Calls from the left for tolerance and to "live and let live" are exactly how we got into this mess. It's funny how that "tolerance" is not extended to progressives' ever-growing enemies list. It's almost like it was just a tool to gain power, not a principle.
I think perhaps the most high profile example of this is the abuse heaped on J.K.Rowling for having the temerity to emphasize the importance of biology and to, essentially, argue that self-identification, allowing men to claim that they ARE women, undermines the status of both womanhood and feminism.
She did this in a very compassionate and reasonable way. And yet . . .
The abuse heaped upon her was extraordinary. This is a person who is on the 'left', has been a supporter of women's rights and feminism and has donated considerable sums to charity. She is not, by any stretch of the imagination, some bigoted monster.
But for this single 'transgression', this deviation from the progressive catechism, this heresy, she has been vilified by the gender activists.
In my view, and that of many others, she said nothing at all remotely 'hateful' and yet received an astonishing level of hatred in return - including some wishing that she be raped!
This is progressive 'tolerance' for you - this is the level of 'morality' they really have. These supposedly compassionate and caring warriors for justice reveal a deeply ugly and dark reality whenever their dogma is challenged.
The sane have remained the sane. See the good sense available here and growing daily across Substack. It’s the insane we need to ignore. As arguing with them is futile and may drive you insane 🤪
Indeed. I am surprised that The Regime has been so slow to flood Substack with trolls or to just silence it.
My concern is that the insanity is being pushed at the highest levels. We are being bombarded with lies and absurdities constantly. Reality and truth have taken a beating lately, but they will reassert themselves again, right? Right???
As I was told when working in India by a youngster I had worked with for a few years and mentored during his promotions to someone who claimed I was racist - he's not racist, he just doesn't understand what politically correct means.
Cui bono? That’s always the correct question. The answer is ultimately found by following the money trail. Who are the groups promoting this? Is it genuine grass roots (rare -if it were they wouldn’t get this level of publicity if any) or professional agitators (media handily at the ready to cover in full gory glory)? So, who’s paying them? There’s always a source providing the seed money, hiding just behind and often in plain sight. And what do they want? An asymmetrically large return on their investment. We see the same set up over and over from climate to covid to the new new thing.
Douglas Murray in his book 'The Madness of Crowds' speculates on this well-funded and well-coordinated rise of "progressive" ideology. It does seem that someone, somewhere, pushed a button around 2015 and said "let's ramp it up and take it to the next level, guys".
Whether that's true or not it certainly has that appearance of coordination and underlying agenda.
What's this 'assigned' at birth stuff? Did somebody sit there going 'you're male' or 'you're female' or did they merely register the fact that biology showed that this new bubs was male and that new bubs was female?
And what about the males who now reckon they're women but are still married to their female partners. You do know, don't you, that these idiots are claiming to be lesbians?
We need to tell these colonizers that they need to stop with the colonization of women's spaces.
It originates from the clinical practice of having to assign gender at birth for those unfortunate children born with genetical, chromosomal, and/or physiological defects resulting in deformed or malformed genitalia. It is much, much easier and safer to immediately perform surgery than to wait several years until the child has developed a personality and can be asked its opinion. Cellular growth simply doesn't respect freedom of choice and rights and other fairy tales.
So, practice was to bring in a specialist surgeon and let him make the call based on the situtation and the risk/reward regarding healing and development. Most often, especially before 2005 or so, surgical techniques meant it was easier to carve out proper girly bits: can't build a scrotum and shaft and glans from nothing you know.
What the trannies and homos got hung up on was that parents were informed of this, they instead got told it was urological surgery due to the urinary tract not being fully developed, nthing to worry about, your daughter will be with you soon as the doctor is finished, it happens sometimes, it's no stranger than a cleft palate really.
This lie was told to save parents from anguish, and to help cement the social part of the gender assignment: if the parents know it a girl, they'll raise a girl, reinforcing this in the child and heloing to alleviate anxiety and confusion (since the brain may well be male, the child having say XXY chromosmal make up f.e. - I know a person who has that make up, thinks and acts like a man, looks like a girly girl, and is an adult woman). Sometimes, especially for those born wiht genetic/chromosomal defects hormonal therapy under some other guise was given until puberty, most often to ensure that puberty tallied with the assigned gender.
All these resources were spent to give the child and the family the best possibe start and the least amount of social stigma and trouble. All of it destroyed by the trannie-fundies.
