Victimhood Invoked, Victory Lap Indulged In
TIME spoke to Gender Queer author and illustrator Maia Kobabe about eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment.
Captain, your signal’s breaking up. I’m getting a lot of static. Must be solar flares. That, or dangerously high levels of pretension caused by the proximity of Ms Kobabe, an activist and supposedly ungendered being, complete with boutique pronouns, and TIME’s Madeleine Carlisle. Given what follows, the words “restrict access” – and the subsequent claims of persecution – may seem a tad misleading. Ms Kobabe’s book, we learn, explores,
Questions around how to introduce nonbinary pronouns to people who might not be familiar them. And also how to be a role model as a nonbinary adult, especially in a setting like a classroom.
You see, our aspiring role model has produced a book combining hardcore self-involvement with dysmorphic cartoon pornography, with the results being made available to schoolchildren, including 11-year-olds. As one might imagine, there have been some, shall we say, reservations regarding whether a book of this kind should be circulated among children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Readers may recall scenes in which parents attempted to read aloud passages from the book among fellow adults at school board meetings, typically resulting in reprimands, the shutting off of microphones, and threats of physical removal. Apparently, “vagina slime,” fellatio and “strap-on hotness” are inappropriate topics for adult discussion, even as an attempt to specify a problem, but totally fine for kids. Who apparently need to know about the joys of masturbating while driving.
Ms Kobabe tells us that parents’ concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.” A wickedness indulged in only by those “looking for books to complain about.” This, we’re informed, is part of “a very dangerous and upsetting effort to make it harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.” And not, as seems more likely, a reluctance among parents to have their 11-year-olds exposed to somewhat outré pornographic material.
Evidently inspired by both the gushing of leftist librarians and the disapproval of countless parents, Ms Kobabe is close to finishing a second book on much the same theme, one aimed at “younger readers,” i.e., middle-schoolers.
Update, via the comments:
In the above and other interviews, Ms Kobabe frames the episode as one of bigoted and hateful conservative parents “targeting” books that “happen to feature LGBTQ characters,” and driven by “a very dangerous and upsetting effort to make it harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.” She implies that complaints were based on ignorance, on parents not having read the book, and of course on hatred. The parents, we’re told, were “cutting a lifeline for queer youth,” presumably out of some inexplicable malice.
Curiously, Ms Kobabe is not challenged on these claims, at all, despite the particulars of the parents’ grievances being readily available and repeated many times. That a number of those complaining about the book being unsuitable were themselves gay somehow escapes mention. Presumably, these details would not suit Ms Kobabe’s self-flattering persecution narrative.
Note too the conceit that, despite the rapid embrace by educators of transgender ideology, parents couldn’t possibly have anything to worry about. It seems to me that the eagerness of activists to breach the customary boundaries between adults and children – and to circumvent parents, who will be left to pick up the pieces of any unhappy consequences – is not only an extraordinarily arrogant overreach, but also an indicator that its proponents are quite unsavoury, possibly unwell.
And when middle-school librarians believe that 11-year-olds need to know how to whore themselves, to fund surgical mutilations and thereby approximate the opposite sex – as if raising a dysmorphic “sex worker” is what every parent dreams of – then some widening of the eyes seems in order.
Alas, there will be no Ephemera tomorrow, but feel free to throw together your own collection of oddments in the comments.
Ms Kobabe is close to finishing a second book on much the same theme, one aimed at “younger readers,” i.e., middle-schoolers.
Also not unrelated, a teacher scolds a student .
Ms Kobabe tells us that parents’ concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.”
Notice that leftist fetish for the word “erase”? The jargon of the ideologically possessed. And like all who are possessed, they need either psychologists or exorcists.
Ms Kobabe tells us that parents’ concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.”
Some voices should be “erased”, at least from schools and libraries and day-care centers.
TIME spoke to Gender Queer author and illustrator Maia Kobabe about eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment.
For f*ck’s sake.
For f*ck’s sake.
