hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
To be clear, progressives don’t have an answer for this. The case for conservative views on trans is at least coherent enough to put in simple words- a woman is a biologically female adult human, trans women by definition are not that, ergo trans women are not women. The case for progressive views on trans is not that, and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
Because the point of 'climate advocacy' isn't controlling the weather. It's demanding every left wing idea under the sun get enacted, and spending trillions to do it. See also: nuclear energy.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans
Where are the republicans inventing new legal theories to prosecute their political opponents? Where are the republicans forcing businesses to boycott their opponents organizations? Where are the republicans using partisan organizations assessments of their ideological opposites as a justification to enact a domestic spying program?
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Attempting to summarize the ideas of red tribe normies around me
-Putin is not popular. Russophiles are acknowledged to exist but seen in the same way hardcore conspiracy theorists in, say, 2010 would be. That being said, ‘Russia is our enemy but Ukraine is not our friend’ is a good summary of the popular consciousness.
-Most people are aware that EG Poland and Greece are much poorer than the US per capita but believe that France, Germany, the UK, etc have lower personal incomes mostly due to very high tax rates and that these societies have similar resources to Marshall for defense to the US once you adjust for population size. There is little sympathy for euro defense budgets.
-This is the main military recruitment demographic in the U.S., especially for the combat branches. There is no appetite whatsoever for their sons coming home in body bags. On the other hand, most believe that in the event of a major war a draft is just, necessary, and correct. That it would be extremely unpopular is something politicians should consider before putting boots on the ground. The cultural memory of stop lossing and national guard deployments abroad is alive and well.
-Most support America as #1, hate and fear red China, and believe Islam needs to be repressed. But there is widespread disapproval of the, uh, social and cultural goals associated with US foreign policy.
-Japanese rearmament is extremely popular; so are Israeli and South Korean conscription. France, Germany, Britain, etc are viewed as freeloaders that should follow their example instead of relying on American protection. Many think they should cut their welfare budgets to pay for it. British and German hate speech laws are widely hated and seen as evidence that they don’t share our values.
-Most accept that non-US powers are allowed to have interests and advocate for them. But they do not want the US to advocate for the interests of these countries, or fund those interests.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
The majority of the J6 prisoners had the book thrown at them for minor crimes and impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask- on the contrary, I think the pardon power is fine. Instead, weaponization of the justice system is the problem- and most of the j6 defendants would already be out without it.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
It is illegal to kill the poor, and in point of fact the pro-life movement is fighting(and, it must be said, generally losing this fight) against the killing of the elderly and chronically ill. There is nothing inconsistent about being pro-life; this is simply a very progressive man dressing up his progressivism in the guise of Christian religion. There’s nothing particularly unique about this; lots of people wrap their ideology in the trappings of local religions. There’s also little that’s particularly Christian; no doubt this pastor would point out, accurately, that Jesus wants us to be better people. But so does Confucius and Kant and Aristotle and president trump and, presumably, Chuck E. Cheese. Jesus also wants us to believe in Him and bring all nations to belief in Him, and I doubt this pastor mentions that part much.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Feminists give horrible advice like this all the time. I’m not sure why they do this; most seem to think there’s a noble lie involved.
I 100% guarantee you this woman would find an offer of menstrual products creepy and off putting, and that she will not talk about her period IRL any more than she would talk about shitting or blowing her nose.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I agree it seems strange, but not nearly as odd as BLM blowing up in countries with basically no black people.
This is not the first case of weird leftist obsessions crossing country boundaries in random ways.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
Little House on the Prairie
This is actually a fascinating series because it actually happened and so can be presumed an accurate reflection of reality for at least a certain slice of the population. It's not just the Victorian equivalent of a soap opera. There's quite a bit of, well, values dissonance in Laura's childhood, too, and not just about the racial attitudes of the adults around her. Strict gender roles, teenagers grow up as fast as they damn well please but don't get to do it by half measures, fairly extreme forms of corporal punishment are normal and unremarked upon, dad rules over mom with no dispute, little to no age segregation, liberated women are viewed as unlikable and possibly insane, teenaged girls gossip about which adult bachelor they're going to marry and angle for their attention quite openly, etc, etc. There's a scene in one of the books in which teenaged boys physically exclude an unpopular teacher from school, and this is treated as normal, expected behavior that occasionally just happens. As long as boys learn to read and do arithmetic, it isn't particularly important whether they earn any formal credentials from their schooling.
