Discussion and Debate Community Thread

[Lord Thesaurian]

Interesting take

Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.

The reason inheritance often seems to be blending—the reason we seem to be a mixture of paternal with maternal, and the reason racial intermarriage leads to a spectrum of intermediates—is polygenes. Though every gene is particulate, lots of genes each contribute their own small effect to, for example, skin colour. And all these small effects together add up to what looks intermediate. It isn’t really like mixing paint but it looks that way if enough particulate polygenes sum up their small effects. If you mix beads it looks that way too, if the beads are small, numerous and viewed from a distance.

Anyway, the point that is relevant to this essay is that particulate, Mendelian, all-or-none, non-blending inheritance was staring Darwin, and Jenkin, and everybody else in the face. It was staring them in the face all along, in the form of the non-blending inheritance of sex. Sex is pretty damn binary. Male versus female is one of surprisingly few genuine dichotomies that can justly escape censure for what I have called “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind.”

https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/...y-damn-binary/

[Ludicus]

Project GG-21: “All volunteer deaths will be promptly reported, usually within 48 h of the PI being notified to the Georgian Military Hospital and WRAIR”
Project UP-8: All deaths of study participants should be reported within 24 h"
Fake news, I think- biological experiments










I find that hard to believe. There must be a reasonable explanation: Russia propaganda. Who is Dilyana Gaytandzhieva? Bulgarian Paper Fires Journalist Who Exposed Baku's -Armenian National Commitee of America

The Bulgarian Trud Daily newspaper has fired Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, the journalist, who last month published an expose about Azerbaijan’s support for terrorists, reporting that 350 Azerbaijani diplomatic flights carry weapons for terrorists... I’m going to set up my on on-line media, because no one in Bulgaria will now agree to publish my investigations. I will not be offered job in Bulgarian media. So I think about establishing my own media, this is the solution,” the journalist concluded.

-Merged with the chat thread, as the OP lacks a sufficient basis for discussion. ~Abdülmecid I

[Sar1n]

I think that's just dishonest reporting.

Even a contract about part-time job at McDonald's will have a clause regarding workplace injury or death. I know mine had, back when I worked there during my studies. This is the same thing.

[Gigantus]

The 'expose' linked at the bottom is 5 years old. Given the dishonest reporting (agree with Sar1n here) of the 'biological experiments', it looses a lot, if not all credibility.

[Ludicus]

The 'expose' linked at the bottom is 5 years old.

After a quick search,

Ukrainian pro-Kremlin media published an “investigation” suggesting that the Pentagon conducted biological experiments on 4,400 Ukrainian and 1,000 Georgian soldiers. According to the story, the experiment measured antibodies against Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and the hantavirus. This narrative is a continuation of a widely disproven conspiracy theory dating back many years, while the article itself is based on a debunked 2018 story published by a Bulgarian journalist with Russian ties.
—Roman Osadchuk,, DFRLab Research Associate, Kyiv

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

The year is till fresh and we have already a absolut senseless crime in my country:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Germany: Police arrest suspects after deadly shooting

Two police officers were shot dead earlier on Monday during a traffic stop. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the killings as tantamount to an execution.

German police arrested two suspects on Monday following the fatal shooting of two young police officers.
Special forces officers arrested a 38-year-old man in Sulzbach in the western state of Saarland following a wide manhunt. Another man, aged 32, was later arrested in the same area without resistance. The arrests took place about 37 kilometers (over 20 miles) from the scene of the shooting.

