The Nehor

Well, perhaps we should turn to scripture to look into surrogacy: Okay, but that is just one incident and…. Then you have levirate marriage where a man was to take his dead brother’s wife as his own and have children that will be the heirs of the dead brother which sounds a lot like surrogacy. Also, did you really have to take time in the original post for some gay-bashing as if they are heavily tied to surrogacy? Just had to get some cheap shots in where you defy the scholarly consensus just because you don’t like it even though it is mostly irrelevant? Is it reflexive at this point?

I put up a short post but thought I could share a little more about Utah in particular. While that is a lot of water to donate it a minor hedge. The biggest loss of water is just the lake evaporating and there is not that much that can be done about it. I heard there were ideas to try to shade portions of the lake with solar panels or something similar but it is just not viable. Putting metal things and human construction in general near really briny water destroys the thing pretty quickly. Short of arresting climate change not much can be done. The other big drain is agriculture and the biggest water consumer is alfalfa. We should probably grow a LOT less of that. It needs a lot of water and is primarily used for livestock and not human consumption. Alfalfa growth to human calories consumed it is very inefficient. All the consumer level water conservation of replacing lawns and the like won’t move the needle. The biggest move that can be made is cutting back on the alfalfa growing which would of course mean a bunch of alfalfa millionaires (probably including the Church) would fight tooth and nail against it. Also the statement saying the only thing we can do is hope for more rain is defeatist and silly. As the Great Lake dries up there will be less rain. Hoping for a miracle or a short term rainfall of extra rain isn’t sustainable. I also really don’t know how you write a piece like that without mentioning climate change unless you deliberately are trying not to mention it.

The whole Southwest is in trouble. Lake Powell is approaching critical levels and it is likely to come down to either keeping Lake Mead or Lake Powell viable and it will almost certainly be Lake Mead that survives for a while. We need to cut water use in all of the southwestern states but everyone largely accepts the need to do that as long as it has no impact on them specifically. It is political suicide to try to make the harsh cuts needed to arrest the problem so the can keeps getting kicked down the road.

If it quacks like a Nazi……..

Nope, not completely malleable. And in authoritarian nations using the laws to persecute political enemies is done openly. In liberal democracies you usually have to be more subtle if you can do it at all. No. It is devoid of rationality. The premises do not support your conclusion. Then why was it not exercised to arrest this guy years ago. His activity that supposedly was a violation of the law happened many years ago. So by your standards you lose to a basic calendar. It is an antisemitic conspiracy where “elites” are trying to dilute a nation by bringing in non-white people. It is the rhetoric that got Hitler into power. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. If you want to preach fascism at least be honest about it. Immigration happens therefore great replacement theory true? Yeah, no. Wrong. Godwin’s law also applies to (incorrectly) labelling someone a Nazi or a fascist and saying someone is pro-holocaust is pretty much assigning that label. Your pedantic dodge is facile and silly. I am not downplaying persecution. I am trying to deduce why this is happening now and not five years ago. You are just being a simpleton about it. Not what I am arguing but if you need to brush up on basic math go nuts. Yes, it is normal. This particular level of persecurtion of those who donated to someone years earlier is not the norm. This guy wasn’t a political opponent like any of those you listed. You’re comparing apples to oranges. Trying to understand why something is happening now and not years ago when it could have isn’t downplaying the persecution. You aren’t very logical. Then again you buy into fascist conspiracy theories so that is kind of a given.

So suddenly they have to represent a third sex for them to show a spectrum. Straw man. Silly. Facile. Dumb argument. They actually often are. The Church Handbook even acknowledges this. You’re reaching. You want a strict binary. You are shown exceptions to that strict binary. You say that those more obvious exceptions aren’t always the same people as those wanting to shift along the spectrum in defiance of the binary. This is projection. You insist that there is a strict binary and then retreat to these kinds of breezy arguments to try to invalidate the obvious exceptions without actually dealing with them. Some do. Which is something sporting leagues can figure out. It is not some massive conundrum that is threatening to uproot society unless we have a moral panic over it. They make the binary look fuzzy because they objectively show that the binary is fuzzy. That if there is a God that God obviously isn’t nearly as obsessed with correlating humans into that strict binary as you want Him to be. Maybe you should look into the data behind things instead of posting propaganda articles. Here is Dan McClellan talking a bit about this with references along with dealing with other pieces of transphobic nonsense. Intersex people prove this. There are lots of studies about them. You are being deliberately dense. There are only two sexes and I can prove it because there are males and females and others that don’t fit neatly into either category. You do realize how ridiculous that sounds right? Argument by assertion. This is not a mutual feeling. I find your facile rhetoric insulting and dangerous to the lives and wellbeing of people I care about. I hope you will follow the advice Dan gives at the end of the above video.

