In other groups with I’m familiar, you would kick out people you think are actually a danger (e.g. you discover the guy is a convicted child molester, and have some intelligence to the effect that they are not a reformed character) or you think they might do something that brings your group into disrepute. (I can think of one example where the counterintelligence investigation of a group member suggested that they were setting up a financial scam and were planning to abscond with people’s money).

But otherwise, I think it’s a sign of being a cult If you kick people for not going along with the group dogma.

Go ahead, delete it if you don’t think it was a good comment,

It was an honest attempt to think of instances of paranoid uncertainty (protestors don’t know if other protestors are acting in good faith), but sure, delete it if you think it wasn’t up to standard,

At the risk of this being a plot spoiler for Inside Mari, there is something that surprises me about that manga…

it suggests, I think, that the character has a sudden, abrupt dissociation, where they suddenly perceive themself as a different gender. I think, from talking to a bunch of trans people, that what they have is just not like that. On the other hand, I think it’s entirely possible that some minority of trans people really do have something like that.

“It's that they know what it feels like to feel attracted to women, and are desperate to have that same kind of loving attention directed back at themselves.”

From reading Ray Blanchard, I get the impression that this is not AGP in his typology. He thinks AGP is paraphilic attraction to being a woman, which — in his view — is quite different from wanting a sexual or romantic relationship with a person, and regarding transition as a means to get sex, love, etc.

The comedy account HalimedeMF says:

“personally I think a lot of white transgender women would benefit from not basing their entire ideas of femininity on the wrong anime girls. as a woman you're supposed to be defined by your mother's failings”

Usually, when I’m sharing LLM generated text, it’s to demonstrate some observed property of LLMs, not to make some other claim about the world.

It’s not, “This claim about the real world is true, because this LLM said it” — that’s an invalid deduction. It’s “This claim about a particular LLM is true, because here’s evidence of it doing the thing.”

We get into more interesting territory when an LLM suggests some thing about the world, and I verify that its argument is sound. How should we credit that? It’s not true because the LLM said it, it’s true because you can verify it. But perhaps we don’t want to take credit for coming up with it ourselves.

Ethnicity isn’t quite the same as nationality, and ethnicity is at least part in people’s heads and not objective.

As a matter of law, Wales is part of the UK and France isn’t. And yet Wales has a language and a flag, and you can call yourself a Welsh on census forms if you feel like it.

So there might be an element to the EU that is more like an ethnicity than a state, that the peoples of assorted Western European nations feel part of some ethnicity that’s wider than a state, just as you can belong to an ethnicity that’s more regional than a state.

I think I agree with the analysis that the EU is like nothing else.

As I tried to think of a comparison: The Hanseatic League? No, it’s not like that. But, surprisingly, some of the EU countries have formed an alliance calling itself The New Hanseatic League.