This Is Your Captain Speaking
Argentina’s first transgender pilot has debuted the new uniform designed for the female pilots of the country’s national airline.
Traniela Campolieto announced his “transition” to passengers during a flight last year, after which one person tried to get off the plane. pic.twitter.com/v1h3Iyl128
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) July 20, 2024
And hey, every passenger wants the pilot to be a bewigged, mentally ill fetishist who bangs on about the super-girly tightness of his uniform, and who takes endless, pouting selfies in the cockpit.
To say nothing of the heightened risk of suicidal inclinations. Ah, the thrill of modernity.
Before becoming a shimmering vision of womanliness, Mr Campolieto was a professional bodybuilder, a proverbial brick shithouse. Hence the bad wig, the transformative powers of which may have been overestimated.
Update, via the comments, where WTP adds,
From the above Publica link:
In 2020, the country’s President, Alberto Fernández, passed a decree establishing employment quotas in the public sector for individuals who identified as transgender. The decree mandates that at any given time at least one percent of all public sector workers in the national government must be transgender, as understood in the 2012 Gender Identity Law.
And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are wildly unreliable, at least regarding himself.
Previously: Banking and mental illness, together at last. Oh, and policing and mental illness. Because unstable personalities, such that a person isn’t entirely sure who or what they are on any given day, are very in right now.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
I just finished watching the interview. Rather fascinating to see those two minds interact. Both of their brains tend to run faster than their mouths: Peterson ends up talking a lot, and Elon can’t seem to get his words to match what’s going on inside.
I don’t fault Elon for not knowing that he was being emotionally blackmailed and lied to, at least not at that time. His own team of scientists doesn’t lie to him, so why would he suspect that professionals from another field would tell such a colossally Big Lie? His kid was in distress, and there was a medical path laid out for the kid, so he figured he’d better follow their advice.
Also, someone who launches rockets is exceptionally well versed in the limits of science, because when SpaceX runs up against those limits, there are large explosions. They have to get 1000s of things right for those things to fly, then freaking land themselves on a barge in the middle of the ocean.
This came to mind:
The conceit that all cultures have somehow been equally glorious at every point in time is pernicious and stupefying. Yet, for some, it’s an essential piety.
It’s an interesting interview. Though, yes, I do wish Peterson would let Musk actually answer a question properly before interjecting, or before the next question is launched. And it seems to me the “gender-affirming care” conceit is difficult to discuss, difficult to think about, precisely because the implications are so indecent, the scale of its wrongness so vast.
Peterson’s interview with Chloe Cole is Must See for a good understanding of the impact. She expressed herself well and had good rapport with Peterson.
By the way, I’ll be out of town tomorrow and Friday, so no Ephemera this week, and you’ll have to make your own entertainment.
A crushing blow, I know.
Agreed.
Also: Elon’s degree is in physics, not biology or medicine. Most physicists do not know much more about biology and medicine that the rest of us, so it’s not that difficult to deceive them.
Know thy enemy.
Besides, in between the exploding blood pressure and red curtains of blood, it’s often funny. Not intentionally, for the most part, but one must find entertainment where it grows.
Same reason why I read the readers’ comments in the New York Times.”Sarah” writes:
Another example of the mindset of New York Times readers.
“Looking Glass” from New Jersey writes:
No, LG, you’re not sure. This person fails to realize it could have just as easily been . . . well, anyone the Dem party is shoring up.
By the way, I’ll be out of town tomorrow and Friday, so no Ephemera this week, and you’ll have to make your own entertainment.
You’re dead to me.
Peterson does have a tendency to talk more than an ideal interviewer.* I have noticed that now and then, and I think it was remarked upon here regarding his interview with Theodore Dalrymple. In some other interviews he does better, spending more time restating what the interviewee has said to make sure he and his listeners have a clear understanding, and then asking follow-up questions.
* Peter Robinson of The Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge series is closer to the ideal interviewer.
We could fashion a Golden Calf. But only a very small one, since your absence will be only 2 days rather than 40. Bacchanalian excesses optional
Did a tingle go up her leg?
Commencing wailing, have schedule gnashing of teeth for late in the day.
Precisely the problem. Why would you transfer the qualities and virtues of people you know and trust to people you have recently met, who have been presented to you under circumstances over which you had very little control? Elon comes from a privileged, high trust social background. People who can rely on that considerable trust have a greater potential to achieve much more than those who constantly have to recalibrate their information sources. Of course this only works until it doesn’t. Elon’s son is paying the price for that trust. Which itself has some insight into how the smartest/wealthiest man in the world can be so clueless when picking long term sexual partners.
