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.
It does happen. Although often it is done rather surreptitiously. And in retrospect, I wonder about the men who were always present in the showers and locker rooms when, as a young naive boy, I was taking swimming lessons.
Of course, nor did I imply that it was. I merely noted a related issue that came up when arguing with wokesters who refuse to recognize social boundaries.
@pst314, who spake thusly:
I’ve been calling out the Emperor on his nudity for a long, long time. Ever since I first noticed this as a teenager, and chose not to “further my education”.
Today’s “education” is more of a game than it is anything resembling the classic ideals of scholarly learning, and it is my contention that it, along with most of the rest of the mess we’ve made of things civilizational, needs very badly to be assessed and judged strictly on performance and real-world results.
If you graduate someone from your institution, hand them a degree that says “I are a trained economist”, and they start saying and voting for things the way our infamous bartender congresswoman from New York has? That degree and that school ought to be severely downgraded, to the extent that someone investigates them for educational malpractice. Everyone with a degree from that school ought to be up in arms, because of what that one graduate has done to devalue it.
Likewise, if you give someone a degree in engineering or management, then they go out and build bridges that collapse, or run companies into the ground? That fact ought to have effects back at the institutional level. As in, losing accreditation and all the degrees you’ve issued being thrown out.
No accountability? No responsibility. Which is why nobody cares about it all.
Frankly, I think that if you’re running a school, and your graduates can’t find a job? You should be sued out of existence.
The universities and colleges are the ones who got us into this whole “credential uber alles” mess, and they ought to be held accountable for all the deleterious effects it has had.
It’s an unfortunate thing, but “credentials” concept inevitably turns into a racket, one wherein the paper on your wall means more than your actual worth and accomplishments. Which is a civilization-killer, in the long run.
Let us not forget the efforts of the federal government with its grants, subsidies, and subsidies disguised as loans. They’ve done as much to devalue the worth of higher education as any of the universities and colleges.
@aelfheld,
Griggs vs. Duke Power didn’t happen “just because” the government chose to get involved. If you go looking into the background, the whole thing stank of academia; there was a decade or more of legal academic theory behind that decision, and the academy was waiting in the wings with a “solution”: Make every job require a degree, a certification… Something they happened to have a monopoly on providing.
Never mind reality, which is that the people they weren’t testing any more did horribly on the actual jobs.
You have to go back and look at the whole picture of how Griggs got leveraged into being the “law of the land”. Academics were involved, and I remain entirely unconvinced by their protestations of innocence. They sold the nation a bill of goods, saying that everything would be better if only everyone had their pieces of paper.
What wound up happening is that they massively devalued the worth of their own product, and saddled us with generations of “properly credentialed” drones with no real skills or abilities, as well as being entirely out of touch with reality in the workplace, ‘cos the academics couldn’t be troubled to go out and ensure that what they were teaching was in alignment with that which was being done and was necessary.
Triumph of theater over reality, really. Have you met any primary-level teachers, lately? How many of them would you trust teaching your dog obedience?
When my Mom was still teaching (into her late seventies…) the crap I’d find from other teachers in her office was truly depressing. I found a note, once, helping her pack up for the summer, and I thought “Hey, this isn’t bad for a second-grader…”
It was from a teacher. With a f*cking Masters degree in Education. Handwriting, grammer, and spelling? All at about what I’d term early primary grade level. She’s teaching those kids… Most of my Mom’s peers couldn’t grammar their way out of a wet paper bag, and they’re the ones teaching. The admin staff was even worse, because they’re all failed teachers someone felt sorry for, and gave admin jobs to so they’d stay employed. It’s the ignorant and dumb teaching the kids, these days.
And lest we forget, Edina and Patsy are meant to be juvenile and grotesque.
Griggs vs. Duke Power was decided in 1971. Federal subvention of higher education started in 1944. Colleges & universities obviously cheered it on, but it seems unlikely academia would have metastasised absent the stimulus of a growing stream of taxpayer money.
@aelfheld,
And, who, pray tell, made up the government? Going back to Woodrow Wilson? Were there any voices inside the government speaking for the unindoctrinated masses?
Academia captured government back during Wilson’s era, and spent the rest of the century entrenching and reinforcing their position. Try running for office, or getting a high-level executive job without academic credentials… You’ll be laughed at, hysterically.
It’s a self-reinforcing circle of idiocy, when you get down to it. Take a long, hard look at the EPA folks who killed a thousand miles of river, and examine their fates. Credentialed, all.
https://billwhittle.com/the-outside-inside/
This is well worth the listen.
Also, is on point for what we’re discussing. The whole of it can be framed as a new aristocracy enforcing its whims on the rest of us…
Two mutually exclusive but simultaneously popular dogmas of my youth:
1. Everyone should go to college to get fully educated and become ideal citizens.
2. “Those people” just aren’t smart like us.
@pst314
Personally, I thought the bits that were particularly revealing and disgraceful, from a bunch of people demanding more pay, were these:
“four-day work week … non-performance-based bonuses”
Bunch of non STEM “educated”, largely comprising “AWFULs”, with a huge opinion of themselves, disparaging of working class white men…and utterly useless, lazy, good for nothing.
