Leaderboard

The violin, obviously. You've all heard the fuss about Sax and violins.

I hope you remember to clean up your workout equipment when you're done I hate it when the guy in front of me leaves the 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pound weight as a sweaty mess

Absolutely right person. You are just in Trump's very own bubble. You stubbornly defend Trump, who: -- defends Nazis. He said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. -- persecutes LGBTQI* people. He ordered trans people out of the military. You know, dangerous threats to society like me. -- fawns over and kowtows to dictators. Kim Jong Un is grateful for the platform Trump gave him. Erdogan made Trump abandon the Kurds with ONE phone call. Putin has gained SO much from Trump's decisions. -- is openly disablist, misogynistic, racist and promulgates hatred and distrust. -- calls the intelligence services of the United States incompetent, untrustworthy and untruthful. You know, well known partisan organisations like DHS and CIA. These have never had Republican leaders ever. -- engages in smear campaigns against top ranked diplomats who have served the US loyally for decades. -- Routinely defames decorated war veterans and insults Gold Star families. -- conversely, he just gave a pardon to a war criminal who had shot down an unarmed not yet fully grown girl in a flower-decorated burkah. Over the objections of the Pentagon. -- engages in outright witness tampering by tweeting libel and threats at men and women who have been called to Congress as fact witnesses. And you justify all of this by saying "Democrats are just as bad or at least they would do it if they could do it, too." None of the above is justifiable. No matter the party the perpetrator pretends to belong to.

Name the last Democratic president who claimed 'absolute immunity' from the investigative powers of either Senate or House of Representatives, please. In fact, name any president of any historical party who ever did. I no longer have patience for President Trump nor his apologists. He just issued a pardon for a war criminal who shot and killed an unarmed girl for his own amusement, against the wishes of the Pentagon. The man is bereft of any sort of either morals or ethics. He kowtows to and fawns over dictators. Oh, and hours ago he engaged in blatant witness intimidation during an ongoing investigation where the witness was being questioned. He is unabashedly misogynistic, racist, queerphobic and disablist. He has constantly been engaged in violations of the emoluments clause ever since he ascended to the Presidency. Any equivalents to presidents past are irrelevant even if they could somehow be found, no matter their party. Did a Democratic president engage in this sort of behavior, they should unquestionably be impeached, too. It is future presidencies that concern me, for if the current President is granted a free pass, Republicans have just opened the door for allowing Democratic presidents to act in the same way. And that is not a jot or tittle more acceptable to me than this is. There are Republicans who without hesitation condemn the way the creature squatting in the Oval Office is acting. Former Republicans, some may claim. To that I respond that they had sufficient conscience, patriotism and respect for the rule of law to disassociate themselves from the ongoing disaster that is the Trump administration. I salute Justin Amash, Jennifer Rubin, Rick Wilson and all who still remember what the Grand Old Party once stood for. It most assuredly did not stand for the Klan.

From what I remember of those days, you were just the sort of moderator we needed back then. Someone less aggressive might have let too much slide (I'm pretty sure I would have). As a moderator you might be a less ideal match for the current more sedate forums, but I still think you're a good moderator. You may pull out the moderator red a little fast at times, but you always give people warnings before taking any more drastic action (in fact, I don't think I've even seen you do anything more drastic than lock a thread since I returned). ...This has gotten me thinking of the work you do for this forum, and have done for years, and while it's on my mind I'd like to say "thank you" for that work.

I'd like to go a little bit more into partisanship. Not all partisanship is unreasonable. There are people on both sides who may have good reason to fear the extremists on the other side. Those fears are not easily laid to rest and while there is no communication there cannot be compromise. Worse, some things are impossible to compromise on. Take me, for example. I am a trans woman. The right wing, not only in the US but in Denmark, considers me a threat to society. They make laws designed to protect society from the danger they believe I pose. For example, I might go into a bathroom and commit rape on people there. Or, I should be kept from serving my country in its armed forces. (I am fifty-three, and I served my duty when I was much younger. My identity notwithstanding I engaged in no act of treason nor did I endanger my comrades in arms.) I should not be allowed to have a job purely based on my conviction that I am a woman. What society thinks is more important than me, and it is better than I be destroyed than I be allowed my personal conception of myself. Which part of that should I be willing to compromise on? I cannot offhand give examples of similar attitudes on the right wing for obvious reasons, but I am sure they exist and I am equally sure that these beliefs are as valid to them as mine are to me. I don't think that the people who hold their beliefs sacred have any great hope of the other side being willing to listen to them, either. Now let me speak briefly of a gentleman named Justin Amash. He was a founder of the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives and I suspect I have few political ideals in common with him. And yet he gave me a political gut punch mere months ago. When the Mueller Report came out, he was the only Republican who saw it as concerning enough to question the President's fitness to serve. And yet that was not what stunned me. What stunned me was that he said -- I am paraphrasing, mind you -- "I have spent four days reading this report. I have had my staff help me analyse it and discuss critical issues with me. And yet when I speak with my fellow members of this institution, I get the impression that nine out of ten of them have not even bothered to read it. They have made up their minds based on partisanship alone." And of course he got me there. I hadn't tried to read it, either. I'd made my mind up on partisanship alone, too. Now, you could argue that it wasn't my duty to, and that I don't have a staff to help me, but that is not the point. The point is, I didn't even try. With that one remark Mr. Amash cast the entire nightmare of partisanship into stark relief for me and I was deeply shaken for the rest of the evening. He has since been repudiated by his own former caucus and his party, and I honestly doubt that the Democrats will welcome him either. Nor do I think him capable of such a drastic political flip-flop even if they would. Even so, I still deeply respect him for his commitment and his willingness to lay his political life on the line. He is the loyal opposition that any government could only dream of, and were he in the majority he would be the kind of leader I would wish my political adversaries to have. In fact, I would rather have just one Justin Amash than ten million Bernie Sanderses or Elizabeth Warrens. And if it came to picking a political leader of my country and I could choose between a Justin Amash and either of those other two, Mr. Amash would get my vote. That is all.