Source: the wife, who was in academia in gender studies before it was cool.
Yes, absolutely so, but that's the point you and I as logical, humane and empathic humans would make - it's a medical procedure to be decided by a professional liable according to profssional ethics and standards, with the least harm and the most benefit for the patient first and foremost.
For a POGROM-activist, it's a political lever to turn the fulcrum of power their way, the actual humans involved have no real value beyond being figureheads at best.
I had a trans-friend, yes, past tense, who was female-to-male and hetero based upon his new gender. So, he who was once a she, and who appeared very convincingly male, was attracted to straight. However, he never had bottom surgery. And when all his dating endeavors ended after just a few dates he couldn’t understand that straight females don’t want to do the horizontal bop with a man who has a vagina!! He really couldn’t fathom what the problem was!
If you're a straight guy, for example, you're not going to fancy some hirsute hulk with gonads the size of house bricks simply because he claims to be a woman!
It doesn't work that way.
Yet to the gender activist this is, apparently, some kind of 'bigotry' and 'transphobic'.
They also seem very keen to push the notion that homosexuality is not about same sex attraction, but same **gender** attraction.
This is the logical consequence of putting 'gender' in a primary role and relegating biological sex to an irrelevance. But just because something is 'logical' does not mean that the conclusions derived from that logical reasoning are correct or true - you can demonstrate any conclusion you like in a logically sound manner if you start from false premises. It's the GIGO principle in action.
The people pushing this idea that sexual attraction is based on gender, not sex, are either lunatics, feeble-minded, or know that it's bonkers but have a different agenda in mind.
There’s a reason that every transgender person I know, and I know several, are all taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. They were unhappy before they transitioned, thought transitioning would make them
happy and found out they’re unhappiness followed them. Imagine thinking that mutilating your body and taking dangerous hormones for life will somehow make you a happy person. It’s really quite sad.
Perhaps it's just the systematic destruction of the family, social structures and the ability to reach out to one another. Consider in 20 years how "quaint" having families might be when you can have whatever you want sexually, without the baggage of children.
In 40 years, a serious drop in population ensues, and the (temporary) pursuit of happiness ends with loneliness, regret, a lack of offspring to enjoy, and certainly no real caregivers or friends.
Misery loves company, and is touting all the fringe benefits you can have today in order to get your misery and loneliness tomorrow.
it was a long time ago - I still remember having a tearful and angry altercation with the teacher (sorry Ms Allen) as she tried to get me into the damned things.
I think I'm in awe. POGROM. Such horrific beauty. What terrible splendour of an acronym - or should it be "acridnym" since it virtually etches itself to the screen?
The Scouring of the Shire, when I re-read the book (or tome, had an edition with the whole thing in one bind) as an adult, struck me as a part being about how it feels to be home from the war of the trenches, only to discover that the skivers, the oily goulash-barons, the sneaky gits and sleekit buggers rule the roost, and that the people just and true simply let them, lacking the aggression and experience of a man who's had had to face war and keep on living.
I think the author meant it as both warning and as a spot of hope: a warning to the profiteers at home whose peaceful existence is solely due to others braving horror, and a hope that warriros having faced true evil will cherish home and hearth enough to fight for it directly, not just in the wars of the powerful.
Tolkien is actually a rather fitting touchstone for the entire topic, so again I'm in awe: hadn't exactly put his works and psychology and motivations of the alphabet-crowd together. What drives and motivates the orc? Hatred, fear, and self-loathing in equal measure. The queer crowd hates everyone not living up their standards (which is projection of them not having any standards beyond "I want!"). They fear their prey and enemies realising how powerless they really are, since allt their actual power stems from Sauron (governement). And they loathe what they are because they know they can never be anything more or anything else, because they've made their choice long ago not realising what it really meant and must now stay the course (the first-born elves being lured away by then fair-faced Melkor and turned into monsters tallies rather nicely with the original women's lib and gay rights being turned into today's monstrosities).
Aw, thanks so much Rikard. I fear you do me too much credit, but it's much appreciated.
I'm wary of any 'simple' answers to complex problems, and I'm even warier of 'solutions' that are pushed rather than grown organically. Societal norms tend to grow more organically and not all of them are perfect by any means. The 'norm' of women having few opportunities other than staying at home, for example, was not a great one, although there is a quid pro quo even with that.
Unless you're one of elites, you can't "have it all" - and the elites today seem not to want us to have anything (but you'll be happy, of course). It is all rather serf/master modern day feudalism at its core.
