You’re probably all aware of the quote on pornography in which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart didn’t define it but, rather, famously stated “I know it when I see it”.
Wow, you’re right and what you said about these ideologies of opposition really rings true to me as being the central problem.
Why— if you take the funniest/most depressing quotation from that bizarre article (the angry statement that people don’t get to “consent to puberty”)— we see that the current opposition is to nature itself, and indeed to one’s progenitors and Creator. I didn’t consent to being born! I didn’t consent to bring female! I didn’t consent to being white! And so on. Geez. No wonder doctors are prescribing antidepressants like candy. Wokism is profound ingratitude, anger, and resentment over things that simply cannot be changed.
Actually, some have. I'm sixty. I had baby-boomers pieces of shit as parents (hence my alias?), wankers who thought highly enough of themselves to consider me as a nuisance in the way of their no-holds-barred counter-culture lifestyles. I'm from the next generation, the last ones who worked their asses off all their life and tried very hard not to fall into that trap and become decent human beings. All for nothing, I'm sorry to say.
What we have now is the resurgence of that boomers mentality - or rather, mental sickness - carefully groomed from the top down through various intelligence programs - men are pigs, wokism, cancel culture, LGBTQWERTY, critical race theory and whatnot.
By the way, when I was 2-4 years old, I never raged about not being able to "remake the world to my whim". I was essentially a very nice little boy. Not anymore.
The person who wrote the article about trans kids (ironically published on the "Intelligencer") is Andrea Long Chu. I encourage the readers to look him up but be careful - he's not for the faint of heart.
Among his gems: "I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend . . . for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts." "“Sissy porn did make me trans," and "(being female) defined by self-negation" that includes "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another." Because who knows best about being female than a man?
Critics fell all over themselves to praise him for it, BTW.
By his previous standards this current article in the, erm, "Intelligencer" section was quite tame in comparison.
Chu's article only has the *appearance* of erudition - one might describe it as trans-erudite - but it's chock full of barely coherent reasoning and dubious 'facts' and mis-characterizations.
JKR is an amazing woman of courage and stature, far outpacing her sniveling detractors. If any of our political leaders had a fraction of her common sense and valor we would not be in the mess we are in today.
“The various online forums for ‘trans’ issues all seem to argue that, if the parents do not immediately ‘affirm’ their kids, they are abusive and should be cut out from the lives of the child.” Sounds rather cult-ish in practice.
You can find various articles on the 'properties' of cults. You can run through the list of the techniques they use and you'll find a very strong overlap indeed in the 'trans' case.
All 'political' programming adopts these kinds of techniques too. It wouldn't be wrong, in my view, to describe Mao's cultural revolution, for example, as the rise of a cult.
I'm so sorry but I just couldn't continue reading after that image of the fascists demonstrating their redacted pejorative in public.
No no, not due to offense or "ermagerdIfacepalmedthelaptopto bits", nothing like that. No.
It reminded me of a comic album I have stashed away, one made by the french comic artist Lauzier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Lauzier). Fluffing wikipedia - coding for accents is apparently impossible: Gérard Lauzier.
Anway, he had an eye for observing absurdities in any faction, cadre, sector, whatever: an equal opportunities satirist, who directed and visited well-deserved mockery unto all and sundry. Communists or catholics, feminists or fascists - no bias. Highly recommended if you can find his series "Tranches de vie" (Slices of life), that you buy it to preserve it for the future.
In one episode, we get a look into a meeting of french feminists in the late 1970s. We have the upper-class bourgeoise aging careerist, the young rabid idealist for whom /everything/ is connected, the token migrant who looks on confused as she hasn't got the language, and a couple of marxists who can't help trying to out-dogma each other all the time.
And then one lady arrives late, dragging a crying woman along. Apparently, the crying woman has been assaulted and raped.
To sum it up, it turns out this lady is a tranny streetwalker (i.e. a transsexual pre-op man) who was assaulted by her palestine female pimp, and was saved by a french jew intervening.
Which leads to total syntax error among the feminists in the group.
Long rant of mine aside, I bring this up just to point out that this isn't new - it's a repeat of the worst of the radical 1970s, but with the internet and with the powers in power embracing it and weaponising it.
