Ok, let’s continue to focus on this technicality then.

Let’s say that’s true, and that anything other than witnessing the vows and signing the form is “ceremonial” and covered under freedom of speech. (Forget the part where you need to, you know, prompt each party for their vows. Not like you just sit there, stone cold, and they walk up and start talking to each other. But anyways.) The role of public servants is to be impartial and provide a common good or service to all citizens. And for a judge especially, this is extremely important. If a judge shows signs of bias, it could call into question the ways that they interpret the law. Did they also make biased judgements? Did they interpret laws to target certain classes of people, when they could get away with it?

So, if all of that is speech, then I propose that judges should be required to perform the same procedure for all couples when they are doing so as a service in a court. If they say “kiss the bride” to one couple, they have to say “kiss the ___” to all of them. That’s fair, prevents judges from seeming biased and prevents the institution from seeming biased, and allows judges to decide what they want to do as part of the proceedings. They can each have their own flair, or just do the basic witness + signing.

Would that be acceptable, in your view?

Look, we’re talking past each other.

I don’t believe that any judge or person in general should be forced to perform a ceremony of a different religion or belief system. I agree with you on that point, because full ceremonies are indeed performances with a lot of layered, cultural meanings.

The issue here is you are then taking that and asserting that any proceeding that is more involved than signing a piece of paper is, in fact, a ceremony. This is where we differ, and I’ll tell you why: by that definition, signing the paper is ceremonial.

Yes, it does record a real world event. But that is a ceremony that we have culturally come to accept after a long history of doing it. We could have come up with many other types of ceremonies to confirm a contract - it could have been a wax seal, or using a broke stick like stocks originally were. Anything can fit the definition of ceremony if you squint hard enough.

So, what’s a reasonable place for us to draw the line? I would argue that the current status quo is not particularly religious or meaningful outside of the contract.

The officiant confirms that both parties understand what is happening, that this is a contract that will legally bind them together. It’s very serious. Be very sure.

Then, they announce that the couple is officially wed, and they sign the document.

Last, they usually say “you may kiss” or something to that effect.

The most objectionable thing here is the final statement, but even that is hardly objectionable. It is a statement of fact and does not imply any level of endorsement beyond confirming that the deed is done.

This is a very, very small formality. There are courtroom procedures that are more lengthy and involved than this regularly. But you are pushing to say this counts as a ceremony, because if it does, then the judge doesn’t have to do this and she’s in the right.

I just don’t buy it. The only part of that which can be called remotely ceremonial is the statement about kissing, and honestly if the judge refused to say that in the end I would not care. But every other part is a reasonable procedure to make sure both parties understand the stakes, are not being coerced, etc.

Ok, cool. Law should be updated. Noted.

In the meantime, here in reality, I know this because I got married at city hall as a formality and my wife and I tried to just have it signed, since our real ceremony was months later. We were refused, because according to the clerk, we needed to follow a full procedure.

Stop arguing in bad faith, you’re just plain wrong here. Until laws and procedures actually change, the fact is that those are the minimum requirements and she refused to do them.

The point is that it’s part of standard process and procedure, and she made an off-duty judge come in on her day off to do it instead.

It’s an asshole move. She should not be a public servant if she intends to hold up proceedings based on her beliefs. Especially one with authority like a judges.

The ceremony aspect of marriage is not just a ceremony, it’s a requirement. Asking the basic questions is part of the court procedure, it’s what makes an officiant different than a notary.

She refused to sign the paper, essentially.

Yes, because in order for the marriage to happen, you need an officiant to ask some questions of both parties and confirm that they know what they signed and that it was all above board. That is not a performance, that is standard court procedure and the minimum requirement to get married.

This was a court proceeding, look at the actual article. The marriage happened in court.

By the sound of it, she was the on-duty judge at city hall. It was a public service because it’s the most basic kind of legal marriage, a courthouse marriage. There is barely any ceremony or performance, and lots of people do it prior to the real ceremony because it is considered a formality.

Why shouldn’t a public servant who is assigned that duty be required to follow through? I understand not wanting to do it if it’s a whole ordeal, but if this is the bare minimum required to formalize a marriage, should that not always be available to all people regardless of their race, sex, etc?

This really conflicts with the idea that, as platforms, websites are not legally liable for the content their user’s produce. At least at a high level, it feels like those two should be mutually exclusive. If X owns all of the accounts on its site, it should be legally liable for all of them. If X is not legally liable, it should imply some amount of individual ownership.

