Harrison Danneskjold

Firstly, it's not impossible to defeat a nuclear power. It is risky, and shouldn't be attempted just for the LOLS (we shouldn't be declaring war on, say, Britain or France simply because they have nukes) but we absolutely could do it, if we decided it was worth the risk. Here's a good rule of thumb: you must never dismiss the possibility of conflict with someone who does not share your values and interests, nor assume that they will automatically win such a conflict. The moment you concede that you've already surrendered your own values. And to be perfectly frank I have had just about enough of the defeatist, hand-wringing sort of obsequiousness towards Russia that the right seems to have recently discovered. You're an American, for God's sake! It's our flag that's on the moon (which rightfully should be American territory) and we're the ones who decided the outcome of two world wars (one of which involved the invention of the very weapons you consider undefeatable)! Everyone, in every single country on Earth, watches the movies and listens to the music that we create. Which country has by far the greatest number of Nobel laureates, the most scientific discoveries and by far the most inventions? We are the hub of the production and trade of the entire globe, and our military remains supreme. We're the cultural, scientific, economic, technological and military apex of all of Western civilization and if we decide we dislike the underwear that Putin wears then we'll damn well inform him of where he's allowed to purchase replacements and how large of an American flag we'll require on them! This extremely French sort of attitude used to be unique to the left. Probably not. They could opt for that (it's always possible) but I would not bet any actual money on it. The Ayatollahs are bad news, though. It would be difficult for the Iranians to pick a worse form of government - and if they did then we could quickly and cheaply change the regime again, without setting a single boot on the ground. I don't use the word "glass" as a synonym for "nuke". I just mean to devastate an area with an aerial bombardment, which our military is very good at and could probably do without a single American casualty. Iranian casualties are for the Iranians to worry about when they're choosing their next form of government. No, the modern form of Islam is not "what they've been doing for 1000+ years"; the modern (past century or so) interpretation of the Koran and the Hadiths is far more rigid, virulent and fundamentalist than anyone has tried to practice for a very long time. Just as the modern form of Christianity is very different from the early form that conquered Rome, the modern form of Islam is different from (and much worse than) any earlier strain of it. The current form of Islam evolved as a response to prior military humiliations by Western countries; they embraced the strictest and harshest possible interpretations of their scriptures out of the belief that Allah would bring them victory if they did so. The Islamists (the political Muslims who are causing problems) are more than happy to explain that their fanaticism will lead them to military victory. Yaron Brook has an excellent lecture course on YouTube about this, if you're interested. It's about six hours long but it explains exactly what I'm talking about in much more detail. To remedy this belief it's not necessary to wipe out all or even most Muslims. We only need to demonstrate that Allah will not save them from America. I don't know how many Muslim regimes we'll have to stomp on before they learn that lesson but we should continue the demonstration until they do so. Half-measures do not work in the Middle East.

Thought about it a bit more and I'm actually not sure they were misapplied to January 6th. Not after some more serious consideration. So yeah. Jail all of the troublemakers, jail anyone who was part of any protest that included the troublemakers, convict any political leaders who agitated for it and bar any of them from ever holding public office in the future.

Also great stuff to work to. Most of the music I like is.

Seriously? That's flattering in a weird way. Objectivism Online is worth spamming? What are the spammers trying to do? If they're here with financing options on new cars, some of us might be interested.

I suppose there are some sticky questions around legally encoding that; yes. On an individual basis, I'd advise people to be as up-front about it as they possibly can be; it's just not a good strategy to do otherwise. However, considering my track record with women, I'm really not sure what my relationship advice is worth. I can tell you all about the Roman Empire. Women, though? Women are fucking weird.

