Tankies are leftist because the oppose private property and favor the state controlling the means of production rather than individuals or corporations.

You’re confusing authoritarian communism with social democracy and anarchism. Stalin was a leftist, he was also genocidal and authoritarian.

Tankies are far left authoritarians. The left/right spectrum refers primarily to economics.

See also: hexbear, lemmygrad.

There was over Iran,

Uh. When did we go to war with Iran again? Are you taking about when the shah was deposed, or the hostage crisis in the late 70s? I’m not sure that this is really relevant here.

As I remember, there wasn’t much demonstration over Afghanistan.

You remember incorrectly. A strong majority believed it was justified. A minority recognized that it was a disproportionate response, and would do more harm than good. I, for one, strongly remember talking to a coworker and saying that we were going to end up killing tens of thousands of uninvolved non-combatants–civilian women and children–because Al Quaeda killed 5,000 Americans. Not only was I right, but bin Laden wasn’t even in Afghanistan when we invaded.

I look for alternatives that don’t seem to be there.

Then you aren’t looking very hard, are you? The alternative has been there since 1947, but Israel won’t accept any solution that doesn’t give them the entirety of their god-promised Zion.

The lack of documented cases of IDF rape does not mean that it doesn’t happen. There are remarkably few documented cases of rape by US military members; about the only time they come up is when civilian courts investigate and prosecute the cases. When the investigation/prosecution is done by the military, they largely seem to disappear.

I would wager that, if there was a truly independent oversight group that had the power to investigate and prosecute allegations of sexual violence by members of the IDF that you would have a very different picture.

Fuck off with that nonsense.

When Al Queda crashed four airplanes on 11 September, you had TONS of Americans protesting against invading Afghanistan over it, and you had Dubya telling the whole world that you either supported the US in our invasion -or- you were supporting terrorists. It was a bullshit false dichotomy then, and it’s a bullshit false dichotomy now.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. They did terrorist things. Israeli is an apartheid state. They’re committing genocide and war crimes. It’s not true that, “Hamas is a terrorist organization, so anything Israel does is just”, nor is it true that, “the Israeli directly murders and allows the murders of Palestinian non-combatants, therefore Hamas’ use of terrorism and sexual violence is justified”.

The diagnosis in DSM-V are the consensus of professionals. Diagnosis appear in it once there’s sufficient clinical evidence of the <>, and the members come to a consensus.

It is true that you won’t find e.g… scrupulosity in the DSM-V, but you will find OCD, and practitioners that deal with religious issues recognize that scrupulosity is a manifestation of OCD. Religious trauma would be more correctly seen as a cause of PTSD of CPTSD, rather than a distinct diagnosis of it’s own…

Simply being a practicing psychologist and acting as though a thing is real is not sufficient proof that a thing is real; after all, you’ll find plenty of therapists–almost all of them treating therapy as a religious exercise–the will talk about addiction to pornography and masturbation, when the literature indicates that it’s not a problem in the way that they act like it is. Therapists in Utah will quite often act as though any use of pornography is evidence of an addiction to pornography (see also: Jodi Hildebrandt). Some therapists still insist that being homosexual or transgender are mental disorders than can be cured.

Hey, can you tell me where sex addiction is in the DSM-V? I can’t seem to find it as a diagnosis.

See also: Hexbear, Lemmygrad.

If it only affected them, and not just their (potential) children, I’d be fine with that. But growing up in that kind of family ain’t no way to start life.

Honestly, if you make enough money that you can be a solid tradhusband, and you find a woman that wants to be a tradwife, that’s fine! Do that thing if that’s what you want. But slipping into poverty because you need to live out fantasy visions of masculinity, and dragging your family with you? Naw.

“Affordable” Care Act.

Ha.

I need surgery. The list price is $40,000. The cash-up-front price through a hospital was $9500. The price for the same surgery through an ambulatory surgical clinic is $4700. I am offered insurance through my workplace. My monthly premiums would be $200, I would have an annual deductible of about $5000 before 20% coinsurance, and then an out of pocket maximum of $9500. My price through workplace insurance would be $11,900 (monthly premiums + out of pocket max). I can get a platinum plan on the Healthcare.gov that would cost me $750/mo in premiums–I don’t qualify for any subsidies because I can get shitty insurance through my workplace–that has an annual deductible of $750, and an out of pocket maximum of $1500. So the same surgery would be $10,500 for a full-price plan on the marketplace.

Short of a catastrophic accident or illness, insurance just isn’t affordable, and doesn’t make sense. Unless Biden can fix the system so that you can get subsidies on the marketplace even if you are eligible for insurance through your employer, it’s just not going to work. I would definitely pay $250-300/mo for a platinum plan, but I can’t afford $750/mo, and I can’t afford to pay both the premiums and the deductible for what I can get through my workplace.

Unfortunately, yes.

If I pay my credit card off every single month, then I pay no interest and I get ‘rewards’ that works out to money back. Sure, retailers pay 1-2% in fees (assuming they’re a large retailer, and not a Square customer), and the people that don’t pay their card off get hit with 18% APR interest. But I get a check for a few hundred each year. Plus ‘discounts’ at certain merchants, or for specific goods and services.

