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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. Gave it a try in what sense? Also, I'd say it was a hundred years at best. The British occupations in North America and Australia were examples of using genocide, subjugation, and token failed efforts at assimilation to conquer and colonize new territories. India was more an example of using already existing tensions within the failing Mughal Empire to divide and conquer. Shoot, the Hindu caste system in some ways dovetailed nicely with English sensibilities regarding class. Why change something that reflected their own values to a significant degree? Teach them English and cricket, import them to Africa as administrators for the railroads, which they then later became the diaspora merchant class for much of east Africa. But there was never any real effort to Westernize India or Indians. Heck, if you ask plenty of upper class Brits what they think of Indians you get an answer that sounds surprisingly familiar to what a redneck white Texan from rural east Texas thinks of African Americans.
  2. Misogyny is worldwide, with a significant historical and pre historical basis. 200 million women throughout 30 countries have undergone genital mutilation simply to make them more suitable for their future man. South Korea is polarized along gender based lines in existential ways as women achieve greater financial independence but men want them to be the same type of wives their mom's were. Instead, the women are choosing not to date and not to have babies. 5 million women and girls are currently victims of sex trafficking, with 73% of those in Asia and the Pacific. Women in the US are extremely aware of the different threats they face on an ongoing basis due to their gender, whether from outright physical coercion, or mental abuse designed to isolate and make them emotionally dependent on their partner. I do believe India is the worst. It's not just arranged marriages, even as an early teenager. It's not only the justified disfigurements or murder - sometimes by the father - if a potential bride refuses their match. It's also the ongoing practice of sending widows into isolated communities where they're considered outcasts, never to socialize with anyone outside of their fellow widows for the rest of their lives. But throughout the Islamic world, the Hindu communities, Africa, and the Far East there are horrible abuses perpetrated on women on an ongoing basis. The West is not immune, but in a relative sense things have been getting better over the last 100 years. But there are plenty of circles where this is not seen as a good thing. It's seen as a threat for a cultural, ethnic, and religious identity. Look at what is happening in Iran, where the theocracy is making it abundantly clear they're willing to kill millions of their own people to ensure the continued subjugation of women. There's not a lot to be done on a daily basis to make others behave differently. Make sure our culture survives, both externally through a strong military and internally through a healthy civil society with shared values, mutual interdependence, a sense of fairness and justice, and respect for differences of opinion. Which we're failing at currently, but hopefully one day we'll improve from where we are right now. But failings on the part of our culture/society are fodder for places that do not share our values as to legitimate reasons not to allow Western styles of tolerance and the granting of more opportunities for women. Personally I'm grateful for the progress that has been made, and I hope for more in the future. In the meantime I'm glad we all share a sense of horror over stories like these and others that do not reflect what we believe is the right way for men and women to exist together. I'll also say the Indian government has made some token efforts to change things. I just don't believe in their sincerity or effectiveness. But that's me being cynical. At least on the outside there is some acknowledgement that the way Indian men treat Indian women in the aggregate is not okay.
  3. Well, the other thing humans have done is annihilate whole civilizations who are perceived as a cultural threat, and/or occupy them and force them to change. That's probably the most productive thing the US could have done. Actually carried out a successful occupation in either Afghanistan or Iraq and over decades try to encourage a different level of treatment of women. But instead we failed at both pretty miserably. And failed in nation building in Somalia, and in encouraging democracy in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Libya. In the case of Syria and Libya, catastrophically so. If you're able to nation build successfully and show a different way to live that people desire to emulate, it becomes an even greater existential threat for cultures/nations/religions who are behaving differently. But outside of that, not a lot can be done. In some countries like India these are manifestations of root identities. There's no real external compulsion that's going to change things.
  4. SL Xpress

    Rowing

    And the Directors Cup. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s been a great year for the athletic program as a whole. Just not the ridiculous year last season was. Still got the volleyball national championship, and that one was really special for me personally. 3 out of 4 still has a really nice ring to it!
  5. When something other than the effectiveness of the military becomes the biggest priority, it's unsurprising that the effectiveness of military suffers. In Russia's case (and China's, to a significant degree) the military is seen as a potential threat to the rulers of the state. Therefore mediocrity, the ability to survive in a backstabbing bureaucracy, the ability to project complete loyalty, personal ambition (but only within certain parameters), and a certain incompetence in leadership so no one would actually follow you in a coup attempt, become what is valued most. Frankly, when we try to make the military an instrument of social justice we do the same thing in this country. That doesn't mean we shouldn't. It doesn't mean Russia shouldn't be prioritizing making the military a non threat to take over the government. But if the focus becomes something other than building a force that is extremely efficient at killing large numbers of the enemy, then it can deteriorate from that purpose. In Russia's case, astonishingly so. But it's the same thing Gibbons talked about in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Weak emperor/weak generals means fragility. Weak emperor/strong generals means a replacement. Strong emperor/weak generals means weak military. Strong emperor/strong military is the ideal, but it doesn't last long because one or the other is replaced. Rinse and repeat.
