bubbatheclown

Sign me up please. I don't care what role you ascribe to me. I'd just like to be included in one of these things for once.

Come to think of it, I might've told that one before.

I worked at a seafood restaurant (that gave me warts, I'm pretty sure) for a couple of years, and across the street from it was a gas station where I'd go when things got slow-ish to buy a little snack.

One day I walked to the store and realized that I didn't have my wallet on me. Two female customers had left the shop right before I did, and at some point I guess had been standing close enough they hypothetically could've lifted it off my person, so I went outside and asked them if they'd taken it.

One of them responded to the effect of "What, and should we remove our bras?". Apparently she thought I was some kind of sexual harasser looking to strip search them.

(It turned out I'd left the wallet at home.)

That would be a fun tradition to revive. I've actually had an idea for a DART/Debatecraft fic that's been weighing on my mind for quite a long time. Problem is, it's way easier for me to write one pilot chapter than to stay motivated and keep writing afterward.

In all honesty (partisan circle jerking aside), this could doom us if China decided to take advantage of this crisis. We're tied down in the Middle East and it'll take a little while to replenish our stockpiles of high-end weapons.

If they don't, and assuming the regime actually comes down, then any future WW3 will happen between us and two rival great powers, not three. If the IR is still around for such a war then it'll do the same thing it's doing now, which is closing the Strait of Hormuz (and the Red Sea via its Houthi proxies) and cutting off the flow of Gulf oil to US and allied nations, and forcing us to divert desperately needed troops from other theaters of the war to fight them. It's also worth noting that one of two major arteries of China's Belt and Road Initiative linking China with Western Eurasia flows through Iran.

I think it's fair to say we will know in 3 years' time whether or not this was worth it (for us; Iran's 90+ million inhabitants are a separate question).

So, uh, we're doing this again. In roughly 2 years we should be back on the moon, this time to establish a permanent human presence. But for now, hopefully we'll get some cool pictures.

Discuss.

I think there is a degree of mostly harmless egotism entailed in the average person's decision to have kids. Things like the right to attempt to instill your values in them (albeit with little to no control over their final decision as adults), which includes restricting them from doing things which constitute major violations of said values. If you disallow that, then you take away one motivation to have kids, at a time when the government is struggling to keep birth rates from plummeting even further than they already have.

Everyone waxes poetic about all the ideal qualities a parent should have but at the end of the day it's a hugely expensive (in both time and money) volunteer job, and volunteers aren't exactly forthcoming relative to the level of need. Honestly if a parent can put food on the table and isn't beating, molesting, or neglecting them like the meth-head parents from that one episode of Breaking Bad then they're qualified in my book.

It's probably more helpful to study the actual policies of communist countries.

And sure, at greater length than "they starved people to death and persecuted Christians", surveying a fairly broad range of regimes as opposed to just the worst ones like the Khmer Rouge or the USSR at its absolute worst moments. But my point is, if you have lofty Marxist theories that something like two dozen dedicated Marxist states with zero internal opposition never attempted to put into practice, there's little use describing Marxism as being the sum of said theorizing. Political religions, like theological ones, are the sum of what their followers make of such. You could just as well try to boil down "Protestantism" in its entirety to the tracts and manifestos of Calvin and Zwingli, or the confessions produced by 16th and 17th century state churches, as opposed to the lived religion of a billion worshipers around the world today, who are members of diverse denominations and who by and large have never read such.

All this over one internet argument?

A 2025 survey found that 49% of American adults and 44% of French and German adults reported Holocaust denial as being common in their countries.

https://www.claimscon.org/country-survey/

Given that the average German community is far more likely than its average American counterpart (especially given that the Holocaust happened disproportionately in Eastern Europe, with most of the major camps being liberated by the Soviets rather than the Americans) to have Holocaust survivors or witnesses living among them, or at least people who had the chance to interact with said survivors/witnesses while such were still alive, 5% is an astonishingly narrow gap.

This could be a case of heightened sensitivity to Holocaust denial among Europeans, as people who perceive that something is a problem are likely to perceive it as a pervasive one, but if we take these results at face value then it suggests criminalizing Holocaust denial doesn't actually correlate to less widespread disbelief in the Holocaust.

