Tom Price

@wylfcen But none is as awesome as "Bishop Sexwulf of Mercia"

Anglo-Saxons loved to name their kids after wolves. Here were the most common Old English names containing “wolf”↓

@Oneiorosgrip In a single choice about one person your argument makes sense. But when extrapolated to 8 billion people choosing, it doesn't work. It guarantees killing loads of people, and over 50% pressing blue is the only way to save everyone. It's the tyranny of large sample sizes...

@Oneiorosgrip But that's not the same as the button situation. When 8 billion people choose, it is guaranteed that some will push blue. Maybe they are colour blind, or blind, or too young to understand, have dementia, or speak a language that doesn't distinguish red and blue.

Here is another way to think of this scenario. You are on the sidewalk in front of a burning house. You do not see any evidence to determine whether or not there is anyone inside. You do not see any evidence that the fire will be put out before it consumes the house. Do you go inside, even though you cannot determine whether there's anyone inside, just in case there might be someone in need of rescue? If not, then no matter what you think right now, if presented with the choice in the absence of any evidence as to which button anyone else has picked, knowing one button carries a risk of your death and the other does not, you would push the red button. If you do, then you might be a blue button pusher. Now, imagine another person is with you on the sidewalk. You discuss the fire briefly and both conclude that none of the available evidence can help you determine if anyone is inside. The other guy decides to check inside. You think the roof could collapse and the timing would be unpredictable. Do you try to stop him? If so, you would not only push the red button, but you'd try to stop others from pushing the blue button. Imagine you are unable to stop the other guy. You see him take off running, but the smoke blocks your vision and you can't tell if he went inside, or ran somewhere nearby for some reason. You are certain that the condition of the building and the fire make a roof collapse very possible, but still not very predictable. If the roof collapses and that guy is inside, he will die. If you enter, you might be able to rescue him, but you might both die, or he might not be in there and you might die in there alone. Do you run in after him to try to rescue him? If so, you could be influenced by others' actions to push the blue button. If not, you'd more likely push the red button. You've probably faced things in life that inspired you to act in ways that you didn't think you would. You think - or at least hope - that you'd behave in a way that is brave, or altruistic, or otherwise admirable in such situations, but when confronted with the reality, you have a different response. It's only moderately useful to do these thought exercises like the red and blue button meme. Mostly, it just pressures people to take a side and defend it as if their life depended on it. If it really did, you'd have to think... what is the smarter choice here, in a situation where literally nobody has to risk death: believing that some people chose that unnecessary risk anyway, just because they can or on the assumption that others have... or believing it to be entirely unlikely that anybody would take such a risk if they had another, no-risk (to them) choice? Do you feel morally obligated to do something profoundly stupid and risky just because someone else -might- have done it? I don't. I think it's more likely that regardless of what people think they would do, everyone will push the red button if such a situation arises, especially if they are alone with the buttons and their own aversion to death. For that reason alone, it would be idiotic to push the blue button. I also don't feel morally obligated to do something profoundly stupid and risky just because someone else might have done so and might now be depending on others to do the same. I would push the red. And if I saw another person reaching for the blue, I'd probably kick their dumb ass for even thinking about it. What the fuck is wrong with people that anyone would think it's a good idea to push the maybe death button in a no death or maybe death choice, when nobody has to do that?

@DreyfusJames Bellend

Yup. If you could kindly drop a brief comment in my posts beneath this, that’d be greattttt… 😁

@wil_da_beast630 FFS the OP @EchoesofEmpire_ wrote this because it is awesome that at least one set of elephant armour was preserved! @EchoesofEmpire_ is not saying "this was theft!"

A question, before any discussion about sending this back: why is it the only one left? Didn't the Indian empires have thousands of these, at one point?

@AdrianP_doc @The_Davos_Man Hmmm. The Green Revolution was pretty cool. Also the eradication of smallpox. And satellites were pretty good too. But yeah, the fall of the USSR was awesome 😎

The collapse of the USSR was the best thing to happen to the world since the defeat of Nazi Germany.

@joni_askola Also, when the USSR fell, the Cold war ended, and suddenly nations all over the global south got to stop being eternal battlegrounds between murderous anticommunists/anticapitalists/freedom fighters/terrorists and be free...