I do not wish to enter the internal American political discussions but I do feel a need to describe how this looks from the Danish point of view. We have seen the President of the United States again and again yield way to dictators and embrace their praise of him when he did. We saw President Trump in Helsinki where he praised Putin and called Putin's offer to take charge of American citizens and have his intelligence service interrogate them 'incredibly generous.' We witnessed the United States rightly demand the expulsion of Putin's Russia from the G8 when the Russians invaded Ukraine -- and now later we have beheld the sight of Trump agitating for Russia's readmission even though her attack on Ukraine is ongoing. Now, most lately, we have witnessed how Trump withdrew his support from Kurdish allies without warning, leaving them to the untender mercies of the dictator Erdogan. And we wonder why Trump seems to be fighting so hard for Putin's goals. Not long ago President Emmanuel Macron declaimed that the United States could no longer be trusted to uphold its NATO obligations. As a citizen of Denmark and a veteran of the Danish Army, I have long supported the United States. Not just out of gratitude for my life and freedom, which I owe to an America that did not embrace the craven and shortsighted 'America First' doctrine, but also later on when Danish troops, planes and naval vessels supported the US during the Iraq war, in Afghanistan and also in the second Iraq war. I believed in the 'weapons of mass destructions' claim and even after it was disproven, I would still have supported a US attack on Iraq if it had used the simple justification of Saddam Hussein being a clear and present danger to peace in the middle east. I met an Iraqi immigrant in Denmark who told me that he did not care what anybody else accused the United States of. He would forever be grateful to them for removing Saddam Hussein. I live in a country which Russia during the Cold War considered a simple obstacle, nothing more. The presence of Denmark to them consisted of an inconvenient bottleneck in which they risked getting their fleet blocked from entering the Atlantic during a potential war. Their plan to deal with this was to drop nuclear devices on every single Danish major city and airport -- even the small local sports airfields -- as well as carpet nuke the entire width of southern Jutland to keep NATO troops from entering the country. They would have left nothing alive in the place I call home and in spite of all still love. These are the people which Trump unhesitatingly would leave us at the mercy of, in spite of any treaty obligations. I do not agree with President Macron on very much. I consider him repellent. But I agree with him about the United States, and that terrifies me.

Heh, that reminds me of one I read where the DM decided that his players were over-reliant on magic. So he created a monster who was immune to all forms of magic damage, both direct and indirect... and had ONE hit point. He nearly managed a TPK before someone hit the monster with something non-magical... accidentally.

I created a pirate who was imaginatively named "Jolly Roger" for my superhero game. One of his best and most successful superpowers was that he had a stuffed parrot with a built in radio transmitter sitting on his shoulder. But the radio wasn't the point. The point was to tempt any enemy he faced into spending an attack on it to knock it off his shoulder. And it worked. Every time. EVERY. TIME. That consarned parrot had one purpose and one purpose only. Ablative armor. And it didn't once fail him. My players didn't catch on to it until after the campaign ended and I actually told them. That resulted in a lot of laughs, facepalming and even kudos to the guy. He was really low powered in general but worked mainly on smarts, and the players applauded him for pulling such a simple yet irresistible trick on them.

Unfortunately there is no escape from the bad science of Voyager.

In fact, in our universe the concept of "stationary" is meaningless and what object we assign it to is completely arbitrary. You say I'm doing push-ups; I've defined that my back is stationary and I'm bench-pressing the planet.

As for shorthand in the era of classical antiquity... Shorthand note taking was a well developed art in Imperial Rome. There were as many lawyers per capita in that city as there are in modern cities. The Ampersand "&" is actually one of the survivors of Roman Shorthand, being derived from the Latin "et"

I stand corrected, yet you stand absurdly. A common stance used by people who do not have a leg to stand on.

