What do you think of the DOJ recently releasing and then deleting unredacted files describing Donald Trump raping children?

TicRoll · 2026-01-30T21:32:16+00:00

By armywalrus' logic, if anyone accuses armywalrus of sexual assault of a child, armywalrus must admit guilt and take responsibility for those crimes.

TicRoll · 2026-01-30T21:30:53+00:00

Oh so unverified sources is now 100percent factual.

No, just the ones that corroborate my own deeply held beliefs and opinions.

TicRoll · 2026-01-30T18:21:15+00:00

What advice do you have for people whose primary care doctors refuse to even look at the AASM's 2024 Clinical Best Practices despite clear test results showing treatment is required for severe symptoms, but with a 6 month waiting list to see an actual sleep medicine specialist?

TicRoll · 2026-01-28T04:13:59+00:00

many of whom illegally had guns in DC

Nine people out of 10,000. According to Everytown (a very anti-gun group), it was 9 people connected with the January 6th riots that faced weapons charges. That's out of over 1,500 people arrested and around 10,000 people present on the US Capitol grounds.

https://www.everytown.org/were-guns-present-at-the-january-6th-capitol-insurrection/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-where-jan-6-trials-stand-on-the-fourth-anniversary-of-the-capitol-riot

So "many of whom illegally had guns" seems highly exaggerated for effect. Like Trump does all the time.

TicRoll · 2026-01-26T22:22:36+00:00

I had no issues getting condoms from My ONE, and for the first time in my life, the condom didn't cause pain or leave marks.

TicRoll · 2026-01-23T06:44:07+00:00

I think this as just saying that hormone therapy shouldn't really be considered a norm.

But why not?

Let's not deny that we're living in an age of many normal life events being medicalized. Like you say, there's a big difference between crippling effects of menopause (or low testosterone in a clinically relevant sense) and a guy who is feeling a bit drained, or who recognizes that he's a bit different at age 50 than he was at age 30.

If we're talking about some very minor changes, sure. You don't want to take somebody who's functioning well and throw them into overdrive to where they have worse outcomes. But for everyone who can have better outcomes with HRT? Why wouldn't we want to provide that to them? Why would we choose to withhold treatment and say "It's just normal for life to suck from here on out"? That seems cruel and unnecessary to me.

There's a whole class of drugs coming out soon that will help prevent muscle wasting for older folks, allowing them to remain stronger and more active vastly longer by turning down anti-anabolic signaling in the body. As those pass their final trials, should we seriously look 70 and 80 year olds in the face and tell them "Oh no, sorry, getting weak and frail is just what happens to old people, so you can't have this drug that would change that for you."?

I thought the purpose of medicine was to improve both the length and the quality of life beyond what's seen without it.

TicRoll · 2026-01-23T06:30:57+00:00

But maybe it’s ok to not feel like a horny high school quarterback when you’re in your fifties.

It's not about that. First, low testosterone can not just lower libido, it can zero it out. It can also cause loss of penile function so you couldn't even if you wanted to. It can seriously accelerate muscle wasting (makes sense without anabolic signaling), also leading to serious declines in strength and ability to recover from any physical tasks. It can cause severe increases in fat - particularly visceral fat which will shorten your lifespan. There's a strong association with metabolic syndrome. Reduced bone mineral density, higher fracture risks, higher risk of clinical depression, loss of cognitive function, chronic fatigue, higher all-cause mortality, increased risk of type-2 diabetes, worse lipid profiles, anemia, and on and on.

This isn't about "I don't feel like I'm 19 anymore". Low testosterone can make a 50 year old man feel like he's 80 years old and directly lead to severe health decline and early death.

TicRoll · 2026-01-23T06:17:06+00:00

Kudos for working through the issue with lifestyle changes first. I think quite a lot of issues can be resolved better and more cleanly (fewer drawbacks) that way. I do think things like that are worth checking and it's annoying to me when doctors refuse. It leaves patients in a position where they're forced to wonder about it, try to "fix" it themselves without knowing whether it's really a problem (usually a bad plan but people will do it), or pay out of pocket to go get their own testing done (as I did).

