Scott75

Yes, change does happen, but some changes are a lot worse than other changes Up until this point, we agree. I think it's also rather important to point out that it's not "my" gender argument- we're talking about definitions that have been created decades ago and are now being used both in well known sources of information, such as Wikipedia, as well as in the courts. I also disagree that it's "among the worst kinds of changes there could ever be". The issue here is, what constitutes a mental disorder? While transphobia is not currently listed as one, that might change in the future. As to your referring to normalcy, I'm pretty sure you're referring to social norms. Here's Wikipedia's introduction to this term: ** A social norm is a shared standard of acceptable behavior by a group.[1] Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws.[2] Social normative influences or social norms, are deemed to be powerful drivers of human behavioural changes and well organized and incorporated by major theories which explain human behaviour.[3] Institutions are composed of multiple norms. Norms are shared social beliefs about behavior; thus, they are distinct from "ideas", "attitudes", and "values", which can be held privately, and which do not necessarily concern behavior.[4] Norms are contingent on context, social group, and historical circumstances.[5] Scholars distinguish between regulative norms (which constrain behavior), constitutive norms (which shape interests), and prescriptive norms (which prescribe what actors ought to do).[6][7][3] The effects of norms can be determined by a logic of appropriateness and logic of consequences; the former entails that actors follow norms because it is socially appropriate, and the latter entails that actors follow norms because of cost-benefit calculations.[8] Three stages have been identified in the life cycle of a norm: (1) Norm emergence – norm entrepreneurs seek to persuade others of the desirability and appropriateness of certain behaviors; (2) Norm cascade – when a norm obtains broad acceptance; and (3) Norm internalization – when a norm acquires a "taken-for-granted" quality.[7] Norms are robust to various degrees: some norms are often violated whereas other norms are so deeply internalized that norm violations are infrequent.[4][3] Evidence for the existence of norms can be detected in the patterns of behavior within groups, as well as the articulation of norms in group discourse.[4] In some societies, individuals often limit their potential due to social norms, while others engage in social movements to challenge and resist these constraints. ** I'd say that certain norm entrepreneurs have been pretty successful in lobbying to get terms like man and woman expanded so that people who identify as one of these can be one of these. You may not like it, but ultimately what sticks will be what remains in online resources of information and in the courts.

That's easy. If you're tolerant of woke bullshit then you're a RINO. I'd say that if your screening for people you don't like includes crass insults, you're already off to a bad start.

Again, they are if some people define terms like male and female to include anyone who identifies as male and female. You seem to want to deny that this is, in fact, how many people define those terms, including myself now, but that doesn't change the fact that they do. Well, too bad for them. I don't deny that people like you are here pushing this madness. I am soundly rejecting it. I'm just pointing out facts on the ground. I also think that this is how things should be, but that point is secondary. Oh great, back to playing your dumb game of pretending like you are not here advocating for this... I have already said numerous times that I think the new definitions are good. The one thing that I think you don't fully understand is that these new definitions were created long before I arrived here and I sincerely doubt they'll be leaving.

Then stop with the ruse as if you are just some objective, neutral observer here. You are not. I try to be as objective as possible, but I've never said I was neutral in this discussion. I prize things like civility, logic and evidence based reasoning. You don't need to. Just don't call yourself trans. As I've said in the past, that -can- work, but it depends on the circumstance. There are certainly circumstances where just saying that you are a man or a woman may not answer whether you are cisgender or transgender. In many circumstances, this may well not matter, in which case, fine. As I've said before, for the past 3 years living in Mexico, I've never once felt the need to tell anyone I was cisgender. But there are some circumstances where it -does- matter, and in those circumstances, I could say that I am cisgender. You don't need to. That is why we have words like male and female and trans. As I've explained before, many people, including myself, now accept the fact that terms like male and female, at least when referring to a person's gender, now include anyone who identifies as those genders. You at least recognize that the word trans helps in differentiating between people who may have been born with predominantly male or female parts but identifies as the other gender. Adding the word cis is just a simple way of pointing out that one identifies with one's biological sex.