The Prof already having addressed this, I shall let his explanation stand. My original statement was: It is important. Please keep it in mind. I will use it to address your argument below. I shall sidestep the issue of the statues here save to say that it is my contention that they are there to glorify past wrongdoers rather than stand as warning examples. Many of these alleged memorials have dedications like 'To our fallen heroes.' Does that seem like a good reference to past wrongdoing? Also, by the time this arrived at the level of national interest, it was after a self-confessed Nazi had run his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring twenty-eight others. It was no longer about statues at that point. It was about a terrorist attack on peaceful protesters. They had just as much freedom of speech as the Nazis did. Yet a Nazi, true to the spirit of his loathsome ilk, decided that the proper counter to that was violence and first degree murder. Trump, when confronted with this, elected to say that there were 'good people on both sides', in effect granting the Nazis a pass for having whipped their side into such a frenzy that one of their members felt this was a quite normal and logical act. To be fair, this was a normal and logical act -- always provided that one is a Nazi. And Trump chose to normalise it. Look up at my original dictum. Trump sat at the same table as the Nazis and when one of them committed an act of terrorism and first degree murder, he nodded benignly. Can you blame me for not being impressed with his integrity and moral fiber? Also, please do not insult my intellect with a whataboutism cry of 'but antifa.' One, 'antifa' is a media pundit's invention, an attempt to sound clever by shortening 'antifascist.' 'Antifa' are not an organisation following hate ideology in a relentless march against civilisation. They have no historical legacy equal to that of Nazi. The are spontaneously arising grassroots movements that react to fascism and protest against it -- hence the name. For example, I am an antifascist. I am this by virtue of objecting to and presenting arguments against fascist propaganda. And two, I have yet to hear of 'antifa' committing a terror attack causing deaths and dozens of injured. (I have heard of them beating up Nazis and of throwing milkshakes at them, but certainly not of anything to equal Charlottesville -- let alone World War Two.) Possibly you will forgive me for employing a different definition of 'reasonable.' My father suffered lasting harm and trauma from his flight to Sweden in 1943, and so did my late grandparents. My late grandfather-in-law fought at Normandy on D-Day and nearly drowned when the USS Susan B. Anthony struck a mine and sank; he subsequently participated in the entire campaign across Europe until and including the Battle for Berlin, missing only the Battle of the Ardennes due to being on Christmas leave in the US. A dozen and a half family members of mine either committed suicide to escape the Nazis or were captured and killed in the extermination camps. (This last number is admittedly uncertain. At least some of these might well have died at the hands of Soviets when the Nazis retreated from Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Stalin had no great love for Jews either and his troops weren't always, shall we say, at the pinnacle of chivalric behavior on the battlefield. As an aside, you should have heard my grandfather-in-law speak of the Nazis. The feelings I have expressed for them here? They count as a mere dislike in comparison to how he felt about them. He did not merely hate them. He loathed them. He despised them. He spoke fondly of the days where Nazis were greeted with Garands and thirty-ought-sixes because he lived through them. And possibly because so many of his friends and brothers in arms did not. I am convinced I know why the Nazis are finally crawling out from underneath their rocks, and it is because my grandfather-in-law's generation has by now mostly passed away. If they had dared to show themselves in the open only twenty years ago when he was still alive and retained much of his vigor, he would soon have shown them the error of their ways. I do not even intend to speculate on his reaction towards those who 'keep their prejudice at a reasonable level.' I actually wince at the thought, for I do not think my imagination is up to the task of envisioning it. I believe I owe you an apology here. The original topic was impeachment; I started a separate post without specifying that I was stepping away from impeachment itself to criticise Trump on a moral level. You are of course absolutely correct that issuing or endorsing this kind of executive order is not impeachable -- I can argue that it is morally bankrupt (and intend to do so), condemn it as short-sighted, and essay a number of other outraged reactions, but it is not impeachable. It is merely a matter for the voters to consider at the next election. While I understand this position, I am afraid it is simply not relevant. I shall now explain why. Both the bathroom problem and the transgender discipline issues came from the same place. Transphobic imaginings. Neither had anything whatsoever to do with reality. I would like to go a step further and say that both came from the active malice of TERFs and similar people, but I cannot. I only have proof of that in the former case. Yes. I said proof. And I meant it. Here it is. Warning: This links directly to a TERF site and it is not pretty reading. It is hate group propaganda, and frankly speaking it turns my stomach. Please note a particular paragraph near the bottom. It is highly revealing. They are outright stating that they fabricated this argument out of thin air. And of course they had. There was no evidence whatsoever for this argument because it did not exist. Look at this Pink News article. Near the bottom it presents research demonstrating that the TERF argument was not empirically founded. Similarly, the discipline argument against transgender troops is utterly unfounded. In some ways it was even worse. It invoked 'disciplinary issues' that had never actually happened because there was no evidence whatsoever to support their existence. Openly transgender troops had only just been allowed to serve. There was no grounds whatsoever to point out disciplinary issues that had yet to occur and every possible transphobic reason to slam the ban through on no basis whatsoever because it would place the burden of proof on trans people themselves -- a proof they could not possibly deliver because they had just been banned from serving altogether. It is barely possible to excuse that they did not at least take a look at the eighteen other countries that had allowed transgender soldiers to openly serve since the DSM was changed in 2013. After all, they could argue that the US is not necessarily like the rest of them. But for that exact reason it should first have been investigated whether such issues existed at all. Instead, the EO was issued based on prejudice alone. Or in other words, it was NOT a 'solution' at all. It was a mere act of bigotry addressed at a 'problem' that had not even been determined if it had any real existence at all. I reiterate my condemnation of that order. It is morally bankrupt. Please note that I am not saying this indicts Trump personally as it is possible he was for some reason stampeded into issuing it rather than doing it out of deliberate ill will. As they say, 'Never attribute to malice what may be adequately explained with incompetence.' I agree one hundred percent with the above.

I think Dan is using the tension between Sarah being tempted and resisting temptation as a way to make her almost believably imperfect without adding the extra plot complications of her actually doing bad things.

If there is no memory, knowledge, or other advantage transferred from previous to current life, then reincarnation remains an abstract concept and not a useful ability Well, just because it's not useful as ability doesn't mean it's abstract. Obviously, what DOES transfer is the soul. (Not the music.) Now, if you don't believe in existence of soul, or more specifically if you believe there is no part of you which wouldn't be encoded in physical connection of neurons, then you can't even describe what reincarnation IS. "What's worse: ignorance or apathy?" - "I don't know and I don't care."

No one cares that nobody cares. So they held a Mass. Everyone came. Then it was a critical Mass. Oh the deconstruction! The Mass hysteria! "No bodies! Scares!" "Luke, I am your Dada!" "Noooo!"

