The Bedlamite Contagion
Quoted below, extracts from a conversation that in many circles would result in much hissing and flailing of limbs, but which, it seems to me, very much ought to be had:
It’s captured everything. This ideology – this crazy, insane ideology that has no grounding in reality – has captured… every institution. It’s in schools, it’s in mainstream media, it’s everywhere… and it’s utterly absurd… Denying the existence of the mental illness doesn’t help those who suffer from the mental illness. All it does is prevent them from getting the necessary care.
It’s not a sign of good mental health for a man to want his penis inverted and turned into an open wound that he has to dilate for the rest of his life. That’s not evidence of a sound mind…
The reason that we’re forbidden – the reason they went on this de-psychopathologising campaign – which was WPATH, the organisation I wrote the report about – the reason that they did that is they wanted to destigmatise transgender identities. I understand that… But the answer is not to deny the existence of the mental illness… Let’s say there’s a stigma attached to being schizophrenic. The answer is not to deny the existence of schizophrenia. That would not help schizophrenic people at all. And the same thing goes with gender-related issues…
In any other branch of medicine, doctors would ask why. If you saw a sudden, 5000% increase in young people with bipolar disorder, the mental health world would investigate immediately… If you saw a 5,000% increase in girls suffering from anorexia, immediately we would want to know – what was that trigger, what is causing this? And yet, with gender, the 5,000% increase happens and nobody says a thing. Everybody’s pretending that it’s perfectly normal and healthy. Why? Because… it’s gender. You’re not allowed to question anything. You can only celebrate.
It’s almost as if we’re supposed to celebrate a 5,000% increase in teenage girls showing up at gender clinics and wanting their breasts cut off.
From the following video, in which Andrew Gold talks with the formidable Mia Hughes, author of The WPATH Files, about pseudoscience, malpractice, and experiments on children.
It’s a forty-five-minute watch, but there’s plenty to chew on. Much that could be quoted. I should point out that the later sections of the interview, which explore surgical affirmations, or as one surgeon puts it, “creating body types that do not exist in nature,” does get a little vivid, and indeed surreal.
I was just about to send you a link to this.
It’s a very good interview. The only problem I had was in choosing which bits to quote.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ah, but you mustn’t raise an eyebrow. It’s “an empowered act of self-creation.” For some – say, this chap here – mutilated novelty genitals are the latest must-have. The path to a shiny tomorrow. A “genderqueer planet.”
And not, despite appearances, suggestive of something from a Cronenberg film.
Sort of human Labradoodle.
Back in the 90s, the slogan was “there’s no such thing as biological sex so you have to use gender” and I found that after you explain how babies are made they wouldn’t argue about it because that wasn’t the point. They don’t believe it. They said it to find out who won’t go along with the slogan and disparage them as hateful -ists and identify who to shun.
Everyone who goes along with it is (especially the ones who get angry).
As I’ve said before,
It isn’t hard to imagine how repeatedly and emphatically affirming a fiction, an obvious absurdity, and doing it very publicly, staking one’s social status or career upon that claim, rather paints one into a corner. It’s not obvious how someone – say, a self-styled activist – could subsequently backtrack or even equivocate without losing face, or credibility, or funding. Even when the situation has become bizarre or grotesque.
I find this lack of insight, perception, whatever amongst intelligent, educated people quite disturbing. In this and many other regards. Not just recently but going back decades.
Ah, this is a woman speaking. But of course we’re not supposed to notice this difference in biology, which was apparent decades ago, because…well…
Copium leaves one hell of a hangover. Emphasis on the ‘hell’.
Hair of the dog.
Ummm…
Well, etc. I gotta go pick up a new car. But per the Colonel…
This.
A couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with some people in their early twenties, when the subject of transgenderism, much in the news, came up. I didn’t immediately say anything, so as not to derail an otherwise agreeable evening, but eventually my silence was noticed, and I was pressed for a contribution.
I basically said what I’ve said here many times, about the hazards of bundling together different phenomena with very different moral connotations, and then being expected to affirm all of these things wholesale and without reservation.
This was met with an air of something close to muted scandal. I was by no means being mean or gratuitously provocative – just stating what should be obvious, and doing so as politely as I could. But to people immersed in the ideological soup, people recently educated, it seems that almost any deviation, however measured, can induce gasping. A sense of jeopardised social status.
As if I’d said we must gather kindling and build pyres.
Col. M, precisely: the Grand Universal Shit Test.
“…the reason that they did that is they wanted to destigmatise transgender identities.”
In the name of “compassion.”
