The author of this article is a public defender in the pacific northwest. He sometimes writes for Jesse Singal, but he also has his own substack.[1] Many of his posts provide a unique window into the criminal justice system. If that sounds interesting to you, I strongly recommend reading more of his writing. In my opinion, his greatest hits are Eleven Magic Words[2] and Death of a Client[3].
The lawyer asked "“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?”
and the judge said, oh, well "since you have asked if I want to, yeah I guess I do, so I'll just change my ruling for no reason?"
That article was posted by the original author on Reddit and one of the commentators came up with a plausible explanation (which convinced the author).
In one sentence the idea is that because public defenders know that the overwhelming majority of their clients belong in jail, and the judge knows that public defenders know that too, if a public defender makes an extra plea to the judge that's a signal that the public defender knows something that means this client really shouldn't be in jail and therefore changes the judge's opinion of the client.
Exactly that. I had to read it twice too. The way I read it is there were so many hearings so quickly in a row that the judge was in some sort of blur. Case, bam, verdict. Case, bam, verdict. One every 10 minutes. And in that situation, just from being asked to think it over a few more seconds, she saw that maybe she had it wrong and changed her mind.
My reading was that the judge had thirty seconds to regard the grieving family and changed her mind and asking her to reconsider gave her an easy opportunity to change the sentence.
It's possible that the judge already was considering changing their ruling (or was "on the fence" about it), but the question gave them a way to explain it (rather than saying "I changed my mind").
Eh, if he were a great writer, I'd understand the point of the story, specifically what was so powerful about the eleven-word incantation. Which I don't. I would like my 3 minutes back, Your Honor.
Apparently I'd have to be an attorney to get it, in which case I'd have presumably learned about this obscure legal hack in law school.
Altogether, it took more like seven or eight minutes, but because it was decently-written and had some legitimate educational and entertainment value, I'll settle for a partial refund.
>Recall how plea deals are structured, and how the entire purpose of a suspended jail sentence is to dangle the anvil over someone’s head to “encourage” them to do the things they’re supposed to do.
I was in a relationship with a police officer for a while, and this is what she said about probation: "Fuck that, send me to fuckin jail." And she reiterated it a couple of different ways to make it perfectly clear she wasn't joking.
A lot of people who haven't experienced it think probation is "being let off easy". It's not. You have to show up for check-ins, and excuses aren't tolerated. You have to pay for this punishment out of your own pocket too. And any other things the court applies to you too. And if you fuck up, and fail to show, you go to jail. If your car breaks down on the way, you go to jail. Your pregnant wife gives birth on the way and you reroute to the hospital, you go to jail. It's basically setting you up to go to jail, but rather just having the threat of it hanging over your head. At least in jail it's hard to fuck up and you're not responsible for anything while there. Probation is putting you in charge of your own punishment and making you literally pay for it too.
To hear an actual, currently employed police officer say they'd prefer jail to probation is a far weightier than it first seems statement. A police officer, in jail. With inmates who'll probably find out that they're a cop and take out their understandable if not justified frustrations on them.
Would rather go to jail than face probation.
Remember this the next time someone says "they just got probation", I'll never forget it. It's a very stressful, and expensive anvil they've got over your head, and it might fall on you for things completely out of your control. You're not "free", you're not "out", you're sitting under a very real sword of Damocles.
Very true! I've had many clients opt for jail. The benefit of jail is that it's at least definite. The pervasive uncertainty in probation amplifies the stress factor, especially since sanctions can come out of nowhere and wreck your life.
>Singal was supported by sex columnist Dan Savage, who derided what he described as a "long & dishonest campaign" against Singal,[14] and urged readers to listen to Singal's interview of a youth-gender clinician before judging him as transphobic.[6]
I'm afraid that everyone using a computer today is relying on the John von Neumann architeture. To add, von Neumann is problematic and called for premptive nuclear war and the genocidal murder of tens of millions of human beings. I suggest throwing that vile machine in the trash immediately - you don't want to be using something designed by a wannabe mass-murderer, do you?
There's a way to bring stuff like this up on HN that won't result in...well, you see the replies. Yes he is a bigot, and I know this from reading his own comments (not from hearsay as his defenders like to assume), but even as The Choir I find this comment a bit unhelpful. It's a one-liner and a link. Not even with an anchor to the part of the wiki that addresses this.
Singal isn't a bigot. It's not the service to trans people that many people seem to think it is to call anyone who documents unflattering dimensions of trans politics a bigot. Colin Wright, mentioned in the article, could more reasonably be called a bigot, though having his Paypal account terminated on that basis wouldn't be just.
But this really shouldn't be about Singal or Wright. I, a trans woman, had a fine evening out with the actual author of the piece, Yassine Meskhout, back in April along with a few other folks, and I'm quite sure he isn't bigoted against trans people.
I think I'll stick with my original opinion based on my own experience and reading. You don't get to decide for me any more than I get to decide for you.
> You don't get to decide for me any more than I get to decide for you.
> There's a way to bring stuff like this up on HN
Mhm. Let the dark lord decide for all of us I say. After all it is only a matter of proper verbiage how to most effectively ostracize someone you've personally deemed unlikeable eh?
PayPal is such a weird company. I was a loyal customer for 20 years until I wanted to convert my account from business to personal (I closed the business) and the site refused to do so. after months of calls with support, it became clear that no one was able to do this (something locked the flow and no one was able to see what; I guess my account was so ancient, it has some db flags no longer used but still checked by their backend?), so I asked just to terminate my account. That also was not possible. It took 6 months to figure out why; my company still existed they said; it most certainly did not. It took 2 months to find out why they thought that; apparently, somewhere in the past 20 years, they searched for my company in the NL company register and attached the wrong company number to my account. So I told them the real number and they said; now all is fine, we can even convert it to personal. 1 hour later I received an email from PayPal that I am permanently banned as I am trading with a business account of which the company no longer exists… Well done!
Brazil (1985 film) was not supposed to be an instruction manual!
The scale of these absurdities is just wild. Years ago I signed up for a domain for my blogger.com blog. At some point google decided to transfer the management of that domain to google workspaces ... I don't know how or why but they did. So when it expired I was told to login to google workspaces, but I don't have a google workspaces account at the email they kept emailing me at ... and their emails never told me what email to login with.
To get help on the website I was told to contact my google workspaces administrator ... but not who that is.
I figured out who the domain registrar was and told them my story and they helped me get a hold of the domain. Kudos to them to having a very fast and effective support team.
Now even more years later I get more emails from google workspaces that my account is expiring and sorta implying some consequences (but not actually saying) ... not that I can do anything about it.
At this point I have it in the back of my mind that any given day google could find this weird situation, assume malice, and ban me... a situation that 1. I didn't make happen. 2. I can't even fix. 3. I don't even know how it happened / what the problem is / google won't really tell me.
I think Kafka's The Trial is an even better fit - in Brazil, you could at least see some of the machinations unfolding - in The Trial, like in reality, you only hit a wall of the bureaucrats telling you that your case is being studied with no way of knowing when or if you will ever get anything more.
Are there options for small business payment processing that don't invite comparisons to dystopias? I think crowdsourced patronage is a great model for society to fund creative works now that copyright regulations have largely been captured, but with Patreon ignoring security, and paypal being this disfuncional... Is there a safe way to accept something like vinmo for micropayments?
I lost access to a PayPal account I had used for years, because one day they decided they needed to know the CVV of a long-expired credit card, and refused to let me log in without it.
Surprisingly, customer support was very helpful and let me transfer out the (minimal) balance in the account to another, completely unconnected PayPal business account I happened to have. Which is even more disconcerting, because it meant they were sufficiently convinced about my identity to let me transfer money out, but not enough to let me login in. Insane.
I'm still (very, very occasionally) using that business account today, even though the underlying business also ceased to exist years ago. I wonder when the banhammer will drop?
Transferring money out is far lower risk than unauthorised account access.
If they transfer money out and it turns out it was fraud they can easily compensate the original account holder by putting the money back in their account and there's little harm done, especially if the sums are small.
If they give unauthorised account access then there's far greater harm including risk they'll get penalised by regulators over data security as well as the damage being potentially hard to undo if further changes are made to the account.
In a large corporation, different precesses can be handled and developed by separate teams often working in silos.
After many years, there may not be a force to assure these processes are consistent, have rules that make sense in relation to one a other. I think the answer may just be it’s “dumb” because no one cares or has the power or will to look at things holistically.
Your GP had "it meant they were sufficiently convinced about my identity to let me transfer money out, but not enough to let me login in. Insane", and your parent is explaining why that's a non-insane thing.
> If they transfer money out and it turns out it was fraud they can easily compensate the original account holder by putting the money back in their account and there's little harm done, especially if the sums are small.
But, once he'd learned that all of the other ½ cents are left floating around inside the megacorporation's database, Gorman hacked into the company's computer system and funneled them all into his next check, accruing the amount of $85,789.90, (a crime that would be later be known in slang as "salami slicing").
I closed my account when they discovered suspicious activity in my account, at least claimed so but apart from locking me out until I prove I am me with photo ID copy and independent sources about my address (bank statement, utility bill, ...), basically collecting more data on me, they did not make any steps tracking down this suspicious activity, not even explaining what it was, they did not report it to the authorities! It was complete unresponsiveness when I asked for details on the event, asking about reference to the case at the authorities, told them that I will report it myself to the authorities (someone doing something to my money!!) and need some info, nothing, complete silence!
My conclusion that they simply lied to my face!
I was around the time when PayPal got some bank like regulatory status in Ireland and might have needed some more data so they forced me to provide through a bullst claim. At least this is the only scenario I find feasible. I had very little money there, after gaining access again (giving them a lot of data on me) there was no sign of any activity there that not belonged to me, nothing.
