I am so tired of supposedly progressive, left wing people parroting right wing conversion therapy arguments.

Give it a chance! No

You might like it! No

You won't even try? No

There are strap-ons! No

There's more to a relationship than sex! No

OTHER people have tried it and liked it! No

It's exhausting, deeply homophobic, and incredibly entitled.

Nobody is required to go along with your delusional beliefs. No matter how sincerely you think you've become a man, you are still just a woman pretending to be a man. (And vice versa).

A gay man is not required to pretend he wants to date you.

I’m sure this is going to be fine

Wasn't there a movie (and TV show) about how this was a bad idea?

It'll never amount to anything. We all know that "the people most likely to kill" in the UK these days are MUSLIMS. And they're untouchable politically. So any "predictive tool" that actually comes close to working will point at millions of muslims--and that's just not allowed.

So they're have to "tune" it a bit. Or a lot. So it points to...acceptable targets. Meaning, you know, actual white-skinned Brits.

Uh, you know what? Never mind. It's going to do exactly what they want it to do. Why wait for Brits to actually commit "crimes" like "misgendering people" or causing "anxiety" when you can just jail them ahead of any crime at all because they were GONNA DO IT.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Hair too fast

filmmakers and audiences and critics alike all need to start suspending their disbelief again

‘this doesn’t make sense’ so?????

important edition

I feel like this one is relevant too

THE MUMMY (with Brendan Fraser and company) is one of my favorite movies. The plot doesn't make a lick of sense. The "logic" such as it is, is laughable. And ordinarily, I hate movies with plot holes.

But. The Mummy is just so much goddamn fun to watch that I tell my brain to sit down and shut up and enjoy the movie. And it does.

The true goal of any story (in books, comics, plays, television, film) is to be entertaining. Everything else--all the rules about writing--is a MEANS to that END. If your story is entertaining enough for the audience, that's all that matters.

I think that if parents decided to pull their kids out when trans athletes enter the same competitive lane, and as women, collectively bonded together and said 'let them compete, we'll sit this one out' - people would either stop attending or trans people would be forced to create their own lane.

-Flame Monroe

Yes!

The whole reason that women got our own sports category, was because biological sex significantly affects performance level.

World class female athletes, top of their fields, don't have any problem with saying that they'd lose if competing against men.

This isn't 'internalised misogyny' or some such rubbish. It's merely showing just how well these women understand the working of the human body.

And they know that male bodies tend to be faster and stronger than female bodies. They throw, lunch and kick way harder.

Serena Williams is top of her field in women's tennis. But predicted that she's lose '6-0, 6-0' in between 5 to 10 minutes.

"The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder, it's a completely different game."

Veteran British Olympic Swimmer Sharon Davis tells exactly the same story about swimming.

Absolutely trans athletes should get their opportunity to compete.

But it's plain dishonest to deny that biological sex DOES affect performance.

Even more so after puberty.

Maybe have two women's categories?

One only for female competitors. The other where trans women can compete against women who don't mind competing against them.

No. "Trans" women are men. "Trans" men are women. There are already men's and women's sports categories.

These creeps are choosing to compete against women (and note that trans "men" trying to force their way into men's sports isn't an issue) because they CAN'T COMPETE AND WIN against other men. Either they haven't tried, or they have--and they're also-rans. Every single one of them. Not a SINGLE "trans" woman was a winner in men's sports competitions before they felt the need to pretend to be women. LOSERS are doing that. And ONLY losers.

That is the Devass Class Private Yacht from a supplement for the Mongoose Traveller RPG. I own that book. It's a nice one.

Vague thoughts on Trump 2.0

Most of us who voted for him were playing the long game. Maybe I'm speaking for myself, but I certainly didn't expect the "Golden Age of America" to arrive by this month. I expected resistance, and maybe even a little chaos, but made the gamble that it would be worth it. It wasn't about "cheap eggs" in 2025, it was about what the world would look like in 2035, and beyond.

We should be excited that we have someone who isn't willing to "play by the rules" and actually follows through on his promises to shake things up. Millions of people say they want change or even that they hate "the system" and want it to come crashing down, and then freak out when it shows signs of actually happening.

I'm willing to go through a few years of uncertainty. And the recent meltdowns I see from mainstream sources have me very curious indeed about how things will play out... and very willing to exercise patience.