Great. I wrote a nice reply, and a little dissertation re: division of labour, historically men being the more controlled (or "oppressed") sex and some related tidbits.
And then hit "Cancel" instead of "Reply".
Captain Haddock-rants over that aside, absolutely: homegrown is best. It's the same with society as with veggies. I can prepare the ground and plant the seeds and even provide water (except in the 'Herbert Spencer'-corner of the garden, where plants are left to sort it out on their own) - but the plant must be left to do the actual growing.
And lots of so-called weeds have their uses too. Nettles makes for food and cloth and even ropes. Plus one can gently rub a nettle-leaf on a mosqito-bite; it will sting, briefly, but when the sting goes away so does the itch (on me at least). Several kinds of thistles have edible roots. And so on.
I wouldn't be me however if I didn't include the nasty backside to this: as with gardens, the good society is not decide by what's planted or mollycoddled to fruition, but by what is weeded out.
And that one leads to who decides what's a weed, and how is the weeding to be done and where are the weeds allowed to grow and other sorts of nastiness we're supposed to think we've "evolved beyond".
Calls from the left for tolerance and to "live and let live" are exactly how we got into this mess. It's funny how that "tolerance" is not extended to progressives' ever-growing enemies list. It's almost like it was just a tool to gain power, not a principle.
Problem is, can we return to sanity?
Indeed.
I think perhaps the most high profile example of this is the abuse heaped on J.K.Rowling for having the temerity to emphasize the importance of biology and to, essentially, argue that self-identification, allowing men to claim that they ARE women, undermines the status of both womanhood and feminism.
She did this in a very compassionate and reasonable way. And yet . . .
The abuse heaped upon her was extraordinary. This is a person who is on the 'left', has been a supporter of women's rights and feminism and has donated considerable sums to charity. She is not, by any stretch of the imagination, some bigoted monster.
But for this single 'transgression', this deviation from the progressive catechism, this heresy, she has been vilified by the gender activists.
In my view, and that of many others, she said nothing at all remotely 'hateful' and yet received an astonishing level of hatred in return - including some wishing that she be raped!
This is progressive 'tolerance' for you - this is the level of 'morality' they really have. These supposedly compassionate and caring warriors for justice reveal a deeply ugly and dark reality whenever their dogma is challenged.
Her case is also illustrative of how people will sit back and watch the jackals tear someone to pieces and not utter a word in protest. IIRC, a good number of the films' stars felt it necessary to come out and tell reporters that they, too, felt Rowling's comments were beyond the pale. Such ingratitude for the artist whose work brought them fame and fortune. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/why-jk-rowling-has-been-snubbed-from-the-harry-potter-reunion/O4FBXILA6ZIDKSX3DN3O3IQ4KY/
The world has gone mad, Rudolph Rigger.
The sane have remained the sane. See the good sense available here and growing daily across Substack. It’s the insane we need to ignore. As arguing with them is futile and may drive you insane 🤪
Indeed. I am surprised that The Regime has been so slow to flood Substack with trolls or to just silence it.
My concern is that the insanity is being pushed at the highest levels. We are being bombarded with lies and absurdities constantly. Reality and truth have taken a beating lately, but they will reassert themselves again, right? Right???
You're right! But, I don't believe in white knights coming to the rescue. It's down to the everyday sane folks.
Yes. Step number one is to speak truth and not remain silent in the face of these lies.
Exactly, Sir. Qui tacet consequire if I remember Robert Bolt’s a man for all seasons correctly. Silence gives consent.
As I was told when working in India by a youngster I had worked with for a few years and mentored during his promotions to someone who claimed I was racist - he's not racist, he just doesn't understand what politically correct means.
Cui bono? That’s always the correct question. The answer is ultimately found by following the money trail. Who are the groups promoting this? Is it genuine grass roots (rare -if it were they wouldn’t get this level of publicity if any) or professional agitators (media handily at the ready to cover in full gory glory)? So, who’s paying them? There’s always a source providing the seed money, hiding just behind and often in plain sight. And what do they want? An asymmetrically large return on their investment. We see the same set up over and over from climate to covid to the new new thing.
Douglas Murray in his book 'The Madness of Crowds' speculates on this well-funded and well-coordinated rise of "progressive" ideology. It does seem that someone, somewhere, pushed a button around 2015 and said "let's ramp it up and take it to the next level, guys".
Whether that's true or not it certainly has that appearance of coordination and underlying agenda.
