In terms of what the Trump administration is doing it seems to fall under pulling strings everyone for reasons I will never comprehend forgot were, and always have been, attached.
...what a weird thing to say.
Yes, the Trump administration is doing that, but they are _also_ deporting people based on their speech. Which not only is itself wrong, but it makes it pretty clear what it is asking colleges to do.
There is an amazing ability of people here to pretend that Trump's actions exist in a vacuum, and that we should judge 'Trump administration claims to be worried about disorder on campus and doing things to reduce that' alone, and not notice that the Trump administration is also literally grabbing all the protestors it can and secreting them across the country to stand trial, and making it extremely clear it's about their content of their speech, and also openly saying its dispute with Columbia is about specific speech.
"Let's pretend that we have no context for this thing and things being stated about it by the Administration do not exist. We shall, for the purposes herein, pretend it happened under a perfectly spherical government." is getting a little old.
Well, I'm not a doctor, but I do know people with prescriptions for gender-affirming reasons, that's why I was using them as an example, and they are generally prescribed them to adjust their hormone levels to within a normal range. There is testing done to start with, seeing how far things are off those ranges, and then more testing after the prescription to check the new levels, and there sometimes will be adjustments afterwards.
This is, from what I understand, the reason that they are prescribed to a lot of people... in a very broad way. I can't say that's always true, some of the same things can be prescribed for birth control or heart disease or even cancer treatment, and now we're getting in medical stuff that doctors know and I don't.
(I actually do know, but we're pretending for the purposes of this discussion that I do not, and I'm talking absolutely everything said on this topic at face value.)
And yet if they have the Wrong Opinion regarding these treatments then that’s terribly important and we need to make sure everyone knows about it (and punishes them for it).
Do you have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments and getting 'punished' for it?
In fact, you do have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments at all? That's weird thing for them to do.
My definition of medical treatment is, let me steal one from AI: Medical treatment refers to the various methods used to diagnose, manage, and cure health conditions, which can include medications, therapies, and surgical procedures.
Thinking about this, it really is weird that an op-ed that is written about how academia is actually not behaving well and needs to talk to more people, or however you want to phrase..
... Is, at the exact same time, arguing that academia needs to start debating medical treatments?
What an oddly contradictory position to have.
If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! What if they decide that, I don't know, putting shunts in people's hearts is... Cultural appropriation or something?!
It sure is fun to write an opinion piece about something, quote someone else saying something vaguely agreeing in that general direction, and then have people pretend the quoted person actually agrees with everything said in the article.
The president of Wesleyan is not a doctor, but more important, hasn't actually said anything about debating medical treatments whatsoever.
Indeed, he's complaining that academia is too insular. As I pointed out, medicine and academia are not the same thing. Like, at all.
So apparently the thing you're arguing, and the thing you're claiming that is being argued in this op-ed, is that academia not only should start debating medical treatments, it should open the doors letting in _more_ people debate medical treatments?
Or have I misconstrued this somewhere?
2025-03-16 16:22:32
What are the legitimate questions about medical treatments?! I assume by academia, we don't mean medicine, right? We're talking about 'professors and university administrators', right?
So, um, why does non-medical academia have positions that they wish to _debate_ on any sort of medical treatment? Do they even _know_ enough to debate how specific treatments are done?
'I, as a professor of literature, think instead of the traditional way of doing this heart surgery, you should open the incision more to the side and put drainage over here. This will allow easier access to the area you need. Also, unrelated, I think the dosage of Edoxaban should be lowered, but taken more often. No, I have no medical knowledge whatsoever, why do you ask? Let's have a professional debate on this!'
Yeah, I can see why doctors would not be willing to debate various medical treatments with random guys who teach a class in Early American poetry! They probably do get pretty rude if you keep trying.
Also, looking at that, I just noticed they said 'gender transition treatments', specifically, which is weird, because almost all those treatment are used for other things. Hormone therapy is hormone therapy, and the goal of which is basically the same regardless of what it is treating. Plastics surgery is plastics surgery.
Also, that's not the right term for that. Not to nitpick, but it's kinda important in medicine. The term is gender-affirming treatments, not gender-transition treatments. Transition would imply you change when you do it, which...would have people flipping back and forth every time they took a pill? What?