This really is the rot at the core of modern liberalism—that we must condone and even applaud the most self-destructive behaviors and social pathologies so that individual “feelings” are never hurt.
God forbid people ever hear a painful truth.
Liberals destigmatised unwed motherhood decades ago—how has that turned out for the children and society at large? Same with substance abuse. Same with welfare dependency. Same with obesity. And now with transgenderism.
Even as we learn this week of a teenaged girl who tried to amputate her own breasts, liberals continue to preen with self-regard for their own heightened sensitivity.
“Behold my virtue!” as David put it years ago. That’s all that really matters.
Mandatory public agreement is one of the characteristics of liberalism. I’ve noticed it again and again, and each repetition strengthens my conviction that liberalism is fundamentally corrosive.
Maybe for those bien pensants.
In the instance mentioned above, I think it was also very much about age. People in their teens and early twenties are more likely to be insecure and anxious about peer-group positioning. Presumably, the individuals I was talking to want to be seen as Good People and have most likely been told, many times, that X is the thing that All Good People Say. So they do. Their opinions are therefore… ostentatious.
In the case above, they just weren’t well-prepared for dissent – even measured dissent – from someone they hadn’t previously regarded as a monster.
As realised by Victor Frankenstein.
I’ll take that as an excuse to suggest that liberals are kids who never grew up.
Certainly there is much about liberalism that is childish.
Band name.
What was interesting at the time was that the people I’d somehow scandalised, despite my efforts at politeness, didn’t have much to say about the various phenomena being bundled together. There was no substantive engagement on, say, autogynephilia or women’s spaces or whatever. It was more a visible disapproval of the fact I’d not been sufficiently affirming of All Things Trans, seemingly regardless of whatever those things might actually be.
Which, it seems to me, is an odd position to take.
As I’ve said before, if someone wants to live as the opposite sex, or just play dress-up, provided no-one is being imposed upon, I don’t much care. It’s not the kind of thing I would spend my evenings being vexed by. But to expect a blank cheque of approval for all of the things being bundled together, often disingenuously, as if no concerns of any substance could possibly exist, is, well, a bit much.
one of the hilarious things about all the isms (ableism, ageism, racism, sexism) is that it implies that about 7% of the adult population (white men who are not old, poor, disabled) not only keep everything running and unfairly teach their kids to play ball and cut the grass, but are, in their spare time, able to oppress all the other demographics. Wow, stand back, we white men are powerful!!!
It is like the implication of wokies claiming blacks can’t even find the local library or school so they can vote.
August Landmesser comes to mind, endlessly, when dealing with these progs.
I remember learning about the 14th century Flagellants. People back then were primitive, ignorant, religious and superstitious. The implication being, of course, that that sort of nonsense could never happen to us.
As realised by Victor Frankenstein.
Yes, and Dr. Moreau has joined the chat.
In addition to forcing you to believe absurd things, the trans ideology forces you to espouse contradictory views: trans women are women vs. women need their own sports and safe spaces away from men. Oh, and consent. It is not possible to have these things at the same time.
See, also ‘overproduction of elites’, grade inflation, and ‘everyone can go to college’. Various modern programming and pedagogies may also be stunting people, but a lot of unimaginative and relatively unintelligent people are being handed degrees.
#RepealThe19th enters the chat.
Metaphorically, certainly. It may even be necessary for some of the more socially and physically destructive activists, especially those in leadership positions. Any concerns about the treatment should be stood against the long term continuation of the physical and mental violence done to the children and bystanders affected by this craze.
As does leftism in general. It’s a vital component in the use of political correctness to humiliate and subjugate.
Offering this as a frequently useful meme:
Some things, many things, should be stigmatized.
Which, it seems to me , is an odd position to take.
As Swift said, “You cannot reason a person out of position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” Jonathan, not Taylor.
We see this time and time again, when real individuals are questioned on their beliefs they are, most often, unable to articulate a cogent point of view.
Another day, another pronoun meltdown.
Amazing how much this looks like murderous spousal abuse.
The Flagellants beat themselves to punish themselves for the sins of the world. The woke beat others to punish them for the sins of the woke.
As with every modern revolutionary movement, it’s a matter of destroying. They destroy. That’s it. It’s what they do, it’s who they are.
For the last 35 years, I’ve pondered how they ALL respond so quickly to the newest fad. How can they all go “marriage is between one man and one woman” on Day 1, and on Day 2, they can ALL – in unison – proclaim that “marriage is gay” and that anyone who says otherwise is a bigot – and always has been.
No memo gets sent and everyone is in lockstep. This is because the Left ALL understand that the only thing that matters is power. And power is best achieved when the populace is experiencing chaos, fear, and instability. What better way to achieve that, than to destroy that which is stable, predictable, and beneficial?