What's this 'assigned' at birth stuff? Did somebody sit there going 'you're male' or 'you're female' or did they merely register the fact that biology showed that this new bubs was male and that new bubs was female?
And what about the males who now reckon they're women but are still married to their female partners. You do know, don't you, that these idiots are claiming to be lesbians?
We need to tell these colonizers that they need to stop with the colonization of women's spaces.
It's all the rage now to claim that gender, and even sex, is "assigned" at birth - like it's some arbitrary decision made by some medical personnel.
It's risible nonsense, of course, but the program is to get people to think of sex as somehow arbitrary and changeable and a kind of social construct.
It originates from the clinical practice of having to assign gender at birth for those unfortunate children born with genetical, chromosomal, and/or physiological defects resulting in deformed or malformed genitalia. It is much, much easier and safer to immediately perform surgery than to wait several years until the child has developed a personality and can be asked its opinion. Cellular growth simply doesn't respect freedom of choice and rights and other fairy tales.
So, practice was to bring in a specialist surgeon and let him make the call based on the situtation and the risk/reward regarding healing and development. Most often, especially before 2005 or so, surgical techniques meant it was easier to carve out proper girly bits: can't build a scrotum and shaft and glans from nothing you know.
What the trannies and homos got hung up on was that parents were informed of this, they instead got told it was urological surgery due to the urinary tract not being fully developed, nthing to worry about, your daughter will be with you soon as the doctor is finished, it happens sometimes, it's no stranger than a cleft palate really.
This lie was told to save parents from anguish, and to help cement the social part of the gender assignment: if the parents know it a girl, they'll raise a girl, reinforcing this in the child and heloing to alleviate anxiety and confusion (since the brain may well be male, the child having say XXY chromosmal make up f.e. - I know a person who has that make up, thinks and acts like a man, looks like a girly girl, and is an adult woman). Sometimes, especially for those born wiht genetic/chromosomal defects hormonal therapy under some other guise was given until puberty, most often to ensure that puberty tallied with the assigned gender.
All these resources were spent to give the child and the family the best possibe start and the least amount of social stigma and trouble. All of it destroyed by the trannie-fundies.
Source: the wife, who was in academia in gender studies before it was cool.
But we're talking a very small % of births here, less than 1% I guess, considering that XXY is about 0.15% or so.
Yes, absolutely so, but that's the point you and I as logical, humane and empathic humans would make - it's a medical procedure to be decided by a professional liable according to profssional ethics and standards, with the least harm and the most benefit for the patient first and foremost.
For a POGROM-activist, it's a political lever to turn the fulcrum of power their way, the actual humans involved have no real value beyond being figureheads at best.
I had a trans-friend, yes, past tense, who was female-to-male and hetero based upon his new gender. So, he who was once a she, and who appeared very convincingly male, was attracted to straight. However, he never had bottom surgery. And when all his dating endeavors ended after just a few dates he couldn’t understand that straight females don’t want to do the horizontal bop with a man who has a vagina!! He really couldn’t fathom what the problem was!
It's really weird isn't it?
If you're a straight guy, for example, you're not going to fancy some hirsute hulk with gonads the size of house bricks simply because he claims to be a woman!
It doesn't work that way.
Yet to the gender activist this is, apparently, some kind of 'bigotry' and 'transphobic'.
They also seem very keen to push the notion that homosexuality is not about same sex attraction, but same **gender** attraction.
This is the logical consequence of putting 'gender' in a primary role and relegating biological sex to an irrelevance. But just because something is 'logical' does not mean that the conclusions derived from that logical reasoning are correct or true - you can demonstrate any conclusion you like in a logically sound manner if you start from false premises. It's the GIGO principle in action.
The people pushing this idea that sexual attraction is based on gender, not sex, are either lunatics, feeble-minded, or know that it's bonkers but have a different agenda in mind.
There’s a reason that every transgender person I know, and I know several, are all taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. They were unhappy before they transitioned, thought transitioning would make them
happy and found out they’re unhappiness followed them. Imagine thinking that mutilating your body and taking dangerous hormones for life will somehow make you a happy person. It’s really quite sad.
Either that or she loved her new gaslighting role, in confusing the hell out of what pronouns are for.
Perhaps it's just the systematic destruction of the family, social structures and the ability to reach out to one another. Consider in 20 years how "quaint" having families might be when you can have whatever you want sexually, without the baggage of children.
