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Serenes Forest's Teehee Thread


MisterIceTeaPeach

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22 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

So let me get this straight, the way anti-LGBT laws are not based on bigotry is because a bunch of religious people are unreasonably afraid of gay and trans people. Are you literally trying to argue that homophobia and transphobia aren't bigotry.

It was not unreasonable fear.

In the mid '80s, your kid coming out as gay was equivalent to them playing a round of Russian roulette. Chances were pretty good they'd be dead from a certain disease within 5-10 years. Even when treatment became available it was prohibitively expensive for many. They also had a dramatically heightened risk of heroin and cocaine abuse, thus of dying from heroin or cocaine overdose.

These were tangible fears that a non-religious parent, who had no belief in an eternal Heaven or an eternal Hell, might've had, or might still have today given that none of this truly went away. Nobody wanted their child to be gay, and it was commonly feared that the gay rights movement might influence their child to go down that path.

22 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Skipped over a lot of less defensible laws being passed there, like those making it illegal to crossdress in public (which have been used to arrest trans people for simply being in public already)

I haven't kept up with this, but my assumption is these are old laws which haven't been repealed yet but probably will in the next decade or so.

22 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

or those restricting medical access to transgendered people for instance.

So far as I know, the only serious proposals have been to restrict it for minors. Doesn't sex reassignment surgery include castration, which sterilizes the patient for life? Having children is a tremendously important and universal part of the human experience; I get that not everyone will reproduce, but it's not something a kid who doesn't really know what their future selves will want should be allowed to flippantly throw away forever. A little time to mature, and be sure about their decision before they do it, seems prudent to me.

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Even the ref's had enough of the dramatic falls XD

Hopefully the game's faster in the second bit of extra time, it's cruelly been kinda boring ngl

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It will go to penalties, isn't it?

---

Oh, the map is the same one V used for the Ange meets Tusk scenario. Interesting.

Anyway, once attacking the "boss" dragon, or perhaps a few turns in, Ange rushes over for the kill. However, the dragon paralyzes Villkiss due to its gravity control. The party worries they can't get near to help... except Simon of course. After all, who the hell you think he is!? He drills underground and strikes the dragon from underneath, disrupting its gravity well. Just then, Tusk shows up, covering for Ange to escape and destroy the dragon's horns. Ah, now the usage of the map makes sense. The Arzenal Para-Mails show up, and Tusk takes his leave. Apparently Nemo had already contacted Jill beforehand and asked for support, huh. However, more dragons show up now, with Salamandinay in tow. Still with a shadowed portrait. Well, let's go...

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4 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Well, spoke too soon!

The commentators on the network I'm on said "it seems like extra time will just be a formality" just thirty seconds before the goal XD

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4 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

In the mid '80s, your kid coming out as gay was equivalent to them playing a round of Russian roulette. Chances were pretty good they'd be dead from a certain disease within 5-10 years. Even when treatment became available it was prohibitively expensive for many. They also had a dramatically heightened risk of heroin and cocaine abuse, thus of dying from heroin or cocaine overdose.

How is this questionably reasonable fear from the mid '80s justification for laws being passed today?

 

24 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

 might still have today given that none of this truly went away.

It is treatable, impacts people regardless of sexual orientation, and the weird drug argument is utter hogwash. Anyone holding this fear now is unreasonable.

26 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Nobody wanted their child to be gay, and it was commonly feared that the gay rights movement might influence their child to go down that path.

While this fear is as unreasonable as believing that beating left handed children successfully prevented them from being left handed.

 

2 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

So far as I know, the only serious proposals have been to restrict it for minors. Doesn't sex reassignment surgery include castration, which sterilizes the patient for life? Having children is a tremendously important and universal part of the human experience; I get that not everyone will reproduce, but it's not something a kid who doesn't really know what their future selves will want should be allowed to flippantly throw away. A little time to mature, and be sure about their decision before they do it, seems prudent to me.

Restricting it in adults has already passed in Florida last I heard (with other states working on their own version), although the version restricting minors is already being challenged in the courts there as unconstitutional, so who knows how that will end up with this supreme court. Additionally medical procedures as extreme as those you described were already not allowed for minors, the new restrictions are on the less invasive options like puberty blockers, and hormone replacement therapy, both of which do not sterilize the patient, and have minimal impact of reproductive capabilities if treatment is stopped.

 

15 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

I haven't kept up with this, but my assumption is these are old laws which haven't been repealed yet but probably will in the next decade or so.

Not all of them, the one I am thinking of where they used to justify arresting trans people on walking along the street was certainly a new one, with one state senator being censored for pointing out that this result might be a legitimate concern if the law passed...

 

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Haha, even though Salamandinay is still meant to be unknown, her cut-in portrait still shows her without.