Or, Woman with mental health issues turns out to be high maintenance.
And somewhat dishonest.
Maybe voices shouting about strap on hotness to 11 year olds should be erased. Although I suspect the vast majority of people who are trans…aren’t using their voices to say this, nor would they wish to.
Any disagreement with the Left is “erasure” because they must fully express their feelings and inner reality or else they are oppressed. The rest of us do not get to express our inner feelings or values because that is wrongthink.
When a group has an identity that is entirely made up of their sexual fetishes, and every group must be celebrated, this is where we end up. Normal people do not want to know about every fetish all the time. It is disruptive and disturbing. Even heterosexuals can have weird sexual things and the rest of us simply don’t want to know. Society to function requires a degree of anonymity.
harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.”
How, ‘xactly?
Oh, it’s “rhetoric”, I guess…
how to introduce nonbinary pronouns to people who might not be familiar them
Not familiar with this nonsense I just made up to make me sound special? HOW DARE YOU.
HOW DARE YOU.
They’re Spivak pronouns, apparently; but yes, your point stands. The practised narcissism – and the attempt to seem fascinating rather than, say, tiresome and predictable – is hard to miss.
harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.
No doubt. When your mental machinery is set against biological reality, things can’t be easy.
How, ‘xactly?
Ms Kobabe has a habit of framing opposition, almost any kind of demurral, as being an attempt to erase or oppress – with either herself as the supposed target or all gay, or dysmorphic, or “queer” people everywhere on the planet. It’s all a bit grandiose, and typical of her peer group, and of course enormously self-flattering. In the Washington Post, Ms Kobabe wrote a typically disingenuous piece, complete with equally disingenuous cartoons, in which readers were expected to believe that parents’ objections were driven by a hatred of gay people, or of effeminate boys, or girls who like climbing trees.
“The book has been out for two and a half years,” she wrote, affecting surprise. “Why now?” That parents had only now discovered what exactly their children were being encouraged to read, without their knowledge, and were understandably unimpressed, was of course part of the issue they were trying to raise. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of those complaining, including in the videos to which Ms Kobabe referred, didn’t object to people being gay or whatever. The parents simply didn’t want their kids, including children aged 11, to be exposed to cartoons about blowjobs, fingering, and strap-ons.
But instead of entertaining this more prosaic explanation, readers were prompted, by the author, to sympathise with the author, and to weep over how difficult it is to sleep after reading tweets that don’t affirm one’s niche conceits.
[T]he overwhelming majority of those complaining, including in the videos to which Ms Kobabe referred, didn’t object to people being gay or whatever. The parents simply didn’t want their kids, including children aged 11, to be exposed to cartoons about blowjobs, fingering, and strap-ons.
I’m amazed it has to be said, but that. And in spades.
If you have to consciously remember someone’s pronouns, they’re not pronouns.
Erasure? Like this?
readers were prompted, by the author, to sympathise with the author,
That.
If your sexual proclivities demand that you must-must-must discuss blowjobs and anal sex with 11-year-olds, then perhaps erasure oughtn’t be off the table.
Be what you want to be or need to be. Privately, just as I conduct my cis-hetero life. If your entire being revolves around you being a female penis, you need redirection. Or just direction.
The book has been out for two and a half years,” she wrote, affecting surprise. “Why now?”
Let’s see, it was published on May 2019 and, I’m sure, it was NOT shelved into k-12 school libraries immediately. There would have been a lot of quiet persuasion and direct marketing to agreeable people in positions of power.
Then 2020 came, kids were locked out of schools for 12 months or more and had to do class via Zoom.
Oops… bad strategy on the part of educrats as parents now had a ringside seat to what was REALLY going on in classrooms across the nation.
And those same alarmed parents started worrying about what else was being trafficked to their kids on the downlow. So it is not surprising in the least that parents found kiddie-pr0n in the school library and started to :::::gasp:::: share those discoveries with other parents.
Oh.The.Horror! It’s All A Vast Rightwing Conspiracy!
