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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
Crazy left wing stuff isn’t over yet. And likely comes back if they get a sniff of power.
Trans still exists. For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal. We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization. The WNBA is actually considering letting men into the league….or at a bare minimum can’t come out and say this is dumb and unworkable. It was only 25 years ago when the most popular tv show of all time executed a person for being gay.
Hasan Piker is only being “talked about” being excommunicated from the Democratic Party despite advocating destruction of white people (whose funnily is 100% white; probably Roman or Greek blood that was by the sword converted to Islam).
It’s not about overreach on a political mandate. Some ideas don’t work. People on the right wanting a lot of deportations are likely correct. We have opinion polls. Only white people favor capitalism, liberalism, and democracy. Which is a big reason why I’ve become facism adjacent because it seems clear to me as currently structured western culture is dead without radical action. Maybe we just haven’t tried to assimilate them hard enough. I’d rather vote for fascists Caesar and get to keep liberalism and capitalism than wait 50 years and lose all 3.
So yes the left still has a lot of wacky ideas. The broader left coalition can’t keep those people in check.
AOC was kind of funny freezing her eggs recently. Shes 36. She’s been with her bf for 8 years. You either get pregnant or you dump your bf and freeze your eggs. But maybe she would lose the 20 something female vote if she had a kid or something.
Edit: AOC broke up with her fiance 5 years ago. So the freezing eggs things makes sense.
Not always. People like that, along with the mentally challenged/mentally ill and standing out by other characteristics (e.g. albinos or twins) could be considered unlucky/unnatural and be sacrificed or killed.
Or they might be considered taboo, which was always on the fine edge between being auspicious and inauspicious. Strange edge cases like that were the province of the spirits or the gods, and could be intermediaries between our world and the world of the ancestors/spirits. You might have a crossdressing shaman, but this was not something for ordinary people (the berdache system is something woefully misunderstood and I think modern progressivism has made interpretation of what exactly was going on even murkier and hard to disinter, see the Wikipedia edit on it which can't sufficiently spit in disgust on the horrid European repugnance of it all).
Certainly it was not something to be considered "and this is just like Real Women/Real Men" but now we insist on "and this is exactly precisely the same, see how trans women get their monthly periods on HRT".
What you mean "we", kemosabe? The people who think that transwomen get real periods are laughed at in public by normies and in private by other transactivists.
But laughing is considered rude, don't you know? It's called just being a decent person, bigot! To be polite and kind! To go along with the fantasies!
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How does that help when in public they enable them at every step?
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What show are you thinking of? What I think of as the most popular show didn't have this, at least that I recall.
"Jerry and I are just friends! Not that there is anything wrong with that."
Sopranos. Vito was killed when it came out he was homosexual. But it was by the NY Family and his own family thought about it but felt hurt when the NYC guys did it for them.
I wasn’t sure if I should state it directly or just give a reference for the reader to be like I know the reference.
Also an element thatTony wanted it to be clean and quick, if it had to happen, but the NY guys tortured Vito before killing him . The way you phrased it was pretty funny though, makes it sound like The Sopranos crew were actually executing the guys who died in the show. "Sorry, Joe, Vito got whacked. You know what happens now..."
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ChatGPT thinks he's referring to a character in The Sopranos, an episode that came out in 2006. I haven't seen The Sopranos though, so I can't comment.
My other guess was The Wire, but neither are depicting morality of the society at large, and I think you still see depictions of homophobia its just very strongly the outgroup doing it.
Google thinks it's the murder of Scott Amedure on The Jenny Jones Show.
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Non sequitur, unless by 'crazy left-wing stuff' you mean 'anything Jack Chick didn't like'. Trans people existing does not, in my view, belong in the same bucket as 'refusing to acknowledge biological sex even in medical contexts where it is relevant', 'condemning anyone who refers to the previous name of a trans celebrity even if they were famous under that name', and 'cancelling anyone who doesn't participate in the cancellation of anyone not on board with the cancellation of anyone who disagrees with the trans community'.
One, that was not universal across all civilisations (and they also varied widely in which garments were considered to belong to which gender); two, there have been many things which were considered 'normal' for thousands of years, until we realised that they were inflicting enormous unnecessary suffering, and moved beyond them.
We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.
Bit of an is-ought affair.