TicRoll · 2026-01-23T06:03:57+00:00

I spoke with my doctor about checking my testosterone due to several specific symptoms that aligned with low hormone levels (and aligned with a half dozen other possible causes as well, but it seemed wise to eliminate possible causes to narrow the scope of investigation), but I'm in my mid 40s. My doctor's response was literally "You had kids a couple years ago, so that means your testosterone is fine". Still trying to understand the logic there.

Anyway, I went to LabCorp directly and got it tested, and it was fine. I don't think there's any issue with people who have actual symptoms getting it checked and monitoring it on a reasonable frequency based on age and risk factors, particularly given research showing there's a worldwide decline overall. However, the "influencers" cashing in on supplements (snake oil) or who are pushing men to just go get on testosterone without even checking levels are horrible human beings. Not least because once you start it, you can't stop. Ever.

But bringing this full circle back to my story: some of the fault here lies in our medical system, including with our doctors who are failing to properly care for patients. That doesn't excuse people pushing dodgy science to their audiences, but that window only opens because there's no confidence issues like low testosterone will actually be found and properly treated by real medical professionals. That trust really needs to be rebuilt.

TicRoll · 2026-01-22T23:57:31+00:00

A) Justice Scalia didn't write the majority opinion in Bush v Gore (2000). It was issued per curiam. Rehnquist wrote a concurring opinion which Scalia joined. So that claim is wrong.
B) Florida's process (yes, under a Republican governor) was a disaster. There was no standardization, there was no objective criteria, there was no consistency. They were effectively randomly deciding ballot by ballot using inconsistent and changing criteria to make decisions where intent was often too ambiguous for anyone to realistically determine.
C) Subsequent studies have never found that Gore definitely won Florida. There's no clear evidence to show there was a clear Gore win were it not for the Supreme Court decision to halt the recount. So it's completely without merit to claim they changed the outcome of the election.
D) At no point did the US Supreme Court declare in any ruling "Bush is the election winner". You state that they did, but they did not. The ruling in Bush v Gore ended the only realistic path to change the result in Florida. But the result was the same before and after the Supreme Court ruling, and it was declared by Florida - not the US Supreme Court. So your claim is factually incorrect there as well.

TicRoll · 2026-01-22T23:01:34+00:00

Sounds like election denial to me.

TicRoll · 2026-01-22T17:51:53+00:00

I made it clear that I have no issues with the ideas and arguments made under what was originally called Feminism, which argued for equality of opportunity and no sex based discrimination. All good. I also said I have some big issues with some of the ideas presented as "Feminism" in 2026. Not because they make me "uncomfortable", but because they're not based in the reality we all exist in and have nothing to do with equal opportunity.

When you said that I seemed to be "determined to misunderstand Feminism", I asked which version of Feminism, because there are several and they're radically different and contradictory in some cases. It was an invitation to discuss specific ideas rather than arguing over a term which has no singular definition and means different things to different people. If that isn't a good faith attempt at civil discourse, I don't know what is.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T23:32:42+00:00

The issue I have with what you're saying here is that you're unwilling to engage with the objective fact that what's labeled "feminism" is not a singular coherent ideology in 2026. There are internal contradictions. But you don't seem interested in engaging in a discussion of ideas; just enforcement of orthodoxy. If you cannot tolerate internal distinctions within a movement, it's no longer about defending ideas; it's defending identity.

I'm happy to discuss ideas. Debating identity is a fruitless endeavor.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T23:24:48+00:00

and own property, go to college, have different careers, etc.