Ms Kobabe tells us that parents’ concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.”
She says that like it’s a bad thing.
It occurs to normal people that – at some point – these people don’t want to co-exist, or get along, or “make nice” and go about their otherwise productive lives.
They live to torment you, because they are tormented and they can’t stand being alone in that.
Again – and I don’t advise this, because it’s counterproductive and stupid – but if you take their “arguments” to their inevitable and logical conclusions, they lead to the normalization of ANY and ALL genuinely EVIL behavior.
Their argument for MAPS is that a certain (small) percentage of every population on Earth has been sexually attracted to minors, that attraction is therefore “normal”. Consequently, if it’s “normal” it must be celebrated, not discouraged. Extrapolating that out to other behaviors, the urge to violently murder another human is universal throughout time and – using the same definition they want to use for MAPS – therefore normal. It too must be celebrated. Prove me wrong.
Bottom line: These people cannot be reasoned with or persuaded. And it’s quickly becoming VERY clear that they cannot and must not be tolerated in a civilized society. It’s time to stiffen the spines and extinguish this brush fire before it consumes a generation.
‘Related’…
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1565397053123051521
They’re Spivak pronouns
Not to be confused with Michael “Meathead” Stivic.
They live to torment you, because they are tormented
I would guess the mental health issues that result in Ms Kobabe pretending she isn’t a woman are the same mental health issues that make her delight in both ludicrous overstatement and the overstepping of normal boundaries.
See also, just about anything else here tagged Pronouns Or Else and His Pretty Nails.
I look forward to her autobiography, Eir Today, Eirased Tomorrow: One Sexless Boor’s Journey.
Gentlemen, make sure you pick the right label for your orientation, it might just be a fetish for female naughty-bit owners.
Ms Kobabe tells us that parents’ concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.”
I vote for a sustained, organized and vigorous effort to erase — no, let’s say expunge — every trace of this garbage.
Farnsworth: they are defining men as “bi” if also attracted to women (vulva owners) who identify as men. Sorry to burst their bubble but if they identify as men, most actual men lose interest in their vulva.
I also have to add: what the actual F
“how to introduce nonbinary pronouns to people who might not be familiar them.”
Such as speakers of the English language.
“eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment.”
I keep getting a mental picture of the Fonz. Only this isn’t cool.
“They’re Spivak pronouns”
I’ve never been to Spivakia myself, but I’m told it’s lovely. Although you have to be careful not to buy any dodgy Rolexes off the locals.
The jargon of the ideologically possessed.
Ms Kobabe rather slyly frames the episode as one of bigoted and hateful conservative parents “targeting” books that “happen to feature LGBTQ characters,” and driven by “a very dangerous and upsetting effort to make it harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.” She implies that complaints were based on ignorance, on parents not having read the book, and of course on hatred. The parents, we’re told, were “cutting a lifeline for queer youth,” presumably out of some inexplicable malice.
Curiously, Ms Kobabe is not challenged on these claims, despite the particulars of the parents’ complaints being readily available and repeated many times. That a number of those complaining about the book being unsuitable were themselves gay somehow escapes mention. Presumably, these details would not suit Ms Kobabe’s self-flattering persecution narrative.
The jargon of the ideologically possessed.
Note too the conceit that, despite the rapid embrace by educators of transgender ideology, parents couldn’t possibly have anything to worry about. I’ve not often been called prudish, but it seems to me that the ongoing eagerness of activists to breach the customary boundaries between adults and children, and specifically, other people’s children – and to circumvent parents, who will be left to pick up the pieces of any unhappy consequences – is not only an extraordinarily arrogant overreach, but also an indicator that its proponents are quite unsavoury, and possibly unwell.
And when middle-school librarians believe that 11-year-olds need to know how to whore themselves, to fund their surgical mutilations and thereby approximate the opposite sex – as if raising a dysmorphic “sex worker” is what every parent dreams of – then some widening of the eyes seems in order.
One of these vids came up in Youtube shorts.