I decided that their practices are shady and I will never ever trust them!
(I did not report it eventually to the authorities, even the preparation for it took time with little supporting material, and I already had an unrelated matter to tackle, it was simpler leaving them and spread their reputation. PayPal definitely did not bother reporting it as I was never approached or questioned about the suspicious activity in my account ever. It was about 10 years ago btw.)
This is normal for almost all (all?) large corps; they don't have to tell you why the account was terminated/blocked so it could be anything; something you said online (about them / founders etc), something you paid they don't agree with, just ROI vs TCO for your spending habits etc etc. They don't have to tell you and 'suspicious activities' is an easy one: adsense/adwords uses it as well. They use 'if we would tell you what it is exactly and how we measure it, it will allow evil actors to use that against us'.
Same here, someone tried to transfer money to me and PayPal decided that they didn’t like that, and that they wanted my ID. Then, they wouldn’t let me close my account, and when I finally provided some sort of ID they claimed that my name is wrong and as such can’t do anything until I provide more ID with an account name change request. All of which apparently makes the account impossible to close. Or so I presume, having talked with support four separate times, receiving completely different reasons/answers, and then finally saying that they’ll force-close my account, which they never did.
Now when I do absolutely need to use PayPal, I use my card on a friend’s account (with their permission).
It's actually illegal to tell clients when a Suspicious Activity Report is filed. It's quite possible they filed one. It wouldn't necessarily trigger any investigation but it would be kept on file.
> I lost access to a PayPal account I had used for years, because one day they decided they needed to know the CVV of a long-expired credit card, and refused to let me log in without it.
LOL, I kinda had the same issue, but I had to remember the last 4 numbers of some old credit card. Couldn't find it in any email, so yeah ... couldn't use my Paypal anymore.
This was a while ago, so maybe it was the four digits and not the CVV for me as we? Not sure, but I do recall that the card was waaaaay expired (as in, a decade ago) and it took me a while to figure out what card they were even referring to.
Maybe for your account they registered the wrong number as well?
I could’ve gone on using it if I hadn’t told them. But in NL this is an issue (hence I tried so hard); bank accounts to companies need to be closed asap when the company gets closed and you definitely cannot pay or receive money with them as that will anger the tax office.
They certainly are. From their NL terms and conditions [1]:
> Who provides the Service?
> The Service is provided by PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l.et Cie, S.C.A. (R.C.S. Luxembourg B 118 349) (“PayPal”) to registered users in the European Economic Area. For details on how to reach PayPal, please refer to this page on Customer Service, or in an emergency, see “What to do” below.
> PayPal is duly licensed in Luxembourg as a bank (or “credit institution” in legal terms). We are under the prudential supervision of the Luxembourg financial regulatory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier or CSSF. The CSSF maintains a register of the organisations that it regulates at https://supervisedentities.apps.cssf.lu/index.html?language=.... PayPal is number B00000351 on the register, but you can also look us up on the register by our name.
To be honest I'm surprised they even tried as hard as they did. Normally in my experience if you cost them more than about 30 minutes of staff time fixing any problem, they'll ban your account just on the basis that you're costing them more in customer service than the revenue you bring in.
The Dutch support is really very good. Before they had local support it was even worse. But the dutch support, as far as I have used them (quite a lot from begin ‘20 to begin ‘22 as I tried to convert my account), they were professional and nice, but have very little power and need to talk to their US counterparts all the time (which, I presume, is why the weeks/months fly by over something I would assume is a support-portal lookup).
Edit; I guess by having written this, if a PayPal manager reads this, the Dutch support will get an ‘urgent read now!’ email from their manager to not waste so much time on customers…
I'm glad your experience was better than mine. I had to get a lawyer involved after the Dutch support told me I would be refunded if I returned an item, and then after I sent it back, denied the refund.
Well, my story didn’t end well, but at least they were nice and courteous. Maybe I just got lucky there but my experience with US support was random phone hang ups, infinite queues to ‘I will just fetch this info, moment sir’, people being short, blaming me, barking insults etc.
I guess you found out as well, like me, the US has the last say in any matter and they don’t really listen to their overseas colleagues if their flagging algo/AI says ‘nope’.
Did the lawyer work? If it did, I am happy that at least it seems possible to go against them. I will never touch them again though.
I've contacted one time PayPal Japan to transfer money to a personal account from PayPal Brazil because it gave me some error. They told me I should contact PayPal Brazil because the recipient account was not verified. On PayPal Brazil, they told me that I could only transfer personal money through Xoom, which is another service from PayPal. But when I tried, Xoom doesn't work with Japan. After I asked PayPal Japan again, they confirmed only business accounts can receive money in Brazil. It took around 3 weeks going back and forth until they could give me a clear statement saying that what I tried to do was impossible. I wondered why the interface was allowing me to chose this kind of transfer in the first place.
This story has pushed me over the line, finally triggering me to close my PayPal account. I can't describe the sum total of stimuli that brought me here, it's a gestalt, a gut feeling.
But not keeping money on them is NOT enough as a seller to extricate yourself from that morass.
They will find subtle ways to force-link your real bank account to paypal, and then its game over. They have the keys to the kingdom.
One day you will get some random charge on your account that keeps growing and growing and you don't recognize the transaction at all, but you can't do anything because they can pay themselves from your linked bank account.
I advise all businesses that use paypal that at worst case, link a completely unrelated bank institution to paypal, and then keep this secondary bank to low funds as often as possible.
Otherwise, you will never know when paypal may poison the well and your physical bank business operating account is suddenly unavailable!
> They will find subtle ways to force-link your real bank account to paypal, and then its game over. They have the keys to the kingdom.
for most reasonable sized US banks, once you have one account that has enough money not to be charged fees, you can open additional accounts with them, and easily transfer money between them. You could open a paypal-only account and keep it empty. You could also close it, and open another one whenever you need to verify an account with PayPal again
Years later I get a letter from the State Comptroller about how they are about to receive my balance ($200) from PayPal because they (PayPal) haven't been able to contact me (Don't they have my email address?) There's a number to call, I call it, the PayPal employee says "How do you want your money, check or in your PayPal account?" I choose check, of course, because the account is locked.
And that's the last I ever heard of it. No check. No new letter from the comptroller. PayPal must have kept it. They found a loophole in the system.
It's literally not worth my time to pursue it, so instead I just mention this story in public from time to time.
I have a business account that now has a whole series of notification boxes, some empty, one saying the account is permanently closed, and one saying I need to update KYC to restore the account.
Filling in the KYC sometimes restores it, but then it gets locked again because the KYC changes account details, which triggers the KYC process and reverts the changes.
I have been trying to upload some information they asked to verify my business account. For a new business account I opened
I already have 1 business and 1 personal account which is their limit and got permission from PayPal to open this one.
I kept getting an error when I go through the official form. Possibly because I have a linked account already.
So I talked to customer support and after a huge timesink and getting passed around between several agents and contacting them multiple times they gave me an alternative place to upload.
Which worked but I think no one saw the documents as that alternate form.
I contacted customer support again and they said that alternate upload form was just for personal accounts.
In the end I just decided not to accept PayPal as means of payment for that business.
What monopoly? I've literally never used PayPal. I did use Venmo for a while til they said they were closing my account unless I provide them with information I already provided them with, I decided that I'd let them close it and now they won't stop offering me $10.
Same for transferring accounts to a different country. Can’t be done according to their useless help line. Has to be closed and reopened under a different email addr according to them
I disagree. ETSY and eBay appear just as weird, crazy, and up to various odd machinations. The Internet is littered with tales of people completely baffled and perplexed at having their accounts suspended without explanation, then getting the runaround or cold shoulder from customer service.
There is also speculation about some type of secretive blacklist that is floating around and used by various companies for preemptive actions.
> 1 hour later I received an email from PayPal that I am permanently banned as I am trading with a business account of which the company no longer exists
I hate that I have to do this and to be viewed as defending a vile organization like PayPal but this specific incident here could be the result of another department/silo (compliance/anti-fraud?) within the corporation issuing an immediate ban for your account to avoid or limit any regulatory burden.
I am not defending them at all, their total disregard for their customers, and lack of courtesy make them in my book one of the most awful companies to work with or patronize, but usually organizations of this gigantic scale are compartmentalized, and work in silos, and thus you have to figure it out yourself, or through an insider, how to navigate the bureaucratic maze, and accomplish the task at hand and not be disheartened with the initial frustrating response that you might get from the first line of contact with them.
It honestly doesn't really matter. That's a plausible explanation, but the customer shouldn't have to care / make special allowances because this is a big company with lots of people. It either
does good things or it doesn't, and in this case it didn't.
I could be wrong, but isn't it flat-out illegal for a company to refuse to remove/delete your account on your request? I'm pretty sure GDPR, at least, requires this explicitly.
> the contract you “agreed” to means you are legally not allowed to take them to a real court. Your only recourse is arbitration.
americans can sign away their rights to sue at their own courts? That seems wrong.
For me, as a german, the paypal contract reads that i can escalate a conflict to the EU consumer protection agency or the french regulatory authority for financial institutions (which signs their banking license). It further reads that the governing body of law and court of of justice should be in Wales, but that this does not limit my consumer right to sue at my local court. No arbitration clause, especially no mandatory arbitration with an agency of the corporations choice.
I do understand the idea that private arbitration may be cheaper than court proceedings, but is mandatory arbitration even legally enforceable, or is that just scary text a court would overrule?
> americans can sign away their rights to sue at their own courts? That seems wrong.