The suspects will be questioned to "reveal if there are other perpetrators," according to a police spokesman.
Earlier on Monday, a 24-year-old policewoman and her 29-year-old male colleague were shot dead in the district of Kusel, near Kaiserslautern, after a traffic stop.
Before dying, they were able to radio to colleagues, saying "They're shooting." They had reportedly seen dead game in the vehicle they had pulled over.
Police said in a statement that the 38-year-old had not made any statements on the matter and will be brought before the investigating judge on Tuesday.
Both suspects are reportedly German citizens. Police did not offer any motive for the killings. Weapons were seized during their searches.
The 38-year-old gave himself up willingly after contacting police through his lawyer. He was known to authorities after once fleeing the scene of an accident and having a weapons permit. He was described as a trader of wild game.
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the killings as tantamount to an execution.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a post on Twitter: "I am deeply saddened by what happened in Kusel. My sympathies go out to the families of the two young victims. And I am thinking of the many police officers who risk their lives every day to protect us citizens. We must quickly clarify the background to the crime."
Violent police deaths are rare in Germany. In response to the killings, flags were flying at half-staff in the state.

Germany: Police arrest suspects after deadly shooting | News | DW | 31.01.2022

For the poaching the two would have get a max 1-2 years at probation.

Now with killing to disclosure the poaching they will get a life sentence high likely without chance of probation because of murder in first degree.

[PointOfViewGun]

Let's not break habit and post the picture of the suspect:



Named Andreas Johannes Schmitt.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

A shocking average looking guy from the neighbour house.

Edit: The police get very quick on their track, as one of them lost his passport at the crime scene.

[Lord Thesaurian]

When Democrats talk about packing SCOTUS, abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, it’s because this system obstructs their political domination, and they seek to destroy it. Never forget what’s at stake.

[Sir Adrian]

Republican policies have always struck me as just stupid, greedy or stupid greedy mixed with a hefty dose of callousness, but democrats come across as actively malicious.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

The entirety of the American political spectrum is possibly irreversibly ed because the media and first past the post system has slowly pushed polarization and extremism of the fringes to the mainstream over the past several decades, and both political parties are incentivized to constantly change the rules to ensure that nothing can stop this trend rather than risk rocking the boat and losing power.

[Heathen Hammer]

Its not a bug, its a feature:
"You don't wanna vote for me? Well my fellow boomer opponent here is slightly more to the opposite of what you believe in, so I guess you have no choice!" - representative "democracy" in the nutshell.
The system is set up in this way exactly for that reason - to prevent citizens from getting in the way of what corporate elites want.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

The system, at least the de jure parts and not the de facto parts that are unwritten and arose over decades and centuries, is not inherently ed. It’s just that historically gerrymandering and enforcement of the duopoly via rule changes and propaganda didn’t occur/wasn’t as effective to the extent it is now. If Democrats really were afraid of the immense dangers of Republicans like they say then they wouldn’t have helped massively restructure the system post-Perot to basically make it impossible for a third party to ever rise up and replace a major party that has failed to represent a major percentage of the voters’ interests any longer. Ranked choice and reducing the requirements for minor parties to be given matching federal funding and being included in debates to pre-92 requirements would massively increase the chances of parties being elected that represent the electorate rather than the electorate buying into “lesser of two evils” fallacy and constantly lowering the bar, but this would never happen because both parties are incentivized to radicalize their base and have a boogie man rather than risk splitting their own base and losing their job creating a system that enables successful third parties

[Heathen Hammer]

It was originally "meant to work" in 1800s, when only property owners could vote. As voting rights spread to everyone and majority of voters ended up having no stake in the system, that's when the exploit was reveled - that you can "buy" votes for welfare. Ever since that's how established parties rule - making (usually fake) promises to increase everyone's living standards and safety net, while passing more direct laws that benefit the rich elites at the expense of everyone else.

[Prodromos]

https://providencemag.com/2021/06/tears-father-day/

Military historian Sir John Keegan authoritatively wrote in The Face of Battle that the best fate of any prisoner in World War II was to be a German taken captive by Americans.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

Military historian Sir John Keegan authoritatively wrote in The Face of Battle that the best fate of any prisoner in World War II was to be a German taken captive by Americans.

Anglo-american propaganda historians.

