What are your favorite keys on the keyboard?

Xcancel is an alternative frontend for twitter to specifically avoid having to create an account to use Twitter. Again you could’ve gotten this information with a simple google search lmao “what is xcancel” 😂 there, I even typed it for you.

I also wasnt the person you responded to initially.

I also think that you’re a startlingly uncurious person if doing even a cursory glance at a google search is too much for you. Maybe these kinds of discussions just arent for you to begin with. If you really couldnt care less whether someone is a fascist or not, certainly not to the point of wanting to actually find out for yourself, then yeah maybe dont partake in the conversation.

You’re more interested in defending being lazy than you are in discussing the subject. I’m sure you’ll say something like “its the principle that matters”, which is the most boring possible answer you could give. I’m more than willing to see if someone hates trans people and/or is a white supremacist. I would absolutely prefer to know that so I can avoid them. It took me very minimal effort to find that information for myself. Less than 2 minutes.

I feel like its usually not with the intent to harass but a misapplication of the term born of genuine ignorance about what makes someone or something fascist, which is itself subjective in certain contexts.

A cursory glance at his Twitter profile shows him using the R slur, defending the fascist paramilitary group ICE, sharing an image that appears to depict Canada and Mexico being entirely conquered and subsumed by America, here’s an interesting little post of him glorifying literally fascist art, being a general transphobe (unsurprising), and im sure there’s lots of other heinous stuff i missed.

Really it was very clear from one single glance at his Twitter page. Come on now, you can manage that much on your own surely.

Lol

Arguments are based on reason. This is an argument for instance. You have produced an example that you feel conflicts with my earlier statement.

Are you able to provide a rationale or argument to your dog that they should get into the crate? Are you capable of reasoning with her logically? How can you communicate those things with her? Could she for instance have this argument that we are having right now? Can she understand the argument I am presently making and provide a rational counter argument? If not, why cant she do that?

Youre essentially arguing for a broad semantic definition of argument. Both of the participants in the exchange you just provided are focused on one individual. The exchange from your dogs perspective never crosses outside of your dogs subjective sensory experience. Your dog dislikes going into the crate. She is incapable of understanding why it is necessary for her to go in the crate. To claim that she has a humanlike awareness of that situation is to anthropomorphize her. From her perspective I doubt there are any explanations that could be presented to her to convince her that going in the crate is a good idea. She could be motivated by fear or by reward or by her own subjective emotional experience (maybe sometimes she just doesnt mind it that much) or even out of a desire to follow your directions as her master. But you couldn’t sit her down and provide a rational argument to her about why she should get in the crate. That’s not something her brain is capable of doing. Humans alone have neurology conducive to that. There is variation in the animal kingdom, but nothing that even approaches abstract referrential language.

Cool. This isnt a response to anything I said, and you have offered nothing to prove your claim that dogs can speak English lmao.

You are the exact kind of person for whom the ape torture experiments were made to begin with. Someone entirely uninterested in what can be observed and proven. Someone with a delusional anthropomorphic view of what animals are. Blind to your own biases and convinced by the subjective emotional experiences you have projected onto your pets.

No, I’m sorry but “believe me its totally true, everyone knows dogs can speak english” is not a legitimate argument nor a response to what I’ve been saying.

Your first statement is entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand, so I dont even really know why you said it.

I’m saying I’ve never even heard of it. I would love to see a qualitative analysis of ‘arguments’ with dogs. I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that anything even approaching actual language comprehension is happening. Understanding some words and sentences is not the same thing as language comprehension. Do they understand the meaning of the terms? Can they infer new things if terms have been rearranged? Do they understand the structure of language? No. They definitely cannot. They are capable of pattern matching human vocalizations though, especially as they relate to themselves and things in their immediate environment. Thats not the same thing as language. I’m very sorry if you do not understand the nuance between those 2 things, or if you genuinely believe any of your pets could speak English. Theres nothing I or anyone else can say to convince you otherwise if youve already decided that your subjective emotional experience with your animals leads you to believe they have English language speaking skills.

Sorry you lost me with the archeology memes, ill take your word for it lol.

I said exhibited, that already implies that I dont know for certain. I am saying that there has never been any evidence provided to me that my pets, or anyone else’s pets, have ever communicated using structured abstract language to communicate. I think believing that animals have a secret ability to communicate in non-symbolic ways is basically a conspiracy theory. There is nuance to what we would define as symbolic and what we would define as structured abstract language, but overall I think this holds true even with very generous definitions for those terms.