I could explain the existence of intersex people to you for what? The tenth time? Maybe more? Why bother? Go ahead and stick your head in the sand and pretend that religious dogma and reality somehow match up perfectly but you should give up arguing about it if you are just going to selectively edit reality or suggest some people don’t matter because there are relatively few of them or whatever. Oh, and about the brain imaging. I wasn’t claiming there is a hard and strict dichotomy. I was arguing that it showed a spectrum, the very thing you deny exists. The studies show that *checks notes* there is a spectrum and transgender people lean more towards their self-identified gender in terms of brain function than cisgender people assigned the same gender at birth. I don’t see how saying there is a spectrum which you do to refute me suggests you are right about there being a strict binary. PICK A LANE!

And you didn’t answer any of the core idea of what I said and instead just broke what I said up into small pieces and repeated pat phrases after them. Also no, sex-segregated spaces were created by men for men long before women got any meaningful spaces for themselves. Also I am personally tired of the people who support restricting the rights of women in general pretending they care about women’s spaces and women’s sports. They don’t unless it serves as a bludgeon against someone else they don’t like. Same with the mostly mythical LGB mythos. While their side is gutting adoption rights for gay couples they want to pretend they are helping the LGBTQ community defend itself from an interloper when they want to hack away at the rights of everyone in the community.

That you are comparing in ‘on the ground’ military operation to transgender people getting rights as somehow equivalent is ridiculous. We don’t need to have every detail of how things will work figured out before we can do anything. This ‘just asking questions’ schtick is as old as institutional bigotry and is one of its primary defenders. If we free the slaves what will keep them from raping all the white women? If we let black people have civil rights what will keep them from persecuting white people or becoming communists and allying with the Soviets? If we stop persecuting gay people what will keep them from converting your children into being gay? And AIDS!!!!!! That proves they are evil. If we allow black people to join the military it will destroy cohesion. If you can’t explain how we will avoid destroying all discipline in the ranks we shouldn’t let them in. Oh, and the same with gay people. If we let them in all the gay recruits will prey on the straight ones. Oh, and letting women in will destroy discipline as well. If we let women have jobs that have historically been open only to men what will keep them from wanting even more rights? If we let them go to the cities to work what will keep them all from becoming hookers? Now it is that if we let transgender transition cis men will pretend to be transgender in order to prey on women. So transgender women cannot have equality because cis men will use their equality to be predatory? That is just disgusting. It is telling that it admits that transgender people aren’t the actual problem. Just like all the talk about grooming and abuse by transgender people is something done more by cis men as well but we can’t try to change society at all so we will just let the cis men be predatory and have a moral panic about another group that doesn’t require actually challenging the powerful because we are moral cowards or something. Le sigh.

I am sure a dollar store version of Hitler like yourself can easily tell. A handy tool for letting sane people know they should avoid you at first glance. Thank you for doing that.

It doesn’t require courage or daring. It is pretty easy. And accurate. Kind of fun too. Ah, the QAnon slogan. How very unsurprising that you buy into a white supremacist conspiracy theory formed in support of a terrible political campaign. A conspiracy theory that was basically a massive trolling operation. And learned nothing from them? I am sure your letters are read aloud by them. When everyone is on break. So everyone can have a good laugh. The bonkers claim that 255,000 white girls were raped by “grooming gangs” is another conspiracy theory that is completely unsubstantiated and based on a very bad estimate attempting to generalize from individual cases of abuse. So no, that never happened. Get help.

You do know that the whole character arc of that movie is Kirk realizing that this prejudice of his is wrong and that he needs to change? I abhor a lot of fans of Star Trek who are so media illiterate that they don’t realize they are the very people Star Trek is warning us against becoming and that these people are the problem and why we can’t have a more pleasant society.

Therefore you saw we should be just as violent and cruel to others because ‘they started it’. Vile stuff ya weirdo.