I didn't really jump into this at the time. I think there's something to what @stansfield123 was saying here; it's just not framed in a very precise way. First of all, the notion that "there's no such thing as absolute free speech" is precisely analogous to the question of sexual dimorphism. If there are legitimate exceptions to the principle of free speech (such as incitement to violence) then does that invalidate the general principle? I don't think so. In the same way and for the same reasons that the existence of hermaphrodites does not disprove the fact of sexual dimorphism, the very small number of valid exceptions to freedom of speech does not negate the general principle. Secondly, although the first amendment is one of the most important things we can defend (and a large part of what I have against the trans movement), just because some leftist claims that something is part of their "freedom of speech" or "freedom of assembly" doesn't make it so. And we're in for real trouble if people don't start figuring that out and punishing the bad actors involved. Drawing swastikas on other peoples' property, looting and arson, for example, are obviously not covered by the principle of free speech. It's not even that they're exceptions; they simply have nothing to do with it. Blocking roadways and restricting everyone else's freedom of movement is not a peaceful protest. It would be a violation of rights even if our roads weren't public property which every single citizen is supposed to be able to use. Even some of the stuff I routinely see posted on Twitter ("Don't miss Trump next time" or "the time for peaceful protests is over; we need to make our protests hurt") should not count as free speech; trying to round up an angry mob to go and inflict violence is not a legitimate case of free speech, and ought to be prosecuted. Weirdly enough, the left got some of the reasoning around this correct in how they dealt with January sixth. I don't agree that was an actual rebellion (when you're starting a rebellion you damn well bring guns) but it wasn't good, and some of the rhetoric surrounding it -ideas about trying to foment a rebellion (or start a riot) and how that ought to be dealt with- were actually right on the money. They were just being misapplied. This is what those ideas should be applied to. Not because totalitarian wokists have no right of free speech, but because much of what they're doing on a daily basis has nothing to do with free speech. So anyway. I imagine you and I would probably agree on most of the details of what that would mean, but the general framing of the issue is also important. Lol. How? Gave their lions indigestion? Shut down the schools and centers of philosophy, shut down all pagan temples and killed off all the values that had made Romans behave in a Roman way. Also, prior to taking over and legally proscribing all other religions the early Christians were the ones who wanted to be eaten. They wanted martyrdom. There are numerous accounts of Pagan governors and bureaucrats saying things to the effect of "if you want to die then go do it on your own time; I can't be bothered to deal with your madness". It's actually quite remarkable. The same long, slow march through the institutions that some Communists have been attempting to do today is precisely what the early Christians did in Rome. And when Julian the Apostate (the last Pagan emperor) attempted to reopen the Greek schools and Pagan temples, in the hopes of Making Rome Great Again, the Christians rioted across the empire and burned down Alexandria. The Roman Pagans did not take Christianity seriously until it was too late. We are better than Rome in many ways today, but still based on the same underlying ideas and still subject to the same kinds of dangers. Modern Christianity bears little resemblance to the early form of Christianity that killed Rome (thankfully); far from being commonplace, to find a modern Christian castrating themselves without any form of anesthetic or actively seeking their own death would be pretty unusual. But modern Islam is quite similar, as are some of our domestic philosophies. We ignore them at our own peril. I can't find the original video this comes from, but 6:00 into this one Woke Moses seeks to be eaten by a bus. And I don't know about you, but part of me would be extremely entertained by sticking Woke Moses in the Colosseum with a wild bus and charging admission to watch her wish be granted.

I genuinely don't know, though. I'm hopeful (the Israelis do seem to get very good results once they commit themselves to a course of action) but hope is not an argument, and as far as any definite outcomes of this war I'm not trying to take intellectual responsibility for anything. If I find myself committed to a position on that I'll take it as a sign that I'm no longer thinking clearly about the subject at hand, log off and forget about the whole thing for a few weeks, until I'm ready to approach it again with fresh eyes. Actually, I am confident that they'd eventually break if Israel started carpet-bombing Tehran. But I'm assuming that the Israelis aren't willing to do that and I'm curious as to whether it's strictly necessary. Iran should end. I can state my reasons for that belief while hopping on one foot. Will it end right now, because of this? Again, all I feel confident in stating is that I hope so. I don't mean that it's a selfless action, on their part; just that we're not really helping them, despite the fact that we clearly share national interests in seeing Iran go up in flames. Exactly that. I don't have a plan. My plan would be to carpet-bomb Tehran, blow up the holiest Mosque in the country, bring their entire economy to a full halt, salt the Earth so that crops could never grow there again and see if they were ready to surrender of if they wanted more. It doesn't look like anyone's going to enact anything similar to my plan, but maybe they don't need to. Do they? Maybe they do, since members of Iran's command structure are being replaced as rapidly as Israel can assassinate them. Maybe nothing short of decimation (in the old sense of the word; a loss of ten percent) will be enough to achieve our goals. Or maybe the will to fight in Iran is such that a tricimation or bicimation is required. This is actually one of the primary reasons why I lump Russia into the same group of countries as Iran. It's not because of their domestic policies or laws (which I know very little about); it's simply because they're an unfriendly nuclear power. If they can give nukes to Iran then they can give nukes to any other petty tyrant or terrorist cell with anti-American sentiments, and that's not acceptable. The fact that you're concerned about what they might do with their nukes (and you're not wrong to be, either; it is a perfectly legitimate concern) is precisely why we can't keep pussyfooting around Putin forever. The "we can't act against him because he's too powerful" argument only works if you're refusing to consider its long-range implications. He's not going to become weaker by remaining in power for longer; he only stands to gain from procrastination and we only stand to lose. Sooner or later that particular cancer has got to be dealt with. I don't want to go on too long about Putin. He's distressing and sad to think about, and I'd prefer to dwell upon the positive vibes of Iran having finally been dealt with. But sooner or later he's got to go, too. Oh, Hell no. I'd like to think that's one lesson we all should have learned by now. One of the other benefits of glassing a place is that you don't have to give one single bullet to your future enemies. Exactly. And when you give a blackmailer what he wants, he doesn't go away; he discovers that there are more things that he wants from you. Things he didn't even know that he wanted until he realized how cheaply and easily he could make you give them up. There is a very good reason why one must never negotiate with terrorists.

