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@ebuc
Yeah, I think it's generally understood around here that clicking on any link shared by Wylted is a bad idea. I'd maybe risk what looked like a news article, but that's it.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
It was 100% not available for me, either on mobile or PC, these last two days.
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Senator Bob Menendez (D--NJ) has been convicted of 16 corruption charges by a jury, related to him accepting bribes and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of governments like that of Egypt.
To save face, several Dems have publicly called on him to resign, though it goes without saying that they privately wish he doesn't, given how slim their Senate majority is at this time.
Anyway, discuss.
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Imagine not yet having turned 45 and you've completed a full term as Vice-President.
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Cool. If Trump dies in office or gets bonked via the 25th we'll have another President under 50. The first since Obama aged out back in 2011.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
If there's one takeaway from what I wrote above, it's that people whose experience violating a major taboo was an intensely pleasurable one would be keen to try violating other major taboos as well. This is a dangerous and unhealthy way to live.
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First time a President was actually wounded in an assassination attempt since Reagan in 1981. Wow. A 43 year lucky streak broken.
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Alright, I remembered wrong. It seems 7 members of the aforementioned choir are still alive today. But it had a lot more than 40 members, going by the photo.
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@Moozer325
I'm speaking in terms of averages and likelihood. Of course some gay people are completely normal and well-adjusted. But why join the community when it puts you at dramatically elevated risks of these outcomes?
BTW I don't buy the "trauma" excuse. Returning male veterans have an alcoholism rate of around 10.5%. They actually saw stuff. They suffered painful injuries on the job. Gay men, by and large, just had parents and older relatives who disapproved of their life choices, and that's more true of the older generation than the younger one.
Anecdotally, my relative didn't even come out until she was already living in a faraway state and was embedded with an uber-liberal peer group. And yet, I hear often that she uses pot and I heard a rumor that she's tried even harder drugs before. I don't believe this is true of any other family member, and I come from a big family.
Here's another explanation:
The average single man might, hypothetically, have sex with hundreds of random women if the opportunity were to present itself. But (most) women understand that sex with strangers is a risky business, so they're picky about who they do it with, which curtails the ability of the average single man to do so.
Men have lesser inhibitions in this regard, so two gay strangers will happily screw each other. When they congregate in big cities there's a vast pool of willing lovers with whom to have one night stands or 5 minute bathroom sessions. They engage in risky sexual behavior every day, and become addicted to it because it's just so pleasurable. We saw this with the AIDS epidemic, where gay men could've quite easily protected themselves by settling down in monogamous relationships with each other, but by and large they lacked the willpower to bring themselves to do that. I once saw a photo of an all-gay choir, with like 20-40 people in the picture, and all of them were dead by the end of the 1990s. Apparently not one member of this large group was willing to get off the gravy train and stop having endless buttsex with strangers. Or heck, just abstain from having sex for like 10 minutes if they didn't have a condom on hand and needed to go get one.
One risky behavior lessens their inhibitions about other risky behaviors. It's a crazy thing to stick another dude's Donald John in your mouth, but if you're willing to try that then you're willing to try other crazy things, like party drugs. Gay men, like and often overlapping with the pool of drug addicts, often develop what's called a high time preference, meaning they choose instant gratification over delaying such to build a better life for themselves in the future. I'll concede that this is also kind of, sort of true for most straight people but gay people take this to another level.
These are not the values that lead to a sustainable human civilization. And as these values spread, everything will go downhill.
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@Moozer325
#1. Historical Perspective
In the West until about 60 or 70 years ago, two men being in a relationship was a fundamentally alien notion. 1950s Bugs Bunny did sketches about Bugs dressing as a lady and marrying Elmer Fudd, and that wasn't "queer representation". It was meant to be funny, because the idea was so farfetched at the time that nobody assumed it was being played serious. Two or more strange men wouldn't hesitate to share a bed in a hotel, because it was just taken for granted that nothing sexual would, or even could, happen between men.
Being gay is so widely accepted today that many young people assume it was always that way, and that people who disapprove always must've been the weirdos and oddballs of society. No; the "fringe" position today was uncritically accepted by like 99% of Americans at the time when your grandparents were born, and as late as the '00s being gay was still taboo in many parts of the United States.
Whether said disapproval is objectively right or wrong, old attitudes die hard.
#2. Religious Perspective
All of the world's major faith traditions have independently reached the same conclusion that homosexual conduct is one of the worst vices a human being can commit. Believe me when I say that I cannot stress this hard enough; it was more readily tolerated in the Bible for two siblings to marry. Consider how beyond the pale such a thing is, now consider that a man bedding another man was somehow even worse in the eyes of YHWH or Allah.
For people from this religious background, it is among the most extremely vulgar acts fathomable. What, by merely seeing it, causes you distress? What manner of hate and bigotry could make you feel physically ill? That is homosexuality to the hardcore religious believer, and there are hundreds of millions of them.
#3. Men's Perspective
In the 20th century, norms of masculinity revolved around sexual conquest and presenting as a badboy or an athlete. Men who bought into this would, and often still do, bully other men for being virgins. The gay man was perceived as effeminate and an even bigger loser than the virgin, because he "received" as a woman. Such men, likewise, fear that a gay man, by causing them to so receive, could strip away the masculine status that they dread losing above all else.
#4. General Moral and Social Perspective
Gay men are 12x more likely than straight men to use amphetamines, 9.5x more likely to use heroin, and solid 25% of gay and transgender Americans are alcoholic. They're far more likely than the general population to be promiscuous and catch and spread AIDS. They were reported not long ago to have several times the incidence of food poisoning than straight people, and the reason was that gay men were licking each others' buttholes and ingesting at least traces amounts of human feces in the process.
There's a huge correlation between identifying as LGBTQ and a dissolute lifestyle, to say nothing of crippling mental illnesses. The more people who are encouraged to adopt this label for themselves, the more people who will end up like this. Finally, they tend to not have children at a time when the birthrate is already too low, so the spread of this movement will mean even fewer births in the future.
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Sentiment of the Japanese public was a key driver of the country's aggressive Showa-era foreign policy. It made for a convenient postwar myth that they were dragged into a war they didn't want by men like Hideki Tojo but the fact is that the average citizen was, by and large, guilty.
Baby Hitler, in contrast, was a baby.
This analysis is, of course, flawed in that Japanese babies and children who had nothing to do with the war were killed too. But whatever.
