Even if you trained relentlessly to preserve your original tone - lean muscle mass, fat distribution, bone density and skin thickness are all tied to your sex hormones and your cells are constantly being replaced. The oldest a muscle cell (exempting heart cells) gets is like 15 years with the average being more like 10. The good senator has been on HRT for over a decade. There’s not any even negligible physiological advantage of experienced testosterone puberty left.

Like anything trained skill and age is more important a factor. Unless either is a trained martial artist the advantage most at play would be that McBride is like 20 years younger. Greene does however give the impression like she has punched out a few people over low cost electronics at Black Friday events so I dunno.

Gunna say it’s a close toss up.

Again you are taking these arguements as two separate categories. Let’s take a theoretical and start figuring out instead what you think is unacceptable where the line is of what is acceptable. Should a professional sport accept anyone unambiguously if they, with full medical assistance, took a regime of puberty blockers until the age of 16 and uninterrupted courses of HRT as soon as they are eligible (this requires the consent of a guardian) and thus never went through a male puberty?

This pre-supposes that the trans person in question has actually gone through a male puberty which is one things trans advocates are trying to make medically optional and anti trans protesters are trying to take off the table. A lot of trans girls don’t want to be forced to go through the puberty that will cause them to be looked down on BECAUSE it will be used as a basis for villification and exclusion from multiple facets of society for the rest of their lives…

But the majority at large would rather have these two conversations separately because transphobes don’t want to have young trans women going through a female puberty with the consent and blessings of their parents and a panel of specialists. Heaven forbid! No, they want to make sure that they have justification to make trans girls these monstrously powerful beings who are always supposed to be some kind of threat because they should be forced, like men, to be transformed into animalistic beasts with raw unbridled physical prowess and unfettered lusts that we cannot allow into the careful guarded cloisters alongside the delicate tissue paper likes of womankind.

There is never allowed to be a win condition because there’s never even a tiny concession on any front in favor of trans people. If trans advocacy got what they wanted in the realm of trans healthcare for young trans people we could be having a very different discussion about both endocrinology and trans women in sport. Instead we must always assume in these examples that there’s zero healthcare options that delays puberty and averts the puberty of one’s birth sex and THEN face regular preaching about how policing the fairness of essentially silly games is cause to label us all completely unreasonable while painting trans women as cheats and monsters. It is an embittering Catch 22.

I find it helpful to leave no muddy water or room for misinterpretation. Conservatives understand hypocrisy well and they prime every one of their folk to not consider or think of it.

“Conservative” being a reference or implicationto a policy that is expected to be either frugal or tempered by moderation and due concern is basically branding gold. Conservatives LIVE for that shit. It’s why socially progressive people still hold onto “but I am still a little conservative” seed. Because everyone thinks they are moderate and the belief that the Conservatives are cutting services to save money seems to make sense to them. The minute you try and get them on why they cut or outsource social programs they plead money saving and the second you throw a budget in front of the public proving they are still overspending you get whataboutisms, red herrings or logical fallacies because that’s how they train people to think… Or not think rather. They are already trained to let an argument about spending just slide over them and never sink in.

You have fallen for the grift… “conservative” doesn’t refer to money conservation or a cautious disposition towards taking measures. Oftentimes Conservative ideology and politics is neither of those things beong actually more wasteful and sporadic than other political parties …

At it’s core Conservatism believes in a heirachy that requires effort to conserve from the forces which scatter power horizontally. Social welfare programs, debt relief, market protections, union power and democratic elections are all things which upset the “naturally” forming heirachy like one might conserve a nature preserve. That the heirachy they are fighting is actually fairly artificially enforced isn’t something you are supposed to think about. Originally they were post revolution pacts conserving the power of the old powers… rich land owners , the lords, monarchists, the industrialists, the capitalists, colonization and imperialist powers… And they still kind of are.

In this instance Disney essentially has power it was granted outside the Conservative veiw of “efficient” heirachy. Disney was fine until they started doing things that conflicted with party directives and exercising their power autonomously. It’s not doing what the officers who veiw themselves as rightful weilders of power want them to do so it must be busted to conserve the food chain.

Should Disney have that level of sovereignty? Probably not, but watching snakes try and swallow each other starting at the tail is fun.

Okay, can we just take a minute to acknowledge that the ONLY gender affirming surgery legally on the table before you are 16 is for breasts?

It also requires the sign off of a legal guardian and there are a bunch of recommendations in place from therapists about how to make good long term decisions so it’s not like minors are making uninformed decisions on their own.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

• Charles Dickens

I personally hope each and every member of the the GOP enjoyed their visits from the Ghosts of Christmases, Past, Present and Yet to Come.

You seem to be conflating “the left” with the Democrats. The Democrats are not particularly leftist. The political compass doesn’t move just because the Democrats do that is like saying “The car drives East so North becomes East.” It’s wiser to treat the political compass is more of a fixed set of cardinal directions. Leftists and Right Wingers exist outside of parties.