This guy is hilarious…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHA4VrVT7Fw&ab_channel=EVOLVE_G
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlGnVIogvvY&ab_channel=EVOLVE_G
Erasure? Like this?
No; this is trans erasure.
This guy is hilarious…..
Now removing my blogging thong and putting my YouTube shorts on…
proponents are quite unsavoury, and possibly unwell.
[Ponders how those people got there]
“Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made until they find out they are the principal ingredient.” – seen somewhere on the internet
Wait… are WE supposed to be wearing the thongs or just David?
Wait… are WE supposed to be wearing the thongs or just David?
There is no actual dress code here, but if you wear a thong David will favor you with slightly fewer lint-covered snacks.
Other things seem to have a higher priority: David stopped giving me coasters when I first failed to close some italics.
Some of her comics are here .
“a very dangerous and upsetting effort to make it harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live.”
The left frames all disagreement and all refusal to submit as “dangerous” and “threatening”.
Speaking of victimhood…
♪♫…a pretty girl, is like a melody…♪♫
Have to update the scorecard, fat trans>trans>LGB>fat, I guess.
Some of her comics are here.
So, a woman who equates Donald Trump, and by extension half of the U.S. electorate, with fascism and the Nazis, and who has fantasies of getting breast cancer, a prospect she looks forward to.
Okay, then.
“a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere.”
Schools are not the public sphere. If they were, I could rock up and explain to children why communist scum should be terminated with extreme prejudice.
While it’s still early days, there might be another hate”>https://spectatorworld.com/life/duke-volleyball-byu-hate-hoax-rachel-richardson”>hate crime hoax brewing.
Apologies, mangled the link.
there might be another hate crime hoax brewing”
No. *shocked face*
Anyway…
Wait… are WE supposed to be wearing the thongs
For me, not even a thong at twilight. Simply bare even if the lights are not low.
there might be another hate crime hoax brewing.
Remember the Duke Lacrosse fake rape hoax? The Congressional Black Caucaus fake hate hoax?
Is it Satan!?!?
It’s not the eruption of the mentally ill into the public sphere that rankles but the demand that their delusions be accepted as reality.
Meanwhile, yte supremacy in “higher” education.
…but the demand that their delusions be accepted as reality…
Meanwhile in the West Midlands…
I was expecting someone to post a link to this.
You can imagine my disappointment.
Reparations: oh lawwdy save us. When the brits ended slavery in their territories, they paid off the slave owners (it was a taking of property after all). In the US, slave owners were not compensated AND there was one fatality among troops for every 6 slaves freed. Isn’t that pretty big reparations? Do blacks owe descendants of those dead soldiers reparations? What about people who emigrated here recently? What about the many (majority) blacks with some white ancestors? Do they get a fraction? What about the welfare since the 60s? Isn’t that reparations? And affirmative action?
It all becomes insane the moment you move beyond slogans.
HOWEVER it all makes sense if you view it as a payoff to a loyal voting block. evil but logical
So, a woman who equates Donald Trump, and by extension half of the U.S. electorate, with fascism and the Nazis, and who has fantasies of getting breast cancer, a prospect she looks forward to.
Her world is an irony-free zone.
When you defer to the pretence, complications will ensue.
complications will ensue.
The comments…
The comments…
Today’s words are practised neuroticism.
Though I did like some of the mocking. “Must’ve been sweating like a glass blower’s arse.”
Not sure what is going on here.
Today’s words are practised neuroticism.
Or psychosis?
(Dr) Sharpling
……a wide variety of earlier Undergraduate, Postgraduate and teacher training qualifications in languages and teacher education.
An extremely lengthy CV which somehow remains remarkably coy about the learning institution and precise subject which led to this qualification.
Still, it’s good to see the West Midlands holding its own in modern-day academia.
The comments…
For what it’s worth, the Black community has asked that we use ‘enby’ for nonbinary people, as NB typically means Non Black
Really?
For added amusement, replace “For what it’s worth” with “NB“.
NBLM?