Crying over the collapse of the USSR is insane. Every nation that escaped that failed empire and chose Europe is thriving far beyond what was possible under Moscow. You simply cannot call yourself an anti-imperialist while mourning the fall of a brutal empire

@ConceptualJames You seem to be comparing Nazism with Stalinism. Wouldn't a fairer contrast be between Fascism and Communism? Ie compare the best societies of both systems (Spain?, Portugal?. Greece?, Chile?/Cuba?, Poland?, Vietnam?)? Also the worst (Germany vs Russia, China, Cambodia)?

Maybe there's just no way to compare how dark it is in two different pits of hell. Maybe that's all there is to say here.

I have spent a lot of time studying and reading Communists. I have also now spent a lot of time studying and reading Nazis. The question "which is worse" always lurks in the background. Lately, I lean Nazi, but every time I pick either, I talk myself out of it pretty quickly. Generally, I think it's right, as it has been suggested, that beyond a certain level of human evil, it isn't exactly profitable to make ordered comparisons like "worse." That is, the hierarchy of sufficiently bad ideas is a partially ordered set, not a totally ordered set, and beyond a certain point it might not be ordered at all. I do feel qualified to talk about this argument I have with myself more or less continuously as I pore over their literature and history, though. I'm currently leaning Nazi because their brutality was willfully embraced as brutality. Their murder was done specifically as murder, not just as a necessity of their project but as a part of the fundamental reality of what it means to be human. The stronger must kill the weaker. The pure must murder the impure to prevent contamination and, in fact, to purify the race specifically to enable the advancement of humanity. All this was done openly in embracing the so-called Law of Nature, which is the "Aryan" Nazi playing God by deciding how humanity should progress in an explicitly evolutionary project. It's deliberate and psychotic. A reflection that hits at this point is that even though more people died at the hands of Communism -- far more, in fact -- the vast bulk of the deaths caused by Communists were not deliberate murders meant to purify the race in the name of advancing humanity. They were rank failures caused by forcing people to accept, embrace, and implement a broken system that cannot work. Most deaths under Communism were from starvation under famine and exposure. Millions were murdered, to be sure, though. So then I talk myself out of it. No, I reason. Communists are worse. They too specifically murdered by the millions, whether we look at Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine or Pol Pot's genocide of his own people (3 million of them, 25% of the Cambodian population). These are numbers that in some cases rival the Holocaust, and then there are the famines and the exposure and the catastrophe and the failure on top of it all. But then I turn to the motivations and talk myself back into it being the Nazis who are the greater evil. The Nazis intended the murders as a central part of their motivating mythology. Communists do not. Communists would gladly kill nobody except that it would require the willing submission and self-transformation (ideological remolding) to agree fully with them to avoid it. Communists, at the end of the day, want humanity to return to itself because they wrongly believe we are intrinsically socialists. The capitalists only have to be expropriated (often murdered) because they won't willingly go along with the socialist program that allegedly reflects their true nature. Nazis are different. Nazis wanted to kill Jews. All the Jews in Europe, and perhaps all the Jews everywhere if they could. From the very beginning of the Nazi Experiment, we have Hitler writing that the removal of all Jews from Europe is a necessary good, and in the end everyone knows there's only one way that could be accomplished, given they had no Israel to go to (a fact Hitler knew and expressed). He didn't plan their murder from the start, necessarily, but it must have been on the list of realistic possibilities, and it was the only realistic possibility for fulfilling his psychotic mission. And it wasn't just Jews, although Jews represented the most callous among the calculations and the most vicious of his views. All of the allegedly inferior races would be purged or destroyed. All of the physically or mentally unable would be purged, sterilized, or destroyed. But the Jews would be destroyed simply for being Jewish, representing not just a potential genetic contamination of the race but a full-blown contamination of the society itself in every possible dimension: racial, ethical, economic, social, military, cultural -- everything. It's a unique kind of malice. This is because the Nazis at the higher levels were possessed of an insane belief that their chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, described as "the Myth of the Blood," which he also recognized as "the Myth of the 20th Century," taking "myth" as a positive force for a society. Their belief was that the human foundation itself is blood, and Nordic Aryan blood is highest and best, indeed representing not just a creative, powerful, and beautiful race but also a sinless one, above the good and evil of the lower races. And this race, allegedly, retained its highest concentration in Germany, where it was opposed by its absolute racial antithesis in the Jew. The Nazi Experiment, then, wasn't to forcibly change the minds of the people under its power, as with the Communists, who would destroy the intractable and inconvenient. The Nazi Experiment was to purify and advance this one particular racial strain (which doesn't actually exist) through any brutality necessary, including the Holocaust. And that returns me to thinking it's the Nazis who are the worse of the pair. But the Communists are just inhuman. Fanatical. Maniacal. Believing not that Man has to be remade for his own good but that Man has to be remade into his prelapsarian state, which is the socialist, uncontaminated by ideas of ownership, privacy, or self. And then I circle back around again because that's true for the Nazis as well. Aryan man is prelapsarian too. He descended into the lower world from Atlantis or wherever, says Rosenberg, fell away from the Myth of the Blood, and must be recovered through careful, deliberate, and murderous eugenics. Maybe the punt is right to begin with. Maybe the punt to incomparable evil because it's so far within the pits of hell that it's morally indistinguishable in that utter darkness is right. Maybe the profundities of evil are, in fact, an unordered set. I don't know, and the more I read, the less able I am to decide. And yet my soul screams that it's definitely, definitely the Nazis. ...and then I remember Pitesti, even as I spend waking moments trying never to remember it again.