Came for the religious flame war, stayed for the bear memes.

"Bad parent" is used so subjectively as, in popular usage, to include merely mediocre parents, or even good parents who their adult children just happened to disagree in hindsight with the parenting methods of. Anywhere that sets the bar for parenthood (re: excludes those from the option unable to meet it) that high ends up like the West, which is hemorrhaging people and has to import foreigners to stay afloat. We cannot afford to be more than a little picky when it comes to this subject.

One, Iran is huge. Iran has a population of 90 million people, which is a lot more than Israel and Ukraine. this means Iran has basically huge recruitment potential, huge conscription possible.

In a long war, sure. It takes months to produce a quality soldier; while Iran technically does have peacetime conscription, anecdotes I've come across online suggest said recruits aren't given serious military training. It's mainly there to make military-aged men a captive audience to regime propaganda for a while.

But why, you might ask? Well, in large part for the same reason they'll be reluctant to call upon the draft now: they don't want a potentially hostile fifth column having access to quality training and weapons. People who've chosen to make a career out of the army/IRGC thus far have been almost entirely regime loyalists or people with no moral scruples who just want to earn a paycheck, but a true, blind draft would fundamentally alter the balance of power inside the country.

Again, however, even if this were not the case, the regime would have to survive the next few months to mobilize said multi-million man strong army.

two, Iran has ability to fight back, with many drones and countless missiles in storage.

Their missile capabilities will fall off within another day or two assuming this isn't already the case, because the US has been targeting their launchers (missiles are useless without some means of firing them), barring a minority of launchers that they're hiding underground.

Drones are a more serious problem, sure. The "shooting down a $200 drone with a $2 million rocket" problem hasn't been solved yet. But I don't believe this one asset is enough to upend the power imbalance between the US and Iran; for one thing, their purportedly huge drone stockpiles haven't translated to an overwhelmingly high volume of drone attacks happening all at once. All a large stockpile in their case means that they can keep the current pace up until their ultimate defeat.

three, Iran will fight back, because at this point it became obvious its "do or die" situation.

As I've discussed at length, this might be true for the army but not the citizenry at large, who overwhelmingly either hate or are ambivalent toward the regime. Having bombs dropped on their cities for a couple of weeks is a scary prospect, but living the rest of their lives under the boot of thugs who barge into hospitals to summarily execute wounded men and women is even scarier. Maybe a small minority of bootlickers actively prefer this but they're not "Iran" at large.

Four, Israel will be primary target. the most obvious target Iran could attack is Israel, and by far much easier target than US bases because US bases can be missed easily, Israel is difficult to miss.

As an American, that's no skin off my back.

Iran's armed forces are among the largest in the Middle East, with

approximately 610,000 active-duty personnel and 350,000 reserves, totaling nearly 1 million personnel.

Same was true of Iraq in 1991 (they actually had a bigger and more modern army than China's) and that didn't stop them from getting steamrolled. Granted, there's no guarantee this'll prove the case again, but what I've seen so far suggests the IRGC is indeed a paper tiger. They're on the verge of losing control of the skies, a sizable chunk of their navy is at the bottom of the ocean, their supposed cyber threat hasn't amounted to anything yet, etc.

The only strong cards they have to play are blowing up stuff with drones (which has had the consequence of making their previously neutral Arab neighbors join the fight against them) and closing the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. And the latter only really matters in the event of a long war.

Let me give you some real life advice.

I can see that, at this point in your life, you're trapped in a weird headspace. I was there too once, albeit perhaps not this bad, when caught in the Quora algorithmic doom spiral. I was getting a daily dose of the most toxic content under the sun from both misogynist men and misandrist women and it screwed with my head for a while. Whatever the heck it is you're consuming, it's not indicative of real life.

Both the average man and the average woman is selfish and wants the best deal for his/her self. That's just life. People are selfish and it's not a worse sin for a woman to commit than for a man to do the same. I'm guessing you watch porn and that, of all the material available to you, you gravitate towards that involving women in the top 20% in terms of looks. How is that any different from the responses gave by women in the infamous OK Cupid survey?

