The Progressive Dance
Lifted from the previous post, an excruciatingly obtuse discussion about wangs and women’s changing rooms. In which the very patient Warren Smith attempts to tease sense from a self-styled ‘Harris voter’.
Again, I say obtuse, but it’s more a matter of practised dishonesty:
Responding to the exchange above, Rafi adds, not unfairly,
Mr Harris Voter does seem to be struggling with some very basic realities. Things that we, as a society, used to understand.
I imagine much of his difficulty lies in the need to be seen holding fashionable and therefore statusful opinions, as determined by his peer group, and the illogical nature of the opinions currently in fashion. He wants to be seen as being “inclusive,” as he puts it, even though the consequent position is fundamentally incoherent.
And so we get the pinhead dance. According to which, cross-dressing men have every right to enter women’s changing rooms, and women who object can… er, choose not to use them. Or choose to flee, provided they do it politely. So as not to cause offence.
We must, it seems, be sensitive. Albeit unilaterally.
Maddening and slippery as Mr Harris Voter is, I think the exchange above is quite revealing. It does show the contortions required of the type. It also suggests that it would be unwise to rely on such creatures.
Ladies, they’ll sell you out in a heartbeat.
If nothing else, the exchange highlights how an urge to seem like a good and progressive person, a caring and inclusive person, can be entirely at odds with actual goodness or anything approaching coherence. Such that the pretence, the preoccupation with how one seems, if only to one’s equally pretentious peers, entails not caring – at all – about women and girls who would rather not share an intimate space with mentally ill men and opportunist perverts.
As this chap says in reply to Warren Smith’s original post on X:
This is not a trivial point.
Update, via the comments:
Oh, and if Mr Harris Voter’s opinions on What Women Should Be Happy To Put Up With sound vaguely familiar, you may be thinking of Mr Dolatowski, the cross-dressing chap mentioned here previously, and who insists that he isn’t “a threat if I use the bathroom,” and who tells us, emphatically, “I know I’m not a threat to anyone.”
Except, of course, to ten-year-old girls in supermarket toilets.
Update 2:
In the comments, EmC quotes Mr Harris Voter saying, “The reason I don’t care is because I don’t know that these situations are happening.”
She then adds,
Absolutely. To claim not to know about these things – to not know about any of them – as if the very idea were inconceivable and not an obvious and inevitable consequence – is quite an achievement. Of a sort. Though according to Mr Harris Voter, if any discomfort or conflict of interests should ever materialise – in theory, hypothetically – it will somehow be the fault of women. For not being sufficiently open-minded and progressive.
Liz quips,
Well, indeed. This is someone who implies, quite strongly and more than once, that mothers who don’t want their six-year-old daughters exposed to the genitalia of cross-dressing men are somehow being uptight and selfish, and are therefore of limited importance. Compared to cross-dressing men who wish to impose themselves, intimately, on women and girls who may object. And often precisely because women and girls may object.
The mothers, we’re told, are “free to leave” their own toilets and changing rooms. Because their expectations of privacy and safety, and the safety of their children, are merely things that the mothers “choose to care about.” By insinuation, needlessly.
And how very dare they.
And so, Mr Harris Voter, our champion of human progress, is someone who would have us believe that the psychological gratification of the male interloper, his triumphant intrusion, is of at least equal importance to the rights of women not to be watched as they undress by some weird and creepy man who enjoys violating normal boundaries.
Again, it’s quite the mental dance. Yet so very much in fashion.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
British understatement?
It is quite the feat, given the verbal convolutions of Mr Harris Voter. Though it does, I think, pay off. Things are revealed.
Jesus wept, that video… Eye bleach please.
The complete video can be found here. It’s a little vivid, I grant you, and not entirely savoury, but given Mr Harris Voter’s evasions, and the evasions of others like him, some realism seemed in order.
Oh, and let’s not forget Mr Dolatowski, the cross-dressing chap who insists that he isn’t “a threat if I use the bathroom,” and who tells us, emphatically, “I know I’m not a threat to anyone.”
Except, of course, to ten-year-old girls in supermarket toilets.
And whose advice to women, I should add, is not entirely unlike that of Mr Harris Voter.
[ Post updated. ]
“The reason I don’t care is because I don’t know that these situations are happening.”
It’s That Thing That Never Happens again.