IMO we, not even getting into who we might be, should focus more on being disciplined, productive, realistic and very very suspicious of others trying to trick us, kindness and normalness both be damned. That is what I think current-year demands.
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I will note that "trans still exists" could be read not only as "transsexuals still exist", but also as "trans ideology still exists", and even "substantial official deference to trans ideology still exists".
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No, we should be normal. We tried being kind, and then the definition of what kind is shifted from "refraining from outright laughing in their faces" to "wholeheartedly playing along with their delusion at all times". Now, "being kind" just means outright lying because a person prefers lies to truth.
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From my point of view the majority of new trans since the great awokening are - FtM - mental illness and social contagion in young women. MtF - sexual fetish.
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Misdirected empathy is what got us in this mess in the first place. I have no problem with 'being kind', but only when it is appropriate to do so. Unrestrained 'kindness' is effectively cultural AIDS and will lead to further eradication of the West as things stand.
Here's a brilliant article on why "just be kind" produces bad policy.
(I like the author of this article, it would be so cool if he also posted on The Motte.)
I do!
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How? Demanding that new definitions for "man" and "woman", and a belief if in "gender" be adopted is far beyond anything I recall seeing in a Chick Tract. The practice of Gender Affirming Care can also be rejected on the basis that it's pseudoscientific garbage, rather than "Jack Chick didn't like it".
Still a lot more universal than pro-trans people like to believe. A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.
There is nothing kind about accepting transgenderism, though.
The parent poster fantasises about stoning, a punishment that is only known/relevant in our cultural context due to its preservation in the memetic time capsule of the Levant ca. 500BC that is Old Testament Christianity. The reference to Jack Chick, as one of the most internet-famous proponents of Old Testament morality, is apt enough.
(All the more so because I don't even think the Old Testament, or other historical texts, tend to opine particularly strongly on transsexualism or crossdressing per se. Once you get into "apply Old Testament punishments to modern American bugbears, while entertaining the belief that this is a human universal" territory, Jack Chick becomes a very iconic choice indeed.)
No, the old testament very explicitly condemns cross dressing- although from the perspective of believers who hold the prohibition still in force, the more common example is women in pants.
The point of the OT prohibition on cross-dressing is that the two sexes should be visually distinctive so you can tell from a distance whether you are dealing with a man or a woman. The practical application of this rule is easy in almost all cases.
For example, male and female Highland dress are completely different, despite both involving a skirted bottom.
Similarly, although some women wearing trousers are doing so to be deliberately androgynous, nobody could think a Hilary Clinton pantsuit was anything other than ladieswear and a man wearing one would be cross-dressing.
In the context of western culture, "men only wear a skirted garment as part of full traditional Highland dress, and women only wear a garment with divided legs when doing work or sports for which a skirt is unsuitable" is a good fence around the rule against cross-dressing which I find broadly reasonable if you accept the rule.
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This kind of creates a circular reference, though, since the OT has nothing carved in stone about what 'women's clothing' and 'men's clothing' is, and who/what the deciding factor as to what article becomes for what gender is.
(If 'intent of the person creating the clothing', then pants are women's clothes and skirts are men's clothes [re: kilts], so it can't be that. If interpreting that as 'the clothes that provide sexual designation', that seems like a better dividing line, but it still suffers from the fact that to everyone else, pants aren't sexual designators any more- dresses and undergarments, sure, but that's not usually what they're restricting themselves to.)
I think that "women must never wear pants" is just an excuse to be traditionalist for the sake of traditionalism (or "fostering group cohesion by believing odd things"/"set apartness", if you prefer), or at least that appears to be the intent behind doing that.
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If that was his objection, maybe he should have quoted that part?
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As far as I've been able to tell, the vast majority of them are simply "failed male, useless for the normal purpose of men". Spartans would have yeeted these off a cliff. These other cultures allowed them to live, and found something marginally useful for them to do.
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The progs are reinterpreting those foreign/ancient culture through their own values, yes, but so are you. Those ancient foreign cultures were sexually degenerate; they were not exemplars of traditionalist Abrahamic sexual ethics, they were the thing that traditionalist Abrahamic sexual ethics defined itself against. I think the progs' "they had a third gender!" read of the situation is, though entirely incorrect about right and wrong, still closer to the truth than your "the entire world stoned these people to death until just now". There's nothing new under the sun. Modernity did not invent rampant culturally promoted sexual degeneracy.