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@Tidycraft
Everything is a "threat to democracy" nowadays, to the point where the phrase has become so watered down as to be almost meaningless.
The US Federal Constitution does have the 25th Amendment, which allows for the effective removal of the President if he's deemed incapacitated. Biden is the first modern president who arguably might fit the definition of incapacitated, or plausibly will in the next year or two or three.
But that's not even what is happening here. People are nicely asking Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. He doesn't have to. But he'd be doing his party and the country a favor if he did.
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IMO it's impossible to predict the race before we know what happens on the day of Trump's sentencing, which is scheduled for September. If he gets off with nothing more than a fine like he did last time then sure, I believe what you're saying. Otherwise all bets are off. Despite everything we've seen in the past 9 years, I really think it's a stretch that 60-70 million Republicans will choose to cast their votes for a guy who's locked up in a state penitentiary.
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I'm day I'm gonna do the whole Programmatic Civicism thing for real, assuming I don't die young of a heart attack or whatnot. When that day comes, I'll have built a secular support network for everyone, and which I myself could also benefit from to fix my life. But until then, we'll have to suffice with hiring personal trainers or therapists.
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@WyIted
It seems that religion has the ability to spark rapid and lasting behavioral changes. How could the above be systemized to my life so I can lose weight or add other discipline that is beneficial to my life?
You have to actually believe in it, though. Otherwise there's no benefit compared to a secular regimen to lead a disciplined lifestyle.
Also, it almost sounds like you're asking me for life advice when my personal life is a trainwreck, lol. If you want that, go offline and find some older person who's actually living a good life.
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So where am I going with this?
The evidence suggests that it's written on the hearts of men to develop and practice religions, and the forms of religion which come most naturally to men are the templates described above. Even if a religion starts out as a lofty intellectual construct (e.g. Buddhism), or the founder expressly discouraged several of the above (for instance, Jesus and repetitive prayer, Paul and asceticism), it will, within a few generations, morph into the above. Thus, orthopractically, religions tend to converge in the same general direction.
Psychology of religion is an important field for understanding the subject. This field has tended to be dominated by atheists, which is why many theists distrust it, but one could use the insights provided to construct the "intuitive religion" of a generalized form, AKA the one common religion of mankind.
Which raises the question: why is there, in a manner of speaking, one common religion that people across the world know by pure intuition?
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Perennial philosophy is the idea that all religious paths ultimately lead to the same God. Its origins can be traced to the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, when Christian Europe was exploring and colonizing foreign lands. It was discovered that Muslims worship one God, contrary to the Medieval belief that they worshiped Muhammad, or "Baphomet", as a deity akin to the Christian relationship to Christ. And they discovered that Hindus, nominally polytheists have a sort of esoteric belief in one great God who created everything, whose pursuit is arguably the true objective of Hinduism and which veneration of the lesser gods is a mere vehicle of.
It was shocking to them that parts of the world which were basically cut off from each other, thus developed independent religious traditions, had a convergent development toward a set of principles held in common by everyone. And so, it caused some thinkers to start asking questions, which led to perennial philosophy.
Anyway, this thread is about a related idea, though it concerns orthopraxy ("right practice") more than it does orthodoxy ("right belief"). It seems to me that different cultures all arrived at the same intuitive understanding of what religious practice ought to look like. Below is a probably not comprehensive list of tropes that can found across the world:
-The consecrated ones, the authorized functionaries of religion and special elites of the religious community. Tithes are paid to them and their institutions to which they belong by the community.
-Process of consecration. Which is the say, it's not enough that the consecrated ones exist, but they have strict notions of ritual purity that must be realized in order to be a "real" priest. A priest might be visibly distinct, such as shaving his head or wearing certain clothing or being circumcised or castrated. He might abstain from certain foods, or from sex or alcohol. The ritually pure may be called "holy". One is considered to have a greater degree of holiness if it costs more to enter that state, namely in terms of time and effort. Thus, as religions become better organized, the requirements on the consecrated ones grow more and more complicated. This also poses a barrier to entry for competitors who cannot match these requirements.
-The sacrifice. The institutions to which the consecrated ones belong, or "temples", perform a function pertaining to a god, which creates a bridge between men and the gods. A costlier sacrifice is considered more impactful. To prepare the priests who administer the sacrifice is in itself rather costly, but this usually means the forfeiture of a financially valuable asset. Priests can offer sacrifices on behalf of lay givers, usually of a more modest nature, or grand sacrifices on behalf of the nation which the religion serves, such as the white bulls slain in the Temple of Jupiter on behalf of Rome, or grand sacrifices on behalf of wealthy individuals, such as the Greek hecatomb (100 bulls). Depending on culture, the proceeds of this sacrifice may be administered to needy members of the community; for example, in many cultures the portion of the sacrifice which wasn't burnt up was served as a meal.
-Lay consecration. As a religion becomes better organized, the average citizen becomes a sort of mini-priest, being expected to uphold a fraction of the priest's holiness. For example, circumcision was practiced by priests in Ancient Egypt, but the Israelites made this a duty of all males. This creates a powerful in-group identity, which has helped the Jews remain as a cohesive group for thousands of years as a disaspora. Furthermore, when even the laity is holy, the small body of elites who go above and beyond this are the "holy of holies", and having such figures administer the sacrifices in the temple afford exceptional prestige to the god who that temple serves.
-Sacred texts. There may be a singular canon, such as the Bible for Protestants or the Qur'an for Muslims, or multiple sacred texts but some of which enjoy higher priority than others (e.g. the Bible for Catholics and the Torah for Jews). Rather than just considering that a sacred text contains true words, the physical copy may itself be an object of veneration, such as in Sikhism or Judaism, and manuscripts may be lavish and expensive, or have a heavy ritual element to their production so that the manuscript is itself a consecrated item. In folk religion, said physical copy may be an object used in divination. In some cultures, individuals who memorize said text may be persons of great honor.
-Sacred relics attached to holy places or people. For example, the tombs or bones of saints or water drawn from the wells of Zamzam (in Mecca). The act of going of pilgrimage to a sacred place may confer merit in the eyes of the gods.
-Holy elements, such as fire or freshwater without visible impurities, or sacred trees dedicated to a god. Conversely, sources of ritual impurity and defilement like feces, bodily fluids, or certain animals. Some traditions may have an eternally burning flame, such as Vesta in Rome or the Zoroastrian Fire Temples. Eastern Orthodoxy believes that a miraculous fire is lit annually in Jerusalem, and pieces of the fire are transported abroad for the benefit of the broader Orthodox world.