@avidseries @jlsofian231 Not sure that's true. Viking ships made it to America about 1000 years ago. And Cornish tin was the basis for the entire European bronze age 4000 years ago...

@jlsofian231 In the scope of recorded human history, northern Europe was a backwater until fairly recently.

Population genetics just dropped an atom bomb on blank slate science denial in the pages of Nature. We were told for decades that evolution could not have meaningfully operated on the human brain in the "short period" of time since humans left Africa for Europe and Asia around 50,000 years ago. In fact, it's been accelerating over the past 10,000 years, and the proof is in our DNA, and the DNA of our ancient ancestors. Bigger data sets and improved scientific techniques are exposing the ideologically-motivated lie that's been ruthlessly enforced in academia since the 60s: Population groups are biologically all the same under the skin. Reich himself warned liberals back in 2017 that they needed to prepare for some bad news, and that if they didn't they were going to end up on the wrong side of the scientific revolution occurring in genetics. But rather than accepting his argument, Reich was attacked. Now the bad news is arriving.

@TheNarrator000 @geogvma Oh mate, that's just sad. Did you actually read it? A Marxist Prof of Medieval Literature tries to show that Stalin did nothing wrong. It is hilariously biased and delusional. He claims the 1944 Warsaw uprising was a Polish crime! How biased can one man be?

@TomARPrice @geogvma Educate yourself, son. It takes a little work but it’s worth it. mltheory.wordpress.com/wp-content/upl…

Oh

@TheNarrator000 @geogvma Recent work by Tim Snyder & pals has found the messages between Stalin and his guy in ukraine, in which Stalin tells him to take the Ukrainian seed corn, making it impossible for them to have another harvest. i.e. a deliberate order to create a famine to kill Ukrainians

@geogvma show me the criticisms you refer to - I'm sure since you "know the literature" you won't have to use AI

@PompeySteph Can I ask, where is your evidence against this? I haven't found anything that supports your view. Of course, the vast majority of trans people never commit crimes. But none of the data I've seen on crime rates says they behave like cis women when it comes to crime.

@PompeySteph Djene et al 2011 showed that transwomen showed male typical patterns of crime and violent crime. AFAIK every attempt to study sexual crime rates in transwomen by conviction rates have found vastly higher sexual offending rates in transwomen than cis. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

A phobia is clinically an "irrational fear." It's wholly irrational to fear sharing female spaces when there is absolutely no evidence that bona fide trans women pose any more risk than s!s women themselves. In fact, trans people suffer crime at twice the rate of s!s people.

@Cathcupoftea357 @daniellismore I don't think shouting "shut up you baddie" has gotten either side very far in this. I'd rather try reaching out.

