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.
@WTP, who said the following:
I have to agree that part of the problem is “the church”, but… Also, not “the church”.
Religion is an expression of the cultural milieu it springs from. Which is why Islam is so f*cking toxic; the majority of the people who profess to it are disgusting scum who’re entirely on-board with marrying 9-year-old little girls, consummating that marriage, and enslaving others. Among a whole host of other things… Were that not so, then the “features” of Islam catering to this crap would not be emphasized or even taught these days. As they are? Do the math, dumbasses…
Today’s “Christianity” would be unrecognizable to people that called themselves Christian a century or two back. On multiple levels… And, this is not a reflection on the various denominations, either: It was the people walking in the doors that did it, not what was inside. The Bible ain’t changed; the readers have.
Like it or not, this bullshit we’re surrounded with is the fault of men like your father, and you yourself. You’re the living embodiment of the church; you sit there in the pew, accepting and tolerating the vile humanist bullshit being spewed? You don’t get up, shout at the obvious outright evil being taught? You don’t resist?
That’s you, my friend. You rail against the church having “changed”, but did you do anything about it? Did you get yourself onto the board and do something, or did you just sit there in the pew, shaking your head sadly?
The churches of today reflect today’s worshipers. No more, no less; they’re an expression of the zeitgeist of the times.
Like it or not, that’s a truth.
It’s like the experiences I had in the Army; I could see the institution going down before me, and while I was helpless to stop or fix it, at least I could point out the folly. Which is why I experienced a drastically truncated career; ain’t nobody loving a truth-teller, least of all one who proves themselves right. I did at least try, though.
Only comfort I have is that today’s Army is going to be an absolute shitfest if they try to use it for anything like suppressing civil unrest.
I don’t want to come across as mean, but your construction that “the church” is responsible for any of this is so much wishful thinking. The church represents the people that walk in the door; the fact that it has changed so much, even while a lot of parishioners disagree with the new teachings vehemently? That actually means that those parishioners didn’t truly believe in their former teachings all that hard, not enough to fight for them.
And, so…? They’re actually demonstrating utter compliance and belief in the new.
And yet Wangs were minis.
[ Awaits lengthy, bewildering conversation about fax machines. ]
@ccscientist, who said:
I had to think about this post for a few.
I don’t think that what happened went quite along the lines you lay out, here.
Most, if not all of, the decay stems from first-order performative displays of “morality”. People obsessing with surfaces and appearances, not the underlying reality. Nobody likes to do the hard work of actually thinking, and when some glib and facile “thought-leader” tells them some sweet-sounding bullshit, they tend to just go with it all.
Lifeboat analogy works well, here: Is it a net moral good to take your already full lifeboat back into the scrum of drowning victims, and pull more and more of those victims into your lifeboat, until it founders and takes everyone down with you?
Most of the people screaming to go “save the drowning” are the facile idiots we see all around us: Let in the illegals, their lives are so horrible where they are. Never mind that they’re “so horrible” mostly because of the things they do and their own decisions, we’re to save them by welcoming them into our society, our lifeboat.
The thing we sane have to recognize is that when you hear someone calling to take the full lifeboat back in to get more survivors, you’re hearing the siren call of moral idiocy and the shithouse rat crazies of the world. What do you do with sirens? You sure as hell don’t listen to them, because that leaves you and yours dead, dead, dead.
The idiots behind all this bleating “love thy neighbor” bullshit don’t actually have to deal with the repercussions. Those of us that do? We need to do something about the bleating idiots, and that starts with ignoring them.
The sheer insanity of the positions these morons have taken up is truly incredible. You see the streets of Paris, Rome? That’s due entirely to the bleating idiot do-gooders; if the Italian and French coast guards had simply towed the various boats back to North African shores and then sunk them once emptied of passengers? No more illegal migration. Let Africa fix Africa, for once. Bringing the problem to Europe isn’t going to fix anything, but it will break an awful lot.