-Monasticism, which are communities dedicated to priest-level consecration without performing priestly functions for the wider community. These have sprung up in Christianity and the Indian religions, and Sufism has a quasi-monastic element to it.
-Liturgy in which the mass participates, either actively or passively. Chanting of hymns and recitation of prayers. In more developed religions, this often takes the place of the burnt offering.
-Repetitive prayer as a matter of private devotion. Prayer beads are used in Christianity, Islam, and the Indian religions, and have been found as artifacts of Bronze age cultures predating these religions.
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God, otherwise unknowable and ineffable, descended to our level and took on human form. He experienced things as we do and lived the blameless life that none of us could, though being tempted daily just like a normal human is tempted. He both served as a perfect moral example for mankind and offered himself to be destroyed in order to appease God's wrath against humans.
People who aren't lacking in self-awareness understand that, over the course of living, to some extent or another, we either think or actively do things that are inexcusable and objectively depraved. Some people, lacking in self-awareness, deny that they've personally done such things, but this is untrue. All human moral codes have assumed that, for the greater good, wrongdoers must be punished. If we are to apply these standards consistently, we too deserve to be punished. And under God's moral code, which is the most perfect and consistent moral code, and which he has the power to enforce absolutely, we deserve to be punished more harshly than our own codes would allow for, since we don't dare assign ourselves a punishment weighty enough to match all our crimes. This is the source of God's wrath.
God dealt himself a punishment weighty enough to match all our crimes, which were the consequences meted out for our crimes, hence we don't have to be punished for such. This may seem irrational, since God could've just not punished anyone including himself. Were this the case, however, then it would create an amoral reality where evil is not punished and good is not rewarded. To uphold a moral reality it was necessary for someone to be punished.
God expects that humans who are recipients of mercy desist from further violations of God's moral code. Perfect compliance with this expectation is impossible. One of the great unsolved questions of Christianity is what degree of non-compliance will be tolerated without said mercy being taken away. There is no consensus on this point, though it's widely recognized that people at least ought to strive to sin less and less over time.
One must also accept the idea of God who assumed humanity, one must worship God as framed by this idea and described in the historical text known as the Bible, and one must ask God so framed for mercy. It's accepted by most that trying to live a less sinful life is futile if you don't recognize God so framed and ask him for mercy, since this is the only way to be a recipient of said undeserved mercy. Without said mercy, you cannot be good enough to merit being spared God's wrath. Hence, other religions are futile even if they promote good works.
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@Moozer325
I'm just baffled about how much people seem to care about the age of someone who has proved that they can do the job
It matters a great deal. Biden has proven that he was in good enough mental shape to do the job from 2021 to 2024. It says nothing about his mental shape for another 4 years. If he's showing any signs of cognitive decline now, then that will worsen in years to come. You don't want somebody like that tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding the United States in the nuclear age.
Again, I don't know if it's true. But if, for the sake of argument, it is, then it's extremely consequential and demands to be taken very seriously.
his mental health has nothing to do with his competence
Being President is largely a mental job. Losing your mental faculties is a death blow to being able to do it competently.
Meanwhile, Trump is a convicted felon
Even assuming the jury reached the factually correct verdict, Trump's crime was... *drumroll* putting in a misleading entry on a document about the nature of a payment.
That's it. He didn't accept a bribe or embezzle funds. He didn't steal from anyone or scam anyone. He didn't commit espionage. It wasn't violent. He harmed no person and damaged no property. If what Trump did is a crime, it's rightly a misdemeanor worthy of a fine at most, and the law which would make it a literal felony is a retarded law. Of course, everybody knows this.
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@Moozer325
A presidential election is not a popularity contest. It's not a beauty pageant. It's not a Vatican conclave to decide who's the most pious and the most favored by God to become the next Pope.
It is a selection process to appoint one of several candidates to a job opening. The debate can be thought of as an interview of said candidates. While candidates do try to present themselves as likable, or a "man of the people", at the end of the day the only criterion that really matters is how good a job they'll do. In the grand scheme of things, being a role model and inspirational figure is but a tiny sliver of what that job entails.
Contrary to what sometimes get said, Trump does have a platform. Polls show that more Americans, regardless of voter preferences, care about the border and illegal immigration a lot more than you're probably assuming. Selective protectionism has also endeared him to workers in certain industries. And it's observably true that the world is less peaceful and secure today than it was 4 years ago.
While Trump was President, inflation was low and the economy was doing okay up until Covid, and it's probably safe to assume another global pandemic won't randomly come out of nowhere again in the next 4 years. Which is to say he has a proven track record of being an at least half-decent President when it comes to actually governing, a track record that could repeat itself from 2025-2029 if elected.
But never mind that. Let's suppose Trump was indeed a relatively incompetent crook. If the worst rumors about the state of Biden's mental health were true, then anyone with an interest in self-preservation would still choose Trump.
I don't know if said speculation is true. Personally I think he did alright aside from the first 5 minutes. But the point is that millions of people now believe the rumors. Hence, the debate matters.
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@Double_R
Why do you guys keep making excuses for him?
I reject this framing. "Making excuses" implies denial of the obviously true.
First, visiting a cemetery and calling the soldiers who were buried there "losers and suckers" would be such an exceptionally horrid and unbelievable statement for a grown man not in the throes of dementia to make in the company of other grown men that exceptional proof is warranted to prove that it happened as described. I don't care if you feel as though Trump is the kind of guy who'd say it. Again, show me the exceptional proof.
Second, given that the alleged statement "leaked" close to the 2020 election, there was such blatant motive by Trump's enemies, including the press, to fabricate the statement, given it could sway potentially millions of votes to the Biden camp if widely believed by the public. It's a sad but true reality that millions of American voters including yourself totally ignore the 50 ton elephant in the room, which is said conflict of interest that's been there since 2015, when it comes to reporting on the former president by people who hate his guts and will literally cry on television if he wins the election.
Seriously. If coverage of US presidential elections were covered by networks and journalists from a spread of foreign countries, I suspect the end result would be more fair and neutral. With the American press they'll either do whatever it takes to help Trump win or they'll do whatever it takes to make Trump lose. There is, for some inexplicable reason, no middle ground.
People get fired in every administration
First, I would presume that Bush's men, or Obama's men, dealt with a boss who treated them with respect and parted on amiable terms. It's self-evident that they'd be less likely to hold a grudge than somebody who worked under Trump.
