Not worried about transvestites at all. You're displaying the knee jerk reaction to any criticism, anything not full support, as if trans people are perfect, and can never be criticized. Sorry homie - ain't no one above criticism.

At this point, I know a few, mostly through interactions in stores. I'm pleasant, even chatted with them. In a world where there are a fir number pf people who do have a problem with them, they appreciate a person who treats them as human. I'll note more than half of them stopped. Some just figured that as a gay person, they didn't need to "play dress-up" others decided a more traditional approach was the way.

No, mon ami, if you paid attention, it is not the transgender people I have issue with so much. They are just people, with all the pluses and minuses that individuals have. My issue is with the doctors who enjoy experimenting on them, who seem to be in a hurry to get really invasive with them, and were working the age down at which they start amputating primary and secondary sex organs on children way too young. It is the academics who preach that an ever increasing number of people are not the gender they were assigned at birth, and hose who believe that these children will never change their minds - we see this in the denigration of detransitioners. It is the schools that have been given the right to hide gender affirming treatment to children from the child's parent.

Assuming you are of the age of majority, I fully support you doing anything to your body you wish. As long as you aren't doing harm to others, you are free to take any measure on your body you feel like.

Here is what happens when your attitude that all things transgender are above reproach. Read this, and tell me that this is a great way to handle the issue https://www.newstatesman.com/p....

One of my favorite parts of the Tavistock Center FTA "From the middle of 2014, puberty blockers became routine clinical practice. On top of this, the service moved from an “age” to a “stage” approach, whereby access to medical interventions would be dictated by an individual child’s stage of puberty – in this case Tanner stage 2 – not their age. Provided a child had reached this early stage of puberty they could potentially be referred for puberty blockers. “Twelve is an arbitrary age,” Carmichael told the press at the time. Those starting puberty “aged nine or ten” could be considered for treatment from now on."

You think this is appropriate?

I was having a conversation with a friend, a real small government type. His premise was that all government jobs were corrupt, and always will be. So privatize everything. I noted that it is people who are corrupt, so when we get rid of corrupt guvmint, where are the corrupt people going to work?

Private enterprise is at least as corrupt as government workers. Belay that - more corrupt. It is surprising how many decent, honest people work in government. Yeah, at the top at present it's really sketchy - but look where they came from.

I had been saying for many years that we have a need to stop ignoring the working class, they eventually get pretty pissed. When K Harris told the president of the Teamsters she would win with or without them, I said to myself "No you won't". See, not everyone is Union, but so many are Union adjacent. Harris and the DNC thought they would carry the election on the votes of angry liberal women, thinking that laborers - mainly male - were unimportant. Those are the people the present situation hits hard. And Cheeto and his merry band haven't done anything for them either. This is not remotely a good situation.

Time for some introspection.

No, I mean the concept that biological sex is an option. I'm right around the center of teh left right spectrum, and I understand that genetics can determine if someone iOS male or female, and that has become a real stumbling block for the Democrats, Ask Seth Moulton, who when he said he didn't want biological male running over his daughters. The Democrats tried to cancel him, make him resign, even though his voting record was favoring their positions on other matters.

So they ended up twisting themselves into knots, first sayin that a man is a woman if he says so. Then it got awkward - they even resorted to calling actual women "Birthing people" or Lactating people". Which by the way, reduces women to nothing more than breeding stock, and yes, many women were insulted.

So the Democrats tried to place women under the tyranny of men, and reduces them to nothing more than baby machines. All the while, refusing to accept genetics.

It is the problem when progressives work very hard to eventually become not progressive. The far right eventually takes on some not far right aspects.

People in here attempt to claim I'm transphobic. No. I fully support people over the age of consent to do whatever they wish with their bodies, be it amputation of their penis or breasts. I support them dressing as they wish. Just not for people who cannot give legal consent in other matters, as you would have to admit, removal of one's penis is a life altering amputation to say the least. Pretty hard to come back from that if you change your mind, and teenagers are often a bit confused about their sexuality.

A fair part of it. Some of it is just brain dead accounting. An example is what is also called outsourcing.

Bean counters come in and tell the C-Suite that incredible amounts of money can be saved if we just get rid of department X, and outsource the work.

With us, it was the Machine shops. We had a lot of master machinists making good money. So we got rid of several, and outsourced a lot of the work.

Then the companies we outsourced to, might just put any old hack making what we needed made. Re-working shoddy work, parts not meeting spec, Engineers having to travel just to inspect everything the companies made. Whereas once upon a time, the engineer could just walk down to the shop to check progress, performed by a master machinists, now it was a flight out and back - usually short notice, so really expensive - hotels and food. Between all that, it ended up costing more, with little control. So new machinists were hired, and work was done in house again.

Then another crop of bean counters came in and told the C-suite we could save money by....... It was a rinse and repeat cycle, aided by silly rules.

I'm not certain about what you think the average car buyer here is - certainly in my area of PA there aren't a lot of large vehicles - unless you consider a Jeep large. And where I live, 4WD is nice to have around the house. Our weather can be chaotic. There are the occasional Suburbans, but the huge truck craze is largely gone, after they priced themselves out of the market. You have to be pretty wealthy to buy one of those 100K trucks.

