Darth Fluffy

I'm fairly certain that this is not literally true. It seems that the significance of her work was not recognized for what it was until over a century later, when computer science was coming into its own. It is possible though, that early builder/programmers like Alan Turing knew of her work. This, thanks to Charles Babbage, the inventor of the cost overrun. (Not really, he was hardly the first. His major contribution, often underappreciated, was pushing the state of British machining technology forward.)
 
Fixed it for you.
 

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"

If it's any consolation, I don't have all the answers either. For that matter, I don't even think I have all the questions. And to be perfectly honest, my first gut reaction as soon as I meet someone who claims to have all the answers is to be very, very wary of every single word they say.

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.

This word has for a while now brought a certain cartoon to my mind. A large banner reading "Catholic Meeting" flies over a room containing several priests, nuns and a befuddled looking gentleman with horn rimmed glasses accompanied by at least a dozen cats. The poor gentleman looks at the bemused clergy and says, "Oh, I am SO sorry! I thought this was a meeting of 'Catholics Anonymous!'
Especially if it is misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted or mistranslated. Or all three. I can think of a certain quotation that originated as 'Suffer not a poisoner to live.'
A friend of mine once said "Give me a Bible and a highlighter and I can change the interpretations so they will make your hair stand on end." I believed him.
I suppose I might count as one. I am an anti-existentialist inverse solipsist. I believe that I am made up but that everything else is real.

"Just like the Bible says, assuming one hasn't read it." is frilliant! (effing brilliant)  I'm going to have to start abusing that one.

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!"
 

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!"
 

I challenge you to hypothesize an alternate point of view, that accommodates professionals with decades of experience in their fields possibly speaking the truth, and a head of state widely held to be less than competent merely attempting to cover his own ass by flinging his feces, so to speak. Try it on for size, see if it at least makes a little sense. Pretend it's an exercise in fiction, if you must.
 
I challenge you to hypothesize an alternate point of view, that accommodates professionals with decades of experience in their fields possibly speaking the truth, and a head of state widely held to be less than competent merely attempting to cover his own ass by flinging his feces, so to speak. Try it on for size, see if it at least makes a little sense. Pretend it's an exercise in fiction, if you must.
 
Google is your friend. Fox Noise is not going to spell it out for you.
 
This is a very dangerous precedent. '... both the civilian and military leadership of the Department of Defense opposed the pardons. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, and senior military leaders advised against the pardons, worrying they would “damage the integrity of the military judicial system, the ability of military leaders to ensure good order and discipline, and the confidence of U.S. allies and partners who host U.S. troops.” The secretary of defense described “a robust discussion” with the president, wanting to clearly convey the department’s and his own personal disapproval of the pardons.'
Of course, beyond the egregious undercutting his own military, there's the appalling lack of discernment.
 

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.
 

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."
 

That is very relative. I would call World War Two a method that many might consider 'too strong.' The Nazis didn't win that one, if you will recall.

This I can unfortunately relate to.
Twice, when I was very little, say just turned four, I expressed discomfort at loud sounds, one being a local parade and one being the NYC subway system during a visit. On both occasions I got smacked for giving my father a hard time. Let's just say communications skills in a youngster were not exactly a positive trait, in his view.
I've had a fairly severe high end hearing loss for most of my life, which I believe stems from these incidents, although mowing lawns with no hearing protection I'm sure contributed as well (wasn't a thing, back in the day).
(My anecdote has nothing to do with gender; the point was that parental shortsightedness can cause long term problems for the recipient.)

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 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.

Sorry, good call.

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.

If I may be perfectly honest? I am no longer really worried about any of that. My real worries go something like this.
2016: Presidential election. Big confrontation between Party A and Party B. Massive electoral interference from foreign powers, principally believed to be Russia. Russia decides they would like to own a presidential candidate, so naturally they only focus on candidates of one party.
Naaaaah. They are not stupid. They do the best they can to suborn candidates of both parties. They might or might not succeed. But this leads to...