I said that some people here had transphobia, which I believe implies that they are transphobic. As to whether it's pejorative, I'd say that it's more about pointing out a specific flaw in certain people. Note, I think that I myself have a bit of transphobia, but I think I'm working hard on overcoming this, in part by having this long discussion here. I think that the term racist is the same, I also think I'm probably still a bit racist despite my efforts to overcome this. I'm curious to know what some posters told you to persuade you that it's a good thing :-p.

I'm not sure if they spelled it out, but I think that if they really had anything, they would have said so. No, it was literally spelled out. "We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Your quote says that they didn't "establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election inteference activities". Left unsaid is that they didn't exonerate the Trump Campaign of doing this either. That being said, I've read about the "evidence" that was gathered against the Trump campaign. It's just bad and I strongly suspect that those who gathered it knew or at least suspected that it was bad, but gave it a pass anyway for political reasons. Exhonorate them? That is not what an investigation does. You are innocent until proven guilty and they couldn't even find any evidence. My quote is from the Mueller report and backs up exactly what I said. It seems you forgot what you initially said in the post that started our discussion here. I'll quote you: "There was no collusion. The Mueller report spelled this out." I responded that I wasn't sure that Mueller's report spelled that out. In response, you took the following quote from the Mueller report: "We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." I pointed out that Mueller's report didn't exonerate Trump and you've now responded that that's not what investigation does. Did you see how you moved the goalpost? Your initially statement was that the Mueller report "spelled out" that there was no collusion. It didn't. It simply stated that Mueller's investigation "did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities". In essence, the Mueller report said they found no substantive evidence that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia. They never said they found compelling evidence that the Trump Campaign didn't collude with Russia. In the end, I think we're focusing on the wrong thing here. Just because a federal investigation did or didn't find evidence for a given conjecture is less important in a debate then whether one or more of the debaters has found evidence one way or the other. From what I've seen, there was never any good evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians. I have also seen good evidence suggesting that those who -did- accuse Trump and his campaign of these things used shoddy evidence. I -suspect- that this wasn't just an accident, given the fact that throwing shade on Trump and his campaign would directly benefit those who wanted to continue a civil war with Ukraine, one that has now erupted into the potential of a global war between the 2 nations on earth that could wipe out most if not all life on earth. I have no idea what any of this has to do with anything I am talking about here. I was presenting evidence that might suggest why Trump's political opponents might try to smear him with these accusations of colluding with Russia.

I thought I did. I think part of the issue is that it's hard for me to understand that you can't seem to grasp that different people have different definitions of certain words from your own. You can't seem to grasp that I understand this, I just soundly reject what you are doing. All I'm doing is pointing out words like cisgender and gender identity that have been around for over 3 decades, and that I think they're good additions to the English language. You may not like them and "soundly reject" them, but they won't go away just because of your personal dislike of them.

Once again, you have no room to cry on here about people calling you names when you engage in the same personal attacks. Telling someone that they seem to have a case of transphobia, that is, that someone is afraid of people who are transgender, is similar to saying that one seems to have a case of arachnophobia, that is someone who is afraid of spiders. I fully admit that I am somewhat afraid of large spiders. I'll even admit that I am perhaps a bit transphobic myself. That being said, I have done my best to overcome this fear. No, it's just a label that I think fits people like you and Deluge. If you'd like to argue that you aren't transphobic, by all means, present your evidence. It is not my job to disprove your baseless assertions. I think there's a good amount of evidence to support my assertion in this case, perhaps best denoted by your frequent refusal to acknowledge that terms such as gender, male and female now have definitions that you don't like. First of all, I'd argue that no one should call someone else by the a term. The fact that you decided to replace the s's in the term suggests that either the forum software wouldn't even allow you to use the word, or that you decided to pull your punch a bit because you know that you're going beyond the limits of a civilized discourse. Secondly, I never said that I -knew- that you were transphobic, only that I thought that it fits people like you and Deluge, and that you were welcome to present evidence that this wasn't the case. No, calling someone transphobic is a baseless assertion about them as a person that adds nothing to the discussion. Perhaps we can just agree to disagree on this point.