Like, yes federation is better and we should be pushing for it, but also, we should be trying to push for better regulation of incumbent social media platforms too if we can. Seems unlikely but we can try.

I don’t care what bad-faith conservatives are saying, yes they’re full of it. Here are the facts:

• We are pushing forward full-tilt on renewables in general. Factories are going up, the IRA was 80% focused on renewables, and as long as the incoming admin doesn’t actively roll things back, we’re heading in the right direction.
• Headlines like this one are coming up because private companies are starting to invest in nuclear for their own purposes. This is spare money and effort that we could be leaving on the table.
• If we start seeing politicians actively shutting down green energy in favor of nuclear, we should absolutely say “fuck no”.
• As of yet, I have not been seeing this in policy or in reality, and every year the renewable industry becomes more self-sustaining and grows without active pushes from the government (though we can and should continue to subsidize).

From where I’m standing, we should be encouraging the private sector and investing some percentage of our portfolio in restarting and building nukes with all of that context.

This is the same logic behind building an investment portfolio. You could go all in on Bitcoin, or you could spread out your portfolio in the market. 80% into the solid, tried and true stocks, 15% into up and comers, 5% into moonshots like crypto or gamestop or whatever. Same deal here.

Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:

• Hospitals and emergency services
• Data centers and communications
• 24 hour transit needs
• 24 hour lighting in cities
• Ventilation, heating/cooling for certain climates

Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.

If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.

My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.

I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.

And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.

We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.

We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.

We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.

We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.

When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.

The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?

I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.

We can do both.

Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.

On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.

It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!

Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.

The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”

They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:

1. We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
2. We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.

Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.

We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.

If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.

The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.

Japan for one, whose coal and natural gas consumption has gone up significantly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan

Germany has stayed fairly steady, fair enough. Imagine if they had just focused on replacing fossil fuels instead of nuclear, they would be nearly carbon free by now.

I have no problem with the majority of funding going to renewables and making progress right now, but I also don’t see why we can’t break ground on new 4th generation nukes and continue investment in nuclear research at the same time. We can hedge our bets, make progress on both. If the 100% renewables + storage plan pans out, cool, we stop the nukes. If they don’t, then cool, we have our carbon free baseload production and we aren’t a decade behind on it when we need it.

I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.

Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.

When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?

The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.

I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.

We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.

Yeah, like, even generally those are really tough questions. And every kid is different right? Even among my brothers, I had 5, and they were all different. One was a rebel, one was a golden child, one was a space case… it’s not really possible to be perfect.

But if you’re talking specifically about gender and exploration, I can share my thoughts there. I’m not a parent yet, so I haven’t gone through this, but here’s how I would approach it I think:

First, let’s talk about social experimentation and transition. All of this is pre-medication and would be the first steps of things generally. This is a time to figure out what they want by trying things out, which is something we all do during childhood and adolescence. It can start at any time, and it can fizzle out or keep going.

