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Australia flags denying U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning entry visa
Australia has signaled it is preparing to ban U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning from entering the country ahead of a scheduled speaking tour, the organizer of the engagements said. Manning, the transgender U.S. Army soldier who served seven years in military prison for leaking classified data, is scheduled to speak at the Sydney Opera House at the weekend.
However, Suzi Jamil, owner of the company organizing Manning's speaking tour in Australia, said late on Wednesday Manning had received a notice from the Australian government informing her Canberra was considering cancelling her visa. [...] Australian law allows the immigration minister to deny anyone a visa if they do not pass a character test, a broad criteria that affords the government sweeping powers.
Manning is scheduled to travel to New Zealand after finishing her three events in Australia but the center-right opposition National Party has also called for her to be denied entry.
Also at NYT.
Related: Chelsea Manning Released from Prison, Remains on Active Duty Pending Appeal
Chelsea Manning, Newly Freed from Military Prison, Speaks in San Francisco
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:06PM (46 children)
A transgender person who reveals government secrets? Two things the right wing nutters just can not tolerate.
Our species is a sad ignorant lot, but hey, here's to the slow progress we are making *tink*
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:17PM (7 children)
But at least you got to hate on a generic 'right wing' nutter. Right? At least you got that going for you.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:29PM (5 children)
Which is nice, yes.
Sadly for you the stories of left wing nutters being assholes are fewer and far between. But hey, at least you got to hate on a generic AC post. Feel better or do we need to proceed with the coffee enema?
Next up: AC spams some shitposts! is it the same AC? The world may never know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:56PM
Why were all of aristarchus' submissions on Australia banning alt-right Canadian whites like Southern rejected, and this one accepted? Please tell me it is not just to get a rise (literally?) out of Runaway!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:17AM (3 children)
"Sadly for you the stories of left wing nutters being assholes are fewer and far between."
.
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Apparently you have a selective memory.
The Antifa are compiling quite a record of bad behavior and quite a few of them are in FBI files now ( ask me how I know that ...).
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @02:55AM (1 child)
english motherfucka do you speak it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:59AM
what?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @02:57AM
How is this off topic ?
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The Antifa are leftists and there are plenty of examples of them behaving very badly indeed.
/
The moderation on the site calls into question the intelligence of the participants, and i am trying to be kind when I put it that way.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Fluffeh on Friday August 31 2018, @01:37AM
I was watching some Studio 60 the other day, came across this golden little interchange:
Harriet (Christian, Right Wing character): Why can't the left and right get along?
Matt Liberal character: You lot think that we all think you're stupid.
Harriet: Okay, so why don't you folks get on with us?
Matt: Cause we all think you're stupid.
It's paraphrased from memory, but so amusingly accurate I think for the most part.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:34PM (27 children)
Our constitution actually specifies a punishment for treason: death.
Being transgender leads to visa fraud, because it is normal to be asked if you are male or female. Look, I can self-identify as an Apache attack helicopter, but that doesn't mean I actually am one, even if I mutilate myself to look more like one.
Our species is a sad ignorant lot, with about half the people thinking LGBT is sin and the other half thinking it is something to celebrate. The reality is that we should lump it in with autism, blindness, schizophrenia, seizures, dyslexia, cystic fibrosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, paralysis, and so many other tragic problems. It is clearly a mental problem, no matter what the politically-influenced DSM may currently say, and in most cases it is a birth defect. Research into prevention and early detection of LGBT should be a financial priority just as much as it is for so many other serious medical problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:01PM (1 child)
Citation needed for the legal definition of male and female. Not the feminist definition. Not your definition. The legal definition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:23PM
Let's see ...
Clerk: You got balls?
Person: Um, yes.
Clerk: Male!
Person: Um ...
Clerk: Wait, do you plan to keep 'em?
Person: No.
Clerk: Awe man ... here, fill out this form.
Person: Can I borrow your pen?
(Score: 1, Troll) by bob_super on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:10PM (10 children)
> about half the people thinking LGBT is sin and the other half thinking it is something to tolerate
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @12:30AM (1 child)
What are your thoughts on busty lesbians?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:03PM
MY thoughts are: Can I watch?
Oklies if I can't. Just asking. You know, for science. And masturbation. Perhaps with a side dish of potentially joining in if they are so inclined.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday August 31 2018, @12:32AM (6 children)
I'm a member of the third half of people who don't really think much about trans-gender people at all, until I meet one. Then I treat them like, you know, a person. br.
There are not very many of them, so I don't meet many.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 31 2018, @12:54AM (5 children)
"treat them like, you know, a person", is included in my broad definition of "tolerate".