Not the point. It should not require a degree in biological science, or much else, to have a common sense understanding that feeding a child hormones/chemicals/whathaveyou to interrupt their sexual development is not going to be reversible. It doesn’t require a degree in theology to understand that humans are not God(s). My suspicion* is that it is much more likely that Elon was too wrapped up in his businesses and such to give the proper attention not just to this specific problem but his family and social responsibilities in general. Something he appears to be trying to correct with his youngest son.
*Not that I pay tremendous attention to celebrities’ personal lives but when they are put on display as people to look up to…
The people whom we allow to drive our culture. What could possibly go wrong?
Actual LOL. As I believe the kids say.
Yes.
I think you misspelled mandatory.
Regarding the lovely Cressida, mentioned upthread, this:
Works for me.
[ Begins making phone calls. ]
Something British, maybe.
But never let me be said that I do not respect world cultures.
New instructions incoming. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
That’s seriously bent.
Can’t help but picture Ms. O’Toole spouting her views on the superiority of Maori culture as she sinks into the broth.
Parenting dilemma.
[ looks at box of tissues ]
What exactly are you implying?
It’s a position arrived at via contrivance and pretence. Yet it’s a signature gesture of progressive arm-waving.
For someone less dishonest than Ms O’Toole, it would, I think, seem pretty obvious that a civilisation capable of long-distance colonisation – capable of global seafaring, cartography and navigation, and of exploring unknown continents on the other side of the planet – would be somewhat more sophisticated than the ossified Stone Age foraging culture discovered upon arrival.
Hear, hear!
Poor kid. Having to think for yourself without help of the hive mind. Not gonna be easy.
In lieu of Ephemera this week, here’s a fun game for your next pig roast.
Blasphemer!
Quite. But imagine belonging to a supposedly elite academic in-group in which that simple, rather obvious line of thought is carefully avoided and effectively taboo.
His own team of scientists doesn’t lie to him, so why would he suspect that professionals from another field would tell such a colossally Big Lie?
Also, someone who launches rockets is exceptionally well versed in the limits of science
Point of order: Musk’s degree might be in physics, but his experience is in running software companies. Something I noticed after switching careers from chemical engineering to software engineering is that software people tend to have an unreasoning acceptance of The Science, even in the face of stark counter-evidence. It’s because they’re used to working every day with systems that behave exactly the way the spec says they do. They’re also in many ways more emotional than the average person but pride themselves on being less emotional and more rational, logical, etc. than the typical person who is clearly not as advanced a being as they.
All of this combined means that when it comes to ambigous situations (or worse, outright deception) software people tend to handle them very poorly. If you’ve noticed that things seems to Not Work As Well As They Used To, that’s part of it. Software people are very bad at designing and operating distributed systems because the notion that That Part Over There might not do exactly what it’s supposed to do when you interact with it is so foreign to them that they don’t design for it.
Ms O’Toole famously bemoaned the colonial propagation of Shakespeare
Richard III, ladies and gentlemen.
Parenting dilemma.
Every smartphone in existence can be parental locked so that she can’t do anything on it except what the parents have enabled, and have all messages and traffic copied to the parents for review. They just can’t be arsed.
All together now: “Your child is a shit person because you’re a shit parent”.
Sartre’s ‘other people’.
[ Nudges browning, partly peeled banana closer to Daniel. ]
I could put it under the heat lamp if you want it later.
[ Banana-browning intensifies, wisps of smoke. ]
Daniel,
Most of my career was in software, but with a heavy dose of hardware hands-on. In my cohort, the EXPECTATION was that the hardware was significantly likely to not meet spec, and that the spec itself was likely broken in some way.
Defensive, paranoid sw design was the norm. As one program manager (for GLCM/SLCM) memorably said, in his inimitable southern drawl, “I want y’all to remember there’s NUKLIAR BOMBS attached to this thing.”
This. This, this. Though the “exactly the way the spec says” has more exceptions than you might expect. I specifically remember a situation with a basic math function, the specific one will not occur to me until 4AM sometime next week, that some mathematicians or comp sci or statisticians don’t agree on. Back in 1998 or so there was a significant change in the C++ standard and thus we needed to perform a large third party tools upgrade. I tried to get the message across that while I (well, ‘we’ but the other “smart” guys wouldn’t speak up) didn’t know what would go wrong, something very likely would. But the specs! Read the specs! Yeah. Whatever. The math function gave a different answer than the one by the previous compiler did. But it’s math! The spec! Never believe the specs. HelloWorld is your only friend. He also tends to work best on whatever box you are on.
