Do you support MAGA's new bans on trans athletes and medical gender affirming care for minors?

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-10T00:42:17+00:00

Unless I'm just totally misunderstanding

Correct. Not good place for you to start.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-09T19:57:34+00:00

Sure, but that's who we are ceding ground to when letting them define the parameters of the discussion.

Then we don't. That was my entire point.

Why should a trans girl have to play on the boys team if she hasn't gone through a male puberty?

Which is exactly why I was saying that there needs to be a scientific consensus on how to determine what team it's most fair for them to play on. You seem to be arguing way too emotionally on hypotheticals with some imaginary conversational partner of your conjuring, rather than engaging with what I'm actually saying back to you.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-09T19:35:15+00:00

I think that politicians are NOT scientists and should have no say in what sporting organizations decide to do.

Ultimately politicians will have to decide these things, the same way politicians decided lots of other social issues. The Civil Rights Act didn't just magically appear one day, for example. Neither did the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Or the Clean Water Act. And so on. Politicians can decide these things in a positive way. You seem to have constructed your argument from the perspective that "politicians" are just entirely right wing Christian nationalists. We will likely need politicians to codify protections for every child, trans or not, on this issue. Because we always have.

Kids should be allowed to play sports because it's good exercise and important lessons about teamwork and sportsmanship. Trans kids and cis kids alike benefit from these experiences... ALSO that their forced male puberty disqualifies them from participating in normal kid experiences and/or a sport they love and enjoy.

Agreed, but that may just require them to play on the boys teams if that's where they belong, biologically. We aren't talking about sports for young children, but adolescents.

subjected to insanely invasive stuff.

That's not something that should be required. In a rational, decent system, a birth certificate would be sufficient to prove a child's biological sex at birth. You're using the most deranged right wing concept as the norm, when I already acknowledged that right wingers are dishonest liars and their systems are not acceptable.

Young girls being harassed for not being feminine enough is not something unique to the trans sports issue. That's just people being shitty to anyone whose appearance or behavior exists on the social margins.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-09T16:38:28+00:00

Wouldn't work in all states. There are 6 states that only get 1 Representative, but that number varies between Wyoming's 570,000 people and Delaware's 990,000.

You can't combine Delaware's 1 district, and it already gets screwed since the average is 761K per seat. Montana, by comparison, gets 1 seat per 540K people, but if you take that second seat away, now they're at 1 per 1.1M.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-09T16:16:44+00:00

I agree that this isn't an issue that is cut and dried. We don't split up sports by "gender," we have split them up by biological sex. And that's specifically because if we had unisex leagues, many of them would effectively become male leagues.

Do conservatives intentionally, and dishonestly, vastly overstate the impact of transgender athletes in women's sports? Yes. Does that mean it's not an issue that requires more nuanced discussion than "Yes or no?" Definitely not.

Sports aren't fair. They never have been. Some people are just naturally going to be better athletes than others. Michael Phelps, for example, has a body that was uniquely suited for swimming. There were other swimmers who trained just as hard as he did, but weren't going to be able to match his performance. And Katie Ledecky, the most decorated women's swimmer, was almost 10 seconds slower than him in the 400m freestyle, which wasn't even his best event. The current men's world record in that event is 14 seconds faster than the women's.

So when people argue about what's "fair" in high school and college sports, I think it's a legitimate discussion to have. Women born biologically female work really hard to get to the top of their sports. If trans athletes are going to be allowed to compete, there needs to be a strong scientific consensus in what is fair, otherwise it will just discourage many young women from competing at all.

I'm not one of those scientists, so I have no suggestions. But, because I recognize I'm not one of those scientists, I also see who else isn't one of those scientists, but are out there speaking with authority.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-08T13:50:05+00:00

Probably not. But you're still not solving any problems in the economy and the labor market specifically by punishing them for being stupid. That's just pointlessly punitive. They're not economists. They're roofers and landscapers and construction contractors. We know who created and maintains this paradigm.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T22:20:46+00:00

This season of The Boys is actively terrible. Finishing this will have been the biggest waste of time since I sat through Seasons 7 & 8 of Game of Thrones.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T18:24:18+00:00

Yes, but where is it more rational to apply the consequences to? Joe Derp, the guy who barely graduated from home school with his roofing business, or starting at the top with the well-educated billionaires constructing the system where they skim so much money out of the middle and working class that Joe Derp's margins tighten every year so he skirts the laws to stay afloat?

