Then my CS advisors were lying to me even more than I thought? They are selling this as job training. The people that hire for software development look for computer science graduates. If it's not job training then what is it?
Yes, if they said that they were wrong. University exists to teach the academic state of the art, not the professional state of the art. You should learn algorithmic analysis and theory of databases, compilers, and networks, but you should not be learning the framework du jour and even source control is relatively irrelevant. This may or not be useful in the workplace, but it is not job training and universities do not exist to provide that. Admittedly, many people have this confused and society at large does nothing to discourage it.
Computer science is like art. You either have it or you don't. In both cases, the intrinsic talent must be developed and polished, but there has to be in-born talent to begin with. You can't force it, no matter how much you might like the salaries being promised.
I disagree that this is true of either, having taught both subjects. Or at the least one must consider that there is a lot of low-skill positions in both fields.
Most definitely not. Kind of the exact opposite since it's spreading the views of a faction of the Saudis.
No, the House of Saud is not interested in giving up Mecca and Medina, and especially not to some group that thinks they're going to be the next caliphate.
You're certainly inviting flaming by mentioning ESR to me, especially in connection to politics. I'll skip the anti-Zionist screeds if it's the same to you. I have read a number of books on the history of Islam and the region. I could certainly use more, but I'd rather have more current information about trends.
We don't have allies in the region, just more problems. It's not like any of them are going to leap to defend us, we just use them for our own ends, mostly for lack of alternative.
The situation had no more to do with Islam than Charles Manson has to do about Christianity.
I'm not sure which situation you mean, but IS is absolutely fighting a religious war. And I think we can dispense with analogies here.
Gender expression is, as noted previously, a different topic, but: sometimes it's easier to present one way or another. Some people don't feel strongly drawn one way or another. And generally considering identity as something fixed is probably more fallacious than not. What people consider themselves isn't really your business, and there isn't any reason why gender expression is treated any differently than any other form of self expression.
If you're suggesting that there are lots of transgender people who are going on and off HRT at their whim, that would be...well, let's just say that to a first approximation, that doesn't happen, and in the potential handful of cases around the world where that might be true, yes those people probably have some pretty severe issues.
Given that 62.7% have an identifiable mental comorbidity, and 81.4% have a personality disorder, I think there's a very, very high probability that the high suicide rate comes from mental illness rather than societal pressures.
You don't have much conception of the societal pressures. Personally, I dealt with varying levels of depression from about age 8 until fairly recently, and it's been precisely the realization of how much of that was due to external pressures that has been key to ending that. One of the more punishing mental traps is the idea that you are somehow shameful or wrong for being who you are. That is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. I mean, look at this forum; Slashdot is even one of the better-educated parts of the Internet.
As far as your studies go...oh boy. So the statistical error you're making is not considering or controlling for other confounding factors. Assault and various kinds of sexual and other abuse occur at a rate far higher than the general population, and these have well-documented effects on mental health. You're also interpreting a correlation as a causation, and specifically framing that causation in a manner which supports your prejudices when all evidence suggests the reverse. I also am forced to assume that you did not read anything of those studies beyond the abstract. You might have noticed that the one was published in "Psychiatry Journal", the other in "Medical Journal of Islamic Republic of Iran", and both of them were done in Iran. Even if there were some reason to believe that these were valid journals or good science, there's no justification for assuming that these figures correspond to conditions in the Western world.
So to repeat, I did ask for something other than the first paper that came to hand. And a minimum standard of politeness would involve reading it first.
The topic is probably fraught because among other things you're verging on being personally insulting. Which still puts you ahead of the crowd, or rather the torrent of bile and hatred.
I think this is partially misleading, because yes, I've seen the same data which suggests it is still better "than not", as you say, but the outcomes are still not median, not by a long-shot.
I would be happy if this were otherwise, but this depends mostly on how trans people are treated by others. It's not like being transgender is ipso facto a reason to be depressed. It's actually kind of cool in a sense. However, the psychological load of having more or less the entire world telling you that you are something you are not is pretty intense. We have a loooong way to go before we see improved outcomes
I think it's not hard to argue that persons in the middle of transgender treatment are probably unfit for military service in most cases.