Every time you hear about someone wanting to “do good”, you really ought to be slipping the safety off of your Browning. If you had any sense, that is.
Y’all really do not want my opinion on all the various suicidal do-gooder church groups here in the US sponsoring “migrants”.
The Orlando mass shooter and his mother.
No, @pst, we only do that (punish parents of mass shooters or hell mass shooters themselves) if said parents and/or kids are white. If a black shooter is mentioned at all, it is his lionization after his demise by the police.
Yes. No. I’m not “railing against the church” but I will point out that expecting me to accept BS like the world was created in
sevensix days in 4004 BC is clearly, very clearly at odds with clear evidence and logic**. Not big on the virgin-has-a-baby thing either but not a battle worth fighting. After all I could be wrong on that one. Could be. My father worked very hard for our church and while not a theologian, was as influential as he could possibly be in fighting the liberalization*. He was always to the right of the pastors of our churches even back then. He worked very hard to hold things together through some crises they brought upon themselves. The liberalism on social matters, the giving without expectation of change on the receiving end was a topic that after he passed even his pastor mentioned to me. He seemed rather appreciative of my father’s perspective as I think it gave the pastor some backbone with the larger church.My work with churches has been a similar experience. I had done some mentoring of people who were on the margins of becoming homeless or struggling. I tried to steer things in a more conservative, self-sufficiency, personal responsibility direction. Then that church wanted to address those actually in homelessness. Except that after much ‘training’ it was becoming apparent that they weren’t really interested in addressing the underlying issues. They were just going to hand-hold people. I was adamant that this was a bad idea. Long story there but that was my last attempt at regular church attendance until a couple months ago. Let’s just say after attending numerous services at numerous different churches in this “conservative” community I now live year round in, things aren’t looking good.
*I believe my father’s “liberalism” in regards to religion was driven more by his war experiences than anything. He would joke somewhat about hating the Japanese, he refused to ride in a Jap car until his broke down while doing church work and the pastor showed up in his car and…well… but I digress. As much as he hated the Japanese government he was very encouraging when one summer I befriended some Japanese exchange students. Yet he saw how the war-years Japanese fanaticism had driven them to such extremes. He also saw some reverse atrocities, nothing near as bad as what the Japanese had done but still unnecessary and quite counter-Christian. But that’s war. He might have even been in a situation where he had to do or was forced to tolerate some bad things. We never got too deep on that stuff but just guessing by some of his implications.
**See also “Jews, Catholics , Protestants, Mormons, etc. don’t go to heaven” BS. Though there are some Lutherans…never mind…
@ComputerLabRat, who said:
This is one of those things that will play into the eventual shift over into outright persecution of people like this. And, because we’ve got the historical proof that their “no-fault” sort of society doesn’t work, it will probably be a lot longer-lasting.
What you’ve got going on here is a demonstration of maladaptation to modern social conditions. This is going to eventuate in a shift in those social conditions; the current idea that children and adolescents can’t be held responsible for things they do, alongside the corresponding insanity of the idea that neither can their parents…? That’s eventually going to convince a bunch of people that both propositions are inherently wrong. And, even worse, unworkable.
This is going to show up with a return to the proposition that “you do the crime, you do the time” is a fixed law of the universe, and nobody is going to care that you were underage or whatever.
Today’s numpties forget that once upon a time, people gathered in large numbers to see criminal malefactors hung from the neck until dead, and they celebrated at such functions… Even when said malefactors were underage or female. Hell, they used to consider hanging women as more of an attraction, from my reading.
They keep up on this trend towards decivilization, then the corresponding social mores and values are going to come in. Again. How long until you see vigilante action in the parking lot, where some good citizen decides to simply execute the person seen shoplifting…? Or, as a likely intermediary step, the store managers hiring local gang-bangers to serve as door security? With the typical “disappearances” of shoplifters to follow?