They want power. They can’t obtain it in a stable society, so they set out to destroy that stability in order to obtain power. Simple as that.
And then I saw this segment about MAiD, and I realized that we’re much farther along in our dystopia than I realized.
O, Canada. Oh my God, Canada.
Javier Milei, rock star.
Grok on who ripped off whom.
I’m not the first to point out that cross-dressing men harassing waiters and serving staff is now a niche trend. Targeting people who are obliged to be polite and somewhat deferential – deliberately manufacturing a conflict, escalating it, filming it, and attempting to get the target fired – does rather suggest malevolence.
Albeit malevolence in a bad drag of victimhood.
See also this, among many others.
“Like a car,” that open wound, the one smelling of cadaverine, “needs a tune-up.“
On the subject of WPATH, a thread.
In which, the destruction of a person’s genitals, and the subsequent, permanent loss of sexual function, and a lifetime of pain and medical dependency, is equated with the extraction of a wisdom tooth.
Do note the self-satisfied smirk.
You see, it’s just an “adventure.” One in which the surgeons share, albeit, for them, temporarily. Not for a lifetime.
I thought Frankenstein was meant to be a warning.
The surgeon referring to phalloplasty as an “adventure” – i.e., destroying the female genitals and attaching a grotesque, non-functional parody of penis – something like this or this – later admits that the procedure will “definitely” have permanent, ongoing complications, including incontinence and necrosis. That cadaverine stench.
It occurs to me that one of the reasons some people are reluctant to be realistic about the issue is that they might then have to consider the possibility that an entire, supposedly affirming industry – one worth close to a billion dollars a year and projected to reach five billion by the end of the decade – is exploiting mentally ill people, including children, and experimenting on them.
Those lovely surgical adventures.
In other news, I’ve been watching Andor, which is apparently one of the less bad Star Wars TV series. Now halfway through the first season. Does it get… better?
I keep hearing that. About all of our colonised serieses. Star Trek Picard Season something-or-other had that too.
I think it’s the desperation of those people who used to be fans, when the product was made for them, and still passionately want to enjoy it even now when it’s made by people who actively despise them.
They pretend to themselves that any minor improvement over the absolutely unbearable, preachy, sanctimonious, amateurish garbage the product has been turned into is a game-changer.
I’ve learned not to trust these claims.
Yes, season three of Picard was wildly overpraised. It was, it’s true, better than preceding seasons, which were bewilderingly inept – I mean, bizarrely, comically so – but it was still very badly paced and badly written, and coasting on nostalgia for episodes aired decades earlier. Sort of, Cadaverous Picard and the Face-Lifted Ladies Make You Remember Better Stories Than This One.
As I’ve said before, I’m not a huge Star Wars enthusiast. I enjoyed the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, before the thing turned into what I gather is utter shite. It wasn’t The Best That Television Can Be, but it was… diverting enough.
I saw glowing reviews for Andor, hailing it as much, much better than other, related offerings. A neglected gem, supposedly. I should say it’s not actually bad, and there are a few nice touches, but the pacing is slow – too slow, I think – and, halfway through the season, I haven’t been hooked yet.
I’m finding it quite hard to care about many of the Rebel characters, or their plight. Some, like the rebellion cell leader, Vel, are miscast and distractingly unconvincing. Her only character trait seems to be that she’s a lesbian. Because apparently that’s enough these days. Box ticked.
I don’t mind watching it, but I do notice that my attention wanders occasionally. I’m just wondering how much I should recalibrate my expectations.
Does it have the approval of The Critical Drinker? Wouldn’t touch any new Star Wars product without that…
If memory serves, he liked it.
One small thing I noticed about Andor is that, so far, halfway in, each episode ends on a scene or shot that doesn’t feel at all like a place you’d conclude an episode. There’s no cliff-hanger or significant resolution of anything. No tension or relief. The first couple of times it happens you go, “Oh, er, okay.” Then as you’re watching subsequent episodes, you start to guess that some largely unremarkable scene is probably where the thing’s going to end, and it does.
It seems to be a stylistic choice, presumably done deliberately, but it’s quite odd – repeatedly ending an episode on a relatively flat or underwhelming moment. It doesn’t conclude. It just… stops. I’ve no idea what kind of point is being made.
Yes, well. I’m proud to declare that I’ve moved through the various stages of beloved-series denial and have now reached the “Don’t give a fuck” endpoint. I’ve finally accepted that they are no longer made for me, and have no interest in continuing to give them a try. Probing the wound, as it were.