You still have immediate access to the courts if you are challenging the legality of the contract (i.e. something is actually against the law in the contract or you are claiming the contract is so unjust it should be allowed ). If it's just a dispute under the terms of the agreement, you usually have to do arbitration and then you can go to court. Every time I've done arbitration, the outcome has been pretty fair (which to me, means I won) and even a better experience that US Courts are. US Courts use an adversarial system, so if you don't spend a lot of time in courtrooms (which I don't), it's not a pleasant place to be even when you win.
There is always a clause saying you can opt out of the arbitration stranglehold in writing, it'd be unenforceable if there wasn't. It's just that nobody gives enough of a damn to utilize it, and it's time-gated, so by the time you actually run into a dispute, you're already stuck.
The US Paypal terms also allow you to take the case to small claims.
Mandatory arbitration can be enforceable if certain requirements are met. The big difference between the EU and US is the American rule, each side bears their own costs. Lawyers might be $300 an hour, so arbitration can be a lot less expensive for everyone
This piece demonstrates excellent writing skills - bits of humor interspere information-dense sections on legalese, allowing the reader to easily absorb the information.
As far as the byzantine arbitration process described here, signed off on by the US Supreme Court and adopted across most of the corporate world, with the obvious intent of making it hard for ordinary citizens to sue corporations for damages, see this quote:
"Control the coinage and the courts -- let the rabble have the rest." Thus the Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
There should be real skepticism about arbitration in user agreements, but didn’t make it easier in this case? Only someone rich or famous enough to entice a free lawyer could afford to sue PayPal over a suspended account. But many many more people could afford to try arbitration.
That's what I'm thinking. Okay this was a little weird and byzantine, but wouldn't it be like 1000x harder, more expensive, and more byzantine to hire a lawyer, file an actual lawsuit, and take it at least past the initial stages, i.e. surviving a motion to dismiss?
There are probably greater risks to a company if the case goes to something like a jury trial. Here, they may have run afoul of 'political discrimination' which some locales have made illegal. For example, there was a 'refusal to provide services to a Trump employee' case in New York:
> "Had the incident taken place in Washington, D.C., it would have likely been illegal. The District of Columbia has an anti-discrimination law covering political affiliation. In Madison, Wisconsin, it most certainly would have been. The city’s broad non-discrimination clause defines political beliefs and physical appearance in its law. Political views can include 'opinions, manifested in speech or association, concerning the social, economic, and governmental structure of society and its institutions.' "
Hence a dedicated person could plausibly incorporate their business in the District of Columbia, and then bring a (potentially very expensive and public) lawsuit against PayPal on the basis of political discrimination. Such incidents might be relatively rare, but they could also have major negative PR effects as well as the possibility of large jury awards, outcomes that binding arbitration is designed to avoid.
As far as where the line between 'respectable political affiliation' and 'member of a violent organization' lies, Irish history is worth looking at, i.e. Sinn Fein vs. the IRA.
The only issue I saw here was that the process was buried in a giant service agreement, and customer support was factually incorrect about possible recourse.
Yes, I know, I really get amused by references to "I fought the law and the law won", that takes real creativity to come up with! Never would have seen the pattern if I got into a dispute with a large corporation and then was victorious!
It's worth knowing that in the UK PayPal is covered by the Financial Ombudsman service. They wouldn't be interested in accounts being blocked as in this case but they were very helpful to me when PayPal made a payment that I did not authorize and then refused to put it right.
I don't use PayPal any more. Their support staff are impossibility hopeless so any kind of problem with your account will cause you a world of pain.
The Financial Ombudsman Service is one of the few UK organizations that is anyway effective. If only all other regulatory authorities were half as good?
One problem I have found with some UK eCommerce sites though is that their payment gateways are often broken with Brave/Chrome and the paypal payment option is an easy way of bypassing this issue.
The FOS seems effective to consumers because it levies a £750 charge to the financial institution for each case it investigates. It is often cheaper to do whatever the customer wants, whether or not the complaint is justified.
The financial institutions at the receiving end of FOS decisions don't necessarily regard it as effective. Claims management companies, for instance, can flood banks with very many dubious claims, with the FOS as effectively the enforcer.
My state (New York) has a similar regulatory feature. I had an issue with bees inside of the utility pole that feeds my home. Issue: the pole is owned by the telephone company. So power people tell me to call the phone company, and the phone company tells me to get a landline before they will talk to me.
So I called the public utility commission, which apparently starts fining both parties within 48 hours of the complaint, which I submitted on Sunday. Monday morning arrives, and there is a comical gathering of trucks with crews frantically working to replace the pole (which is a fascinating process).
The foreman told me that the government is essentially level 3 support, and had I worked through the company, he probably would have inspected it over a few months before any work would have started, and only if I was persistent.
The key lesson is that large companies only perceive pain. PayPal lives in a big loophole, so it’s difficult to inflict pain on them and thus difficult to ever be satisfied with them.
I once put the word "complaint" on the top of a letter to a UK bank who had made a mistake on a statement. It made all the difference. What had previously been dismissed as unimportant was addressed and they sent me £100 compensation.
Just taking that first step towards the Financial Ombudsman was enough.
It's a bit "one weird trick", but you're right that absolutely the best way to get consumer problems addressed in the UK is to use the word "complaint". It starts the clock as complaints typically have to be addressed within certain time limits.
If you don't use the word complaint then companies can argue that they thought you were merely providing feedback or engaging in something other than a complaint.
As soon as you use the word complaint, they can't argue that and it puts you on track to escalate to the ombudsman and the companies know it, and they know you know it.
I participated in the arbitration swarm against Indie Go Go a few years back..
There was a crowdfunding which was successful, they charged all of us, told the creator they were sending the money, then after a week canceled the crowd funding and refunded our money.
According to their TOS, they were NOT a party to the contract we had with the creator and forced arbitration, so we fought it. Each participant (200+ iirc) each had to pay $200 while IGG had to pay the other $2300/participant (~$460k) to get the arbitration initiated. Then they tried to push it to a class action (to simplify their legal battle) but according to their own TOS a class action was not allowed so that died quickly.
So then we collectively worked through one firm who iterated on our filings based on how each one went.
After a year+, IGG finally unlocked the creator's account, issued an apology, and updated their TOS. Insiders at IGG claim that the legal bill was into the millions.
It's not easy but you can fight bad behavior from these guys.
> For consumers, I suspect that much of the power “arbitration” seems to confer on corporations lies in its opacity
This one hundred times. There has been a surprisingly-effective PR scare campaign around arbitration in the U.S. Sure, for sexual harassment, it’s a bad forum. That’s approaching criminal territory. But for civil disputes, it’s straightforward and cheap.
I'd have more faith in arbitration if it was offered as an option instead of being required by the TOS. If it's universally good for me, surely there's no reason to force me to use it?
When I originally opened my PayPal account many years ago, the terms and conditions were displayed in a textarea and thus completely editable. So I deleted them before I clicked the confirm button, and ran off a screenshot of the page.
I always wondered what would have happened if I'd had any kind of dispute with them; would this have over-ridden the various "we're updating your terms and conditions" emails I received from them over the subsequent years? Or would continuing to use my account have amounted to acquiescence? (I assume the latter)
In practice I closed my account a couple of years ago when I moved to Sweden as it's not possible to transfer the account between countries. I hadn't used it much because (Transfer)Wise makes international bank transfers so much cheaper than they used to be and for everything else I use a debit card (or, within Sweden, Swish).
> I always wondered what would have happened if I'd had any kind of dispute with them
NAL, but a contract requires a "meeting of the minds"[1]. You altering the contract without the other party knowing makes it invalid.
The process when modifying a contract is generally to have all parties initial next to each modification to indicate that they've read and agree with the change.
Right, but that's my point. I deleted the terms (contract). So what contract applies? There was clearly no meeting of minds on this. So, for example, I would speculate that I could not have been bound to arbitration in the event of a dispute. Usually the Ts&Cs also contain verbiage about how and when amendments to the terms must be accepted, hence I wonder if subsequent changes would automatically be binding without further notice (over simplified, but you know what I mean) in the way that they normally are.
I don't think it's as clear-cut as all that, though in practice I wouldn't much want to trust my weight to that rather flimsy hypothesis. I'd love to hear a real legal opinion on this though, just for shits & giggles.
Then there's no valid contract, and you are not legally allowed to use the service. You retain the right to go to court, where you would find a judge unhappy with you for being a smartass.
This person secretly edited their post employment discrimination release agreement. In court, they got out of the agreement, but they were forced to pay back the consideration + interest.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and even PayPal are public utilities at this point, and we need better accountability from them. If there's one piece of legislation I think the US needs, it's to make these monstrous, global, faceless, tech companies use a tiny portion of their mind-boggling profits to staff a proper help desk that can actually FIX these kinds of problems. Make the data public, and if the user-satisfaction rate isn't high-enough, stiff (actual!) penalties start being applied until it gets there.
I know this won't be popular here, but I stand by it.
This isn't a "tech company" thing - PayPal is no different from any bank in this regard. Banks close accounts for seemingly no reason (or silly reasons) with no recourse literally all the time.
And yet, your point is completely pointless. I can easily go find another bank. By design, they're fungible. PayPal's position and "reputation" puts them in a league of their own when it comes to accepting online payments. I don't even know of something that has the same mindshare. Venmo? Owned by PayPal, in yet another CLASSIC American monopolistic cannibalization, engineered to explicitly deny my ability to USE SOMEONE ELSE. Seriously, I don't know of any others besides Apple Pay. Does Ebay work with that? My point is that your options are limited, like the power company, water, or sewer.
Thanks, I remembered I was receiving a few dollars a month from patreon which added up over the years, I just transfered a big chunk of that out of my account.
At this point, I'm not worried about Paypal's security, but more about their own policies of shutting down accounts. I wish companies were required to specify why an account was blocked, but I'm 99% sure they don't and they've weaseled their way out of it so that challenging the decision becomes more difficult. If they specify a reason to someone who is more ligituous or who knows legalese, they could probably pick the reasoning apart.