Hell, if I were Walmart? I think I’d be partnering up with the local Crips and Bloods, tell them that there’s X number of dollars going out the door, every day, and that if they stop that, they’ll be in for a percentage of it all. Observe what happens then; it’ll be a lot less “friendly” than today’s nonexistent and dysfunctional legal system.
It will be, however, “indigenous” insofar as actual solution goes.
A form of luxury beliefs social/status posturing. You non-elites have to put up with the shit I endorse and encourage.
@WTP, who said:
I took what you said badly, and did not intend to come across as viciously as I did.
Frankly, you raise a lot of the same points I did while the adults around me tried to “bring me to religion” as a child. Didn’t work; I wound up as a free-thinking Deist, once I discovered that existed as a thing.
I will plainly observe that while I think the “problems with the church” across all faiths begin with the worshippers, the other side of that coin is precisely what you point out here: Very few modern religions these days manage to account for the state of things we’ve learned over the last few centuries. I’d say that it would be accurate to say that none of them have, really.
So long as they insist on believing obvious nonsense, well… They’re pretty much doomed, and will take with them a large part of our cultural/civilizational underpinnings and infrastructure. Today’s left is largely returning to the pagan past, wherein the denizens therein thought it perfectly A-OK to expose unwanted or unfit infants on convenient hillsides for wildlife feeding purposes. Or, the occasional savior slavetaker…
What goes in the door of the church is what comes out of it. Today’s lack of moral clarity and ambivalence stems from the lack of those things in today’s worshipful types. They do not believe in the things the church is telling them, not really, so they don’t follow it. And, in an attempt to keep them coming, the churches offer lukewarm pablum and ineffectual/inconsistent solutions.
Which, over the long haul, simply do not suffice.
I honestly think that we’re about overdue for some pragmatic sort to do the hard lifting of making all the irreconcilables reconcile. Sure, the Bible has a lot of good advice in it, but at the same time, there’s a ton of bullshit entombed there as well. I mean, I’d love for bears to show up and dine on the people making fun of my baldness, but in truth, I can’t say that would be a good thing, either. Or, righteous; I mean, what happened to people making fun of non-prophetic baldies? Nothing? Is that just? Shouldn’t all mockers of the hairless be eaten by bears…?
To be a bit more clear, the experiences you relate here regarding your Army life damn near parallel my experiences in the corporate world. Especially my space and defense contractor work. Perhaps because many of the people running those organizations were former peacetime military people. As my father would say about similar military people he saw on the news, you could tell they were never shot at in anger.
The best major project manager that I ever worked for, probably the only one worth a damn, was an ex-Army infantry colonel with Vietnam war experience. This was on a non-military project. I remember telling my dad how impressed I was by this guy’s abilities. He really saved our project. Eventually he ran afoul of the CEOs and other cronies (CEO was ex-Marine officer with zero combat experience) because they failed to stand by what they had promised to the project team. He left without saying anything about tge conflict he was having with them but later as I became better friends with his administrative assistant I learned how contentious (and loud) some of their meetings had been.
No problem. I got where you were coming from.
Yes. Devil’s (?) advocate but I emphasize with the church’s dilemmas here. They’re really in a tough spot and nothing can be reconciled without a tremendous amount of risk being taken on. Most people so oriented are not going to be big risk takers. Yet the kinds of people needed for this task are very unlikely to be able to do the very important soft work of helping people through grief or moderating (with principle) family and local social strife.
No idea about the veracity on display here, but… It is germane to the discussion:
Sharif in the Casbah, rocking…
I doubt this is going to be widely disseminated, and will be forgotten until the subject actually kills a woman in the ring, and then everyone will just be shocked, shocked I tell you, that this travesty was allowed to happen.