Absolutely. To not know about these things – to not know about any of them – as if the very idea were inconceivable and not an obvious and inevitable consequence – is quite an achievement. Of a sort.
Though according to Mr Harris Voter, if they should ever happen, hypothetically, it will somehow be the fault of women. For not being sufficiently open-minded and progressive.
I’m not surprised he didn’t want to show his face.
Heh. Well, yes.
This is someone who implies that mothers who don’t want their six-year-old daughters exposed to the genitalia of cross-dressing men are somehow being selfish, and therefore of limited importance. Compared to cross-dressing men who wish to impose themselves, intimately, on women and girls who may object. (And often precisely because women and girls may object.)
The mothers, we’re told, are “free to leave.”
And so, this is someone who would have us believe that the psychological comfort of the male interloper, his triumphant intrusion, is of at least equal importance to the rights of women not to be watched as they undress by some weird and creepy man who enjoys violating normal boundaries.
Again, it’s quite the mental dance.
[ Post updated again. ]
See, I keep saying this place is interactive.
In my personal experience, those who claim to not know do indeed know. Which shows that they are malevolently evil, not merely ignorant and stupid.
I was doing something else while listening to this in the background, but was pulled up short by this, near the end, from the Mr Harris Voter:
I could probably just leave it there.
I mean, how much more Homo Sovieticus can you get than the idea that when reality is an obstacle to the fulfilment of the latest five year-plan then the solution is to redesign reality instead of abandoning what is an obviously absurd and ill-conceived plan?
Just FYI, the full quote starts about 16.20 in the video and is:
It does seem rather improbable. And I have to say, listening to Mr Harris Voter, the words honesty and good faith did not spring readily to mind.
Heh. Same here. I started playing the video yesterday, distractedly, while fiddling with other things, then found myself listening in something close to disbelief.
As Mr Smith says,
As others have noted, the patience on display is no small feat.
Re-reading this,
Reminded me of this post, on San Francisco’s militant fetishists and their need to transgress, to impose on others, including children. The indignant replies from progressives, in defence of the activists and their wearisome kinks, are not entirely dissimilar to the evasions of Mr Harris Voter, above.
On the contrary, I would happily bet he has a wife, very likely a college educated daughter with the right “education ‘, female colleagues, maybe even a sister.
And I am willing to bet that’s where this “progressive” man gets his “views”.
It’s mind boggling.
Women of a certain type (upper class, college, etc) were the ones who did decades of “women are same as men” and used that to disadvantage men in the workplace, and didn’t even spare small boys and their boy scouts.
Even now, it’s mostly women of that class who support trans.
And somehow, with the lack of logic and accountability that only they can manage, certain other women, who are opposed to this trans obscenity (but were completely on board with the prior “gender equality”), are still painting this as “misogyny”.
And instead of admitting it’s their fault, they are still attacking those same men who, when they were in charge, put in place women’s spaces and sports and are aghast at mentally ill men barging into their daughter’s bathrooms.
“…well they can just leave…”
Slightly paraphrased, but once again the same change the world to accommodate a fringe nonsense. Of course not everyone can just leave, and clearing one’s throat is just the same as having a man in women’s “spaces”.
And this is the problem, the nub of things. There are, of course, sexually dysmorphic people who, dysmorphia aside, seem perfectly civil and rational, and who pose no obvious danger. But when taken as a group, sexually dysmorphic people, especially dysmorphic men, pose a very real danger. Not least to women and children.
Much more so than men in general.
And as there’s no practical way to differentiate the harmless from the dangerous, no practical way to police entry on an individual basis, and no law that can do the filtering for us, the desire of men to use women’s intimate spaces cannot be accommodated.
Not without farce and a very real risk.
And it seems to me that the kind of man who would press the point and insist – the kind of man who would place his desire for affirmation and role-play above the eminently sensible objections of women – is precisely the kind of man who should not be admitted. Or be granted license to intrude.
Say, by slippery progressive pinheads much like Mr Harris Voter.
And this is the problem, the nub of things.
You can just leave, even if you don’t want to.
As I’ve said before, probably more than once, trans activism has become a society-wide shit-test.
And we aren’t doing terribly well.
Some do. Some. But the mainstream normies who still get their news, and feel very well informed mind you, from the mainstream sources when they do hear of such things believe they come from right-wing fanatics on Faux News. Which of course is the only news source anyone on the right listens to. In their fevered imaginations anyway. I fear Thanksgiving is really going to suck this year.