That article is pure revisionist drivel. Russia didn't invade Ukraine because of some rebels or some inability of Zelensky. They invaded Ukraine for the land. They did it with total disregard for life. They have targeted and killed thousands of civilians. They were never going to negotiate. Short of Zelensky giving up the land and moving everyone out, Russia/Putin would never have settled. I suspect that this is what the western mainstream media would have you believe. It's not the truth though. You may not be aware of this, but Ukraine started a civil war 8 years before Russia's military operation. That, in turn, only started after a massacre killing dozens of people in the capital in early 2014, which was swiftly blamed on the elected President of the time, Victor Yanukovych, who in turn fled for his life to Russia. A lot of evidence has since surfaced that Yanukovych was -not- responsible for that massacre. A good article on a lot of this evidence can be seen here: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-hidden-truth-about-ukraine-italian-documentary-bombshell-evidence-kiev-euromaidan-snipers-kill-demonstrators/5619684 Anyway, as I said, after Yanukovych's flight to Russia and the takeover of the Ukrainian government by far right and neo nazi elements, those same elements almost immediately tried to denigrate the Russian language by forbidding it to be used in government institutions in all of Ukraine, despite the fact that it was the primary language for many eastern Ukrainians. This may well have been the final straw for the Crimeans, who held a referendum to rejoin Russia. After the referendum was in favour of rejoining, Russia accepted and annexed them back into Russia. Much of the rest of eastern Ukraine, while never having been part of Russia in the past, still had strong linguistic and ethnic ties to Russia, and so began to engage protests in eastern Ukrainian cities, perhaps most notably in Odessa. The same far right elements I mentioned previously perpetrated a massacre there. Evgeny Norin, a Russian historian focused on Russia's wars and international politics, wrote a very good article on the whole thing, which can be seen here: https://www.rt.com/russia/554860-burned-alive-2014-odessa/ Quoting from the article: ** A total of 48 people died: two Maidan activists and 46 Kulikovo Field Anti-Maidan protesters – two on Grecheskaya Street, and 42 at Kulikovo Field Square. Eight people jumped from the building to their deaths, while others suffocated or died from burns. All were citizens of Ukraine. A total of 247 people requested medical help following the incident, of whom 27 had been wounded by gunfire. Albu, the local politician and one of the leaders of the group, was among those who had taken cover in the building but survived. He later joined the LPR’s Prizrak Brigade in Donbass. Another leader, local MP Vyacheslav Markin, died the next morning from injuries sustained after jumping from the building to escape the fire. Ashes In the following years, not a single person responsible for the killings in Odessa was punished in any way. Many of the murderers acted openly, wearing no masks or disguises, and were very straightforward about their intentions. Only a handful even faced criminal investigation. But ultimately, not a single one was brought before the courts to answer for the crimes committed. Whatever hearings did manage to be scheduled were derailed by the so-called ‘patriots’. A number of judges were forced to recuse themselves from the cases after receiving threats from militants. Meanwhile, high-ranking Ukrainian politicians were quick to identify the ‘culprits’. Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchinov said that the disturbances in Odessa “were coordinated from a single center located in Russia.” Sergey Pashinsky, acting head of the presidential administration, said that it was “an FSB provocation to divert attention from the [so-called] anti-terrorist operation [in the Donbass]”. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry declared that “the tragedy was a pre-planned and well-financed operation by the Russian special services.” From the very beginning, the authorities in Odessa seemed to deliberately obstruct the investigation. By the morning of May 3, the area around Grecheskaya Street had been cleared by municipal workers, who quickly disposed of all the physical evidence. The Trade Unions building remained open to the public for the following month. Citizens could watch live streams from the smoldering ruins, with one cameraman referring to the corpses of a young pair as “Romeo and Juliet.” No attempt was made to preserve the crime scene. The weapons used to kill people were never found. And these are just a few examples of the investigation’s dismissive and negligent attitude toward the case. In September 2015, UN Special Rapporteur Christof Heyns acknowledged that the bulk of the evidence relating to the May 2 events was destroyed immediately after the crime. Euromaidan activist Sergei Khodiyak, who fired at people with a hunting rifle, was released from custody, and the judge recused himself from the case under pressure from a group of Maidan activists led by Igor Mosiychuk, an MP from the nationalist Radical Party. Vsevolod Goncharevsky, who used a club to beat and finish off Kulikovo activists who had jumped out of the windows of the burning building, was released due to a “lack of evidence.” [snip] In fact, Ukrainian social media did exactly what is commonly attributed to Russian propaganda. The piles of burnt corpses evoked feelings of horror, but also of rage. May 2014 was a breaking point: volunteers from Russia started to arrive in the breakaway republics en masse and even some men from Western Europe came to fight on their side. Slogans about autonomous status and the need to engage in talks with Kiev gave way to an unwavering resolve and determination to stand and fight to the bitter end. Just a few days after May 2, a Donbass rebel wrote on a destroyed and burned-out Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicle: “This is for Odessa, you bastards.” ** Despite all of this, for 8 years, Russia tried to find a diplomatic solution to this civil war. Putin even mentioned this in the speech he gave on the day he started his military operation: ** This brings me to the situation in Donbass. We can see that the forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014 have seized power, are keeping it with the help of ornamental election procedures and have abandoned the path of a peaceful conflict settlement. For eight years, for eight endless years we have been doing everything possible to settle the situation by peaceful political means. Everything was in vain. As I said in my previous address, you cannot look without compassion at what is happening there. It became impossible to tolerate it. We had to stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people who live there and who pinned their hopes on Russia, on all of us. It is their aspirations, the feelings and pain of these people that were the main motivating force behind our decision to recognise the independence of the Donbass people’s republics. ** Full transcript: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/statements/67843 Former Swiss Intelligence Officer Jacques Baud provides evidence that strongly suggests that Putin's motivation for starting his military operation when he did was based primarily on western Ukraine once again attacking the Donbass region, despite the Minsk accords prohibiting it. Quoting from an article he wrote shortly after the military operation began: ** In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knows that the Ukrainians began to shell the civilian populations of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem or to sit idle and watch Russian speakers from the Donbass being run over. If he decides to intervene, Vladimir Putin can invoke the international obligation of “ Responsibility To Protect ” (R2P). But he knows that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention will trigger a shower of sanctions. Therefore, whether its intervention is limited to the Donbass or whether it goes further to put pressure on the West for the status of Ukraine, the price to be paid will be the same. This is what he explains in his speech on February 21. That day, he acceded to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Republics of Donbass and, in the process, he signed treaties of friendship and assistance with them. The Ukrainian artillery bombardments on the populations of Donbass continued and, on February 23, the two Republics requested military aid from Russia. On the 24th, Vladimir Putin invokes Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance. In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately obscure the fact that the war actually started on February 16th. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as certain Russian and European intelligence services were well aware… The lawyers will judge. ** Full article: https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/09/former-nato-military-analyst-blows-the-whistle-on-wests-ukraine-invasion-narrative/

