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  • When the heat was on and the Left was seething, Republicans passed a very reasonable 15 week abortion ban that was broadly popular enough to give the Left 0 benefit and 0 backlash.

  • Then just recently, now that the Right has consolidated more power and allowed the Left to waste their energy & credibility on dumb shit like "don't say gay" and banning porn books from schools, the Republicans come in with: "15 weeks? Let's do 6 weeks instead with exceptions for rape, incest and human trafficking" switching Florida from one of the more moderate restrictions to one of the most strict short of a ban.

And you know what? It's barely in the news. 0 backlash. There is no much other shit going on that this went right under the news cycle, and Democrats have already been seething so much over every little thing in Florida because they're desperate to stop DeSantis, that their REEEEing over this is just background noise.

This is how you win at politics. You win the battles you can win and move the front lines forward without overextending like many Rs did last year and got backlash, then you wait for your time to strike and you get it done. Politics is a game of propaganda, momentum, and timing.

I'm glad at least 1 state in this country has figured that out.

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IN the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor. my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a “transsexual,” my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him “her.” Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering.

Because “transsexualism” involves, is indeed virtually synonymous with, extensive surgical alterations of the “normal” human body, we might ask what would happen, say, to a man who went to an orthopedic surgeon, told him that he felt like a right‐handed person trapped in an ambidextrous body and asked the doctor to cut off his perfectly healthy left arm? What would happen to a man who went to a urologist, told him that he felt like a Christian trapped in a Jewish body, and asked him to re‐cover the glans of his penis with foreskin? (Such an operation may be alluded to in I Corinthians, 7:17‐18.)

“But,” the medically informed reader might object, “isn't transsexualism a disease? Isn't it — in the grandly deceptive phrase of the American psychiatric establishment used to characterize all ‘mental diseases’ — ‘just like any other illness'?” No, it is not. The transsexual male is indistinguishable from other males, save by his desire to be a woman. ("He is a woman trapped in a man's body” is the standard rhetorical form of this claim.) If such a desire qualifies as a disease, transforming the desiring agent into a “transsexual,” then the old person who wants to be young is a “transchronological,” the poor person who wants to be rich is a “transeconomical,” and so on.

Such hypothetical claims and the requests for “therapy” based on them (together with our cognitive and medical responses to them) frame, in my opinion, the proper background against which our contemporary beliefs and practices concerning “transsexualism” and transsexual “therapy” ought to be viewed.

Clearly, not all desires are authenticated in our society as diseases. Why the desire for a change in sex roles is so authenticated is analyzed with great sensitivity and skill by Janice Raymond in “The Transsexual Empire.” Arguing that “medicine and psychology ... function as secular religions in the area of transsexualism,” she demonstrates that this “condition” is now accepted as a disease because advances in the technology of sex‐conversion surgery have made certain alterations in the human genitals possible and because such operations reiterate and reinforce traditional patriarchal sex‐role expectations and stereotypes. Ostensibly, the “transsexers” (from psychologists to urologists) are curing a disease; actually, they engage in the religious and political shaping and controling of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. Miss Raymond's development and documentation of this thesis is flawless. Her book Is an important achievement.

The claim that males can be transformed, by means of hormones and surgery, into females, and vice versa, is, of course, a lie. ("She‐males” are fabricated in much greater numbers than “he‐females.") Chromosomal sex is fixed. And so are one's historical experiences of growing up and living as boy or girl, man or woman.

What, then, can be achieved by means of “transsexual therapy"? The language in which the reply is framed is crucial — and can never be neutral. The transsexual propagandists claim to transform “women trapped in men's bodies” into “real” women and want then to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis). Critics of transsexualism contend that such a person is a “male‐to‐constructed‐female” (Miss Raymond's term), or a fake female, or a castrated male transvestite who wears not only feminine clothing but also feminine‐looking body parts. Miss Raymond quotes a Casablanca surgeon, who has operated on more than 700 American men, characterizing the transsexual transformation as follows: “I don't change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient's mind".

too bad this is from 1979: https://archive.is/gQFec

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Six weeks after coming to help defend Bakhmut, the men of the Adam Tactical Group, one of Ukraine’s most effective battle units, were quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it. “The enemy exhausted all its reserves,” the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday, straddling a chair as artillery, air defense and intelligence-gathering teams worked around him.