I'm sure both trans people that wanted to join the Army are very upset. However, whether they're fit or not should probably be a case-by-case medical issue rather than some blanket condemnation. And let's please not pull the all-trans-people-are-crazy card.
I don't think anyone actually things that Pfc. Manning had a traitors hearts, but a combination of self-admitted gender dysphoria, depression, and isolation led her to do things that were very harmful to the United States. This is probably an unnecessary risk.
I'm not aware of any such harm, and we've heard this same argument applied to gays before.
Not a problem, friend of friends! I'm happy to repeat myself.
You see, it's possible to build computers out of things that don't involve electricity. People have used mechanical devices, living cells, fluids, photons, and even the mechanism of human intellect. Additionally, electrical computers do not actually expose their electrical nature beyond the circuit level; the zeros-and-ones abstraction is pretty fundamental, and certainly nothing else is available at the OS level. Thus we can say that electricity is incidental to computation. Personally I'd give about half odds that optical computing will be the dominant paradigm in a hundred years.
Read the fucking article and find out you shithead. You're lucky you can be pseudonymous on this issue rather than having your bigotry shown to the world.
Of course the concept of "curing" or "treating" a condition suggests that it is a disorder, and that is itself a politically charged decision.
No, it does not, and no, this is not a political decision. You're a jerk for implying otherwise. Being transgender is a medical condition, not a disorder, and the article I linked makes that point fairly explicitly. If you have some motivated reasoning that prevents you from being objective about this issue, that would seem to be your own problem.
And I'm happy for you that you have no idea why that might be, but I did ask for some specific citations, not the first vaguely applicable paper to hand.
Trivially false. Gender identity is a result of hormonal action upon the brain, and that hormonal response necessarily happens as a separate process after the formation of the genitals. Please review the literature on the subject.
The problem is the transsexual folks, still display a high rate of comorbidity with other other illness, suggesting they are probably still ill.
This point would be directly contradicted by all studies on the matter. Yes, health outcomes still suck, but not necessarily at a greater rate than the general population after controlling for preexisting conditions and socioeconomic status. The problem is that the statistics for trans people before treatment are really quite shameful.
The conclusion of nearly all studies on the matter is that HRT+therapy+surgery as applicable leads to better health outcomes than not. If you're going to argue otherwise, I would politely request you to supply some pretty convincing citations.
The depressing thing about this is that if the research did not actually suggest that doing something led to better outcomes, nothing would be done. As is, things are moving very very slowly towards insurance companies having no medical reasons to object to covering transgender-related procedures, and I promise you those people are not responding to social indicators in favor of medical/financial ones.
Your reasoning on this issue appears to be strongly biased. No researcher would use the term "self mutilation". I would doubt your objectivity if I had reason to believe it existed.
It's probably best considered a health condition, if we're not going to consider it as a normal outcome of human development. It should not be considered a disease or an illness, in the sense that people with this condition do not want to be 'cured'.
Humans do not have exactly two genders. Humans have two sexes. Gender identity is a related but distinct phenomenon, and gender expression is a further topic. You've never bothered to do even the slightest bit of research on gender development. Why don't you start with this article, which gives an overview of current medical knowledge. If you have an argument with any research contained therein, please do be specific. This topic is actually fairly interesting from a neurobiological perspective, but having the conversation polluted by uninformed bigotry is, frankly, boring and ineffectual.
But the military cares about suicide rates. It's a problem. Add to that the well document FACT that transgendered people commit suicide at a far greater rate than the average person (whether or not they have had surgery) and they (the military) have a good reason to be concerned.
Why them particularly? And do you have a citation that says that the suicide rate and/or other health outcomes are equal or worse for transgender persons in the military as opposed to the general population?
Again, where "importance" is defined by you. And I have no idea what you think of as "everything they want", but I am sure that this is completely uninformed by what trans people actually want. It's your side that's pushing for legislation on this issue.
I base my everyday clothing decisions on what's least likely to get me assaulted. My public restroom choices are similarly informed. Trans politics are "please let us feel safe in public" followed by "man, it would be nice if we could get health insurance". But the thing is, when you're marginalized to that extent, you really don't have time to get into politics. You're too worried about paying the medical bills.