There was no collusion. The Mueller report spelled this out. I'm not sure if they spelled it out, but I think that if they really had anything, they would have said so. No, it was literally spelled out. "We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Your quote says that they didn't "establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election inteference activities". Left unsaid is that they didn't exonerate the Trump Campaign of doing this either. That being said, I've read about the "evidence" that was gathered against the Trump campaign. It's just bad and I strongly suspect that those who gathered it knew or at least suspected that it was bad, but gave it a pass anyway for political reasons. I've read another article from Aaron Mate that was published shortly after Russia's military operation in Ukraine began that provides a possible motive for giving this bad intelligence a pass. Quoting from the introduction and conclusion: ** On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81). The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas. At that point, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was just months into an upstart presidency that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas conflict. Instead of supporting the Ukrainian leader’s peace mandate, Democrats in Congress were impeaching Trump for briefly impeding the flow of weapons that fueled the fight. As his Democratic allies now like to forget, President Obama refused to send these same weapons out of fear of prolonging the war and arming Nazis. By abandoning Obama’s policy, the Democrats, Cohen warned, threaten to sabotage peace and strengthen Ukraine’s far-right. “Zelensky ran as a peace candidate,” Cohen explained. “He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.” But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists “have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine.” [snip] While claiming to profess concern for Ukrainian lives, NATO policymakers have made plain their disregard for diplomacy. Instead, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman recently told me, they have pursued a policy of fighting Russia “to the last Ukrainian.” “Everything we are doing, rather than accelerate an end to the fighting and some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting,” Freeman, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, among a number of other senior positions, said. Invoking Freeman’s warning, Noam Chomsky concurs that US policy amounts to a “death warrant” for Ukraine. Indeed, on April 5, the Washington Post made clear the prevailing viewpoint in Washignton and Brussels: “For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.” While rhetorically claiming to support Ukrainian agency, in reality, the Post added, “there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support to win the peace.” This is undoubtedly the message being relayed to Zelensky from the White House in what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described as “near-daily contact” with Zelensky’s team about the negotiations with Russia. In sabotaging Zelensky’s peace mandate to side with the Ukrainian far-right, the US pushed Ukraine into a calamity that Professor Cohen warned about nearly three years ago. “There were moments in history, political history, when there’s an opportunity that is so good and wise and so often lost, the chance,” Cohen told me in October 2019. “So, the chance for Zelensky, the new president who had this very large victory, 70 plus percent to negotiate with Russia an end to that war, it’s got to be seized. And it requires the United States, basically, simply saying to Zelensky, ‘Go for it, we’ve got your back.’” By choosing to ignore the pleas of lonely voices like Cohen to instead have the back of Ukraine’s far-right, Washington sabotaged a historic peace mandate and helped provoke a catastrophic war. ** Full article: https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/18/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us-sabotaged-zelenskys-peace-mandate/