Or just a "oh you have ruled 'fraudulent activity'? Prove it"
I haven't been using PayPal since more than 5 years.
For quick transfers I can use Revolut. For buying something I can use card. For easy payment integration with Web apps there are countless tools.
So I am wondering what use cases PayPal still serves, use cases which aren't already better covered by better means. Why pay heavy commissions to PayPal?
I only buy from merchants that offer PayPal (there are few I trust by card, like Amazon). And the reason is that whatever it happens, I can always get my money back with PayPal. It happened 3 times in last 5 years that seller took the money and never shipped anything. I got all them resolved very quickly.
That's BS. Had a seller screwing me over who "sold" me a VR headset.
He gave me a UPS tracking number which belonged to a package that was delivered to another city, another person, was part 1 of a 3 package delivery and weighted 28kg, pretty heavy weight headset. The only match was the zip code everything else had nothing to do with me.
So I complained to Paypal, gave them all the data that showed that the tracking number wasn't from the right package and still PayPal let the seller keep the money.
Aside: Where do you live that has a postal service where zip codes match in different cities? Sounds like someone misunderstood the point of a postal [zip] code. Or, did I misunderstand?
As a rule of thumb, sure, you can presume that zip codes follow political boundaries (city, county or state). The vast majority of times, that's the case.
However, if you do a lot of mailing, you'll discover some zip codes that cross state lines (because some remote area is actually served by a post office across the state line).
Or some area where several towns & cities map to a single "preferred" name that the USPS uses (example: Centennial, CO).
Zip codes are for the convenience of USPS and to make their life easier. The edge cases are very fuzzy & fractal.
This is more common than you would think in the U.S. ZIP codes don't always follow geopolitical boundaries. There are two cities in 57717. Some ZIP codes even cross state boundaries; USPS won't state it when you look up ZIP 42223 in their web tool, but part of it covers Tennessee. For example, the Pratt Museum is in Fort Campbell TN but has a Fort Campbell KY mailing address.
You can, but you probably have to call up your bank during business hours, wait on hold for a while, and then get given the runaround for a while. PayPal you just push a button and it's done.
In the UK my experience with chargebacks is that they’re very biased towards the company. It’s a drawn-out process during which you get harassed by the company’s anti-chargeback team in to accepting an ex gratia payment etc. you have to supply lots of evidence and when the company provides some poor quality evidence the bank goes “oh well that’s decided then” as if responding was sufficient.
This is true, you have to very persistent with the chargeback route, sometimes only a threat of legal action against the bank will move things forward.
If you live in the US, you could use Privacy for this (privacy.com). Not only do they allow you to create a separate card for each merchant, pause/unpause/close/set spend limits and so on, but their support is so nice that half the time they'll just give you credit instead of making you bother with a proper chargeback. And you can do that over email.
Works even with merchants that don't support PayPal. Everyone supports good old card numbers.
If you contact their support over email they'll enable the option for you to use a card as your funding source. But IIRC you have to connect a bank account first with more than $50 in it and then you can switch to the card.
My co published an App in Germany as recently as 2 years ago and PayPal support was almost unavoidable. It turns out that penetration of credit and debit cards in Germany is significantly behind other parts of the EU and many of them habitually use PayPal for e-commerce payments.
> It turns out that penetration of credit and debit cards in Germany is significantly behind other parts of the EU.
Yep. Therefore, we also use PayPal a lot to transfer money to a friend when we're at some place that is cash only and someone doesn't have cash on them. No need to type an IBAN and wait for a day.
Also, it's a great backup solution for online purchases if I don't want to share my credit card details or things don't work. For example, many vendors borked the 3d visa verification process so PayPal often was the only realistic option.
The delay can be skipped in many cases via the IBAN instant payment option. Requires both banks to be participating in the program and trust each other (the delay will happen if additional checks are needed, for example if the transction gets flagged for manual inspection, eg if you write "funny" purpose text, etc)
Use Wise (https://wise.com). In Germany especially N26 is also popular but IMO they went downhill quite a bit as soon as they realized that being a neobank is a losing venture.
I don't know, but I checked a few of these "neobanks" (or whatever they are) available in Italy and they seem more or less to have in common 3 things:
1) they offer services for free or for a low cost (compared to "normal" banks)
2) when these services work, they do work
3) when - for whatever reasons - these services do not work their assistance/support is either not-existing or unreachable, and when (if) you manage to contact them they provide no solutions/fixes and more likely than not you end up with your account frozen or closed (with no actual idea of the reasons why it was frozen/closed)
Surely there must be something (in EU) that complicates matters (anti-money laundering Laws/limits to transfers/National and EU Authorities/whatever) but right now it seems to me like none of them is actually reliable (if it is used as secundary or tertiary card/means of payment they are fine but I wouldn't trust any of them as "primary".
BTW - just for the record - right now N26 has been ordered to suspend making new accounts in Italy by the Bank of Italy (since March 2022) assertedly due to not full compliance with anti-money laundering checks:
The value is that it's easy from the perspective of the user. You mentioned that you use Revolut for one thing, direct card payment for another, and other tools for web app integration.
PayPal offers all that in a neatly packaged solution. It's no surprise users would choose that instead of 3+ different services that serve different purposes
With virtual cards and whatnot I don't use PayPal anymore to protect the card number from circulation.
But I still find them useful for long therm subscriptions to provider. That why when I need to change the card I don't need to login to (and remember) all websites where I have an ongoing payment plan
From the buyer's perspective: hassle-free unsubscription, seeing all my subscriptions in one place, no need to create accounts on random seller sites. And yes, I'm willing to pay a couple of %% to anyone who can fulfill those needs, not necessarily PayPal.
I use it if the seller forces me to type my CC number into their interface. If it's some payment provider, that's fine but I don't trust random webshops to keep my credit card details safe
I can't comment on their morals or views on customers, but I think they've been governed by banking regulations for some time now. In my country (.ie) that's their claim. Banking regulations come with quite a lot of consumer protection, both national and EU originated.
Buying things in a foreign country, or where a seller hasn't integrated the card type you want to use (particularly a problem for small/local websites). Sending money to a friend internationally. Avoiding having to give someone your bank details or credit card number.
I'm wondering wow difficult can it be to just set up Stripe in addition to PayPal. I've set one up without any legal entity at all, just as a plain old human being resident of Estonia, and it seems to just work for occasional payments. Should work in US, too.
Second, I wish there was more followup from "My account got limited/blocked, and I need help." HN posts of that nature—assuming they reach the front page—typically get resolution in enough time that the person with the issue posts a followup, but I don't think that's the norm.
> While PayPal is technically a private company that can work with basically whoever it wants for whatever reason, its centralized role as an online payment processor makes this a weirdly potent free speech fight.
> He did share correspondence with me where prominent free speech attorneys told him, in an apparent contradiction to my claims, that he had no viable legal recourse to getting his account reinstated.
Though somehow money is speech, the author never supports his claim how PayPal, which is not a government actor, can violate free speech. The First Amendment does not prohibit private individuals, companies and employers from restricting speech.
The US constitutional guarantee of freedom from government interference in speech is just one aspect of the matter. If private companies own every method of articulating your views, and are preventing you from doing so, then you aren't free to speak.
> If private companies own every method of articulating your views,
They aren't. We're nowhere even close. To the point where I can't even envision how that could happen.
Perhaps in some sort of fantasy libertarian future where everything has been privatized, including the streets and sidewalks. But that's certainly not anything like now.
If you want to envisage such a future for a dystopian novel or something like that, just imagine this wild fantasy:
1. Imagine a world where all the major online spaces - twitter, reddit, facebook, tumblr, HN, tiktok, instagram, youtube, twitch, slack, and discord and so on are privately owned. As are skype, zoom and google meet. Imagine a world where you can't even send e-mails if private companies don't like your 'sender reputation'.
2. Then imagine a world where all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards are owned by private corporations. Maybe they're even owned by a tiny number of corporations, with specific political leanings.
3. Then fantasise that universities and similar venues for public speaking are a law unto themselves, and are within their rights to choose who they invite to speak.
4. Imagine a world of rising land values and increasing urbanisation, where only the absolute richest people could hold an event of any scale on land they own themselves.
5. Then imagine a world where public squares and parks in cities increasingly in private ownership. Perhaps city hall is sold to an investment firm who lease it back to the city. As it's private land, private security can move anyone on for 'unacceptable behaviour'.
6. There's still a risk some free speech would happen on public roads - we probably can't transfer those to private companies. We'll have to use the state's power here and arrest them - but don't worry, it's not a free speech issue. They were, uh, obstructing ambulance traffic. Or we could just make it legal for motorists to drive into people and let nature take it's course.
Thank goodness such an absurd fiction could never happen in real life :)
This list doesn't come close to being a place where "private companies own every method of articulating your views".
I believe you want to force a large company to accept an advertisement on any topic whatsoever, at a "reasonable price", and that that there should be no First Amendment right of free association which allows them to deny that advertisement.
If not, do you want to force them to post that same information at no cost?
Yes, you'd still be entirely free to articulate your views in the privacy of your own bathroom, so I suppose it's technically true private companies don't control every way of articulating your views.
Your list didn't include federated systems like Mastadon or IRC. It didn't include open source systems like Zulip that you can host yourself.
I don't use one of the big email providers, so I do get bounces when an organization thinks my ISP is untrusted. But that's not "can't even send e-mails if private companies don't like your 'sender reputation'" only "can't send e-mails to some people". And those people decided to use that system in part because they want the email provider to filter out some of their email.