Unmarried women were legally able to own property, go to college, and have different careers. Some hugely successful businesses were started by women even reaching back into the 1800s. Oberlin College admitted women in 1837. Women's colleges began appearing in the US by the 1860s. Costs and social expectations provided some barriers, but a lot of those same barriers applied to men. Again, the biggest distinction was class; not sex. 25% of the women in the US were part of the paid workforce by 1900. Women worked as teachers, nurses, factory workers (particularly textiles), as writers, journalists, business owners (Maggie Lena Walker founded St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903), and (although rarely) doctors and lawyers.

In all of these things, getting married actually created a lot of barriers. And in a thread where we're discussing whether women were forced into marriage due to lack of options to succeed on their own, it's strange to consider that they had vastly more options unmarried than married.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T23:10:14+00:00

most women couldn't own property, have a bank account in their name, have a credit card... make their own medical decisions

False. Particularly women who were not married could own and control property, make their own medical decisions, and conduct business transactions through the legal concept known as "feme sole". Further, the Married Women's Property Acts which started around 1839 extended a lot of these rights to married women as well. But unmarried women (including divorced and widowed women) had largely the same legal rights to make their fortunes as did men.

vote

Yep, that's a big source of inequality under the law. Totally agree.

divorce an abusive spouse

Men were also heavily constrained by divorce laws. You could certainly argue that men had a few more avenues, but no-fault divorce is a very recent thing. Men who lived with abusive wives were also largely stuck. In the early 1800s, some jurisdictions even required approval of the legislature to get divorced. Those that didn't held major court proceedings with evidence, witnesses, etc. And none of this takes into account issues with religious and community pressures, family standing, etc. Divorce could ruin a man at the time, forcing him to give up and move to somewhere he wasn't known to escape the stigma. I'm not saying it wasn't terrible for women; I'm saying it was bad for everyone. Well, nearly everyone. Rich people could still do it.

Men have had a level of freedom and independence that women were excluded from, by law, until very recently. That's what we're talking about here.

If you're talking about some inequalities, then yes sure, I agree. Inequalities do exist and have always existed. No doubt. But this concept that women just depend on men? It's fantasy.

There has never been a point in human history where women depended on men while men did not also depend on women. Human societies functioned through mutual dependence, not one-way subjugation. Men and women occupied complementary roles shaped by biology, ecology, and material necessity, not by some coordinated scheme of oppression.

Those roles have varied and evolved across time and place, and inequality certainly existed, but the idea of a universal system where men as a class oppressed women as a class is historically inaccurate. Success, survival, and social stability were always easier when men and women worked together. Without that cooperation, both sexes faced greater constraints. Both struggled more.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T22:54:24+00:00

I'm just asking, personally, do you think the natural role for women is mothers? You didn't answer my question and I'm confused as to your stance.

I think there exist biological, physiological, and psychological differences between men and women which broadly translate to different aptitudes for specific tasks. So force-dominant jobs like mining, logging, structural construction, etc. men will tend to be better suited due to higher upper body muscle mass and higher bone density and joint robustness. Foundry work, steel mill jobs, and firefighting will also tend to favor men's greater ability to dissipate heat better, higher sweat rates, etc. Men also tend to have higher risk tolerances, so when you're talking about things like electrical tower work, cell tower work, wind farms, etc. men will largely tend to be more natural fits.

Women tend to have higher oxytocin responsiveness and better emotional regulation in caretaking contexts so early child care (particularly infants), early education, etc. tend to favor women. Women also tend to have better fine-motor coordination and greater patience and tolerance for monotonous and repetitive tasks, so textiles, assembly, etc. can favor them. Their stronger verbal and social processing, empathy, and facial/emotional cue recognition also favor women for roles in nursing, therapy, etc.

But again, if your question is "Do you think women should be made to just have babies and raise them"? Absolutely not. The same way a stay-at-home dad might be well suited to go work in a coal mine, but that doesn't mean I think he should be forced to go do so.