(There's a hilarious passage in the above-mentioned comic when one radical lady tries to show why a greaser calling out "Hey babe!" is equal to Auswitch - it's hilarious to me because having been balls-deep into the black&red political camp in my teens, that is actually how they reason: Reductio Ad Absurdum. Or Ad Absurd-dumb, perhaps.)
Yeah - it's quite surprising when you realize just how long these nutty ideas have been around (particularly in academia).
I think the difference, today, is just how far they've permeated everything. They've become the kind of de facto cultural 'standard' - or at least they are presented that way because almost every institution from Parliaments, the judiciary, the schools, police forces, companies, has been seriously infected with it.
We're no longer dealing with a few greasy gormless goons spouting their immature radical ideas - people who, in the past, we could safely ignore.
Yes, it absolutely has to do with the set of ideas/way of being (intellectually/developmentally speaking) reaching a greater level of permeation than ever before.
I'd place the starting point earlier than the 1970s, however. The first time utopian ideas that can be said to be the seeds of the current madness can be said to have been discussed for real or been given real thought is in the 1880s-1920s period, and then it was a subset of the upper class elites that talked about it among themselves (sort like the dinner scene in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" if I recall the novel correctly).
From these elites it seeps into academia during the 1940s/1950s and from professors it is spread to students in the 1960s, which is also when it enters mainstream entertainment-media. During the 1970s, it has gestated to such a level it enters into education proper and int the 1990s the teachers at teachers' colleges have been replaced with sufficient numbers of believers to swing both teqachers' training and school/education proper towards where we are today.
Now, we're in the phase where the ideas achieve normality by mutating into a form that doesn't destroy society entire, or are (again) abandoned as unfeasable, irrational, immoral (dep. on what kind of cluster of ideas-norms succeeds the current paradigm).
I'd say ignoring them in the past is precisely what our (grand)parents' generations did wrong. Sure, they likely did it out of respect for ideas of free speech et cetera - but such rights can only ever be extended to people who in turn respect them, not just as platitudinal statements but in action.
I'm more than a little sick and tired of hearing/reading things like: "They want us fighting against each other rather than against them", and so "We should focus on the things we have in common".
Oh yeah?
Name one.
They are the ones counting on our patience and benevolence, while they are wreaking havoc in families, society and humankind. That's the way they've always proceeded. It's their modus operandi.
"We've made too many compromises already. Too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here, this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done."
___________________________________
Truer words were never spoken. Sadly, on the advice of his newly acquired diverse friend, he didn't keep his word. It's up to us to act accordingly.
I get where you're coming from. I sometimes feel a bit like this too, but I don't think letting anger, however righteous, to influence our actions is the right way forward. I don't want a purge or a bloodbath - whoever is doing it. I think we need to find a better way forward than this.
Fuck the Woke and then tar&feather them, and if they survive then hang them and give the corpses a fair trial, oh wait I mean the COVID "WOKE" enabler MD's & PHD's
In addition to the quote " The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" should be added " The Devil makes work for idle hands". The wokerati haven't got enough to do and is the real cause of them poking their noses into everyone else's business. They need to be sentenced to some hard physical labour - don't they have a vegetable garden to dig?
This is semi-topic, but since you're dowsing the woke, here's a study that correlates mental illness (anxiety, depression) with woke: the more woke, the worse your mental health.
Title: "Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes". It was recently published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. The text is in english, so no problems there.
"Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others."
This is the thing that really pisses me off. I did some bicycle racing in my youth (way back in the 70s) and we had very few women in that sport then. Now there are far more women in cycling, and it's great to see their huge packs in road races here every summer. The idea that a man only has to identify as female to compete in the same events as these women is a travesty, an insult to women, and just plain misogynistic.
Wow, you’re right and what you said about these ideologies of opposition really rings true to me as being the central problem.
Why— if you take the funniest/most depressing quotation from that bizarre article (the angry statement that people don’t get to “consent to puberty”)— we see that the current opposition is to nature itself, and indeed to one’s progenitors and Creator. I didn’t consent to being born! I didn’t consent to bring female! I didn’t consent to being white! And so on. Geez. No wonder doctors are prescribing antidepressants like candy. Wokism is profound ingratitude, anger, and resentment over things that simply cannot be changed.