You are not afraid to walk around in public. You're not afraid to take a piss. You have a default expectation of people respecting you as a common member of humanity. If there were some violence that were being done to you simply by trans people existing, your attitude might be justifiable. Or, potentially, if it hurt you at all. What is being asked of you is no more or less than common human decency. Is that really so much of a problem?
At this point I feel like I no longer have a good handle on this subject. It seems fairly complex. I'd definitely appreciate any information that you had to hand. There seems to be a lot of propaganda flying in every direction. I'd really like to get a good handle on what [a] the average Muslim in {S.A., Iran, Indonesia} thinks about ISIS, on what [b] the clerical opinion is about ISIS in those countries, and definitely any reliable accounts of money movements to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other extremist Salafists/Wahhabists.
ISIS does represent something of an existential threat to the Saudi Arabian kingdom. Generally I tend to think that most existing Islamic governments are probably going to oppose attempts to establish a caliphate. That individual Saudis rebel can't really be denied -- no one has forgotten UBL and company -- but it seems illogical to suppose that the government as a whole supports them. I believe that it is also relevant to this topic to note that Qatar is home to Al-Jazeera, which doesn't bode well for objective reporting.
The issue of the military base seems like a distraction. We did have a base in S.A., and lots of people were upset about this, including UBL, who gave it as a reason for 9/11. I don't think you're arguing that we should reopen that base. It could be argued on the same principles that the base in Qatar is also a bad idea. Generally, our attempts at regime change and peacekeeping have been interpreted as wholesale violations of autonomy in the region, and honestly, they're not wrong.
To me Islam seems like an ironic punishment for believing in Islam, and I think that our foreign policy goals should be encouraging Islamic republicanism (as opposed to caliphates/autocratic states). Whatever the solutions, it gives me no pleasure to suggest that the least evil option is to work with the existing governments. If you have good reasons for preferring one government over the other, though, do let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
Then my CS advisors were lying to me even more than I thought? They are selling this as job training. The people that hire for software development look for computer science graduates. If it's not job training then what is it?
Yes, if they said that they were wrong. University exists to teach the academic state of the art, not the professional state of the art. You should learn algorithmic analysis and theory of databases, compilers, and networks, but you should not be learning the framework du jour and even source control is relatively irrelevant. This may or not be useful in the workplace, but it is not job training and universities do not exist to provide that. Admittedly, many people have this confused and society at large does nothing to discourage it.
Computer science is like art. You either have it or you don't. In both cases, the intrinsic talent must be developed and polished, but there has to be in-born talent to begin with. You can't force it, no matter how much you might like the salaries being promised.
I disagree that this is true of either, having taught both subjects. Or at the least one must consider that there is a lot of low-skill positions in both fields.
Most definitely not. Kind of the exact opposite since it's spreading the views of a faction of the Saudis.
No, the House of Saud is not interested in giving up Mecca and Medina, and especially not to some group that thinks they're going to be the next caliphate.
You're certainly inviting flaming by mentioning ESR to me, especially in connection to politics. I'll skip the anti-Zionist screeds if it's the same to you. I have read a number of books on the history of Islam and the region. I could certainly use more, but I'd rather have more current information about trends.
We don't have allies in the region, just more problems. It's not like any of them are going to leap to defend us, we just use them for our own ends, mostly for lack of alternative.
The situation had no more to do with Islam than Charles Manson has to do about Christianity.
I'm not sure which situation you mean, but IS is absolutely fighting a religious war. And I think we can dispense with analogies here.
Gender expression is, as noted previously, a different topic, but: sometimes it's easier to present one way or another. Some people don't feel strongly drawn one way or another. And generally considering identity as something fixed is probably more fallacious than not. What people consider themselves isn't really your business, and there isn't any reason why gender expression is treated any differently than any other form of self expression.
If you're suggesting that there are lots of transgender people who are going on and off HRT at their whim, that would be...well, let's just say that to a first approximation, that doesn't happen, and in the potential handful of cases around the world where that might be true, yes those people probably have some pretty severe issues.
Given that 62.7% have an identifiable mental comorbidity, and 81.4% have a personality disorder, I think there's a very, very high probability that the high suicide rate comes from mental illness rather than societal pressures.