That took him two days and he only did it because his spin doctors made him. This is my opinion of Nazis. If one Nazi and nine other people sit around a table and none of the others around the table object to the Nazi's views, there are ten Nazis at that table. Oh, you are a homophobe, too. That's okay then. Name one other US president who fawned over a man like Putin and defended his aggression against smaller countries. I'll wait. -- At the last G7 meeting, Trump argued loudly for Russia's re-inclusion in them. Russia was specifically expelled for its attack on Ukraine. It still hasn't returned the possessions it stole and remains at war with her. -- There is currently an American base in Syria which now has Russian flags flying because Trump ordered all defense of it heedlessly abandoned when he betrayed the Kurds. -- The diplomatic position internationally of the US has degenerated to that of laughingstock. President Emmanuel Macron of France recently pronounced NATO on 'life support' because abovementioned betrayal of the Kurds (urged by Erdogan, another dictator) showed that the US cannot be relied on to keep its treaties. Despise him though I may, in this he is unfortunately right. The other G7 countries try to avoid Trump because of his fawning over Putin and he was all but ignored at their last meeting. -- the situation in the Middle East is immensely improved to Putin's advantage. -- abovementioned and ongoing destruction of the US' international standing leaves a power vacuum which of COURSE is to the advantage of an opportunistic dictator like Putin. -- Trump has convinced his entire base, you included, that it is to the advantage of the US to trust in and believe Putin over its own intelligence services. Not a bad start, and that is just what I can remember off the top of my head. You must be sodding blind and deaf. When a journalist during the 2016 campaign with a neurological disorder attempted to interview him, Trump openly mocked him and made exaggerated and clownish movements in order to ridicule him. He attacks Muslim families whose children fight in the US armed forces. The current government of Israel is itself racist. He is not supporting them because he loves them. He is supporting them because he wants to fan the flames in the Middle East -- which also favours Putin. He called an American-born judge 'Mexican' because he took a position against him. For YEARS he insisted that the five young people of colour in New York who were accused of rape deserved the death sentence -- and continued to do so even after they were found 'not guilty'. He and his father long carried a policy of not allowing Black people to rent apartments or rooms of any kind in Trump property and went to court for it. They lost. The whole vile 'Birther' mess, which you of course will claim was not at ALL racist. I did not say it was a crime. What I say is that it was reprehensible and disgusting. I will stand by that. What makes me wonder is why everybody else in the GOP just tamely either accepts it, supports it or at MOST vaguely mutter that it 'lacked class.' Without noticing that Trump has never, EVER shown class. Tell me, would you have given Obama a pass for doing anything like that? Or even kept it to a mild statement like 'it lacked class'? You really do live in a bubble, don't you. Hello? Did you even listen to the direct transmissions from the public hearings in the House of Representatives? I did. I'd learned my lesson from Justin Amash, thank you. Ambassador Yovanovitch was the victim of a smear campaign for months and was removed over the objection of several other career diplomats who had served Republican and Democratic administrations both for decades. Are you REALLY so lost that you actually believe that everybody who ever objected to Trump is part of or the patsies of a Deep State conspiracy? The details are out there. LOOK THEM UP. I refuse to do your work for you because I could quote the bollocking Encyclopaedia Britannica at you and you would call it a Deep State plot. What I marvel at is that you apparently feel it is okay for Trump to attack someone and then lay the burden of proof on the people he attacked. ...last I heard, killing someone because he was 'probably' guilty of a crime was still murder. I believe the specific term is 'vigilantism.' So if I aim a loaded gun at someone, I am not engaged in a reckless and dangerous action as long as they are unaware of it? And more to the point, HOW DO YOU THINK THAT TWEET WOULD AFFECT SOMEONE ELSE WHO MIGHT BE CONTEMPLATING GIVING EVIDENCE? Are you really so incredibly dense that you don't recognise the same methods used by the Mafia when they employed public intimidation against witnesses, not just to try and silence them, but also to make an example of them to other potential witnesses? Trump was saying, "I am destroying this woman's reputation and telling my followers to hate her and persecute her. This will happen to anyone else who tries to present evidence I don't like, too." Yeah, for of COURSE he doesn't have, like, staffers to do that for him who might conceivably tug at his sleeve and tell him, "Mr. Chairman, you need to see this." I mean, Justin Amash has a staff that he can put to work for him for things just like that, but after all, he is a Congressman in the opposition and Schiff is only a committee head. As to what he wanted or didn't want to hear, that is sodding irrelevant. What matters is what Ambassador Yovanovitch said. At least there we can agree. They have the evidence of all the witnesses put together, and I am increasingly convinced that you did not even bother to watch the direct transmissions of the public hearings themselves. Funnily enough it was a Republican who taught me that partisan fervour alone is no substitute for paying attention to what is actually going on. Witness tampering is obstruction of justice. See above. Ordering public servants not to testify in spite of Congress subpoenas is obstruction of justice. As to the rest of it, you clearly have more faith in a Putin narrative parroted by Trump than you have in your own nation's intelligence services. I hope you like your bubble since you refuse to ever poke your head outside of it.