The books take place in a time of very rapid change; they're a story of a family going from subsistence farming, to more comfortable subsistence farming, to commercial farming, with the daughter marrying a man in his twenties at 15 and becoming the wife of a commercial farmer. It deals with her early years as a married woman, including the infant mortality rate of the time, fading premodern social structures for labor allocation, etc. It touches on then-current social issues including temperance(Laura is in favor), women's suffrage(Laura is against, and doesn't understand why suffragettes are in favor), and immigration(she's undecided). The main character works two jobs- once, as a seamstress, there's a subtext that maybe her parents hope this will lead to her meeting men who are unmarried(otherwise why would they hire it out) and wealthy enough to hire it out, and then as a teacher, where she begins seeing Almanzo- because he obtains her father's permission to take her back and forth between the school she works at and her family home. Her mom isn't too happy about this but her dad thinks it's a great idea, and so she never even thinks to push back on it. There's social and technological change in the background; the Ingalls stop trying to outrun the expansion of the railroad in about the fourth book, set themselves up as commercial farmers, and eventually mechanize. In the first book Laura fantasizes about eating meat as a special treat. They get a sewing machine, ride on a train, and even buy their first refrigerated food. The books take place in the aftermath of the civil war, and figures from the civil war are mentioned in an offhand, recent-history ish way like people might talk about prominent early-2000's people today.
The books are worth reading just to see how people two lifetimes ago thought about the world.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Imane Khalid is not trans. There’s a reasonable- but not ironclad- argument that she has an intersex condition which should preclude her from competing in the women’s division, but she just objectively isn’t trans.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Secular Media Reporting on Poor RCC Governance by Pope Francis
https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/
So, having access to sources of information not available to the general public, none of this really comes as a revelation, and there's a bunch of biased narration and low level mistakes, but the reporting is broadly accurate. Or rather, delivers big picture accuracy while distorting the true stories of lots of specific incidents to reflect the author's liberal biases. Like here:
Last year, for example, a landmark declaration allowing clerical blessings for same-sex couples was diluted after a fiasco involving religious musings on the nature of orgasms.
What they're referring to is Pope Francis' #2 being revealed to have authored erotic poetry(and a book on kissing entitled "Heal me with your Mouth") and trying to defend himself by calling it theology. It was a scandal but didn't have much to do with the backlash to gay blessings, which was the global south against progressives. African bishops declared their opposition to Fiducia Supplicans, in partnership with the eastern rites, as a group and got concessions.
What the article gets right, I think, is doing a pretty good job of summarizing the pope's inability to hold his own coalition together, and accurately noting that this occurs in an environment where most senior churchmen are laser-focused on the possibility of a conclave very soon. It also begins to convey his immense personal unpopularity with Vatican insiders; even cardinal Parolin is campaigning for the conclave by emphasizing their dissimilarities. I like this anecdote:
“Read the document[Fiducia Supplicans],” said a Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak openly about a pope he described as vindictive toward critics. “It says: well, obviously you cannot bless a homosexual relationship, because from a Catholic point of view, it’s sinful. However, we will invent a new form of blessing. It’s not a sacramental blessing, it’s a ‘fracramental flessing.’ It looks almost like a blessing, and if you run sideways, and do it in under ten seconds, and keep it totally spontaneous…”
The chief problem, the official added, is that the pontiff has an overriding need to do everything his way, often at the expense of ideological coherence. “Most of his energy goes into hiding what he thinks, hiding who he is, and hiding what he’s going to do, in an almost neurotic way,” the official complained. “He keeps what he wants to do even from himself as long as possible, in order to be totally unexpected in what he does.”
This is not the way to win friends and influence people in an oligarchy of elderly true-believing academics.
It doesn’t help that, in all likelihood, the Pope is not long for this world. At 87 and with only one intact lung, he struggles to breathe, suffers bouts of pneumonia, and is perennially in and out of hospital. Every public cough generates macabre headlines. Meanwhile, he has largely failed to appoint enough allies to the College of Cardinals to guarantee a like-minded successor, and liberals wonder whether he will leave any progressive legacy at all.
This is perhaps understating things; many of the cardinals appointed as Francis allies turned on him over something or other, often personal falling outs or mismanagement driven by the tendency referenced above. Factually one of the top papabile in the next conclave, cardinal Pizzaballa, is a recent Francis appointee now campaigning among the conservatives, and the largest initial powerblock in the next conclave is likely to be backers of cardinal Erdo's promise to reign as Benedict XVII. It also understates the mood in the Vatican that pope Francis is going to die any day now.