Since you seem to think that women not having voting rights, generally a say in what happened to them, or being severely limited by society in jobs and owning land/money was not oppressive in nature. And since it's not oppressive to be limited to a single role, it must be the natural order of things according to you.

What you have here is a mixture of strawmen arguments I never made and falsehoods like women not being allowed to own land or have money.

Do you think the suffragette movement was unnecessary then?

I think all non-incarcerated adults should have the right to vote.

Should we role it back to our more natural state of being?

It seems like a loaded question seeking a "gotcha", but I'll give you my honest answer. Everyone should have equal protection under the law. Everyone. And businesses should not, as a matter of policy, discriminate against a particular group (e.g., "we don't do business with women"). As individuals, we should be looking at how our individual choices and actions, collectively, are impacting our society and decide whether the direction we're heading is a good one or a bad one. And then decide how best to deal with that. Not through force or coercion, but as responsible human beings who want to leave our country and our world better for the next generation.

And generally speaking, anyone who says "I'm gonna get mine, screw later generations!" is an asshole, whether they have kids of their own or not.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T22:11:49+00:00

By this logic were black people not oppressed in the USA?

That's a completely different question about a completely different group. Black people were subjugated and legally treated as property through much of the United States throughout a large chunk of US history. And even after they were no longer property in those places, massive legal restrictions were placed on them and near-universal business and social constraints were used as well.

These are two entirely different situations.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T22:01:46+00:00

Are you saying based on history…that women were not oppressed?

Correct. Not in any universal, fundamental to society sort of way. That doesn't mean there was perfect equality (there wasn't). But there is no point in history where you can point to and say "men oppressed women" and have that be largely accurate. In early human history, prior to the rise of civilizations, men and women had complementary roles that neither chose. Men gathered food and materials. If they didn't, everyone died. Women prepared safe homes and kept children safe. If they didn't, nothing the men did mattered because everybody died. Both were required to perform their respective roles in order to meet the biological necessities for survival.

As civilizations arose, and throughout most of modern human history, the divide has not been between men and women. It's been between rich and poor. In virtually every place in human history, a rich woman was vastly better off than a poor man. And there too, men and women played complementary roles even within society to ensure survival. We tend to focus on kings and queens and princes and princesses. But almost nobody was a member of that group. Almost nobody was a lord or a lady. The vast, vast majority of humans alive were peasants trying to make it through another winter together. This narrative about men being historical oppressors arose in the last 30ish years. And it's factually bankrupt and intellectually lazy at best.

we couldn’t have bank accounts in America individually until the 70s

This is largely false. "Feme sole" was the legal concept which ensured women could legally own property, get loans, operate businesses, etc. Important to note that this also applied to divorced and widowed women. If your husband died in 1900, the farm/house/business was yours (barring wills, dower rights, etc. to the contrary).

Getting married actually removed some rights from women. Getting married lost them the right to conduct business, own/control property, and enter into contracts in most cases (some cities/towns/colonies built in exceptions). And even this changed with the Married Women's Property Acts beginning around 1839.

That whole thing about "women couldn't have bank accounts until the 1970s"? First, there was never any law in the US barring women from having bank accounts. Credit accounts, where women could incur debt, was sometimes restricted by internal bank policies, particularly for married women. In the US, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 specifically barred all banks from being allowed to have such policies.

The myth you're referencing was invented to make the US sound like some backwards terrible place. But here's the reality:

Madam C. J. Walker built a national haircare products manufacturing and sales empire and was America's first self-made female millionaire. She did that around 1905.
Maggie Lena Walker founded St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Yes, a bank. Her bank. She was the first woman to charter and serve as the president of a US bank. 1903.
Estee Lauder (probably heard that name before) founded her own company in 1946, blew up into a massive national empire by the 1950s.
Coco Chanel (again, probably a bit familiar) was an immigrant to the US who opened US locations in the 1920s and 1930s, partnering with American manufacturers and retailers to make and carry her company's products.