  6. In some of the biggest news I've seen in a while, the Wall Street Journal is reporting South Korea has a confidential agreement with the US government to provide 250,000 artillery shells in a first tranche eventually to reach 1 million shells. Not sure what happens with the agreement being reported in the press, but I am excited to hear about it. The article is behind a paywall. https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korean-artillery-supply-allows-u-s-to-delay-decision-on-cluster-munitions-for-ukraine-4e41c04b
  7. I've seen in multiple interviews from people serving in the frontlines that they had to pay a bribe at the recruiting office to be allowed to volunteer. They were refused because of medical conditions, but after paying $300, no more medical conditions. That was multiple people with the same experience. Doesn't mean it was happening everywhere, but it's obvious it wasn't an isolated incident, either.
  8. It’s not like stores run out of brunette hair coloring.
  9. Yeah, but to me the decisions on both Iraq and Afghanistan ultimately were with the president and his administration. I don’t mind blaming the party for those decisions, but I have a rough time blaming any specific member of Congress - even McCain, as influential as he was in foreign affairs and military matters. That doesn’t address what you’re specifically saying because I don’t want to get into the weeds about my views on Iraq and Afghanistan. But I can’t think of any initial efforts utilizing the US military where I put the responsibility for those actions on a member of Congress. The Surge in Iraq is different, because misguided or not (and we were certainly already balls deep in Iraq by that time) that doesn’t happen without McCain pushing so hard for it against a reluctant administration.
  10. So did we advance as a species during that time? Or did we decline? In your opinion. I could make an argument for either, although there's no doubt that technologically we've advanced. Just unconvinced that's the only metric we should measure ourselves by, when sometimes it seems like it is. We certainly became more globally connected. And our conflicts and our level of cooperation both became more global right along with it.
  11. I don't like to get too critical of the Obama administration at the time. I was extremely disappointed we didn't support Ukraine more back in 2014, especially since - just like in the Arab Spring countries - there was an implied support from the pro democracy NGOs funded transparently and clandestinely by the US, that repeatedly evaporated when push came to shove, or was misapplied and led to all kinds of unintended consequences. But I'm unconvinced a Republican administration would have performed better. I am convinced the Trump administration wasn't better, and would have been far worse post 2022 invasion. But all of that is simply my opinion. Not trying to proselytize. If someone wants to believe the Trump administration handled everything wonderfully have at it. I'm not going to argue it here. What I will say is I always loved John McCain. He was butchered by an infamous attack in the South Carolina primary otherwise there's a chance he could have won the election in 2000. He had no real shot in 2008 after Lehman Brothers was allowed to go kaput. I don't know that he had that much interest in domestic affairs, but I always felt he had a tremendous sense of foreign policy - probably because it so often mimicked my personal beliefs. I was grateful to him for the surge in Iraq, regardless of the merit of us being there. It wasn't enough, and I felt it was too late in some regard, and the rest of the philosophy around the occupations led a lot to be desired, but it was absolutely a huge step in the right direction. In any case, I miss him. For me he represented many of the best parts of the Republican party. Thanks for posting. Makes me wistful.
