People still believe Iraq had WMDs to this day.

I never understood how someone with a six week old managed to find time to boink. But I guess some folks are just very horny.

I guess maybe we got lucky, then.

I do know some kids have real legit physical issues (colic being a big one). And if you don’t figure out how to mitigate their distress quickly, they simply learn to scream when they want to communicate.

But when I hear “some kids are just assholes”, I tend to see some underlying problem (possibly something you just can’t do anything about at this stage, but it exists) that they’re responding to. It’s not standard baby behavior to make parents miserable.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

I might take this with a large grain of salt. My man is a neocon’s neocon.

If you dig into Afghanistan’s history, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union, there were a lot of parallels between the quasi-socialism of the Soviet occupation and the quasi-liberalism of the American occupation.

In both cases, the occupying army tried to subvert self-determination of the Afghan people. Trying to claim The Taliban as a product of US policy against the Communists or a product of Islamist policy against the Christian Nationalists really misses this as an ongoing effort by Afghanis to secure their own brand of domestic nationalism.

Get down to “Who is responsible?” Rubin doggedly insists that (a) US support for the Taliban in the '70s was worth the price, entirely to keep Communism out of Pakistan. And (b) we are the victims of imperfect policy rather than our own hubris.

Both beliefs are ultimately misguided, even if his history is a fun read.

I can confidently say that I am the most basic bitch straight cis white male with no strong desire to change any of that.

But also, we only get one body. It certainly isn’t unusually to be curious how other people live. I think there’s a preprogrammed “How dare you want to change anything!” naturalist attitude. And that discourages anyone from even thinking about the possibility of change.

I think if there was no stigma, you’d definitely see far more of the population coded as Trans, Fluid, or some other variant. I think you’d see more people who are simply gender non-conforming.

I think part of what upsets the Boomer/X generation is the fact that they never got a chance to choose. And as Millennials/Zs/As are umshackled, I’m hoping the resentment fades.

If he starts punching you in the dick, you can still take the highroad.

I’m sorry, what’s the high road here?

At some point a fight is the only way to stop the violence.

The brutal truth that too many liberals don’t want to accept is that we can’t Vote our way through this.

Even newborn babies are programmed to scream intermittently so that the parents are never well rested

As someone who has taken care of three newborns, that’s not a requirement. If you put the infant on a regular two/three-hour feeding/changing cycle, they don’t reflexively cry unless they’re in some kind of physical distress.

The trick is to execute that schedule, which is itself extremely exhausting, especially if you’re exclusively breast feeding. When you’ve got two or more people handling feedings (especially with formula) then the baby is chill and parents get more sleep and everyone is much happier.

Also, ffs, this is why both Mom and Dad need maternity leave. The job is 10x harder when one parent is working solo.

I do think that in a truly just world, anyone who preaches Quiverful child baring should be kicked in the nuts at least once for every child they claim they want to have.

At every stage, the US lost more and more territory. By Biden, they’d been hedged into Kabul like the US was backed into Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

The idea that we could have just camped out and refused to leave was politically impractical and logistically incredibly difficult. And why would we have been there, except to periodically fling bombs into neighboring territory?

We’d lost the war a decade earlier and simply refused to admit it. By Biden, it was a farce. We didn’t control the country in any meaningful way.

please look up how the taliban treats their own people

Okay, but then look at how the Heroin smugglers and child sex traffickers that ran Afghanistan under the US treated their own people.

Absolutely. The plan was to do in Afghanistan what we’d done in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Argentina and the Philippines.

We wanted a local aristocracy beholden to the US business interests with a police force willing to brutalize dissidents. Taliban wasn’t that thing, so they needed to be supplanted.

Problem was, the Afghan aristocracy that the US aligned with were more vile than the Taliban and rejected by the public at large. So the US spent 23 years killing everyone who refused to submit to them.

I mean, a big component of professional ballet involves the use of beta blockers to prevent girls from showing the signs of puberty.

Some of that is on athletic grounds - maturity brings changes to the body that impede the performance of the ballerina. Some of it is purely aesthetics. In fact, until fairly recently, women professional Olympians would avoid puberty to maintain the lean look that judges preferred. Only in the mid-90s/early-00s did we begin to see the power figure skaters and gymnasts who took advantage of the increased mature muscle mass to outperform their younger peers. Someone like Simone Biles would never have moved passed the preliminaries in an 80s-era Olympic competition.

But you could play the same game with male athletes and steroids/HGH/etc. Practically every professional uses some kind of performance enhancing medication of nebulous legality. And the younger you start, the greater the benefits over your career.

I gotta ask, if we’re so worried about this, do we need to get rid of professional athletics entirely? Or are we going to accept some degree of young body modification and parental control over their bodies?

The Portion Makes The Poison

Almost as though there’s some kind of merit to professionalization of pharmacology.

If we’re banning purely cosmetic or cultural changes to a child’s body, are we throwing out ear piercings and back braces and dental work, too? How about haircuts and hair dyes? How about vaccines, since these are now fully included in culture war politics? So much of this seems to boil down to a naturalist attitude towards children. “Just don’t change ANYTHING! Changing things is wrong!”

And the fact that its coming from people - like Elon Musk - who paid top dollar for IVF doctors to guarantee his children conform to his consumer preferences (you’ll notice he’s exclusively had male infant children) is even more obnoxious.

It’s very obviously just pot-stirring. Resent your parents for changing you. Resent your children for changing themselves. Medicalize resentment of everyone.

Congress has the power to declare war

That they fully abdicated with the 2001 AUMF, which they keep renewing specifically so they don’t have to ever make these decisions.

This is what people voted for

The people vote for candidates, not policies. And they candidates they vote for routinely talk out of both sides of their mouths. NDAAs regularly pass with overwhelming bipartisan support, even as a super-majority of Congresscritters campaign against this or that component of them.

Vote better next time, I guess.

I was told to VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO because there is a Cheeto In The White House. If both major parties field pro-war candidates, what’s the move?

Removed by mod

John Witmire is a DINO by every definition of the word. He’s deep in bed with the police, he loves privatization of public services, and he makes common cause with the state’s Republican leadership on a regular basis. Nothing the man loves more than “balancing the budget” on the backs of public workers and low income residents.

But he’s been a Democrat since he took his State Senate seat and squatted in it back in 1983. So the party apparatus loyally and mechanically supported him all through the primary and general elections. The “It’s my turn” candidate is taking his turn.

Hire the senior most administrative staff that oversee the executive bureaucracy and update the policies that these senior most administrators execute.

Don’t worry, we’re bringing in a bunch of C-levels from AI companies and giving them Lt. Colonel rank so they can approve a “Move Fast And Break Things” approach to Pentagon IT investment.

I predict “billions over budget” will look absolutely quaint in another five years.

Also, incidentally, check out the ADE 651

A bunch of left-leaning Democrats in 2020: “We should abolish ICE. It does not appear to serve a useful purpose and is staffed with people hell bent on doing irreparable harm to the public.”

DC Leadership: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! You’re destroying America with your extremist Tankie pro-terrorist propaganda!”

A bunch of far-right eugenicists in 2024: “We should abolish FEMA. Natural disasters aren’t a big deal anyway and it’ll help thin the herd if only the strong are able to survive.”

DC Leadership: “Shrug Let’s put it to a vote.”