Gentle forumgoers, a little while ago I had a discussion with our esteemed fellow poster @Darth Fluffy. In it I offered to share some of my and my family's experiences with him. I have decided to post a brief essay I have written on the topic publicly here in the hope that others might benefit from reading it, too. Darth, if you feel it may be helpful, I suggest you show this to your daughter. It might conceivably open some pathway of discussion between you that I hope you may both benefit from. Please note that I am issuing a general content warning for what may be somewhat personal emotions and experiences. It might trouble some readers and be of no interest to others. Also please note and respect that I am not open to unsolicited advice nor to opinions about my state of mental well-being. I leave that in the hands of the health professionals I trust and have no interest in armchair psychology peddled by people who have no direct personal knowledge of me. With that said, let me begin. My name is Monika, and I am a trans woman. I am writing this document at the urgings of my father, who believes that explaining my identity in my own words may be a good way to make myself understood to my friends and family. I also dedicate it to my online friends and acquaintances, many of whom have trans relatives or are themselves genderqueer. It is my hope that my own experiences may be helpful to those who wish to better understand. Please note that I am writing on my own behalf and that I do not speak for anyone else, though it is my hope that other trans and genderqueer people upon reading this will nod and recognise at least some of what I have experienced. Now, right out of the gate I wish to deal with a potential source of confusion. It is common trans terminology to say “I identify as <gender identity>.” Many assume that ‘identify’ here functions as an active verb and that it is a choice I have made. Nothing could be further from the truth, which I will attempt to explain in this document. Whether my identity was already biologically determined at birth or it formed in the following years is not relevant for these purposes; what matters is that it formed and that I at no point ever possessed determination in coming into it. As far back as I can remember, I was a girl even in childhood. I was simply assigned male gender at birth based on my physical attributes and was obviously never even consulted on the matter. Why didn’t I ever object to it back then? Perhaps I did and was gently or not so gently corrected by respectively my family and society at large. Children were not allowed agency in expressing their gender back then and it is still rare today. We are heavily socially conditioned to express our assigned gender as soon as we are old enough to be subject to conditioning. Whether it fits us at all does not matter. We are simply told to conform, and if we do not, we suffer the consequences. And in fact I lived in such fear of these consequences that as time passed, I could not bear the thought of not presenting myself as a boy. I would be considered abnormal, strange, weird. I would be ostracized by my agemates and seen as an aberration by people older than me. And finally that fear grew so strong that I entirely repressed my female identity and pretended to be a boy. Which I was not very good at, so I got ostracized by my agemates and seen as an aberration by people older than me. Ah well. Having arrived at the point where I am at last able to acknowledge being a woman to myself has transformed my perception of my life. So many things that made no sense to me in my childhood and teen years have suddenly become comprehensible to me. And in the process, repressed memories of mine resurface -- at times with startling lucidity -- and I marvel at how they suddenly make sense to me from my new perspective. Throughout my childhood I was the odd one out, among the last ever picked for any team, the misfit no-one quite knew what to do with. My agemates called me the ‘girly boy’, I did not properly engage in the ‘boy games’, I pretended but never convinced anyone. Not even myself. I was just too afraid to even consider the alternative. It led to some moments I consider very telling in retrospect. An example: I loved singing in the school choir. Then one year the woman in charge of the choir decided to perform the March of Saint Lucia, an old and well-loved midwinter celebration welcoming the return of daylight. But because the performers wear long white robes that are basically dresses, the boys in the choir shied away from the idea in horror. A mere week or two after the decision they had all left. I stayed behind, not even understanding why there would be a problem. And as a result got more flak for being the ‘girly boy’ than ever. I could provide more examples, but I’d rather go on in a more general way so this will not grow overlong and repetitive. Suffice it to say that I again and again encountered situations where my actions were judged on the basis of me performing as a boy, and again and again I fell short of expectations. Failure became so common to me that I started to take it for granted. As I entered puberty I fit less and less well in among the boys around me. I felt uncomfortable in situations where we got divided into ‘boys and girls’. And when the other boys discussed girls, I frequently found myself biting down on wanting to interrupt them and say that they were not being fair, or mean, or just didn’t understand. Eventually I just couldn’t relate to my agemates at all and ended up entirely sidelined. I even accepted it. This was, after all, the only normal I knew. Unfortunately acceptance did not enable me to endure it and eventually I failed out of high school with a resounding crash. (I have since learned that this is not an unknown phenomenon for trans teens of either gender.) At this point I would like to address the elephant in the room: a general and common perception of trans people as ‘mentally ill.’ While this is no longer the accepted view of the DSM, it was only addressed back in 2013 and many still believe that trans people are delusional. For now I shall sidestep Foccault and his ideas that ‘insanity’ is a view of society rather than necessarily a medical condition, though I do wish to nod to him in passing. But as a matter of fact: Yes, I suffer from mental illness. To be precise, clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. But I posit that naming them the reason for my identity not matching my assigned gender is placing the cart squarely in front of the horse. Rather, I suggest this possibility: that being forced to spend my entire childhood and adult life pretending to be a gender not my own resulted in me experiencing constant anxiety and eventually severe depression. I daresay that there are professional psychiatrists and psychologists that are at least amenable to discussing the idea. (By the way, two common arguments employed against the concept of transgender identity are respectively 1] that trans individuals are delusional and insane, and 2] that it is not possible to just ‘choose’ to be the other gender. Precisely how and why one might ‘choose’ to become delusional and insane is for some reason never satisfactorily explained.) All this, by the way, is why I am violently opposed to the notion that I have ‘become’ a woman, or even more ludicrously that I have ‘chosen’ to be a woman. I have always been a woman. I was merely forced to repress my actual identity out of powerlessness to resist the one imposed on me and fear of the consequences if I should object to it. I was a girl from childhood on. I was just never allowed to express it. Along these lines, trans people in general tend to object to the conception that they either 'become' or 'choose to be' a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. I hope this helps to make it more explicable why. I may have more on this topic later, but I think I am done for now. If you have gotten this far, I thank you for reading. Monika

When I came to the realization I was non-binary (or rather, like Tedd, discovered there was a name for how I'd always felt) I was in a phase of trying not to think about the unpleasant parts of my childhood, so I never really examined my past in light of this knowledge. A lot of what you've said sounds quite familiar to me though, Old Hack, and it's making me contemplate how much of my difficulties fitting in as a child might have been the result of my gender. Thank you for the food for thought.