The truth:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Rheinwiesenlager (German: [ˈʁaɪnˌviːzn̩ˌlaːɡɐ], Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany by the U.S. Army to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War. Officially named Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), they held between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel from April until September 1945.
Prisoners held in the camps were designated disarmed enemy forces, not prisoners of war. This decision was made in March 1945 by SHAEF commander in chief Dwight D. Eisenhower: by not classifying the hundreds of thousands of captured troops as POWs, the logistical problems associated with accommodating so many prisoners of war mandated by the Geneva Convention governing their treatment were negated.
Most estimates of German deaths in these camps range from 3,000 to 6,000. Many of these died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinwiesenlager

The Biscari massacre:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_massacre

The Chenogne massacre: On 1 January 1945, members of the 11th Armored Division executed 80 Wehrmacht soldiers.^[57]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenogne_massacre

The Jungholzhausen massacre:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungholzhausen_massacre

The Lipppach massacre: On 22 April 1945 American soldiers from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the 12th Armored Division killed 24 Waffen SS soldiers who had been taken prisoners of war in the German town of Lippach. Members of the same unit are also alleged to have raped 20 women in the town.^[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippach_massacre

In Taken by Force, J. Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,040.^[71] As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.^[72]

Although policies against fraternization were instituted for the Americans in Germany, the phrase "copulation without conversation is not fraternization" was used as a motto by United States Army troops.^[73] The journalist Osmar White, a war correspondent from Australia who served with the American troops during the war, wrote:

After the fighting moved on to German soil, there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them. The incidence varied between unit and unit according to the attitude of the commanding officer. In some cases offenders were identified, tried by court martial, and punished. The army legal branch was reticent, but admitted that for brutal or perverted sexual offences against German women, some soldiers had been shot – particularly if they happened to be Negroes. Yet I know for a fact that many women were raped by white Americans. No action was taken against the culprits. In one sector a report went round that a certain very distinguished army commander made the wisecrack, 'Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternisation.'^[74]

A typical victimization with sexual assault by drunken American personnel marching through occupied territory involved threatening a German family with weapons, forcing one or more women to engage in sex, and putting the entire family out on the street afterward.^[73]
As in the eastern sector of the occupation, the number of rapes peaked in 1945, but a high rate of violence against the German and Austrian populations by the Americans lasted at least into the first half of 1946, with five cases of dead German women found in American barracks in May and June 1946 alone.^[72]
Carol Huntington wrote that the American soldiers who raped German women and then left gifts of food for them may have permitted themselves to view the act as prostitution rather than rape. Citing the work of a Japanese historian alongside that suggestion, Huntington writes that Japanese women who begged for food "were raped and soldiers sometimes left food for those they raped."^[72]
White American soldiers in Germany were responsible for mass rapes, but the black soldiers of America's segregated occupation force were both more likely to be charged with rape and severely punished.^[72] Heide Fehrenbach writes that while the American black soldiers were in fact by no means free from indiscipline,

The point, rather, is that American officials exhibited an explicit interest in a soldier's race, and then only if he were black, when reporting behavior they feared would undermine either the status or the political aims of the U.S. Military Government in Germany.^[75]

In 2015, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that German historian Miriam Gebhardt "believes that members of the US military raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, with most of the assaults taking place in the months immediately following the US invasion of Nazi Germany. The author bases her claims in large part on reports kept by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945."^[76]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_d...ny#U.S._troops

According to an article in Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been wilfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "greatest generation" mythology surrounding World War II. However, this has recently started to change, with books such as The Day of Battle, by Rick Atkinson, in which he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Antony Beevor.^[58] Beevor's latest work suggests that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".^[59]