Uh... Where have I said that they were?
Perhaps I overinterpreted:
and
?
One of these was not written by me.
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“ We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.”
Here I am primarily talking about you using “kindness” as a moral code. We should do good things for people but what is the good can be subjective.
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I don't think you're correct here, no matter how narrowly or broadly you define human civilization.
In the UK, you have things like Shakespearean actors playing female parts, or the pantomime tradition of cross-dressing.
In the Weimar republic, you have things like transvestite passes.
And even in places where it was disapproved of or illegal to crossdress, I bet you would find a variety of actual practices for most of written history.
No, arguably we did that early on, when eunuchs were more widespread in many different human societies.
Certainly, calling a eunuch "male" probably isn't obviously correct until the discovery of sex chromosomes, (and even with that discovery, I think you could have a perfectly viable definition of "male" that excludes eunuchs.)
If you are going to use a prime example The Weimar Republic - Please tell me what came next? And what happened to the people blamed for instigating practices like transexuals in the following years?
The Weimar Republic would not be a good example to refute a claim that for 8k years we stoned transexuals. I was being a little hyperbolic but that time period would seem to support my hyperbolic claim.
Creating eunuchs wasn’t a good thing to do. And its entire purpose was to prevent someone from having kids so they could guard your hoes and not fuck them. Or could run your empire without trying to kill you and create a new royal lineage. But still essentially male.
I was just trying to give a basic existence proof. I don't think there was anything inevitable about the Weimar Republic becoming Nazi Germany, and so I think the fact that there were years of official tolerance of transvestites is a decent proof that your statement was wrong.
If you want more, look at Plato's Republic, suggesting that upper class men and women in the ideal republic wear the same clothes. Look at the legends of Achilles being raised as a girl and wearing girl's clothes, because his parents hoped to avoid his prophesied death if he ever took up arms. Look at the eunuchs in the cult of Cybele.
And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.
Even as hyperbole, I think your comment falls short. Practices differed across time and space, and to pretend otherwise is to replace nuanced historical analysis with a make believe mono-culture extending back further than one is actually attested to in the historical record.
Tbh one of the biggest recent crossdressers I can think of, Dame Edna, got cancelled pretty hard for anti-trans comments and the actor seemed pretty heteronormative outside of the Old Lady character. I'm sure there's been a lot of gay crossdressing actors in theatrical history, but the phenomenon has also arised in sufficient cultures and places amongst straight men who've produced generations of children that I don't think it's a 1-1.
Trying to tangle ancient cultural expressions like cross-dressing into sexual identity is a sad thing that's only happened as a consequence of the normalization of Homosexuality in recent years and the requirement to 'No Homo' all sorts of Male activities. I know people from gay-stoning cultures who engage in behavior that'd seem overwhelmingly homoerotic by current Western norms, like the old Khabib Nurmagomedov bath photo that surfaces every so often. Western Men are essentially deprived of expressing platonic love for eachother due to the desire to not appear gay, which is a direct extension of the average woman finding any sort of homosexuality on a partner's part to be a massive instantaneous ick.
I am not talking about identity at all. I am responding to a specific and narrow claim about how men who dressed like women were treated for 8000 years.
It was a claim about behavior, not identity.
Did those men claim to actually be women, though?
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I mean you have given zero evidence of transsexuals ever existing without being killed. London Theatre is acting not being transsexuals. Eunuchs were not trannies. Germans ended up killing them. Achilles was basically an Arya Stark situation of hiding your identity.
My quote that transsexuals were basically killed historically seems to be truish.
I wasn't talking about transsexuals. You said:
Which is a claim that I disputed. I gave several examples where men wore women's clothes, and were not stoned to death.
If you had wanted to claim something different, you should have claimed something different.
I mean you cited the Weimar Republic and transvestite passes. I didn’t know we swapped to wearing women’s clothing for professional reasons.
Transvestite passes were just an example of men wearing women's clothes and not being stoned to death. I brought it up as an example of behavior, not identity.
Look back through my posts in this subthread. Where did I ever get off of the specific topic of responding to your specific claims about 8000 years of stoning men for dressing as women?
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