Touche. Fairly confident. Not 100% but fairly high. At some point last year I was arguing with some trans activist on Twitter. He provided a list of trans people who'd been recently murdered (I think it was on Wikipedia) which I started digging into much more thoroughly than he expected, and found that the majority were of this nature. It wasn't just strangers who shouted "ho, there! A trannie!" and commenced with the murdering; it was lovers who'd discovered their deceit too late. Almost all of them were inner-city men with extensive criminal histories who murdered their inner-city trans lovers, too, which suggests something about which American subcultures consider summary execution to be an appropriate response to such deception. So although Wikipedia itself doesn't count as a proper empirical source, in a pinch I could track that list back down, chase down the proper sources and come up with some better data on it - and I'm fairly confident the proper sources would bear out what I was finding in the individually-linked Wikipedia articles. No. There probably should be some sort of legal consequence for deceiving someone into bed with you. That's not okay. That this consequence should be summary execution, though (and without even a trial) - no; that's not tenable, and I don't agree that it should count as a legitimate legal defense. Even when people are behaving immorally and genuinely mistreating you, you can't just kill them. It does speak to the legitimacy of the premise of the argument about "safety", though. It's not analogous to a Jew in a neonazi biker bar fearing for their life - so long as the trans person in question hasn't seduced an entire crowd of gullible ex-lovers. Although I suppose that partly depends on the promiscuity of the trans person in question. And in a situation where a secret trans person is in the company of their lover, and therefore has legitimate cause for concern about being "outed", that situation can only exist in part because of their own ongoing malfeasance. The better analogy would be of a woman who'd been told she could have unprotected sex with her boyfriend, since he'd already had a vasectomy, only to later discover herself several months into an unwanted pregnancy due to her boyfriend's dishonesty. Such a boyfriend doesn't deserve to have his head blown off right then and there, certainly, and yet any danger he finds himself in would be because of his own transgressions. And he would have no right to demand that some third party help to perpetuate his lie even further. That's fair.

This makes no sense to me. If he doesn't get credit when I see him doing right then how can he be given blame when I see him doing wrong? I was right there with you, badmouthing his treatment of Iran a week ago - and from everything we knew a week ago, his treatment of Iran was objectively shit. We know better now, though, don't we? I don't know. Maybe you'd like to rephrase or elaborate slightly because as it currently stands this statement simply baffles me. Also not sure what you mean. IDK. He's made posts on his dumb social network to the effect of: "I gave Iran 60 days to negotiate. This is day 61. Some of the people I was negotiating with are dead now. The survivors should sign a deal with me while there are any survivors left." Now, this is all talk (if you were to argue that it remains "talk over action" I'd have a difficult time disproving specifically that) and Israel is doing all of the heavy lifting for us, here. Still, it seems to be the right kind of talk, and within the context of Iranian armaments and military leaders being converted into so much red confetti. I dunno. I'm just happy to see the Iranian threat being vaporized. I suppose so. What I mean is an end to the Islamic Republic. Would Israel have to invade en masse, though? What happens if they simply wipe out the entire command structure? Do you think the Iranians would eventually fill all of those positions with new Islamists? This is not a real argument (I really don't know the answers to those last questions) but since the number of Islamists in Iran is finite, theoretically assassinating enough of them in a row should have some sort of effect. Right?

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Let me ask you this. If you were a waiter at a restaurant and you had a customer request that you say "the universe was created by Jehovah six thousand years ago" would you do it? They are a stranger who has no authority over you, so there'd really be no point in arguing, right? What if this same customer went on to ask you to state that the Jews are responsible for every problem in the Western world and that we won't have peace in the West until we deal with the Jewish question? You could not stop them from making these requests, certainly, and neither you nor I would advocate for any laws to prevent them from making such requests. But would you say it?

