-1=e^ipi

Proof?

^ While Harper's praise for King Abdullah was also deplorable, Putin doesn't come close to Castro. There is a lot of sense in seeking better relations with Russia.

What is concerning is that Saudi Arabia may get observer status. If Saudi Arabia gains observer status then we should leave the organization.

The comments by Trudeau... are concerning.

That is ridiculous. How unfortunate that the republic that founded so much of classical liberalism is not run by people that support the ideals of the republic.

I do not have the same position as Jordan Peterson's position, but I think you misunderstand Jordan Peterson's position. We aren't talking about Peterson refusing to call an MTF person she. In fact Peterson is willing to call MTF people she, such as Theryn Meyer. Peterson takes issue with using 'new' pronouns such as ver, xemself and thon. He also dislikes using 'they' as a singular pronoun. Also, this doesn't even go into otherkin pronouns such as dragonself. Now, personally I don't mind using new pronouns or using they as a singular pronoun. I created a thread on the topic over a year ago. http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/24700-gender-neutral-english-and-french/ But in any case you are misrepresenting Peterson's position. What I will say is that if we start having 30+ sets of singular third person pronouns then we are basically defeating the purpose of pronouns. The reason we use pronouns is to simplify language and make it easier to communicate. Having 30+ sets of pronouns starts to defeat this purpose and we might as well use eachother's names instead. If we just had 3 sets of singular person pronouns (masculine, feminine and neutral) or perhaps 4 (it/itself/its could be considered a 4th category if it cannot apply to humans and only inanimate objects) then that would seem reasonable to me. It would be extremely useful to decide on a preferred gender-neutral third person set of pronouns that can apply to people because then you would have a pronoun that could apply to non-binary people and also then you could have a pronoun that would be used for situations where the gender is indeterminant (as opposed to writing him/her, he/she all the time). The usage of they as singular seems to be the most popular option recently, due to it having historic usage, being a pre-existing pronoun, and due to it being already used sometimes as a singular pronoun colloquially. Of course, they isn't exactly optimal because it makes it more difficult to distinguish between singular and plural. As for the 'my pronouns are not up for debate' group, I don't think this is representative of trans people or non-binary people. A lot of transpeople take a traditionalist view that everyone is either male or female and don't agree with non-binary people or their pronouns. Many non-binary people don't really give a damn about pronouns. And many non-binary people take the view that there should be a gender neutral option, but not 30+.

If public funds were being used to 'bless children' then I'd have a problem with that as well.

Good. Teach kids to code instead. Better use of time.

The problem is that it violates secularism. It uses public money to fund religion, which violates separation of religion and state.

Simple: respect the right to self determination of states, and give them the option to leave the union if they don't like it. Then you can give all votes equal rate and states can leave if they feel they are being ignored or screwed over.

Oh I understand the justification, I just don't agree with violating secularism. I take the classical liberal position.

Yeah, and then it becomes the government picking and choosing which religion to favour, which is dangerous. That's why societies were moving towards secularism. But we see that certain regressive left posters here who claim to be 'liberal' reject core liberal values like secularism in favour of determining which position take depending on the perceived level of oppression of the individuals involved. Also, it would be far more productive to teach kids coding or the scientific method than a bunch of religious ceremonies.

Religious fairy tales should never be respected. Trying to force children to respect such nonsense sounds like indoctrination.

Yeah, this is a violation of secularism. I hope she wins the challenge.

Part of the definition of trolling involves intent. There are some posters that will have a tendency to convince themselves that other posters have some hidden evil intent in order to accuse them of being trolls in order to dismiss their arguments or opinions. There are different types of trolling. Some forms of trolling, such as trying to deliberately drag a thread off-topic are easy to recognize and deal with. However, other kinds of trolling, such as someone pretending to be a socialist teacher or a nazi skin-head can be indistinguishable from someone's genuine political position. This second group is basically impossible to get rid of without eliminating political discourse on a political forum. I guess one option is to have some ultimate arbiter to decide what political positions are genuine and what positions are 'troll' positions. I suspect some individuals, such as Waldo or Cybercoma, would be willing to be such arbiters in order to get rid of opinions that they believe are 'troll' opinions. Maybe this is what smallc wants.

Yeah, I agree. Maybe add consent to genital mutilation, be it circumcision or a sex change operation to the list.

Ironically, Trudeau is just as bad as Trump when it comes to divisive identity politics. Arguably even worse.

Allah created women and men. Allah commands that women cover themselves up from head to toe to be modest. Women covering themselves up from head to toe causes them to not get enough sunlight, not produce enough vitamin D, and get rickets. https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Health_Effects_of_Islamic_Dress For some reason Allah didn't think to give women the ability to produce their own vitamin D. It's almost like Islam is false...

What about economics classes? What about psychologists like Jordan Peterson? I think your claim is not correct.

sounds useful. But the amount of power you would get from that is very small. You couldn't power a car with that.

Carbon is black. If you mix it with paint and make your car black then I guess it would heat up since black things tend to absorb more sunlight.