I used to see a lot of NSH*, living halfway between Boystown and Andersonville, and had plenty of great dinners and parties with a wide assortment of people our Vice-President would run from.
* : Not Strictly Hetero, which is a lot simpler than remembering LGBTQIWTFBBQOMG...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:20AM
lickbutt isn't hard to remember
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:48AM (1 child)
Yeah, *some of my best friends are queer*
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 31 2018, @04:20PM
"tolerate" doesn't necessarily carry a negative connotation. I was just FTFYing someone, going for the closest word to what they used.
> *some of my best friends are queer*
Indeed, and I spend time with them every week. We regularly joke that hetero is the minority (at the table).
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday August 31 2018, @02:42AM (1 child)
I'm not sure your Vice-President would run from someone who is NSH (as long as nobody was watching).
There's a dude denying who he really is if ever I saw one.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:16AM
"There's a dude denying who he really is if ever I saw one."
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You're projecting, you sick fuck.
And you gays wonder why some of you have been hung on barbed wire.
It's too funny. You insult someone and you expect no retaliation. That means you
have the mind of a child.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:51AM
Actually demographics are really changing, of the 40 and under crowd I'd say you could bet on a good 33%, on the pessimistic side, being totally fine with LGBT. That leaves 66% to spread between your two REALLY pessimistic divisions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:42PM (8 children)
My view on this is that transgender conditions are congenital disorders - a bit like intersex conditions where a child is born with ambiguous genitalia. Something went 'wrong' in development. That's not the person's fault; it's not a mental problem, it's a manufacturing defect. Like other defects such as cleft lip, the solution is to fix the problem to give the person a normal life. That might be counselling, if it works (cheap, non-invasive), and if it doesn't then medication (less cheap, more invasive), social transition (cheap but socially irreversible) and finally surgery if all else fails (expensive, irreversible, invasive). Sliding scale of treatments for a problem of variable difficulty.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @12:10AM (7 children)
Transgender conditions are both congenital disorders and mental problems. The same as autism: it's a manufacturing defect. Something went 'wrong' in development.
Ideally, the solution is to fix the problem to give the person a normal life. More realistically, we should try to prevent this damage from occurring, for example by regulating environmental toxins like BPA. Another cause seems to be maternal antibodies to a protein required for male development, so a solution similar to the one for Rh factor might be viable.
Cures are great, but don't get your hopes up. Prevention and early detection are both very reasonable goals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @02:26AM (5 children)
What difference does it make as to what hardware or software sexual preferences an individual has anyway?
All that matters to me is how "it" treats me and other living creatures.
If "it" is a kind, gentle, loving, and contributing individual to society, I welcome "it".
If "it" is a destructive scoundrel spewing hate, I want to distance myself from it.
This is my basic paradigm for dealing with "it".
So far, in my experience, I have found little correlation between sexuality and simply being EVIL. Some of the most hate I have heard has been spewed out of the mouth of people that many see as "respectable", although after a tirade of that, I see them as a piece of ignorant human shit that has no idea what its like to be "not him", and it takes a lot of willpower on my part not to take his microphone and ram it up his a**.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @02:54AM (4 children)
Trannies have a 40% suicide rate. Surgery doesn't really change this.
Lots of these people are miserable. Their families are miserable. Why would you not want to find a way to prevent so much misery?
Both the "celebrate it" and the "sinners against God" views are unhelpful. In either case, there is a refusal to accept that these are damaged people who are mostly miserable, and there is a refusal to fund the research needed to prevent the problems.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Kell on Friday August 31 2018, @04:36AM (2 children)
How many trans people do you personally know?
I've had to pleasure to know a fair few (I'm a member of my university's diversity network), and I wouldn't classify any who I work with professionally as miserable. Quite the opposite - I've known two people both before and after transitioning (one I went to school with, and the other is a friend) and both and went from being fairly grumpy people to very happy. I very much doubt the 40% figure that gets bandied around* - I have met precisely one trans girl who tried to kill herself, but that was because she couldn't get treatment. Once she did, surprise surprise, she didn't want to die anymore.
From all I have seen, and what I have learned from talking to others who are more involved in this field, the treatments for transgender and gender diverse people work. But don't take my word for it - there is a whole research field of developmental medicine, psychology and gender science (science, not studies - the two are not the same!) exploring gender diverse disorders. Nobody is getting rich selling estrogen to transwomen or testosterone to trans men; doctors continue to prescribe treatments because they work.
*And yes, I am keen to see studies that explore the longitudinal suicide behaviour of trans people pre and post-treatment.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:47PM (1 child)
My workplace seems to love hiring trannies. I think they fill some sort of diversity quota.