The volume of misinformation at that time was astounding. It was (and still is) such that no one really wanted the actual facts to be understood. It is completely understandable to me why this person may have, growing up and maybe well into maturity, thought of himself as female. He has no external testicles and a “micro-penis”. Remember the recent story of the guy with three penises he likely never knew he had? Understandable, somewhat. He didn’t transition to a female because…biologically…he never was a female. However once he was tested, a lightbulb should have come on. Whatever his specific situation I can understand why *he* was confused. Everyone else however has no excuse. But everyone had to talk past each other “He transitioned to female to win boxing matches and beat up women!” “No! He really, really, really is a girl! He says so! He must be right!” Because that’s the dumb, stupid world we live in.
Any reasonable person seeing that person trying to pass for female would take one look at his obvious physical attributes and say “Yeah, that’s a man in size and strength… He shouldn’t be competing against actual women. Period.”
That didn’t happen, in large part because the world has grown exceedingly stupid. A great clarification is upon us, or at least, in the wings and warming up. This BS cannot go on for much longer, and the accumulated contradictions are becoming utterly untenable. I await the new era of truth and understanding, when common sense reigns, and confused folk like our boxer here are introduced to objective reality.
the store managers hiring local gang-bangers to serve as door security?
Once you pay the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane.
because they failed to stand by what they had promised to the project team
People who have watched men close to them die because the close air support they were promised failed to materialize tend to take a dim view of those who are cavalier with their word.
Now the stakes certainly aren’t the same but frontline combat is a very good example of why keeping your word has evolved as a virtue.
Couple of points to be made, here:
One, that the Danegeld is currently being paid to our modern sanctimonious and sanctified all-powerful state. For no apparent benefit. Walmart ain’t getting much for its tax dollar, anywhere they do business and there’s a problem with shoplifting.
Two, what don’t work and don’t justify its expense? Gets replaced. Inevitably as sunrise after dawn. Current governance isn’t working? Well, then, what might?
This is how the Mafia wound up running entire states, after all. State won’t give you justice? Talk to Don Gambino; he likely will, if you’ve been good to him. He has an interest in keeping you sweet…
The assholes running our modern world have forgotten this, and they’re no longer worried about even paying lip service to the idea of serving the needs of their clientele. I guarantee you that Don Gambino wouldn’t have been breaking doors down to kill your pets, the way the almighty State of New York just did. He might have dropped by and asked for some money, sure, but he knows better than to kill for no damn reason. Or, he’ll be getting whacked, himself.
Part of the problem with the modern state is that its actors are too remote from consequence; they fear nothing, because nothing can touch them. Were that to change, I suspect that they’d be a bit more interested in actual customer service and keeping people happy.
It’s a hard thing when you have to acknowledge that actual Mafiosi could well be more humane than state agents. It’s also a damn good sign that you’ve allowed your government to get out of control.
Agree. Though I got mocked by a friend’s trans grandson (didn’t know he was her grandson at the time) for saying exactly that and by the way he carried himself. The obtuseness. It can be stunning at times. But again, the guy himself I don’t really blame too much. What nature (God?) did to him and people like him is horrible. His persistence is a problem but only in the context that no one with any significant power is willing to tell him he doesn’t belong. It’s those people that I blame. Especially if he does eventually kill some actual female.
The effort that I have put into trying to find a away to work “So have you ever been shot at in anger” into a job interview…well…
@WTP, who said:
See, this is the very point wherein you and others start to go off the rails with these things. You’re making a value judgment and ascribing responsibility for that essentially neutral event to something that’s beyond and utterly irrelevant to criticism. It simply is.
Because you’ve done that, you’ve effectively ceded moral high ground to the people behind making this asshole a competitor in women’s sports.
The reality? As we crass enlisted swine used to put it, sh*t happens. Can’t do anything about it, just deal with it.
In this case, what happened was that nature’s cure for the malformed fetus didn’t take place, and our protagonist wasn’t spontaneously aborted the way he should have been. Too bad, too sad… Nothing to be done about that, but I’m pretty sure his ancestors would have finished the job and left him on a convenient hillside slope, somewhere bordering on the Sahara. Wiser folk than we, these days.