We are not in a world where "all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards are owned by private corporations." Member-supported radio and TV, and college radio, are still things, as is community/public-access cable.
Further, how do you want to change it? Do you want a government station which is required to be open access so anyone can broadcast anything?
Universities and similar venues for public speaking have always had the right to choose who they invite to speak. This is what freedom of association means.
Also, they are not a "law unto themselves". There are limits on the types of speech they can prohibit - a public university is restricted by civil rights laws, as is a private/non-publicly funded school which allows public rental of a space.
How do you want to change it? Do you want them colleges to be forced to accept any speaker on any topic, whatsoever?
We see events like the Gathering of the Juggalos, with 20,000 people, and wonder what you mean by 'only the absolute richest people could hold an event of any scale on land they own themselves.'
And I already commented on your "As it's private land" in my "fantasy libertarian future where everything has been privatized" - as something we aren't close to doing.
Yes, I totally agree that privatization of public spaces is something I don't like, though I'll point out the oddity of how the privately-owned public space at Zuccotti Park was a better site for the Occupy Wall Street protest than a public park, because the latter had curfews.
"Outside City Hall on the south bank of the Thames, home to London’s democratically elected mayor and assembly, private security guards working for the More London estate (ultimately owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait) prevented the Guardian from carrying out any interviews.
Security officers intervened within moments of a reporter attempting to ask questions of members of the public, and immediately escorted him to the security office where it was explained that unsanctioned journalistic activity is banned on the site.
So the example of a city hall leased from an investment fund with private security moving people on for unacceptable behaviour is, unfortunately, not merely fantasy.
> Further, how do you want to change it?
Who says I want to change it? My beliefs don't include defending to the death other people's right to glorify the holocaust.
I recently lived through a pandemic where offline means of communication and assembly were severely curtailed - and everything from education to concerts to job interviews to doctor's appointments to courts to funerals to national legislatures ended up reliant on multinational tech companies' servers.
It seems to me, in other words, that almost all communication was in the hands of private companies.
If someone says they support free speech except when private companies are involved, IMHO they might as well say they support free speech except on days ending in Y.
Are we anywhere near close to selling out city halls in the way you describe, in such a way that "private companies own every method of articulating your views" is meaningful?
I specifically called out POPS as something I don't like.
FWIW, the HQ for the Greater London Authority has since moved, to a building owned by the Greater London Authority - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Hall,_London_(Newham) . (Confusingly, as I just learned, it's not a city hall, in that it does not serve a city.)
> If someone says they support free speech except when private companies are involved, IMHO they might as well say they support free speech except on days ending in Y.
IMHO, those who support free speech without also supporting the right of free association ... are not actually supporting free speech. Hecklers do not have a veto right.
I would change it by having and enforcing significantly stronger anti-trust laws, restoring restrictions on media conglomeration, stronger personal privacy rights, including strict limitations on resale of personal information, and restoring postal banking for anyone to use. For starters.
Yet the result will still have all major online spaces be privately owned and nearly all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards owned by private corporations.
Do you think it would still be so dystopian?
Could you elaborate more on real-world examples of your points #3 and #4?
Regarding #3 has many cases where a college has changed its mind on inviting a speaker, but every case I've read seems to be a valid exercise of a right of free association.
> They aren't. We're nowhere even close. To the point where I can't even envision how that could happen.
We are pretty close - Mastercard and Visa's (non-public) BRAM rules are pretty clumsy and arbitrary, and effectively do have a tremendous impact on global speech as they are effectively a duopoly. Their terms apply to essentially every business that requires any revenue, and therefore any platforms that people might want to speak on.
That is a problem. A terrible one. And they abuse it.
Yes, I well remember when the US pressured many big financial companies to stop financial transactions with WikiLeaks, and cut off something like 95% of their funding. (Bank of America also didn't like WikiLeaks' planned release of the bank's internal documents.)
I'll note that WikiLeaks is still around, and I believe they could always receive wire transfers. (As a less relevant point, WikiLeaks uses the money for ongoing acquisition and curation, and not only dissemination. The information was mirrored and available elsewhere.)
This therefore isn't an example of b800h's "private companies own every method of articulating your views."
They are and have been for decades. One of the reasons of passing laws preventing businesses from engaging in certain forms of discrimination is because because businesses had enough power that to discriminate based on a protected factor could lock someone out from society. This is extremely noticeable in smaller communities where there might be only a single grocery store, but even in larger communities you'll find companies often working together and that they share common suppliers of certain goods or services who can lock you out of the majority of companies all at once.
Up until now we have tolerated it because the forms of discrimination we wouldn't tolerate have since been individually banned and there haven't been enough cases of coordinated denial of social involvement to prompt further legal action, but the power is there. I assume the threat of legal action further limiting the power of companies to discriminate has prevented the threat from going too far, and why companies will even walk back cases when enough popular support gets behind it.
It is, however, a consumer rights issue. It's obviously the case that some larger tech companies -- PayPal, Google, Amazon, Meta, etc -- can have a large impact on one's life if they decide to suspend or ban your account, but legal remedies are...limited. As happened here, often they don't even tell you why, and greatly limit or block your ability to appeal. This is a problem, not a free speech problem, but a consumer rights problem.
The first amendment is not the end-all and be-all of 'free speech'.
Heck, the literal phrasing is "Congress shall not abridging the freedom of speech". The fact that congress is mentioned means that others can also abridge the freedom of speech.
Note that 'abridge' means diminish in scope. If your boss says "If you say ducks are nice, you will be fired" that affects your freedom of speech. It isn't a first-amendment issue unless your boss is the government. But it remains someone inhibiting your speech.
How many times does this utterly pointless discussion on the legality of platform censorship need to be had? No one is saying that what PayPal or any other big company is doing in terms of censorship is illegal, it’s usually just either that 1) they think it should be or 2) they feel it’s vaguely unamerican. Comment threads of this nature should be preeemptively removed by dang because they go absolutely nowhere.
In the case of freedom of speech, the First Ammendment doesn't establish a right for citizens, it establishes a prohibition to Congress:
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
I really don't see how this can be taken to mean that a private company can't establish a rule abridging the freedom of speech.
Note that there is another part where I would agree that it establishes a positive right:
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
The language here does seem to assume that there exists a right peaceably to assemble, so you could argue that private companies also have to respect this right, even if the amendment only explicitly calls out Congress for this as well.
Companies that scaled up quickly in earlier days of the internet tend to treat their customers like trash.
Today, as they reach the limits of their growth (hard to grow when nearly every person on the planet has had an account with you or has one with a competitor), they will find that poor customer service comes back to bite them. Everyone will remember the time PayPal closed their account without warning, or the time AirBnB refused to refund them for the rodent feces and other unlivable conditions in their rental, or the nonsensical response from Google's "support" that ignored everything you sent them.
Populist take:
I would really love for some regulation and standardization of service usage agreements. We already know basically nobody actually reads them, despite the checkbox or button confirming it. Give us a summary with some popular icons or simplified lists.
I'd also love for some regulation around forced arbitration clauses. It should not be legal to waive your rights to remedy by trial any more than it is to waive your right to minimum wage.
> Companies that scaled up quickly in earlier days of the internet tend to treat their customers like trash.
Well, it is just much cheaper to optimize for the 90% Case (Everything works just fine, nothing unusual is happening) than aiming for covering 100% of cases. Ofc this is more of a general business rule imho than just startups(=scaling fast), but when you grow fast, you also need to prioritize much more.
But in the more general sense it seems to me, that this is also the reason that government spending is quite a bit higher than if a company would do the same, because governments should be (and mostly are) aiming for 100% and not the most convenient subgroup of the population.
In recent years, financial institutions - Paypal being one of them - have had an increased tendency to deny service to clients based on their having espousing unpopular views. Glenn Greenwald has recently written on this matter:
As always, not actually doing something useful like banning payment discrimination, just passing laws to protect speech they like and not speech they don't like.
Same! The number of times they claim I'm logging in from a new, unknown device has gone up significantly, even though I'm using the same browser on the same device all the time, and I don't clear cookies between sessions. The most egregious thing to me is that after solving the captcha, you are thrown back to the login form claiming that the password you entered is incorrect - which is impossible, as I just pasted it from my password manager. I'm happy about every web shop adding GiroPay as an alternative payment method in Germany.
The important thing for Americans to understand is that Paypal is not a bank.
You can have an "account" and hold money in it and it may function similar to one, but it has none of the federally mandated legal protections of being a bank.
Some much more recent Fintech startups such as Chime are legally underpinned by something that is an FDIC regulated bank.
Indeed, it’s the magic that made PayPal what it is today.
Back when it was x.com, they were trying to figure out how to avoid being a bank, and they did it with something that violated credit card merchant agreements: by crediting accounts without correlated purchases (you can still do this today, depending on your card processor I think).
That got noticed, so they just started holding the money instead. I never figured out how a company that holds your cash with exclusive rights to do anything they want with it has avoided banking regulation.
FWIW, I had a successful arbitration process this year via the German Insurance Ombudsman after my bike was stolen and the insurance didn't want to pay. The process took a few months, but was pretty easy overall and I got my money back :-) (In the end, the insurance paid just to avoid further hassle.)
Regarding PayPal: I've always avoided getting an account with them, because I generally don't like online services having access to my bank account. Two weeks ago, though, I was forced to create an account with them to pay a conference fee - just to have the PayPal account locked literally the minute it was created. I have no idea why, I didn't get any further information, and no useful response from customer service. So I guess I will remain a non-PayPal customer...
> Arbitration — by design — happens behind closed doors in boring confidential proceedings. So the only information we get comes to us piecemeal, but it indicates consumers and workers win between 1% to 6% of the time.