Hear, hear. Enough deflection. Back to the topic at hand.

It was determined by the republicans' own department of justice that the whistleblower followed proper procedure and provided substantive and verifiable material. This much was made clear from the very beginning. They violated no laws and provided real information that they were authorized to submit. Any other statement is just white noise intended to drown out the truth.

When did prior Presidents this grotesquely undermine the Constitution? And why do you call me to task for not criticising Clinton in your presence more than ten years before we met? And when did we have a debate about President Obama where he had potentially violated the Constitution and where we gave him a free pass? I seem to specifically remember agreeing with you that governing by executive order was a bad idea. My 'defense' of him was that he had 'no choice', which even I could hear was thin. If the stipulation is that overriding Congress with executive orders is putting the President on Constitutionally shaky ground, Obama is not free of sin. Also, name a President that made grotesque concessions to the Russians and other dictators and betrayed allies that I ever spoke approvingly of. What made Trump's offense against the Kurds so egregious was not merely ending the alliance with them -- which could theoretically be defended if it had been considered policy -- but doing it unilaterally, without warning and leaving them in an extremely vulnerable position against the Turks and the Russians. Whatever Obama's other foreign policy failures, bad as they might have potentially been, none of them came even close to this. He also did not hand dictators a platform. He also did not own two expensive hotels in Istanbul that resulted in his motives being cloudy. Please note that it is not about whether Trump's motives are impure or not, the emoluments clause is there to ensure that the President's motives are not exposed to doubt in this way at all. And when they so informed him, he yielded. How curious that Trump and the Republican Party are completely ignoring this precedent. Especially since it was a precedent the Republican Party itself established.

No. Not worth noting. What is worth noting is that back then a large number of Republicans rallied behind impeachment, too. They realised the dangers of undermining the Constitution very clearly and wanted no part of it. Also, Clinton is an example. He, too, underwent impeachment proceedings. It is how he responded to it that matters.

Well, in Germany we say "Zauberstab", which of course means exactly the same thing. An even better example might be the baton used by a conductor to direct an ensemble of musicians.

For a moment I read that as 'Tedd, can you enchant forums?' The thought kind of appeals to me. If he could put some sort of TERF and troll slapping spell on the forums, I might finally be able to resign from my post as moderator.

Yeah, it just keeps falling apa ... oh, wait, there went another testifier, and he directly linked quid pro quo to the president. And aren't the republicans giving in on that now, too? No, what you've got going for you are the republicans' Moving Goalposts®. Every time one of their definitions of an impeachable/removable offense gets met, they just roll them goalposts back another 15 yards and declare a new definition. Convenient.

He certainly seems unable to resist tooting his own horn at every opportunity.

Excellent points. Was our Tedd the actual target? The Goo never attacked Tedd, or even tried to. That would tend to support the "strengthen the other Tedd's" theory.

Had to skip today's follow-up blood tests / med checks. Mrs. Prof, a.k.a. my transportation, came back from the urgent care clinic last night with a diagnosis of borderline pneumonia. No way I was making her drive me to the doctor. My pre-op tests are still scheduled for Monday. They wouldn't let me schedule both the follow-up and the pre-op simultaneously, claiming insurance wouldn't pay for it. Bastages. I'll get the follow-up done later. A new issue is raising its ugly head, and it has to do with the endovenous ablation of my lower right leg. I'm starting to get some swelling and pain down the back lateral part of my leg, down to the curve of my ankle joint. It feels like something is stuck down there, like perhaps it's not draining properly. I'm going to call the vascular surgeon's office tomorrow to find out WTF is going on.

And here I thought those bits were in Doucheronomy. You forgot the part that read, "Until they start to cost money. At that point they and the mother are free to go die in a ditch."

For what it is worth, mine are, too.

Good idea. Take good care of yourself, Prof. :/

It was so much easier when the Vikings just told the rest of us what to do And they had such a great recruiting song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTwq1_9VH68

"Did you need something?" "How can I help you?"

In the few RPGs I've run, I've strenuously tried to avoid doing that - or at least being that blatant about it. (If I want the party to go right and they go left, I'd rather quickly retcon the geography than somehow force them to turn around.) However, I'm more of a story-teller than a game-master, so I wasn't always successful.

... ...yes, yes. Whatever you say. I may answer later if I can be bothered. I really have better things to do than to argue with someone who firmly believes that one side is the source of all wrongs and hence this justifies the other side in repeating the exact same wrongs only worse. Enjoy your partisan bubble. I will go on reading both progressive and conservative arguments and attempt to navigate a course from there. It's much less comfortable because I keep having my beliefs challenged and even proven wrong at times, but I prefer that, possibly because I am a masochist.

More than 1/4 of the Union Army died at Gettysburg, more than 1/3 of the Confederate Army. Edward Everett was the name of the featured speaker. Quoting history.com : " Everett, the former president of Harvard College, former U.S. senator and former secretary of state, was at the time one of the country’s leading orators." It is worth noting that a two hour speech was customary and expected at the time. " Lincoln's speech was short because that was his role, akin to being the one to use the scissors to cut the ribbon at a building dedication. Of course in hindsight, it is easy to see that a two minutes speech of less than three hundred words can be memorable, less so a two hour oratory. That the Gettysburg Address was crafted on the train ride is a myth. Witnesses place the writing the days prior to the event. Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward accompanied him, so there may have been further discussion and possibly some revision along the way. It was a well crafted piece designed to hammer home a few key points, the most radical of which, (and honestly, this had escaped me, the referenced article laid it out), was that the Declaration of Independence was a foundational document of our government. I've understood the notion, even scratched my head at "why?"; it never occurred to me that this speech is the one that drove it home, linking the intention of the Founding Fathers laid out in the Declaration to how we govern. "Oh, that makes sense now; this is way more foundational that it might appear at first glance. It's more than just a really good speech." He was cutting the legs out from under the argument that "The Constitution does not forbid slavery."