The current synod has invariably stoked the fears of conservatives who see it as a Trojan horse for an insidious woke agenda. As if in confirmation, the synod’s own leaders have cast it as the last great hope for introducing real structural reform: “If we miss this experience, we will not be effective in our mission,” Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod on Synodality’s secretary general, told POLITICO in his Vatican office, a portrait of the pontiff smiling down from the wall behind him. “And then the future will be bleak.”
Cardinal Hollerich, the Synod’s relator general, acknowledged that the goal of the synod is rather more aspirational — to seed a culture of inclusivity and dialogue that could, perhaps, lead to doctrinal reform, somewhere down the line. Holy See spokesperson Matteo Bruni said its core aim was to foster “greater involvement of the people of God” in pastoral and administrative Church matters, pointing to early successes in the Eastern Church. But he emphasized that it wouldn’t delve into the other big questions — the Synod on Synodality, as its name suggests, would be entirely self-referential.
I wanted to highlight these two paragraphs- the progressive faction(of which cardinal Hollerich is more or less the leader and one of the more extreme examples thereof) is dispirited, weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s), extremely high average age, and ties to an unpopular and more moderate than commonly perceived pope. All the way up and down the totem pole, progressive Catholics are cynical, expect to lose, and increasingly too depressed to even grasp at straws.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Evil vs incompetent is, at this level, a false dichotomy. These doctors are lying to cover up their ideologically-driven confusion. That’s both those things.
Communism is bad at managing agricultural production. That’s not because it intends to cause famine, that’s because its prescriptions are retarded. But that doesn’t make it blameless. Likewise doctors confidently mouthing off ideologically-driven answers to questions that the available evidence indicates a different answer two.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Is Nullification on the Horizon?
Recently the Biden admin rewrote some regulations to encode gender identity in title IX. While this is stupid, it's not something that in itself seems likely to be a productive motte top level post. Ken Paxton sued the white house over it, but this is just the default assumption about federal administrative rules on culture war topics. No, what I'm getting at is the letter from Greg Abbott:
Dear President Biden: Title IX was written by Congress to support the advancement of women academically and athletically. The law was based on the fundamental premise that there are only two sexes—male and female. You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they were girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity. This ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX exceeds your authority as President.
I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate. Your rewrite of Title IX not only exceeds your constitutional authority, but it also tramples laws that I signed to protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting men from competing against female athletes. Texas will fight to protect those laws and to deny your abuse of authority.
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/O-BidenJoseph1.pdf
I guess telling the federal government to kick rocks back in January and getting away with it set a precedent- and, obviously, Joe Biden is not going to send the troops in to escort male athletes into the high school girl's locker room in an election year.
This obviously raises the question- are we on the cusp of an era where big state governors feel free to resist the federal government? Obviously, being combative with the Biden admin is a political winner for Greg Abbott. It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year; I don't think he thinks he can get away with bullying New or old Mexico but the strongman image requires something. And, of course, are Ron Desantis and Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul watching closely and learning? Will they resist Trump policies as brazenly(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance) as Abbott does Biden's, given that he's emboldened by a base which may not be pro-secession but is absolutely confident Texas would be fine if it did happen?
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I (very quietly)consider myself to be, well, not quite ex-gay but certainly ex-bi, and the median representative of the camp which hates conversion therapy has never quite figured out what they’re actually saying, while the median conversion therapist does less than a homeopath. There is an extremely broad range of things covered under the label ‘conversion therapy’- ranging from electric shocks while looking at gay porn to forced non-sexual same sex bonding to talk therapy. There’s a typical motte and Bailey, obviously, but the electric shocks thing is genuinely both stupid and harmful. And lots of cranks and charlatans are genuinely happy to tell you they can turn you straight, for a price. But conversely most of the opponents of conversion therapy seem to honestly not care one way or another if it works, it should be banned because fewer homosexuals is an inherently bad thing.
For the record, I used a sort of variant of courage international(the one Antonin Scalia’s son is a chaplain for) without going through courage international the organization. I certainly think it worked well enough and was probably good for me in ways other than just no longer wanting to have gay sex(which, whether or not it’s morally evil, is very definitely an unhealthy habit which is worth discouraging).
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?
Who/whom.