This.
https://twitter.com/CasuallyGreg/status/1562936990085300225
This.
Again, wokeness tends to be antithetical to reciprocation. If you go through life locked into assumptions of oppressor-and-oppressed, double standards are inevitable. Along with quite a lot of self-flattery.
It’s also why Ms Kobabe isn’t challenged on her assertions during her tongue-bath interview.
And when middle-school librarians believe that 11-year-olds need to know how to whore themselves, to fund surgical mutilations and thereby approximate the opposite sex – as if raising a dysmorphic “sex worker” is what every parent dreams of – then some widening of the eyes seems in order.
Jesus wept. What the hell is *wrong* with these people?
What the hell is *wrong* with these people?
What indeed.
Following this clip from one of the school board meetings – one of the clips found so “upsetting” in its alleged hatred – note the number of leftists in the subsequent thread claiming that the content being read aloud must be fabricated, can’t be real, is all some conservative conspiracy, a smear tactic, etc: “Whoever this guy is, he could have just brought in something he created himself. I don’t believe this for a minute.” And variations of the same.
Whether those merrily dismissing the evidence, and accusing the parents of malicious invention, have subsequently changed their views on the matter, following the contents being applauded in various ‘progressive’ publications, I couldn’t say. Though the three I checked don’t seem to have tweeted any revised opinion. It strikes me as more likely to be another example of the “It’s not happening and it’s a good thing that it is” manoeuvre. But such is wokeness. Mental contortion is the price of The New Piety.
Some of her comics are here.
In the comics, she shares that she was educated at a Waldorf Elementary School, followed by a period of home-schooling, followed by a return to a Waldorf High School, a school system based on an abstruse theory (anthroposophy) which aims “to provide an education that enables children to become free human beings, and to help children to incarnate their “unfolding spiritual identity”, carried from the preceding spiritual existence, as beings of body, soul, and spirit in this lifetime”.
That doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of oppressive and uncaring school environment that would cause depression by making a child feel abnormal and excluded.
Unsurprisingly, the extract from GenderQueer in that link ends with the teacher welcoming a boy called David into the class to announce his new initiative, fully supported by the school, a lunchtime “Queer-Straight Alliance” club and where, on her first visit, she is warmly welcomed and where it is also made clear that Kobabe began to find herself (“I am here” she cries jubilantly, a celebratory Pride rainbow behind her).
And I don’t know about the US, but certainly in the UK Waldorf Schools (also known as Steiner Schools) are very popular with generally upper middle class educated liberals (as well as all manner of New Age hippy types).
So again, unsurprisingly, this scene shows how her mother took the revelation of Kobabe’s sexual/gender identity, which is to say, with a great deal of calm.
I say “calm”, but it’s easy to see how that could be read, certainly by a child, as indifference.
It makes me wonder how much of Kobabe’s memoir of growing up is at least as much about her struggles – apparently futile – to find a responsible adult with a system of moral values they were able and willing to make clear to the children they are raising and educating (without adapting them ad hoc on a regular basis).
Since no one seems to have made much of an effort to outline what that moral system might be, perhaps it’s not all that surprising that the (incredibly silly) comic strip Dancing with Pride ends with the conclusion that “gender divisions are fluid” and poorly defined, liable to change on a whim.
And, a further irony, a defining feature of totalitarian states is not, as often assumed, their rigidity, but actually their fluidity. That’s to confuse their methods of policing with their legal foundations. The latter can turn on the head of a pin, completely blindsiding a populace continually subject to the very real threat of violence from the former.
It makes me wonder how much of Kobabe’s memoir of growing up is at least as much about her struggles – apparently futile – to find a responsible adult with a system of moral values they were able and willing to make clear
I hate you Daaaaad/Pay attention to meeeeee
For some (significant and growing) subset of the female dysmorphics, the soi-disant dysmorphia is just this decade’s version of black lipstick and listening to The Cure.
Mental contortion is the price of The New Piety.
That.