Slightly related: He himself was one of his “other people”. Many others, not so much.
This too. But don’t try telling them that. You might as well be denying the absolute truth of Glowballistic Warmering. Well, until recently as it has become quite bloody obvious. Some of them will now admit it. But of course they are the few that saw it happening all along.
Can you imagine having to face that SOB at breakfast? That would be hell.
In college after our group worked through a particularly vexing compiler issue that may have been an interpretation of the documentation…or maybe a bug…I submitted WTP’s Law of Computing that nobody really, truly knows what goes on inside of a computer. It’s all just theory and conjecture. Nobody wanted to hear that. Especially not the professor.
Richard III, ladies and gentlemen.
When did The Stratford Festival’s creative director move to England?
Our Festival, years ago, inspired the whole “put a chick in it and make her gay” movement.
Hey, love is love, man.
A very large Richard.
Most of my career was in software, but with a heavy dose of hardware hands-on
That’s just it. Aside from kernel or firmware developers, pretty much no software developer works directly with hardware these days. At every job I’ve had in the last seven years, I’ve had to explain how the web works to senior web developers.
Our Festival, years ago, inspired the whole “put a chick in it and make her gay” movement
I miss Richard Monette. I punched out of the Stratford Festival (to the tune of ~$1000 worth of tickets annually) when the “Editorial Director” emailed me personally to call me racist for objecting to the practice of hiring poor actors because of the colour of their skin, and prioritizing experimental pop theatre over classic Shakespeare.
Hey, love is love, man.
I was directing a project many years back. One of the consultants on the project was originally a Brit. Over a senior team lunch he told the group a story of being in a third world country and witnessing someone “rogering” a donkey by the side of the road. After explaining to us Canucks what “rogering” was, laughter ensued for at least five minutes. For the remainder of the project, “Roger the Donkey” became a very popular catchphrase.
Update:
According to a thorough investigation conducted by Moroccan news website Ledesk, the incident, which was widely reported by Moroccan and international media, turned out to be a hoax.
Cue the jokes about Scotsmen and Aussies…and Portlanders.
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? 😀
I miss Richard Monette.
I was theatre editor for the Ryersonian in 1981. I had to review the play “Bent.” which featured Monette in the role of Max at the Bathurst Street Theatre. I was able to get an interview with Monette. He was a real asshole.
A lot of those theatre types were. Many were so insecure, they tried to make every one around them feel small. I interviewed Rick Salutin who wrote the horrid play “Nathan Cohen, A Review”. Salutin spoke as if it rivalled Shakespeare. Despite his Chalmers Awards it truly stank. It’s not even mentioned on his Wikipedia page.
Daniel, yeah.
Custom microcode. Network interface cards. Real time os kernels. Memory managers. Schedulers. System reliability tests. Low level drivers. Disk controllers. Font scaling & rendering. Etc.
My respect for most contemporary “coders” is approximately zero.
Well, there’s “working as designed,” and then there’s “working as coded,” and ne’er the twain shall meet.
It looks so amateurish.
I don’t think I’ve seen this word used here.
Why do you always hold out on us?
“I looked better than you and you couldn’t handle it”.
Is he a pilot too?
“Won’t someone please think of the furries” said no one ever.
Suggestions of illegal mind-altering activity
this word
Not one as a long-term English speaker I have ever come across but it does bring to mind unsavoury pictures of fat, elderly men straining at the leash – as it were.
[ Thank you, but I have already booked a psychiatrist’s appointment.]
[ They call it mellow yellow. ]
I don’t think I’ve seen this word used here.
Great word, and extra points for the “ffi” ligature, but the kerning is awful.
Meanwhile, regardless of one’s stance on the issue, this is painful to watch as not a single one of the lefty loons can muster a single rational counter argument, all they have is arrogance and condescension. Feel free to skip around, ignore the guy clearly off his meds.
‘Cockwomble’ doesn’t get nearly the airing it should either.
I would wager that entire exchange was a “said no one ever”.
Dining out in NYC? Meh. I wouldn’t normally say this but f*** these “victims”. They voted for this crap, even those working/visiting there at this point are fools. If your work “requires” you to be in NYC and you don’t put up significant resistance to that idea, you get what you deserve as well. You enable it with your complicity.
Am I Racist?
“Republicans are Nazis”, “the entire system has to burn”, “you [‘good’ white struggle session volunteers] cannot separate yourselves from the bad white people”, “this country is a piece of shit”… That’s Saira Rao , isn’t it?