Once beaten, Salamandinay prepares to leave again. Or so it seems, instead having lured Ange into a trap. It also comes to my attention that she calls the mech Bilkis? It doesn't look like a mistranslation since it is Villkiss everywhere else, and it's fairly consistent only Sal is "saying" it that way. Did V had this? I'll admit I don't remember. Anyway, Sal prepares to strike, but Wataru gets in the way, which does makes Sal back off and flee. Well, he is the Savior, which makes Nemo take note she too may know about the legend. Meanwhile, Ange still wonders about both knowing the song and... ah, they do point out the pronunciation difference. Phew, thought it was a translation issue there for a moment.

With no enemies left, the Para-Mails intend to take Ange and Vivian into custody, though Ange takes responsibility for the two. The OG intercedes on her behalf, though, using their Keepers of Order creed. Just, shhh that they deserted, mkay? Not that the squad cares, apparently. So now Nemo pulls rank that he is now Ange's superior and... mentions one Alektra? Hmm? Just then, Jill calls the Para-Mails, ordering them to comply. So now the group is heading to Arzenal. All this now makes Ange curious on just who Nemo is... and admittedly, so am I. I know some stuff already from looking up the series, but what else is SRW X doing with him? Unknown so far for me! More so since Salia muses Alektra is Jill's real name, so how does he know?

Now at Arzenal, seems like with Sumeragi back in V, Jill is handing over command of the 1st Squadron to Nemo here in X. He and Jill discuss about the one pulling Gargoyle's strings, and thus they share a common enemy. Knowing things, it's definitely Embryo. Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, things are off to a rocky start between the 1st Squadron and X-Cross. Hmhmhm... and thus the map ends...

Alright, enough for tonight. Will continue tomorrow.

Edited by Acacia Sgt
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1 hour ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I generally subscribe to the idea that "those that don't know history are doomed to repeat it", and the failed coup attempt on Jan 6 is giving a lot of Beer Hall Putsch vibes to it, and I think you need to review history if you think he will not try again with greater success.

Fun fact, Hugo Chavez attempted a military takeover of Venezuela like a decade before he ran for president. Thrown in jail, later pardoned. 

Because of him, Venezuela went from one of South America's richest countries to one of it's poorest and both he and his successor had/have power for more than 10 years now. Venezuela once had a single term limit of five years. Chavez won and changed it in 1999 to two terms of six years then in 2009, he was able to just outright abolish the term limit because he really wanted to keep being President after his third term ended in 2013 (when the constitution was changed the first time, it caused early reelections). 2013 was also the year he died so he ended up pulling an FDR in the sense that he won a fourth term then died like two months into it.

1 hour ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Hell I even agree that not all conservatives are hate mongering bigots trying to bring about fascist rule in America, but Trump is one of those that is.

The Republican party is split in two. On one hand, you have actual conservatives. On the other hand, you have whatever the fuck MAGA is. And it's the latter that has taken control of the party.

Mind you, i think every nation does need a healthy dose of conservatism, because having an opposing viewpoint never hurts. The problem is when the opposing viewpoint becomes violent, which is what we see with MAGA.

I mean not too long ago, Republican leaders, Trump included, made fun of Nancy Pelosi's husband after he was attacked with a hammer. But now it's "God protected Donald Trump" even though that bullet went into the brain of an audience member. God didn't protect that guy i guess.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

The 20th century culture war was driven by a mix of religious people who feared the normalizing of LGBT would create a difficult and unaccommodating society for themselves and their children to live in (I'd argue recent history has proven them right, and it goes back to the whole "conflicting interests" bit)

Who threw the stones first?

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

The likes of suburban moms are a stabilizing force in our society, because in elections they help vote down the guy who comes across as more unhinged than his counterpart.

Trump still won the first time dawg (granted it's because we have the worst electoral system of the modern world).

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Present day anti-LGBT laws are basically of two kinds: keeping queer literature out of children's spaces and keeping trans women out of cis women's restrooms. Neither approaches the level of fascist targeting of minority groups, and it's merely a lesser continuation of the aforementioned culture war.

Why are they keeping queer literature out of children's spaces? And i'm not talking about the overly sexual stuff, i'm talking about literature where gay people just exist.

That first one you realize has led to several book bans already, not just for queer stuff but basically anything that parents don't like. Banning books in general is already a fascist move.

The bathroom bans also target minority groups, as it's safer for trans people to use the bathroom that matches their gender. Also, notice how the talking points are about trans women specifically. Trans men basically don't exist here. So this whole thing loops back around to targeting women.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

is that no-fault divorce made it "too easy" for couples to give up on their marriage, which created a generation of kids who grew up being shuffled between one parent's residence and the other, and didn't get to take a conventional household for granted.

That's for the individuals to decide. The state shouldn't get to dictate who can and can't get divorced.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

You're talking about that one rally?

"That one rally" he said

Spoiler

nazi.JPG

16941228283241.jpg

Two different examples from Florida. Not a word from DeSantis.

