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SlowRiver

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Everything posted by SlowRiver

  1. Just to add to that - yes, I think that authorities are trying to use masking as a way to allow more freedom in other ways. But I would say that it's very limited. In my own self, I've stopped going to public indoor events unless I have to. I don't g to concerts. I've put off finding FT work outside my home until later in part because I don't want to mask that often. The kids at school hate it and want to avoid it. For many people it simply isn't a nothing that allows them to behave as normal.
  2. I think this is an important point. There are a goodly number of people who feel like this. They just don't mind the masks. But they really do bother a lot of people, and are a real impediment to their social life and interactions. They find them uncomfortable, they mean they can't hear, they can't interpret expressions. It becomes an effort to engage in a real conversation. I've actually given up going to the farmer's market since masking has been required. I went a few times, but the combination of ambient noise and not being able to see people's faces meant I struggled to hear and had to repeatedly ask people to repeat themselves and was asked to do so as well. Having a conversation, which was half the appeal of going, was simply impossible in that situation. I also find it difficult in my job, which involves public service, often speaking to elderly people. The main point being that it makes all social interactions in public spaces unsatisfying and even a little unpleasant. I think this is just one more thing that's impacted people's mental health and sense of connectedness to others.
  3. Things would have to be very extreme to get us to really curtail things. We still have an indoor mask mandate which we follow, but I think it needs to go. To me, we are at the point after more than a year that we are seeing significant bad effects from restrictions, things like mental health, lack of testing in other areas because testing is all directed to covid, etc. I don't consider kids to be high risk for covid compared to other things kids do, so I would not be restricting my kids who can't get the vaccination on that basis. At this point, I consider hospitalisation rates more important than numbers of positive tests.
  4. A lot of the critical academic voices in terms of CRT have talked a lot about the fact that groups like BLM focus on only certain types of problems while ignoring those that affect racialised communities most - gang violence etc - and in fact that the ideas like defunding the police tend to be extremely unpopular in those communities. But this kind of gets to what the problem is, at least in high school level programs. If they are presenting a CRT perspective as if it is the only approach, they aren't teaching appropriately. because it's not the only way of thinking. Any more than it would be ok to teach with a humanist, or Jewish, POV undergirding everything. If the students aren't ready to explicitly understand that there are different perspectives, and be exposed to them, then they aren't ready to be taught as if one of those perspectives is undoubtably the truth, either. If you can read Coats in the classroom they should also be capable of reading West or Reed or McWhorter, all of whom, from different perspectives, take a different POV than Coates and are in some cases explicitly critical of him, in a more or less friendly way. At a university students should, simply by taking classes from different people, be exposed to different perspectives, which they then have to sort out for themselves. Unfortunately that is something that is becoming a challenge which is a serious problem for academia, but that's a different kind of problem than high schools have, and lower level schools for children, where the school itself has to do much more interpretation for students and is acting much more within the limits of what parents believe. Ultimately, as long as more and more parents see their kids learning things they really disagree with, we'll see parents trying to use whatever tools they have to stop it. And that is likely to be a broad spectrum approach.
  5. Yeah. It seems like originally the thought it would be the best way to get something done as they didn't think they had enough to prosecute successfully criminally. That's always going to be a judgement call that could bite you in the a$$ later on if the situation changes.
  6. If it were where I live the fuss would be about them not allowing transwomen in. I wonder though - I can see people making a fuss of women or men's only swims on the grounds that they are not inclusive. But at the same time there seems to be pressure to break groups up, for example in workplaces, according to various identity characteristics, so they can address their specific needs. But there seems to be an element of all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
  7. And also, I don't think having times set aside is always understood as unreasonable. In my city we have a population of mostly Muslim, but also a few Jewish women, who can't swim with men. So in a lot of cases, they can't swim in public pools, and they can't depend on lake swimming areas to be single sex either. There are a few pools that have times set aside for all female swims and they are ver popular with that population. I don't think there are any completely female only pools but there could be if someone wanted to open one, or a women only beach. No one thinks that there should be no mixed sex pools or every pool needs to have single sex only swims.
