Time to fly high the flag of the proud Island of Lesbos.

Fine. “Everyone except Evangelical Christians are welcome here.”

Define official.

Tale as old as time. The abused grow up to become the abusers.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t honor your wishes. There is no button you can click that says, “opt me out of all AI and cloud data features.” You can disable apps, buttons, and tracking today, but there will be new ones out tomorrow. And there may be a period of weeks or months of them sucking your data up before you figure out what they’re tracking and how to shut it down.

Himmler.

The real irony of all this is that the people being genocides right now in Gaza have a much closer genetic relationship to the actual human beings who wrote the Torah than those who are genociding them. We’re watching the actual descendents of the ancient Israelites being exterminated right now.

On the other hand, there have been Jewish states before modern Israel, and it always ended in tears. Maybe believing that you’re God’s chosen people inevitably causes you to act with an arrogance and belief in your own invincibilty that eventually causes your country to be destroyed. If you believe God literally wants you to have a piece of dirt, why practice good diplomacy and have good relations with your neighbors? Your only concern is keeping God happy. In the Old Testament, the Israelites suffered invasion only when they somehow let God down. With that as your cultural foundation, what does that do to your nation’s foreign policy?

Part of me really is starting to wonder if giving folks who think they’re God’s special chosen people was a terrible mistake.

The rich aren’t accessible, but their property sure is awfully flammable.

It’s not enough to reform campaign finance. We need to destroy the class of people behind this. We need to really wage class war, a class war of annihilation.

We need a national wealth cap. 1000x median household income. Anything more is taxed at 100%.

I just remove my upper layer of skin whenever it gets too hot.

I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.

Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.

I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.

This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.

Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.

Depends on the official, really.

Iran would be perfectly within their rights to assassinate various US government officials. After all, that’s exactly what the US and Israel have been doing in Iran.

Those who seek outrage will find it every time. Yes, obviously there are some trans people that don’t seek out medical transition. That’s why I said “trans people who medically transition.” But language can be overly inclusive. We don’t need to start every single writing on trans people with three paragraphs describing every exception and caveat. Obviously when you talk about a group, any group, you have to talk in generalities. If you insist on starting every comment about trans people with paragraphs of caveats and provisos, you make actually getting to the point impossible. You water down the language to the point of uselessness. At at time when trans rights are under assault on all sides, I don’t mind focusing most trans discussions on the material realities and needs of most trans folks.

Most trans people want to medically transition. Are those that don’t somehow invalid? No. But we also don’t need to start every discussion with a thousand caveats describing every sub-category within a group. There are atheist Jews and there are gay Muslims. That doesn’t mean every discussion of those faiths is centered around these rare exceptions.

Trans people transition BOTH their sex and their gender. The term “transgender” is a broad umbrella term. But most people under that label do seek to physically change their bodies. You’re arguing semantics, I’m arguing the lived experience of living breathing human beings.

Do you know what an actual scientific attempt to define races would look like?

Let’s say you wanted to scientifically define races. Instead of using subjective things like facial structure, you look at actual DNA and the groupings among populations. Let’s say we want to group humanity into a half dozen races, and to avoid bias, we do it based on some statistical analysis of DNA patterns.

You know what you would end up with? The computer would spit out that there are five racial groups represented the population of Subsaharan Africa…and one racial group representing everyone else.

The vast majority of human genetic diversity lies within Subsaharan Africa. If you tried to rationally define a list of ‘races,’ you would end up with a bunch of African racial groups and then one group for literally everyone else.

This is what people mean when they say race isn’t real. Our culturally-defined racial groups are completely unrelated to the actual diversity and distribution of human DNA patterns.

Disengaging does not help spread propaganda. Engaging and giving horrible ideas a platform does help spread propaganda.

Your “debate bro” advice is about ten years out of date.

The differences between the sexes is much less than people like to pretend. Every cell in your body has different modes it can operate in. Many, perhaps most, cells have estrogen-dominated and testosterone-dominated modes. If you change the dominant hormones in the body, every cell in the body switches between these modes. Trans people who medically transition are simply taking advantage of the body’s existing mechanism of secondary sex characteristics.

Ultimately, any person could have a male- or female- typical phenotype. If you put the right hormone injections into a fetus at the right time of pregnancy, an XY fetus would be born with a vagina and a uterus. And the opposite is true as well. These conditions sometimes happen naturally with intersex conditions. Every human body has the potential to develop along a male- or female-typical path. It’s just a matter of what hormones are passing through the body at what stage of development.

But race? There’s no comparison. Cells don’t have different expression modes that correspond to different racial phenotypes. There are no “black hormones” that a white person could take to gain many of the characteristics of black bodies. There is simply no equivalent to the medical transition process many trans people undergo. There is simply no equivalent to the fundamental rewiring of the body that occurs on a cellular level with trans medical treatments.

Well trans people, if they medically transition, quite literally change their sex.