My rewards are paid for in overall higher prices across the board, and by people that don’t have the financial luxury to pay off their credit card every month. The system rewards me for being lucky–although it claims that it’s ‘hard work’ and ‘smart financial choices’–and punishes other people. Not using the system as it exists doesn’t end up changing the system, because individually I have no leverage. So the best I can do it try to convince my legislators to change the legal structure, which can have unintended consequences.

IMO, credit/debit card payment systems should be handled by the US Treasury, so that there’s no profit involved at all.

I’m curious how all these alt-right (e.g., white supremacist/christian nationalists) think that they’re going to be able to afford a family–since the very concept of a tradwife is rooted in having a large family–when their wife is going to be entirely a stay-at-home wife? What kind of career do they think that they’re going to have? Are they in medical school, or prepping for the bar exam? Did they just finish their MBA?

"Anybody. I would be happy to support virtually any one of the Republicans, maybe not Vivek [Ramaswamy], but the others that are running would be acceptable to me.

That is a man speaking who dislikes Trump personally, but doesn’t have any issues with his policies. Ramaswamy, DeSantis, et al., are very similar to Trump politically, only more polished in personality. Nikki Haley and Chris Christie are probably the most rational of the current crop of Republican primary candidates, and they’re still far from the more centrist Republicans like Bush I or II, or even Richard Milhouse Nixon.

The mild steel penetrator on M855 “green tip” ammunition enhances penetration on hard targets, but is not an AP (armor piercing) ammunition. It will go through level IIIa (soft) armor, but so will pretty much any rifle bullet other than .22lr. It should not go through level III armor, and definitely not level IV.

The older M193 ammunition (pre-1980) was what really tended to tumble and fragment, and that’s the most common range ammo in use today; a 55gr FMJ BT.

That’s… Just not accurate.

Okay, so, to start, you have a temporary wound channel, and a permanent wound channel. The temporary wound channel is cause by the pressure from a bullet trying to displace blood and tissue at high speed. Below about 2600fps, the tissue around the path of the bullet will blow open, but then snap back into place, because muscle, fat, etc., are a little elastic. Pistol rounds will overcome that by being large to start (9mm v. 5.56mm), and by being designed to expand to up to about 2x their original size.

OTOH, above about 2600fps, blood and tissue are being displaced so fast that it overcomes the elasticity of the tissue, causing permanent tearing in a much larger channel than the path the bullet itself is creating. So a much smaller bullet moving at a higher speed will create a larger permanent wound channel than a slower–but larger bullet.

Most intermediate and larger cartridges–typically rifle cartridges (other than .22, or rifles firing pistol calibers)–will go faster than 2600fps. Very, very few handguns are able to go 2600fps.

5.56 specifically does some weird things ballistically when it hits at ranges under about 200y; the bullets tend to fragment and yaw. Past about 400y, once they’ve dropped some speed, they’ll ‘ice-pick’, where it’s just a clean hole going straight through.

Full size cartridges will usually have some pretty gnarly exit wounds. It’s not ‘blow your lungs out’–which is the second dumbest thing Biden has said about guns–but it’s definitely far, far worse to get hit by a .308 Win than a 9mm. All other things being equal, you’re much more likely to die if you’re shot by a rifle than a handgun.

No, the party that wants to get rid of guns says it wants to do those things, but doesn’t actually follow through. In states and cities with Democratic veto-proof super-majorities, most of the things that Dems say they want still doesn’t happen. Take, for instance, affordable housing. We can all agree that good housing that was cheap enough to afford for anyone working full-time–including at minimum wage–is a good thing, right? So we shouldn’t have any problem changing the zoning in an already residential area to allow high-density affordable housing, right? And yet, as soon as the cards are down, Dems turn into NIMBY. Sure, we want to house homeless people, but not near me. Reform criminal justice, but also arrest these black people trying to have a barbecue in a public park. Decriminalize drugs, but arrest the homeless junkies near my Whole Foods.

And I will point out that the states that have Deocratic super-majorities–California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, etc.–still don’t adequately fund all the shit that would actually solve the underlying problems that lead to violence. (I know for a fact that Illinois has moved money away from public schools to charter and magnet schools, while the public schools in Chicago are literally falling apart.)

So, not an addiction?

Most sex researchers have noted that actual compulsive sexual behaviors are very, very rare, and that what many people think of as a porn “addiction” comes more from a place of values judgement–especially religious values, whether they recognize them as such or not–rather than from the behavior being significantly outside of the norm in any way, or even damaging to the person.

Mormons–“Fight the New Drug”–have done a fantastic job of convincing people that porn and sex are terrible, and that any consumption at all is problematic.

I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time find porn addiction, or even sex addiction, in my DSM-V. Could you tell me which page(s) it’s on?

It’s all good.

.223 and 5.56 are a little different, but it’s mostly in case capacity and o/a cartridge length. Once can be higher pressure than the other, but I can’t recall which without consulting one of my reloading manuals. In almost all situations, they’re interchangeable. You can get into some other differences with o/a length when you’re talking about hand loading for bolt-action v. semi-auto, but that’s more of a specialty difference rather than a general purpose difference.

FWIW, the AR-10 came first, because Eugene Stoner was trying to directly compete with the M-14. It really didn’t go anywhere at the time, and it’s only become somewhat popular in the last 20 years or so. And it’s still not popular because 7.62x51mm is significantly more expensive to shoot than 5.56. But a 6.5CM AR-10 can be incredibly accurate to a very long range; it makes a great longer range hunting rifle.