"alternative facts" are a thing to the same extend that alternative medicine is a thing. if it was reasonable to call them true / if it worked, it would simply be called a fact / medicine.

your time of day and season example really isn't at all what the blog entry is talking about when it discusses facts and "alternative facts". of course your examples are simply overgeneralizations.

in another comment you said that the blog was "just saying one might count those things as "evidence of UFO's" and others might not". it is very obvious that some people DO count those as evidence of UFOs, but that is not all the author is saying. he is asserting that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is "omitting context" when he says that there is "no evidence for the existence of UFOs". obviously nobody is unaware or deviously omitting that people claim to have been anal probed by aliens. NDTs the point is that there is no credible evidence. the author on the other hand is saying that these "alternative facts" are "completely genuine" and "honest disagreement about omitted context". this is nuts.

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The title is like saying the sky is blue

You must have the eyesight of a hunting bird

The descriptions of the angels in the Bible probably looks similar to the creatures In the show.

Not at all.. of course bullshit is still bullshit

But, yes, alternative facts are a thing that genuinely exist

Fact: it’s daytime and winter

Alternative Fact: it’s dark out and summer

These are both equally true to different subgroups of people

so what you and the blog entry are saying is that this tweet represents an ""alternative fact,” in a completely genuine and non-insulting sense of the term", based on "honest disagreement about omitted context". because that seems to me the point of that blog entry. he is not just saying that some people believe in facts and others believe in "alternative facts" but he is saying that those two views are both equally valid. which is mental, both in the case of UFOs and trump tweets.

Yeah, everyone can see the tweet but the reactions to and interpretations of it can be wildly different and any discussion around it quickly devolves into tribalism. That’s all he’s saying

This isn’t a political post so I’ll keep political debate out of it, but minimum there’s surely truth in saying that American manufacturing can’t compete with Chinese manufacturing

Differentiate between having a reputation of being x and is x? The two are very comparable and a more accurate way of phrasing would have been that the Guardian has published a few articles that have been deemed transphobic.

Your example of the Christian baker was silly. As to Bell, perhaps you are right but what type of person stays at a clinic for twenty-years whose practice he fundamentally disagrees with and then decided to launch a report at the end lf those twenty-years? Also, what is so wrong about requesting a report? Surely lack of nuance here is noting that the Trust did not want such report to be made at all which far more suspicious than Bell requesting one.

Sidenote: Bell is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst

The fact that autism is more prevalent in gender dysphoria than cis-gender people is still warrants the question of why that phenomena is the case and to go back to the point you made previously, it’s not about ableism, it’s about properly assessing each INDIVIDUAL, and not a mean, to see if that child is indeed experiencing genuine gender dysphoria before being administered hormonal treatment.

I honestly do not understand why there is retaliation to the idea of being thorough with each patient and ruling out all possible factors before allowing treatment. It’s seems like common sense but somehow lacks nuance.

Why should it cause more harm if they are with an environment where people affirm their gender? Why do we push the narrative to be your preferred gender then you need xyz. If gender is fluid and doesn’t pertain to genitalia then why is it so essential to have hormonal treatment or operation? You cannot have the cake and eat it to. The answer to this is to of course address the dysphoria, to allow them to express their preferred gender, to have their environment and those around them to affirm their preferred gender and take much less hands on approach until they become an adult. A child can note vote at 16 yet we somehow allow them to make a life changing decision? We either deem children responsible at such an age or we do not.

You're not mistaken. I read that he referenced the bible because he thought it would be mostly unfamiliar with the Japanese audience.

I do recall that line. That scene makes more sense now, ty

Totally misses the point the older Wittgenstein made against the younger Wittgenstein, i.e. meaning holism destroys the possibility of atomic facts.

I think you're reading too much into it. Even the show runner admits he had only a superficial understanding of Christian motifs.

Evangelion works better when you view it as less of a deliberate philosophical statement (like you said, all the religious iconography is there just to look cool) and more of an accidental allegory for its creator's struggles with his mental health, as his frequent breakdowns and battles back toward recovery are continuously reflected in the production of the show and the subsequent movies.

