Reading some of what that guy supposedly said, I wouldn't say he's a liberal necessarily, he may be a right-winger and a bit of an edgelord. Although people nowadays love taking quotes out of context, so you can never be too sure. But that's not in itself such an apocalyptic thing. There was a time when people would have just shrugged and gone 'ok the guy may be a bit of an idiot but he's made a really good Linux distro' (I'm not familiar with this distro but apparently it's popular). People used to understand that other people have opinions and they are sometimes different from their own.

Nowadays however you have this army of sad people on social media who find any quote that goes against the allowed set of opinions and act like the author of the quote personally genocided a whole country. Of course the real message is 'you can totally see how much I hate these opinions, because I have all the correct opinions, I'm a good boy, please tell me I'm a good boy'.

If you believe somebody is saying something wrong and/or stupid you can try to explain to them why they're wrong, or at least explain to others why they're wrong. What's bad is acting like expressing a wrong opinion is a capital offense. That's far far more dangerous than one person talking anti-immigrant or anti-vax nonsense or whatever. Because once you've established that just having 'wrong' opinions deserves you being fired from your job or even imprisoned, it's extremely easy to change what's defined as 'wrong opinions', depending on which government is in power at a given time. And then you suddenly find that criticising the government in any way will land you in prison. US may currently be the only place with real freedom of speech but if people keep trying to undermine it, it may not have freedom of speech for much longer.

There's a theory that if our civilization regresses to a pre-industrial state, or if indeed humanity dies out completely and some other species becomes sapient in the future and starts building its own civilization, this future civilization will never be able to achieve any kind of advanced technological level again.

The reasoning goes something like this. A civilization can't come up with new technology just by some smart guy sitting in a cave thinking things up. You need a certain level of social stability and organization, advanced enough agriculture, and most importantly ubiquitous technology that's just a bit less advanced than technology you're trying to inevent. Which in the end all comes down to resources. In the pre-industrial age it'll mainly be metals, for early industrial civilization coal, then gas, uranium, etc etc. Not sure if gold and silver are necessary for civilization.

However resource extraction also needs a certain level of technology. So you have a chicken and egg problem here, you can't have technology without resources, but you can't extract resources without technology. Our civilization was able to overcome that because there were widespread resource deposits that required only very primitive technology to exploit. Surface deposits, open-pit mines and so on. Those were depleted early on, but by that time we developed better technology and were able to use harder to get to resource deposits.

However for a hypothetical future civilization that bootstrap process won't be available. All the easy to get to resource deposits have already been depleted (by us) and all other deposits require technology which they don't have. So they'll be forever stuck at a pre-industrial level.

I don't know if I totally believe that theory, it'll depend on whether they could find a way to use the mines that were left over from our failed civilization, or if they could repurpose many artifacts left over from us. Or perhaps that hypothetical future civilization could base its technology on different resources than we did. It seems at least reasonably plausible though.

But this isn't about a missile attack. A power plant in US should be just as easy to hack as a power plant in UK. I bet some idiot pressed a wrong button or something or they deployed cool new software which hasn't been tested very much, and then they decided to blame this on the Iran boogeyman instead.

Especially since it's not clear what's in it for Iran. They're not at war with UK, but they are at war with US, so wouldn't a US power plant make a lot more sense as a target? Afaik during the course of this war so far Iran has only attacked targets belonging to either US and Israel or to the neighbouring Gulf nations. OTOH this government has been known to use foreign policy as a distraction to domestic problems, as have a lot of governments. Add to this that The Telegraph is known to, let's just say, not be the most reliable source of information, and has a very right-wing bias and indeed this seems very fishy.

My guess would be, mostly internal propaganda, sort of like a military parade on steroids. Moon is a lifeless rock, any mining operation there would be absolute light years away from being economical, never mind that it may well be logistically impossible to get the necessary mining equipment there or maintain enough people there to run any sort of mining operation. Any 'permanent settlement' there would as far as I see it be their own version of ISS, with hookers and blackjack, just based on a big asteroid rather than floating in space. I can't see such a 'settlement' having a population of more than a few astronauts. So very little practical benefit to be gained.

