Why did you break up last time? Have you put in the hard work of figuring out exactly what went wrong last time, how things will be different this time, and why you're even trying at it?
A hard truth is that if you see an executive pushing return to office, you know one of two things about them. One of the following is true.
They are terrible at finance and don't understand the sunk-cost fallacy. They have to keep using that building they bought; they've spent so much on it and simply can't bring themselves to sell it.
They're a sexual molester. They're someone that uses the power of their position to coerce sex out of their employees. Fucking their employees is their primary motivation for not retiring early right now. You can't coerce your secretary to give you a blowjob over Zoom.
That's really it. They're either bad at business or they're a sexual predator. If you see an executive pushing return to office, be sure to ask them which one of these they are. Because they're definitely one or the other.
We should welcome an Iranian bomb. Honestly, it's what the Middle East really needs to bring it to stability.
The biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East is Israel. They're a destabilizing force because they're an expansionist nuclear-armed power with no hard borders. Their borders aren't actually fixed; they're in a decades-long process to slowly expand them. For those who forget, Israel's MO is to:
Destabilize border regions of neighboring countries and foster the creation of militant groups within them.
Use those destabilized regions as justification for military occupation of the territory of neighboring countries.
Announce the creation of border "buffer zones."
Allow their civilians to move into what is supposed to be a DMZ-like buffer zone.
Again have civilians in the line of fire of militants, demanding further border expansion.
Israel has been expanding like this for decades, and there's no end in site. Their immediate neighbors are all to weak and destabilized to resist this process of slow Israeli lebensraum. The people in the Middle East are rightly afraid that they'll be next under the Israeli boot, and they'll find themselves reduced to the plight of the Gazans.
Israel is out of control. It's an expansionist military power hellbent on gobbling up its neighbors. The reason they're able to get away with this is because they have nuclear weapons. No Arab nation can invade them without the threat of being nuked in return. Israel uses its nuclear arsenal to conquer its neighbors.
Another nuclear power is desperately needed in the region to hold them in check. A nuclear Iran would serve this role well. They wouldn't be able to wipe Israel off the map, as that would result in them getting nuked in return. What a nuclear-armed Iran can do is to finally put a check on Israel's endless military expansion. We need powers that can stand up to the Israelis as equals and say, "no. Your borders are fucking big enough. You're not taking one more square meter of land."
You're reading way too much into this. My comment was simply a joke. An absurdity. Someone so mad about being blamed for wars they go and start a war over it.
Those who seek outrage will find it every time. Yes, obviously there are some trans people that don't seek out medical transition. That's why I said "trans people who medically transition." But language can be overly inclusive. We don't need to start every single writing on trans people with three paragraphs describing every exception and caveat. Obviously when you talk about a group, any group, you have to talk in generalities. If you insist on starting every comment about trans people with paragraphs of caveats and provisos, you make actually getting to the point impossible. You water down the language to the point of uselessness. At at time when trans rights are under assault on all sides, I don't mind focusing most trans discussions on the material realities and needs of most trans folks.
Most trans people want to medically transition. Are those that don't somehow invalid? No. But we also don't need to start every discussion with a thousand caveats describing every sub-category within a group. There are atheist Jews and there are gay Muslims. That doesn't mean every discussion of those faiths is centered around these rare exceptions.
Trans people transition BOTH their sex and their gender. The term "transgender" is a broad umbrella term. But most people under that label do seek to physically change their bodies. You're arguing semantics, I'm arguing the lived experience of living breathing human beings.
Every now and then, Israel acts to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power – and honestly, we’re all the better for it, the world does not need another set of religious crazies to have nukes.
At this point, I would be fine with Iran having the bomb. I really don't see any evidence that they would behave more recklessly with it than Israel does.
Do you know what an actual scientific attempt to define races would look like?
Let's say you wanted to scientifically define races. Instead of using subjective things like facial structure, you look at actual DNA and the groupings among populations. Let's say we want to group humanity into a half dozen races, and to avoid bias, we do it based on some statistical analysis of DNA patterns.
You know what you would end up with? The computer would spit out that there are five racial groups represented the population of Subsaharan Africa...and one racial group representing everyone else.
The vast majority of human genetic diversity lies within Subsaharan Africa. If you tried to rationally define a list of 'races,' you would end up with a bunch of African racial groups and then one group for literally everyone else.
This is what people mean when they say race isn't real. Our culturally-defined racial groups are completely unrelated to the actual diversity and distribution of human DNA patterns.
The differences between the sexes is much less than people like to pretend. Every cell in your body has different modes it can operate in. Many, perhaps most, cells have estrogen-dominated and testosterone-dominated modes. If you change the dominant hormones in the body, every cell in the body switches between these modes. Trans people who medically transition are simply taking advantage of the body's existing mechanism of secondary sex characteristics.
Ultimately, any person could have a male- or female- typical phenotype. If you put the right hormone injections into a fetus at the right time of pregnancy, an XY fetus would be born with a vagina and a uterus. And the opposite is true as well. These conditions sometimes happen naturally with intersex conditions. Every human body has the potential to develop along a male- or female-typical path. It's just a matter of what hormones are passing through the body at what stage of development.
But race? There's no comparison. Cells don't have different expression modes that correspond to different racial phenotypes. There are no "black hormones" that a white person could take to gain many of the characteristics of black bodies. There is simply no equivalent to the medical transition process many trans people undergo. There is simply no equivalent to the fundamental rewiring of the body that occurs on a cellular level with trans medical treatments.
Police, like all bullies, are ultimately cowards. They have no problem abusing people when they can do so with impunity. But if their own lives are on the line, suddenly they're on their best behavior.
You have a myopia that makes you incapable of looking past a single election. It is that myopia that has gotten us to this point here. Cycle after cycle of blind, zero-thought "blue no matter who" has made the democratic power-brokers completely disconnected from the base. You're going to vote for them no matter what, so your opinions, thoughts, and desires are absolutely irrelevant. You do not matter to the political process at all.
Understood. None of us are immune to it; the internet really doesn't bring out the best in us.