Really drives in how long ago the ‘90s were that I haven’t heard a single Mr. Garrison reference in regards to this case.
I will say I’ve seen some sass that cis people seek out gender-affirming procedures too and yes indeed I remember the 1980s and 1990s when breast-enlarging implants were a voguish gender-affirming cosmetic surgery for cis women but I remember that even when within they were within the natural human range (say, the size that women often surgically reduce) it was considered quite improper and reflective of poor character to get very large ones
Q: WHY isn’t Twitter doing more to crack down on LibsOfTikTok and others highlighting hospital youth gender transition programs, yielding avalanches of death and bomb threats?
A: Twitter can *maybe* survive having banned Donald Trump, if he doesn’t personally get re-elected, but if they try to suppress a major Republican campaign of “look at this thing! dislike it, and vote for us who will act against it!” then the next time they hold power in Washington Twitter gets thrown against a *wall*
I love when kinky people are like “I’m such a freak in private. You’d never guess that in my normal life I’m a nerd who works in tech and plays DND.” Babygirl yes we would.
I am baffled how relevant drag is proving in 2022.
On the other hand, if you were trying to reconcile the prominent public performance of gender-crossing back to pre-2010 culture thats exactly what you’d start hammering rn.
Like, everyone realizes that if there’s a roar coming up lately from university-educated would-be administrators seeking to segment and serve particular identity categories that’s not the sound of a new order being born, it’s the Great Society death-rattling, right?
Impressive though they are, the entire weight of Russia could still grind the entire weight of Ukraine down in time. This is in many ways the typical Russian way of war, the (unsuccessful) early shock was uncharacteristic and more typical of American doctrine.
Russia might deploy less than its total weight; a full mobilization might have greater political or economic costs than its regime is willing to bear, the integration of its supply chains with Ukraine-friendly sources withdrawing support may limit its capabilities.
India and China could conceivably offer themselves to Russia as replacements for Western market outlets, in China’s case this would be motivated by geopolitics and the appeal of forming the core of a non-American bloc to congeal around; in the case of India the appeal would be in using Russian technology and fertilizer (which is essentially natural gas value-added for export) to modernize its agricultural and other productive sectors
Ukraine can supplement its weight with the support of friendly regimes in Western Europe and the US, providing materiel and advanced technical aid.
Europe relies on Russian natural gas for much of its energy and a split with Russia will impose serious costs on European citizens and economies. Even if European political leadership classes are committed to Ukraine this will create severe tensions with their domestic bases; France is familiar with the dynamic of elite-approved programs being walked back in the face of popular resistance and has already had to abandon plans that raised energy costs for this reason, the German economy and political economy is substantially based on energy-intensive heavy industry exports.
Russia in war has a habit of waiting for “General Winter” to do work for them and brother, winter is coming.
Has anyone made a hot take that anti-shipping helped cause online fandom to be heavily dominated by mentally ill people who are Like That? Every anti-shipper I met online was the sort of mentally ill person who never took their meds or went to therapy recently, even if they weren’t outright sexual predators. The mentally ill people who actually take care of themselves either avoid fandom entirely or are hardcore pro-shippers.
Welp, another beautiful day, gonna take a break from sitting on my phone acquiring an effectively limitless supply of goods and watching the esteem and influence of all the bad people recede in real time and go out to apply my newly polished sense of focus to permanently increasing the quality of my environment in a way that both makes me more attractive and earns the esteem of my neighbors!
Military operations on the scale of this counteroffensive do not succeed or fail in a day or a week. Ukrainian officials have long acknowledged that they do not have the sheer mass of mechanized forces that would have been needed to conduct a blitzkrieg-like drive to destroy the Russian defenses in Kherson Oblast or anywhere. They have instead been setting conditions for months by attacking and disrupting Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs), Russian command and control, and Russian logistics systems throughout southwestern occupied Ukraine. The timing of the start of the counteroffensive is consistent with the observed degradation of Russian capabilities in western Kherson Oblast balanced against the need to start liberating occupied Ukrainian lands and people as soon as possible. There is no reason to suspect that the timing has been materially influenced by inappropriate considerations or tensions. Counteroffensive operations now underway will very likely unfold over the coming weeks and possibly months as Ukrainian forces take advantage of the conditions they have set to defeat particular sectors of the line they have identified as vulnerable while working to retake their cities and towns without destroying them in the process.
Military forces that must conduct offensive operations without the numerical advantages normally required for success in such operations often rely on misdirections and feints to draw the defender away from the sectors of the line on which breakthrough and exploitation efforts will focus. The art of such feints is two-fold. First, they must be conducted with sufficient force to be believable. Since they are feints, however, rather than deliberate attacks expected to succeed, they often look like failures—the attacking units will fall back when they feel they have persuaded the defender of their seriousness. Second, they take time to have an effect. When the purpose of the feint is to draw the defender’s forces away from the intended breakthrough sectors, the attacker must wait until the defender has actually moved forces. There will thus likely be a delay between the initial feint operations and the start of decisive operations. The situation during that delay may well look like the attack has failed.
The Ukrainian military and government are repeating requests to avoid any reporting or forecasting of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, a measure that is essential if the counteroffensive includes feints or misdirections. It is of course possible that the counteroffensive will fail, that any particular breakthrough attempt that fails was not a feint, or that the Ukrainian military has made some error in planning, timing, or execution that will undermine the success of its operations. But the situation in which Ukraine finds itself calls for a shrewd and nuanced counteroffensive operation with considerable misdirection and careful and controlled advances. It is far more likely in these very early days, therefore, that a successful counteroffensive would appear to be stalling or unsuccessful for some time before its success became manifest.
well, time will tell!
I mean, General Winter launches the Russian political offensive against NATO unity soon, I’m not sure Russia needs to press advantages that hard in pursuit of mere strategic gain right now
The world’s not perfect yet, but to the extent I see dumb stuff go by I’m usually like “well, headed for a fall that way” or even “hey, you know you could play a good game of ‘let’s you and he fight’ with this” these days