  12. Christianity talks about original sin. I talk about the evolutionary process. Our brains are remarkably similar to what they were 70,000 years ago. If you think of our genetic makeup and instincts as a sort of hardware, and religion as one of the many software layers we overlay on top of the hardware, then to me it becomes unreasonable to think the hardware won't exist any more, especially when the software has to be reset with every birth. Instinctually our brains don't do well with unknowing. We want to feel like we have answers to things, so oftentimes we'll give our brains an answer for why things happened the way they did, and whether that's the reality of it is less important than simply having an answer that gives us some sort of solace so we can move on to the next problem. We don't have an eternity to spend contemplating things, and some people end up having more leisure time in their existence than others. Religion provides answers to complicated subjects for us that we no longer have to provide ourselves. But it's not really feasible to simply "do away" with religion, or even to do away with organized religion. We tend to substitute it for something else regardless. I cannot tell you how many people I know who genuinely invest themselves in the concept that how bodies of mass outside the Earth's orbit have an actual influence on our personalities and behaviors. The industry is massive and is growing. They tend to be very judgmental of other organized religions, and yet here they are organizing themselves into their own communities and casting their own levels of judgement on people outside of their community. This is what we do. I'm not saying astrologists are about to call for acts of various kinds of repression over people who don't believe the way they do. I am saying if at some point we have a powerful nation state of crystal loving zodiac obsessed worshippers we'll see various forms of repression in the same way we would any belief system. The key similarity between Mongols, Hutus, Maoris, and whoever else we want to identify - and Christians we want to vilify, is that we're talking about communities with power. Inherently communities who don't hold power don't commit horrific acts...because they're powerless. It's inherent in their dynamic. The people who do commit horrific acts are the ones who hold power. Because they can, and there's an evolutionary tribal impulse of "them or us." As a species we don't always act on that impulse. It doesn't have to be inevitable. But it cannot occur unless a community holds power. There is a pattern of that behavior occurring throughout history. It's occurring right now. It will continue to occur. We're not suddenly wiping out that aspect of our species out of the genome. I would argue there would be unintended consequences if we did. To point to Christianity with a specific animus because of the hypocrisy between the religion's beliefs and its actions doesn't make sense to me personally, although I acknowledge it does to you. Those horrific acts are going to continue to occur around the world where a specific community holds power, and for whatever reason the dynamic of "them or us" has reached a stage where the community in power has become convinced it's an existential fact. Almost invariably with the help of a leadership that is parlaying our instinctual tribal affiliations into a bid for control and/or an extension of it. One of the things that is rarely discussed is the outsized impact Christianity made on the cessation and enforcement of the Atlantic slave trade, the influence over the ending of slavery in the United States, and how rare such a movement exists in either degree or effectiveness throughout the history of mankind. This does not make Christianity okay. It's not meant as a true defense. But I resent the constant efforts to paint Christianity as an enabler of slavery - it most certainly was - without also giving the religious belief system credit for the ending of an abhorrent, but also very human, practice. Mostly it's understood that Christianity became - and still remains in a significant way - a defense for the colonization and exploitation of other cultures. But again, what I will say is that some of that was going to be part of the dynamic in any case. One culture more powerful encounters another culture and exploits, subjugates, and even exterminates them. That's what people do. Since even before we were people. Young male adult chimpanzees go around their territory and beat to death any chimpanzees they find not a part of their group. We didn't inherit that from chimpanzees, but we did inherit that trait from a common ancestor. As a people the conquering culture then uses their own rationales for their abuses in a way that galvanizes their tribe in support of those actions. In the case of Europe post Dias sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and then the subsequent forays by other powers all around the globe, Christianity became a big part of that rationale, because it was the tool available to them. In my opinion we're fortunate it doesn't happen more often than it does, because the wiring for it is ever present from the genesis of our species, and it's only the software - the values we're groomed to adopt and as individual adults choose to act upon - that keeps it from happening even more. In any case, in my ideal world - and I posted something similar earlier in the thread - there would be some way as a society we could have a Methodist Church that feels okay with ordaining gay ministers, and another group that doesn't feel like it's okay, and yet we could live in a society that allows both groups to practice their religious beliefs. If both groups want to believe the other side is going to hell, so be it. I grew up with a sweet Grandmother who made sure I never had communion in her Church of Christ church because I wasn't a member, and it took me until my 20s to come to the realization she understood on a very fundamental level her beloved grandson was doomed to an eternity of torment in the fires of damnation because I wasn't a member of the Church of Christ. But to me, that's okay. At least she didn't remind me of it on a regular basis and I could attend church with her anytime I wanted. I didn't want any of those stale wafers or what was probably shitty grape juice anyway.