When I have pressed them on this and related matters, they have begun with claims of not knowing, often combined with demands for evidence, but when I presented them with evidence they either explained away the evidence in various dishonest ways or claimed that the incidents were not objectionable.
There are some astonishingly ignorant and stupid people out there, but the ones I know are fairly well educated and well read. No excuse for being what they are.
OK, this. This a lot. And in places you may not be aware that such a thing is doing much greater damage far more silently.
Example, and bear with me this might get long…About a year ago or so I had the opportunity to make a couple of C-notes by participating in a pretend-jury thing for a real case. The actual lawyers for this case presented their arguments, just as they would in court. They even read the jury instructions verbatim (and exhaustively) to us, a group of about 50-75 people. We were then split into smaller jury groups of 12 people. One guy was appointed the foreman, just as might happen for real based on his past real juror experience. The thing I’m getting to…
In the initial discussion the foreman read some ground rules stuff and one of the points was that for the purpose of our deliberation such-and-such a word would mean something different than the common understanding. I objected. I wanted to hear the dictionary definition of that word (which for whatever reason could not be provided). It was generally accepted amongst the older, more assertive participants that this definition was something of a stretch. I had three or four other people on my side of this, one a younger black nurse who seemed fairly independent minded for someone her age. I actually think the jury foreman would have been on my side too were it not for his sense of obligation to his duty to that job. Most of the others were either bored by the discussion or annoyed by our discomfort with changing the meaning of a word.
If you watch for it, this crap happens a lot. Usually it’s the use of a word pretending to refer to the first or most common definition but then when as actual implementation approaches they pop up with the third or fourth or seventh definition and gotcha-pretend like they meant that one all along. There are certain words that are antonyms of themselves that can be very dangerous in this regard (sanction, cleave, bolt, overlook), but even those are not enough for the lawyers. They will impose new meanings on old, commonly understood words to create their own ‘realities’. If we let them get away with it.
The people I am talking about are well educated as well. People that I worked with on complex design projects, doctors, engineers, etc. There are some astonishingly ignorant and
stupidsmart, educated people out there. They’re just educated in what they’ve been trained to be educated about. They listen to ‘experts’. Because smaaaart.There are some astonishingly ignorant and
stupidsmart, educated people out thereIt’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. Most licensed professions have built-in safeguards to mitigate it, at least within the bounds of the profession itself; that doesn’t help when doctors opine about politics or engineers about epidemiology.
Software engineering doesn’t even have the safeguards, which is why I’m giving serious thought to exiting the profession. Today I had to explain to a “senior” developer that environment variables don’t have types.
So wait – according to Mr. Harris Voter and his ilk, there’s no difference in women with wangs and women without wangs – they are one and the same – yet it also seems that women with wangs take priority over women without wangs when it comes to access, sports, the Victim Hierarchy, etc.
Harris, herself being a woman without a wang, is touted as being the first woman vice president of the US, and wants to be the first woman president of the US. Yet if Trump declared himself a woman, he’d be a woman with a wang, and thus be higher in the hierarchy than Harris, and then what’s so special about Harris? If Trump were to declare himself a woman, the current ideology applies it retroactively (no deadnaming, right?) and then he’d have been the first woman president of the US, and Harris only has what little blackness she possesses to fall back on, but we’ve already had a black person as president. First black woman without a wang maybe?
Argh this nonsense makes my head hurt, and it is too early to start drinking.
There is a natural impulse in humans to resent restraints and rules. Children for example. But rules and customs and boundaries exist for a reason. Lets take the old courting rituals. They served to allow the parents and other family members to assess the boy when he came courting, to see if he was serious and a good provider. The customs also helped prevent out of wedlock pregnancy. In the old days, there was no safe abortion and an out of wedlock pregnancy either meant the family had to raise the child (a severe hardship) or it meant dire poverty for the girl and her child. I have two neighbors who had to raise their grandchild, and it was tough even today. Feminists were all up in arms about such customs being old-fashioned and patriarchal. Overthrowing them meant IRL that lots of kids grew up without a father, with the resulting poverty and poor outcomes. But those poor outcomes are strenuously denied by progs. To them there simply cannot be a down side to the freedom they demand, even when the evidence is clear.