I agree with the premise, but Evangelion’s themes and philosophy explored are very surface level. It comes across as a work written by someone who took one college philosophy course and had an existential crisis.

lets take this trump tweet as an example: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."

a civil and open-minded discourse concerning such a laughable tweet is simply impossible. it is also not clear to me what the author means when he attests a "universal agreement on the facts". clearly the discourse is not about the "exact words he said" (they are evident, right there in the tweet), but about whether or not these ramblings contain any truth. obviously they do not, which might be hard to understand for someone who believes in the absurd concept of "alternative facts".

100°C is equivalent to 212°F, which is 373K.

^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)

I think the author is unfamiliar with the concept of "shared pool of meaning". Part of interacting is comparing our individual pool of meaning with another to see where we match or don't and going from there to refine our shared pool of meaning in order to coordinate.

Context, nuance, and circumstances always matter.

If I ask someone to "describe water". It might seem like an "easy" task. But the complexity become apparent when we think more broadly. You might describe it by it's chemical formula H2O. You might describe how it behaves under various circumstances (boils at 100°C and freezes at 0°C - under "normal" atmospheric pressure, at sea level, on Earth - those temps are different at elevation or on another planet with different atmospheric conditions) and if someone isn't familiar with the Celsius scale, those number wouldn't "mean" anything to them. There is prerequisite knowledge that builds off other prerequisite knowledge, which is why advanced classes often have prerequisites to make sure the learner has a foundational understanding of the underlying concepts before building upon that foundation.

This is why science gets documentation. It allows us to expand our collective shared pool of meaning beyond our lifetimes and update our understanding as we build upon those foundational tenets.

Yes the above still remains gobbledygook but if you trace through to the game theory 'game' someone else posted, then look at Nicky Case's page (who programmed the game) her YouTube video "How to Explain Things Real Good" is excellent.

Glad the above is working for you! I'll stick to practical advice but will keep an open mind some of the above may be applicable in future

I read somewhere the writer literally only did the bible stuff because it would sound cool lol IDK if misread that but that was essentially all it amounted to, a cool backdrop where we say cool things and reference stuff out of thin air

Thrice Upon a Time. She is referred to as being from the "Shikigani series", there is the scene with all the different pictures of that series being whittled down to one, she sees the original when she is absorbed by Unit 13.

I did not say the Guardian was transphobic, only that it has a reputation for being so. You keep taking my tempered statements and making them absolute - I wonder why that might be. Doing so once may be a mistake, but repeatedly doing so…

My example isn’t silly. He was a governor of the entire Tavistock service, and not specifically the gender identity clinic - thus, it is perfectly reasonable to posit that he worked in such a position due to his interest in psychoanalysis and not gender identity. He may therefore be motivated by outdated notions of gender development and personal ideology. Again, this is the sort of nuance lost in Zizek and in responses I have received here.

The point is that the majority of patients being see by the Tavistock do not have autism. Their own data indicates that around 15% have a diagnosis of autism, whilst international data indicate between 10% and 25% of young people presenting at gender clinics have autism. This is far higher than the rate in cisgender populations (and would benefit from further research), but still far from being the majority. There’s also no indication that the majority, if any, of these autistic individuals are to be found in the adolescent girls seeking support - they might be, or they might be equally spread out amongst all the young people presenting at the clinic, or only in the boys seeking input. We simply don’t know. Your assumption here again is exactly what I was calling out Zizek for…

As for doing no harm - why is it always about doing no harm to the 3%-5% who might regret and never to the 95%-97% who won’t? There is harm in transitioning when this is not right for you and there is harm in being denied early transition when this is right for you. A ban on all transition related medical intervention for children and adolescents can cause real harm to those who will grow up to live as trans individuals - why no concern for them? Do we need to continue to develop our ability to identify who might fall into each group - absolutely. That doesn’t mean we ban all treatment for young people, however. That approach involves doing as much, if not more, harm than the alternative.

Fair enough but tbf I think the show doesn't hesitate to hide that it's a character study and clearly focused on the examination of their mental health rather than the greater world and it's events.

Ah. Shame she was properly fucked up enough in the original series.

Yes you are right, I meant rei