SaltSong

Working my way through Master and Commander again. I'm up to Truelove.

Oh, you're gonna have a good time.

It's not flawless, (what is, after all) but it's quite good.

He's a wonderful example of someone who desperately needs to be fixed.

Your average autistic person is rather inoffensive. No need to fix anything, unless they want to be.

More or less. No bonus points for me, I guess.

You need some kind of cue to keep in step. If you can see the other guys feet, that helps, but often tinted you can't. The sound of yourself matching helps, but without some occasional cadence, or other governing factor, the speed of the match tends to change in a collective sort of way. My BMT platoon would get faster as we marched, unless the DI shouted at us occasionally.

Realistically, by way of being the political equivalent of a fleet-in-being.

Mostly, though, by way of ducking up anyone who looks like challenging our putative superiority.

maybe stop comparing race and gender then.

Isn't the entire premise of the post that someone is seeing parallels here, and would like to understand why the similarities are not meaningful? As I said, I agree that transracial people are being silly, but I haven't seen an argument here that can't be used against transgender people.

trans women only pass because we’re women.

But there are plenty of transwomen who don't "pass" despite being women. But they should still be treated as women. Hell, there have been at least a few reports of ciswomen who couldn't pass as women, at least to sufficiently assholish observers. On that basis, I don't think we can use "passing" as a factor to determine people's identity.

So, as a white person, I cannot pass as black, so I can never expect people to treat me like I'm black?

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is silly, but all the arguments I've seen in this thread are a word-swap away from being a bad argument against transgender people.

What's the essential difference?

Information flow can never go backwards. There's plenty of examples of reporters or even social media compromising military operations. In at least a few cases, it has lead to the destruction of military assets. Once broadcast, the damage is done.

Trying to force reporters to think hard about what they are broadcasting is a good thing, from the point of view of national defence.

Is it normal to allow people to send military information to your enemy?

I'm not a huge fan of either of the two belligerent, but this is not exactly an unreasonable position to take. And they are at least putting reporters on notice.

Wood.

I picked it up from an episode of Deep Space Nine. Good times.