An article published today on Trudeau's departure that I liked: https://www.soniaelijah.com/p/breaking-trudeau-steps-down Quoting from the article: ** On January 28, 2022, in response to the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers making their way to Ottawa’s Parliament Hill to protest against Canada’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates, Trudeau infamously said: “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other, who know of that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, our rights, our values, as a country.” [snip] A record-breaking convoy of 60,000 truckers from Western Canada and 12,000 truckers from the Eastern region, eventually converged at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on January 29, 2022. For almost three weeks, Canada’s capital city grinded to a halt. Alongside the truckers, thousands of additional protesters from across Canada and even from other countries joined in, with many camping out in their vehicles during the protest. However, on February 14, marking a historic first for Canada, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to address the truckers' protest. This unprecedented act granted Trudeau’s government sweeping authoritarian powers, including the ability to ban gatherings at certain locations. Moreover, under the Emergencies Act, banks were given the power to freeze personal and business accounts of individuals and entities linked to the protests without the need for court orders. This measure was aimed at severing financial support for the truckers in order to break up the protest. Significantly, Trudeau’s draconian decision was later ruled as "unreasonable" and "unconstitutional" by a Canadian judge in January 2024. Now, three years after the Canadian truckers’ epic protest, it can be said “the small fringe minority” finally got their wish- Trudeau’s resignation. **

I believe you're right regarding the FBI's claims, but I'd also like to point out that I haven't seen any evidence that robosmith has lied, by which I mean I haven't seen any evidence that he has tried to persuade anyone here of something that he himself doesn't believe to be true.

I'm not sure if they spelled it out, but I think that if they really had anything, they would have said so.