I repeat myself but I can't stop flogging a dead hobby-horse:
They have the emotional and intellectual maturity of 2-4 year olds.
At that age, it is fully normal to be raging about not being able to simply point and dictate and remake the world to your whim.
/Why/ an ever-increasing number of people in the western world havn't developed beyond that stage during the past 70ish years?
That is the question.
Actually, some have. I'm sixty. I had baby-boomers pieces of shit as parents (hence my alias?), wankers who thought highly enough of themselves to consider me as a nuisance in the way of their no-holds-barred counter-culture lifestyles. I'm from the next generation, the last ones who worked their asses off all their life and tried very hard not to fall into that trap and become decent human beings. All for nothing, I'm sorry to say.
What we have now is the resurgence of that boomers mentality - or rather, mental sickness - carefully groomed from the top down through various intelligence programs - men are pigs, wokism, cancel culture, LGBTQWERTY, critical race theory and whatnot.
By the way, when I was 2-4 years old, I never raged about not being able to "remake the world to my whim". I was essentially a very nice little boy. Not anymore.
The person who wrote the article about trans kids (ironically published on the "Intelligencer") is Andrea Long Chu. I encourage the readers to look him up but be careful - he's not for the faint of heart.
Among his gems: "I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend . . . for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts." "“Sissy porn did make me trans," and "(being female) defined by self-negation" that includes "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another." Because who knows best about being female than a man?
Critics fell all over themselves to praise him for it, BTW.
Yes - I was aware of some of his previous gems.
By his previous standards this current article in the, erm, "Intelligencer" section was quite tame in comparison.
Chu's article only has the *appearance* of erudition - one might describe it as trans-erudite - but it's chock full of barely coherent reasoning and dubious 'facts' and mis-characterizations.
JKR is an amazing woman of courage and stature, far outpacing her sniveling detractors. If any of our political leaders had a fraction of her common sense and valor we would not be in the mess we are in today.
“The various online forums for ‘trans’ issues all seem to argue that, if the parents do not immediately ‘affirm’ their kids, they are abusive and should be cut out from the lives of the child.” Sounds rather cult-ish in practice.
It's very much like a cult.
You can find various articles on the 'properties' of cults. You can run through the list of the techniques they use and you'll find a very strong overlap indeed in the 'trans' case.
All 'political' programming adopts these kinds of techniques too. It wouldn't be wrong, in my view, to describe Mao's cultural revolution, for example, as the rise of a cult.
I'm so sorry but I just couldn't continue reading after that image of the fascists demonstrating their redacted pejorative in public.
No no, not due to offense or "ermagerdIfacepalmedthelaptopto bits", nothing like that. No.
It reminded me of a comic album I have stashed away, one made by the french comic artist Lauzier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Lauzier). Fluffing wikipedia - coding for accents is apparently impossible: Gérard Lauzier.
Anway, he had an eye for observing absurdities in any faction, cadre, sector, whatever: an equal opportunities satirist, who directed and visited well-deserved mockery unto all and sundry. Communists or catholics, feminists or fascists - no bias. Highly recommended if you can find his series "Tranches de vie" (Slices of life), that you buy it to preserve it for the future.
In one episode, we get a look into a meeting of french feminists in the late 1970s. We have the upper-class bourgeoise aging careerist, the young rabid idealist for whom /everything/ is connected, the token migrant who looks on confused as she hasn't got the language, and a couple of marxists who can't help trying to out-dogma each other all the time.
And then one lady arrives late, dragging a crying woman along. Apparently, the crying woman has been assaulted and raped.
To sum it up, it turns out this lady is a tranny streetwalker (i.e. a transsexual pre-op man) who was assaulted by her palestine female pimp, and was saved by a french jew intervening.
Which leads to total syntax error among the feminists in the group.
Long rant of mine aside, I bring this up just to point out that this isn't new - it's a repeat of the worst of the radical 1970s, but with the internet and with the powers in power embracing it and weaponising it.
