aabattery

cant believe i peaked three calendar years ago

always get weirded out by the lack of the longer blonde hair on holland whenever i see actual footage and photos from this movie @Chewy

Thanks for running the list @grim22; haven't caught much this year but nice to have an idea of what I've missed.

Happy new year! 2020 will be sorely missed as it was a great year for everybody; let's hope 2021 can live up to it.

feel like that's more about the meteorite than any inter-species tensions between us and dinosaurs (also birds are dinosaurs)

leave me alone @CoolioD1

Thanks for everything, Andy. You were a huge asset for the forums; your derby is one of the first things I participated in on the forum!

Way too soon. Incredible how much he managed to achieve while battling his own body.

Massive props to all those players taking a stand today. Takes a lot of guts to really put their money where their mouths are like this.

Good thing I said SHOULD. Bet = HEDGED

if only there were someone to hold our nuts

me

I actually agree with the general premise that nature doesn't make mistakes. I think that implies a more humanistic intent to the whole thing than is really there; nature just is. Obviously the religion element can throw a spanner into that idea but I do think if one does have those beliefs, the interpretation of God's intentions can be flexible enough to account for the realities we find down here on Earth without making you a bad Christian; but this is just my interpretation as a more or less irreligious kind of guy. If there is a divine being in charge of it all, I don't expect our feeble minds to grasp the complexities of their plans. It's up to us to accept or deal with the consequences of messing around with ourselves and the world around us, but ultimately I think changing someones anatomy (be it through hormonal treatments or surgery) is a net good in the world on account of how much it helps the people who want it. I don't know if you know any transgender people yourself, but I can tell you from those I do know is that these treatments make them so much more comfortable in their own skins and in themselves. Climate 'alarmists' (I think that phrases implies that people are exaggerating the threat, which I would pretty heavily disagree with) I think, for the most part, aren't saying what we are doing is 'against' nature; obviously messages get muddled but I can tell you as someone who is an actual earth scientist is that climate change is the natural consequence of pumping a shit load of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Whatever happens, the world will keep turning and the big old rock we call home will probably keep being a big old rock, but the reality of it is that we are going to make the big old rock very uncomfortable not only for us but for all the other things that call it home unless we pretty drastically change what we are doing right now.

Personally, I don't think it's fair to brush a small but still significant minority of people as mere anomalies. They're real people with real experiences and real lives and should be recognised as such rather than pigeon holed into our current binary. I think the great thing about science is that it isn't a static thing; we can look at the evidence and existence of these fringe cases and expand our terminology and understanding to make room for them. But I will say that it's hard to change the paradigm, and it can be hard to accept new things when they go against what we previously understood. It's true of almost every science I think; from my own field, (geology) there's a great example of it in the first proponent of the theory of plate tectonics, Alfred Wegener. Won't go into to much detail but when he first suggested it, the response was uniformly hostile. Guy was ridiculed for years, all the way up to his death in 1930. People were still denying it up into the 1960's. But the ball got rolling, and as people actually looked into it they found a lot of the ideas were supported by some pretty strong lines of evidence. These days we can even measure how fast the plates are moving, which is a far cry from the prior belief that they just stood still forever.

There is a world of difference between gender identity and identifying as an animal or plant or whatever. Evolution wise, we split from plants over 1.5 billion years ago. To use your dog example from the other day, we have been evolving apart from them for an odd ~60ish million years. I guess there could be an interesting debate about species identity if other hominids were still walking around with us, but as it stands there is only ones species on this planet that we can currently procreate with. The difference between that is uncomprehendingly immense in comparison to the differences between biological sexes. The basic interpretation of biological sex is the whole XY and XX chromosome thing, but like all things in biology (and science in general) it is often more complicated than the binary we get taught in primary school, as the (objective) existence of intersex people can demonstrate. And even that can seem simple in comparison to how complex the workings of our brains are. I won't pretend to be an expert on the exact science of transgenderism and what not, but if someone who is in all ways biologically male can develop a uterus (this is a real thing that I mentioned the other day, Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, look it up), is it not possible that someone who would appear to be biologically female could end up with a 'male' brain? Like I said, not an expert but I have enough familiarity with the field to recognise that that shit is much more complicated what most of us get taught. I know it's hard to comprehend, but if you actually listen to the words and experiences of transgender people, I think you might find a little bit of empathy and understanding of their position.

Roman J. Israel would've made it and it would've won.

This is ten minutes up the road from me.

That's your view. Other peoples views are different.