  13. Are there people on this thread who truly believe Christianity is the source of evil against humanity in the name of religion? As opposed to people simply being people? The fossil record shows evidence for any number of settlements/cultures wiped out purposefully. Neanderthals almost certainly became extinct in part because of their encounters with homo sapiens. Same thing with homo erectus and home heidelbergensis. The Neanderthal DNA in Europeans almost certainly doesn't exist because of friendly relations and interspecies swapping. It's from raping and the destruction of rival tribes. The Maoris weren't Christian. They took a great deal of pride in finding isolated island communities and wiping them from the face of the earth, taking their women and girls with them. Ghengis Khan wasn't a Christian as he wiped out 10% of the human population on the planet. I've always found his perspective interesting when he told the Muslims "if you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas weren't Christians. Neither were the Comanches. Alexander the Great wasn't Christian when he wiped the Thebans from the face of the planet. Rome wasn't Christian when they ended the Carthaginian culture for good. Neither Stalin nor Mao were Christians. The Japanese weren't Christian. The Turkish Kemalists weren't Christian when they wiped out the 500,000 Greeks at Smyrna, and kicked out all the Greeks out of Anatolia. The Hutus weren't massacring Tutsis because Jesus told them to. People are people. They're going to use the tools at hand to create tribal associations, and then eventually someone is going to come along to convince people in those tribal associations it's either them or us. The only real defense for it over the long term is complete assimilation so that tribal distinctions become practically nonexistent, like with the Mongols ruling China. Or some way of creating a tradition so rich in allowing peaceful transitions of power that differing tribes get their turn at fucking things up only to peacefully hand it over to another tribe for their chance to screw up. But that's extremely fragile and always vulnerable to a charismatic leader and our natural instinct for various forms of repression and elimination. But that happens whether Christianity exists or not. The good thing about Christianity is that the historical religious leader is not also the political and/or military leader. So we have "rend unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and instead of leading an army, we have the image of Jesus dying on a cross. The other good thing about Christianity is that the reformation movement, including Luther but also other sects, successfully led a shift in mindset where according to this new belief people were capable of their own relationship with Jesus Christ and God, and therefore no longer needed a central authority to tell them what to think, or dictate to them whether they were going to heaven or not. Whether you believe Christianity is a good thing or not, or believe in somewhat wacky versions of the religion where being prosperous is a sign of your faith (you know, from the biblical stories of requiring apostles to give up all their wealth, or the meek shall inherit the earth, or overturning the moneychangers' tables because they took advantage of the requirement to only donate in the local currency), the truth is there's precedence in the faith for a wide variety of belief structures. Hence, this thread. Where, sure, a lot of people in the church feel like you're going to hell for engaging in sexual acts with your same gender, and deserve condemnation and judgement for doing so. But there are a whole lot of people looking for a revisionist interpretation where people who engage in sodomy and a reach around on Saturday night can now lead a congregation with a sermon about the love of God the next day. I don't see that as evidence of the evils of Christianity. People are going to do people things, and Christianity in many ways is simply going to reflect that.
  14. When you say we've read this book before, what do you mean, exactly? Are you referring to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan? Several things I'll say in response. First, everyone should keep these nutjobs at arms length. They have no chance of actually succeeding with anything. There's no strategy. This isn't incipient guerilla warfare. This is a weekend joyride with no overall concept of how it's going to end. Second, Russia isn't going to produce a leader who isn't some kind of radical by Western standards. It's not in their cultural DNA. All they know is horrific strongmen who massacre their countrymen and neighbors, only to eventually be replaced by the same and then adored for being so strong of a leader. I guess maybe an invasion and outright long term occupation, but that's not going to happen, and even if it did, we're showing we can't do effective occupations any more. But that's really a silly point. We're not occupying Russia. Ever. Honestly, this is right up Putin's playbook. He secured his power by poisoning, jailing, exiling, and otherwise getting rid of any political opponent who had a realistic chance of garnering more popular support than him, but kept the opposition nutjobs that made him look sane by comparison. But make no mistake. Even the reasonable opposition in many ways speaks in a language that would make everyone here uncomfortable in some way. That's Russia for you. This is a diversion, and an embarrassment to Russia that it's even allowed to occur. But beyond that it doesn't have any long term value. Mind you, that's enough, but we shouldn't have any expectations about it. And we sure as heck shouldn't connect ourselves to it.
  15. This particular contagion was traced to a pathogen created when the Patriot defense system started knocking Russian hypersonic missiles out of the sky. Watch out Russian R&D community. It’s highly contagious.
  16. Those Swedish IFVs are supposed to be top notch. Glad they're on their way.
  17. The Chinese wouldn’t send 200,000 troops over the Korean border completely undetected, either. Nothing to worry about here!
  18. Hannibal would never go through the Alps.
  19. It's hard for me to take any of this seriously. At the same time, it does say something about Putin's control of the country that anything like this is happening at all. For me, at this point it's still just a false flag operation or a clown show. Or some kind of combination of the two. The whole thing seems ridiculous.
  20. You sound optimistic. I like the way you think, but I do not share in your beliefs. I do hope for a successful offensive, but I do not expect a regime change or a pull back of Russian military from all occupied areas.
  21. Texas has a new beach volleyball transfer from Arizona State.
  22. It was Ron DeSantis's favorite hotel.
  23. I realize some people get upset when the thread veers off in any way, but if you're so inclined I'd love to hear the story of how that photo came to be.
  24. To prevent anyone from going down any rabbit holes they would later regret: What Does 'CFMN' Mean? | Acronyms by Dictionary.com CFMN WHAT DOES CFMN MEAN? CFMN is an acronym with two usages, both relating to sexuality: come fuck me now, and clothed females, naked male. The latter is a kink, or practice, in the BDSM community.
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