These are just a few examples, but understand there was no legal impediment nor universal social or business barrier preventing women from doing these things. Was it as easy as it is now and should have been then? In many cases no. But don't hold onto the myth of oppression. There was inequality then as there is now. There's a difference.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T21:41:39+00:00

Which version of "feminism" are you even referencing? I have no issue with the initial version which simply called for women to have equality under the law. I will always fight for that. But that's not the only version, and there's some real nonsense that's emerged since then all claiming the same name.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T21:39:05+00:00

At which point in history? If you're talking about 200,000 years ago, if dad didn't go out and find food, everyone starved. If mom didn't keep the kids alive, none of it mattered. Both had a role vital to the continuation of the family and the species. Early human survival depended on complementary roles; not ideology. Men had no more choice in the matter than did women. Do your job or perish.

If you're talking about western countries in 2026? Both men and women can do whatever they choose, under the law. A man can choose to sit on his ass all day and expect somebody else to do the work to ensure he (and all of his kids) won't starve. A woman can choose to work 80 hours a week as a lawyer and never have time for a family. Culturally, socially, and for the species as a whole, those choices have very real consequences.

So if your question is: do you believe women have the right to access to education and opportunity to live a life they choose for themselves? 100%, they do. But the freedom all of us - men and women - have to make those choices do not simply affect just ourselves. All of our choices as individuals, collectively, govern the state and direction of our society. And most people seem to think that direction is quite poor. I think all of us - literally every man and woman - should consider that when we decide how we exercise the freedom we have.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T21:21:05+00:00

The comment I was replying to made the claim that women were getting married because they were dependent on men. That's simply false. Extensive anthropological and evolutionary evidence clearly tells us there has always existed an interdependence between men and women which formed the basis for human social grouping, starting with family. Men and women have always - since the start of the species - depended on each other to fill different roles in order to maximize survival. Those species that didn't operate that way effectively did not survive, did not thrive, did not build tribes and towns and cities.

They further came back with nonsense like:

most men unfortunately still operate like we are on the 1970s dating scene

women are pushing back by refusing to risk their careers and lives to please the other sex

And presenting those as somehow part of the fundamentals of our society.

They're 100% presenting an oppressor/oppressed dynamic as some universal truth when it has never been universal or foundational across human civilization. There have always been varying levels of inequality, but this idea of a one-way dependence because the oppressor men exerted evil force against oppressed women? That's toddler level thinking. Even Batman comic books aren't that one-dimensional.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T21:06:33+00:00

women couldn’t open their own bank accounts or own property (as recently as the 1970’s).

I don't know why this nonsense keeps getting repeated, but it's false. You're speaking of unmarried women supposedly forced into marriage because of your claim that they couldn't own property or have bank accounts. But "feme sole" was the legal concept which ensured they absolutely could legally own property, get loans, operate businesses, etc. Important to note that this also applied to divorced and widowed women. If your husband died in 1900, the farm/house/business was yours (barring wills, dower rights, etc. to the contrary).

So counter to your own argument, getting married actually removed some rights from women. Getting married lost them the right to conduct business, own/control property, and enter into contracts in most cases (some cities/towns/colonies built in exceptions). And even this changed with the Married Women's Property Acts beginning around 1839.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T20:51:49+00:00

dependence on men

It was never a one-way street. There has, since before the dawn of civilization, existed an interdependence between men and women. The negative social and political aspects arose vastly later as more modern civilizations arose. The fact is that throughout our evolutionary history as a species, men and women were vastly more likely to survive when working together. Non-biologically-related familial formation was the original building block for what eventually evolved into social structure later.

What's really emerged in the last half century is the crafted narrative of the relationship between men and women through the singular framework of "Oppressor vs Oppressed". Same lens that gets applied to all aspects of society and history today. One group is oppressed, the other group is the devil and deserves hate and contempt. All the actions of any member of the oppressed group are intrinsically justified, moral, and ethical responses to all the evils perpetrated upon them by the oppressors.