I don't think _this guy_ knows anything about medicine either! Why does he want to debate doctors about medical treatments?!
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...what a weird thing to say.
Yes, the Trump administration is doing that, but they are _also_ deporting people based on their speech. Which not only is itself wrong, but it makes it pretty clear what it is asking colleges to do.
There is an amazing ability of people here to pretend that Trump's actions exist in a vacuum, and that we should judge 'Trump administration claims to be worried about disorder on campus and doing things to reduce that' alone, and not notice that the Trump administration is also literally grabbing all the protestors it can and secreting them across the country to stand trial, and making it extremely clear it's about their content of their speech, and also openly saying its dispute with Columbia is about specific speech.
"Let's pretend that we have no context for this thing and things being stated about it by the Administration do not exist. We shall, for the purposes herein, pretend it happened under a perfectly spherical government." is getting a little old.
Well, I'm not a doctor, but I do know people with prescriptions for gender-affirming reasons, that's why I was using them as an example, and they are generally prescribed them to adjust their hormone levels to within a normal range. There is testing done to start with, seeing how far things are off those ranges, and then more testing after the prescription to check the new levels, and there sometimes will be adjustments afterwards.
This is, from what I understand, the reason that they are prescribed to a lot of people... in a very broad way. I can't say that's always true, some of the same things can be prescribed for birth control or heart disease or even cancer treatment, and now we're getting in medical stuff that doctors know and I don't.
(I actually do know, but we're pretending for the purposes of this discussion that I do not, and I'm talking absolutely everything said on this topic at face value.)
Do you have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments and getting 'punished' for it?
In fact, you do have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments at all? That's weird thing for them to do.
My definition of medical treatment is, let me steal one from AI: Medical treatment refers to the various methods used to diagnose, manage, and cure health conditions, which can include medications, therapies, and surgical procedures.
Thinking about this, it really is weird that an op-ed that is written about how academia is actually not behaving well and needs to talk to more people, or however you want to phrase..
... Is, at the exact same time, arguing that academia needs to start debating medical treatments?
What an oddly contradictory position to have.
If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! What if they decide that, I don't know, putting shunts in people's hearts is... Cultural appropriation or something?!
It sure is fun to write an opinion piece about something, quote someone else saying something vaguely agreeing in that general direction, and then have people pretend the quoted person actually agrees with everything said in the article.
The president of Wesleyan is not a doctor, but more important, hasn't actually said anything about debating medical treatments whatsoever.
Indeed, he's complaining that academia is too insular. As I pointed out, medicine and academia are not the same thing. Like, at all.
So apparently the thing you're arguing, and the thing you're claiming that is being argued in this op-ed, is that academia not only should start debating medical treatments, it should open the doors letting in _more_ people debate medical treatments?
Or have I misconstrued this somewhere?
What are the legitimate questions about medical treatments?! I assume by academia, we don't mean medicine, right? We're talking about 'professors and university administrators', right?
So, um, why does non-medical academia have positions that they wish to _debate_ on any sort of medical treatment? Do they even _know_ enough to debate how specific treatments are done?
'I, as a professor of literature, think instead of the traditional way of doing this heart surgery, you should open the incision more to the side and put drainage over here. This will allow easier access to the area you need. Also, unrelated, I think the dosage of Edoxaban should be lowered, but taken more often. No, I have no medical knowledge whatsoever, why do you ask? Let's have a professional debate on this!'
Yeah, I can see why doctors would not be willing to debate various medical treatments with random guys who teach a class in Early American poetry! They probably do get pretty rude if you keep trying.
Also, looking at that, I just noticed they said 'gender transition treatments', specifically, which is weird, because almost all those treatment are used for other things. Hormone therapy is hormone therapy, and the goal of which is basically the same regardless of what it is treating. Plastics surgery is plastics surgery.
Also, that's not the right term for that. Not to nitpick, but it's kinda important in medicine. The term is gender-affirming treatments, not gender-transition treatments. Transition would imply you change when you do it, which...would have people flipping back and forth every time they took a pill? What?
I don't think _this guy_ knows anything about medicine either! Why does he want to debate doctors about medical treatments?!