J.K. Rowling Summarizes the Damage Done by Gender Ideology

Here's one more J.K. Rowling post dedicated to those people who sat on your hands while thousands of confused teenaged girls were being butchered and/or injected with hormones that would lead to their permanent sterilization. Moreover, as Rowling notes, there is the problem with luxury beliefs like this, benefitting only the elites. There's also the problem with the men who take advantage of vulnerable women. Rowling, who has been subjected to non-stop death threats for years, has this to say:

"This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.

Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police. Its activists have threatened and enacted violence on those who've dared oppose it. People have been defamed and discriminated against for questioning it. Jobs have been lost and lives have been ruined, all for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.

When the smoke clears, it will be only too evident that this was never about a so-called vulnerable minority, notwithstanding the fact that some very vulnerable people have been harmed. The power dynamics underpinning our society have been reinforced, not dismantled. The loudest voices throughout this entire fiasco have been people insulated from consequences by their wealth and/or status. They aren't likely to find themselves locked in a prison cell with a 6'4" rapist who's decided his name's now Dolores. They don't need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don't want penises swinging around the girls' showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.

Those who've benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren't theirs.

The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who've resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you'd be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you'll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second."

Continue ReadingJ.K. Rowling Summarizes the Damage Done by Gender Ideology

Matt Taibbi: The Bullshit Stories of 2024

Matt Taibbi:

2024 was the year in which people we used to call “elites,” i.e. party heads, intelligence chiefs, CEOs, media celebrities, university presidents, and so on, exhausted real-life strategies for maintaining institutional trust and were reduced to trying to bullshit their way through crises holding no cards at all. Stories like “the politics of joy” were patches used to cover up what in 2024 became big cracks in the illusion of elite competence. For every over-covered pseudo-story like “joy” or “the new masculinity,” 2024 saw ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.

Here are Taibbi's nominations for the top four BS stories o 2024:

1. WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY? "We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.

2. HOW WAS JOE BIDEN INDUCED TO END HIS 2024 CAMPAIGN? "Sy Hersh, writing in a July 27th Substack piece called Leaving Las Vegas, reported an unnamed “official” said the deal went down Saturday, July 20th. “Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,’” the source said."

3. WHO WERE TRUMP’S WOULD-BE ASSASSINS? "[A]ctual coverage of the assassination attempt in papers like the Washington Post was near zero, with little to no information emerging from law enforcement sources and even editorial treatments mostly limited to denunciations of “conspiracy theories” that emerged in the wake of Trump’s shooting."

4. WHAT’S WITH THE DRONE GASLIGHTING? "Is there a threat or not? Someone is lying. Kentucky’s Rand Paul blocked the Senate measure, but the ongoing episode demonstrates that the FAA, DOD, DHS, FBI etc. are holding back what they know about the recent War of the Worlds remake for… what reason exactly? Has unreality become a principle all its own?" Matt Taibbi, excerpt from "Gaslit Nation: From drones to terrorists, authorities are having a laugh at the public's expense":

If you’re in the growing population of Americans that is tired of being fed streams of sensational and inexplicable news stories, while authorities that appear to delight in public confusion sit back with buttoned lips, yesterday might have been the last straw. We are officially Gaslit Nation ... I don’t know what officials are up to, when they leak like sieves about some issues (Russiagate, Luigi Mangione) and refuse to provide even basic answers about others (New Jersey drones, Thomas Crooks, Covid origins). All we know is there’s an elaborate media strategy at work, one that in the content moderation age extends to outright removal of certain materials, like Shamsud bin Jabbar’s Facebook videos. Trying to unwind the logic of these decisions is tiring enough when it’s voluntary, but living in a country that won’t explain things flying over your house is absurd. I get that the president is a corpse, but can’t someone be found to give an old-fashioned Oval Office speech? Why leave us to chew over so much crazy?

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: The Bullshit Stories of 2024

Is Christmas About Jesus? Residential Christmas Light Displays Offer a Clue

To what extent is Christmas about Jesus? On evening of Dec 18, I conducted a survey of Christmas lights in south St. Louis. I walked through neighborhoods to photograph residential Christmas displays. I walked through several neighborhoods (in the vicinity Ted Drews, for those of you from St. Louis).

I photographed every front yard that had a person or a thing on the front yard, excluding houses that merely had Christmas lights without figures. I also excluded houses with only Christmas tree images and those displaying only angels. I wanted to know the percentage of homes that displayed Jesus or the Nativity Scene. If a house displayed Jesus plus other figures, I counted it as a house that displayed an image of Jesus. I'm fully aware that this was not a scientific survey. There are likely many religious people who choose (for many reasons) to refrain from displaying images of Jesus in their Christmas front yard displays.

Out of 164 Christmas displays I photographed, only 13 (8%) displays a representation of Jesus.

At the end of this article I’ve listed many of the other personalities and objects you’ll find on neighborhood lawns to celebrate Christmas. In addition to Santas and reindeer, these figures include Harry Potter, penguins, unicorns, pigs wearing sunglasses and the Grinch.

Why would I do this survey? I was not trying to point out America’s loss of religiosity. I’m an atheist. My position is to each to his or her own. Feel free to follow a religion or no religion as long as you celebrate the right of all other people to celebrate their own religion (or no religion).

