Fauci Spins His Handy 'Wheel Of Science' To See What He Should Recommend Today

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[–]FediNetizen 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Eh, people on the left have plenty of their own delusions. Try reading up on the science of transsexualism and you'll get tons of misinformation from activists, who will boldly declare their misinformation is "the science".

Same when we talk about race & sex issues. James Damore was fired from his engineering position at Google for writing a paper arguing that the reason there were more male engineers than female engineers at google is likely due to differences in life goals & interests between the sexes, rather than some kind of sexism in the education or hiring process.

It was also a popular talking point for a while (even being cited by Obama a couple of times) that women made 75-80 cents to a man's dollar, supposedly because of sexism, even though the actual research on the topic showed that when you compared men and women in the same occupations with the same experience and qualifications, the pay gap was more like 3%.

The left tends to follow the science more, but there are definitely areas where people on the left throw the science out the window.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

OK - now that you bring reliable information to the thread - we can discuss the problems on the left.

One of the serious problems in the next 4 years in D.C. will be dealing with the varieties of specific concerns and interests on the 'left'. They're terribly picky (whereas Trump supporters were seemingly happy with almost anything he and his supporters did). Short of him openinly supporting late-term abortions, no one was seemingly critical on he 'right' he and other Republicans continued driving the US to $27 trillion in debt, whilst getting filthy rich on their arrangements. Thus,

Transsexualism - many different views on this from the 'left' and is will be easy to divide them by aguing about the potential scientific approaches to humna biology and intersex people. Eg. regarding the Olympics, the a woman competitor cannot join a women's team if she has a certain percentage of testosterone. This rule nonetheless has not disqualified some competitors who have been somewhat more male than female. And I wholeheartedly agree that these athletes who identify as women, but have a significant amount of testosterone, should not compete against women who do not have this athletic benefit. It's almost like doping. And one can see how easily these testosterone blessed ladies win races &c. It's not fair. Sometimes the 'left' will of course use human rights arguments whilst avoiding the science. And that is wrong.

I would address the other points, but have to go now. The firing of James Damore is interesging, and should not have happened. Google is known as a circle-jerk of sycophants by those who've worked there. It's a strange place. I worked on gender pay equity cases several years ago, and can say that there is much less of a pay gap now at US Universities than there had been, but I am not sure if it's only 3% across the board.

[–]FediNetizen 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

With regards to the trans women in sports issue, they still retain athletic advantages even after having spent years on HRT and having testosterone levels comparable to women. If you want a fairly balanced and fairly well-researched take on this, I can recommend Rationality Rules' "Do Transgender Athletes Have an Unfair Advantage?" video. I've watched this video a couple of times, because he presents the science in a neutral way that tries to be charitable to trans people and that I don't think any reasonable person could argue is transphobic, and I think it's pretty good.

It is a ~20 minute video, so if you don't want to watch it and just want the tl;dw: while trans women that take HRT do reach testosterone levels comparable (higher than average, but not outside of the extremes) to women, if they went through puberty, and the vast majority of them have), then they still retain the skeletal structure advantages (height, width, limb length), most of if not all of the heart and lung size advantages, and only limited effects on muscle fiber type (fast twitch which is used for explosive activities, vs slow twitch which is for endurance activities). Additionally, I don't believe it was mentioned in the video, but the research also shows that trans women retain some of their male advantages to total muscle mass.

The end result is that while it's possible that there are some extreme endurance sports where trans women could compete on a level playing field, for the vast majority of sports they still retain some of their male advantage, and women simply can't keep up. This is more pronounced in explosive/sprint type sports such as powerlifting and the 100m dash, but some level of advantage is present in the vast majority of sports.

He did caveat that for trans women that haven't gone through male puberty it's possible that they could compete, but that opens a whole different can of worms about the harmful effects of puberty blockers which trans activists insist are safe and fully reversible, but which the science shows are anything but. Lupron, one of the most popular drugs used to block puberty, is the same drug sometimes used to chemically castrate sex offenders to try to lower risk of reoffending. It was also used to treat precocious puberty (puberty that begins at an unusually young age, which is more common among women than among men) in kids through the 90s and 2000s, and those kids are now developing muscoskeletal problems you would expect to see in seniors, because it turns out that lupron inhibits the bone development process, and kids that take it end up with noticeably lower bone mass density, which leads to failures within years that you normally wouldn't see for decades.

There's tons more we could talk about with trans issues alone, but it's only tangential to the overall topic of how faithful to truth and science "the left" is, and this is already turning into a wall of text. And it is true that you'll find a variety of opinions on trans issues in general on the left, but if we can acknowledge that it tends to be people on the left that argue for anti-science policies such as no restriction on trans women competing in female sports, or treatment in any context for that matter, then it's not entirely accurate to say that the left is the party of truth, or conversely that the right isn't.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Many thanks for the info. I'll watch the video.