And keep in mind, this shit was barely seen before Trump came in. Not that they didn't exist but Nazis understood that if they showed their face, they'll be slammed into the pavement. But now, they're out and about and no one's really there to do anything about it.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

For many people, it's because the Confederate soldiers were literally their ancestors,

And people in Germany and Argentina today are descended from SS officers yet you don't see them idolizing the Nazis. Well there's AfD but they got banned like five times for being Nazis in disguise iirc.

Also, the Confederacy was a mere blip. It lasted five seconds. The country only existed in a time of war and was dissolved at the conclusion of that war. It was born and died within the same generation, so being proud of "Confederate ancestors" is really strange.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

and because holding off the Feds for 4 years is still a source of immense regional pride to many Southerners to this day,

And why were they holding off the feds for four years?

53 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Alas many are new enough that these are still working their way through the courts, so we will see how many of these awful things stick...

A lot of them will get struck down but the problem is that the courts take a while so at the end of the day, these laws are put in limbo and waste everyone's time.

DeSantis trying to ban gay people for the 50th time when he could be doing something about the insurance crisis instead. Abbot really cares about where he stands on the "trans debate" but when Huston gets hit by a cat 5 hurricane, he fucks off to Asia.

35 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Chances were pretty good they'd be dead from a certain disease within 5-10 years.

Yeah that's because when AIDS was spreading, Reagan didn't do shit about it until the end of his presidency.

39 minutes ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Doesn't sex reassignment surgery include castration, which sterilizes the patient for life?

Not all of it. I think it depends.

And of course, to this extent it was already not allowed on minors, the stuff being banned is the less invasive stuff.

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8 hours ago, Lightcosmo said:

As long as hate and revenge exist in people, this wont suddenly just "go away".

Bullying is going to sadly be a part of life, i hate it as well, but I would never hurt another human being over it.

Then you shall be condemned to a life of watching the bully beat others to death, doing nothing to stop it while believing that everything in the world is as it should be.

2 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

The 20th century culture war was driven by a mix of religious people who feared the normalizing of LGBT would create a difficult and unaccommodating society for themselves and their children to live in (I'd argue recent history has proven them right, and it goes back to the whole "conflicting interests" bit), and the likes of suburban moms who instinctively feared that which the prevailing culture deemed abnormal. The latter group would've been as opposed to, say, a nudist rights movement. The likes of suburban moms are a stabilizing force in our society, because in elections they help vote down the guy who comes across as more unhinged than his counterpart. They crave normalcy and moderation and we need that. But this fear of the abnormal isn't always necessarily helpful, I'll admit.

Present day anti-LGBT laws are basically of two kinds: keeping queer literature out of children's spaces and keeping trans women out of cis women's restrooms. Neither approaches the level of fascist targeting of minority groups, and it's merely a lesser continuation of the aforementioned culture war.

"You know when you really think about it, the Nazi's weren't really racist they were just brought up by centuries old anti-semitism that just casually prevailed in Europe at the time, and hey, lots of Jewish families were involved in the banking industry so of course they would fear them and the influence they might've had, it's just reasonable."

Do you see how this methodology fails. Just because someone has a reason for bigotry doesn't mean it's reasonable, especially if it ends up hurting real people.

Also I would love to know what your definition of "normalcy" is and why it is a standard we should adhere to as if 50 years ago it wasn't totally acceptable to say that you would hate it if your daughter brought home a negro.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

It was not unreasonable fear.

In the mid '80s, your kid coming out as gay was equivalent to them playing a round of Russian roulette. Chances were pretty good they'd be dead from a certain disease within 5-10 years. Even when treatment became available it was prohibitively expensive for many. They also had a dramatically heightened risk of heroin and cocaine abuse, thus of dying from heroin or cocaine overdose.

I guarantee that the last thing a family in the 80s would be thinking to their kid coming out as gay would be "Oh no, my son is going to have so much anal gay sex that he'll get aids and die."

The fact that you're willing to accept the general political climate's opinion at the time (Which was, to put simply, "Don't be gay, it's bad obviously.") is extremely telling.

 

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2 hours ago, Armagon said:

Who threw the stones first?

Not a particularly helpful question. Both sides have their own interpretation of "who started" the culture war.

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

Why are they keeping queer literature out of children's spaces? And i'm not talking about the overly sexual stuff, i'm talking about literature where gay people just exist.

As mentioned above, the idea is that exposing children to queer literature raises their future likelihood of being gay. An idea that has merit, if this statistic is any indicator:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adults-identify-lgbtq-national-survey-finds-rcna135510

Suffice to say, this is not what the situation looked like 40 years ago. And there's no reason to think that in a typical human population in nature, genetics would cull 30 percent of its members from the breeding pool due to one factor alone every single generation. The cause of this is most definitely social and cultural.

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

That first one you realize has led to several book bans already, not just for queer stuff but basically anything that parents don't like. Banning books in general is already a fascist move.

Angry parents have been banning books from libraries for like 50-100 years. If that's fascism, you and I were both already born into fascism, as were your parents before you. And whatever the ethics of library censorship, it's virtually a non-issue in 21st century America, when anyone can visit a bookstore or order a copy from Amazon or download an e-book. Why this issue gets so much attention is beyond me.