Historian Peter Lieb has found that many U.S. and Canadian units were ordered not to take enemy prisoners during the D-Day landings in Normandy. If this view is correct, it may explain the fate of 64 German prisoners (out of the 130 captured) who did not make it to the POW collecting point on Omaha Beach on the day of the landings.^[58]
Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert, 30 Wehrmacht prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers.^[59]
In the aftermath of the 1944 Malmedy massacre, in which 80 American POWs were murdered by their German captors, a written order from the headquarters of the 328th U.S. Army Infantry Regiment, dated 21 December 1944, stated: "No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but [rather they] will be shot on sight."^[60] Major-General Raymond Hufft (U.S. Army) gave instructions to his troops not to take prisoners when they crossed the Rhine in 1945. "After the war, when he reflected on the war crimes he authorized, he admitted, 'if the Germans had won, I would have been on trial at Nuremberg instead of them.'"^[61] Stephen Ambrose related: "I've interviewed well over 1000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner ... Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up."^[62]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ropean_theater

Please tell me more of the noble deeds of our benevolent protectors.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

Edit: I'm fully aware of the war crimes of Germany in WW II and the Allied War Crimes didn't minimize or excuse them one yota.

But i get a strong allergic reaction from "Greatest Generation" self glorification or putting the US on a podium as prime example for humanity, as it happens very often by US "patriots".

[irontaino]

As Afghanistan faces famine, Washington has decided to steal from Afghanistan's frozen reserves to pay 9/11 victims.

President Joe Biden signed an order Friday to free $7 billion in Afghan assets now frozen in the U.S., splitting the money between humanitarian aid for poverty-stricken Afghanistan and a fund for Sept. 11 victims still seeking relief for the terror attacks that killed thousands and shocked the world.

No money would immediately be released. But Biden’s order calls for banks to provide $3.5 billion of the frozen amount to a trust fund for distribution through humanitarian groups for Afghan relief and basic needs. The other $3.5 billion would stay in the U.S. to finance payments from lawsuits by U.S. victims of terrorism that are still working their way through the courts.

The entire Afghan population could reasonably be considered victims of 9/11. None of the hijackers were Afghan (they were mostly Saudi), the average Afghan wasn't even alive on 9/11 (the median age in Afghanistan is roughly 19), OBL was being harbored in Pakistan, and yet the US has saw fit to punish Afghanistan, between waging war on them for 20 years and holding their entire economy hostage/stealing from it (while, as stated before, they're in the grips of famine). Right now Afghans can't even withdraw their own money for food and medicine, this freeze is going to kill more people than 20 years of war.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

None of the hijackers were Afghan (they were mostly Saudi)

But Saudi-Arabia has paid billions by buying US arms, so they got the "You are released from prison" card.

[Lord Thesaurian]

As Afghanistan faces famine, Washington has decided to steal from Afghanistan's frozen reserves to pay 9/11 victims.

Based.

But Saudi-Arabia has paid billions by buying US arms, so they got the "You are released from prison" card.

This is false. The card officially received by the Saudi Government from the US State Department is called the “One is permitted to exit the penitentiary grounds at any time he or she or they or zhe may choose” plastic transaction wafer. It comes with 3 years 0% APR and 20,000 bonus air miles, plus a $500 cash bonus if they spend $1000 or more in the first 90 days. It’s definitely a great deal but I wouldn’t say it’s free.

Anglo-american propaganda historians.

Wow so true. Not many people know US POW camps are the same as the death camps of the Holocaust. Total hypocrisy!

Please tell me more of the noble deeds of our benevolent protectors.

The Soviet Army committed more rapes - understandable if you look at the war crimes of Germany in the UdSSR

Psh tell me about it. The Soviet rape of ~2 million German women and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Germans in Soviet prison camps was understandable; after all the Soviets were the real heroes of the war. That’s way cooler than a measly few thousand at the hands of US soldiers. Total weaksauce! That’s why what we should really be furious about 80 years later is the Americans. Why couldn’t they have just stayed home and minded their own business? Europe belongs to Russia. If the pesky British and Americans hadn’t stopped them at Berlin, the Red Army would have liberated all of Germany! Ah, what could have been….