I believe it’s called “subverting your expectations” in the patois of the cretinously inept. Those being your expectations that the show night be intelligently, even capably written.
Did the Queer Majority get hacked? That was actually funny and moderately insightful.
I did a quick search and some fans on Reddit claim that this is because of three-episode mini-arcs within the season. But these supposed mini-arcs aren’t really arcs as such – it’s all rather slight – and the endings of the episodes that would mark those supposed mini-arcs are still as abrupt or underwhelming, or as flat, as pretty much any other episode so far.
Unless, of course, it’s just a result of some last-minute altering of the number of episodes or something – and a lack of care.
Ted Cruz gets angry. Not without cause, I think.
Again, regarding trans activism, the issue rather illustrates how little scope for compromise there is. Or, one more time:
And yet, here we are.
The not-so-friendly skies:
Yes. How most people tolerate this bloody stupidity is beyond me. It’s like the vast majority of people have their heads buried so deep in the sand…or more likely, piles of BS…that they just don’t know what is going on. Or are they just cool with it because lol you mad bro? This is just nuts and it’s not going on in some backwater and it didn’t just begin five minutes ago.
This is the problem. The left launches its minions into outrage if someone misgenders someone or …TRUMP!!!!…but absolutely idiocy like this gets exposed in a Senate hearing and it’s mostly crickets from the right.
Nothing has had the effect of the original Star Trek, and the farther from the original subsequent forays have gotten the less interesting they are.
Haha. That.
Speaking of surgery …
That standard deviation can really bite you on the ass.
I don’t think I’m being unfair.
As I said at the time, when you’re three hours into the story and faced with another episode in which nothing really progresses, and the story, such as it is, feels both convoluted and simultaneously inert, it’s not a sign of top-notch writing.
The eighty-year-old-discovers-he’s-a-father thing didn’t work at all, and so what followed from that didn’t hit the mark, and whenever the whiny Raffi appeared on screen, you could feel your heart sink. And given the importance of pacing to good storytelling, you’d think it might deserve at least a little attention.
Though they did manage to finish ruining one of the series’ best villains. So there’s that, I suppose.
Could be. BUT: I know (or knew) a lot of fans who also accepted all sorts of woke bullshit in other walks of life. The number of lies they would accept (and even regurgitate) was astounding.
As I have said before, a lot of fans have very bad taste–crude, childish, etc.–and will accept the most clumsy pulpish drek. I have, over the years, pointed out specific examples of differences in quality in stories, movies, music, etc., and they just couldn’t perceive the difference.
In large part because it was the first.
Sadly true.
Long ago, my buying habits were guided by book reviews in Locus and the NY Review of SF and other semi-intellectual sf magazines. Until I figured out that the reviewers were nearly all dishonest hacks, lying for profit or for ideology.
Anybody remember the 1970’s TV show The Paper Chase? As I recall, there was much popular horror at the stress put on young students to learn as much as possible and learn it perfectly. Never mind that when a lawyer screws up his client can lose their savings, their livelihood, their freedom, or even their life.
[ Finishes compiling tomorrow’s Ephemera, considers sausages for tea. ]
“Ram it in, jam it in, students’ heads are hollow. Ram it in, cram it in, plenty more to follow.”
—Cosm by Gregory Benford
Most people don’t encounter it. They may hear of it happening elsewhere but they’ve never had to deal with it ‘up close and personal’.
The quality of the writing in the original series was, certainly for the first two seasons, fairly high.
I understand the legal defence being argued by American Airlines is that “If you fly with us you should expect“:
The airline will employ perverts and sexual deviants in the interests of ‘Social Justice’. These employees will be watching and filming you as you go to the toilet.
The pilots hired by the airline will be diversity hire tokens and may be utterly incompetent to fly a plane.
The aircraft utilised by American Airlines will be built by a company which hires diversity tokens based on their race and/or gender and certainly not on their competence. Your aeroplane’s doors and/or wheels are liable to fall off in flight.
The traffic controller in charge of the airspace your plane is passing through may be a diversity hire token and utterly incompetent to manage your plane’s safety.
The flight you have booked is subject to arbitrary cancellation because the airline doesn’t employ enough pilots of any kind to fly all the bookings it takes during busy holiday periods.
The baggage staff hired by the airport will be illegal aliens who will rifle through your luggage and steal anything they fancy.
The baggage collection area will be infested with Government diversity trolls who travel widely at public expense and often make off with other people’s suitcases.
Have a nice flight!
They said it to find out who won’t go along with the slogan
Ah, this is a woman speaking
A sense of jeopardised social status
the Grand Universal Shit Test
X is the thing that All Good People Say
“Stop trying to make heteronormativity happen, Gretchen.”