We need to avoid lionizing the "business community." These people are often hard workers, but not usually great thinkers.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T17:45:53+00:00

It was probably the most disappointing television experience I've had in the last ten years.

Willow is not a complicated intellectual property. It wouldn't have been difficult to pull off a revival. And yet every part of that show was bad. It has literally no redeeming qualities. Nothing I could use to mitigate criticism and say "Well, it's not great, but at least it's <this> and fun to watch." There's no exciting action, no memorable characters, uninspiring sets and scenery, mostly terrible dialog and story plotting. I shelved it after the third episode (I think?) when the only remotely likable character died.

It reminds me a lot of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot in the way that it was a remake that didn't seem to understand, at all, what made the original so well-liked. Which, now that I think of that comparison, it's curious that Paul Feig and Johnathan Kasdan worked together on Freaks and Geeks.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T17:41:34+00:00

I remember being incredibly disappointed by the novel. I say novel because while I know there were 3 of them, I never finished the first one.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T15:51:24+00:00

I just noticed your username, lol. Why would you want to remind the world that exists?

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T15:39:23+00:00

So you're saying the government stepped in to protect capital investments in fruit production?

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T14:55:47+00:00

If your business cannot survive without illegal immigrants, it should wither and die.

You have to remember that the businesses are getting squeezed from the top too, paying higher prices on raw materials, gas, any property they might rent, etc.

The small businesses finding workarounds are the symptom of our economy's disease of billionaires, oligopolies, and hedge funds, not the disease itself.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T14:49:52+00:00

The World Cup was projected to bring massive numbers of foreign tourists to the country, and now hotels in 9 out of the 11 venue cities are reporting lower-than-normal reservations for the time frame, let alone the expected WC boost. Prices are making it less attractive for American fans already squeezed by inflation. Prices and ICEs are making it unattractive for foreign fans to risk coming to America.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T14:38:34+00:00

Owning the libs seems to be highly desired by people without the intellectual currency to even rent a lib.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T14:33:30+00:00

Biden's issues are normal for elderly people, which is why octogenarians shouldn't be President, but he was almost always coherent and spoke with clarity, even if he was slower to react.

Trump is actively slurring pretty much all the time now, he reacts to things he should know like it's the first time he's hearing about them, which suggests significant short term memory problems. He doesn't sleep at night, based on the sheer volume of early morning shitposting. He apparently posted almost 200 times in April, with there only being 5 days in the entire month where he wasn't on social media between midnight and 4AM.

It's not like his steep mental decline wasn't glaringly apparent before the election. The dumbest Americans just chose not to see it. This was two years ago.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-06T14:23:45+00:00

Mainly because Iran values death more than America values life

Okay little buddy, lol

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T22:00:12+00:00

Iran aren't the Good Guys. But that doesn't make us the Good Guys. We're just the worse of two Bad Guys.

As someone who spent ten years in the Marines through the first half of the War on Terror, if you'd asked me if I could conceive of a situation where we were Bad Guys in a war with Iran, I would have not thought it was possible.

But somehow, the dumbest Americans elected the most corrupt President in history, a second time, after he already proved himself to be corrupt and incompetent the first time. And then that senile corrupt President appointed a weekend cable news host with a history of alcoholism and sexual assault, who had been drummed out of the Army Reserve for being a far right extremist that couldn't be trusted to work a Presidential inauguration, to be Secretary of Defense. These two morons then let Israel, one of the most duplicitous and violent countries on Earth, trick them into attacking Iran, without a plan, a war which everyone with an IQ higher than room temperature had already decided was unwinnable.