My purpose was inspired by the following passage by Thomas Sowell, from Knowledge and Decisions (1980):

Perhaps the most important feature of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions is simply its analysis of decision-making processes and institutions in terms of the characteristics and consequences of those processes themselves—irrespective of their goals. As noted in Chapter 6, this approach rejects the common practice of “characterizing processes by their hoped-for results rather than their actual mechanics.” “Profit-making” businesses, “public interest” law firms, and “drug prevention” programs are just some of the many things commonly defined by their hoped-for results, rather than by the characteristics of die decision-making processes involved and the incentives created by those processes. So called “profit-making” businesses, for example, often fail to make a profit and most of them become extinct within a decade after being founded. In Knowledge and Decisions the owners of such businesses are defined not as profit makers but as residual claimants to the firm’s income—that is, to what is left over after employees, suppliers, and others have been paid. Put this way, it is dear from the outset that what is left over may be positive, negative, or zero. There is no more reason to expect "drug prevention” programs to prevent drug usage or “public interest” law firms to serve the public interest than to expect that most “profit-making” enterprises will in fact make profits. Whether any of these organizations do or do not live up to their expectations or claims is a question of empirical evidence. Pending the presentation of such evidence, such organizations can be analyzed in terms of what they actually do, not what they hope or claim to achieve.

Is Christmas about Jesus? Somewhat, but evidence abounds suggesting that Christmas is, mostly, for most Americans, about other things, including an orgy of consumerism. A Martian anthropologist who objectively studied Christmas behavior, including America’s choices in Christmas lights, would probably agree with me. Yes, Jesus is discussed in churches, but where are figurines of Jesus in grocery stores and hardware stores? Is Jesus discussed to any meaningful degree at family dinner tables? How often do people spontaneously discuss Jesus at cocktail parties?

Christmas, as a national institution, is mostly not about Jesus. It’s mostly about other things. It is my belief that it has become more and more about things since my childhood (I was born in the mid-1950s) and it has been a slow imperceptible drift. Jesus is the frog in the pot.

But the institution of Christmas is merely one example of many such drifting institutions. It appears to me that most American Institutions have been hollowed out over the years. They no longer do what they claim to do. Hence, the caveat offered by Thomas Sowell.

Wikipedia, which claims to offer a “neutral” point of view, is one of these hollowed-out institutions. And see here. 

Also note this about Wikipedia's annual budget:

Consider also the FDA, which is almost completely captured by pharmaceutical money. Consider the Department of “Defense,” which has waged numerous wars of discretion for decades, all of these wars supported by corporate media marching in lockstep.

And speaking of the corporate “news” media, it is clear that one can expect mostly to be misguided and propagandized by these institutions, not well-informed. Here are more than 300 examples of that.

Is a school functioning as a school?  You need to dig in deep to figure it out.  Don't just read the word school on the building and assume that children are being educated inside.

In conclusion, I refer back to the wise words of Thomas Sowell. Don’t ever assume that an institution actually does what it claims to do. I’m from Missouri, the “Show Me” state and I recommend that we all take on this attitude.

I decided to do my Christmas light survey because it was easy: people reveal in lights what is on their mind about the reason for the season. It’s much more difficult to tell what is really going on with most other institutions. Whenever institutions make claims that they are doing good things for society, demand that they open up and show you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Merry Christmas to all, whatever that might mean to you!

Continue ReadingIs Christmas About Jesus? Residential Christmas Light Displays Offer a Clue

About Those who Seek to Censor Us

For several years, it has been made clear (by the Twitter Files and through the works of Mike Benz, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and other courageous journalists) that America's censors are well-to-do people with degrees from fancy colleges who hide within enormous federally funded bureaucracies. Now consider these words of Matt Taibbi:

So let me pause to say something about America's current intellectual class from which the anti-disinformation complex works. By the way, there are no working class censors. The dirty secret of content moderation all over the world is that it's a tiny sliver of educated rich correcting everybody else. It's telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it, basically.

The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennan's, James Clapper's, Mike McFall's, and Rick Stengel's who make up America's self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword fight to the death.

Our aristocrats pee themselves at a mean tweet. These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism, which is unique to them, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They are simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off. They may have one idea, and it's not even an idea, but a sensation. Fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat. They're afraid of each other. But they're also terrified of everyone outside their social set, and they live in near constant dread of being caught with even one original opinion.

I just finished posting the following on FB, where I often piss off the sheep and where many well-meaning people are afraid to say what they think:

BTW, you'll rarely hear about these words of Matt Taibbi of the works of other amazing independent journalists from corporate media. They have by and large decided that their job is not to provide you with facts so you can make up your own mind on issues. Instead, they serve their corporate masters by telling you what to think. They feel that it's their job to fool you by hiding relevant facts from you and by making shit up on a grand scale in fairly lockstep coordination with other corporate outlets. I know this is hard to hear for many of you. I know that you might prefer to remain in blissful ignorance rather than do the hard work of growing a spine and telling these propagandists and censors to fuck off because they are Anti-American.

For more on how censors think, consider the words of Robert Corn-Revere, author of The Mind of the Censor:

The message of the censor is clear and unmistakable: I (or we) know the truth, and must control the ideas or influences to which you may become exposed to protect you from falling into error (or sin). Truth may be revealed by whispers from god, by political theory, by popular vote, or by social science, but once it has been determined, the time for debate is over. Anthony Comstock did not invent censorship, but his DNA may be found in the genetic code of every would-be censor who walks the earth. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it: “Self-assurance has always been the hallmark of a censor.” In this respect, he echoed Mencken’s assessment of vice crusaders that “[their] very cocksureness is their chief source of strength.”” . . .

There appears to be a psychological dimension to the censor’s dilemma as well. What can one say about the type of person who devotes his or her life to denouncing certain types of expression and advocating its prohibition while choosing a profession in which he immerses himself in it? Purity crusaders claim to hate the stuff they want to suppress and argue that it will ruin all who are exposed, but invariably they can’t get enough of it. They search it out, collect it, study it, categorize it, archive it, talk about it, and display it to others, all for the ostensible purpose of making such expression cease to exist. . .

Continue ReadingAbout Those who Seek to Censor Us