Mental contortion is the price of The New Piety
Speaking of which, scroll through as “Family friendly lesbian person” (he/they/she) undergoes not so much a contortion as mental grand mal seizure.
In the comics, she shares that she was educated at a Waldorf Elementary School,
The intellectual partner of a Statler School.
Jesus wept. What the hell is *wrong* with these people?
…
her struggles – apparently futile – to find a responsible adult with a system of moral values they were able and willing to make clear to the children they are raising and educating (without adapting them ad hoc on a regular basis).
Since no one seems to have made much of an effort to outline what that moral system might be, perhaps it’s not all that surprising that
Fiction. Consuming way too much fiction. 20th century and later fiction which has not had to stand the test of time, yet much of it has replaced our more Bible and classical literature based fictions which provided the moral compass that got us here and thus dreck like Toni Morrison and such has filled the vacuum. For this I blame the churches for first their resistance to change in the face of real science and long needed changes to some social attitudes and then followed by their more recent cave-in to feel-good, anything-goes mentality. Long ago as I was breaking away from religion, I had an argument with our church’s pastor. Granted I was more liberal then, but it was more of a liberal in the grounded, classical sense. He accused me of throwing out the baby with the bath water, and he was somewhat right. But as I told him, at some point you need to throw out the bathwater before it sickens/kills the baby.
An aside that might cause …well, something…As some were curious about my opinion regarding the Heinlein book I sought recommendations for here…gave up on it (“Double Star”) about 30-40 pages from the end as the characters were engaged in girly dick measuring and then the main character expressed regret that he had attended his father’s funeral because of some emotional crap that was really a result overthinking his feelings. I rarely quit a book but as I get older my patience has run out.
claiming that the content being read aloud must be fabricated, can’t be real, is all some conservative conspiracy, a smear tactic, etc:
Hmmm. Sounds, well… familiar
“No, Comrade Stalin would never approve of this. It must be the work of kulaks…”
as mental grand mal seizure.
Read the comic and some of the mental contortions, and am still left puzzled. What is the connection between “GamerGate Dad” (the original title) and “they’ve made the baby political”? The “terrible” people who are identified as GG are conservatives, no? Conservatives approve of using the proper gender for an infant.
I’m guessing the wife’s worried that the baby’s biracial skin outs her as an adultress and is relieved in the end that GG Dad doesn’t notice that.
I’m so confused by this strip that the revised version makes no sense to me either, but commenters claim it makes him the good guy. The only conclusion I can reach (apart from checking myself into a hospital for dementia) is that this is a clown-on-clown struggle, in which case pass the popcorn.
and am still left puzzled
The comic itself makes the baby political. But this is how the left, and mainstream culture at this point, works. They take the words used by those on the right, which have repeatedly been said to them, and ju-jitsu them to suit their own purposes. They do it with “snowflake” and “triggered”, etc. Like any other lie, if it gets repeated often enough, it becomes true AND the word becomes their own property. And the right lets them do it. Every. Damn. Time. Because arguing with them would be silly, unserious, and oh so ever not-adult.
I’m amazed it has to be said,
One reason being that Ms Kobabe and her peers are all too happy to lie, and publications such as TIME are all too happy to enable those lies.
[ Added: ]
Again, wokeness is stupefying and leads to habitual dishonesty. If, for instance, someone thinks in terms of Designated Victim Groups, in terms of oppressor-and-oppressed, they will tend to indulge in double standards and unilateral exemptions, and they will be reluctant to test the claims of the supposedly put-upon party, even when evidence to the contrary is readily available, as in the case above.
Some will be quite explicit about how it is verboten to question the claims of those who invoke group victimhood, however absurd those claims may be. As when Slate readers were told that should any of their comments “contradict the author’s understanding of her own situation,” they would be deleted.
…stupefying and…habitual dishonesty…, but funny…
Designated Victim Groups
In my prior post regarding leftist language ju-jitsu, I was trying to remember a most egregious recent example but it had slipped my mind…”victimization”. A recent media headline referenced MAGA reaction to der Gruseliger Onkel’s recent speech as being steeped in “victimization”.