But a city car, the tiny things, they really aren't all that practical for driving in my area.

Not certain if you are referring to the weird used car craze we had a few years back here in the USA. Covid times. At the time, I had a Jeep Renegade. I was at a dealership known for decent prices. At the time my care was 2 years old. There was an identical Renegade they were selling for something like 3 thousand over what I paid.

The rejection of science and reality went pretty deep. The strange agenda that men and women are defined by what they say they are was not quite sane - fortunately that has cooled down now. Ironically, it placed women back to the tyranny of men, after all the work women did to become equal. And getting death threats if you dare to say that genetics is the determinant factor. Or at the very least, utter rejection if you say that if an adult wishes to modify their body to pretend that they are the other sex, it is fine, but it should be by people able to give legal consent.

So people got the Republican's better messaging - they often simply reported facts. The Seth Moulton saga. The people fired because they wouldn't use personal pronouns, the testimony of children damaged by the invasiveness of transitioning and paying dearly for the results of surgery and injection of powerful chemicals. The in your face rejection of labor unions, once part of the base.

Meanwhile the democrats message was the cringy men for Kamala ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... that is what they think men are.

Or the real core of 2024 Democrat thought: Vote against your husband. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Julia Roberts, an extremely wealthy woman, tells other women that their Husbands have to be opposed, and her stereotyped husband is obviously stupid in the ad.

That's only one of the reasons the Dems got their asses kicked in 2024. How bad can a party be when an Orange shitgibbon gets (re)elected as a result of party "missteps"?

Fix is not too difficult:

Come back closer to center

Reclaim the working class rather than reject it.

Lose the misandry

Lose the rejection of science and biology.

Back off a bit on the pop culture worship.

Be more actually inclusive. If a party claims inclusivity yet casts out those who I noted above, you ain't inclusive. Finally, don't throw hatred on those who have the audacity to be introspective and try to fix things rather than double down on what caused the curb stomping. Disagreement is fine. The standard soundbite quality insults are not. That makes people look like the equivalent of slash dotters using mod points of troll of flamebait, when they just disagree.

We all are a bit off. Anyhow, if you wish to read my take on it, I posted about what the constitution has to say about t6his, and why the Republicans ignored the order.

Nullification of States Rights by presidential edict, and placed in a spending bill removes a tool the Republicans have used for many years.

But let us not believe that insanity is limited to Republicans, or Americans. The world shows that in a world full of Kooks, the USA isn't even remotely the worst. The world has a lot of latter day Visigoths. They are always at the gates, and we must decide if we let them in or not.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

A lot of reading to catch up on what powers are delegated to the federal government, and plenty of interpretation has happened along the way.

Now, the legal question is why have Republicans ignored this order? It sets a real precedent, that's why. It nullifies States Rights. Republicans have long used states rights, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to do things like nullify restrictions on gun ownership, immigration, and Devil's lettuce. States rights have been used to modify discrimination against the elderly and disabled, and limited the ability of rape victims to sue in federal courts.

States Rights is also used as a Dog Whistle for a number of other things, like desegregation, same sex marriage, and reproductive rights. A lot other this rhetoric was used by the Dixiecrats, who en masse moved to the Republican Party when the Democrats became too liberal on segregation.

So to the issue at hand, States Rights is an important tool in the Republican Party's toolbox. One they wish to not have nullified. And a lot of states rights ideology makes sense no matter what party you are in. After all, the tenth amendment was put in there for a reason.

And despite the years of obsequious Marching to Trump's demands, at least some Republicans understand that Trump won't be in office forever, and a Democrat will eventually land in the office, with all the powers Trump declared as his own.

Wikipedia has a nice writeup, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some of us are weird.

Then again, there is something a little off about a person who. determines Americans are universally "weird" based on a rando posting on Slashdot who might be from anywhere on this globe.

If you wish to decent your universal condemnation that's a bit strange as well, shows some fascinating prejudices, and zero critical thinking.

The autopen has been around longer old sleepy Joe, and has been used by various presidents. https://www.msn.com/en-us/poli...

Thomas Jefferson used Autopen.

I am surprised how many people seem to think it is something new. There was a brief kerfuffle on the early 2000's when Democrats were angry because G W Bush used Autopen. The administration at that time declared a statement that intent was the metric, not the specific signature. Which makes sense to me.

As opposed to an award wing researcher such as yourself.

The article isn't about every single possible ink or combination. It is about the results of subcutaneous injection of various chemicals or substances. Where Macrophages transport those chemicals to the lymph nodes. Here's your challenge. Show point by point the inaccuracies in their work - you make the claim of scientific fraud - prove it. I'll even provide web space and will publish your analysis. You can end up on retraction watch, the researcher who pointed out actual fraud.

You mad bro? Or is this sarcastic?

She's well within her rights. I'm a big fan of the Wiccan Rede: "An' ye harm none, do what ye will." Now some might find that she is harming herself - especially in the context of the issues in this topic, that is a her decision to make. If she is comfortable with what many find intentional disfigurement, I'm fine with it as far as having the right.

But if I find it repulsive, I have the right as well. You might find my right as me being a piece of shit and disgusting. You have that right. I might note that your over the top reaction says more about you than me.

That is, if you are serious. If not, I'll take my whoosh and move on, considering the source.