They are not happy people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @12:08PM
Perhaps they are unhappy because they have to work with people who keep calling them "trannies"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:32PM
I don't know if you're a Muslim or a feminist, but you can cram your concern trolling right up your ass.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @03:18AM
You could be right. But I've seen a lot of statistics showing people are wrong about a lot of things. Maybe they are just wrong about needing to change their gender.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:51PM (4 children)
Homosexuality was shown to be tied to higher fertility rates of female family members. And since humans evolve as family units rather than individuals and it's evolutionary advantageous to have extra hands around unoccupied with their own children... Well, a problem worth treating it's definitely not. It's not liberalism. It's not kindness. It's just that social engineering needs to be justified at the social scale rather than the individual level. And what you consider "mental issues" is about as significant as the color scheme on a chicken's plumage to a poultry farmer. It's not even on the agenda.
The other stuff you're mentioned is also mostly the same. Autism, dyslexia and OCD are all more common with smart people. In extreme cases, they might even be impossible to cull out without losing too much. There very good stats showing children of academic parents are in higher risk of autism; That OCD is impossible to disassociate from academic success and that many types of dyslexia appears to be alternative optimization paths to algorithms we just happen not to use as much in our current way of live.
Fact is, we just don't need to remove those traits. And spending time and effort on fixing problems that aren't problems is just bad engineering.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @12:54AM (3 children)
"Fact is, we just don't need to remove those traits."
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You'd think differently if you were responsible for a profoundly autistic child who would need to be watched every second of every hour of every day for 35+ years.
Or maybe you'd enjoy 35 years of a living hell ? Maybe you like hearing a child scream for no reason at any hour of the day or night for 35+ years ?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @03:45AM (2 children)
No I wouldn't. Because I wouldn't be in those circumstances. I'd just dump the kid on the state. Pater Patriae comes with Parens patriae. If the state gets the right to intervene in family life by removing children from unsafe parents or messing around with our education, they're also responsible for taking care of children that the parents feel they can't take care off themselves. There all sorts of these "responsibility equals power which equals responsibility" social constructs that people just don't get. The worst one is probably that drug enforcement and food safety = free health care. People just don't understand that if the government gets the right to tell us what we can and can't put in our bodies or produce and sell, than it becomes responsible for our health. It's not even socialism. It's just what real checks and balanced looks like.
And let me make a little promise to you: When 90% of autistic kids end up in the government's care, I guarantee you the government will at least fund free prenatal tests and abortions. The problem will never really go away. But it will turn into a no-problem. And no real social engineering would be involved since the same kids that would have been left for dead by their kids under minimal government circumstances would be left in institutes.
Let the gods decides what's crueler. But I can tell you what's fairer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:08AM (1 child)
"I'd just dump the kid on the state."
.
.
Obviously you are not a parent, and I sincerely hope that fate does not allow you to become one, because you're a piece of shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:27AM
Just because you are privileged enough to be able to take care of an autistic child does not mean that we all are.
I realize GP was being an ignorant asshole (that's my explanation for the word "dump"), but being ignorant about such situations is the norm, and people simply cannot understand.
I am not a parent of a problem child, and I have no idea what they go through, but I can certainly see how in most cases a child who needs constant supervision cannot be left in the care of the parents.
I would find it perfectly normal for such parents to go insane (and possibly kill the child in a fit of rage), and they would certainly need to already have a lot of money, or someone would need to provide them with an income plus shopping plus cooking and cleaning.
I can certainly tell you that if I had such a child, I could not keep my job, and I would need my job in order to feed the child.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
I'm not an expert, but everything I've ever seen suggests Australia's right is way way way crazier than the US's in every respect but guns.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:06PM
And healthcare.
But yes, crazy right wing nutters.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:21AM
Australia spawned and gave the United States a Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the creator of Fox News.
So yeah. He went on to spread his brand of right wing nuttery to the UK as well.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:20PM (2 children)
Now, let's keep this in perspective. Bradley Manning stole the government secrets, then became Chelsea/transgender while in jail at the tax payer's expense. So it's not as bad as you make it out to be ... it's worse!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)
What do you imagine the price tag was?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:45AM
"What do you imagine the price tag was?"
.
.
It cost at least a dick and a pair of balls, but maybe those parts were recycled as fish food, since it was bite-size for the goldfish.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday August 31 2018, @01:55AM (3 children)
They're country, their decision.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @09:06AM
Doesn't mean we can't criticise 'em.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @09:11AM (1 child)
Are you trolling the spelling nazis? It's the same damn word. How can you get it right once and wrong once in only four words?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:38PM
As a thin person, I think we should stop covering medical care and twinkie diets for people in prison with type 2 diabetes.