> Notably, neither Square nor Stripe offer to cover arbitration costs, and Stripe even requires the loser of the dispute to pay the winner’s entire legal expenses
I am glad the author got it sorted, but it appears that if this was a material dispute with money at stake for PayPal, the game is stacked against you so much, you might as well be a medieval surf teying to get justice against the Lord that has wronged him.
Computers have gotten so complicated, exploitable, and finicky that sometimes I feel only some programmers are able to fully enjoy the benefits of them. Likewise our legal system has gotten so complex, exploitable, and finicky that only lawyers can navigate disputes with other entities. I wonder which is a more valuable skill.
> PAYPAL WILL COVER THE COST OF ARBITRATION: .. PayPal isn’t alone here as Etsy has basically the same provision, as does Amazon Pay and many others.
> (Notably, neither Square nor Stripe offer to cover arbitration costs, and Stripe even requires the loser of the dispute to pay the winner’s entire legal expenses.
Yes, I also won my case against Paypal after a topic from a person on this site. I was able to get my money back from Paypal that they froze before the start of the pandemic and it appears they might be forced to pay me interest over it too
I think a lot of these companies make two mistakes. They allow rogue employees to have too much power in banning users, and their knee-jerk reaction to an account that gets too many “reporters” is to suspend it.
So a bunch of Tumbler users who get mad at someone can report en masse a Twitter user, or an Etsy employee who gets his feelings hurts can click on a button and get an account blocked. The C staff and legal have no idea this is going on.
ITT: people that think PayPal was acting alone as a “private” company.
I’m under the firm belief that this is just our federal government pushing a censorship and “misinformation” policy that is unconstitutional, but using pressure on private companies to accomplish said policies.
I have been locked out of my account by the stupid 2FA made mandatory. I have previously entered my phone number for contact purposes, forgot about it, and once I returned in some years they won't let me sign-in without a code sent to that number (which isn't mine anymore). Apparently I'm not alone caught in this. Luckily I only had about $20 there and don't really need PayPal nowadays.
The article and comments here talk about "money in the account". This confuses me as my use of Paypal is to send and receive money. The money is in my bank account - a "burner" account as I use it for Internet stuff and never have more cash there than is necessary for whatever transaction I'm doing. I never thought of Paypal as a bank where I can park funds.
My problem is that PayPal is the primary, and often only method of payment accepted on online auction sites, specially person-to-person of used electronics.
I buy electronics by the boat load (I think, never seen the boat) to experiment with them. Most Asian or individual sellers will accept just PayPal.
Yes, it is a monopoly in the niche field of online auctions.
I accept that Paypal is part of my financial life. Therefore I aim to manage the risks. I use a "burner" bank account to send and receive funds. It's a bank account with a bank with whom I do no other business.
TLDR: PayPal's user agreement says you can't sue them and must use arbitration for any disputes. And PayPal will pay all the costs of arbitration up to $10k. This guy followed the process and they unfroze his account without any explanation of why they froze it in the first place.
The only one I could think of would be the John Brown Gun Club. One of their members committed a terrorist attack on an ICE facility back in 2019 so perhaps that's why PayPal flagged the post author.
The EU PayPal entity seems to be PayPal (Europe) S.à.r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. Attention: Legal Department, 22-24 Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxembourg.
Legal claims fall under the Luxembourgish laws. I'm not seeing any language in the Dutch terms of service that mention any arbitrage.
Another thing to note is that the European branch of PayPal actually has a banking license. The Dutch national bank lists the permits (though the registration was done in Luxembourg, obviously): https://www.dnb.nl/en/public-register/information-detail/?re...
It looks like the 2007 basic banking license was extended around 2018.
PayPal probably have a legal entity in the EU, and different terms of service/privacy policy (to reflect EU regulations like GDPR), so probably not. You're free to read the double digits terms of service you agreed to to check the exact process :p
There was an article posed on HN not long ago (I am unable to find the link), where some business tried to sue Paypal for stealing them money (yes literally) and Paypal were giving them the run around claiming that this or that jurisdiction had no authority to sue them, maybe somebody can find the link, basically paypal claimed they couldn't be sued in any country.
In the EU paypal is deemed a bank I believe thus must abide by the same rules as regular ones. That's not the case in US.
Paypal refunded a customer over one thousand dollars despite the tracking number AND the buyer saying the item was delivered after they opened a case, the buyer simply failed to close the case but they commented on the case saying it was delivered and tracking showed it was delivered.
AFCA got my money back, got them to pay me compensation and I got a personal apology from someone in Ireland over the phone.
Almost nobody who reads this but doesn't already know who Jesse Singal is will bother to do the mountains of reading needed to figure out the reality, so I feel that I need to provide a counterpoint. I'm quite familiar with Singal, and my reading is that he's judicious, fair, scrupulous, compassionate, but willing to explore touchy issues in a way that triggers his critics. We need more like him, and I encourage people who are interested enough to take a look and come to their own conclusions.
Independent from who is thinking what I believe it is nowhere near the PayPal's business to decide about the acceptable social behaviour when it is not sanctioned by law.
But when an act violates a law they are mandated to report to authorities and inform the affected parties about it, about the nature of violation they discovered.
Based on what I seen here (unluckily cannot read the article in full, I do not want to register in yet another something for one article), also based on personal experience with them, the PayPal is a shady party here.
As someone who doesn't follow any of this, having just heard of "sex realism", do trans people generally think they are a different biological sex than what their DNA and gene expression shows? I thought trans was about changing gender, not changing sex.
> a different biological sex than what their DNA and gene expression shows
Sex characteristics are expressed primarily via hormones. That is why, for example, a person with an XY chromosome karyotype and complete androgen insensitivity syndrome will appear fully "female" externally.
Hormones are affected by DNA and genes, but can be overridden to alter secondary sex characteristics. Ideally (in most cases), this would be done pre-puberty, but even later in life it is possible to induce a "second puberty" which results in major changes. Further changes, including to primary sex characteristics, can be achieved surgically.
These changes do not need to follow a standard "male" or "female" template. Characteristics can be mixed, matched and/or rejected. Current medical technology has limits, but they are beyond what you might expect.
> I thought trans was about changing gender, not changing sex.
This is a matter of perspective and how one defines things.
An alternative view is that it is about affecting external change to match what the internal state was all along.
More poetically, one could describe it as "the realization that one needn't continue wearing the disguise that society seemed to demand".
Or, if one wants to be shitposty about coming out after having established a career, "New Game+".
> I thought trans was about changing gender, not changing sex.
Mostly true, but it's confusing. Historically, sex and gender have been used interchangeably. That is slowly changing. There are a lot of places that refer to "sex" where "biological sex", as you put it, is not what is meant. See e.g. how trans people can still get their "sex" updated on documents that refer to sex and not gender, and how many places described as single-sex are actually closer to single-gender.
> Historically, sex and gender have been used interchangeably.
This really isn't true. "Sex" was the only word anyone used for most of history; the idea that there's a distinction between "sex" and "gender" was invented by the sexologist John Money in 1955.
The Wikipedia article you link to also claims that the 1882 Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language said that one meaning of gender was sex. Other dictionaries from well before 1955 also support this. In fact, the 1828 Webster's dictionary, available online, specifically says the meaning of sex came first, the meaning in grammar followed from that. The separation of sex and gender is recent, you're right about that and that's what I was saying too, but you're wrong that sex was the only term used before that.
Does this have any relevance at all to the PayPal article or are you just trying to ensure that people who disagree with you on certain topics are shunned from society?
It erases everyone who does not consider themselves inside of a binary, which is a lot of people. It excludes and erases them, tells them they don't fit in and that they should just conform (or they'll be made to).
It sounds like you have the same intentions as PayPal then: PayPal doesn't want to do business with them because of their personal views, and you don't want to forward their story that you implied you found worth sharing, because of their personal views.
There's probably a lot of political stuff I am unaware of here, but a "sex realist" immediately made me understand what Colin's views probably area.
I don't get the "legitimatize" bit. If I acknowledge that some people believe the Earth is flat, and call them flat Earthers, how does this make their position legitimate?
Is the thought process here to pretend such people do not exist? I don't grok.
"Flat earther" is an accurate representation of their beliefs; it doesn't say whether those beliefs reflect reality or not. "Sex realist", however, implies that this Colin person's beliefs correspond to reality, while his opponent's beliefs do not. Imagine if flat earthers started going around calling themselves "geological realists" -- anyone who then used that term would pretty clearly identify themselves as aligned with them.
Everyone on both sides of this debate would claim to be a "sex realist". I'm not at all familiar with Colin's views, but "trans denier" or "biological determinist" might be more neutral terms.
OK, I agree that "denier" is probably not neutral. I was more focused on explaining why "realist" wasn't neutral, than actually coming up with a better option (particularly as I don't actually know anything about this Colin person we're talking about).
I guess I get you, but, it don't see the point of even bringing it up. Or caring.
Why?
Because worrying, caring about this is the ultimate red herring.
Imagine there are two sides. One which believes all blue people should be exiled, another which is opposed... including the blue people.
Now, to add to this frey, people start shouting at the name the other group calls themselves?!
I mean really, it's like caring that someone is putting too much salt on a sick of salted butter.
How about we argue about the salted butter itself?!
Worse, every erg of energy complaining about the name, is a wasted breath to fight the real issue. And even worse, the other side chose the name, likes it, so what's the point.
People will always think of them by this name. Always.
People probably don't like it being called a mental illness.
It's not a good idea to generalize a whole group of people when that only applies to a very small percentage, while the rest make the decision because they've been led to believe they should feel that way by no fault of their own.
Hmm, maybe, but if that was the case, would they get reinstated so easily? Getting immediately reinstated makes it sound more like it was a mistake, not the result of some real internal policy.