You start by agreeing that something that happened, beyond the control of anyone, is “horrible”, then you’re setting yourself and the rest of us up for the follow-on, which is that you have an obligation to make up for that horror.
Me? I’m a heartless bastard; I’d simply tell the stupid bastard the facts of life, and then let him cope with it. I’m under no obligation to fix what nature wrought, and I dare say that unlike the unfortunate raccoon I met the other day, who was possessed of several birth defects, he’s not cute enough to keep alive for cuteness’s sake. I mean, the perv obviously knows he’s bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than other girls, so… Why does he get off on beating them up?
Similarly, you’ll note that he’s from Algeria. Wherein he is not expected to maintain the social norms for Muslima victims of Islam; he wears no hijab, he wanders through male spaces unmolested. They know; he knows. It’s a fraud, meant to enable beating the crap out of mostly Western women, who they all hate. And, of course, the Western women just love the abuse…
Nice trolling.
Sigh. Heavy sigh. Heavy sigh in a chicken basket. No. I thought I was pretty explicit in saying “no one with any significant power is willing to tell him he doesn’t belong. It’s those people that I blame. Especially if he does eventually kill some actual female.” The people making him a competitor, they should be condemned totally. In bold. Large font. With bells and whistles on. Including the women who got into the ring with him. In some ways I condemn those women even more. And their fathers and brothers. A heartless-bastard-that-I-am point that lost me a “conservative” Christian friend. No big deal. No great loss. To your “shit happens” point, yeah. Sure. We can play amoral universe as well. No God. Shit just happens. Still would suck to be that guy regardless as to whether nature has any ethics (actionality? Wtf the word I’m looking for..). What I am trying to get across is the attention on him is grossly misplaced. He is but a tool here. Not that he has moral high ground himself either. Just that the people around him are far, far more to blame than he is. I think my last thought about this issue was that any woman that he does eventually kill was effectively asking for it at this point.
And a very small one by report.
But no, he’s not a tool. Like every other man he has agency – his actions are his own, no matter if the culture around him approves or applauds.
Dammit, that was the word I was looking for in re to nature…but as to the boxer, I am not denying him agency either but..again…it is a mistake to put the focus on him. It’s not like we’re talking about a personality like Mohammed Ali. He’s nothing to speak of. It’s the IOC, the boxing sanctioning entities, the media, and the women willing to fight him who are the real problem and who deserve to be publicly called out and shamed.
I’m sure I’m not the only person whose bingo card had “appeal to sex-blindness”, and indeed our friend asked Warren why he’s so obsessed with penises in women’s locker rooms, whatabout the people who are uncomfortable about male genitalia in male locker rooms or female genitalia in female locker rooms, and surely the fair and rational thing is to treat all exposure the same unless it can be proven to be lewd.
Because society hasn’t yet processed the full implications of homosexual mainstreaming, people have still been working under the assumption that single sex spaces are celibate spaces, that introducing a person of a different sex breaks the celibacy which might be something desired by the group, and that somebody who wants to break into a single-sex/celibate space (with the other sex in the space – no fobbing off with spaces/times to change individually) has a sexual intent which the group has a right to be suspicious of.
But a fair and rational society won’t judge a man as a peeper or an exhibitionist for wanting access to women’s locker rooms. Instead the women in the room will be expected to judge him on the content of his character, which is impossible without being instantly able to read minds, and therefore there’s no admissible reason for assuming that his gaze is voyeuristic or his exposure is exhibitionist.
You just scribbled that in the free space. It’s not a thing and no amount of obfuscatory verbigeration will make it so.
A sane society will judge him as a clear and present danger & remove him forthwith.
Is bacon a spice? Are there any Muslims who might know about this? The free world is in good hands.
@WTP,
The point I meant to be making wasn’t an attack on you, but the whole idea of “Oh, this is horrible…”
No human being alive or dead had anything at all to do with the malformation of the fetus or the survival of that fetus into adulthood. “Horrible” doesn’t enter into it; it just is. Similarly, Helen Kellar had a horrible sort of situation going on, but there wasn’t anyone responsible for it. It just was.