It is common that overthrowing customs has adverse outcomes for others. Crime affects the weaker members of society. Too much drugs leads to pooping on the sidewalk in front of homes. While some people may actually not care if men use the female locker rooms or bathrooms in their presence, it is unjust to assume that no one is bothered by this or that no adverse outcomes are possible,
I’m fairly sure today is the first time I’ve used the word wang.
Just sayin’.
You have offended the ghost of An Wang.
Not be be confused with Women of Wongo.
Related.
The problem is that in a secularist, materialist society, there is no place for anything except the most crude of objective moral standards. *I* know that letting men into women’s locker rooms is degenerate and immoral, but I don’t know it through a deductive process, because you can’t get to an “ought” from an “is.” I know it because my morality is based on a particular religious framework.
When we devalue those religious frameworks and ban them from the public space, as the secular US does more every year, we are left with noplace to stand to enforce our morality.
I don’t want to live in a nation that is devoid of Christian values. That sounds horrific to me. But you can’t have Christian values without Christianity, which means open, public acknowledgement of Christianity
There is a particular sort of pseudo-smart person who will not accept anything that has not been “proved” in academic journals. Mensa members tend to be notable offenders in this area, but they are far from the only ones.
Note, however, that most other religions have similar views on this matter.
So I would generalize your comment as “morality based on thousands of years of accumulated wisdom”.
Depends how you look at it. Men, as a category, are a risk to women. Objectively, on well-established facts (not to mention crime stats). Stronger on average, more reckless, much less at risk from unprotected sex. Anyone on the left would accept this without question if we were just talking about sexual abuse in isolation. And that *at least* some men would abuse this advantage is trivially obvious.
I think the fact that we’ve developed morality, mostly via religion, to *generally* train men not to abuse the advantage is the “is from ought”, but that the risk is obvious to anyone who cares to look.
That the left skate around the obvious risks, as this guy in the video, is just motivated reasoning on top of a habit of adapting praxis to fit theory. Non-empirical thinking. The topic is transgender access to bathrooms, not VWAG. The lefty mental association is that excluding minorities is bad, mmmkay? So the theory is that transwomen should have access, and praxis has to adapt to comply because the theory is ‘compassionate’. That’s what they always do, it’s trained. So why not ‘redefine what female means’, if it makes the theory work?
It’s a shame Smith didn’t hammer that point, though. “If even 0.1% of trans-identifying men are an actual risk to women and girls, is it appropriate to tell ALL women they should accept this risk in public changing rooms and bathrooms, or ‘just stay at home’?”
Nielsr:
Your point falls into the “most crude of objective moral standards.” It’s the libertarian standard that all things are lawful if they don’t pick my pocket or break my leg. That standard has no room for moral hazard. Trannies in women’s locker rooms aren’t just wrong because they might be a physical threat to the woman, they are wrong because my Bible condemns homosexual and transgender behavior and normalizing it such that people have to put up with it in even the most private of spaces is destructive to the morality of society. I would oppose it even if there were no known or suspected cases where a man had physically harmed a woman in such a situation.
Pst314:
No. Modern Jewish and Islamic morals are drastically different from Christian morals on many, many subjects. I am not interested in living in an Islamic or Jewish based society. I want to live in a Christian-based one.
In order to be “of the left” you have to be essentially innumerate and unable to conduct the usual sort of “if/then” correlations. You have to be able to assert one thing here, and then assert the diametric opposite over there. At the same time.
White is black; white is also simultaneously white.
Consider the mental gyrations you have to go through in order to say that “All men bad, dangerous to women, not to be trusted”, which is the mantra for the “Me Too” movement.
Then, you turn around and say “Men psychologically unstable enough not to grasp that they are not actually women” ought to be given free rein and total access to female spaces, particularly those where they are most vulnerable, like bathrooms and women’s shelters?
How the f*ck do they square that circle?
On the one hand, blacks and other minorities are oppressed, and unable to conduct themselves in a civilized manner while in the commons. At the same time, they’re also superior creatures that we must listen to, for their truths are self-evident and we are flawed… The “Magic Negro” vs. downtrodden victim of fate. Which is it?
In order to be “of the left”, you almost have to be mentally deficient. I could spend much of the day enumerating all the many and varied distortions of reality that they seem to have internalized, but I’d be beating a dead horse into the ground.