I also did a double take here, but I think the poster is referring to the link on the article’s page that could be seen as supportive of the activities of Colin Wright.
'TERFs' are just feminists who want to retain female-only spaces.
This is not a viewpoint that's even remotely comparable to Nazism, whose adherents are a distinct group with a set of beliefs that are inherently contradictory to feminism.
The venn diagram intersection between Nazis and TERFs is shockingly high. Just look at who is constantly pushing anti-Trans narratives - it's Evangelicals and the wider GQP. Only a very negligible part of the tankie Left is also pushing that kind of crap.
It's not, you have confused several different groups. Those you refer to as 'TERFs' are the feminists with a gender critical viewpoint, who are focused on women's rights and ending sex-based oppression.
> The venn diagram intersection between Nazis and TERFs is shockingly high. Just look at who is constantly pushing anti-Trans narratives - it's Evangelicals and the wider GQP. Only a very negligible part of the tankie Left is also pushing that kind of crap.
The intersection between the people who want to experiment on children with off label drugs, castrate chemically or surgically teenagers who have mental issues, and nazi doctors such a Mengele is even shockingly higher, because these are the real world consequences of an ideology.
All that insanity will ultimately cease with the avalanche of law suits incoming for medical malpractice, mutilation and torture, all done under guise of "care".
You can't separate the body from the mind, and you can't mend an unhealthy mind by butchering an healthy body, the proof is in the fact that people who suffer from these delusions are in need for constant validation of their alternative reality.
This is not something i've noticed. If anything, over the last couple of years, i've noticed a drift from libertarian optimism to an awareness of economic injustice.
Can you give me three example of actual far right positions being accepted here in the last few months?
Further in the interest of fairness, here's a response to Singal in general, including his "When Children Say They’re Trans" story for the Atlantic that he defends there:
> "Behind a veneer of empathy and concern, Singal has supplied anti-trans narratives that the right has found appealing."
As an occasional listener to Singal's very good podcast (which covers mostly internet controversy), I have to say -- Singal comes across as thoughtful and empathetic, precisely because he actually seems to be thoughtful and empathetic.
So, briefly, a generally left-leaning, big city journalist writes several thoughtful, empathetic takes on trans children and gender dysmorphia that don't play into the established lefty narrative, and, of course, it gets treated as heretical. The problem is and was not that Singal is a bigot, or that he's just plain wrong. The greatest problem many have with Singal is that he is not following a prescribed narrative.
These issues are now a matter of public concern whether we like it or not. When politicians in my state are banning gender affirming medical procedures for trans children, we need more light not less, because (and this shouldn't be hard to believe) the real problem actually is the (half true) established narratives. Good journalism is good because it can help us understand more than two sides of an issue.
And when someone like Singal, who is obviously operating in good faith, is treated like a pariah when they dare to say something difficult and unpopular among their in-group, it makes me dislike the partisans for this issue more and trust them less.
> Singal defends conversion therapy and uses poor science to defend his claims. I'm not sympathetic.
This really does drastically overstate even the linked article's, not particularly thoughtful, case.
Saying Singal "obviously" operates in good faith is an exaggeration. Michael Hobbes on Twitter has a few threads regarding Singal where he shows how Singal likes to move the goalposts and accuse people of being "irresponsible" for making straightforwardly true claims (even ones that are supported by his own evidence). [ https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3ARottenInDenmark%20jesse&... ]
I'm pretty sure it's Hobbes who is acting in bad faith. Most of his links are to things that don't support his claims. For example, he'll claim that puberty blockers are completely reversible, but link to an NHS site that says some long term effects are unknown[1], and though GIDS claims the physical effects are reversible, GIDS was shut down due safety issues.[2]
Hobbes also accused Jesse of recruiting detransitioners from a transphobic website[3][4], but the site in question only allows females to join, so Jesse couldn't have used that site to find the people he interviewed for his article.
Lastly, Hobbes blocks his opponents, then screenshots their tweets and argues against them. This makes it much harder for his targets to respond to him and correct the record. It really seems like he doesn't care about what's true, just what he can get others to believe.
Singal claimed that the NHS removed a claim from their website that puberty blockers were reversible. Hobbes showed a screenshot from the NHS website showing that the claim was still there. Singal (and you) changed the topic from whether the NHS made a claim, to whether there were unknown long-term effects of puberty blockers. Hobbes is obviously correct here.
GIDS is being replaced with multiple centers providing similar services primarily due to issues with capacity, extreme wait times, and overcentralization, based on advice from the Cass Interim Report, which also noted issues with inconsistent care. Other organizations, including the Endocrine Society [0] and the APA [1], also describe puberty blockers as reversible.
Your second paragraph doesn't seem to be true. "The site in question" is 4thWaveNow, which is a blog; you don't 'join' it like a forum. I think you've got it confused with the dating website.
The unsafeness of the Tavistock clinic had nothing to do with puberty blockers - Tavi didn't prescribe[1] any puberty blockers to any child. And while the clinic provided by Tavistock is closing there will be many other clinics opening. Provision of gender affirming care to children is being expanded.
[1] This is the big problem with threads like these. You can just lie and no-one knows any different because there's so much disinformation being spread. You shouldn't spread disinformation, and you should feel bad about doing so.
The fact that you don't understand the basics (that Tavistock didn't do any prescribing) but you feel confident enough to comment is peak fucking HN. Bunch of dunning kruger cunts.
No, they did not. They only did psychological assessment, and then referred on to endocrinology who would then do their own assessment and decide whether or not to prescribe PBs.
Here's the NHS England stand commissioning contract. On page 17 there's a flow chart, and you can see that after the assessment phase there's a box that says "Refer to Endocrinology Clinic + ongoing GIDS input", and that box exists because GIDS have never prescribed PBs, they referred children on to an endocrinology service who did their own assessment and made their own decision about whether or not to prescribe. Page 18 has a further flow chart that explains the endo referral process. Page 19 describes the referral and separate assessment process used by the endo service. Page 25 gives further details about referral to the endo liaison team.
From the link you provide: "A standardised set of psychological questionnaires used in the GIDS clinic was completed at the time young people were deemed potentially eligible and referred to the medical clinic." and "Young people were considered for recruitment after lengthy assessment, spending an average of 2 years and up to 6 years within the GIDS psychological service before being referred to the endocrine clinic for assessment to enter the study." - I mean, come on.
One of the lead authors of the link you've provided: "Gary Butler". He's Professor Gary Butler, who works for the Department of Paediatric and Adolescent Endocrinology, at University College London Hospital NHS Trust. This is the service that provides endocrinology assessment and, if necessary, prescribing.
He doesn't work for Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
> Support for children and adolescents up to the age of 18 years has been provided through the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London for over 20 years. The GIDS was nationally commissioned by NHS England in 2009 and extended to Leeds in 2012, providing regular outreach clinics in other areas of the UK. Endocrine evaluation and support has been provided through University College Hospital London for over two decades, and Leeds Children’s Hospital since 2013. Care is provided according to an agreed service schedule,3 taking into account international guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)4 and the recent guidelines from the Endocrine Society.5
Puberty blockers would be "endocrine evaluation and support".
We can go pretty deep in the weeds in a thread that is AFAIK flagged and dead.
> Saying Singal "obviously" operates in good faith is an exaggeration.
From what I've heard and read of Jesse's, he seems to take great pains to be honest and fair. He seems to me to obviously be operating in good faith. Or as I would expect a curious, thoughtful journalist to act. But, yes, you and others may come to other conclusions.
And, unfortunately, my experiences re: Hobbes's journalism have not been as glowing. They've frankly been disappointing. Hobbes seems to lack the very compassion and empathy Singal seems to obviously have. Hobbes tends to paint what seem to me to be good-faith disagreements as grand moral violations.
But I may need to see more and maybe I'm mistaken?
> Singal likes to move the goalposts and accuse people of being "irresponsible" for making straightforwardly true claims
I think you need to be more specific re: this claim. Unsurprisingly, a link to all the subtweets someone has made about Jesse Singal isn't very helpful.
The word "seems" is kinda the crux of the issue here. Singal has the tone of a curious, thoughtful jouralist who enters into research with no pre-established biases, and Hobbes has the tone of a guy who gets into Twitter arguments. The problem is that tone is not important, what's true is important. You can't determinte the truth just through the tone of the person communicating with you. A tone of thoughtful neutrality doesn't make something true, and a tone of belligerence doesn't indicate a lie.
Obviously people need to make up their own mind, but I do hope that they'd read what Singal actually writes and not base their opinion on a mean-spirited, vengeful hit-piece like this.
Has he ever said anything like "trans rights" though? Why is a (seemingly) single, childless, straight and cis man involving himself so much in trans teenagers? He's got an Agenda and it isn't sitting right.
Wright's key points regarding 'sex realism', as I understand them, are that sex is not a spectrum (as many people are claiming these days) but a male-female binary, and that sex is still an important characteristic in many circumstances, such that it cannot realistically be supplanted by 'gender identity' or similar.
Seems like a reasonable viewpoint to me, and not one that would generally be considered offensive for others to mention.
An “intersex” person (now usually described by doctors or biologists as a person with a disorder of sexual development, or DSD for short) is either male or female, just like any other human being. So to use the rather silly terminology under dispute, “binary”. The “disorder” is a non-typical development of sexual characteristics of the person’s sex: a disorder of male development in a male, or of female development in a female. We can’t even mention the disorder without implicitly affirming the sex categorization that it affects. The “binary” is part of the definition of homo sapiens.
Every “intersex” person is either male or female. Many in that community object to others describing them as some kind of other sex and, especially, using their medical condition as an ignorant cudgel to advance the “trans” rights agenda.