Communication through posturing, facial expressions, basic vocalizations, pheromones, can all be used to communicate some ideas that are complex in some ways. You can communicate to someone who knows you very well just be showing them a subtle facial expression that they know you well enough to pick up on. We are especially good at communicating emotions this way. I dont think that anyone would argue those modes of communication are as robust as, say, English. How would we have this conversation through purely posturing, facial expressions, vocalizations and pheromones? Can we convey these abstract ideas through those things that are unstructured and based on what is essentially our ability to pattern much external stimuli? Can you present my arguments to your dog? Can you show that your dog can be made to understand the arguments I am making about language?

Ive had many pets. None of them have ever exhibited the ability of abstraction. Thats not an insult to their ability to understand my emotions or whats happening around them, their brains are just literally not designed to engage in the kinds of communication humans are capable of. They could not have the conversation you and I are having right now, they are neurologically not capable of it. Humans are uniquely capable of this.

The entire study of great apes and sign language has been based on flawed methodology and subjective and biased interpretation of very small data sets.

Its interesting that apes can recollect abstract symbols. It’s even kind of interesting that they can to some extent recollect hand gestures. But it is nothing more than symbolic association at its absolute best. Calling it language is a fundamental misrepresentation of what is taking place. Apes already possess several kinds of ‘language’ comparable to symbolic association, stuff like emotive language and body language and expressive language. There is no substantive evidence that they are capable of understanding and using an abstract language.

What has largely happened in so called ‘studies’ on ‘sign language’ in great apes, has been a lot of animal abuse and fundraising for animal abuse predicated on vague notions of how inspiring the idea of talking apes is. They can’t talk. They are nonetheless very interesting creatures and we should be fascinated by them even without them having the ability to speak human language.

The really frustrating part is that they shouldn’t have to speak with us for us to feel compassion towards them. The really disgusting part is that wild animals were being abducted from the wild and raised in deplorable conditions while essentially being tormented by disgraced researchers trying to prove that they could talk. They’re very well suited to their natural environment (which we are destroying) and are not meant to live lives in concrete cages on the other side of the world being prodded and clicker trained to make vague hand motions. It’s just animal cruelty under the guise of scientific research.

I hate the way the media makes this problem so much worse by incorrectly describing LLMs. They can’t “have intelligence”. They are incapable of any kind of thought. The “intelligence” of GPT1 and GPT5 are the same, in that neither have any. They are complex computational algorithms designed to generate text from prompts. That is absolutely not the same thing as thinking or knowing things.

There are entire cults springing out of the ground believing LLMs to literally be thinking feeling beings 💀 we are so beyond fucked.

I was able to find a source from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website. it seems that it would’ve actually gone up to the 20th letter.

A number of polyhedral dice made in various materials have survived from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, usually from ancient Egypt when known. Several are in the Egyptian or Greek and Roman collections at the Museum. The icosahedron – 20-sided polyhedron – is frequent. Most often each face of the die is inscribed with a number in Greek and/or Latin up to the number of faces on the polyhedron.

It doesnt matter really, evidence is really irrelevant to the entire thing at this point. The people tuning in do not understand what autism is to begin with, let alone what evidence would even mean in this context.

I won’t be surprised when studies show in a few years a large drop in Tylenol use during pregnancy (probably overall use too), and the diagnosis rate of autism continues the overall increasing trend (as we become better at diagnosing it).

In the top case has it been arbitrarily decided to include space in between the would-be victims? Or is the top a like number line comparison to the bottom? Because if thats the case it becomes relevant if there is one body for every real number unit of distance. (One body at 0.1 meter, and at 0.01 meter, at 0.001, etc)

If so then there’s an infinite amount of victims on the first planck length of the bottom track. An infinite number of victims would contain every possible victim. Every single possible person on the first plank length. So on the next planck length would be every possible person again.

Which would mean that the bottom track is actually choosing a universe of perpetual endless suffering and death for every single possible person. The top track would eventually cause infinite suffering but it would take infinite time to get there. The bottom track starts at infinite suffering and extends infinitely in this manner. Every possible version of every possible person dying, forever.