China's economy may be doing better than Europe's or US's in some ways, but they have their own problems, the growth is slowing down and there is a fair amount of domestic discontent. So they're probably looking for an impressive piece of propaganda to distract the population. Taiwan invasion could be one but they're probably realising the heap of problems it would bring. They're learning from US and Russia's mistakes I guess. So a moon base (just like in scifi!) would have pretty impressive propaganda value.

My guess would be they may decide it's not worth it. Supplying such a base would be massively expensive. Also, my knowledge of this is limited, but wouldn't there be additional logistic challenges in resupplying a ground-based base as opposed to a space station, due to the Moon's rotation? If the goal is propaganda, then any catastrophic equipment failure resulting in (probably quite unpleasant) death of the population of the base would be a significant loss of face. So I guess the plans to have a permanent base by 2040 or whatever will remain just plans. Although who knows, CCP has access to significant wealth which they can spend absolutely however they want and pretty impressive know-how, so depends on how much value they place on this I guess.

No, they want to paint the Moon pink and draw a Lenin face on it

OK the whole hormone thing is just a complete red herring. We're talking about the way to determine the sex of the individual. For which the only thing you need to know is, do they have XX chromosomes, in which case they're female, or XY, in which case they're male. That's all you need. If for whatever reason a male foetus has been exposed to very little testosterone during its development, it will probably have a lot of problems, but it will grow up to be a male with extremely undeveloped sexual characteristics. But still a male, not any non-binary nonsense. And what 'brain shape' has to do with anything, I'm still completely mystified.

Besides, as far as I can see gender dysphoria has very little to do with the amount of oestrogen/testosterone a person has. I remember recently taking a bus where the bus driver was wearing female clothes, and this was a huge, very male looking dude.

By definition, gender dysmorphia means you're one gender, but you feel like you're a different one. But if gender that you are can be determined unambiguously, and I've heard absolutely nothing that has persuaded me otherwise, that means what they're feeling is objectively different from reality, so by definition it's a delusion. A schizophrenic man sincerely and genuinely believes that the mole people from outer space are plotting to steal his memories or something. And I have absolutely no doubt that it really sucks to be this way. But you do not encourage the schizophenic's delusions.

This is starting to feel like one of those online discussions that goes around in circles and doesn't accomplish very much at all.

OK I've read all this and I'm still not seeing what these '17 types of brain' have to do with sex of the person in question.

By hormonal doses I imagine you mean testosterone and oestrogen? The production of those hormones is determined by the chromosomes of the person, i.e. by whether they're male or female. Males produce (more) testosterone, and women (more) oestrogen. Sex hormones produced by males and females will have some influence on various sexual characteristics, like male or female genitalia, ability to bear children for women (at least potentially), as well as secondary characteristics that result in sexual dimorphism. So for two women (who both have XX chromosomes, have female genitalia, can bear children etc), what does the 'shape of their brain' have to do with them being women? Maybe if you were to give a link to the study you're trying to reference it may make more sense.

That's just a complete non-sequitur. I believe I am the king of Atlantis. I desire to live in dignity and this belief is important for my sense of dignity, so for me, I'm right and everyone else should believe me. Having beliefs that are not based on reality is very dangerous. If other people insist on holding such beliefs, it's their problem but I have no intention of following them in their madness.

What does that have to do with anything? Everyone's brains are shaped differently in some way. A 'differently shaped brain' has never been seen as any kind of sexual characteristic as far as I'm aware. Even if it was, it would be very much a secondary sexual characteristic. This would be similar to claiming that being a very short man means you're in fact a woman or something else.