 

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

The bathroom bans also target minority groups, as it's safer for trans people to use the bathroom that matches their gender.

Most self-identified trans people have not surgically transitioned. In terms of safety, it's very much safer for them to use the bathroom of their birth sex.

And whatever the ethics of bathroom bans, it was already illegal (or otherwise not advisable) for trans people in most places to use the bathroom of the opposite biological sex. Fighting to keep the status quo in place does not equal actively marching toward fascism.

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

That's for the individuals to decide. The state shouldn't get to dictate who can and can't get divorced.

Sure. But if you wanted to know the reason for said position, I gave it.

 

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

And keep in mind, this shit was barely seen before Trump came in...But now, they're out and about and no one's really there to do anything about it.

I live in a solid red state and have never once seen anybody I knew to be a neo-Nazi, much less a demonstration full of them. If there's been an uptick in their activity in recent years, they're still a tiny, tiny movement and will remain so.
 

Quote

 

Not that they didn't exist but Nazis understood that if they showed their face, they'll be slammed into the pavement.

 

Okay, you lost me there. However atrocious the ideas a neo-Nazi is thinking of in his head, if you're out there doing physical violence and he's not then I'm gonna think you have zero moral superiority to him.

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

And people in Germany and Argentina today are descended from SS officers yet you don't see them idolizing the Nazis.

I dispute this comparison. The Confederates fought a war on their own soil to preserve a status quo they inherited from centuries back, and which they were all raised to believe was moral and they looked to the Haitian slave revolt from 60 years back and thought they and their families would all be slaughtered if the slaves were freed, whereas the Nazis one day attacked everyone and turned a peaceful Europe into a living hell for basically no reason. Don't get me wrong. The Confederates were still doing harm by resisting abolition, but it's not the same thing.

 

Anyway, you wanted to know why, and I answered.

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

Also, the Confederacy was a mere blip. It lasted five seconds. The country only existed in a time of war and was dissolved at the conclusion of that war.

Fair enough, but the same could be said of many wars: fairly brief but the effort by one's own side may be celebrated and commemorated centuries later.

 

2 hours ago, Armagon said:

Yeah that's because when AIDS was spreading, Reagan didn't do shit about it until the end of his presidency.

Here's the story of AZT, the first antiviral treatment for HIV. It took the FDA 20 months, which apparently was a "record" at the time, to approve the drug for use in treating HIV.

https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/

No indication that Reagan did anything to slow this process down. And it's normal for these cures to be developed by the private sector, this being the approach in 2020 when Covid hit. Additionally, there was a statistic floating around back during Covid that a vaccine takes about 5 years to develop. AIDS hitting around 1981 and the drug hitting market in 1987 doesn't sound unusual. Yes, the drug did exist prior, but it'd fallen into obscurity and it took people time to figure out what'd work against this virus they knew very little about.

Beside that, you're talking like HIV was some natural phenomenon that just spread naturally. We both know, and people knew at the time, what the risk factors for the disease are, and despite knowing this an entire community made no adjustments to their lifestyle to curb its spread.

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37 minutes ago, GuardianSing said:

I guarantee that the last thing a family in the 80s would be thinking to their kid coming out as gay would be "Oh no, my son is going to have so much anal gay sex that he'll get aids and die."

I'm positive that many parents did worry about this.

But also, many if not most people have what's called "skittish" ethics, as opposed to "eager" ethics. They don't look at the trolley problem and say "Well, 1 person would die but 10 would be saved so what's the issue?". In these situations they have an intuitive sense that they don't have all the pieces of this puzzle, even if they can't place their finger on what's wrong. This article explains the concept.

 

https://meltingasphalt.com/eager-vs-skittish-utilitarianism/

 

When they see something that's considered abnormal by mainstream society, they hold off on lending it their unconditional approval if they don't fully understand why it's abnormal. So it was when the gay community sprung up. HIV and rampant drug use among the community vindicated these hazy suspicions after the fact (if nothing else, the gay community of the '80s had a toxic culture that needed fixing), but skittishness by its nature is there before any proof rears its head.

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2 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

It is treatable,

Yes, and so is prostrate cancer. That doesn't mean there's a negligible difference between living with it vs. living without it.

Quote

 

impacts people regardless of sexual orientation

 

So I guess there's no difference between driving sober and driving drunk because I could die in a car accident while sober?

In 2021 a whopping 71% of new HIV cases were attributable to male-on-male sexual contact. 7% were "among people who inject drugs", leaving just 22% caused by straight sex.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/data-research/facts-stats/index.html

Quote

 

and the weird drug argument is utter hogwash.