I'm not sure about the things you mention, but you may find the following thread that I just made interesting:

Interesting article just published on Aaron Mate's substack today. For those who haven't heard of Aaron Mate, here's his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Maté Quoting the introduction to Aaron Maté's article below: ** FBI still hiding key Russiagate details, newly released document shows In May 2017, the FBI opened an unprecedented counterintelligence probe of President Trump as an agent of Russia. Nearly 8 years later, the FBI continues to conceal the basis for that investigation. Aaron Maté Jan 06, 2025 As Donald Trump re-enters the White House on a pledge to end national security state overreach, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still hiding critical details on the Russia conspiracy investigation that engulfed his first term. In response to a Freedom of Information request that I filed in August 2022, the FBI on December 31, more than two years later, released a heavily redacted copy of the document that opened an explosive and unprecedented counterintelligence probe of the sitting president as an agent of the Russian government. The Electronic Communication, dated May 16, 2017, claimed to have an “articulable factual basis” to suspect that Trump “wittingly or unwittingly” was illegally acting on behalf of Russia, and accordingly posing “threats to the national security of the United States.” The FBI’s “goal,” it added, was “to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation.” It additionally sought to uncover whether Trump and unnamed “others” obstructed “any associated FBI investigation” – a reference to Crossfire Hurricane, the initial FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign’s suspected cooperation with an alleged Russian interference plot in the 2016 election. While Crossfire Hurricane, which was formally opened on July 31, 2016, had by that point focused on members of Trump’s orbit, the May 2017 probe was specifically targeted at the president himself during his fourth month in office. The investigation of Trump was undertaken at the behest of then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, one week after Trump had fired his former boss and mentor, James B. Comey. According to the declassified document, McCabe’s decision was approved by FBI Assistant Director Bill Priestap, who had also signed off on the opening of Crossfire Hurricane; and Jim Baker, the FBI general counsel. Baker was a longtime friend of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and a key figure in the dissemination of Clinton-funded disinformation to the FBI that falsely tied Trump to Russia. In his FBI role, Baker personally circulated the conspiracy theory, manufactured by “researchers” working with the Clinton campaign, that the Trump campaign and Russia were communicating via a secret server. After leaving the FBI, Baker served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, where he backed the company’s censorship of reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, based on yet another conspiracy theory that the laptop files were Russian disinformation. ** Full article: https://www.aaronmate.net/p/fbi-still-hiding-key-russiagate-details?publication_id=100118&post_id=154280509&isFreemail=true&r=z34xz&triedRedirect=true

It isn't just Trump supporters who believe in the deep state. Chris Hedges, who's always been on the left and was never a fan of Trump, mentions it as well. He brought it up shortly after Trump won his first federal election back in 2016: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chris-hedges-on-how-the-deep-state-will-influence-the-trump-presidency/

Why ? Her claims are pretty extreme however she WAS on the inside. Yes, she was. I was thinking of not mentioning where I first took note of her, because of the controversial nature of the documentary, but I've decided to mention it- in a documentary called Thrive. The documentary gets into certain conspiracy theories on free energy and alien life, things Fitts doesn't get into at all, she focuses solely on monetary issues, but she made a good impression on me from that point. You can see the Thrive trailer here: If you'd like to see the full documentary, it can be seen here: https://www.freetothrive.com/movie/thrive/ Fitts just says a little bit on economic policy a little after the 1 hour and 53 minute mark. I suspect I've seen her in another documentary as well, perhaps in The Money Masters.

I'm not 'fabricating' court cases, or Wikipedia articles detailing the new uses for terms like gender. You have an amazing inability to actually respond to what is said. I did not say you were fabricating court cases or Wikipedia articles. I respond to what you say, you just don't like my responses. True, you did not say I was fabricating court cases or Wikipedia articles. You -did- say that I was fabricating a problem, though. I'm just trying to point out to you that the new gender terms are not something I invented, and they are being used in court cases and Wikipedia articles. You can try to deny these new definitions exist all you like, but Wikipedia and court decisions aren't going to just go away because you don't like the fact that they're there.