• In general, I would let my kids play with and wear whatever they wanted from a young age. I think it’s important for them to have independence, and I also think that really by pushing them to dress “appropriately” for their gender, you kind of are encouraging that behavior (and implicitly discouraging them exploring themselves). Especially at a young age, kids just decide they like random things in my experience and letting them do that sets them up to not have like, a feeling that it’s “forbidden” for lack of a better word, AND especially it lets your kid know you’re safe. That if they want to try things out more when they’re a teen or later, they can trust you to talk about it and try to work it out together.
• To be clear, I would not encourage my kids to experiment or try things at a young age. In fact, I would probably not encourage it at any age. The impulse or the idea should come from them, I wouldn’t want to plant the seed of it. In fact, that’s kind of the “prime directive” that we follow as a trans community: Even if someone seems to be struggling with their gender and asks you if their trans, you have to tell them that this is something only they can figure out. I can tell them about my experience, what I went through, etc. But even if they’re telling me every single symptom of gender dysphoria, the most I would tell them is something like “this really sounds like it could be, you should definitely be seeing a therapist about it and try to work it out and think on it.”
• If my kid did bring up the idea of trying something out - like wearing a dress or a binder, trying on makeup, cutting their hair - I would make it clear that I think that’s completely ok. I would not necessarily encourage it. Like, if they said “I’m thinking about cutting my hair short” I wouldn’t say “oh definitely, you should try that, you’ve never had short hair!”. I would instead say something like “for sure, if that’s something you wanna try that’s cool. Let me know, I can take you to a barber.” Or if it sounds like they really want to, but are nervous, I might say “well it sounds like it’s something you want to try. If you’re worried what other people think, I don’t think that should hold you back, it’s completely ok to try things out.”
• If it moves forward to full on social transition - that is, trying out a new name and different pronouns, etc. I would respect whatever they asked me to call them and expect others to do that as well. Honestly I would probably like to be part of the name-choosing process, it feels only fair haha! But one thing here is that I would NOT expect everyone else to always get it right, and I would NOT accept them being like, super upset if someone is really trying and they mess up. As a teen I would react way more emotionally to small missteps like that, but as an adult… I misgender myself a lot, lol. Like, I think for a lot of people it’s just mental muscle memory, and it takes time. And this is especially true if they’re like, trying tons of new pronouns or names or switching things up constantly. Like, you can’t both expect everyone to always get it right AND for there not to be a learning period 😝
• In all of this, if they try things out and don’t feel happy, I would point that out. If my child thought they were trans and started socially transitioning, but then started really complaining about the things they had to do now, or complaining about missing certain things, I’d note that. I’d specifically be looking for if they were missing certain things due to their new gender role. Like, “I miss playing my sport” is different than “I miss hanging out with the guys and being one of them”, if that makes sense. And if that came up, I would just point out that there’s no reason they can’t do the thing and be trans. Like, if they want to be a guy but wear dresses, or want to be a girl but play football, at least in theory those things should be fine, because from my perspective those aren’t inherently gendered.
• IMPORTANT NOTE: If the reason they can’t do certain things that don’t align with their new/old gender is due to society’s rules, then that’s a modifier here. There are high schools that let girls play football and places where it’s acceptable for boys to wear feminine clothing, and there are not, whether we like it or not. So if they’re like “I’m trans, but I still want to do a thing that’s not allowed by my old gender”, I WOULD NOT say “well, that’s the rules, that’s what happens because you’re transitioning”. That puts me on the side of people that made, from their perspective, unjust rules. I would instead say “yeah, that really sucks, I don’t think there’s really a good reason for them to have those rules, other than I think I’d worry for your safety because society is going to discriminate against you if you break them.” Hear them out, let them vent, let them know you support them, but that those are things that just might not change.

So basically, let them try things out, respect whatever they’re doing at the time, let them know they have permission to try things out (within reason). The important thing here is that all of these things are easily reversible. They could decide to try something out one day, and change it back the next. So, there’s really not much harm in trying things out, unless we get all the way to like, legally changing their name or something.

So, onto more permanent things, specifically medical treatment.

• First off, I would find a doctor and therapist that is experienced with trans and gender non-conforming youth, and I would also look into and follow the WPATH guidelines (they’re the organization that recommends standards of care for trans adults and minors). These would help me set a baseline of what typical treatment looks like and what to expect.
• Surgeries would not happen until they’re an adult. They can wait for that, and frankly a lot of surgeries should wait until they’re older, they are a lot to put on a person.
• Hormones I think I would be ok with at a normal time for puberty, AFTER at least a year (and ideally several years) of social transition and blockers. So like, 16 I think is probably the right age, and plenty of people really hit full on puberty a bit late so I think that would be fine. But if they didn’t figure this out until they were 17, I would tell them they should try to wait at least a year before they start hormone therapy, and that maybe we could do hormone blockers in the meantime.
• Hormone blockers are trickier. I would trust medical experts the most here, but it makes sense that in general you want to give the child as much time as possible to try things out socially and make sure this is right for them. So, I would probably be ok with starting them when puberty in general starts, and continuing as long as there no major side-effects. And I would absolutely be doing my own research into them to make sure it was safe, wouldn’t have long term effects, etc.

So to sum that up, I would generally be conservative in the sense of trying to give as much time as possible before they make any permanent decisions, and I would do my research and really try to make sure that nothing they’re doing is going to cause permanent harm. But I would also trust my child’s doctors and medical team here.

That’s how I feel about it all right now at least. Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions about this, and like I said before, I think if you were looking at this and saying “well I get why that works for you, but I wouldn’t want to buy my 8 year old son a dress” or “I think my kids would have to wait until 18 to do anything medical,” I do think those are understandable feelings and I would respect the right, as a parent, to parent your kid in the best way that you can. Every kid is different, every path is different, and it’s really hard to know what’s right. There’s lots of extremes out there and sometimes I think it feels like we can’t ever just not know or try our best, and the reality is, we never know and life is hard. You seem like you’re trying, which is more than a lot of people 😊