(There's a hilarious passage in the above-mentioned comic when one radical lady tries to show why a greaser calling out "Hey babe!" is equal to Auswitch - it's hilarious to me because having been balls-deep into the black&red political camp in my teens, that is actually how they reason: Reductio Ad Absurdum. Or Ad Absurd-dumb, perhaps.)
Yeah - it's quite surprising when you realize just how long these nutty ideas have been around (particularly in academia).
I think the difference, today, is just how far they've permeated everything. They've become the kind of de facto cultural 'standard' - or at least they are presented that way because almost every institution from Parliaments, the judiciary, the schools, police forces, companies, has been seriously infected with it.
We're no longer dealing with a few greasy gormless goons spouting their immature radical ideas - people who, in the past, we could safely ignore.
Yes, it absolutely has to do with the set of ideas/way of being (intellectually/developmentally speaking) reaching a greater level of permeation than ever before.
I'd place the starting point earlier than the 1970s, however. The first time utopian ideas that can be said to be the seeds of the current madness can be said to have been discussed for real or been given real thought is in the 1880s-1920s period, and then it was a subset of the upper class elites that talked about it among themselves (sort like the dinner scene in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" if I recall the novel correctly).
From these elites it seeps into academia during the 1940s/1950s and from professors it is spread to students in the 1960s, which is also when it enters mainstream entertainment-media. During the 1970s, it has gestated to such a level it enters into education proper and int the 1990s the teachers at teachers' colleges have been replaced with sufficient numbers of believers to swing both teqachers' training and school/education proper towards where we are today.
Now, we're in the phase where the ideas achieve normality by mutating into a form that doesn't destroy society entire, or are (again) abandoned as unfeasable, irrational, immoral (dep. on what kind of cluster of ideas-norms succeeds the current paradigm).
I'd say ignoring them in the past is precisely what our (grand)parents' generations did wrong. Sure, they likely did it out of respect for ideas of free speech et cetera - but such rights can only ever be extended to people who in turn respect them, not just as platitudinal statements but in action.
I'm more than a little sick and tired of hearing/reading things like: "They want us fighting against each other rather than against them", and so "We should focus on the things we have in common".
Oh yeah?
Name one.
They are the ones counting on our patience and benevolence, while they are wreaking havoc in families, society and humankind. That's the way they've always proceeded. It's their modus operandi.
They wanted division? Good, let them have it.
To quote a famous (fictional) captain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PRcEgkCpKk):
___________________________________
"We've made too many compromises already. Too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here, this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done."
___________________________________
Truer words were never spoken. Sadly, on the advice of his newly acquired diverse friend, he didn't keep his word. It's up to us to act accordingly.
They started it. We should finish it.
This is my planet, and they are not welcome.
I get where you're coming from. I sometimes feel a bit like this too, but I don't think letting anger, however righteous, to influence our actions is the right way forward. I don't want a purge or a bloodbath - whoever is doing it. I think we need to find a better way forward than this.
Good. I'm open to suggestions.
Another brilliant piece…thank you!
Thanks Monica - much appreciated
Division, polarity, grievance, manic anger, irresponsibility, all are modes the desired dialectic.
These are not the values of a healthy society, but that is a function of their plan.
Fuck the Woke and then tar&feather them, and if they survive then hang them and give the corpses a fair trial, oh wait I mean the COVID "WOKE" enabler MD's & PHD's
Haha - I like the humour.
"Give the corpses a fair trial" - very funny!
In addition to the quote " The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" should be added " The Devil makes work for idle hands". The wokerati haven't got enough to do and is the real cause of them poking their noses into everyone else's business. They need to be sentenced to some hard physical labour - don't they have a vegetable garden to dig?
This is semi-topic, but since you're dowsing the woke, here's a study that correlates mental illness (anxiety, depression) with woke: the more woke, the worse your mental health.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.13018
Title: "Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes". It was recently published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. The text is in english, so no problems there.
Figured it might interest you?
On vacation just catching up on my reading. Powerful article Rudolph. Thanks.
"Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others."
This is the thing that really pisses me off. I did some bicycle racing in my youth (way back in the 70s) and we had very few women in that sport then. Now there are far more women in cycling, and it's great to see their huge packs in road races here every summer. The idea that a man only has to identify as female to compete in the same events as these women is a travesty, an insult to women, and just plain misogynistic.