  8. Anorexia and eating disorders, cutting, etc, also all seem to be subject to social contagion among girls. It's been a phenomena in middle schools forever that girls want to change their names, or take on a new style, in order to create some sort of group belonging. Much more so than boys. Teen girls also are usually the first group to pick up on language trends. I'm not sure though that the assumption that the right-wing media have some sort of deep nefarious agenda with this is any more realistic than the idea that the left wing media do. In fact I think if anything, on this issue, the latter is more often the case.
  9. I don't think that's how the spa is set up, in this case. There are three sections. Male and female with pools are two of them, everyone is nude. The third section is clothes, mixed sex, but no pools, it's other things like the cafe, games areas, etc. I don't see how a system like that can be divided by gender, or why anyone would want it to be. When it says women and men what it means is male and female. Trans people are either going to need to use the section for their sex, or if that really makes them very uncomfortable, or they think they have changed their bodies enough that it will really make others uncomfortable, it might not be a place they are going to be able to use. Which is too bad, but not a deep horrible too bad. If there is enough demand, maybe the spa, or some spa in all of LA, would consider having a time set aside for trans people, on a weekly or monthly basis. (LA might have enough population to have a spa like this that caters to trans people.) Sometimes there is a sense when people talk about this that it will be some kind of shock to trans people that their gender presentation and their sex are not the same. I think that's really kind of disingenuous, trans people know this. And that being the case they also should be able to understand that sometimes sex is the relevant factor, not gender presentation. People who don't seem to understand that fall into two categories IMO. Either they are deliberately pushing buttons, whether or not they are really trans or just being exploitative. Or they are really naive and not being served by activists who keep telling them that gender is more important and real than sex.
  10. I agree with the above, this mainly seems like situation caused anxiety. Which doesn't make it easier but might affect how you manage it. The community issue seems to me like a big one. I've found that when there are other things I can't control that cause me stress, having a community I depend on around makes a huge difference. So maybe trying to reach out there, whatever that means, would be helpful. It's easier said than done though, I know. Something else that struck me is that you mention you are older so things seem harder. I don't know your age, but hormonal changes in middle age can really ramp up anxiety for a few years. I've fond that seems to be a problem for mw recently, like you combined with some real sources of anxiety. I haven't done anything but I found just realising that might be a factor helpful. I don't think there is much you can do about another person's drinking, other than giving support for you mother's underlying stress. I do think though that if she is not visibly drunk etc I wouldn't worry too much about the kids. Yhe y probably don't really thin a lot about how many beers she drinks.
  11. There are places where there is mixed sex bathing, and I think that's fine. But I also think it's fine when public baths are se segregated, and in North American society that's what most people would prefer. Some religions simply don't allow mixed sex bathing, much less nude bathing. I used to swim at a YWCA pool that often had women only sessions for those groups. The idea that the law doesn't allow for that seems a little crazy. I might not care so much about a mixed change room, but I would not really want to be nude in a public bath with my teenage daughters and have it mixed sex.
  12. Overall I just don't see that it's a good thing for kids, or adults for that matter, to have no sense of privacy or personal boundaries around their sex lives. It's not come out of nowhere that there is this cultural change. And it is a change, lots of kids when I was in school had crushes etc that they obsessed over, but people's feelings and sexual feelings were also considered private. There was no expectation that they reveal them to all. It's quite different at my kids school, there is a view that if you don't declare yourself as something you are being inauthentic. They seem to have no concept of a private self.
  13. You're totally missing my point which was around the efficacy of these kinds of programs intended to improve workplace attitudes, diversity, reduce bias, etc. There's not much in the way of evidence that they improve things and some that they don't. It's logical to ask why, what's the problem? A lot of time and energy is spent on them even without considering that they might create worse outcomes. And if programs in schools are based on the same thinking, it makes sense to wonder if they will be effective, but that would be a lot easier if there was some sense of wha they aren't showing results in workplaces.
  14. So, private change stalls aren't really relevant in this situation because it is also a communal bathing area where people are nude. Once people change they go to the men's or women's bathing area.
  15. We know that they seem to have the opposite of the desired effect in workplace settings, as was mentioned earlier.
  16. It's possibly worth asking, if these kinds of training actually increase bias, what does that tell us about the thinking behind them?