You don't have much conception of the societal pressures. Personally, I dealt with varying levels of depression from about age 8 until fairly recently, and it's been precisely the realization of how much of that was due to external pressures that has been key to ending that. One of the more punishing mental traps is the idea that you are somehow shameful or wrong for being who you are. That is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. I mean, look at this forum; Slashdot is even one of the better-educated parts of the Internet.
As far as your studies go...oh boy. So the statistical error you're making is not considering or controlling for other confounding factors. Assault and various kinds of sexual and other abuse occur at a rate far higher than the general population, and these have well-documented effects on mental health. You're also interpreting a correlation as a causation, and specifically framing that causation in a manner which supports your prejudices when all evidence suggests the reverse. I also am forced to assume that you did not read anything of those studies beyond the abstract. You might have noticed that the one was published in "Psychiatry Journal", the other in "Medical Journal of Islamic Republic of Iran", and both of them were done in Iran. Even if there were some reason to believe that these were valid journals or good science, there's no justification for assuming that these figures correspond to conditions in the Western world.
So to repeat, I did ask for something other than the first paper that came to hand. And a minimum standard of politeness would involve reading it first.
The topic is probably fraught because among other things you're verging on being personally insulting. Which still puts you ahead of the crowd, or rather the torrent of bile and hatred.
I think this is partially misleading, because yes, I've seen the same data which suggests it is still better "than not", as you say, but the outcomes are still not median, not by a long-shot.
I would be happy if this were otherwise, but this depends mostly on how trans people are treated by others. It's not like being transgender is ipso facto a reason to be depressed. It's actually kind of cool in a sense. However, the psychological load of having more or less the entire world telling you that you are something you are not is pretty intense. We have a loooong way to go before we see improved outcomes
I think it's not hard to argue that persons in the middle of transgender treatment are probably unfit for military service in most cases.
I'm sure both trans people that wanted to join the Army are very upset. However, whether they're fit or not should probably be a case-by-case medical issue rather than some blanket condemnation. And let's please not pull the all-trans-people-are-crazy card.
I don't think anyone actually things that Pfc. Manning had a traitors hearts, but a combination of self-admitted gender dysphoria, depression, and isolation led her to do things that were very harmful to the United States. This is probably an unnecessary risk.
I'm not aware of any such harm, and we've heard this same argument applied to gays before.
Why don't you read that a few more times then.
Not a problem, friend of friends! I'm happy to repeat myself.
You see, it's possible to build computers out of things that don't involve electricity. People have used mechanical devices, living cells, fluids, photons, and even the mechanism of human intellect. Additionally, electrical computers do not actually expose their electrical nature beyond the circuit level; the zeros-and-ones abstraction is pretty fundamental, and certainly nothing else is available at the OS level. Thus we can say that electricity is incidental to computation. Personally I'd give about half odds that optical computing will be the dominant paradigm in a hundred years.
Read the fucking article and find out you shithead. You're lucky you can be pseudonymous on this issue rather than having your bigotry shown to the world.
No idea why you think this is at all relevant to anything. Assuming you didn't read the linked article. Sad!
Science, it works you fuckwad. If you don't like it, do better science.
Of course the concept of "curing" or "treating" a condition suggests that it is a disorder, and that is itself a politically charged decision.
No, it does not, and no, this is not a political decision. You're a jerk for implying otherwise. Being transgender is a medical condition, not a disorder, and the article I linked makes that point fairly explicitly. If you have some motivated reasoning that prevents you from being objective about this issue, that would seem to be your own problem.
I'm not sure why you bothered to type this.
This does not treat any issue I discussed. The assumption being that you are incapable.
I know, it's a shame when people have reasonable objections like wanting to spend longer than six months without a visit to the ER.
And I'm happy for you that you have no idea why that might be, but I did ask for some specific citations, not the first vaguely applicable paper to hand.
Trivially false. Gender identity is a result of hormonal action upon the brain, and that hormonal response necessarily happens as a separate process after the formation of the genitals. Please review the literature on the subject.
The fuck does that have to do with anything?
The problem is the transsexual folks, still display a high rate of comorbidity with other other illness, suggesting they are probably still ill.
