bleeding heart

Just so.

But Tim, you are undermined by your own source. You yourself point out the "only difference"....that difference being exactly the one which cybercoma is arguing, and which you dispute. that is, the source you use as authoritative backs up the counterarguments to you...explicitly. Further, it says that the "medical approach treatment for people diagnosed with GID is to support them in physically modifying their bodies so that they better match their gender identities." Oh...and since you offer up "biology" as the Holy Grail, the sacredness Not To Be Tampered With (presumably including other invasive medical procedures, not only transgenderism), then how do you come to terms with the notion--also briefly navigated in the source you provide--that there appears to be a biological component to transgenderism?

I see that an interesting thread about gender identity has morphed--predictably--into ruminations on whether transgender people are simply mentally ill--and can be likened to addicts. (A nonsensical analogy, even by its own--very low--standards.) There is also an undercurrent of sanctimony about this...see, maybe transgender folk are doing something morally wrong. At least ignorant of what's best for themselves....which is to be proposed to them by those who, interestingly, know nothing of the subject and who have never spent a single hour even thinking about it. A familiar refrain, as we've seen, most recently over matters of homosexuality. (The bigots and the ignorant are losing on that score, it appears....all the better. As they continue to lose, so too will they shed much of their bigotry or their ignorance, whichever the case may be.) Transgender issues are becoming more acceptable in mainstream society because we are having, as it was once quaintly but perhaps sometimes accurately put, a "raising of consciousness." It is a measure of our becoming, in certain realms of social life, more cognizant, and more civilized.

But that's not an argument for common beliefs in things like "heaven." Rather, it's an argument that anything anyone invents out of whole cloth is just as possible as heaven...or nothingness (whatever either of those mean).

There was no case, and it didn't relate to your post. That far more entertainers and artists currently appear to lean more left than right, politically, and that doubtless a few of them are happy, decent and stable folk, is not an argument for voting in a liberal direction. In my opinion. August thinks that it does mean this...and yet strangely seems unaware that he thinks this.

Kimmy, "When the Man Comes Around" also plays during the pretty amazing credit sequence in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Very cool.

Well, PIK transitioned quite smoothly from "Canadians are so stupid that they will vote for him" into his remark about the "chicks" voting "with their vaginas"....so I think the fundamental message is pretty clear. Evidently, it's only (and fully) half of "Canadians" who are "stupid" enough to vote for Trudeau.

I think "Girls" is really good. I avoided it until just recently, in part because I'd heard (more than once) that it was "the new Sex and the City." This is not a selling point for me. At all. I think Sex and the City is fairly crappy, myself. But Girls is not much like SatC...unless females in New York is the criteria. Also, Girls has actual, breathing, interesting male characters...whereas the men of Sex and the City are (to paraphrase Heather Mallick on one of her better days) "walking sex organs that shoot money." Also, I disagree with Boges; I don't think there is an underlying meanness to the characters. I think there is sometimes a rather overt meanness...but that the underlying qualities are in fact kind of sweet. I see them as mostly good people.

Hey, that's a helpful response. Good work.

Pct: Churchill, so I understand, did not make any such remark....which, it should be pointed out, is meant to be a throwaway aphorism, not a piece of "wisdom" to be made by conservatives a million times on internet forums...lest we forget (if we are to take it seriously, which we aren't meant to), it describes all young "non-socialists"--quite insultingly, I should add--as virtual sociopaths.

Yeah, I think there are plenty of "liberals" here who could reasonably dispute the charge. For example...I was personally suspended....because of the nature of my response to.....Betsy! Why do I suspect that cybercoma, BC Chick, Guyser2 or eyeball were not the ones who reported me?

Yeah, I'm not seeing it as remotely sexist. Nor was "shocked," which was also targeted, for...some reason, as yet unstated.

I support it for advertisers, and for New Brunswickers. Otherwise, it's off-limits.

Must include the price of the steroids. (I kid, I kid.)