 

Per a 2012 figure, gay and transgender Americans are up to 3x as likely to smoke tobacco as their straight counterparts, a whopping 25% abuse alcohol (compared to 5-10%), and gay men are 12.2x more likely to use amphetamines and 9.5x more likely to use heroin than straight men.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-the-gay-and-transgender-population-experiences-higher-rates-of-substance-use/

This definitely does not look like "hogwash" to me. I'll add that we live in an age where any street drug can be laced with fentanyl, and higher and higher volumes of what's sold are so contaminated. I expect that as the death toll of the ongoing opioid crisis continues to mount, the LGBT community will be disproportionately represented in this area.

 

Whether the culture war has had the slightest bearing whatsoever on the actual number of gay people is one question. But as for why loving parents to this day would prefer that their kids not be gay, I think the answer is pretty clear.

 

2 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Restricting it in adults has already passed in Florida last I heard

Alright, if true then that doesn't sound reasonable.

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....Well I slept through some arguments.

Too tired to read through it all, just replying to the stuff I was noting last night.

39 minutes ago, Armagon said:

>England's domestic abuse rate rises by 32% whenever England loses a soccer match

Good thing they're not as shit as us, that's a depressing stat.

31 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

The important things for the pharaoh were that their body be preserved and their name endure forever. The consequences of either thing failing, IDK.

Egyptian religion, though a cultural monolith that endured for thousands of years, was not immune to change (Amun for instance didn't become important until the New Kingdom, prior to that Amun-Ra was just Ra). As time went on, mummification and things like the Book of the Dead became available for more and more of society, I think. The Pyramids of Giza were Fourth Dynasty in the Old Kingdom, very early, when things were more pharaoh-centric. This earlier era may have been bigger on "pharaoh's afterlife provides for his subjects' eternal survival".

As for offerings, a pharaonic mortuary temple (where priests would venerate the deceased pharaoh) alongside a splendid tomb was common, going all the way from the Old to the New Kingdoms. When pyramid construction declined later in the Old Kingdom, more impressive temples were a kind of monumental compensation.

Also, I believe that concerns about subjects not being willing to work in the afterlife were addressed through small clay(?) dolls placed in the tombs. In the afterlife, they would come alive and do their owner's bidding. As for the questions of subjects surviving the dangers of the night and the weighing of the heart, well I just assumed every pharaoh would've been optimistic about enough of their subjects getting through.😅

Considering a good amount of Pharaohs have since been mostly forgotten, I wonder if we've seen the consequences already.

True, not immune, though it wasn't always quiet about resisting change (see the Aten mess). Now as to the preservation of the common soul, well I don't have the egyptology degree to dig into details on that.

Plenty enough Pharaohs that I could see the land dotted with them. And imagine if it were still around how many there'd be!

Oh look, they had golems prepped

19 minutes ago, Armagon said:

Also my condolences to the 18-20 year olds who come to the bars to watch the game only to find out they legally can't drink here.

  Will FIFA pull the shit they did in Brazil and insist you can sell beer to them?

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1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

As mentioned above, the idea is that exposing children to queer literature raises their future likelihood of being gay. An idea that has merit, if this statistic is any indicator:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adults-identify-lgbtq-national-survey-finds-rcna135510

Suffice to say, this is not what the situation looked like 40 years ago. And there's no reason to think that in a typical human population in nature, genetics would eliminate 30 percent of its members from the breeding pool every single generation. The cause of this is most definitely social and cultural.

image.png?ex=66961a40&is=6694c8c0&hm=79d

Yeah, okay bud.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

I dispute this comparison. The Confederates fought a war on their own soil to preserve a status quo they inherited from centuries back, and which they were all raised to believe was moral and they looked to the Haitian slave revolt from 60 years back and thought they and their families would all be slaughtered if the slaves were freed

Their own soil, the soil that was inhabited prior to European invasion for centuries, then stolen and ethnically cleansed for the then new owners of the land to exploit the land for plantations driven by people treated as property. That was the status quo.

image.png?ex=66961f70&is=6694cdf0&hm=dc5tumblr_inline_oqway7gxA21qfkvv8_1280.jpgtumblr_inline_oqwavoPeRg1qfkvv8_1280.jpg

This was the status quo that the rich planter class perpetuated and fought the bloodiest war on North American soil to keep, over an election no less.

Perhaps you should be thinking about what the slaves were feeling during this status quo.

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Angry parents have been banning books from libraries for like 50-100 years. If that's fascism, you and I were both already born into fascism, as were your parents before you.

Congrats, you figured it out. You wont believe how much inspiration Hitler took from the USA.

2 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Whereas the Nazis one day attacked everyone and turned a peaceful Europe into a living hell for basically no reason. Don't get me wrong. The Confederates were still doing harm by resisting abolition, but it's not the same thing.