In that case, if you strongly feel something, even though this something is clearly objectively false, it's called a delusion. See for example the Capgras delusion where the sufferer believes that someone they know has been replaced with an identical looking impostor, or Cotard's syndrome where the affected person believes they're dead. What you do with patients suffering from delusions is you try to treat them as best you can. You do not try to convince everyone else that this delusion is in fact real.

Wow, some of those look like the courses from 'Community' comedy series. Most of them though seem to be traditional courses - mainly sociology, media studies maybe, physics and mathematics with a gimmick based on some popular cultural thing. This could be one of those, maybe journalism or politics with a gimmick. Depends on what kind of constrainsts the course places on the type of content the students are allowed to generate to gain their followers.

If they do genuinely plan to teach people how to film memes and pranks, or the female students how to jiggle their boobs into the camera, then yeah this is one of the milestones in the collapse of the modern civilization.

Scientifically that's completely irrelevant. Hormones are hormones, and XX and XY are XX and XY. A very low-testosterone male is still a low-testosterone male, not a female, or whatever new gender you want to invent. Same for low oestrogen females.

I feel like the whole non-binary alphabet nonsense was borne of confusion between the biological reality of gender/sex and social/cultural idea of what a male / female is. As far as biological reality goes, it really simple, XX is female and XY is male. Social idea of what male/female is far far more messy, but historically tends towards a muscular square jawed defender/provider male and sexy caring/nurturing domestic female. That is of course influenced by typical hormonal makeup of males/females, but also there's lots of historical/political etc factors that define the social idea of what a male and a female is.

This means of course that social definition of male/female varies quite a lot between different cultures/time periods. As an example, it used to be totally socially acceptable for an Italian male to be interested in cooking and clothes while otherwise pretty closely conforming to the usual male social stereotype. There were/are cultures where dancing was/is a totally normal activity for males. OTOH there are cultures where long before the rise of feminism women in leadership positions were seen as, maybe not exactly common, but not unheard of, in contrast to other cultures where it's completely unthinkable. Also the cultures where women fighting in a war sometimes happened, one or two cultures where it was apparently even fairly commonplace, vs cultures who considered it totally inconceivable.

I have no statistics to confirm this but it feels like there are a lot more male-to female transvestites than female to male ones. I suspect one of the reasons is that for what socially would be considered non-typical women there are a lot of socially acceptable stereotypes - tomboy, one of the guys, tough career woman etc. A man with a non-typical hormonal makeup would usually be suspected of being gay, even if that's not the case.

So people are unable to understand this difference between biology and social expectations in their head. Or maybe unwilling to understand, because they want to be a typical woman rather than a non-typical man. So they instead start demanding that science and reality alter themselves to conform to their confusion. Often these are the exact same people who claim to support science in other areas, like climate change. And somehow in their head these people see no inconsistencies in their beliefs. The extent to which people can rationalise things will always amaze me.

That'll confuse the hell out of a lot of people here. 'China and Russia are bad. AI is also bad. But China and Russia are against AI. Does not compute.'

I believe what's happening is either this is a desperate false flag operation by AI companies - our enemies are against it, so clearly this means we must keep shovelling more money into the AI furnace. Or, probably more likely, China and Russia (mistakenly) believe that AI is a good thing and are trying to make sure their own domestic AI does not fall too far behind. I know there are Chinese companies who have their own LLMs which are actively trying to compete against Anthropic and co.

I'd argue that social media has never been about actually socialising. You've always had the ability to find out what was happening in your friends' lives, via email, phone, texting, or even the old-fashioned face to face conversation. Even from the start, I believe social media has been about the illusion of social status. I have 100 online friends/followers! 500 people liked my last post! Wow, I'm famous! Of course later it turned into a political ragebait engine, in the process turning the political landscape in America and to a lesser extent Europe into a hellscape of polarization and mob mentality. All in order to get people to look at more ads for shit they're never going to buy anyway.

Yes, this is a very good parody of what long-term use of social media does to people's minds and how they end up talking in slogans and hyperbole. This is definitely a parody, right?