So, there’s no reason to feel sorry for the boxing-creature, no reason to “compensate” them for their “misfortune”. The whole thing is an artifact of reality; ascribing either horror or pity to it is a massive mistake, because that’s the first step on the road that ends with this oversized, overmuscled asshole beating the crap out of much smaller actual, y’know… Female-type women.
That’s the point I’m getting at, here. He’s not deserving of pity, he’s not deserving of “horror”, or anything else. He is deserving of the truth, as are the truly unfortunate women they are setting against him in the boxing ring. That truth is quite simple: He is not a woman. Period. That is all that is “owed” him, nothing more, nothing less: The truth.
Things happen. It’s not your job to make them right, nor is it anyone elses. You want to bring in the divine, feel welcome to do so. Me? I just look at it as the random vagaries of a universe created with ineffable rules and goals; I am not to judge God, or his works. Judgment means saying “Oh, that’s horrible…” and “That poor thing, we must make things right for him…”
Ain’t your job, ain’t mine. There’s a principle that the Israeli Defense Forces teach, right there within what they call their Purity of Arms doctrine, their equivalent to our Code of Conduct and so forth. In it, they teach the principle that to take up a weapon and use it means that you’re taking up something of the divine, the power of life over death… And, they emphasize, you have to be mindful of that fact, and do your best to use that power responsibly and only when necessary.
So, too does it go in daily life. You want to pity this fake-female boxer? You want to term his/her/its existence “horrible”? Be aware that you’re taking up some of God’s power to judge, and making it your own. It isn’t your job or mine to make things right for this character, regardless what the numpties want you to believe. He’s gotten the short end of the stick; so be it. That does not give him license to use his advantages of size, strength, and general durability in order to beat the crap out of actual women, and the fact that he does so with such glee? He’ll be answering for that, sometime in the afterlife.
I pay attention to what people in his situation do with the shit sandwiches they’re handed. There’s a sweet young lady in my hometown, a Downs Syndrome “victim”. Wonderful human being, always has a smile for everyone, just a lovely individual to encounter; she betters the world.
By contrast, I know another Downs Syndrome sufferer, and that kid is an utter asshole to everyone. He delights in making trouble, hitting people, and then doing other things that he knows he’ll get away with. He’s high-functioning enough to know right from wrong, but he always chooses “wrong”. Very unpleasant individual to encounter…
Between the two of them, they illustrate both ends of the scale and the fact that it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it. If you bring more pain and hatred to the world, you’re not a good person. Period. Our boxer is in that second category, using their misfortune to batter others. You won’t see his sorry ass getting into the ring with Mike Tyson, will you? He likes being the bully, hurting women, taking their prizes away from them. He hates women; you can see that in the triumphal expression on his face when he wins. They’ve got something he’ll never, ever have.
Rather like the chip shop owner here in the UK who objected to a customer leaving a compliment for a delivery girl, there’s a sense in which some men’s claims of chivalry just don’t ring true, and in fact, are creepier than whatever they are complaining about.
Words used to mean things.
The mothers, we’re told, are “free to leave” their own toilets and changing rooms.
I would love to see these people independently invent the Castle Doctrine.
Yes, it’s one of more squirmy and slippery discussions I’ve seen in recent months. And so, if your single-sex space has been rendered unfit for purpose, you’re free to retreat and do without, but you’re not free to object, which would be insensitive, or to correct the situation. Because modesty, privacy and safety are merely things you’ve chosen to care about – by implication, needlessly.
Beneath the approximation of thoughtfulness, the disingenuous waffle, his assumption is that women should withdraw from their own spaces, surrender their personal territory, and do so regardless of any cultural, practical, or moral objection. Even the idea that such objections could exist is framed as fanciful, as if nothing of substance were being demanded. “If it impacts women,” says he, feigning incredulity.