Speaking of Slate and its contributors, and the sacred status of victimhood.
and the sacred status of victimhood.
Bragging about being pathetic is the new hotness.
and the sacred status of victimhood.
Being dysfunctional came first. Claiming the status of victim came later, to explain away all those failures.
practised neuroticism.
Another one for your files…
https://twitter.com/lporiginalg/status/1566095378122158080
Another one for your files…
I don’t get it. The Pirates are a baseball team and the Buccaneers are (proper) football, not basketball. Now THAT would be offensive. Or something. BTW, did you know if you rearrange the letters in “Malcolm X” you can spell “X Malcolm” which is EXACTLY like erasing him from history? It’s true. Racists are everywhere.
Bragging about being pathetic is the new hotness.
It is something close to bragging. Strangio, a dysmorphic woman, has mastered the game of presenting contrived weakness as victimhood, which, among the pretentious, is a basis for elevation, and offers a convenient degree of immunity from the customary obligations of adulthood.
Though, as a way to live, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Another one for your files…
I am sure it has been said before, but if whoever sees a flying monkey pirate and think, “ZOMG black people”, is probably the one with the problem.
Then there is this clown:
Nerds.
whoever sees a flying monkey pirate and think, “ZOMG black people”, is probably the one with the problem.
Previously.
That doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of oppressive and uncaring school environment that would cause depression by making a child feel abnormal and excluded.
The child might not feel excluded (assuming they go along with that nonsense) but they will definitely come to feel abnormal. The school sounds like a place where emotional outbursts are encouraged and rational thinking is, at best, minimized. The only possible result is an undeveloped mind, where the child (and then adult) are unable to navigate life.
victimhood can be traced back to Marx of course, with his “proletariat” but it was readily adopted by race hustlers. In this context, a POC cannot escape their victimhood. Of course, to make this stick as a political strategy one must ignore that in the US we have made huge progress and have many major cities where the entire government is black, along with the police chief. You cannot admit that the black middle class is growing or that there are black doctors and lawyers. Same with feminist victimhood: you must pretend that women don’t make up 60% of college students, a majority of all health care professionals, etc. No, you focus on the bogus 70cents/dollar stat (which is only due to women choosing kids over career plus their choice of profession). You must, in other words, lie to yourself and to others, nonstop, forever, to maintain this victimhood pretense.
Rings of Power has demonstrated that the most important thing for black people is to see themselves represented, no matter how incongruously, as hobbits, elves and dwarves of colour.
So precisely which D&D characters can safely be made black and which ones are beyond the pale (tee hee).
Pity that you didn’t see that as “actors are normally fucked up” and that the only way he ended up successful was to become someone else. Which the character states in the last bits of the book, written 25 years after the events you actually read (implied spoilers follow):
There’s roughly a page worth of text after that quote.
No, you focus on the bogus 70cents/dollar stat (which is only due to women choosing kids over career plus their choice of profession).
Also due to amount of overtime worked, etc. But the left is congenitally incapable of facing facts.
Previously.
Yes, one of my birthday threads. Sadly no one remembered. I give and I give and I give…
[ reaches for tissue ]
So, a woman who equates Donald Trump, and by extension half of the U.S. electorate, with fascism and the Nazis, and who has fantasies of getting breast cancer, a prospect she looks forward to.
The draughtmanship is okay. The educational comic style is off putting as usual; it’s a habitual leftist/progressive flex. such as was seen often on the pages of ‘Everyday Feminism’ – an attempt to distract from their evident personal uncertainty and anxiety and neuroses by projecting an outwardly assured personality supplied by current ideology. It’s not a happy state – one result may be seen in the comic where Kobabe takes a folk dancing class and decides to educate the educators.
Pity that you didn’t see that as “actors are normally fucked up” and that the only way he ended up successful was to become someone else.