Candidate of party A, who wins the election, is suspected of aiding and cooperating with foreign power. Whether this is true or not hardly matters. What is important is that the country is divided between those who believe it and those who do not. That, of course, was the real aim of Russia. Not installing an asset as president -- though of course that is a bonus they would not actually object to -- but to sow doubt and dissension, and suspicion of whether the election was fair.
2017+: The Russians happily stir the pot. Now it is a matter of keeping suspicion going and ideally intensifying it. Investigations are already ongoing. Carefully dangle false clues among any real ones, intimating that the situation is even worse than people think (which it, again, might or might not be -- that doesn't matter, irrelevant for this purpose.) Intimate that the president won through a swindle. When bills to strengthen election security are proposed, weaken them by implying they are only being proposed to undermine the President. Succeed well enough that no such bills get through. Again, it does not matter if the responsibile politicians are suborned or not. All that matters is that the part of the population that believes the election was stolen think they are.
The President -- whether through malice or simple unfortunate choices, again, no difference to the Russians -- makes a number of decisions that greatly benefit Russia. Trade war with China. China angrily starts to import grain from Russia instead. Constant arguments with Europe, eroding faith in NATO and harming trade. The former obviously benefits Russia; the latter, in this case, China -- which moves to get trade deals that it can convince the Europeans to give them instead. (Obviously with hook in that bait. We have already seen how China uses such deals with major companies to harm freedom of speech.) Most recently the decision to abandon the Kurds, which deals faith in NATO a near fatal wound it may never recover from.
By now everybody from Party B is firmly convinced that the President and Party A are all traitors. Again, unimportant to the Russians whether they are or not. The true objective is dividing the country.
2020: From here on I have to go into speculation. But...
Russia of course keeps trying to suborn presidential candidates. Let's say that it succeeds in the case of hypothetical candidates Sernie Banders and Welizabeth Arren, and possibly Gulsi Tabbard, too. The latter might make a useful idiot if they want a third party runner tossed into the pot for some reason. For example, Party B somehow manages to pick a candidate that isn't suborned. But for the Russians, Sernie Banders would be ideal because he already acted in ways that made him seem suspicious back in 2016.
So, either Sernie Banders or some other suborned candidate makes the grade. He runs against the President. At some convenient time -- mid-October, for example -- the Russians release a floodwave of kompromat that firmly points the finger at the President. It doesn't matter if the kompromat is genuine or not -- the angry half of the population will swallow it either way. Landslide election win for Banders. And Russia is all set for four more years of division... which, again, is what they really want. If both parties are convinced the other side are all traitors, the US will grow steadily more paralysed. Then flash forward to 2024. Second verse, same as the first, the beat don't stop.
And eventually Russia will have won another world war with many people not even realising one is being fought.
That's my nightmare scenario. If you can imagine a worse one, the Russians probably can, too, and that is the one they are really trying for.

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.

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.

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

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.

That is precisely why no sexuality is involved. You did not consent and never got a chance to. This was a brutal act of violence and had nothing to do with sex.
Claiming otherwise is to say that homosexuality includes a propensity for brutal violence -- which is of course the whole point of that homophobic talking point.
And that would still be an act of violence. Tell me, when you want to have sex with someone, does that include a desire to brutalise them? (I really hope it doesn't.)
<raises hand> I'm one.

I really appreciate your comments and insights.
Re: "out of mortal terror of what would happen" and "not out of belief, but out of fear"
That rings true; also internalized expectations of who she was and how she was to behave.
Not all that many years prior I would have been intolerant. Coincidentally, this happened at a time where my eyes had been opened. We assisted a young gay girl get through her last year of high school by providing shelter for a year. She was a delightful housemate, and for me made me rethink my outlook on LGBTQ people. Also the former customer I mentioned, who was a very competent system admin in a regional office, polite, friendly, well liked, a mentor to her younger peers, and in a committed lesbian relationship.
Re: "assigned a gender"
I wonder about the impact of chimerism. There was a horror story in Texas about a woman who lost custody of her own kids, because they "couldn't be hers", except the were. It took a long time before someone figured out they had (at least) two distinct genomes, and you'd get a different answer depending on where you took the sample. But it is unknown how widespread it is. Now, if it is far more common than is thought, a good portion may be male & female.
Re: "The number of trans suicides seems to hint at not all trans people being as fortunate as me."
Yeah, that indeed scares the $#!# out of me as a parent. Also for our other friend who is just a bit younger and similarly transitioned.
Re: "there is an immense disparity in the social power of cis and trans people" ... "the differential in power amplifies that hurt"
That makes sense. I'll watch for that.