White supremacy and a bunch of anti-semitism. Lovely. And a kind of ancestral essentialism where all white people did something because a few of their ancestors (who were the ancestors of virtually everyone else on the planet too) did something. And a lot of bad history and taxonomy and giving dinosaur sapience for some reason. Weird. And wrong.

The Comstock Act classified birth control products as “obscene” and this limited the ability to sell them. Other methods of birth control the government couldn’t realistically prohibit dominated the scene until later Supreme Court rulings chipped away at the law. While contraception is illegal it was well-known and practiced. Of course in the Victorian era it was something you didn’t talk about in public.

I would note that reliable birth control like condoms weren’t around when the counsel first came out. Before that most forms of consumed birth control were useless or sometimes poisonous and the latter sometimes worked but the mother often suffered and sometimes died. Birth control methods like abstinence or breast feeding were more effective and were practiced if children were not desirable at the time. Sometimes because the family was too large or their ability to acquire food wasn’t high enough or both. Families practiced forms of birth control throughout history to limit their number of children. The advice to not use birth control came to a culture that had a lot of open land to work so having four sons that made it to adulthood usually didn’t mean that there wasn’t enough farmland to go around.

He is clearly a huckster and a shill. I doubt he has any concern at all for facts beyond the ones that can be cherry-picked for rhetorical purposes.

That it was strongly disapproved of in the past and now per the Church Handbook it is not something anyone but the couple (and possibly God) should have a say in. If you are looking for a statement saying birth control is approved or not prohibited you won’t find a clear one which is my point. Church leaders sneak in these changes without repudiating what was formerly taught which is why you have members who think birth control is prohibited because of quotes they have read when it is not. The illusion of not changing seems to be very important to Church leaders and they don’t like disavowing previous teachings. They do it occasionally with ‘Curse of Cain’ stuff and things like blood atonement but it is rare. They seem to prefer to just hope the old ideas will die out in time.

No, it is not. It is a first amendment violation if you end up prosecuted for it. You can see the transphobes trying to come up with stories to stoke the hysteria so they conflate a university with the government and run with it because they can’t find any actual government persecution. They do the same with their imaginary bathroom and locker room invasions and spin hypotheticals about the dangers of Drag Queens because they don’t have any good incidents of it actually happening. It is like the Satanic panic as those warning about the dangers of cultists have to accept the flimsiest stories since they can’t find any real ones. This isn’t a spoof.

I don’t think a university having rules about respectfully addressing people counts as ‘the STATE’. If people were being arrested for deadnaming people I would be concerned. Getting disciplined at a university? That is not using the state’s power of violence to force speech.

The prologue and epilogue of Job are believed to have been added later. It makes sense. The prologue and epilogue undermine the whole point of the text. God comes out in the ‘meat’ of the story saying that man cannot comprehend the ways of God and Job is not in a position to question what he endured. We see in the prologue that God made a bar bet with Satan and that is why Job had to deal with all he did. Not really that incomprehensible. Also worth noting that sub divine beings (what we would call angels) in Judaism at the time were often conceived as being opposed to humanity and not their ally. You get texts where angels/divine servants don’t get why God bothered with the foulness that is humanity. You get Merkabah mysticism where the goal is to somehow convince to let you pass or trick or give passwords to dangerous angels when you attempt a mystical descent to the throne of God. Many reportedly died or went insane trying this path because the angels pushed back hard against humanity going where it did not belong.

So are you consistent on this? If someone decides to take their spouse’s last name and someone has a ‘moral’ objection to that practice and deadnames with their old name out of malice that should not result in any kind of discipline? If someone legally changes their name and someone chooses to use the old name out of malice that shouldn’t be a discipline thing? Are you philosophically consistent on this point or do transphobes just get a special carve-out where they are allowed to be jerks?

Why did you put that in quotes? Are you suggesting it is not actually insanity? Based.

Soviet-style Whataboutism. Keep it up Comrade.

I think the increase in therapy is more tied to the general decrease in optimism and hope in society rather than just being a fad. Also I don’t think this writer understands what ‘boundaries’ are in a therapy context. And what therapist would turn a fear of driving into a feminist things? This kind of thing makes me doubt the writer’s intentions. I suspect that is culture war nonsense masquerading as ‘concern’.