This point would be directly contradicted by all studies on the matter. Yes, health outcomes still suck, but not necessarily at a greater rate than the general population after controlling for preexisting conditions and socioeconomic status. The problem is that the statistics for trans people before treatment are really quite shameful.
The conclusion of nearly all studies on the matter is that HRT+therapy+surgery as applicable leads to better health outcomes than not. If you're going to argue otherwise, I would politely request you to supply some pretty convincing citations.
The depressing thing about this is that if the research did not actually suggest that doing something led to better outcomes, nothing would be done. As is, things are moving very very slowly towards insurance companies having no medical reasons to object to covering transgender-related procedures, and I promise you those people are not responding to social indicators in favor of medical/financial ones.
Your reasoning on this issue appears to be strongly biased. No researcher would use the term "self mutilation". I would doubt your objectivity if I had reason to believe it existed.
It's probably best considered a health condition, if we're not going to consider it as a normal outcome of human development. It should not be considered a disease or an illness, in the sense that people with this condition do not want to be 'cured'.
Humans do not have exactly two genders. Humans have two sexes. Gender identity is a related but distinct phenomenon, and gender expression is a further topic. You've never bothered to do even the slightest bit of research on gender development. Why don't you start with this article, which gives an overview of current medical knowledge. If you have an argument with any research contained therein, please do be specific. This topic is actually fairly interesting from a neurobiological perspective, but having the conversation polluted by uninformed bigotry is, frankly, boring and ineffectual.
But the military cares about suicide rates. It's a problem. Add to that the well document FACT that transgendered people commit suicide at a far greater rate than the average person (whether or not they have had surgery) and they (the military) have a good reason to be concerned.
Why them particularly? And do you have a citation that says that the suicide rate and/or other health outcomes are equal or worse for transgender persons in the military as opposed to the general population?
That's just like, your opinion, man.
Again, where "importance" is defined by you. And I have no idea what you think of as "everything they want", but I am sure that this is completely uninformed by what trans people actually want. It's your side that's pushing for legislation on this issue.
I base my everyday clothing decisions on what's least likely to get me assaulted. My public restroom choices are similarly informed. Trans politics are "please let us feel safe in public" followed by "man, it would be nice if we could get health insurance". But the thing is, when you're marginalized to that extent, you really don't have time to get into politics. You're too worried about paying the medical bills.
You are not afraid to walk around in public. You're not afraid to take a piss. You have a default expectation of people respecting you as a common member of humanity. If there were some violence that were being done to you simply by trans people existing, your attitude might be justifiable. Or, potentially, if it hurt you at all. What is being asked of you is no more or less than common human decency. Is that really so much of a problem?
At this point I feel like I no longer have a good handle on this subject. It seems fairly complex. I'd definitely appreciate any information that you had to hand. There seems to be a lot of propaganda flying in every direction. I'd really like to get a good handle on what [a] the average Muslim in {S.A., Iran, Indonesia} thinks about ISIS, on what [b] the clerical opinion is about ISIS in those countries, and definitely any reliable accounts of money movements to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other extremist Salafists/Wahhabists.
ISIS does represent something of an existential threat to the Saudi Arabian kingdom. Generally I tend to think that most existing Islamic governments are probably going to oppose attempts to establish a caliphate. That individual Saudis rebel can't really be denied -- no one has forgotten UBL and company -- but it seems illogical to suppose that the government as a whole supports them. I believe that it is also relevant to this topic to note that Qatar is home to Al-Jazeera, which doesn't bode well for objective reporting.
The issue of the military base seems like a distraction. We did have a base in S.A., and lots of people were upset about this, including UBL, who gave it as a reason for 9/11. I don't think you're arguing that we should reopen that base. It could be argued on the same principles that the base in Qatar is also a bad idea. Generally, our attempts at regime change and peacekeeping have been interpreted as wholesale violations of autonomy in the region, and honestly, they're not wrong.
To me Islam seems like an ironic punishment for believing in Islam, and I think that our foreign policy goals should be encouraging Islamic republicanism (as opposed to caliphates/autocratic states). Whatever the solutions, it gives me no pleasure to suggest that the least evil option is to work with the existing governments. If you have good reasons for preferring one government over the other, though, do let me know.