Second:
If you worked for Bush or Obama and got fired, you find somewhere else to work. No problem.
If you worked for Trump and in your capacity as Secretary of whatever department defended him and his policies on TV, and you get fired, there will be hell to pay for it. The system will not let your "sin" go unpunished. There's only one way to be absolved.
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Aaaaanyway, I'll post some comments on the debate here instead of making a thread for it.
-The takeaway that Biden fumbled this whole debate is exaggerated. He had a hilarious senile expression on his face for much of it, sure, but after the first 5 minutes he spoke intelligently and was able to keep up.
-Trump looked and acted like his usual ageless self. He definitely won in this department. Then again, it did nothing for him come election day in 2020, so.
-Credit to 45 for emphasizing his pre-Covid economic track record while acknowledging both the crash and the extremely rapid recovery, and for pointing out that the last leg of recovery under Biden was "bounceback". This is exactly what I would've advised him to say, and what I was half-worried he wouldn't say.
-I expected the whole "felon" thing to overshadow the whole debate. Instead, it barely came up. Trump was a lot harsher on Biden than the other way around, and the moderators were fair. He walked away looking like a jerk, which is nothing new at this point.
-Trump also couldn't stay on topic. He obviously doesn't care about childcare, and when the mods gave him a last unmerited chance to answer the question he once again just attacked Biden. I wasn't paying as much attention at this point because I stepped out of the room to eat chips and salsa, and the cringe was part of why I chose that part to do so.
-Trump should've stumped hard on the point of fentanyl. He didn't stop the fentanyl ODs either but Biden's border policies are more convincingly conducive to its proliferation within the US.
-I'm honestly kind of dreading Trump's foreign policy, though I'll be voting for him anyway because 90% of everything else. He clearly doesn't have a plan to stop Ukraine, since without Western backing Ukraine won't be negotiating from any position of strength and there will be no guarantees that Putin doesn't just swallow the rest of the country after a year or two's pause to refit the Russian army.
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"General Kelly was the source" doesn't mean Trump actually said it. The Administration had a high cabinet-level turnover rate; a lot of ex-officials, after leaving the White House, had an ax to grind with their difficult ex-boss who fired them, perceived a career-damaging stigma attached to working for the man who the oligarchs hate (which would magically go away if they denounced and renounced him), or sought to rebrand themselves as bold and brave Trump critics to land a lucrative book deal or whatnot. Or several of the above.
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Wrong forum but okay.
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@Moozer325
The problem with all these counter movements like the men’s rights movement is that straight white males are still born much better off than other minorities.
Straight White males are better off than straight males, or males, from other races. Gender experience is too multifaceted to have a narrow set of metrics by which one sex is clearly doing better than the other. One can try, but this is called cherrypicking. Men's rights activists could just as readily pick another dataset that "proves" men have it worse. Neither they nor feminists are wrong per se, but both have incomplete perspectives on this.
Even with the above, I'd add *most* other races. Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans, and even a handful of Black immigrant populations, are statistically wealthier than the average White person. Sure, every now and then they'll be subjected to a hate crime (which isn't intrinsically worse than being the victim of other types of violent crime), but intergenerational wealth is hugely decisive in determining quality of life.
Furthermore there are subgroups within White America who are as poor as Black America. For example, I would presume a deep Appalachian White man and an inner city Detroit Black man have both lived through poverty about the same way. One gets support and recognition for their ongoing hardships while the other basically doesn't.
I’m not really against a white history month or whatever but the reason we have black history month, and AAPI month and all the other ones is to celebrate people who are born without privilege
Wylted's answer to this is pretty solid, I think.
The idea of a White history month insofar as it's used as a bludgeon to make other racial history months not be celebrated may be problematic. But it does deserve to be celebrated in its own right, or at least specific European ethnicity heritage months, because a society where only some people are allowed to celebrate where they came from is fundamentally unjust.
How about we honor the history of white people by going and commits some good old fashioned genocide. Because that’s what most of that history is.
The "true" sin of White people, if you would, is having a far better documented history than the rest of the world, so that none of their historic crimes are simply forgotten and just assumed to have never happened. North Africans, many of whom were Black, participated in slave raids on Europe for over a thousand years during the Islamic period. But all that's remembered today is the 400 year span when Europeans were doing it to them.
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@TheUnderdog
If Trump loses, it'll probably spell the death of political pluralism in America. If he wins, political pluralism will survive. Even if he doesn't do a good job as president in his second term, the survival of political pluralism is worth this in the long run.
Let me explain:
In June 2015, Trump announced his candidacy. His brash rhetorical style aside, his underlying ideas did for the most part have objective merit and weren't radical. The US has unequal trade arrangements with many countries. Most NATO member states weren't spending enough on defense, which the 2022 Russian invasion decisively proved in hindsight. The Obama Administration had indeed bungled the Arab Spring and sent a huge wave of migrants into Europe. Stopping illegal immigration, while allowing legal immigration, is something a moderate can get behind, and per a March-April 2024 poll a whopping 42% of DEMOCRATS support mass deportations.
In short, Trump deserved to be taken seriously. And don't go crying about Jan. 6 or hush money payments, because at this time he was accused of basically nothing, aside from having multiple divorces and filing for bankruptcy in the 1990s. Neither was relevant in 2015; the Moral Majority's push to Christianize America had all but died, and it was accepted by almost everyone that a secular personality could be president for either party. The bankruptcies did reflect poorly on him at the time they were happening, but he was evidently competent enough to save his company and his fortune, so that by 2015 he was a multi-billionaire again.
Weighing the above, it seems that in a fair world, America's most influential figures should've been split, with some supporting Trump and others opposing Trump. Instead, they nigh-unanimously opposed him and did everything in their power to keep him from getting elected. This mass collusion, and cynical weaponization of every institution the public once trusted to tell them the truth against Donald Trump, reveals the existence of a vast politico-social machinery in America.
I often refer to its members as oligarchs, which IMO fits the bill because at this point we're not super different from Putinist Russia. The oligarchs want a single governing ideology, which given the refusal of Republicans to kneel to it means a one-party state, over America. They would control the party behind the scenes, and they would be the esteemed champions and spokespersons of party-sanctioned ideas. As we speak they are tightening the noose around the average person, demanding ever stricter and stricter purity tests, so that now you're a "bad person" for watching films with wrongthink content, for playing video games associated with wrongthinking producers or authors, for trying to keep a neutral stance on Israel-Gaza or being indifferent about politics, for saying "all lives matter" and believing it, for being upset because your only son just cut his testicles off, and so on. The rightist intellectual Curtis Yarvin has dubbed this emergent status quo the "Cathedral", and it certainly resembles the medieval Catholic Church albeit without any God. It has its high priests and its bloodthirsty inquisitions, its patronage of the state and its liturgy-like group rituals.