The rise of the Nazi party in Germany was due to the popularity of extreme German nationalism and middle class anger towards recent liberal reforms after the first world war. Fascism isn't just tyranny served on a silver platter, it's the comfort of tradition offered to what is often a frustrated and scared middle class reacting to progress. That is how the Nazi party won, that is why millions of Germans allowed for the most horrific atrocities in history to happen, it was already "The Status Quo"

It's not about the neo-nazi's who fly swastika flags, it's about the moderates who willfully let society meld them as it pleases because it is easy to do so, it is the path with least resistance, even if that path is fascist in nature.

image.png?ex=66962b2c&is=6694d9ac&hm=94d

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

In 2021 a whopping 71% of new HIV cases were attributable to male-on-male sexual contact. 7% were "among people who inject drugs", leaving just 22% caused by straight sex.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/data-research/facts-stats/index.html

Per a 2012 figure, gay and transgender Americans are up to 3x as likely to smoke tobacco as their straight counterparts, a whopping 25% abuse alcohol (compared to 5-10%), and gay men are 12.2x more likely to use amphetamines and 9.5x more likely to use heroin than straight men.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-the-gay-and-transgender-population-experiences-higher-rates-of-substance-use/

This definitely does not look like "hogwash" to me. I'll add that we live in an age where any street drug can be laced with fentanyl, and higher and higher volumes of what's sold are so contaminated. I expect that as the death toll of the ongoing opioid crisis continues to mount, the LGBT community will be disproportionately represented in this area.

The article being linked in question outright states the reasons LGBTQ people falling into addiction is because of discrimination in all facets of life. We've walked a fucking political circle asking you the question on why The Republican party discriminates against gay people, your answer being that it is not discrimination and that it is reasonable for voters to see being gay as a negative. We ask you why that it is and the answer you give back is "Because they are discriminated against."

 

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5 hours ago, Benice said:

I swear half the Copa finals game so far has been spent on people flopping on the ground XD

We football fans hate it too

4 hours ago, Benice said:

Hopefully the game's faster in the second bit of extra time, it's cruelly been kinda boring ngl

Atleast you didn't watch England's terrorball

4 hours ago, Armagon said:

Well there's AfD but they got banned like five times for being Nazis in disguise iirc.

God i wish

But banning a party with ~20% support is...

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8 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

I will add that, anecdotally, as long as I've been on the internet I have been verbally abused and treated worse than a dog by members of the other side. I've come across web content time and time again that rhetorically defecates on some group to which I belong. I do not believe for one microsecond, and you cannot convince me for one microsecond, that my side is uniquely hateful and yours is fighting "against hate". Not after everything I've experienced.

Might I ask you to elaborate on this? Because when minorities constantly have to endure being blamed for the wrongs of the world, being insulted left and right just for existing and and having whether or not they should exist discussed and deemed a "political" topic, you must've gone through quite the grueling experiences if you believe it's comparable.

6 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Doesn't sex reassignment surgery include castration, which sterilizes the patient for life?

Not for minors, it doesn't. For minors it includes puberty blockers, which have no proven lasting effects. There are concerns, naturally, but there's concerns about literally everything regarding trans people. Surgery is only performed on adults, and even then it's nowhere nearly as easy to get the process started as some would have you believe.

2 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

So I guess there's no difference between driving sober and driving drunk because I could die in a car accident while sober?

In 2021 a whopping 71% of new HIV cases were attributable to male-on-male sexual contact. 7% were "among people who inject drugs", leaving just 22% caused by straight sex.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/data-research/facts-stats/index.html

Oh no, 71%? What a high number! 71% of 32,100 is 22,470. So, 22,470 HIV cases attributed to gay men. Those are multiple thousands!

Now, my question is: How many gay men live in the US? Because perhaps, just perhaps, there's millions of them, and these 22,470 cases are a drop in the ocean. You say it's reasonable for parents to not want their kids to be gay due to the chance HIV, but that's the equivalent of not wanting to have children at all because they might get struck by lightning and die.

Or, for another analogy that follows up on something you brought up in the same post: According to the American Cancer Society, men - all men - have roughly a 1 in 8 chance of developing prostate cancer in their lifetime. If it's reasonable that parents wouldn't want their kids to be gay because of HIV, then surely by that same logic, it'd also be reasonable for parents to not want their children to be men, and take steps to ensure they only ever give birth to girls, correct?

3 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

This definitely does not look like "hogwash" to me. I'll add that we live in an age where any street drug can be laced with fentanyl, and higher and higher volumes of what's sold are so contaminated. I expect that as the death toll of the ongoing opioid crisis continues to mount, the LGBT community will be disproportionately represented in this area.

It's almost like being constantly hated on and questioned by a large amount of people, and your very existence being deemed a "political topic of discussion", would lead to mental health issues and the possibility of restorting to drugs to cope. It's like when they bring up the "trans people commit suicide very often therefore we should ban transness" argument. Maybe we should just be nice to people who are different.

3 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Most self-identified trans people have not surgically transitioned. In terms of safety, it's very much safer for them to use the bathroom of their birth sex.

This whole "safety" argument is way too widespread for how lackluster it is. There's no magical barrier keeping men from entering women's bathrooms unless they identify as women. If a man wants to sexually assault a woman in a public bathroom, they aren't going to start calling themselves a woman to be "allowed" in the bathroom. They're just going to push right through the door and do whatever they want to do.