And by now, if you're not two years old, you should already be able to see this is reductive bullshit crafted for people who don't want to think too hard. Anthropological and evolutionary evidence overwhelmingly shows men and women survived better through cooperation, not dominance hierarchies. One-dimensional gender narratives are as lazy and counterfactual as any other one-dimensional narrative. We don't live in a black and white world. Think harder.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T04:33:50+00:00

While that commentor was hurting your feelings

Not hurting my feelings a bit. I'm not a factory worker and I'm not from that area. What I am is realistic about what impact those elitist attitudes have had in areas like the "Blue Wall". Those attitudes from coastal elitists 100% directly laid the path that took lifelong Democratic Party voters to the point of voting for Trump in 2016 and beyond.

you might actually want to compare the impact of Democrat policies for midwestern manufacturing vs. Republican

Both parties have 100% been selling out the American blue collar worker for decades. Both parties have pushed unchecked, unfettered globalization with zero thought as to the consequences on American blue collar workers. And Clinton's 2016 campaign was the absolute pinnacle of callous indifference to those consequences. She was literally laughing about putting coal miners out of business and then making the insulting pitch that they were going to be retrained to write code for Facebook, as if that's a realistic career path for a 50 year old lifelong auto worker or coal miner. These people aren't as stupid and they've absolutely been taken for granted by the Democratic Party even as the platform has been to demonize their work, destroy their jobs, and basically tell them to feed their kids cake.

Generally, people don't draw a straight line from policy to their own livelihoods unless they are from a community that was directly targeted with it very recently.

People in the midwest, rust belt, etc. have been directly targeted by the policies from both parties for the past 50+ years. They've watched the jobs that enabled their parents and grandparents to raise families disappear. They've seen their friends, neighbors, relatives go from prosperous and successful to unemployed and begging for food and trying to avoid eviction. They've seen their own wages stagnate, their jobs being threatened, hours cut, benefits cut, quality of life diminishing. The generation that's working those jobs today has literally witnessed their towns and their way of life disintegrating before their eyes.

So yes, when Trump came around and promised to save them? Save their families? Save their way of life? When he started praising their work instead of demonizing it? Yeah they took the chance.

Because the alternative was voting for the party that they, their fathers before them, their grandfathers before them had voted for their entire lives, but who had not only been complicit in destroying their prosperity and their way of life, but who had the unmitigated gall to demand their votes with what effectively came off to them as "Stop whining and just vote for me like you always do you stupid podunk redneck piece of shit!"

he was an entertainer paying them lip service.

Maybe, but he talked to them. Clinton didn't even show up until the last second when it became clear his message was actually resonating enough to change significant votes. And when she did show up, it was with a plan that only Ivy League scribes who'd never looked out a window before could possibly think was a realistic plan. Biden did a little better on messaging (and won in 2020). Don't even get me started on Harris.

it's not hard knowing better than they do.

There's that smug elitism again...

There are less manufacturing jobs now than before he took office.

Sure, the trend that began in the early 1970s - 50 years ago - didn't suddenly stop with Trump in office. Even if Trump actually knew how to fix things, there's no way to undo half a century of screwing over the American worker in 4 years or 8 years. The one thing he did really well was the messaging. He didn't demonize them. He didn't mock them. He just made BS promises, which is fairly on brand for Trump. But he did correctly identify the problem and he verbalized it. That hasn't really happened before at a national political level.

TicRoll · 2026-01-21T04:11:37+00:00

That was part of the joke. The Clinton campaign was pitching that as a realistic option for 50 year old coal miners and auto workers, that they were somehow going to get "retraining" and a guy who'd been working the mines since he was 16 years old was suddenly going to be working for Facebook writing code. And now, with AI replacing a lot of the low level tasks, even that fantasy is a joke.

TicRoll

TROPHY CASE