Anyway, as much as I hate the left, it wouldn't be so bad if they were one of two factions in American politics, one of two camps your average American was born into. When ideas are pitted against each other and neither can dominate, you achieve a sort of livable balance where moderation eventually prevails and people learn to coexist.
The alternative is a de facto theocracy. This is what we'll get if Trump loses, because the oligarchs will seize this opportunity to smash the Republican Party. The techniques they've honed against Trump, such as lawfare and the threat of imprisonment for phony or at least petty charges not warranting more than a misdemeanor and a fine, will be employed against other Republicans in the future, should they prove successful against Trump.
Furthermore, at this point they've made thousands of allegations of "bad stuff" against Trump, ranging from speech only a jerk would utter to committing literal rape. I believe that if Trump loses and his life gets wrecked post-election, these allegations will be believed by most Americans going forward. It will tarnish the Republican name, and this will be all anyone remembers about Trump. Not the booming pre-Covid economy or the stable foreign affairs situation. Just...Stormy Daniels, January 6, and supposedly being a white supremacist. That'll be pretty much it.
But more importantly, the Biden Administration will continue to let illegal immigrants into the United States. This will have consequences in 2030 for Congressional reapportionment, and in the long run either they or their children will be eligible to vote in US Federal and state elections, where they'll vote like 90% Democrat so they enjoy a patron-client relationship with the party that let them get away with staying in this country illegally. These elections will be morally illegitimate, but legally binding, so the GOP will disappear.
If Trump wins, it won't make the oligarchs disappear. Trump is nowhere near powerful enough for that. It MIGHT, however, force them to reconsider their political alignment. Trump winning once was a fluke. But if he won again in 2024, after the avalanche of capital they sunk into burying him, then they'll realize that Republicans with similar ideas to Trump will remain politically viable in the future. In this event, some will defect to the Republican side, or hedge their bets between the two parties.
The oligarchs will not be united anymore, and so they'll be unable to totally determine the future of America. It's not exactly freedom for us but it would be a far less bleak future than if he loses. If you want the normalcy you've known your whole life to continue, then vote for Trump.
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I propose...to seize the green up to 35 miles inland
A revision here. According to THIS source:
Their shortest range anti-ship missile can hit 40 km out, and their second shortest 80 km (50 miles) out. Another missile, though not anti-ship, has a 70 km range. Occupying 50 miles, instead of 35, should stop these weapons, and we can assume these are probably the bulk of the Houthi missile inventory.
The capital of the US zone would be the port city of al-Hudaydah, which the country heavily depends on for the import of humanitarian aid. Securing this city would prevent the Houthis from weaponizing food against the population.
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@Best.Korea
Really, like it or not, Saddam was keeping ISIS in control, and was the only one who was able to keep Iraq united and stable.
He wasn't "keeping ISIS in control". There was no ISIS before his ex-soldiers, after the 2003 invasion, decided to form it. They went from Arab socialists to jihadists in the blink of an eye, because their real motivation for fighting was Sunni identity politics.
Iraq was an inherently more sustainable project because: (1). the US installed the majority group in power, whereas Saddam represented a minority group; (2). the country's flat, relatively barren terrain isn't as suitable for guerrilla war as the extremely mountainous Afghanistan or the dense jungles of Vietnam; and (3). the jihadists weren't being supplied with all the weapons and equipment they needed by a rival superpower, since the US had no such rivals in 2003.
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@Greyparrot
ISIS can keep fighting a low-intensity guerrilla war forever for all I care. Until the day they actually win and take over the country, or at the very least cause the north to secede so that Iraq is incapable of taking it back, it cannot be said that the US lost.
Even if the radical Shi'ites take over the country (and it's increasingly doubtful now, since the Iraqis have declined to sweep them into power at the voting booths and the militias are probably not strong enough to topple the government), they're not the enemy who the US invaded to combat, so it's questionable if that could be called a loss either. The US clearly lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan because the specific enemies it set out to fight eventually won, which isn't the case here.
the current government is absolutely corrupt
Until they're dropping poison gas on the Kurds again, I say whatever. It's still a big improvement over what they had.
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@Best.Korea
Besides, Yemen is mostly attacking ships which travel towards terrorist Israel.
You mean Israel which is right on the other side of the Suez Canal? That Israel? Assuming just for the sake of argument that the Houthis had some moral justification for that, they have no way of knowing where ships are headed. They're indiscriminately firing on random targets.
and its allies.
In other words, they're asking to be bombed by said allies who they're attacking, such as the United States, and they have no right to complain.
Have you learned nothing from Iraq
We won in Iraq, BTW. The idea that we're incapable of ever winning a counterinsurgency under any conditions has been disproven.
Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam...?
The objective here would be far smaller.
It wouldn't matter that we didn't control 97% of the country. It wouldn't matter if we failed to win "hearts and minds", or if the Houthis continued to exist elsewhere in Yemen. We'd just have to secure a narrow sliver of land to push the Houthis out of the Red Sea. Every year that seaborne commerce is safe from them is a year that we win. Even if 10 years later they took it back, we'd have enjoyed 10 good years that we otherwise wouldn't.
Likewise, the small size of this territory would enable the US to keep a sustainably small garrison there (unlike the 160,000 GIs in Iraq at the war's height) meaning it wouldn't tie us down from meeting commitments elsewhere.
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The US Navy is currently fighting its most intense war since WWII. Iran's proxies in Yemen, the so-called Houthis, are firing weapons at ships passing through the Red Sea, one of the entry/exit routes of the Suez Canal. This would have enormous ramifications for global maritime commerce if the Navy sat back and did nothing. In the process, however, it's expending its limited arsenal of state-of-the-art missiles, weapons which we could need against China.
The Houthis, presumably, could do this forever, since they're being armed by Iran. We don't have that luxury. Hence, this post.
See this map?