All trans people want is to be allowed to exist as anybody else. Is that truly so much to ask?

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1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Yes, and so is prostrate cancer. That doesn't mean there's a negligible difference between living with it vs. living without it.

If you bothered to read the whole page of statistic you brought up about HIV I will note this passage here:

Quote

People with HIV who take HIV medicine (called antiretroviral therapy or ART) as prescribed and get and keep an undetectable viral load can live long and healthy lives and will not transmit HIV to their HIV-negative partners through sex. This is often referred to as undetectable = untransmittable or U=U.

to emphasize how much less of an issue it is now. I knew this before I read this article, because the television channels all the people my parents generation watch have advertisements for this kind of medication on them all the time. If I ad-blocked less I might even have a sense of how ubiquitous they are online as well, but alas. Point being, how neutered the danger of HIV has become isn't some secret mystery.

There is a difference between a death sentence and a minor inconvenience. Being afraid your child might die is a little more reasonable than my child might have to take some medication regularly at some future point.

 

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

This definitely does not look like "hogwash" to me. I'll add that we live in an age where any street drug can be laced with fentanyl, and higher and higher volumes of what's sold are so contaminated. I expect that as the death toll of the ongoing opioid crisis continues to mount, the LGBT community will be disproportionately represented in this area.

If you bothered to read the article, you might see that one of the first things it says is that data is sparse (which leans towards it potentially being hogwash), and what little exist indicates that discrimination and stigma against them as a group is thought to be the primary reasons why it is so high. So your justification for why the fear justifying discrimination against the group is justified is that they were being discriminating against, a circular argument that makes the fears seem even less reasonable, as the solution to the problem is stop being so irrationally fearful of them that you discriminate against them.

 

1 hour ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

Whether the culture war has had the slightest bearing whatsoever on the actual number of gay people is one question. But as for why loving parents to this day would prefer that their kids not be gay, I think the answer is pretty clear.

Ancient statistics and fears from the 80 that have either diminished to the point of being more inconvenience than threat, and those directly caused by their insistence it would be better if the kid was not gay do not seem like reasonable fears for these parents, and such unreasonable fears do amount to homophobia.

 

2 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adults-identify-lgbtq-national-survey-finds-rcna135510

Suffice to say, this is not what the situation looked like 40 years ago. And there's no reason to think that in a typical human population in nature, genetics would cull 30 percent of its members from the breeding pool due to one factor alone every single generation. The cause of this is most definitely social and cultural.

You really jumped the gun with the headline there, as reading a little further would reveal that most of them were bisexual, which doesn't eliminate them from the gene pool.

Also to use a different sexually reproducing species as a comparison, there have been enough in depth studies about sexuality in sheep, that textbooks on veterinary medicine indicating that roughly 30% of rams not being heterosexual (with a roughly 2 to 1 rate of bi to gay) is normal. I wasn't expecting the statistic to match so well, last time I looked up one of these studies was when I was in college and could access them for free (I like looking up random studies for funsies back then), but it makes me wonder how many mammals balance out at a 30% point like that. Sorry for being the lazy researcher here, but I don't want to pay for the real studies (bit of a shame as the one I looked up back in the day even had a little data on ace behavior), so here is the wikipedia summary of the subject:

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

 

 

3 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

In terms of safety, it's very much safer for them to use the bathroom of their birth sex.

Citation needed there, as what little I can find on the matter indicated otherwise.

One thing I could find on the topic was a study from the Academy of American Pediatrics on sexual assault rates of trans children in schools that had no bathroom and locker room restriction, and those that had one based on birth sex, showed an increased risk of sexual assault for trans kids forced to use the bathroom of their birth sex, but admittedly I am basing that only on what is stated in the free summary (as I don't feel like paying for a peer reviewed article to prove an internet argument, and getting into the nitty gritty details like that probably isn't all that necessary either).

 

3 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

And whatever the ethics of bathroom bans, it was already illegal (or otherwise not advisable) for trans people in most places to use the bathroom of the opposite biological sex. Fighting to keep the status quo in place does not equal actively marching toward fascism.

...It wasn't really a legal issue in most places before this panic came in place, it was simply a social one, which led to the safest practice available; using the bathroom you most looked like you belonged in. These laws are less than a decade old in the states (the first I know about was in 2016), and trans people have been around long before that. These bills are literally changing the status quo, not maintaining them, and if you can find an older law in the US covering the issue, I would love to know about it.

 

3 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

 

Beside that, you're talking like HIV was some natural phenomenon that just spread naturally. We both know, and people knew at the time, what the risk factors for the disease are, and despite knowing this an entire community made no adjustments to their lifestyle to curb its spread.

