@houseoftolstoy @TiberiusBravo87

I've always been a little evasive about what I used to do in the military - not because it was dramatic or sexy or badass (it was none of those things) - but because I don't want to doxx myself. So let's just say that I have a certain amount of expertise in this sort of thing and ya'll can take my word for it... or not.

The deal with NS2 is that a whole bunch of players have reasons to blow holes in it... and the same players have reasons not to blow holes in it... and everyone potentially has reasons to lie about it. What I'm saying is that unless somebody has inside information - real inside information - anything that anyone says is pure conjecture. If I can't guess with everything I know, I'm not going to accept the analysis of some pundit. I am absolutely not going to take anything put out by the press as gospel. Governmental denials and fingerpointing aren't much better. I would probably believe somebody who admited to it, though.

As far as I can see, the side that gains the most, with the least amount of downside, is Ukraine, but there's no way they could have pulled that off without NATO doing it for them. But that just brings us back to Square 1. NATO has reasons to do it, they have reasons to not do it, and they have reasons to lie about it either way.

About the only bit of information I don't question us that it was a deliberate act. The question is what is everyone going to do now, and how close to the edge is everyone wiling to go. We're playing nuclear chicken with a guy whose back is to a wall.

@redpillschool

Of course the alphabet people are upset: we can't say anything bad about one of them, right? The thing is that Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't just a serial killer who happened to be gay: he was a Gay Serial Killer. The context in which he killed in was unique to that kind of sexual environment.

Think about it: we're (mostly) guys here, and several of us are - quite literally - trained killers who have been to war. How easy would it be for one of us to rack up a body count like Dahmer did, especially considering that he didn't have a huge physical advantage over his victims? It's practically inconceivable, yet he pulled it off because of the FACT that hyper-promiscuity with strange men is a well-known feature of the "gay scene."

Another Dahmer fact is that almost all of his victims were young black men. Racist much? We know that BLM stands for Black Lives (only) Matter (when the killers are white men)... but apparently white gay men get a pass.

One has to ponder the implications of removing the labels from programming when the people who identify with the designated villain object, though. (That's not to imply that Dahmer wasn't an actual villain.) Do those of us with a MAGA bent get to object when Showtime has no fewer than four unflattering "documentaries" about President Trump and his supporters?

Of course not. It's all about whose ox is getting gored, and although everyone talks a good game with regard to equality, in practice "Some animals are more equal than others."

@Typo-MAGAshiv @elizabethscoffin @goodmansaysfuckyou @redpillschool

MBTI truly does have a certain amount of utility as long as you understand what it reveals and what it doesn't reveal about you. Far too many people look at their MBTI category the same way New Age stoners look at their zodiacal sign, though.

At one point on my life I had to get certified to administer the Myers-Briggs assessment. The funny thing is that we had charts for how people "score," and in each dichotomy the difference between men and women was trivial.

Except for T/F (thinking versus feeling).

It will not surprise anyone here to know that women were FAR more likely to assess as "feelers" than "thinkers" when it came to their preferred method of decision-making... it wasn't even close. Obviously that meant that the MBTI was irredeemably sexist - insert eye-roll here - so the questions and definitions were changed to "fix" it. They kept the T/F dichotomy, but the questions were tweaked to gauge whether you tended to make decisions based on the immediate facts or in the context of underlying principles. I would argue that those are not exclusive at all, but being rationally consistent wasn't the point. The point was to hide the fact that men and women tend to make decisions on different criteria, with men asking, "Does this work?" and women asking, "Is there consensus?". Once they did added enough of those questions, the male-female difference disappeared.

inb4 Typo says, Rational consistency is a tool of the patriarchy.

@carnold03

A president does not need congressional approval to conduct affairs at the Department of Justice, a launching pad of the SWAT raids — or to terrify small children.

That's true, but if the Gestapo agents don't get paid they won't show up for work, and the power of the purse rests with Congress. Specifically, all spending bills originate in the House of Representatives. If the Republicans win control of the House (which will happen unless there's a monumental amount of election fraud that not even the Democrats could probably pull off, the Republicans can simply zero out the FBI's budget. This isn't even subject to veto or Senate approval... all it takes is a majority of Representatives in the House to not put the funds into the budget. Even Biden can't veto a spending bill that never reaches his desk.

Of course I have exactly zero faith in a Republican majority to do anything more than genuflect at the altar of the "vast majority of good people" in the FBI, despite the fact that it is those same people who are kicking down doors and waiving their machine guns in the faces of children.

Also, Biden's hatred of religion isn't unique to Catholicism... he's on good terms with liberal theologians of all stripes. Biden and the pope see eye-to-eye on pretty much everything, in fact. It's people who are theologically conservative that he hates... except for Muslims, of course.

@Initial-Glove

That sounds like an odd problem... are you encountering a bunch of trannies?

Obviously I'm a guy and I've always insisted that my women were born that way (XX), but if you know the other person is the right sex, screening for height seems pretty silly to me. Of the dozen-or-so women I dated when I was single, two of them were taller than me. (At 5'7" I'm at the 20th percentile for height among US men, but I'm taller than 87% of US women... so the math checks out).

What we constantly see is women using 6'0" as a cutoff in dating apps, then whining about their lack of success, even though they're screening out 85% of men and restricting themselves to chasing the same small group that every other woman is trying to get. It might make sense if height held any importance, but like I write earlier; height is about as significant as eye color. Also, a woman who would be attracted to a 5'10" guy she met in person will never see his profile if she uses six feet as the minimum in her profile. The computer doesn't know or care that she doesn't really want to reject a great match simply because he's 5'11 rather tha 6'0"... it will just do what it's programmed to do.

Then people criticize guys who "round up" their height. Obviously I'm married so it doesn't matter, but I don't "fudge" my height. I am exactly 5'7" in bare feet. If I were single I might start wearing taller shoes or boots, though.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

I don't blame him. I'm not sure he could answer, since any answer he gave would favor one side, and since we had all gotten through voir dire we theoretically knew what we were doing.

As I see it, the problem is that nobody teaches civics any more, but pretty much everybody gets called for jury duty sooner or later. Consequently, jurors go with their gut rather than with the facts. We've all seen the willingness of people to jump to the worst possible conclusion about something and then refuse to budge. I wasn't joking the other day when I wrote that I've had scores - probably hundreds - of people state their suppositions about me and be 100% confident... and 100% wrong.

Likewise I've had countless people refuse to admit they're wrong even about trivial points despite mathematical-level proof that they're mistaken.

I've had that happen here even among red-pill guys. I've had highly educated, theologically conservative clergy members do it: tell me they adhere to scripture one moment and deny something in black-and-white the next. Not one single internet critic of mine has ever been correct about my background, education, experience, or perspective. Not. One.

Those people sit on juries.

It takes hard work to maintain the level of mental hygiene required to override your "gut" when the facts are ambiguous. Very few people do that, but that's what is required of jurors.

The alternative is worse, though. Without trial by jury, the entire process is in the hands of the state: the cops, the prosecutors, and the judges are all government employees, and we're seeing how "neutral" that is in real time.