In 40 years, a serious drop in population ensues, and the (temporary) pursuit of happiness ends with loneliness, regret, a lack of offspring to enjoy, and certainly no real caregivers or friends.
Misery loves company, and is touting all the fringe benefits you can have today in order to get your misery and loneliness tomorrow.
I remembered “the scouring of the Shire” as referring to Frodo & co. setting things right *after* Sharkey/Saruman’s go at industrialization.
The scouring part is what Saruman did - the hobbit part of the Fellowship marshalled support and fought to de-scour the Shire.
And now I know. Thanks
Tights?
When you were acting?
Embarrassing?
Maybe - when son was picked to be in a circus show performance on holiday when he was about 8 they said "and you need to wear these tights".
Lots of "No" and "they are for girls" promptly ensued.
Then problem solved.
They called them "performance tights" and he was happy with that and 20 years later we still have the photos of hime in the show.
Everything hinges on the description/name.
haha
it was a long time ago - I still remember having a tearful and angry altercation with the teacher (sorry Ms Allen) as she tried to get me into the damned things.
"They're not dolls! They're action figures!" comes to mind.
Or wargamers insisting their little army men aren't toys.
We may look like sissies,
but watch what you say or else
we'll put out your lights.
We're men... we're men in tights
Always on guard defending
the people's rights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1am3KyYgA
I think I'm in awe. POGROM. Such horrific beauty. What terrible splendour of an acronym - or should it be "acridnym" since it virtually etches itself to the screen?
The Scouring of the Shire, when I re-read the book (or tome, had an edition with the whole thing in one bind) as an adult, struck me as a part being about how it feels to be home from the war of the trenches, only to discover that the skivers, the oily goulash-barons, the sneaky gits and sleekit buggers rule the roost, and that the people just and true simply let them, lacking the aggression and experience of a man who's had had to face war and keep on living.
I think the author meant it as both warning and as a spot of hope: a warning to the profiteers at home whose peaceful existence is solely due to others braving horror, and a hope that warriros having faced true evil will cherish home and hearth enough to fight for it directly, not just in the wars of the powerful.
Tolkien is actually a rather fitting touchstone for the entire topic, so again I'm in awe: hadn't exactly put his works and psychology and motivations of the alphabet-crowd together. What drives and motivates the orc? Hatred, fear, and self-loathing in equal measure. The queer crowd hates everyone not living up their standards (which is projection of them not having any standards beyond "I want!"). They fear their prey and enemies realising how powerless they really are, since allt their actual power stems from Sauron (governement). And they loathe what they are because they know they can never be anything more or anything else, because they've made their choice long ago not realising what it really meant and must now stay the course (the first-born elves being lured away by then fair-faced Melkor and turned into monsters tallies rather nicely with the original women's lib and gay rights being turned into today's monstrosities).
You really are bloody clever you know!
Aw, thanks so much Rikard. I fear you do me too much credit, but it's much appreciated.
I'm wary of any 'simple' answers to complex problems, and I'm even warier of 'solutions' that are pushed rather than grown organically. Societal norms tend to grow more organically and not all of them are perfect by any means. The 'norm' of women having few opportunities other than staying at home, for example, was not a great one, although there is a quid pro quo even with that.
Unless you're one of elites, you can't "have it all" - and the elites today seem not to want us to have anything (but you'll be happy, of course). It is all rather serf/master modern day feudalism at its core.
Great. I wrote a nice reply, and a little dissertation re: division of labour, historically men being the more controlled (or "oppressed") sex and some related tidbits.
And then hit "Cancel" instead of "Reply".
Captain Haddock-rants over that aside, absolutely: homegrown is best. It's the same with society as with veggies. I can prepare the ground and plant the seeds and even provide water (except in the 'Herbert Spencer'-corner of the garden, where plants are left to sort it out on their own) - but the plant must be left to do the actual growing.
And lots of so-called weeds have their uses too. Nettles makes for food and cloth and even ropes. Plus one can gently rub a nettle-leaf on a mosqito-bite; it will sting, briefly, but when the sting goes away so does the itch (on me at least). Several kinds of thistles have edible roots. And so on.
I wouldn't be me however if I didn't include the nasty backside to this: as with gardens, the good society is not decide by what's planted or mollycoddled to fruition, but by what is weeded out.
And that one leads to who decides what's a weed, and how is the weeding to be done and where are the weeds allowed to grow and other sorts of nastiness we're supposed to think we've "evolved beyond".