Who exactly are the open racial supremacists, the open racial haters, the inciters of racial violence (metaphorical of course), what’s their ideological and racial background, and who are they targeting? Somebody should tell okely-dokely whites that it’s worrying combination if somebody (a) hates you, and (b) has plans for you, and that you can’t do much about (a) but you can do something about (b).
“Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
The groom might have saved himself many years of misery and lost riches if he had thought to say, “We were in a break!” Maybe. You never know how it might turn out tho.
Looks like her. I was toying with the possibility that the woman was a Rao lookalike who was in on the joke, and that the dinner was staged (the white women would be real marks), because look at the camera work: that’s not a hidden camera — that’s a high-end camera.
Also, she sounded a little over-the-top, even for Rao.
But who knows anymore.
Exceptionally useful name to call someone.
Yellowstone caldera reasserts itself.
A word for the weekend
https://x.com/AlaskanCourtney/status/1816240216648368565/photo/1
Funny how he can turn back into an angry man.
We don’t see what starts the altercation, but the dynamic that follows is certainly familiar. Much like the receding hairline, it’s a common pattern. The sudden transition, as it were, from Wig-Stroking Pretend-Lady to Wig-Hurling Chap With Big Man Voice.
I’m now pondering the implication that the Wig Hurling Moment was meant to be shocking. As if what it displayed wasn’t obvious beforehand. As if it were some third-act Scooby Doo reveal: “Jeepers! The ghostly pirate is actually Mr Johnson, owner of the spooky fairground!”
I suppose that could be, but it seems more likely that it was a reflexive act. Different crazy people have different habitual behaviors.
[ Rummages in bathroom for sunblock, squints. ]
If the use-by date on the sunblock has long since faded into illegibility, I’m guessing it’s time to throw it out.
It seemed like a much more threatening act to me. It was a reveal meant to emphasize that underneath he was a real man who could do her some real damage.
But it applies to so many.
With PTSD.
From putting on the makeup, wig, heels, dress, . . .
I should have been clearer. That’s sort of what I meant.
If the use-by date on the sunblock has long since faded into illegibility, I’m guessing it’s time to throw it out.
If it is faded just remember when the last time you were out of the country, that should get you a ballpark date.
AI struggles with concept of TARDIS dematerialising.
It needs the noise. 😀
Definitely. I do like the idea of the unearthly wheezing sound as the thing just slowly trundles off camera.
[ Rummages in bathroom for sunblock, squints. ]
With my limited knowledge of English weather, I’m guessing that by the time you find the sunblock, the sun will have disappeared. 😉
Even crueler, the clouds block the warmth and sunny cheer but let the skin-burning UV right through.
AI struggles with concept of TARDIS dematerialising.
Maybe it isn’t de-materializing as much as running away before it starts to melt as the Dalek is.
I’m guessing that by the time you find the sunblock, the sun will have disappeared.
No ephemera, looking for sun screen – my guess is that he is headed to Ibezia, or some similar place where last he used it.
En garde!
en garde
…the majority of transgender women who interact with corrections systems (i.e., poor transgender women of color…
What a surprise
Of course transgender women housed in women’s prisons are particularly likely to harass, be violent to, and maltreat other inmates as well as staff.
Of the two arrangements the first seems preferable.
“The decree mandates that at any given time at least one percent of all public sector workers in the national government must be transgender, as understood in the 2012 Gender Identity Law…” Reduce the number of public sector workers to 0. Problem solved…
[ Recalls with unexpected fondness the Collars of Obedience from The Gamesters of Triskilion. ]
For anyone who thought RFK Jr. was any kind of libertarian because of his anti-Covid vaccine stance, I give you, Drug
GulagsFarms. I won’t link to Mother Jones, so here hare some snippets…Of course, organic because…
Right. How will this be paid for you ask?
We’ll fix your drug “problem” by taxing other drugs.
Well OK, sounds about right. For those keeping score, this has already been tried. May not have been a success, but they did have a kick ass jazz band…
California Über Alles
Über Alles California…
So asylums where the patients are given something to do besides sit around contemplating their navels. Not seeing the problem with that. How it’s paid for is a…tax. Outside of direct user fees, taxes collected here to pay for things or to be applied to costs over there is generally a scam anyway. There’s some parallel but the inevitable unevenness eventually all comes out in the wash. It’s not like governments are big on fiscal discipline.
Not a new word to most around here, but it’s, you know, apt.
What if Nick Fuentes is a plant. A fed.
I don’t follow Fuentes at all, so I don’t know, but the dude makes an interesting case.
The contents of women’s purses, in Russia.
One for our host…