So... you don't believe it then? What is it you think that I don't believe? I agree that I'm not merely saying that new defitions for gender terms exist. I've also never denied that I'm in favour of these new definitions. But I certainly never created any "problem" either. There's a big difference between pointing out a problem and creating one.

I did.

I've seen Fitts in the past and I like her work. That being said, I've only seen her tangentially, as clips in a documentary, for instance. As to Trump, I'm actually not a fan in many ways, I just like the fact that he picked RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard for his cabinet. In regards to money in general, I think a great starter documentary would be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA

Absolute balderdash. RFK has been a beacon of light when it comes to shedding light on the corruption in regulatory agencies for health in the U.S. Even those who aren't a fan of his research regarding vaccines recognize his benefits: https://cepr.net/rfk-jr-physicians-pay-schedules-and-the-elites-big-lie/ As for those of us who have been admiring the work of the web site he founded, Children's Health Defense, in regards to the vaccine research they've been doing during what I'll call the Covid times, I can't think of a better candidate. They're constantly coming out with new articles on the subject. This one came out in December: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/university-of-california-covid-vaccine-lawsuit-moves-forward/

Gabbard has ZERO experience in intelligence and RFK knows NOTHING about the science he's trying to RUIN. Gabbard was a military colonel in the Army reserve and has shown that she knows quite a bit about American foreign policy in interviews she's given. John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote an article about her in September that was fairly positive in regards to her becoming the Director of National Intelligence. Quoting the introductory summary and conclusion of the article below: ** We need someone in the post willing to rein in the neocon intelligence and foreign policy establishments when they urge the president to double down on military action based on phony or incomplete intelligence. [snip] The bottom line in my view is that Trump appears to be serious in his desire to change the country’s foreign and intelligence policy. He appears to be serious about shaking up the intelligence community. He appears to be serious about bringing foreign conflicts in which the U.S. is involved to a close. Those are all good things for those of us who support a change to the pro-war status quo that is the military-industrial complex. We can certainly disagree with Donald Trump on a thousand other issues. But on Tulsi Gabbard, he got it right. ** Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/15/john-kiriakou-gabbard-could-help-change-us-foreign-policy/

"The deep state" is what makes government work. AKA the brains and expertise that ^you don't have. I think that in order to discuss the deep state, we're first going to have to define it. I have a brief article that I think does a good job of it. Quoting the relevant section: ** In the midst of election season, conversations revolving around the levers of power become more frequent, and in the case of a U.S. presidential election, that often includes debates around the so-called “deep state.” Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence, Professors Charles Derber and Yale Magrass discuss their new book, “Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America.” There are many interpretations of what the ‘deep state’ actually represents in government, but Magrass offers a clear definition, breaking it down into two parts: the official state and the deep state. The official state, according to Magrass, consists of the elected officials people know very well, who are always in the media spotlight and soak in the blame for the issues that arise from their perceived rule. Meanwhile, the deep state operates largely unnoticed, with the official state serving as cover. “It gives free reign to corporations, free reign to the very rich, and they can more or less do whatever they want, with the official state carrying almost all the blame for what happens,” Magrass says. ** Source: https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/27/how-deep-does-the-deep-state-go/ By this definition, I think it's clear that it's not a good thing.

Once again... as I have already said, far fewer people choose to say cisgender. As I have said previously, I have never used the equivalent term for cisgender here in Mexico in the 3 years I've been living here, so I can agree that it's not a term that's used often. What I'm saying is that there are times, more often in North America (I did use the term when I was living in Canada), where I've found that using the term is beneficial, in particular if one is trying to make it clear that someone who is biologically of a given sex identifies as that gender as well. Sure, but this is about being able to say that someone is -not- trans without saying "not trans" or, even worse, "normal". Nope. Just call men males and women females and trans people trans. I feel like we're going around in circles here. It all comes down to your refusal to accept that some people believe that terms like cisgender or gender identity are good to use at times. You can disagree with them all you like, but they're still going to use it. This includes large organizations like Wikipedia and even the FDA.