#/media/File:Yemeni_Civil_War.svg){kind=link}
The Houthis control the green, and it's obvious how they're able to keep getting away with this. I propose a limited military intervention, not to pacify this whole country, but to seize the green up to 35 miles inland. This would be a relatively small US-occupied zone, but one which would accomplish the following objectives:
1. The Red Sea would be outside the range of the Houthis' cheapest and most plentiful munitions. For each strike, they would have to expend the resources they have less of.
2. They would have no line-of-sight of their targets, since they'd be 35 miles away. Assuming they could use drones to find targets, these would need to have a minimum radius of 35 miles or else they either couldn't reach the Red Sea in the first place or they couldn't make it back afterward, meaning they'd be one-time tools. Assuming the Houthis do have drones of a longer range than this, drones move slowly and the US could have enough time to detect them before they completed their missions.
3. Having at least 35 miles from launch to target would give the Navy, or even the Army, time to intercept.
4. Even assuming none of the above stopped the Houthis, they would become a landlocked group surrounded on all sides by hostile actors. It would be extremely difficult for them to bring in supplies under these conditions, so they'd eventually run out of whatever weapons they had.
5. The US could use its airbases as a launchpad to conveniently strike Houthi targets further inland as need be.
6. The Army would do most of the fighting instead of the Navy.
This zone would be large enough for a sizable chunk of Yemen's population to take refuge in it. They would enjoy immediate humanitarian relief from the Saudi-led blockade, and the US could impose its own law over the area, offering protection from Sharia or human rights abuses by the dysfunctional other Yemeni government. At the same time, it's a small piece of the country overall so reactionaries who didn't like it (or anybody who didn't want to live under the thumb of the United States) could easily migrate elsewhere.
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Yeah no, I'd wager this is 10,000x more common than you're assuming lol
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Russia made Trump president and then got absolutely nothing out of it. Oh yes, I'm trembling at how masterful a tactician Putin is. Oh yes, it all adds up.
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@Owen_T
The denizens of the Matrix had zero control and were totally disempowered by an outside force which had conquered their ancestors.
They weren't informed that their day-to-day reality was a fabrication, so they couldn't consent to it. They couldn't decide the nature of the simulation either. They couldn't decide what happened to their real bodies, or to have real biological offspring. Deja Vu was explained in-universe as the program being retroactively changed and everyone's memory being altered, which suggests the machines were tampering with the most intimate corners of the human mind. At any time the machines could wipe them all out if it found some more convenient way to produce electricity. If they were lucky, that wouldn't happen until long after they were dead. But there were no guarantees, and sooner or later it would happen to their descendants.
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The vast majority of what may be considered CP is a record of the live abuse of a child. Understandably it would be distressing for survivors to learn, years later, that not only does such a record exist but the public is gleefully reliving their trauma and spanking off to it. Consider that distributing so-called revenge porn is illegal, and that this is far worse than that.
But what about simulated CP? The principle objection here is that viewing CP whets the appetite of pedophiles, making it more likely that they'll go after real children even if it serves as an outlet in the short term.
In the aggregate this may or may not be true, so I would add something else to this: that porn has the capacity to "confuse" some viewers.
I once came across an anecdote on the internet from a mother who invited people over to her house. Her roughly 2 year old daughter, who hadn't been potty trained, walked around shirtless in a diaper. One of the male guests, dead serious, asked her if said 2 year old daughter was coming on to him sexually, which was the impression she gave him just from existing in a shirtless state. The mother was understandably freaked out by this guest and never invited him over again.
This guest would've been open to the prospect of molesting a 2 year old, because he was willing to believe that a 2 year old "wanted it" or even had the capacity to "ask for it". He was different from the kind of sexual predator who was perfectly aware of the morality of his actions and just didn't care, which begs the question: how could a grown man of reasonable intelligence come to believe what this man did? The answer that makes the most sense is: he watched CP where the child appeared to enjoy it, and applied this supposed insight to his dealings with children and babies around him.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The notion that they would leave but for some unfortunate lack of boats is absurd.
The reason they didn't leave before is because they were rulers of the land, and held out hopes that Israel would give up and they'd stay rulers of the land. But with every mile Israel advances, giving up and going home becomes less and less thinkable. Assuming Netanyahu has the slightest semblance of a backbone, the offensive will continue and Hamas will eventually lose the chance to negotiate. They're already backed into Rafah and have run out of land to retreat to within Gaza.
If you can't keep your throne, the next best thing you can do is keep your life and your freedom. That's why Hamas may find these terms acceptable.
There is a reason to lock up murderers and rapists besides the emotional satisfaction of it. When people get away with something, something that they wanted to do in the first place; there is an excellent chance they will try again.
How? If they're over in Iran or whatnot, and gave up their weapons when they evacuated, how could they storm Israel or Gaza? Would Iran hand them weapons and risk a war with Israel?
Democracy in name only. The deceptive imitation is more repulsive than the lack.
The lack would only be at first. After Israel left, they'd be free to elect radicals, provided they were willing to incur Israel's retaliation. But for 15+ years the moderates haven't had a voice in Gaza. Giving them, say, two years to call the shots and prove better leaders than Hamas would offer the Gazans compelling reason to keep them in charge.
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@Best.Korea
What's the alternative? That most of them will be dead in less than a year?
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@Savant
There are thousands of Hamas members and they don't all think alike. Some may be willing to die as martyrs, while the others aren't. These negotiations could succeed if those who desired to live were at the helm.
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Recently the Biden Administration rolled out its "ceasefire plan", which entails an exchange of prisoners and hostages and an immediate withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, leaving the orchestrators of last year's mini Holocaust in power. Any reasonable person, upon glancing at it for longer than two seconds, would realize this is not a serious proposal, because PM Netanyahu will obviously never agree to this. Not after October 7, and not after Israel had sunk so much blood, treasure, and political capital into driving Hamas away from Israel's borders. And for another thing, it would permanently end Netanyahu's career. He would be forever reviled among the left and many moderates for slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazan civilians for no reason, while he'd be forever reviled on the right for chickening out at the last second when they'd almost brought Hamas to heel.
So then, here's a serious proposal.
#1. Evacuation of Hamas from the Gaza Strip, and total Israeli occupation.
Diplomacy must either recognize gross power imbalances or the state of war must continue. In this case, Israel holds the upper hand. This must, of course, be balanced against the need to offer the weaker party something of enough value to justify laying down their arms. In this case, an escape to a friendly third country (Muslims everywhere seem to love Hamas and deny they did anything wrong, so this shouldn't be too hard to arrange).