It’s very nearly surreal.
Mr Harris Voter called to mind a more polished version of Minnow, a sophist troll who for a while took up lots of space at the old blog.
It’s also worth noting how Mr Harris Voter’s attempts at mental sophistication almost always point away from reality.
Our Betters learn the rules quite young.
@David, who pointed out:
This is the sign, really. The ideas are never, ever tested, nor are the results of any even accidental testing acknowledged or worked back into the original thesis.
That’s the major issue I have with almost everything of the Left; there’s all this supposed rigorous “scientific” thought surrounding it, but you can never find the slightest hint of anyone doing real science and testing any of their propositions.
Marx, for example? Where is the lasting legacy he left behind? Surely, a man of his wisdom and sagacity should have left dozens of still-functioning examples of his masterful thoughts behind? There have to be a lot of small factory collectives, and so forth… Right? Right…?
To be of the left is to be able to ignore these minor deficiencies, and to also continuously state that no matter how many failures there have been when someone has tried to implement it all, none of them have been “true communism”.
From this, one may take for a certainty that the leftward-leaning have to be inherently unable to recognize reality when it intrudes on their thoughts. I dare say that the vast majority in the Gulags under Stalin were likely still convinced that they had it right, Comrade Stalin loved them, and it was those damn middle-management types who were munging it all up and persecuting them…
This is still on display in modern Russia.
Speaking of Our Betters.
Mighty titans. Hear them roar.
Well, Mr Harris Voter does seem to be directing quite a lot of effort to avoiding some rather obvious considerations. It’s not so much an argument or a position as a rhetorical sleight of hand. But if your worldview, your political persona, is governed by Designated Victim Groups and their positions in some shifting hierarchy, incoherence and dishonesty are all but inevitable. As is betrayal.
And so, for instance, the implied imperative to be sensitive and indulgent seems oddly unilateral. Because there’s a New And Shiny Victim Group in town. And one doesn’t want to be seen wearing last season’s concerns.
That. It’s AbFab but with politics.
Heh. Very much so. I think it plays a significant part in the dramas we’ve been seeing. And it would explain farcical situations like this one here, in which progressive women merrily sell out other women, their supposed sisters – schoolgirls – and sell them out to a pervert – in order to be seen being progressive and therefore high-status.
A concern for the basic safeguarding of schoolchildren being so old hat, you see. No cool points there, darling.
As a matter of fact, a Very Smart Person* once asked me that, as if it refuted my objections to men in women’s locker rooms. I replied that it was entirely reasonable for straight men to object to being ogled by gay men. He wasn’t pleased.
* Yet another Mensa asshole.
Our Betters learn the rules quite young.
This recently came up in a conversation regarding polling, but, as has been demonstrated herein repeatedly, going to school for a long time does not automatically equal educated, and these days rather the opposite.
Yes, a BFO, but bears repeating.
And again, note the fairly explicit connotations of status.
The list of demands is quite long and utterly insane. It includes preferential treatment for “persons of color” and “a say in editorial decisions, including the right to request letters to the editor not be published.”
Again, I rather miss the concept of shame.
This pre-planned “hot take” reminds me of what creeped me out about Starmer and Labour: While they were campaigning it was all focus-group tested talking points. There was no authenticity there, partly because the figureheads of the parties either have no personality or are inherently unlikable people.
Then they get into power and they are tyrants, making policy that goes against the interests of the people they supposedly represent.
And yet, in all my lifetime going to gyms, I do not recall this ever happening. Or maybe I’m just not their type. In fact, it is not nearly the same thing. Even a trans XY in a female locker room who is NOT ogling anyone is clearly violating the space and freaking out the ladies.
‘Moral invulnerability card’.
Absolutely. And to whom might that appeal?
The morally bereft.
Indeed. As a child I was immersed in such a culture and only unlearned its assumptions in adulthood.