BTW the reason that survey turned out the way it did is that dating apps, which the survey targeted, have disproportionately male userbases so the few women using those apps have the luxury of being unnaturally picky. Furthermore a profile pic does a poor job conveying anything about a person (re: it might not include a bio, or such might be curated to portray the subject in a dishonestly glowing light) besides their looks, which for women is just one of multiple criteria in deciding a partner. If that's the one thing they have to go on, then if they can afford to be picky, then the result is that they'll be picky about men's looks on dating apps.

We also have to ask why, if dating apps are so great for women, relatively few of them use such. The simple answer is that it isn't. At the risk of generalizing, women who do use such apps can be divided into two groups: [1]. the lonely who aren't being approached by the men in their lives and/or everyday environments and hope they'll find true love online; and [2]. the sexually divergent. Women have libidos too, of course, but for the majority it's more contextually triggered, something that a woman wants to do with a man who she feels a certain connection with. A minority are fine with getting railed by a different stranger every night as long as he has a good jawline or whatever but most would be genuinely unhappy under such an arrangement, and this is before factoring in the social stigmas that are enforced among women themselves even in the present day.

Most women skew progressive but are not like the neurotic feminists who make for viral TikTok clips. Political compatibility is one factor they consider in a mate but as long as the differences aren't too extreme or in their face every day it's something they're willing to overlook (just as right-wing men in relationships overlook these differences too) if they like a man's other facets. The main reason for the loneliness epidemic is that social skills are declining, including those for how to interact properly with the opposite sex. If people had that, even political differences wouldn't usually get in the way of love.

Even with this having been said, conservative or politically moderate women exist and aren't some rare unicorn either (your own source identified more than a third of unmarried women as Republicans, in the age of frigging Trump). My brother is in his mid 20s and recently married a girl slightly younger than him. How? She was part of the same church network as him. Perhaps you need to hold yourself to a higher standard to actually belong in church circles but hey, said women do the same too. They both are chaste until marriage and promise their husbands that they'll perform most of the traditional duties of a wife after marriage, so it doesn't strike me as particularly unfair that they should be allowed to expect a modicum of suitability from their partners.

Hey, I'm not for or against. I really don't care one way or another. This is just taking way too long.

On February 14, Rima Hassan (a left-wing French politician) was speaking at a college in Lyons, France. A small group of feminist activists, known as Nemesis Collective, protested outside of the event on grounds that Hassan was a vocal supporter of Islam.

There were reportedly as few as five people in this group, possibly all women. So they were backed up by a somewhat larger group of right-wing volunteers who were there to shield them from attack by antifa. Unfortunately, this group wasn't very large or well-disciplined and when an even larger antifa mob showed up they bolted and were chased.

This culminated in the fatal beating of 23 year old Quentin Deranque, part of the aforementioned group of right-wing volunteers.

The event has made national headlines in France, and has elicited a response from the highest levels of government, with most of the political establishment setting aside their differences to condemn the violence. On the ground, however, the leftist response has gravitated between indifference (with even the French language Wikipedia article being considered for deletion, despite currently having 46 citations) to open celebration of the murder of a "Nazi".

Discuss.

I thought we literally held this up to a vote already.

Wait, is this thing still going on?

A selfie.

Fascism: Any vaguely authoritarian strand of rightism, despite fascism being a distinct 20th century phenomenon not comparable to repressive, conservative monarchies of old, ungrounded in concrete legal principles and enabled by unprecedented levels of state capacity that marked Europe at the time as well as total consolidation of public and private institutions under the leadership of the fascist party.

Nazi: Anyone with a sufficiently mean strand of politics, including Jewish Israelis (yes, I had this exact argument before).

Oh, and apparently the American Medical Association has just followed suit, declaring that sex reassignment surgery ought to be deferred until adulthood.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued new guidelines recommending that sex reassignment surgeries not be performed on children under the age of 19.