We know that now, but how the disease functioned was not common knowledge back in the early 80s, and the way its multi-year latency period works (AKA the symptoms of the disease only manifest 3-7 years after infection) really obfuscated its nature. Also once people were better informed the rate of transmission plummeted. Part of the reason why people like to blame Reagan for how bad the AIDs epidemic was back in the day is that his administration did nothing about the disease until 1986, where shortly after the death of a personal friend of Reagan in 1985 he finally did something about it. One of the more notable things he did was better inform the public about how the disease works and spreads as well as easing the access to testing to give people what they needed to fight the disease themselves. The rate of infection went from rapidly increasing year by year, to being damn near cut in half that very year, and it continued to fall to about a quarter that original height now that people were informed enough about how the disease worked to mitigate the risk factors. Ignoring the epidemic to the point that president Reagan didn't even know how the disease progressed or spread until he was personally informed about it by said dying friend, and how stark of a difference his administration actually bothering to do anything actually did in hindering the disease is a big part of why people like to blame him, as he provided the most damning piece of evidence for his own earlier inaction.
 

16 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:

For minors it includes puberty blockers, which have no proven lasting effects.

I am sorry to be a bit of a pedant here, but there are one, arguably two known lasting effects, first they will be on average 2 cms shorter, the second is a loss of bone mass that often requires the drinking of milk on regular basis to mitigate (that sounds like a joke but this medication was originally given to children and this was often part of the prescription to deal with what would otherwise be a lasting effect). Its important to remember that in spite of a bunch of weird fear mongering on how new these treatments are, puberty blocks are an old and well understood medication used in the past (and present) to deal with precocious puberty (where a child will go into puberty at an unreasonably young age, like 6 or 8).

 

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14 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Its important to remember that in spite of a bunch of weird fear mongering on how new these treatments are, puberty blocks are an old and well understood medication used in the past (and present) to deal with precocious puberty (where a child will go into puberty at an unreasonably young age, like 6 or 8).

Thank you for expanding on that. I was aware that puberty blocks have been used for a long time, but I was struggling to find solid info and the post was taking me long enough as it was, so I slacked off a bit on that. My bad.

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Its always funny to see people claim: "compare these situations" basically saying "things like bulliying arent as bad!" Yet children are comitting suicide because of it all of the time. "Being as bad" is an individual feeling.

Edited by Lightcosmo
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10 minutes ago, BrightBow said:

Should have gotten a pro for the job.

Videoplayback36.jpg?width=1920

They wanted some trace of the man to be left behind.

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2 minutes ago, BrightBow said:

An oddly fitting choice for a bookmark.

 

Oh yeah, I remember that! There was talk of it in the Dangen server. Heck I may have given them the idea as I recall lol

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2 hours ago, Lightcosmo said:

Its always funny to see people claim: "compare these situations" basically saying "things like bulliying arent as bad!" Yet children are comitting suicide because of it all of the time. "Being as bad" is an individual feeling.

And these peeps will lead to even more children dying. And more bullying and harassment.

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8 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

As mentioned above, the idea is that exposing children to queer literature raises their future likelihood of being gay. An idea that has merit, if this statistic is any indicator:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adults-identify-lgbtq-national-survey-finds-rcna135510

"Likelihood of being gay" as if they're choosing to be gay. They're gonna be gay anyways dawg, they'll just know about it earlier.

Gay people have always existed, it's just that back then they used to get thrown from trucks. The acceptance of LGBT has risen, therefore, more people are comfortable with their own identity, therefore, more are seen. But with the rise in anti-LGBT laws, these lawmakers want LGBT people to stay hidden, they would prefer it if they didn't exist.

8 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

However atrocious the ideas a neo-Nazi is thinking of in his head, if you're out there doing physical violence and he's not then I'm gonna think you have zero moral superiority to him.

Nazis want people dead dawg. The ones rallying aren't stupid enough to just commit a hate crime in broad daylight but they make their intentions clear: an America for white people only.

And the truth is, Nazis have gotten way too comfortable in recent years with just being out in the open.

9 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

I dispute this comparison. The Confederates fought a war on their own soil to preserve a status quo they inherited from centuries back, and which they were all raised to believe was moral and they looked to the Haitian slave revolt from 60 years back and thought they and their families would all be slaughtered if the slaves were freed, whereas the Nazis one day attacked everyone and turned a peaceful Europe into a living hell for basically no reason.

The Nazis were festering for years, i think saying they "attacked one day" is very reductive.

9 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

Fair enough, but the same could be said of many wars: fairly brief but the effort by one's own side may be celebrated and commemorated centuries later.

I'm not talking about the war, i'm talking about the country. This ain't like Ireland or Catalonia, which existed for centuries being independent, conquered, reconquered, etc. The Confederacy wasn't a country that saw generations of it's people being born and buried. It was basically just a rebellion that didn't go anywhere.

6 hours ago, Dayni said:

Will FIFA pull the shit they did in Brazil and insist you can sell beer to them?

Americans don't like it when people tell them what to do so probably not. We're not even a soccer country in the first place.

 

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