You also, as walterodim points out below, have a situation where there’s no language to describe sexual bad behavior other than ‘unconsensual’. I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her, but it’s not rape. And feminism simply doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘it’s a scummy thing that everyone involved has consented to’, nor does it have any ability to conceptualize the need for that vocabulary.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
I think kulak you’re overlooking a hugely relevant variable- people have kids when they expect to enjoy raising them.
The lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asian countries where childhoods are by all accounts horribly unpleasant for all involved and middle income trapped postsoviet crapholes where grinding poverty combines with anti-natal memes to make raising children suck.
American red tribers love raising kids, being ‘fun/cool aunts/uncles’, babysitting, being youth mentors, etc. Yes, including the women- being a mom is high status and redneck girls’ instagram is basically Morgan Wallen and mom-influencers posting their kids being cute. Charities to connect at risk youth with mentorship advertise on the fishing channel for a reason, too.
I have no direct experience with Israel or much with conservative Jewish culture, I do not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, but it’s worth noting that Israel has the highest alloparenting rate in the world- parents report getting more help from friends and family. This seems like it gestures towards something similar.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
GOP for many decades despite essentially voting against their economic interests?
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could
This sounds suspiciously like ‘Everything chairman Mao says is true. One of his words will overcome 10,000 of ours.’ And realistically she appears to be brainwashing teenagers(this step is not difficult) into making a power grab for her. It is a notable feature of wokeness that there is functionally no way to push back against this: Keisha might be an observable bad actor, but she is also a well credentialed black woman with appropriate ideological views, and telluride is so open minded it’s brain fell out and got replaced by woke.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
The actual lyrics of the song are 'I still can't see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don't see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I'm the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don't understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler nigger heil Hitler they don't understand the things I say on twitter all my niggers nazis nigger heil Hitler'. This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.
I agree that the WWII taboo is fading. I don't think a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in an act of rebellion is the sign thereof.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
The school board wasn’t thinking. They’re teachers and they were going with the flow. It is literally incomprehensible to teachers that ‘the experts’, however defined, can be wrong. Like if you suggest it they’ll stare at you blankly, literally not understanding the words you just said. And the experts suggested kids should be taught this stuff, so teachers concluded ‘parents who want to shield their toddlers from learning about BDSM should lose custody of their kids’ instead of ‘the experts should be shot’.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
What is actually wrong with working at a nail factory? It’s not advice I would give to a bright young man, but, like, somebody has to be willing to work at a nail factory, and the continuing availability of nails is more vital to our civilization than further refinements in advertising software.
There are plenty of people who aren’t college material and aren’t cut out for the trades or the army. What would you have them do? A factory job is usually a step up from McDonald’s. It’s better than being a welfare parasite.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
As far as I can tell, Greenpeace has never been reasonable, and their anti-nuclear power campaigns are evidence of Just Not Being Willing To Be Happy With Anything, Ever. Seriously, the only alternative at scale to nuclear power is fossil fuels unless you have particularly fortuitous geography. Greenpeace also does things like protest against sustainable fisheries and cross-pollinates heavily with hardcore nuts like animal rights groups, to the extent of providing some amount of cover for ecoterrorists.
Campaigning against golden rice therefore is just another case of Don't Want Anything To Get Done. I'm critical of this tendency in my ingroup; I'm far less sympathetic of it in far-outgroup types like greenpeace.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”
I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.
Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Obviously this situation is retarded- did you expect blue collar workers doing nasty, physically demanding, unpleasant, and not well esteemed work were in it for the exercise? Self-fulfillment?
I suspect these coullions literally did think that garbage collectors and grave diggers went to work because they’d be bored otherwise. It certainly seems like the class behind wokeness has no concept of ‘people go to work so they aren’t homeless beggars’.
Individual citizens can call their council members and burn their trash(yeah, it probably takes a ‘not getting the plague’ license). Not a lot to be done though.
I want to point out the cynical case- trans activists are terrible allies and abandoning them could easily be the woke coalition telling its most difficult members to know their place, not the decline of woke.
Trans activists are demanding, high drama, unsympathetic(at a basic level, they’re mentally ill people who look like either very ugly women or very weak men, which is not a very high status thing to be or something that finds it easy to garner sympathy), have no real message discipline, and tend to overextend themselves picking fights that they then expect to be bailed out of. ‘Teaching these people to be team players’ could very well take the form of letting them lose a few battles and telling them to deal with it.
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