POTF 24 - Winner and Runner Up

[Lord Thesaurian]

The winner of POTF 24 was Abdülmecid I, earning 1 competition point and 5 rep points. Well done!

Winning Post

Afghanistan Peace Talks

So, the Americans and the Taliban have signed a ceasefire agreement in Doha. According to the terms of the deal, the number of American troops stationed in the country will gradually decrease, until the last soldier leaves Afghanistan, perhaps sometime in spring 2021. In exchange, the Taliban promise to severe ties with al-Qaeda (not a particularly important clause, to be honest) and to negotiate with the government in Kabul, which they had so far refused to recognize as legitimate. It is interesting to note that the talks in Qatar included only the Taliban and the United States, as the government of Afghanistan was not invited to participate. In my opinion, although it is true that both sides made concessions, the biggest winner, at least in the long term, are the Taliban. They will be obliged to respect and follow the demands of the agreement (as confirmed by the overall reduction of violence during the latest months), as American units remain present in Afghanistan, but when the current government loses its most crucial military advantage, there would be no incentive not to violate the terms, as the balance of forces will have been dramatically changed, to the detriment of their adversaries. The United States will also probably benefit, as there will be more resources, human and material, to spend in other geopolitical fronts than the quagmire of Afghanistan, but the prospects of their allied regime there are not particularly bright.

Runners-up this week were Cookiegod, Kritias and basics. See you next time!

Runner Up Post

Police probe into 'transphobic' tweets of Miller unlawful

Akar the fact that you're trying to argue as if we were anti-gender dysphoria shows that you do not understand our view point. As far as I can see, only one here is arguing against it. Setting aside the main issue of the OP, which I just hope is a no brainer that everyone can agree with, which is that is is absolutely a bad idea and antithetical to a free society if the police shows up at people's workplace and intimidate them over having issued their political opinions, no matter what side you take on that issue - it does not follow from gender dysphoria that sex change operations are a good idea. We could also argue why the hell you'd be a second amendment guy if the whole point of the second amendment is to protect the people against the tyranny of the state (spoiler alert: Even if all the left- and right wing militias in the US banded together, they'd still have zero chance against the US armed forces), but simultaneously want the state to have control over how children are to be raised. That's a cognitive dissonance if I ever saw one. Now on to the article. Unless you believe in some weird form of a soul, EVERY PART of your identity is also reflected in your hardware. Depression, for example, is absolutely also something that can be measured in ones brain. It does not follow from that, that depressed girls and women should be encouraged or even assisted in cutting their wrists, even if that gives them short term relief. The fact that this is physically represented also says absolutely nothing about how it can or should be treated and what it means with regards to its status as a sickness or what not. E.g. getting back to the depression example I listed earlier: It absolutely is a disease, one that manifests itself physically, but you have much better chances at winning over it if the patient thinks of it as a bad habit. Because brains aren't static, but malleable. Your article has absolutely nothing adressing those points and even implies the opposite. But that's even setting aside that it's is clearly and openly arguing in bad faith: I only clicked on those two links because I wanted to see the sample size. I couldn't, because it's not mentioned in the abstract (which is not completely unusual but somewhat weird), and the articles are paywalled. But there's one thing you can see from those article: Yep, they were made by the same people. Why does it matter? Because one scientific study means practically nothing. It needs to be reproduced by different people. The writer of your article clearly knows this and therefore deliberately lies as she writes about two teams. I can almost guarantee you that the sample size will have been very small and would not be surprised at all if the data from the first study was reused. And then again, building on what I stated earlier, but also touching on what sumskilz said earlier: The human mind is NOT independent of of its body. Denial of evolution was mentioned several times in this discussion here, so let's bring that in: If you or anyone else here thinks that the approximate 150 million years our mammal ancestors have been around did pass without specialisation of males and females taking place, then you'd be completely dillusional. As you can read in sumskilz's link, the differences between the male and female brains are significant and go far beyond what minor commonalities anyone with an agenda can nitpick. Your mind is also very much under the control of your hormonal levels, which again are very much gender specific. The whole point of sex changes, both the intake of hormones and especially when operations are concerned, is that the patient is being helped in waging a war against his own body. One it can never win. Hence why they can never stop taking those hormones, and the body will revert as much as possible to its natural state as soon as treatment stops. Depressions are also absolutely genetic, which also has no impact whatsoever on it being classified as an illness. The only thing that matters is what impact this has on your life. Unlike transvestites, who are comfortable in their body, those suffering of gender dysphoria absolutely do have their lives significantly impacted even if all the social stigma is disregarded. There is, by the way, nothing whatsoever to support the popular claim that all the suicides are solely or even mainly the result of bullying. I absolutely agree with you that as far as adult people are concerned, who are well informed and of a clear mind, then they should be free to do what they want with their own money. This is hardly always the case, as this article from yesterday perfectly illustrates: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51676020

Runner Up Post

Turkey opens its borders for refugees to go to Europe.