@TomARPrice @daniellismore Nice? Because he is able to write a wordy post? Look at his profile. Just another everyday misogynist. Can't and wont accept that Women are defined as a Sex and say No to males in our spaces and sports.

J.K. Rowling’s Case Against Trans People Falls Apart Under Basic Scrutiny J.K. Rowling’s writing on her site presents itself as cautious, evidence based and protective of women. It is none of those things in any reliable sense. It is a political essay built out of selective fear, anecdote, conflation and repeated framing tricks that turn a small and vulnerable minority into a public threat. Once the central claims are checked against mainstream psychological definitions, clinical guidance and the better available reviews, the structure gives way very quickly. The first problem is basic description. Rowling writes as though trans identity is a fashionable belief system imposed on reality. That is false. Major professional bodies continue to define gender identity as a person’s internal sense of gender and distinguish it from biological traits, expression and sexuality. That does not mean every clinical pathway is simple or that every policy question has one easy answer. It means the existence of trans people is not a fiction created by slogans or websites. It is a recognised human phenomenon described across medicine and psychology for years. Her second move is more political than scientific. She repeatedly folds trans women into a category of male risk and then treats that association as common sense. That is the engine of the piece. It asks readers to accept that recognition itself is dangerous. The trouble is that this is not evidence. It is suspicion dressed up as safeguarding. A rights claim by one group does not become invalid because another group can imagine its misuse. That logic would destroy the basis of civil protection in every direction. She also leans heavily on the idea that affirming trans people means suppressing women or erasing sex. That is another false construction. Recognising gender identity does not abolish sex based medicine, sex based data collection or serious discussion of violence against women. Clinical guidance and professional standards continue to treat sex related health needs as real while also recognising transgender patients as deserving of competent care. The claim that one can only defend women by rejecting trans people is not a medical conclusion. It is an ideological choice. On healthcare her essay suggests that trans identification is being irresponsibly indulged and that medicine has surrendered to fashion. The actual evidence base is more careful than either side’s loudest slogans. For adults, established clinical standards and recent reviews continue to support access to gender affirming care with assessment, informed consent and monitoring. Reviews published in 2024 and 2025 report that gender affirming interventions are associated overall with improved mental health, body satisfaction and quality of life, while also noting that evidence quality varies and further research is needed. That is a long way from the picture of mass delusion that Rowling promotes. For children and adolescents the picture is more contested and the honest position is narrower. The Cass Review in England and later NHS England work show that the evidence for some youth interventions remains limited and that services need stronger assessment, clearer pathways and better long term research. That supports caution and reform. It does not support broad hostility to trans people, nor does it justify using uncertainty in paediatric care as a weapon against trans adults or against social recognition itself. Rowling’s essay repeatedly makes that jump. It is a political jump, not a scientific one. She also gives the reader the impression that transition is commonly regretted and that medicine is running ahead of human reality. The best known systematic reviews do not support that picture. Regret after gender affirming surgery appears low in the published literature, including systematic reviews and more recent follow up work. That does not mean regret never happens or that every clinic gets

@CathyYoung63 Ending up with The Onion revealing JK was right all along, and this is their way of walking back their unfunniness and extremeness, and returning to the Old Ways when they did actual satire. Now that would be worthy of the old Onion!

@CathyYoung63 Unless... The Onion is doing a pastiche of Prisoner of Azkaban, with JK Rowling as the escaped prisoner who turns out to have been a goodie all along, but was falsely imprisoned by the real villain and his evil cabal...

One can agree or disagree with JK Rowling, but this is incredibly nasty and unfunny

@datadriven_tdoc I don't understand your reply. If they suffer design issues, doesn't that mean they are no more compelling than this study? So on what basis would you believe that gender affirming care helps kids rather than harms them?

@TomARPrice Many. But like this study, they suffer from design issues that do not allow one to be confident in the results.

What happens when you take a high quality data source like the Finnish Health Care Registries and subject them to a low quality research protocol Well, pretty much the same thing as if you took a Formula One racer, and handed the keys to a newly licensed 16-year-old driver link (and other analogies) in the comments below!