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and his cronies, will be allowed to spend the rest of their lives on a beach sipping martinis and reminiscing fondly about that time they killed a bunch of Jewish children and babies and got away with it. This is a hard pill for Israelis to swallow, but they will have achieved their objective of expelling this existential threat from Gaza.
At the same time, this should take the fight out of Gazans. Hamas started a war in their name, ditched them when things got heated, and left them to clean up the rubble and bury the mangled shells of their loved ones. They'll be similarly distrustful in the future of any group similar to Hamas.
#2. One year of Israeli military occupation to mop up any partisans who didn't evacuate, followed by one year of a new elected Gazan government backed up by the Israeli military, followed by Israeli withdrawal
As a show of goodwill to the PA, the authority in the West Bank will be allowed to play a role in establishing this new government, and send its politicians and bureaucrats to assume key roles there. However, it is dangerous to Israel for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be united, so the two governments will be independent from each other.
Likewise, Israel will have the ultimate say up until said withdrawal. The first election cycle? Israel will vet all candidates and parties, and ban Hamas-style radicals from running. The new constitution? Israel will vet it for any antisemitic language or pledge to make war on Israel. The new Supreme Court, whose justices will serve for life? Israel will have to approve the first batch of judges to be appointed to it, ensuring a moderate wing of the government even if Gazans should subsequently elect radicals after the withdrawal.
#3. A full and immediate lifting of the Gazan Blockade, and an Israeli donation of $10-$20 billion to help Gaza rebuild
Straightforward. Hamas was the reason for this blockade, so if they're gone then it can be repealed, contingent on the Gazans not installing any Hamas-like group in the future.
#4. A treaty of peace between Israel and the new Gazan government, and Gaza signs the NPT
Also straightforward.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
You think the economic recovery from Covid began in May of 2020? Maybe May of 2021, but not 2020.
I've laid out the unemployment data for you before. At this point, rehashing it would be like beating on a dead horse.
WTF are you talking about? We actually had a surplus in April
This is inconsistent with the data I have, which shows a nearly $2.5 trillion increase in the national debt from June 2023 until February 2024.
Again, check out this source. It has a graph.
Admittedly it hasn't risen by a trillion between February and today, though it has risen, which either does not suggest a surplus or that the Fed did raise enough money to potentially shrink the debt, which they then proceeded to flush down the toilet.
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@Best.Korea
Plus, they create fun content on YouTube.
I find little that has to do with rainbows flags "fun". And if a YouTuber were genuinely entertaining while they also happened to be gay, then they'd be no less entertaining if they were straight.
Thats better than anything veterans have done.
Was that supposed to be funny?
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@Best.Korea
Sure they have. They endured 1000 years of your oppression and still remained cool about it.
So have public masturbators and people who openly defecate in front of children. What of it?
Point is, there are norms about how to behave, whether those norms are rationally justified or not. And we know that the norms of the Western world contributed to a stable, civilized society which gradually lifted itself out of extreme poverty (they invented the technologies and institutions to do so without outside help), so to say they're unjustified in this case is questionable.
But anyhow, it was always within the power of "gay people" (and nobody was making that a core part of their identity until like 30-40 years ago) to find a member of the opposite sex they found reasonably attractive and shack up with them. And if perchance they were stuck in an arranged marriage with somebody they didn't like, then that was also true of countless straight people at the same time so they weren't special then either.
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@TheUnderdog
Why?
We "support" veterans. Cops who expose themselves to danger every day. People who survived 9/11 or cancer. Stuff like that.
The LGBT community has done nothing virtuous to earn our support, and what's more they voluntarily shirk the paramount civic duty to produce the next generation of citizens, which most heterosexual people do at some point in their lives. That leaves the other implied reason: unfair hardship or suffering which may not reasonably be considered self-inflicted.
Gay sex hasn't been illegal since 2003 and is in no credible danger of being re-criminalized. Gay marriage has been legal in all 50 states since 2015, or almost 9 years ago, and likewise is untouchable at this point.
All that's really left is the disapproval of their peers, but the same can be said of any lifestyle that, in a given peer group, is fringe: for example, a person born and raised in the most hardcore liberal atheist suburb of Massachusetts who became a Bible thumping Evangelical Christian would likely experience ostracism and outright hostility from some. Or a practicing nudist in most social circles, and so on. Choosing not to conform to whatever the culture around you is a luxury which America affords, but it does inherently carry the risk of being isolated from your peers. You accept this risk in choosing to be a nonconformist when you have the ability to do otherwise, and such a person has no right to pull the martyr card or to be constantly applauded for their choice.
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@Best.Korea
Sadly, Russia and its allies are outproducing US and its allies in terms of artillery and rockets, and once Ukraine runs out of those, it wont be fun.
IMO the "artillery shell production gap" talking point is largely irrelevant. Suppose you're a soldier with an artillery piece and a million shells, and you're up against a hundred soldiers (each with an artillery piece) and 10 shells each. You outnumber them 1000-1 in number of shells. Does that mean you'll beat a hundred men?
No. Of course not. More shells just mean that the men firing shells won't run out of them. It doesn't give Russia more men or more artillery pieces. All Ukraine needs is enough shells to cover the battlefield activities of each piece and they should achieve parity with a Russian force of the same size even if the Russians have more shells that they could use. What matters are the big guns themselves and the number of men adequately trained to fire them.
Now, it might be the case Russia is building more guns too. Even then, the M777 howitzer has a minimum crew size of 5 men, and the recommended complement is 8. We can assume Russian guns are probably similar. If Russian built, say, 2,000 more guns like this, it would either need to redirect 10,000-16,000 of its existing soldiers from other wartime roles or draft 10,000-16,000 more civilians. And given that the quality of Russia's military training has reportedly gotten worse, they wouldn't get exactly the same results from the latter as from an average set of 2,000 guns they already have.
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@Best.Korea
Fighting war against Russia isnt free, as many would like to think.
The US isn't spending nearly enough on the Ukraine war to add $1 trillion to the national debt every 100 days. Maybe like $200-$300 billion a year if that much.
Besides, Trump was voted out because he messed up a country.
Trump lost reelection because:
(1). He was unlucky enough to be president in the year when the literal premise of a dimestore sci-fi novel about a mutant virus spreading across the globe and killing millions became reality, abruptly ending our 100-year streak without pandemics which lulled the planet and American society into a state of complacency about the topic so that no one was adequately prepared for it, since in the backs of their minds nobody really thought it could happen. People who say "Well if I were president in January 2020 I would've quarantined America at the first hint of Covid" are talking out of their butts with the benefit of hindsight, and in any case that would've been largely ineffective given how it's more contagious than the flu.