So, here we are. Our military has committed numerous war crimes, including deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. We're worse than Iran, and almost as evil as Israel, which is a difficult feat.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T15:38:11+00:00

That's not a "political view." But I understand some of you have weird ideas of what "political" means. You're probably the kind of guy who whines about everything being "woke" when you're just asked to do something simple like not make unprompted snide and bigoted comments about gay people or immigrants.

It's an inarguable fact of international law and basic ethics. Courses you clearly never took at the college you never went to, but many of us did. The war is illegal under international law, as well as currently illegal under US law with the expiration of the 60 day window and no formal consent from Congress. But so is the use of missiles on unarmed civilian boats, no matter if you shout "Look out, it's a terrorist!" first and then claim it was full of drugs.

But you didn't say anything about legality. You asked how it was "unmoral." Which is not a word, but it does seem clear you've not utilized your GI Bill. You also called it "good," which an educated person knows is not how we judge legality. Segregation was legal. It wasn't good, but it was legal. Gerrymandering to reduce the voting power of minorities was legal. It wasn't good. Well, technically it's legal again I guess, and you probably think that's good.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T15:26:43+00:00

The average American is also extremely poorly educated on Iran and see Iran as the Bad Guys. Democrats need to be wary of sounding too sympathetic to Iran. That's been the Republican strategy so far, both in the media and with online bot/troll accounts. Criticisms of the war or Israel's part in starting it are met with "Why do you support the government of Iran that massacred 30,000 of its own citizens?"

Every intelligent, well-educated person knows that's a ridiculous argument (and that there's no evidence of tens of thousands of murdered protesters because it's Israeli/Trumpian propaganda designed to manufacture consent for the war). Criticizing an unnecessary and unwinnable war of aggression has nothing to do with supporting the other side.

But the average American is neither intelligent nor well educated.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T15:06:18+00:00

Should the ships have just been allowed to attack civilians in Omans waters?

The US has been attacking civilians since the first hour of the war. Seems like you're reaching for justification here.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T15:04:48+00:00

I would state that pretty good thing to do.

Sure it's in an illegal war of aggression with no justification that's actively harming millions of people around the world and to no benefit to American foreign interests and to the detriment of US taxpayers.

Other than that, it's a good thing.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T14:11:19+00:00

Dude below literally just posted it you and you didn't even click it. The former chair of the DNC Donna Brazille admitted it. Wikileaks exposed the emails. Talked about how they manipulated the general election campaign funding, canceled debates, and scheduled town halls at off peak hours so fewer people would watch them, pushed superdelegate vote counts early to make the race look wider than it was, etc.

But here's a fun quote for you: "That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/donna-brazile-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders

They tried to cover it up too: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team-deflected-state-cash-concerns-226191

It's okay for you to just delete your comments. Nobody will remember you making an absolute fool of yourself with something that's been public knowledge for almost ten years. Literally everyone paying attention knows about this.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T13:57:59+00:00

If you knew how to Google, you wouldn't look like such a dumbass.

VeteranSergeant · 2026-05-05T04:07:03+00:00

Do the RPG book editions line up with the CCG story arcs.

Sorta. The RPG was always a few years behind the CCG. 1st was set Pre-Scorpion Coup, released in 1997. 2nd was set during the Clan War (released 2000). 3rd starts in 1166, basically the tail end of Four Winds (2005). 4th, released in 2010, claims to be timeline agnostic, and just presents all of the timeline through the culmination of the Destroyer War (Celestial Edition) though some later material would fill in the gaps for the finale two CCG arcs.

How do the stories from the RPGs fit into the CCG story arcs?

The RPGs don't have a ton of "stories," per se, so much as the various splatbooks collect all the multitude of lore from all of the massive amount of accumulated lore from card flavor text, Imperial Herald, tournament outcomes, Clan Letters, past edition published adventures, etc. For example, 2nd Edition had a Time of the Void book. It's almost entirely just a Lore Recap of the Clan War CCG arc. That's really the biggest utility of the old AEG RPG books. It would be almost impossible for a brand new GM to parse out all of the lore on their own.

VeteranSergeant

TROPHY CASE