Women, all through recorded history, were tough, of course not in the same way as men, but in terms of being able to deal with childbirth without modern meds, dealing with families without the household machines we take for granted, even able to step in and run factories when men were away fighting the enemy.
Not these women, though, even as they are great at talking girl power etc.
The whole thing was a hot mess of stupid and crazy and evil. Which items to pick out for special attention depends on whether you’re focusing at the moment on the sexual and racial politics, or the commissar-wannabe BS, or the slacker utopia fantasies.
@pst314, who observed:
One of the biggest takeaways I’ve gotten, looking at US unions and their usual shenanigans is that the vast majority of them are totally disconnected from reality, namely that they’re actually parasites, and that a parasite which kills its host is going to die along with said host…
Everything they do, from protecting bad employees to demanding impossible benefits packages sucks vitality out of the enterprise. They’re also all too short-sighted to realize that; the entire transaction between labor union and company is generally dysfunctional. You want good employees? Pay them. You want jobs? Make sure the company stays in profitable business.
Most US employees could care less about the company; they’ll stab the owners and the company as an entity in the back in a heartbeat, even if that means losing their jobs. Likewise, many companies utterly fail to recognize that their existence relies on the employees more than anything besides providing actual customer value.
David: I’ll bet you a $50 donation against you saying something nice about American English that this lowlife has a significant arrest record. If only he’d off himself…
“Reimagining public safety” should mean locking up criminals & ostracizing leftists.
@pst314, who correctly pointed out this:
I don’t think you go far enough. Leftists are natural criminals; they want to take the fruits of other’s labor as their own and “redistribute” them. That’s what they do; it’s what they’ve always done.
The Democrats came out of the Southern “Aristocratic” tradition; they thought they were gentlemen, nature’s noblemen, who should not have to work. Ever. Go back and look at the history of the early party, and what they believed. You read their papers and works, what you find is an utter disdain for the “working man” or anyone of the merchant classes. The Brits drove a lot of their scummy aristos out of the British Isles after Cromwell came in, and they mostly wound up in the South. Same people; same attitudes; same crooked bullshit.
When the leftists came along, after 1848? What you found was that the ideology was attractive as hell to the deposed aristocratic class, who took it up with enthusiasm. As well, it appealed to the aspirational middle-class types who thought that because they were educated, they ought to be running things. Same sort of people Napoleon recruited for his idiotic Grandes Ecoles thing. Totally insane outcome; you can see the results across France today, with the “brilliant credentialed class” running everything into the ground. As in Germany, where the same sorts are behind the Greens and their idiotic destruction of the German energy industry.
There’s a reason the left is soft on crime, and it’s the same reason they’re soft on Islam: They are all natural allies, wannabe aristos that cannot tolerate anyone telling them no. That deal with the squirrel in New York? Classic leftoid action; the idea that they were overreaching their powers? Not something they were capable of understanding.
My take on it is that you have to cull the population of leftists every so often. You can do that by offering them free helicopter rides, or you can simply refuse to put up with their bullshit and put them in prison right next to the assholes they love so much.
The longer I live, the less patience I have with these idiots. I’ve been listening to their waily-waily-woe BS since I was a kid, and not a damn thing they said about anything was at all accurate. I remember the way that Reagan was Satan incarnate, and that he’d get us into WWIII… Didn’t happen, did it? Every oppositional politician to them is Hitler; I want to know where the death camps are, because I feel like most of the Democratic Party is living on borrowed time, and overdue for a trip through the ovens… Based on what they’ve been telling us. Just like the goddamn weather; why am I having to service my damn snowblower again, this fall? Sumbitches promised me some goldarned Globull Warmening, and I ain’t seeing it. Crooks, all of them…
You can do that by offering them free helicopter rides
Honestly, he’s not my sock puppet, I swear.
I keep checking my ass for the hand, and coming up “Nope…”
The election news coming in this morning on this side of the pond is nothing short of delicious. But I don’y want to count any chickens just yet…
pst314: “David: I’ll bet you a $50 donation against you saying something nice about American English that this lowlife has a significant arrest record. If only he’d off himself…”
Has he broken into the three figure convictions yet? If not, I think that’s what you call a ‘piker’ over there. Not to be confused with a ‘pikey’ over here!
The suspense is unbearable.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Trump is taking the stage. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5614615980001
Looks like a sweep: presidency, senate, house.
.
[ Refreshes election websites, paces back and forth. ]
Mr Harris Voter does not have difficulties with the basic concepts. He knows exactly what Warren is talking about. He knew it as a kid and he knows it now.
The trouble is that he’s a sociopath, and he’s engaging in elaborate sophistry, because sociopaths absolutely love muddying the waters and playing fast and loose with facts and most of all, they love disrupting societal norms.
He knows exactly what he’s doing. Warren is exposing his sophistry for what it is. Mr Harris Voter might not be conscious of how bad he looks to most people, but he’s having a grand old time talking in circles and being slippery and feigning ignorance.
Bless Warren for his patience. I hope he knows that he was dealing with a profoundly dishonest person.