Back in the mid 2000s I made a fan website dedicated to my favorite game character, kirby, on one of those “build your own website” type sites. I remember I was like 8 and working on it quite a lot. The site was aimed at like kids / teenagers I think. Can’t remember what it was called to save my life. It definitely does not still exist, but the idea is that I could somehow find the site I made in a backup somewhere. Ive done some pretty deliberate searching over the years but still cant remember what the site builder/hoster was called. Something that started with a P, or had a P in the name, maybe?

We are. You keep ignoring the majority of what I say. You also haven’t really pushed back in any way on the majority of what I’ve said. Scientists work with different definitions, right, and so we are talking about sex as it relates to people and how we categorize people. I am asking how we can use a definition of sex based exclusively on gametes in specific situations, specifically to highlight to you that that definition itself is not all that useful when applied to people.

Let me return to your original comment, again.

No, we only have 2 sexes. Sperm producers and egg producers. We call those male and female. All of the other stuff is window dressing.

And the comment I was responding to.

Since I don’t think fungi have a social structure, those are sexes. Humans have two Sexes but also gender expression, conflating those is how transphobes come to their views.

We have been talking about sex in humans this entire time, a subject you are for some reason determined to avoid? Lol

You didnt answer if theyre still female after menopause though. They don’t produce gametes. So they no longer meet the stated definition. And would therefore now be sexless. As would any sterile person. This is an inherent limitation of equating sex 1 to 1 with gametes production. Animals and plants couldnt care less what we think about them. Other people however do tend to care how we talk about them. And I doubt anyone, literally anyone, would agree that anyone who is sterile is no longer male or female. This is an example of the way that the definitions of terms can be one thing in one context and another in a different one. When the word sex is used in common parlance it is usually not as a reference to gametes.

What we are discussing is how to discuss people who are neither male or female. Sex, yes even in the literal Wikipedia definition, defines 2 categories. Not all organisms fit within those 2 categories. Therefore there are more than 2 categories. That is the entirety of my held position.

Your reductive approach to understanding biology is unhelpful in the context of humans. A better statement is “humans only produce 2 gametes”, which is at least accurate. Sex as it exists for people and as it relates to people has really nothing to do with gametes. It is associated with gametes, but is for the most part unrelated to them. The window dressing you mentioned is actually what people generally mean by sex. All of the other things. Even biologists usually mean the window dressing. They dont ask to test subjects gametes before performing studies on them. They accept their stated sex (which is nearly always their assigned sex, and therefore based on external appearance) or what it says on some legal documentation (same as previous) and then accept that assignment.

The word sex used in the context of human traits just does not refer to gametes. You can define it that way, the same way I might define apples as vegetables, but if that definition is entirely divorced from what the word actually means in every day life then what is the purpose of the definition? It serves no purpose. Humans and mushrooms can hardly be equated, and approaching the concept of sex the same in each case is going to do very little except ostracize intersex people and make society generally inhospitable to them.

You essentially avoided answering my previous questions here. Are you saying that post menopausal women are no longer female? Just clarifying. I am pretty sure that if that is the case and you stand by that definition then you stand very much alone.

So you would define them as each as sexless and therefore belonging to the same sex category? I would argue that youve assigned a “third sex” category to them in doing so. If the options are male/female/neither/both, then you’re proposing a system of 4 categories. One which is solely focused on reproductive cells, which is not and never has been the definition of sex in humans.

You said earlier that all secondary sex characteristics, being secondary characteristics, are “window dressing”. Downstream consequences of reproductive cells. How do we account for this in the example I mentioned in my previous comment? The 2 sterile humans, one assigned female at birth and one assigned male at birth. They have the same “sex category”, neither has any reproductive cells of any kind. They should both have no secondary sex characteristics if that is the case, using your own statements. Why then is that not the case? And more to a direct point, why doesnt their drivers license have a “N/A” next to the “Sex” marker?

What happens when someone loses their ability to produce reproductive cells? Are cis women going through menopause “formerly female” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”? Are cis men who have had to have their reproductive organs removed “formerly male” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”?

I’ll now return to your original comment.

No, we only have 2 sexes. Sperm producers and egg producers. We call those male and female. All of the other stuff is window dressing.

Some people do not produce a gamete. Some people can produce both. What sex are each of those people? One person is assigned female at birth and another person is assigned male at birth, but they are both sterile and incapable of producing any gametes. Are they the same sex? What sex are they?