Trump is still making the right people unhappy, anyway, which is the main thing I wanted out of a presidential candidate in 2024.

The arguments against his tariff plan, which echo the arguments against immigration enforcement, are frequently disingenuous and distasteful. But but but we need cheap goods! You know what? Nah. A lot of conservatives, I included, have woken up to the fact that cheap goods always come at a hidden price. "We need cheap TV's!" Seriously? Cheap TV's? That's your talking point? Honestly, the last thing a society in a metabolic health crisis, with people feeling starved for meaning, purpose, and connection left and right, and practically everyone diagnosable with some mental health condition, needs is cheap TV's. Do we need to even talk about the problems caused by cheap food? We sure pay for that, all right! In poor health, environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and harm to rural communities and farm workers. Also, hello???!!! Cheap clothing, containers, furniture, various gadgets we use around our homes, etc., suck, so we just pay more down the road by replacing them all the time. Come on. We know this.

Recently, they trotted out a soybean farmer who is afraid of tariffs. Eyeroll. A soybean farmer, really? Someone who's wrecking the environment with a monocrop and contributing to the mass poisoning of society with toxic seed oils? Sorry if that doesn't arouse my sympathy. "Learn to farm regeneratively" should be the new "Learn to code."

Anyone not critical of Trump these days is branded a sycophant. Well, I have an alternative explanation. Hitting us over the head with articles about how the sky is falling because of Trump has all the markings of a psy-op. I think that makes a lot of people - including people who would ordinarily be fine with criticizing any president - dig in their heels, and say, Not so fast. You're not going to scare me. You're not going to make me backtrack on everything I stood for six months ago because things are uncertain now. Personally, I have to say the signal it's sending to me is that, as above, the right people are angry, and my automatic reaction is to double down.

Also, this:

100%.

I'll add a quote from Thomas Paine that I read more than half my life ago and has stuck with me ever since:

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day." Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty. 

The unorthodox or extreme measures have to come at some point. And there will never be a convenient time for them. They will always anger somebody. So why not let the time be now? Shouldn't we be willing to go through uncertainty today for a chance at a better future? I sleep well knowing that's what I signed up for, at least.

Amen.

I have my doubts about AG Bondi, and FBI Director Patel and Deputy Director Bongino. They all talked a good game, but I'm not seeing results. I'm seeing...more talk. Yeah, the Deep State is going to resist at every turn. That's a given. But there are things they said they'd do immediately--and they haven't. There are things they COULD do immediately--and they haven't.

Sure, maybe they're working like demons behind the scenes the results will show up eventually. But we've been lied to like that for DECADES at this point. They are fast burning up all their credibility and the patience of the voters who support Trump.

The Tea Party was the first try. Polite, well-reasoned, working with the folks across the aisle. They got slandered, libeled, and crushed by the Uniparty. Trump 2016 was the second try. They got some things done, but mostly got blindsided by the lunatic resistance at every level from the Deep State. The politicians, bureaucrats, media, and NGO-paid "activists" worked 24/7 to villainize them and spent the last eight years trying to slander, libel, arrest, convict and eventually MURDER Trump on more than one occasion. So Trump 2024 is the third attempt at reining the criminal conspiracy masquerading as our elected representatives.

If that fails, well, the famous Man On A Horse, who--all else having failed--attacks the Gordian Knot of the Deep State with a SWORD will be the last available option. Nobody wants that. Not even the people who THINK they want that really want it, because violent revolutions go badly wrong far more often than they go right (think the French Revolution and the Terror as opposed the American Revolution). But when the criminals are dug in so deeply and so widely that rooting them out by legal means becomes impossible...that's the only solution left.

Just a quick reminder: when people talk about plastic garbage in the ocean... they're not talking about fucking DRINKING STRAWS.

They're talking about endless MILES of discarded fishing nets.

someone understood the assingment

He's not wrong

The culture in a lot of black communities is sick. It's true.

Describing war to an American

No, wait, seriously. Wasn't there some real conflict where America was running ice cream to the men on the front lines, and it fucked with the morale of the other side, or even intimidated them by having a supply chain so robust it supplied luxuries?

WW2 Pacific theater, there was different ways of doing it.

Had the refrigerated barge for one,

then we had bomber ice cream.