  17. There seems to be solid evidence that fewer young people are having sex. It seems especially prominent in some countries like Japan, where people are just giving up on sexual relationships. Societies obsession with the whole thing is a salient pint IMO. If we reflect back there was a period when many people expected that most women weren't that interested in sex, especially young women. Lots of women objected to that, but I suspect it probably reflected the reality for a certain group of people. It seem to me though that some of this could just be made less of a problem if everyone didn't feel they had to talk and think about their sex lives all the time, or their sexual interests.
  18. There is some argument in social anthropology that homosexuality only came to exist as an identity because homosexual activity wasn't allowed, either legally or socially in the mainstream. Many cultures don't have a concept of it even though they may have lots of people having sex with people of the same sex. And there are also questions about whether sexuality is as biologically fixed as we have tended to say over the past 30 years or so. Apart from outliers who seem to experience changes for no apparent reason, there are also significantly variable pattens of behaviour across cultures, where in some it seems to be clearly a cultural practice rather than some sort of fixed orientation. So it looks like there is some capacity in human beings for movement in this area and we don't really understand how any of it works. Nonetheless, labels like demisexual really seem to be quite a different kind of thing, more like a code for describing a persons sexual interests. It's much more evident when you look at the list of these kinds of descriptors, they become very specific. They seem about as useful as saying "I'm attracted to husky fellows with beards but I don't go to bed with people other than my husband, - and some of them are close to that specific. Having a code for that sort of thing might be fine, except thatpeople seem to treat them with a weight, in terms of identity and also in terms of being some kind of characteristic that needs to be affirmed, that they don't merit and isn't particularly healthy.
  19. But is there some sort of evidence that not feeling sexual attraction is a similar kind of thing to having a sexual orientation mainly towards male or female? And that it is very commonly a lifelong thing that can't be changed? Because if it's not a similar mechanism, or similarly often persistent over a lifetime, it's not actually the same kind of thing, and it may well be a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Libido is often something that changes significantly over a lifetime, and unless there is a medical reason to think it won't why would anyone just decide to take it on as some kind of permanent identity label?
  20. I can't see bans like this being effective really, it's too tricky to define what they are trying to do. I don't think that it's entirely fair to say that what these parents are just borrowing what the media says are issues. Yes, I think people are getting their language from other people in the media etc, but they are using it to describe something they've been increasingly unhappy about but couldn't really articulate as something that hangs together. Lots of people have complained that this kind of teaching is racist though, even before you started hearing them talk about CRT, they were just dismissed as ignorant people who don't understand university type stuff and treated as if they were imagining things. So to find that what they are seeing has a name, and that there is an academic conservative criticism of it, and if they look enough into it they find an academic leftist criticism, and it makes them feel like they have a real complaint and the words to make it. As far as what would be more effective, real narrative history taught with as little gloss as possible, real critical thinking rather than just teaching one viewpoint on what students should believe, an understanding of the political system and where it came from as well as alternates, some real teaching about not only what people did, but why they thought that was the right thing, lots of good robust literature that's not meant to be obviously and stupidly didactic, developmentally appropriate approaches in young kids which I sometimes thing educators don't have any real sense of... all of these things could be done but I don't think they actually will be. I have pretty much no hope of making this happen in the schools my children go to.
  21. People who are really into these kinds of identities, in my experience, are quite happy to say they can be temporary. They compare them to sexuality like hetero or homosexual but don't seem to really have any sense that the mechanisms are similar, or that it's really the same kind of thing. Though maybe they don't think of being straight or gay as something like that either, I've read some things where that seems to be the how it's being discussed, which is fair enough I suppose. But if they are all just words to describe potentially short sexual interests, or lack thereof, it seems kind of silly.
  22. Yes, I don't think there is any reason to think it will go away. Has anyone involved in the medical side ever said it might?
  23. We have low cases here but masking is still mandated indoors, and I don't often see anyone without. There has been a certain % of elderly people who have masked under the nose all along, I assume because they find it somehow difficult not to. I'm noticing some real rumblings though. People here are almost always pretty ready to pitch in, sometimes even when they should probably ask more questions. But I'm hearing more and more people saying that they won't mask or follow other restrictions that much longer and they are coming to the end of their willingness to carry on. I suspect that when we get to most people being fully vaccinated many people will stop, even if there is another variant in the mix and it's still mandated.
  24. Yeah, "being trans" is a treatment path, rather than a diagnosis.
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