Neither right nor left are parties. So when describing parties stances it’s way more accurate to use the party names.

There are a lot of leftists in America, you just don’t have a leftist centric party because the way things are established running one would likely cause a spoiler vote. It’s something of a sore point amongst leftists that the First past the post system keeps them from voting their hearts or running a candidate so representing the “slightly more left but actually still right wing” candidates as “left” isn’t exactly great.

It debuted when I was living in Japan and when I got back everyone was using it and I had just finished blogging my travels and was like… Nah, doing this for my regular everyday life is way too much to bother with. Facebook continued to became a major thorn in my side for years as every social event under the sun was scheduled through the fucking thing so I missed a bunch of invites because I basically refused to play ball.

It is odd after so long to be the envy of people after a solid decade and a half of being cursed by them for not being on Facebook.

Law is a funny beast. Lots of people do things which are illegal all the time and get away with it because you basically have to assert your right to be protected by law to sort of activate it. Like someone yelling at me that they are going to kill me while I am out in public is technically a form of assult. , I can call the authorities and get them to assist me to make sure they don’t follow through and to get them to stay the hell away from me but chances are I am not going to seek restitution in court for something that small because I would have to press charges, seek and pay for legal council, everything would need to be processed to make sure the law is being properly handled at all points of the arrest and the punishment would likely be fairly trifling for all my troubles.

Private entities already basically have the imperitive to determine what is permissible on their platforms. Freedom of speech is not practiced under the auspices of substack. They are allowed to kick you out for whatever the heck they want (some exceptions applying) because they own that space. To remove posts as threats a judge would have to go through each individual one, source it, bring the original commenter into court and go through due process with every single user to check it against their local jurisdiction’s laws for threats and the likely outcome would just be small fines and community service… Quite frankly the juice would not be worth the squeeze.

On the other hand we are absolutely allowed to have an opinion that substack letting Nazis spread hate speech on their platform under their watch is a moral failure on their part.

A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren’t a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.

Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can’t opt out of… And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It’s simply not supposed to be other people’s problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies “tolerance” for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone’s unrestricted discourse.

Then there’s the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?

We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name. There is no moderation policy, even an unrestricted one, that is truly ethically neutral. Your choices about what is or isn’t allowed on your watch always effects people and the mental cost is borne by someone.

Oooh kay why are you sending me this? I already knew it was a song.

It’s newly refurbished

I mean, I am Canadian so dealing with the US as a foreign country with outsized influence is kind of nothing new to me. I think you’ll find the right wing just follows you wherever you go you just change the terms under which you deal with it. American media is a menace here and we essentially have to deal with US gun pollution and American style political discourse from our own citizens even though our Constitutional freedoms and government are completely different than the States.

I do feel like America’s problems are rooted deep in the outsized weight you give your founding fathers and the mythologized history of the two wars that played out on your soil. Breaking free from those fetters and actually updating your constitution to reflect the modern world and making your system more properly democratic using the advancements of political, structural and philosophical thought that’s advanced since the early foundation and adoption of democracy damn near 150 years ago sounds like an amazing idea, buit that require sussession to actually Kickstart that process.

Well assassination of a candidate duration an election has some precedent. But it doesn’t happen often for good reason. If you assassinate a political figure you make them essentially a martyr for their campaign or ideals which stops people thinking rationally and doubling down on their emotional reaction to the assassinee’s party or general ideology. People put aside differences to “carry the torch”.

Honestly killing Trump and pining it on leftist bogeymen would be a move I could see some Republicans doing. They have basically primed their base to accept any shlock they want to pass as news and if they go full authoritarian and get enough support on board to basically ignore democratic checks and balances…

That’s why I hope it happens during the election and the ensuing chaos means they can’t consolidate around a candidate. Dems would just reshuffle if Biden bit it mid campaign because so many leftists vote Democrat because it’s the lesser of two evils but the Republicans eat their own.

Dude is 77 years old and eats like a garbage panda. Gods willing he at best lasts like 4 years

My thoughts and prayers have started ringing to the tune of "please gods may Trump have a heart attack / stroke at the worst possible time for the Republicans and spare the rest of the world another term of American foreign policy behaving as though it was conceived by racist, classist and eight kinds of phobic Elmer Fudd "

Technically speaking you kind of do? The way the States have structured things your individual states have the same binding ability full on countries do… “Land of the Free” sounds kind of insane when you exist outside of that and see instead two countries at constant war with each other fighting over whose rules are the most binding over each of it’s citizens particularly… You can even be extradited back to a former state you lived in! That isn’t how it works for damn near every other democracy. That isn’t freedom that’s just color coded chains.

Yeah the majority of SCOTUS has basically decreed that if an issue didn’t exist at the time of the founding of the Constitution then it cannot apply.

It’s very convenient when you can chuck out a solid 150 years of precedent and just pretend the intentions of a bunch of dead people. Fuck ethics and actually engaging with the wording of the law to dicern it’s intention amirite?