But now, Colonel Mezhevikin said, the Russian assaults have slowed and the imminent threat of encirclement has been thwarted. “The density of assaults dropped by several times,” he said. “Before, they could assault in all directions simultaneously and in groups of not less than 20, 30 or 40 people, but gradually it is dying down.”

The commander’s description aligned with those of Ukraine’s most senior military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhnyi, and his commander of ground forces in the east, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky. Both have said in recent days that the situation of Bakhmut was stabilizing, even with heavy fighting for some Ukrainian units.

On the city’s northern and southern flanks, where Russian troops had tried to encircle Bakhmut in a pincers movement, the Russians were coming up against Ukraine’s most motivated units and no longer had momentum, he said. “When they try to reinforce their units, to rotate, they are being destroyed at the very start,” he added.

The center of Bakhmut, however, remained a hot spot where Russian troops were still attacking with significant force, the commander said: “All that’s left for them is to try to advance through the city, because the buildings protect them from fire.”

Serhii Filimonov, the commander of an assault company on the northern flank of the city... The Russians had meanwhile stalled, he said, concurring with the commander of the Adam Tactical Group. “Now they stopped,” Mr. Filimonov said. “We have a strong line. But we need a strong counterattack.”

As some other commanders have noted, there are weaknesses and gaps in the Russian defenses. “The same way they can encircle us, they can also be encircled by us if we pierce their defense at any place,” Mr. Filimonov said.

The Russians realize the danger themselves, he said, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private military company, which is doing much of the fighting at Bakhmut, publicly warned of the danger in a video post as he called for more military support for his own forces. “If Wagner PMC rolls back, then the following situation will happen in history,” he said in early March. “It is clear that the front will crumble. The front will crumble to the Russian borders, or maybe further.”

Colonel Mezhevikin said there were still strong Russian divisions guarding the critical points of defense but that regular Russian army units lacked morale and were easier to break. “It’s easier to fight them. They are running away,” he said. But Wagner units, which include convicts, were threatened with physical punishment if they retreated, which made them tougher opponents, he said. “They are scared to give up and to leave positions,” he explained. “They prefer to die here.”

https://archive.is/rSbJr

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https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/cosponsors?s=1&r=15

Text of the bill:

(B) COVERED ENTITIES.—The entities described in this subparagraph are:

(i) a foreign adversary;

(ii) an entity subject to the jurisdiction of, or organized under the laws of, a foreign adversary; and

(iii) an entity owned, directed, or controlled by a person described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

(8) FOREIGN ADVERSARY.—The term “foreign adversary”—

(A) means any foreign government or regime, determined by the Secretary, pursuant to sections 3 and 5, to have engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons; and

(B) includes, unless removed by the Secretary pursuant to section 6— (i) the People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Macao Special Administrative Region; (ii) the Republic of Cuba; (iii) the Islamic Republic of Iran; (iv) the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; (v) the Russian Federation; and (vi) the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the regime of Nicolás Maduro Moros.

Based on the hyperventilating I've seen on the internet over the last few days, a lot of people have the wrong idea about this bill and think it applies broadly to all companies and all people. It does not. It only applies to the specific countries above, with said list capable of being amended by the Secretary of Commerce through a 180 day review process.

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We all know Trump and his followers have been going all-out attacking DeSantis this past week, and one of their battle cries is that DeSantis has supposedly "cratered in the polls". Not so:

The surveys, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies from March 21 to 23 for an outside client (not a candidate or super PAC) found DeSantis leading Trump by eight points (45%-37%) in a head-to-head matchup in Iowa and tied with Trump (39%-39%) in New Hampshire.

DeSantis' overall image is the strongest of all the prospective GOP candidates in both states. In Iowa, his favorability/unfavorability rating was a sterling 81%-11%. Trump's was 74%-24%. In New Hampshire, DeSantis' favorability rating was 77%-15%, while Trump's was 69%-29%.

In New Hampshire, 48% viewed DeSantis as the better candidate to defeat Biden, while 46% thought Trump was more electable. In Iowa, 54% viewed DeSantis as more electable, compared to 44% for Trump.

Trump's biggest weakness was on temperament: 68% of Iowa Republicans rated DeSantis as having a better temperament than Trump, while 71% said the same in New Hampshire.

https://archive.is/pFmGu

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