It’s high school mean girls jockeying for position within the herd. It’s always been.
#RepealThe19th enters the chat.
Sooner or later, everyone comes around to patriarchy.
As for the Labradoodle…you all know dog breeds are the result of intensive selection for specific characteristics, right? There are no wild Labrador Retrievers or Standard Poodles. A Labradoodle is closer to the natural canis lupus than either breed individually.
It’s the ridiculously overbred breeds like spaniels, with their near-universal ear infections, hip dysplasia and tendency to canine leukemia that are the Frankenstein’s monster in this scenario.
Also the airline’s website’s comment widget will have a list-creating function written by illiterate spastics and any attempt to use it will make you cry.
Probably.
I’m not sure it’s entirely proper to laugh at the words illiterate spastics, but that’s what happened.
Cadaverous Picard and the Face-Lifted Ladies
Band name.
I’m assuming that, following some on-tour scandal, the Face-Lifted Ladies would leave to do their own thing on a major label.
The retreat into perverse, insulting euphemisms continues.
Related thoughts.
This should turn out well.
There was no surgery involved in the creation of the Labradoodle, no stitching together of decaying flesh, no hoping for a fortuitous thunderstorm. Just a few doggy treats and a few naturally supplied hormones.
Related thoughts.
That. Plus, something I’ve always maintained, it forever taints the individuals of whatever ‘oppressed’ minority is fetish-du-jour even if they are outstanding in merit of their own accord.
AND that’s a feature, not bug, of the race-mongers. So when a melanin-enriched individual goes off the reservation, then their achievements are called into question as “you benefited from AA/DEI/CRT, how dare you dissent now!”
See: Justice Clarence Thomas
What ‘offender’ v ‘justice-impacted individual’ does is erase agency. The perp isn’t really responsible for the rape, assault, burglary or murder. Getting arrested and convicted isn’t the result of something they did, just something that happened to them.
That was going to be one of my contributions to the Friday Ephemera.
If only the Left would make itself ephemeral.
And the bestest most well trained lawyers doing their finest work can take your savings, your livelihood, your freedom, or maybe even your life.
Again, how most people tolerate this bloody stupidity is beyond me.
One of the many variations on the fascist thinking behind Obama’s “you didn’t build that”.
ICYMI
I did listen to him discuss this, but it bears repeating. An evil, evil man.
when you’re three hours into the story and faced with another episode in which nothing really progresses
I find it interesting that once streaming became the standard delivery channel we no longer had to suffer through episodes that had to be 47 minutes and come in sets of 20-22, which meant a lot of time-wasting filler and B plots. Episodes and series were exactly as long as they needed to be, and we got some nice, tight story arcs.
And now we seem to be unable to fill even ten hours with plot and we’re back to time-wasting filler and B plots again.
a lot of fans have very bad taste–crude, childish, etc.–and will accept the most clumsy pulpish drek
There’s an interesting divide between people who grew up with the Star Wars trilogy and those who came along a scant seven to ten years later. The various books, specials, cartoons, etc. post RotJ were awful. Terrible, hackneyed crap; Lucasfilm would hand a license to anyone if they thought they’d get a few points out of the deal. And yet that cohort truly believes the Star Wars “EU”, Admiral Thrawn and all, is some kind of great body of work and they’re furious Disney is ignoring it. Don’t get it myself. I had a passing acquaintance with a couple of the authors and they were quite candid that outside of gaming novels it was the only work they were ever going to get because Lucasfilm just didn’t care.
There was no surgery involved in the creation of the Labradoodle
I don’t think most people are aware of the routine docking of ears and tails and other “surgical” modifications made shortly after birth on many pure breeds to give them the appropriate appearance.
Looks like there was a Community Note that claimed the legislation was to protect innocent people from being prosecuted while they tried to report abusive material, but the note is gone.
Looks like Germany’s going ’round the twist again, 100 years later, and I hate to see what this century’s Weimar decadence resolves into.
Another, longer interview with Mia Hughes can be found here.
After watching it, if the words that come to mind are jaw-dropping medical scandal, then you’re probably not alone.
Some authors can be quite interesting to talk with.
How about those of us who grew up before Star Wars? I was barely in my teens when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. Started out on authors such as Andre Norton, Alan E Nourse, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.
Sounds like one of those old Doctor Who episodes.
Oh, I think it’s more of a Quatermass vibe.
1:15 “sneaks up on you.”
In an alternate universe, I see a “Far Side” comic of a pseudovagina sneaking up on someone.
(x-posted from my tweet there.)