one being pedantic.


  • If I buy a whole chicken at the grocery store, I buy it in the meat section. No one would say “you’re buying a whole chicken, therefore you’re not buying meat.”

    With lobster you can extract the meat and eat it. You can also boil the empty shell to make a lobster stock as a base for a seafood soup or a pan sauce. Just as with chicken you don’t eat the bones but you can boil them to make stocks for soup or pan sauces. They’re still classified as meat and the products you make from them are considered meat products.




  • What is your routine like? Do you go to work? Volunteer? Have hobbies?

    I ask this because going through a breakup — any breakup — involves a grieving process. Part of grieving is about moving on. A big part of doing that is finding new things to do, new people to talk to, and new things to talk about.

    Counseling is good, but talking to other friends and family about her can make it very difficult. If you meet someone new — doesn’t have to be romantic, can be any gender, can just be a friend — can give you a person to talk to and topics to discuss that involve you and your interests and have nothing to do with her.

    When you’re in a relationship for a long time a lot of your thoughts and even the objects around you in life get tangled up in that so that when she’s gone these things still remind you of her. What you need is to be selfish — grieving is a selfish process — because you need to reorient your mindset around yourself and taking care of yourself.

    Lastly, I think it’s also helpful to have a third space where you can focus on stuff completely outside yourself and all that. For me it’s been volunteering as a tutor for high school kids. It gives me a time and a space each week to forget about everything and focus on something else. Helping kids and seeing them learn is a nice bonus for that. That may not be your cup of tea though, but something else may be! If you aren’t already into volunteering I’d encourage you to look into some volunteer organizations near you and try to find one that fits your interests.




  • It’s not only clinical trials where you test on people, chemically. There are a ton of tests for skin care products to compare their effectiveness. These have already gone through trials for safety but long-term research on their effects is important.

    One example is the anti-acne medication Accutane which is known to cause birth defects. This drug cannot be given to women who may be pregnant under any circumstances. I believe doctors even require proof that the patient is on birth control before prescribing it.

    As for menstrual cycles: they are known to affect skin, hair, joint mobility, pain sensitivity, mood, food preferences, weight, and more. Tons and tons of studies are affected by this. Everything from dieting to mental health care, skin care, hair care, and even sports medicine, exercise, and recovery from injury.


  • Oh I can’t justify it at all. These things come about because of complex interactions throughout society. Scientists didn’t decide for themselves to have these strict rules on experiments involving women who might become pregnant. Those rules were imposed on them by politicians and regulators whose goals were not to promote the best possible research.

    The same goes for the situation in the US with employers providing health insurance through group policies. That situation came about during a war-time cap on employee compensation. Employers used the insurance benefit as a way to circumvent the cap. Now Americans seem to be stuck with a system they increasingly do not want.

    One of the worst heartbreaks I experienced growing up was when I realized that no one is really in charge of anything and that we’re all trapped in a system we can’t escape. 1984 was a big influence for me on this one.


  • Science does ignore women a lot of the time but it’s not because they hate women. It’s because of medical ethics rules which make it a lot more expensive to include women in studies. You have to pay for pregnancy tests for women in the study and you have to do all kinds of corrections and extra analyses to make sure women’s menstrual cycles are not interfering with the data. Women who do get pregnant during the study need to be detected and removed from the study because any effects from the study that harm their baby can expose the researchers to enormous lawsuits.

    So many studies, which don’t have a lot of money to begin with (we’re talking university studies run by grad students, not massive clinical trials run by big pharma) exclude women because it’s cheaper and easier and they get to run more studies as a result. The major exception to this are psychological studies that don’t carry the same risks, but these are usually run on the psychology students themselves (many of which are required to participate in them in order to receive course credits).



  • Upwards of 80% of OBGYNs are women. Saying that none of these women care about other women, that they went into a field that specializes in caring for women’s health without caring about women, is an extraordinary claim.

    I think what we’re seeing here is not at all a lack of caring but a mismatch in expectations vs reality. Many women who receive an IUD report some of the worst pain they’ve felt in their entire life. At the same time, it is a routine outpatient procedure and a specialist doctor can perform thousands of IUD insertions over the course of her career. Do we expect this doctor to react with the same intensity and outpouring of empathy every single time? Or would it be more reasonable to expect that she’d get used to seeing her patients in pain and be numbed by the experience? Compassion fatigue is a real and extremely common phenomenon. Furthermore, I would expect that a doctor who is unduly influenced by the pain of their patients may be compromised in their ability to perform under pressure.

    As for the procedure itself, my understanding is that the majority of the pain is not caused by the tools but by the cervix reflexively producing intense cramps in an effort to expel a foreign object: the IUD. There’s not a whole lot that can be done about that besides giving the patient some Midol and a day off work to rest.



  • Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.

    I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.

    I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.

    The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.

    I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.

    I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.