Source they linked for that here

And another

I remember reading accounts from German soldiers from WWII, on, "When did you know that Germany was going to lose?" One soldier recounted how he found a dead American soldier after D-Day, and went through his things, and saw that this enlisted man had coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes on him; in the German army, those were luxuries, only afforded to the officers. But if just your average American soldier had that...

Yeah, that had to be very disheartening....

GUN CONTROL NOW

i don't CARE if the second amendment says we get to have guns

you want to protect the children soooo bad huh? well instead of "protecting" them from trans people, protect them from getting their FUCKING HEADS BLOWN OFF AT SCHOOL

The best way to protect kids is to get rid of gun free school zones and allow staff to conceal carry. But you're u hinged so I don't expect you to be able to understand that.

What OP fails to realize is that we can protect kids from being murdered by psychopaths AND being groomed and raped by degenerates.

In an ironic turn of events, many mass shooters the past few years have been trans.

Also...

GUN CONTROL NOW...or WHAT, asshole?

You'll shoot us? You'll send men armed with guns to disarm us?

Guess we'd better keep our guns in case you get any other tyrannical ideas about who gets to decide what we're allowed to own.

‼️ my recreation textbook said prison abolition now!

[Image id: Figure from Power, Promise, Potential, and Possibilities of Parks, Recreation, and Leisure.

What Recreators Can Do

It costs approximately $30,000 to incarcerate a juvenile offender for one year. If that money were available to Parks and Recreation, we could do the following:

Reprinted, by permission, from E. O’Sullivan, 1999, Setting a course for change (National Recreation and Park Association).

End ID]

If that poor, deprived juvenile offender committed assault or robbery or rape or murder or burglary or car theft or vandalism or other crimes against his fellow citizens and their property...I don't want him enjoying all those things. I want him IN A CAGE.

This was found at an Exxon gas station in College Station, Texas. A woman entered the women's restroom and heard a weird noise and luckily she grabbed the door before it shut. She noticed that on the top of the door was an electronic lock that could be controlled remotely. The lock was on the OUTSIDE of the door and could trap someone inside the bathroom. Shelby recalled the "irate" gas station employees telling her that she couldn't take photos or any footage inside. The workers gave her "I'm watching you" looks and repeatedly gestured by pointing two fingers to their eyes and then at her. She called the cops, and the workers told the police that the lock was in place to prevent a “large” group of men from entering to “destroy” the facility. Shelby noted that the authorities agreed that this was “sketchy” and “didn’t really make sense” because the lock would not prevent anyone from actually entering the restroom. Weirdly, the cops said they couldn't do anything about it. So someone called the fire marshal's office and they came down and removed the lock, citing it as a fire hazard. Shelby stressed that she made these videos to warn the many “vulnerable young girls” who live near nearby at A&M University.

source:

Address of the gas station: 3200 Booneville Road Bryan, Texas 77802

Bryan Fire Marshal 979-209-5960

source: momcallsmeshelby on tiktok

Bloody hell.

Yeah. Nothing sketchy about THAT at all.

Great way to confine a woman until the local rapist/pedophile/trafficker gets there.

I am, sadly, coming to the conclusion that IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER.

Trump has been in office for going on three months. Not a SINGLE criminal politician has been arrested. And it's not like we don't know about BILLIONS in laundered tax monies, and countless violations of black letter federal law.

Kash "I'd shutter the Hoover Building on Day one" Patel is head of the FBI, and he's PROMOTING scum who persecuted the January 6 crowd.

Pam "I'm releasing the Epstein files!" Bondi hasn't done SHIT so far.

Trump has done--and continues to do--a lot of things I approve of. But the most important job, crushing the deep state and sending traitors and criminals in the fedgov to prison is NOT HAPPENING.

Patel and Bondi need to start arresting and charging the perpetrators. I know it takes time for the prosecutions, but the arrests and bail denial hearings should be happening NOW!

Absolutely. Wholesale firings (and being frogmarched out of the offices, access revoked, security clearances revoked, etc) and arrests for their crimes NOW. If the prep and trials take time, sure, but get them caught up in The Machine (tm) ASAP.

One minor nit: the constitutional amendment ENABLED the income tax, but doesn't mandate it. The Congress could just vote to end the income tax, if they chose. (And a subsequent Congress could start it up again, of course, so repealing the amendment is the only sure way to put a stake in its heart forever.)