*scratches head* I don't get it. Obama issues an executive order, and when Republicans file lawsuits against it, they are upholding the Constitution. Trump issues an executive order, and when Democrats file lawsuits against it, they are tearing the Constitution down. The logic seems to be that Democratic actions and lawsuits are inherently unconstitutional. So, the Republicans controlled House, Senate and the Oval Office for two years and still couldn't manage to end DACA. It wasn't Trump's fault. Therefore, the GOP itself couldn't manage to uphold the Constitution even while holding all the cards. That's not a good look. I have some simple yes or no questions I would like answered. Is it acceptable for a US president to react to a Russian offer to 'take charge of' US citizens and 'get them to tell the truth' by calling it 'incredibly generous' on TV transmitted across the world? Is it acceptable for a US president to hand platforms to dictators and strongmen while disparaging democracies and alienating democratic allies? Is it acceptable for a US president to sit in meetings with a dictator without his own staff and Secret Service in attendance? Is it acceptable for a US president to unilaterally and without warning withdraw support of an ally, ordering US forces to depart in such haste that Russian troops are now using US military facilities left intact behind and flying the Russian flag over them, having not paid even a penny for them? Is it acceptable for a US president to employ witness intimidation during an impeachment inquiry? Is it acceptable for a US president to solicit bribes and employ extortion to promote his own personal agenda at the expense of that of the US? Are we to believe that your intent is that all these actions are okay for a Republican President to take because past Democrat Presidents might hypothetically have done the same? Rick Wilson quite presciently wrote that the Republicans who cheer on Trump are failing to realise that it will take no more than a left wing statist to win an election to put the jackboot on the other foot. Do you think that no Democrat would even consider using the precedents Trump will have successfully set if the GOP keeps protecting and enabling him? I have no such optimism. I may be doing them an ill turn, but I can mention at least two Democratic candidates this election I am convinced will gleefully turn the presidency's newly enlarged power and independence from its formerly co-equal branches against Republicans if they win. And I will not be cheering if they do. By the way, since you ignored it the last time -- if Obama was shredding the Constitution, why did the Republicans not launch impeachment inquiries against him when they held both House and Senate during his presidency?

Nonsense. Clinton and Nixon both handed over their files and had their various staffers attend the House of Representatives when subpoenaed for their respective impeachment inquiries. Admittedly I do not think Clinton actually erased important tapes during his but we shall disregard that for this purpose. I am sorry but I missed the impeachment inquiry raised against President Obama. Could you please link me to sources of when it happened and in which ways he failed to cooperate with it?

This is demonstrably false. Regardless, could we maybe keep the political discussion to the Political Discussion Thread?

