Quick point on Twitter (I may come up with other comments in due course): I think it's also worth mentioning how many retweets and likes (which aren't always approbation, I think some users still use them as bookmarks). Someone like Jolyon M can have lots of followers and very few retweets. That particular one has fewer than 100k views (one in five of his followers) and 1k retweets (just over 1% of Twitter accounts that saw it). I should know whether these figures are good or not; they don't strike me as being so.
Jones' tweet got 6k retweets (0.6% of those who saw it—and he blocks people who don't agree with him). Are these people *influential* at all?
Having said that, I don't think you're tilting at straw men: I think these views certainly are held by a widely followed section of the Twitter commentariat; I'm less convinced that many people believe them in private.
On the suicide thing, it's also worth mentioning that suicides by teenagers (the supposedly vulnerable group) are still very rare. Activists intentionally confuse suicidal ideation with attempting suicide, which it's not. And they don't even consider the baseline numbers of teenagers who, at some point or other, think about their own death. Nor do they take into account that "trans" adolescents are disproportionately depressed, bullied, socially awkward, or some combination of those, and they're not outliers if you take stressors or pre-existing mental conditions into account. And finally, I think people are "rewarded" for saying that they're suicidal: they qualify for extra "stroking" and attention. I think this is particularly reckless as encouraging people to identify (awful word, I know) as suicidal intuitively (I don't have any data here) increases the chances of them actually making an attempt.
Final point, I think I've left Twitter, so apologies for not boosting this excellent post.
A brown kid growing up in Tamuff in the 70's should know some stuff about bullying. Never mind being a geek, too! Humans are merciless, they will always find a "Difference" as an excuse to bully. Some bounce back from it, some are victims all their lives, that is what fascinates me.
Shame we can't wind the media clock back a few years and do what it should have done.... which is to have denied this 'trans activist' vastly self-important 0.0001% of humanity the attention it craves. Instead we have allowed it to become a 'great issue ' of our time. How foolish of us. I personally could not give a flying f*** about trans this, trans that or trans the other.
Good take overall of course but you're awfully weird about suicide. Suicide is prevented by survival instinct, not reason. We don't see a lot of calm, well-thought out suicides because it's a lot harder for reason to defeat such strong instinct than out-of-control emotion, not because wanting to die while being of sound mind is some unthinkable contradiction.
Quick point on Twitter (I may come up with other comments in due course): I think it's also worth mentioning how many retweets and likes (which aren't always approbation, I think some users still use them as bookmarks). Someone like Jolyon M can have lots of followers and very few retweets. That particular one has fewer than 100k views (one in five of his followers) and 1k retweets (just over 1% of Twitter accounts that saw it). I should know whether these figures are good or not; they don't strike me as being so.
Jones' tweet got 6k retweets (0.6% of those who saw it—and he blocks people who don't agree with him). Are these people *influential* at all?
Having said that, I don't think you're tilting at straw men: I think these views certainly are held by a widely followed section of the Twitter commentariat; I'm less convinced that many people believe them in private.
On the suicide thing, it's also worth mentioning that suicides by teenagers (the supposedly vulnerable group) are still very rare. Activists intentionally confuse suicidal ideation with attempting suicide, which it's not. And they don't even consider the baseline numbers of teenagers who, at some point or other, think about their own death. Nor do they take into account that "trans" adolescents are disproportionately depressed, bullied, socially awkward, or some combination of those, and they're not outliers if you take stressors or pre-existing mental conditions into account. And finally, I think people are "rewarded" for saying that they're suicidal: they qualify for extra "stroking" and attention. I think this is particularly reckless as encouraging people to identify (awful word, I know) as suicidal intuitively (I don't have any data here) increases the chances of them actually making an attempt.
Final point, I think I've left Twitter, so apologies for not boosting this excellent post.
A brown kid growing up in Tamuff in the 70's should know some stuff about bullying. Never mind being a geek, too! Humans are merciless, they will always find a "Difference" as an excuse to bully. Some bounce back from it, some are victims all their lives, that is what fascinates me.
Shame we can't wind the media clock back a few years and do what it should have done.... which is to have denied this 'trans activist' vastly self-important 0.0001% of humanity the attention it craves. Instead we have allowed it to become a 'great issue ' of our time. How foolish of us. I personally could not give a flying f*** about trans this, trans that or trans the other.
Good take overall of course but you're awfully weird about suicide. Suicide is prevented by survival instinct, not reason. We don't see a lot of calm, well-thought out suicides because it's a lot harder for reason to defeat such strong instinct than out-of-control emotion, not because wanting to die while being of sound mind is some unthinkable contradiction.