Previously, while there have been lone experts in the US and large institutions in non-US Western countries that have dissented from the current US oligarch consensus on the issue (that it's bigoted "misinformation" to so much as question the wisdom of sterilizing and castrating children), this marks the first full-scale rebellion by a medical professional association of that size (it employs more than 11,000 physicians globally) within the US itself. And it comes on the heels of a recent jury trial in New York of all places, where a teen girl who surgically transitioned into a trans man and subsequently regretted the decision and detransitioned was awarded $2 million in damages ($1.6 million for "past and future pain and suffering" and $400,000 to cover medical expenses, including therapy). This is the first time in American history that a lawsuit on said topic resulted in said outcome, and it'll most likely inspire a flurry of further lawsuits like it.

There's a half-interest discussion to be had here. We can break consent down into categories:

Informed Consent: That to which you consent after having the pertinent information thereabout

Uninformed Consent: That to which you consent without having the pertinent information thereabout

Informed Nonconsent: That to which you do not consent after having the pertinent information thereabout

Uninformed Nonconsent: That to which you do not consent, without having the pertinent information thereabout

Note that, as used here, "uninformed" denotes being tricked or making a decision you otherwise wouldn't. Thus, in defining #4, we must consider that lack of information does not necessarily render nonconsent to be uninformed; rather, not knowing can be a perfectly valid reason to avoid agreeing to something, since you're not aware of all of the consequences.

But in any case #2 describes a situation where you would withhold consent if made aware of the consequences, and #4 describes a situation where you would give consent if made aware.

I would argue that all consent regarding the prospect of going to hell (if it exists), or nonconsent regarding the prospect of avoiding it, is uninformed. No one has returned from the grave and described what it felt like (people claiming otherwise are most likely either lying or deluded, or their brains played weird tricks on them during a near-death experience). No one knows how painful 10 minutes in hell is, to say nothing of an infinite amount of time spent in hell. You cannot say you'll be able to handle something that you have no way of understanding before you're dead.

If God has knowledge of counterfactuals, then he is aware that in the counterfactual of you experiencing it you would consent to being saved from it; therefore it doesn't violate consent to take steps to keep you from going there.

But if, for the sake of argument, they did, then so what?

They fought to replace one mass murdering ideology with another. For this reason I would go so far as to say that those members of Europe's anti-Nazi resistance who were communists weren't heroes. Only those who fought to replace Nazism with something that wasn't a different variety of totalitarianism were.

Years ago I came across some source online that did the math. They assessed the scale of the Allied bombing campaign on German industrial centers and quantified the impact this had on the German war machine, and concluded that the Soviets would not have won without said bombing campaign. The Western allies, in short, were a more vital player than the Soviets in deciding the outcome of the war.

But putting that aside, the Soviets helped build the German war machine which they subsequently took credit for defeating. It's questionable whether Hitler would've gambled on Poland or anything after Czechoslovakia if not for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and without those conquests the manpower and economic output that was Hitler's to command would've been much smaller.

To add injury to insult, up until Operation Barbarossa the Soviets were actually paying tribute to Germany in the form of large amounts of raw materials; it's been said that the Germans waited for the last inbound shipment to arrive from Russia before they started their invasion.

This premise is dubious at best. If he'd tried to go for the gun, then that would be a sign he intended to use it, but he didn't despite having the opportunity. If he was going to use a long range weapon, why close the distance?

I would speculate that he had half the motivation he needed to kill someone, but knew he needed an additional push to bring himself to pull the trigger.

I trust you've heard of the idea of someone "looking for a fight". You could very well ask why a person looking for a fight doesn't just start off by throwing the first punch, and the answer is they want the other person to provoke them to violent retaliation. In this case, he either specifically engineered a scenario where an ICE officer would lay hands on him (which would explain why he threw himself between an ICE agent and the woman involved in an altercation with said ICE agent) or somewhat more passively stepped into the middle of a brawl to let the chips fall where they may. Either way, the end result would've been the same: that somebody would afford him the psychologically needed pretext to escalate to murder.

Plenty of signs of aggression he could have shown in that encounter but didn't. And once he was thrown on the ground there was little he could do, so was their plan to kill him the moment he walked up to them? 