While I understand your point, I was running out of gas caring about any of the characters. As I said, at that point the various main characters were all one-upping each other in girly dick measuring that I found quite tiresome. Focus on the task at hand. The writing in general was weak. The overarching story had some validity to it, if something of a credulity stretch, and I might have thought otherwise had I read the story many years ago. But the dialogue, of which there was quite a bit used to carrying the story, was weak. Hell, I could have written much of it and I suck as a writer. Especially with dialogue. Internal to the dialogue the fall back on jigoistic language was itself tiresome. It reminded me of the kind of people I used to work with who would for example refer to the Space shuttle as “the Bird”…ooh, we have a bird on Pad A, a bird in the OPF…oh, STFU. G-D brick with wings. I mean I do get that this may be picky but using that sort of language repeatedly to show, I don’t know, how clever you are with language, while not being all that clever really, is stilted. What little I know of Heinlein, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who listened to other people much which IMNSHO bleeds through in his writing.
Nerds.
D&D has always been the abode of deeply neurotic people hiding from the real world in their adolescent power fantasy. It’s just that the power fantasy used to involve being more powerful, more competent, more badass than one’s real self. The default D&D setting has come to resemble not the worlds of Howard, Lieber or Moorcock but rather the university district of every US college town, with more pointy ears.
Kind of an adolescent powerlessness fantasy, really.
Not to derail too much further into Daniel’s Gaming Blog territory, but there’s been an explosion of indie TTRPGS in recent years that remove all conflict from the setting. Not just combat – all conflict. The author is invariably a dysmorphic, and the game theme is inevitably one of forming an ersatz family from found companions and defining “family” and “home” for oneself. Usually while traveling.
These people are practically screaming their etiologies from the rooftops at us.
(Some of our more…seasoned readers may note that this is the exact theme of everything Joss Whedon does, from Buffy to Firefly to
Firefly 2.0Agents of SHIELD to The Avengers)Kind of an adolescent powerlessness fantasy, really.
But are they really all that powerless if they are getting the powers around them to force people in the real world to bend over backwards to accommodate their various psychosis? Psychosises? Psychosisi? Psychosi? Whatever.
While I understand your point, I was running out of gas caring about any of the characters. As I said, at that point the various main characters were all one-upping each other in girly dick measuring that I found quite tiresome.
I’ll have to stay out of this debate, as after all these years I’ve forgotten many details.
What little I know of Heinlein, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who listened to other people much…
I think you’re right, there. Absolute certainty about whatever opinions he had in that decade. And at conventions he liked to play guru to worshipful fans seated at his feet. Not, however, violently obnoxious like Harlan Ellison.
D&D has always been the abode of deeply neurotic people hiding from the real world in their adolescent power fantasy.
The D&D people I used to know long ago did seem to fit your description.
See Sheldon Cooper as “the mighty Sheldor, level 85 blood elf, hero of the Eastern kingdoms”.
How about Settlers of Catan? There are no “mighty warrior” power fantasies, but I wonder a lot about people who put Catan bumper stickers on their cars–it’s just a game, after all.
ooh, we have a bird on Pad A, a bird in the OPF…oh, STFU. G-D brick with wings. I mean I do get that this may be picky but using that sort of language repeatedly to show, I don’t know, how clever you are with language
Instead of “clever with language” I would say “poseur” as in “by using this jargon I acquire the status of actual NASA engineers and astronauts”.
Rings of Power has demonstrated that the most important thing for black people is to see themselves represented, no matter how incongruously, as hobbits, elves and dwarves of colour.
A question for those who have read more Tolkein than me: In The Return of the King Tolkien mentions black-skinned people who live in the lands far south of Mordor. He also mentions that one of the wizards was in the far south, carrying out his unspecified part in fighting Sauron. Do any of Tolkein’s posthumously published writings describe the peoples and events in those southern lands in more detail? If so, those would be a valid basis for Rings of Power episodes in which everyone would have dark to very black skin. That would be a much more valid approach than what Amazon has done, and potentially very interesting since the Wars for the Ring were supposed to encompass that entire world.