First of all, allow me to respond to your position that I may be projecting. I will not reject it outright or even at all as it has merit and deserves discussion; I will merely present counterarguments. I am not speaking of my own experiences alone. I myself have learned many of the things I speak of from the trans community. In fact, I did not even acknowledge these experiences in myself until I had struggled with them for a long time. My journey to discovering my identity has taken me many, many years. I do not even know if it is complete yet; I just know far more about myself than I used to. If you had asked her at seventeen, she might well have denied it indignantly -- out of mortal terror of what would happen if the male identity slapdashed and grafted on her was stripped away. You do realise what happens to many, many trans people who come out? You do realise that the general conception of society of us is still that we are unnatural, perverts, sexually deviant? I had thoroughly internalised those beliefs by the time I reached puberty. If someone had asked me if I were really a girl then, I would almost certainly have rejected it -- not out of belief, but out of fear. I still wish someone actually had. It might have made me confront myself much, much sooner rather than going halfway and then stopping -- over and over again. Let me be honest here. It comes from experience. From a LONG experience of offending people, and not understanding why. And of all too often thinking of them that they were taking offense beyond all reason and that they were just being thin skinned. I am not a saint. I am not even a teacher. I can be a complete and utter shithead, and I often am. If you ask @CritterKeeper, for example, she can tell about how I once used the word 'retard' in the French sense of 'delay/delayed', and I got all snooty and up in arms over her insistence that I could be misunderstood and that I was being insulting even unintentionally. I mean, people could just know French. Not my problem if they were ignorant and thin-skinned... right? Good. I am glad. I also understand you have difficulties understanding what she is going through, and that is normal. I am experiencing the same from my own loved ones. As to me being unreasonable... well. Part of it comes from sheer frustration of having such a hard time communicating how I feel. Another part of it comes from miscommunications. If I can't communicate why I am angry and unhappy, of course I come across as unreasonable. :| This is a very complex subject to discuss. I shall attempt to simplify; please be aware that while I am informed on the matter, I am not an expert and I am building on what the trans community has taught me and experts in psychology, psychiatry and general medicine have worked out as a consensus. I urge you to not rely on me alone. But be careful which sources you trust. A great deal of disinformation and transphobic propaganda masquerading as reputable sources cloud the debate. But in brief: when we are born, we are assigned a gender, usually but not always based on our external genitalia. (The exceptions would be those children who are born with mixed or otherwise unusual sex characteristics.) I was assigned male at birth, or AMAB. Other children get assigned female, obviously. And society takes it all from there. The problem with that is that not all children fit their obvious assignment. I am not only speaking of outright trans people here. There are those that are genderfluid, agender, only weakly gendered, those who see themselves as fitting both genders... and none of us fit within the existing gender binary. And yet when we experience dissonance as we grow up, we are in no uncertain terms informed that even admitting to feeling this way would get us marked as deviant, perverted, mentally ill, dangerous to our surroundings. (In Denmark, being transgender was classified as a mental illness until 2013.) Is it any wonder that so many of us retreat into denial rather than confronting society and telling it that it is wrong? And yes, I wore the boy's clothes and accepted the boy's toys. I didn't have a choice, after all, except to insisting on behaving in a manner that everybody knew was deviant. I was afraid to. This didn't stop me from being called a 'girly boy', mocked and scorned by the other children, never really fitting in and finally collapsing when the stress became too much for me. I am very happy for your daughter that she discovered her true identity so much faster than I did, and thankful to you for what you have done for her so far. I am merely saying that you can do so much more. Good. Please remember it. It would be best if you could internalise that, too, for it would make your life with her much happier and it would make her happier, too. Mostly from all the other trans people I know who have all experienced similar events or worse. <sigh> My friend Sandra Bond consistently got misgendered by her parents and suffered as a result. She attempted suicide at least once. These are experiences common to trans people. They are not mine alone. Of course that means that I am projecting ALL of our experiences on her... but since she herself has studied us and proclaimed herself one of us, I feel that I have at least some justification in doing so. Of COURSE she was! I was not accusing you and I apologise if I came across like that. We are all a product of our culture and we live, breathe, eat and drink it on a daily basis. That is the entire basis for why so many trans people have so many problems because our culture has little or no room at all for us in its conception. It was not accusations. It was statement of fact. You cannot help your internalised homophobia and transphobia. They have been spoonfed to you since childhood. So were mine. I had equally wrongful ideas when I grew up and they nearly destroyed me. For that matter, I also happened to have heaping amounts of internalised misogyny, racism, religious intolerance, nationalism and not least ableism. It may help to think of it this way: 'internalised prejudices' are the ones we do not think about because we were taught never to question them. Just like a mere eight hundred years ago we would have been taught that the Earth was flat and the centre of the Universe, and we wouldn't have questioned that, either. Until we got really good reason to do so, of course, and even then it is by no means certain that we would have been able to reject the ideas that formed the foundation of our childhood. And that is another problem. These sites do exist but they are bewildering and confusing and they are not conveniently organised. I fully respect your troubles because I have similar issues myself; you merely have the additional handicap of not having the personal experience that guides you to, "Yes, this rings true." I suggest you ask your daughter to help you, if you haven't already. Or, if you wish, I can tell you what my own father and I have experienced once we have worked on it a bit more. I admit that is taking a liberty, but I hope it won't offend you. I apologise if it does. Absolutely. I agree with the above from your point of view -- I have seen it from the other side and I do not in any way impute malice or ill will to you. But by the same token, remember that she is very likely equally frustrated because what seems so obvious to her is so hard for her to explain to you. I am not going to say this with any kind of certainty for in this case I am projecting, but it sounds to me as if she is far more angry at the situation than she is at you. I have no idea if that helps any, though. Quite true. Just remember, trans experiences are as valid to us as cis experiences are to you. The big problem is that there is an immense disparity in the social power of cis and trans people, which means that when you hurt us even unintentionally, the differential in power amplifies that hurt. You cannot help that, of course. It is just another facet of the situation. Me, too. But at the end of the day results are what matters. <sigh> I understand that feeling from having felt it myself. It's just that in my experience when I have it, I have been wrong in a lot of cases. And when someone's life and happiness is at stake, it is not a good time to be wrong. All of these are possible. I have gone through all of them myself. I have come within an inch of destroying myself from doing exactly these things and only the support and trust of very good friends saved me from it. The number of trans suicides seems to hint at not all trans people being as fortunate as me. I am sorry.

Maybe it is just some sort of advertisement mania. God knows Denmark has seen a lot of very odd things happen during our various "Buy Danish" frenzies. I mean, seriously? "Buy Danish bananas"? Where in Denmark do these banana plantations lie, and why did I never hear of them before?

I wanna live in your universe. Hovering sounds cool. Also flying for no aerodynamic reason. Wait, what? I meant relatively to the cartoons. Note that there are plenty of stuff which fly for other reasons than aerodynamic - in case you probably refer to, the reason is obviously magic. (Hovering is easy. There is nonzero probability you will hover just due to random Brownian motion. Ok, it's VERY small probability but it's nonzero .)

This is one of the oldest game traps I think the Boss Circe would pull this stunt on the original Odyssey system

The old Doom clone Hexen had the Porculator, which would turn an enemy into a pig.

Saw my podiatrist for the umpteenth time yesterday. My right foot has started forming a callous once more and it's painful to the touch in the same spot where the ulcer and metal splinter once were. I also reported pain in the ball of my big toe when I walk barefoot/in socks. The doctor shaved down the callous and put an order for an MRI into gear. I go in for that on Wednesday of next week. Something is causing this thing to repeatedly erupt, and damn it, we're going to get to the root of the matter.

I feel that a huge opportunity has been missed by not making magic dildos. Two drums and a cymbal roll off a cliff. Bah dumm tish.

For a long time, the wearing of glasses was a convenient clue to let us know Tedd was in "Mad Scientist" mode The foundation of all I know and believe to be true is built upon rocks that are eroding away

The pirate would take out 99 of the ninja, but the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu tells us that the 100th ninja would be badass enough to take on a whole ship full of pirates. (Unknown if pirates get to get better the fewer of them there are left or not, though....)