People here focused so much on the tree and lossed sight of the forest. For decades now, political and economic centres were trying to convince us that people coming from a muslim country were dangerous for our prosperity, our culture, our very lives. And for years now those centres held up individual cases for our inspection, trying to convince us that there's a correlation between the actions of an individual to an entire group, an entire community, an entire nation, an entire religion. For decades it spread from the fringes until it became mainstream with the economic crisis in 2008. We've even seen it here on TWC; how many hundreds of threads were opened just for this cause? Well, you can kiss this time good-bye. What Erdogan did, in fact, was that he provided those centres with the example they were desparately looking for. When EU officials stand meters away from the refugees and call Greece the "shield" of Europe, when the government announces that the mass movement of people to Europe is an organized invasion, when the army and the riot police are deployed to fight those "invaders" back, the narrative of the so-called Replacement Theorists has just been leveled up from popular to politically legitimate. A quick look-see using the hastags #GreeceUnderAttack and #IstandwithGreece will inform even the deafest/blindest person about the hatred stired against peoples from muslim countries. There's no need to explain the ramifications of this development. In the near to not-so-near future the lives of millions of muslims living inside Europe and the Americas will be affected by what happens in the next few months. And if the situation goes sour, as I think it will, you can bet the treatment of these people is about to get much, much worse. For those of you doubting the involvement of the Turkish authorities in moving these people to the border under false promises that the borders have been opened, or that Turkish authorities goad and assist the refugees to storm the borders -- a quick look in the international media will convince you otherwise. I am checking DW, Reuters, TRT, Anadolu, Al Jazeera and other major stations around the globe and only a handful of journalists support that the Turkish authorities are not involved in the movement and goading of refugees to attempt to cross the borders (only the Turkish news sites refute it, which is to be expected). Several members have shown such videos circulating the news media; if you don't accept the evidence, that's your problem.- For those of you doubting that Greek forces are putting people's lives in danger in land or at sea by using (excessive) force, I would direct you to review the Greek police against the people's uprising in Syntagma during 2010. If they used excessive force on their fellow citizens, do you really believe that they would not be even more violent when they are being goaded by the government and the EU to let none pass? Or is your memory so impaired that you forgot that just two weeks ago the riot police disembarked in Chios and Lesbos in the dead of night to convince the islanders to accept even more refugees by beating them up? For those of you saying that these people are not Syrian in their majority but Afghani and Iraqi etc let me remind you that both these countries (as many others) are still very volatile regions with a lot of fighting going on. Saying that only Syrians are legitimate refugees when Afghanistan hasn't been at peace for nearly 20 years is dishonest at least. I don't know whether or not this is Erdogan strong-arming the EU into doing what he wants. Most analysts seem to believe so. I cannot decipher what he wants to do. I can only tell you that he's playing right into the game of the extreme right propagandists who, now that they can point to the Greek border, will be able to justify any amount of restriction and any cruelty on muslim people who did nothing wrong themselves. I am also concerned by the growing support of Greece's treatment of refugees by the worst elements of our and EU society. It's not an accident that just last week extreme right groups from Austria and Germany arrived on a Greek island to support the fight against the "invaders", in a perverse Spanish civil war volunteer hype. In sort: good-night, humanity.

Runner Up Post

How true is the Bible?

Akar, Since science attracts you so much why not have a look in youtube and see what John McArthur has to say on the Bible and science. I can't imagine you unable to do anything unless you have a scientific reason for doing so or how you manage an everyday type of conversation with anyone since everything has to be scientifically OK'd in your head. I mean what happens when you see a pretty girl? How do you react if she doesn't see you the same way? Yes, you have disparaged me where you might as well have called me a liar and all because I have experienced something wonderful that you haven't. You say you don't care but that is nonsense as you greatly do care because it's something you despise because you haven't experienced it. I recall quite clearly the case of little Fiona, the daughter of a Christian lady, whose eyes were so crossed that doctors said that there was nothing they could do for her anymore than what they had already tried. Her mother arranged a laying on of hands by members of the RAF fellowship which I attended and to my shame I declined being skeptical. The next morning her father stuck his head round the door of out business asking if we had heard about Fiona. She was outside in her pram and so I told Neil her father to bring her in and explain. He lifted her out of her pram and handed her to me and the first thing i saw was that her eyes were as straight as a die. Neil said that he'd just come up from the doctors where both doctors and nurses had gathered round to see what had happened. They were flabbergasted, unable to take in that a prayer to Jesus that night had corrected what they couldn't. Neil being sent down to the Falklands some time later had a marvelous conversion. Of course you'll say that is not science but I respond by saying the One Who holds science in the palm of His hand sorted it out and that evidence is now a fine young lass.

[mishkin]

Congrats Abdülmecid, not the guy I voted for but I guess his post wasn't bad either