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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.
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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