He may have wrongly anticipated that after the fight broke out and the preconditions for murder were satisfied, he would have a chance to draw, point, and fire his gun as opposed to being disarmed as swiftly as he was.

A lot of people carry guns at protests for self-defense purposes, and a lot of them have broken minor laws, so I think classifying Pretti's actions as effectively a violent threat (based solely on what we've seen so far) is casting a pretty wide net.

Sure, but in this case it's more helpful to think of ICE as a collective entity - a fictitious person, almost, with every masked face being the same masked face in his mind and in the minds of most Democrats - that he'd gotten into a bloody fight with just a week before and he was now picking a fight with again, this time packing heat he wasn't packing then. There's a less clear cut correlation between, say, the average person's having been arrested by some small town cop 15 years ago for having a gram of weed and their level of hostility toward ICE specifically now. This was a deranged man with a fresh vendetta specifically directed towards the people who wound up killing him.

I'm open to new evidence if it comes out, but if the entirety of the new context is him doing bad things days before the shooting, I still don't think it meets the definition of self-defense. Should have been arrested earlier, but that's not enough to justify lethal force on its own.

What I'm arguing is that he posed a serious threat to officers on scene. His previous behavior, which was apparently unprovoked aside from the mere fact of ICE being present, painted a picture of him as being an unstable person who would violently escalate a situation at the drop of a hat, and the outcome of his last run-in with ICE would certainly give him more reason to bear a murderous grudge than he had before. This is what distinguished him from any other protester who happened to have a gun on their person.

All of this, coupled with the fact that he evidently didn't bring a gun on him the last time (since he was tackled to the ground and probably frisked) but he did this time, would have suggested to any reasonable officer that he intended to try to kill them, either from the onset or upon something happening that he could choose to interpret as further provocation (as being tackled again would've accomplished).

This being the case, the only criticism I can see holding water as to the officers' conduct that day centers around this question: should they reasonably have believed that the level of risk to themselves had been reduced to the extent that would no longer justify use of lethal force?

Like, sure, if an officer walks past a 4 year old wearing a thick overcoat the chance of some nefarious actor having strapped a bomb underneath isn't technically 0%, but we'd agree that a cop randomly shooting a toddler wouldn't be justified just because he happened to run this thought experiment in his head. So officers are obliged to accept some degree of risk to their persons as a hazard of the job before escalating.

But said obligation has its limits. At some point it becomes justified to defend themselves by killing someone else. The question is whether that threshold was met, both in terms of what they knew and what they didn't know in the heat of the moment, when they opened fire on Pretti. Did the officer who opened fire know he'd been disarmed, that he was unable to reach for the confiscated gun, that he wasn't on the verge of overpowering the officers and doing so, that he didn't have a concealed second gun, or that he was unable to reach for said gun even if it existed?

You know what? I've changed my mind about Pretti.

Basically the entire hagiographical narrative constructed about the man by the media thus far has been proven a lie. He'd exhibited violent behavior toward ICE before, they recognized him going into the second encounter, and such a man having a gun on him was the final straw.

Interesting, but what I've found is that anamnesis had multiple possible meanings, including remembrance. The concept that bridges the gap between passive, perfunctory mental recall and the sacerdotal act you're describing is "commemoration", which is likely what Jesus had in mind.

Yes, and the passage reads as follows:

"In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk.

Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter! For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said,

“This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying,

“This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment. Nevertheless, when we are judged in this way by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be finally condemned with the world."

The Lord's Supper does warrant respect, but it's chiefly representative of participation in church life, and its mishandling in the passage tied to mishandling one's relationship with the church. Some are gathering together as part of the church while treating other members with disdain. Or they're gathering as part of the church while not being sincerely penitent of heart or sufficiently reverent toward the body that they're a part of. It is not really the bread and wine itself that's at issue here; this is an example of synecdoche, where one component of a thing (the food that's eaten during the Lord's Supper) is rhetorically taken to mean the whole thing (the church). Whoever participates in church in an unworthy manner sins against the body and blood of Christ which redeemed the church.