Or maybe more than sufficient. Maybe escalation, irresponsible and murderous. I understand that killin' gets some people...well, a little moist. (Churchill found the idea of "spreading lively terror" among Afghans and Kurds to be rather bracing, as we know from his own words.) But let's take an extremist radical approach and try to determine if there ain't some other way to go about things.

Wilber's right. "Free trade" is not supposed to be only and solely about "buying inexpensive goods." The very underpinning of the theory demands as much of a level playing field as possible....not just so that the price of Hyundais will continue to go down in the Canadian market.

But I'm not sure that your second point follows from your first. That is, neither a post receiving penalties--and certainly not a post being reported (an act which is almost always politically partisan, I believe) is a measure of how "offensive" a post is to everybody...it only has to offend one person, and (arguably) a moderator. I have no problem at all with the warnings, nor with the suspensions, including my own. But to automatically liken them to spam? That's not so clear.

Michael, In a way I can sympathize with you on True detective...not about the show itself (I totally disagree with you) but on the feeling that a lot of beloved programs have been woefully overrated (just incidentally, I feel that way about Hill Street Blues! ) But Michael, while we can certainly quibble about how "deep" Rust's philosophical musings are, they're still--especially by television standards--at least meaningful, and rather beautiful in a poetic sense...and as someone who has known more than a few stoners, I would say I haven't often heard them speak this way. At any rate, I'm sure we're to understand that the nihilism is at least partly the result of the death of his daughter and subsequent dissolution of his marriage, and doubtless the horrors he's witnessed as a Detective and as an undercover cop. Sure, we can decide that Tolstoy and Faulkner had more profound things to say about human existence (and sometimes similarly bleak). But this is still good...and, I would argue with you, it actually is good writing, as were the police interrogations, the marital strife between Marty and his wife, and so on. It's somewhat subjective, no doubt...but if anything, the writerly qualities of this particular show are top-notch, and is largely what sets the show apart...even if some of the other critiques I've heard may have some substance. (Just incidentally....where, exactly, have you "seen that type of character too often in the past"...as opposed to, say, a character from Hill Street Blues?)

carepov: I have seen no evidence--zero!--that "practically the whole world found the Afghanistan war to be justifiable in 2001-2002." I remember seeing something close to the opposite, in fact. I understand that when the NATO partners (meaning the leadership, not necessarily the populations) agree on something, we tend to arrogantly call it "the whole world"...but that's an objective, incontrovertible falsehood. Noam Chomsky remarks on the Gallup International poll taken in September 2001: And from wiki: Unless you have some equal or better information to suggest the opposite, one might wonder from where this rather common opinion--the direct and literal opposite of the actual facts, so far as we can ascertain--has been generated. That is, how do we ever get to this point? Indoctrination? Propaganda? The question is interesting, and I'd argue quite important.

So jbg summons the Nazis again, this time by summoning the name of Saint Churchill, in the old formulation. The two scenarios share nothing in common. And I'm wondering who is the "Churchill" this time? The little losers who are hoping for all-out war against Russia? Because let's not forget that such folks are, without exception, intellectual weaklings and moral cowards. And that's a key difference; while Churchill was certainly a moral degenerate (the "stopped clock right once a day" syndrome notwithstanding), he was no slouch intellectually.

I should think this very discussion--"finishing one war before starting another," etc--begs the more important questions of whether either was actually justifiable or not. Unless we take such things as givens, as truths obvious as the air we breathe.

I agree, eyeball. "Hate the rich" is simply a code term for "reversing the usual top-down class warfare"-- which some people think is the Natural Order. Classist elitists have screamed it into their faces for so long that they've come to believe it's the way it should be.

I hadn't heard it put quite that way, but I think you're right, Tim. Agreements, laws and inter-provincial matters are fundamentally contracts...and most (or all?) contracts can be nullified under dramatic changes in status. In this case, certainly. Canada would have to decide what is and is not in the interests of Canadian citizens.

Most people, in Canada as well as in the US, do not join the military for strictly noble, or even patriotic, purposes. Some do, no doubt. What's more impressive to me is that, whatever the reasons for enlisting, many of them do show tremendous courage in difficult (and sometimes horrible) situations. That's where the hats' off should go....not to the enlistment itself.