What I find amazing is that anyone, anyone at all, can still listen to the idiocy and even politely shake their head in partial agreement. They do this crap right out in the open, asserting these things that have no way of being true, insisting that we clap along with them as they march ever-onward into the brave new world they imagine is just around the corner. While we can see the cliff-edge up ahead, most of us do nothing to even so much as step out of the marching column of morons.
This is just depressing to observe.
My comment was only with regard to the matter at hand. In other words, that most religions disapprove of the sorts of trans bullshit that we are talking about about.
The libertarian standard also has no room for matters of dignity and decorum. There is no libertarian argument against abolishing privacy by enclosing all toilets and changing rooms and showers with glass walls.
I’m fairly sure today is the first time I’ve used the word wang.
Before personal computers could do everything office related, there were dedicated machines for dedicated purposes. For example, dedicated word processing machines eclipsed the typewriter. Wang was one of the largest suppliers of this equipment.
I knew two young ladies who had secured jobs with an insurance company and their sole job was word processing correspondence. They proudly referred to themselves as Wang Manipulators.
They were very popular ladies.
The Orlando mass shooter and his mother.
(via the father of one of the victims.)
. . . is reductive and utopian, dependent on an extremely high-trust society . . . which it will destroy.
Leftist? Leftist.
Note this woman’s mental illness. She goes to Haiti, which is pretty much pestilential, gets gang-raped, and then blames… White men. Specifically. Then, wishes that those “white men” were the ones who were raped…
You see here on display the precise living embodiment of what many who were against allowing women into public life and giving them the vote were saying, back in the days when it was being debated. Is this what the suffragettes fought for, the right to visit foreign nations, be raped, and then turn around and blame entirely uninvolved third parties, because they were male and white?
Even if the idea was valid, this bitch is basically arguing for blood guilt; today’s white male is 100% responsible for what other “white males” did a long time ago, and despite factual evidence or actual culpability for those supposed crimes, should be punished accordingly.
I suspect that if Susan B. Anthony and her sisters could see where this was going to end, that they’d likely be in favor of repealing the 19th Amendment. Surely, they could not have been on-board for consigning their sons to being raped in retribution for things they had nothing to do with? Surely…?
Women like this are precisely why I lost all the belief I had in this sort of kumbaya bullshit, that her ilk brainwashed into me as a child. She got raped, quite predictably, by savages… So, her “solution” is for others, namely men like me who had nothing to do with any of it, to be raped as well…??????
Yeah, truthfully? I’m no longer in the business of protecting people like this, wish that I never had been, and look forward to watching them “enjoy the attentions” of the savages they’ve brought home with them from abroad.
I’m pretty sure that if I walked past a stranger being raped in an alleyway, these days? Instead of white-knighting myself into prison, I’d take a note from Daniel Penny, and just step over the stupid twit on my way to my errands.
Hell, at the rate they’re going? I might even high-five the rapist, one day. That’s how far I’ve been driven from the positions of my childhood. The ones they so carefully taught me… Which turn out to be so much twaddle and bumf.
Referenced for a more general point. I believe that it is Christianity itself that has screwed the pooch here. The church we attended yesterday left me shaking my head. My father used to say he liked his politics conservative and his religion liberal. He never could have imagined things getting this liberal. Though the signs were there. And I believe the leftist swing of most churches today is a direct result of Christianity, mostly Protestant Christianity, holding way too closely to literal interpretation.
The Jews and Catholics have some how managed to…square the circle with science without totally conceding. At least until this most recent pope. Even there, they seem to have more of a backbone about pushing back on his not-so-holiness. Not that they haven’t contributed significantly to the downward trend with their pedo priests and such. Just the science thing.
But back to the Protestants. Even those churches that were not hard-literalists failed to address the science issues in any meaningful way. I had a long discussion with the pastor of my church back when I was still young and stupid. Well, not quite that stupid. But stupid enough in my more modern way. He accused me of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I warned him that the church needs to throw out the bathwater lest it poison the baby. Ah, but I was the ridiculous one.
I had a large Wang back in those days.
[ Points to coat, rattles box of matches. ]
Morals: the slippery slope many churches got on was the social activism kick. Doing good is obviously an unalloyed good, right? Except it leads to supporting Hamas, supporting illegal immigration, refusing to condemn the 2020 riots, on and on. Because you are compassionate and nonjudgemental.
I had a large Wang back in those days.
I had a more modest Wang, but it could work all day and all night.