(2). The media was publishing a nonstop slew of 24/7 hit pieces on Trump accusing him of every imaginable vice under the sun, including (without the tiniest shred of evidence) calling dead soldiers "losers and suckers", to such an incredibly malicious degree that under any other country's law they'd be successfully sued for defamation and ordered to stop. These tall tales might've swayed the votes of enough Americans to make Biden president even if Covid hadn't been a thing.
If Trump and Biden are the best America has, then I dont really see how will Russia lose the war.
Russia will lose the war because the US is a superpower with the support of an equally impressive military alliance, which would take an staggering amount of incompetency to ruin, and because the Ukrainian people are incredibly brave and capable in warfare so as to command the undying respect of the civilized world.
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For about 27-28 months now, the US has enjoyed a streak of unemployment below 4 percent. This streak, a consequence of the continuing economic recovery from Covid which began in May 2020 under Trump and which Biden inherited, was touted by the President, Labor Secretary Su, and other members of this administration as some historic achievement. In their telling, we are living in some glorious repeat of the Reagan or Clinton days and it's because of Biden's leadership.
That streak has ended. Unemployment stands today where it did in January 2022. If it climbs 0.1 more points (and this probably will happen before election day), we'll be back to November 2021.
Here's some more fun facts about the economy. When Trump left office, after 9 months of the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu, there was per the Consumer Price Index a total 7.72% inflation from when he took office. Furthermore, it doesn't seem that the rate of inflation was higher from Jan. 2020 to Jan. 2021 compared to in previous years during his term.
Meanwhile, from when Biden took office until this April, there was 19.87% inflation. Meaning if you've enjoyed a cumulative 20% pay raise since January 2021, your buying power would be nearly the same now as it was then. Biden's term is not finished, BTW.
And yes, my source here too is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"But hold on", you might say. "Wages have risen faster than inflation! Biden had said so repeatedly, and the President of the United States wouldn't lie repeatedly! Nor would his cabinet officials! Such a thing has never happened, period!"
Well...
Let's keep going. On June 6, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage had 6.99% interest. At the time when I originally made a thread about this last year, the then-current number was 6.67 percent. Not only has Biden failed to tame the beast in the last 6 months but it's actually higher today, standing at virtually 7 percent. I already explained before how badly your average person would be screwed taking on a 6.67% mortgage. Now add another third of a percentage to that.
What about big macro-problems? How's the national debt? Surely Trump was the worst spendthrift in American history, and Biden's mighty hand piloted us away from the cliff of bloated and ballooning deficits.
Sadly, 'tis wasn't to be. We are adding a trillion to the national debt every 100 days. This wasn't in 2021, in the wake of Covid when the Fed was desperately passing big stimulus bills because they feared the cost of doing nothing (prior to Covid, the national debt under Trump was rising but at a noticeably slower rate). This is an article from 3 months ago.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Thus instead of motivating the extortion of a false report of consent the motivation is to murder the child so there is no witness.
Given that children are molested far, far more often than they're murdered, I don't see the current age of consent laws as having a bad track record.
The issue isn't consent. it's that I think the relationship would do more bad than good on average.
This kind of sums it up, but more to the point the right to consent must be taken from minors for their general protection.
Picture this: a 15 year old kid is approached by a salesman who offers him an instant $100,000 loan. He's given a big stack of legal papers, which he doesn't read through. One of them, in fine print, stipulates that the interest rate is 10%, and that he must pay at least 10% of the outstanding balance every year, or else he defaults. If he defaults, he will be sold into slavery for the rest of his life.
Now, somewhere out there is a 15 year old kid who would hypothetically be dumb and shortsighted enough to consent to this agreement. Do you think the law should permit him to enter into such a contract?
If that was true, then no one would talk about whether an animal consents.
Again, though, animals are moral patients. If your question is whether animals as moral patients ought to be protected from other animals, society has decided no. In part because the whole animal kingdom would go extinct in one or two generations.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Also, starting at 5 PM Central Time I won't be able to post on DART for the next few days because I'll be away from my computer and I don't remember my login info.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
It's only necessary to lie to enemies who threaten your liberty. That doesn't apply here.
Society is built on the bedrock of collective myths. Property rights. "The country". "The people". Some would argue objective morality is a myth, but one we need in any case. Many things are banned because the consequences are disastrous in 90% of cases, so the need to keep these protections in place gives rise to the myth that it'll necessarily go wrong in 100% of cases.
That would only get them off the hook under the assumption that your fabricated principle of sexual morality prevails.
In the hypothetical that I gave, I was talking about actual molesters (adults who have forcible sex with unwilling children).
If it was illegal to have sex with too great an age gap regardless of age, then saying "it was consensual" is not a defense.
Yes, that's the point. Child molesters cannot get off Scott-free if having sex with said child would've been illegal even if "consensual". Hence, children enjoy an extra layer of deterrence against molesters touching them.
1.) That there is only one checkbox for sexual morality: consent. If you have consent then there can be no immorality
No, that's not my position. Adults having sex with minors should be illegal, even if the minor is willing, because this relationship will likely do more bad than good.
Same for incestuous relationships, which you also mentioned. I don't dispute that, somewhere out there, two adult siblings had a consensual relationship that didn't end badly. That doesn't change the fact that like 99% of the time it's a 30 year old uncle raping is 12 year old niece or whatnot, and that said uncle seeing two siblings happily married would embolden him to think his actions were acceptable. And it doesn't negate that legalized/normalized incest would be catastrophic in other respects.
In the US, for example, many people are friendless and don't trust their neighbors or their government(s). The family unit is basically the last stable venue of lifelong companionship and cooperation that the average person benefits from. But for the same reason that straight men aren't intimately friendly with each other anymore, familial closeness being plausibly interpreted as flirtation would ruin it basically forever. And again, this is assuming nobody gets raped.
Animals can't consent even though they can only reproduce through sex, implying that every non-human pregnancy was a rape child and every mother a rape victim.
Animals are not held to the moral standard of humans. To borrow terminology from a debate I read recently, they are moral patients but not moral agents. For society to function, humans must be moral agents.
I think the historical solution was to send the young men out to die so the rich old men could keep their harems
I'm against the male-only draft just like you are, so I fail to see your point.
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