Phanerothyme

Just going through the archives and old hard drives, and I came across this. I think I may have been a moderator at the time.

Hi Sierra! It looks crazy from over here, can't imagine what it must be like over there! Wishing you and your kin the Best of British luck and a return to less deranged times soon. I hope you and your family had a great day. The family's all grown up here, just waiting for the next generation to turn up now - but they seem to be in no rush! Can't say that I blame them

I don't have many traditions, but this is one of them. Happy Fourth of July to all our American members and friends - congratulations on throwing off your colonial shackles and growing into the greatest country in the world. Yes the US-phobes will be trotting along to point out all the bad stuff I'm sure, but today I want to celebrate Independence Day (and a change of government here too). Hope it all goes off with a BANG and you all enjoy the Fourth of July with your friends and family.

Well it looked an awful lot like him! Richard Hawley was in last week, but that's not as surprising.

The family is grown up @Sierra and thriving thank you, I hope you and yours are well! Delighted you looked in and saw this. Back in 2005 the internet was a smaller, quieter place, and the forum was tiny. You were always a great ambassador for the USA, and changed my views more than once in our conversations. Can't go back, but I can remember, and a little ritual like this is a good way of helping that memory stay put! So best wishes to you and yours, stay safe and well. P

Wishing all our members from the USA a happy Independence Day and throwing off your colonial overlords. I hope your day goes with a bang!

I think we probably went over the climate tipping point some time in the 80s, and the future of warfare, and subsequently armed insurgency, crime etc, will be robotized. The final liberation of "energy too cheap to meter" will unleash an exploitation of the earths resources at a rate unrivalled in history. In some ironic act of self-destruction, we've created possibilities - through technology - we're ill-equipped to deal with (evolutionarily speaking). So while the future may well hold mass-migration, a chaotic high-energy climate, famine, assassin drones and ecology collapses, some humans will survive. They're very resourceful. But we've sent biological matter out to deep space. The planet has successfully sporulated. Everything else is just an epitaph.

Yay robots:

Yeah - it's not exactly the exoneration it appears to be. Kolomoisky has form. Ukrainian politics aren't a million miles from Russian politics, unsurprisingly, and they're just as murky. But Putin made Ukraine choose a sphere of influence on Feb 24, and banked on Ukraine choosing Russia. I think Ukraine has made its decision pretty clear.

No, not really. A cursory google search reveals that his parents naturalised as Israeli citizens with the help of the president, and are guests in Israel of Igor Kolomoisky, living in his house that's worth "£8m" - because they became something of a target in late February. They take security very seriously in Israel.

Yep, they're definitely the victims of the piece, this should all be about them.

I know how I choose to understand it, but I wouldn't want to insist it's the correct definition, or even that a correct definition exists tbh. Where people and their minds are concerned, I think its helpful to think of traits and characteristics (behavioural and physical, mental and apparent) are continua rather than categories.

You say that as if it's a rhetorical device. It's not a rhetorical device, it's my honestly held opinion - see what you can learn, you might be surprised at what you find. But if the furthest you're willing to go in understanding a complex and difficult topic about people and how they feel is to skim read google results, then any discussion we're likely to have here is going to be unedifying and futile. I'm no expert, or scholar - I don't have a radical or extremist view either IMO, but I have tried to get my head around the terminology and gain some insight into how trans people (in particular) experience the world, because it's important to me to understand - rather than take an immovable, extreme position and defend it. Read around. It's sounds to me like you've been dwelling on the gender critical side of the debate, with a side order of manufactured culture war, and you've made up your mind - that's fine - it's not my job, nor an inviting prospect, to try and convince you any different. I would only remind everyone that so-called normal common sense beliefs, as expressed in society today, do make other, different, people quite miserable. And if they say that this is what's happening to them, it's not up to us to disbelieve them, but to see if its reasonable to change or even just tweak our 'common sense beliefs' so they are less miserable, and maybe even a bit happy. That's where I'm starting from.

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Jesus wept. "No one can tell me what a 'gender' actually is". It's really not up to people to tell you. If it concerns you, find out about it. It's no-one else's responsibility but your own to educate yourself about gender, sex, attraction etc. There's reputable science and good, well balanced writing on the subject and a long history of sexuality and gender too if you're willing to look. That's a choice you can make.