Yes. When you hear leftists complaining about the "trans panic" legal defense, they are specifically referring to people who were tricked into having sex with a trans individual and responded to the discovery of their being trans with violence. I'm not sure how anyone is being tricked by this (do people not know that vaginas are supposed to lubricate themselves or that penises do not require a hand-pump to operate?) but apparently they are. And of all the violence committed against trans people that we know for a fact was perpetrated specifically because they are trans, the vast majority of it is precisely this. You're right on the money. The issue of not giving into unreasonable demands is more important in a customer service job; not less. The fact that most people have that backwards is why so many people wrongly think of these as Hellish and soul-crushing positions. It is not true that the customer is always right. Anyone who's worked a customer service position before can attest to the number of customers who will declare that they should receive a discount your boss discontinued a month ago because their friend told them she just got it yesterday, or that they should be given free merchandise because some other customer was rude to them, or that you should personally give them free merchandise simply because the price you're supposed to charge is immorally high. Any employee who simply bent over and said "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'am" (depending on the customer's preference) to anything that any customer said would be sacked on their first day - and rightly so. This issue is not unique to customer service, of course. It's something that all of us have to consider whenever we deal with random strangers.

I'm splitting this thread off from the Origins of the Kashmir Conflict, where I'd been bitching about Trump's apparent inability or unwillingness to deal with Iran. In the last couple of days Israel has been stomping on Iran pretty thoroughly, and as of right now I haven't heard any indication that they intend to stop soon. I'm quite pleased with this. I said some unkind things in that thread about Trump's foreign policy in his second term which I'm not sure were warranted now. Could this be the beginning of the richly-deserved end of Iran?

Probably not. Proper nouns have no semantic content beyond the specific object they are referring to; gendered pronouns do. Lilly (or Nicholas, if we were to insist on his birth-name) himself says as much when he explains that "being misgendered hurts so much worse when it's unintentional, because it means that *this* is what a male looks like to you". There's an awful lot of reasoning going on inbetween your evidence and your conclusion, on that point. Don't get me wrong; I agree with a lot of the reasoning involved and it's an intriguing idea. It probably warrants some more thorough research. From nothing more than the attitude some people have towards nonconformists and the overrepresentation of autism among transgender kids, though, I don't think we can currently call it anything more than an interesting possibility. Well, yes, and a few trans people (like Blaire White) have undergone such extensive surgeries already as to fool any average observer. But one must first have the surgeries performed before anyone will be fooled about anything, and many other trans people have no intention of doing any such thing. And yes, sometimes people make mistakes which lead to bad consequences. Worse outcomes are possible every single time you get into a car. Yes; sorry. That one was my bad. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14753567/transgender-influnecer-slammed-disney-world-misgendered.html This is a news article about one of the video clips you saw, which includes more of what happened. Specifically in regards to that I did say "this is the type of person who would say that". I haven't heard of him actually doing so, either, but I believe he is precisely the type who would. Right. And on a legal level I think we're on the same page there. There shouldn't be any laws against making ridiculous requests, no matter how outrageous they are, so long as nobody pulls a gun on anybody. On a moral level, though, that's completely absurd. On a moral level there is no difference between the request "don't call me sir" and "don't say that the sky is blue" or "I'll feel so very unsafe if you mention what two and two make". It's not just that I have the legal right to say "no, and fuck you for asking"; that is the morally appropriate response that absolutely everyone ought to give to such a request. I wouldn't say that's ridiculous. It is ridiculous, only that's not the thing to be pointed out about it. This argument is based on the assumption that we're surrounded by a bunch of homicidal maniacs who will immediately fall upon any trans person they find. That's the obvious part that's usually the main point of contention. My question is, if we are surrounded by such homicidal maniacs (if we simply accept that premise uncritically) why in the Hell am I responsible for their actions? Notice, again, the shifting of responsibility. This time it's from allegedly homicidal maniacs (instead of the trans person, themselves) but once again the unearned responsibility goes directly onto the nearest innocent bystander; onto anyone and everyone who ever interacts with any trans person. Who died and made me the grand lynch-keeper? By what right?

Of course. But there is a slight difference between keeping someone in a concentration camp (with all that implies) by force and calling someone "sir". In general, nothing you could do without at least taking away someone's freedom of movement (i.e. confining them somewhere against their will) can make their suicidality your responsibility; at least nothing I can think of off the top of my head. Certainly not correct gendering. And it's not "misgendering" to call a trans woman a man, or a trans man a woman. That's truthful gendering and should be spoken of as such. That's an excellent analogy.