This sounds like you're conflating biological sex (i.e., having both breasts and a penis) with gender (i.e., person IDs as female). I understand why; they use almost the same terms. However, it is important to note that, if you are describing a person who was assigned female at birth, and continues to identify as female, that's entirely describing their gender, not the state of their biological sex characteristics.
In other words, if a person experiences DSD, but self-identifies as male or female, what you are describing is not proof that sex is a binary, but rather proof that a person with DSD can experience gender dysphoria.
I don’t see where I’ve conflated anything, nor do I understand your attempt to show where I have. “Biological sex” is redundant; sex is a biological classification. There isn’t any other kind.
You argue that people who are intersex regularly identify as male or female, and do not like being pointed to as trans representation...but that's not describing their biological sex characteristics, that's describing their gender identity. You're describing someone who identifies as cis-male or cis-female, despite their biological sex characteristics.
It may SEEM like a reasonable viewpoint to you, but it's not grounded in reality.
Saying sex is a binary is excluding anyone that doesn't fit within that binary. And if that's something you can't imagine, then it's not a subject you should have or voice an opinion on.
You might disagree with this point of view, but that doesn't make it unreasonable.
As Wright notes in https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum, this view of sex as a binary system is based on the concept of male and female being the two discrete halves of the reproductive system in humans (and other anisogamous species):
"Biological sex [...] is connected to the distinct type of gametes (sex cells) that an organism produces. As a broad concept, males are the sex that produce small gametes (sperm) and females produce large gametes (ova). There are no intermediate gametes, which is why there is no spectrum of sex. Biological sex in humans is a binary system."
Surely this is not an unreasonable starting point for an evolutionary biologist to extrapolate from?
It’s grounded in the reality 99.98% experience - that individuals are biologically differentiated into the male (inseminating) or female (gestating and nursing) reproductive role.
Stress reproductive role there - as unique individuals they have limitless other personal and social roles they can fulfil, and to be honest I don’t see these as naturally gendered, nor feel it would be desirable for it to be so.
Well, you could downvote - but, given as the first paragraph seems to be biological fact, perhaps you could instead mount a reasoned defence of gendered personal and social roles, and why they should have primacy over sex as defining components of the identities of “man” and “woman”.
As someone born in the 60s, a time when gendered roles began to be considered limiting and harmful, I would genuinely love to see a defence - at least one beyond “It makes people with gender dysphoria happy” (which is a good thing, but not obviously the right thing given the opportunity for discrimination between genders and expected conformity to normative gender stereotypes).
The trick here is that we're looking at dogwhistles.
To someone outside the theater of culture-war this takes place in, this looks like a series of perfectly ordinary statements. Of course sex is binary, and that statement doesn't sound like it conflicts with gender being a spectrum, because sex and gender are obviously separate.
However, to someone who has lived within this theater of culture-war--who have been dealing with this rhetoric as rhetoric, which is what it is--this is a red flag. "Sex is binary" is the opening salvo in a common rhetorical strategy, which goes "Sex is binary, you're either male or female" -> "I'm just stating a fact, no need to be defensive" -> "See, this is why I don't trust trans people" -> "This is why you shouldn't trust trans people, they contradict basic facts like sex being binary". Notice the magic trick here--by picking phrasing that's plausibly deniable, and then framing any reaction to it as "disagreeing with Science", this guy can make it look like he's disagreeing with trans people, and make it look like trans people are somehow in the wrong for this, without ever actually having to stop and explain why.
That's not even getting into the fact that, frankly, "sex is binary" isn't actually correct. There are plenty of examples of species that don't actually fit into a binary sex model correctly--species which can reproduce both sexually and asexually, species which can change sex in order to find mates more reliably, and even cases where more than two sexes can be observed (such as in bees, for whom "worker", "drone", and "queen" all have different sexual characteristics). This goes against what most of us were taught when we were young, but that's part of the rational approach to the world: sometimes the model that we were given when we were in elementary school is wrong, and a newer model is a more accurate description of what's going on.
And that's part of the goal, here. "Sex realism", here, has nothing to do with reality, just as "religious fundamentalism" rarely has anything to do with the fundamentals of whatever religion is involved. Rather, "sex realism" is a rhetorical strategy which uses the aesthetics of skepticism to make one's argument seem sensible, polite, and rational. It relies on the audience never actually questioning whether the "sex realist" is describing reality, or reading beyond the face value of what they are saying.
The especially insidious part of this tactic is the way it weaponizes the reactions of people who understand what the dogwhistle means. People like me, who have spent hours upon hours discussing these things, immediately recognize the tactic at play--and more often than not, react loudly and angrily. After all, I've seen this conversation play out over and over, and invariably the guy claiming to just be a sex realist turns out to be an asshole, just like how the guys who claim to be "race realists" inevitably start citing things like the 13/50 argument (which is a whole other can of bad-statistics worms). But that's part of the plan--when I or someone like me says "What the fuck, get out" in response to the initial statement, that's when the sex-realist turns to the audience and says, "See how upset this person is over these definitely true things I just said! Clearly, if they're losing their cool this badly, I must be right!" And this works, because it short-circuits past the part where the sex-realist's argument is evaluated. By framing things in this way, the sex-realist can convince members of the audience to trust him before evaluating his argument, which lets him avoid actual scrutiny of what he's claiming.
TLDR: Wright is framing a simplified, not-really-correct statement as absolute truth, and then framing the people he opposes as unreasonable and irrational, to take advantage of the fact that human beings use trust to save processing power and avoid having to actually evaluate arguments.
I'm not sure why people talk about insects and goldfish and things like that, when someone says "sex is binary" and they are talking about humans, they mean "human sex is binary". Anything that may or may not be true about other species does not matter for the argument. I'll say "as a general rule, human sex is binary" if you really want that changed.
That's a bit more accurate, though it still sweeps a few edge cases under the rug.
Choosing phrases and words that more clearly express what you mean is a good thing. Communication is hard enough under normal circumstances, and on topics like this, things get even more complicated because of groups who are trying to conflate seemingly-innocent phrases with their own arguments (both to make their own arguments sound like there's already widespread support, and to make their opponents seem unreasonable, as I described above). You should try to be sure that you're saying what you actually mean, and try to avoid unintentional meaning from phrases that have been coopted by others.
On the other hand: Why, exactly, does it matter whether biological sex is binary or not? The other half of trying to say what you mean is understanding what you actually mean. What are you arguing toward?
If someone thinks biological sex is binary, that shows they're uninformed. Like gender, it is essentially a point cloud in n-dimensional space - largely bimodal, but with a few other notable clusters.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. We are humans. Giving our biology the finger and doing what we want is an option. It is not a remotely new option, but both the accessibility and extent of that option are increasing over time.
Customized regimens of drugs and surgeries are available to achieve combinations of sex characteristics that simply do not occur naturally. Many insurance plans in the US will cover them.
We've just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. I read an account recently of someone doing a YOLO by knocking out their DMRT1 gene with CRISPR. The goal was to alter hormone levels - and it seems to have worked.
I'm living the bleeding edge of some of this, the culture war is real, and it is heating up. All I want is to exist without oppression. This will likely play out similar to how it did for same-sex couples. Visibility and social acceptance has grown. We are now in the period of conservative people trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The effort will probably fail eventually - but much suffering will be caused in the process.
My choice is to stand up for myself - and do what I can to help those who cannot.
> If someone thinks biological sex is binary, that shows they're uninformed. Like gender, it is essentially a point cloud in n-dimensional space - largely bimodal, but with a few other notable clusters.
Not really though - if someone has carefully considered this topic and still regards the sex binary as the most appropriate model to apply, it's more likely to indicate they are considering function over form in their reasoning. In particular, reproductive function - i.e. why we all have sexed bodies in the first place.
With this model, sex isn't just an assortment of bodily features, but is based on the reproductive function around which several related aspects of our bodies have evolved, with male and female being the two types of anatomical pattern appropriate to each reproductive role.
However, I do understand that to those who want to believe that sex can be changed through pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, this view of sex as a functional biological system isn't as compelling as the 'point cloud' model, which comes with the implication that if these points can be changed somehow, then sex is too.
...This still ignores examples where sexual characteristics don't actually fit a binary, though. These are edge cases, yes, but they are edge cases that occur in nature. This is why cases like the bee example are important--bees have sexual trimorphism. Drones, workers, and queens all have different sexual characteristics that affect how they reproduce. Based on the reproductive function of bee anatomy, sex is not a binary for bees.
Also, I'd like to point out--for the record--that the ability to change one's sexual characteristics, and the presence or absence of sexual characteristics, has almost nothing to do with one's gender (beyond avoiding body dysphoria). This is an important distinction to make, because while we don't have full ability to change a person's sex (i.e., we don't have artificial wombs yet), a person's gender can be independent of their sexual characteristics (as evidenced not only by trans people, but also by intersex people who identify as cisgender).
Mind linking a source for the CRISPR thing? I was just thinking the other day that having a CRISPR-based "one and done" pill for hormone therapy would be awesome.
I know it's a controversial topic. I'd rather it wasn't, and that, given the wide-ranging impact on policy and law, people could discuss this freely without e.g. getting banned from online payment services and social media sites, being doxxed by activists, and so on.
If you know it's controversial, we now know "not one that would generally be considered offensive for others to mention" was, at best, being disingenuous. Is there anything else?
I meant generally as in, most people, who don't take an active interest in this topic.
I know it's controversial to those who do. But I think that in itself is worth challenging.
I mean, in the comment at the top of this thread, we have someone who became extremely offended at even the mere mention of someone with an opposing viewpoint to their own. In an article that isn't even about that topic. Does that seem a reasonable reaction?
1. https://ymeskhout.substack.com/
2. https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/eleven-magic-words-unlocked
3. https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/death-of-a-client