The Republicans are too stupid to realize they aren’t alone in the censorship.
Never imagined being anti-war, questioning an unknown DNA altering substance in your body, repeating already proven facts and documents, repeating song lyrics written thirty years ago, criticizing allowing a 6’4” trans with his junk intact, a shoulder span the size of Montana, bone and muscle density that you can see through his effing skin and had swam on the men’s team is “ transphobic”.
I was cancelled for calling out Biden’s press conference boasting that he’d given a list to Putin of who not to hack. Can’t make it up.” “Hate speech and misinformation”
I got cancelled two years ago for a snarky comment about college level trans athletes. What really hurt is that it wasn't even controversial from the perspective of where I live(d) in one of the bluest cities in NorCal.
We'd be much better off as a society if there weren't so much focus on getting and wearing "badges of honor". None of those I most admire had or claimed or needed any such "badges." They knew--without worrying about others' approval of them or the lack of it--whether they were honorable or not.
"Badges" of honor go with a society lost in empty, stupid virtue-signalling as a substitute for genuine virtue.
Now for a comment on the substance of Matt's article: The New York _Times_--as he aptly pointed out--had alreadly forfeited any claims it might have once had to respectability as a daily newspaper and would-be opinion-leader. This tempest smacks of alarm and outrage that Hitler's driver turned right on red without stopping.
Banned for posting I would like to see someone slap Maxine Waters across the face. NOT “I would like to slap her,” (even though I would like to) NOT “I will...” but I would like to witness it. I don’t care either way.
I question her trans status.I’ve had trans friends for 40+ years.They share one commonality.. vanity. Perfect hair, makeup, jewelry.. uber female. Cases in point, Caitlyn Jenner, Chelsea( blanked out on her last name), the one who had passed government classified docs
There's speculations in certain quarters that Lia Thomas is pulling one over everyone and will revert back to being man once all the trophies have been won.
Whatever the reason, it’s terribly selfish. Perhaps Thomas couldn’t cut it as top tier on the male team. Regardless, it is the antithesis of fair play and the very concept of competitive sports. These girls have worked for years to complete and play by the rules among others within well established guidelines.
It’s tantamount to pitting Tyrus against Oscar side la Hoya in a boxing match.No matter how skilled de la Hoya is in the lightweight category, ever if Tyrus was not the front runner as a heavyweight, one punch and La Hoya’s down. And that’s two biological males!
In the seventies, a male tennis player suddenly decided to become a female. Renee Richards. Richards had actually gone the full surgical route. In a non- professionally deigned matchup, he and Billie Jean King played on a bet. King was the female world champion, gay and not exactly the typical poster girl for the feminine standard. Richards beat her handily. Richards was also enormous. The issue was put to bed.
What's happening now is merely the logical conclusion of the postmodern idea that gender is nothing more than a social construct. A couple of years ago I was having a conversation with a large group as we watched Phelps hoover up gold medals at the Olympics in Tokyo. During our discussion the topic of women vs men came up, and I stated that it would be virtually impossible for a women to hold the overall world record in any swimming event. Cue the outrage among all the women present. If you go look at world record times for female athletes, in many cases those times wouldn't even meet the Olympic qualification times for men.
Example:
Womens' olympic qualifer time 200m free: 2:08:43
Women's fly 200m world record long course: 2:01.81
Men's olympic qualifier time 200m fly: 1:57.28
Men's fly 200m world record long course: 1:42.00
Finally society is coming back to the idea that maybe women and men really are different. I still bet most that most college educated women would reflexively take offense at my statement, though. What elite athletes can or cannot accomplish says absolutely nothing about the value of men or women.
"the logical conclusion of the postmodern idea that gender is nothing more than a social construct"
A thing that completely baffles me is that, according to the mass media, declaring yourself to be a sex other than your biological one gets you on glossy magazine covers (e.g. Caitlyn Jenner, Elliot Page) but making a pretense to a racial identity which you do not sufficiently* possess (e.g. Liz Warren, Rachel Dolezal) is a big no-no and merits contumely. I mean, if your identity is whatever you say it is, anything should go, right?
I am not making judgments or calling for any laws to be passed. I merely observe that one of these things, for whatever reason, is not like the other in the arena of public spectacle.
(*If I really wanted to get myself in hot water, I would opine that "race" is much more of a social construct than biological sex, but whatever.)
100s of high school boys every year beat Flo-Jos incredible time in the 100m.
I wonder about lia Thomas’s mental state and not even from the perspective of wanting to be trans. I can’t see actually believing what she’s doing is righteous. I think she’s some type of full blown NPD sociopath or something
a penis is removable a vagina can have an “extension” but XX or XY is forever (so far). Why call yourself “trans?” If you want to “identify” as a woman or a man go for it but why identify as trans? if that’s how U see yourself then establish trans-sports teams and competitions. Why not? BECAUSE NO ONE WOULD WATCH!
I think the goal for most trans people is to pass without having to identify as "trans." I think that's why trans lobby wouldn't ever consider making a "trans" category. The reason some trans people identify that way is to usually make a political statement and/or because they know they aren't passing...yet. I know plenty of trans people who absolutely do not want anyone to know that they were born the "sex" that they now reject and don't identify as.
Perhaps she exposed the documents on moral grounds or perhaps she had other motivations. One thing seems clear though, her moral compass broke when she turned on Glenn Greenwald, who helped her immensely through her travails. Her reason for very viciously turning on Greenwald had something to do with his alleged swing to the "far right." Greenwald was quite gracious: "Friendships that depend on political agreement were never 'friendships,' just cynical transactions." Some alleged that Manning released the documents to impress an online romantic relationship she (at the time still a "he") was pursuing. Given her behavior towards Greenwald, that speculation seems more plausible to me.
I think there's a case to be made that becoming trans and using it to beat women in sports is no different than drug enhancements, which are prohibited.
I get your point, except trans-cheating is more like mainlining meth right before a race. They wouldn’t even bother testing you, just eject you from the sport…
"If the female athletes don't fight this, well it's on them." A more accurate statement would be "if the medical community doesn't fight this ("this" being the lie that men (XY) can simply declare themselves female (XX) and it goes unchallenged), they will ultimately lose professional and personal integrity.
We all need to say something. Martina Navratilova went out on truth island on this subject . When the insanity tide canceled her the lesson we learned was don’t go to truth island. We can all own a little bit of that
The people who are not standing up for the female athletes are the coaches, the parents and, most of all, the medical community that knows males are anatomically advantaged in sports. Until courage trumps the fear of being cancelled, losing employment and being out there on a limb by yourself, this will continue. The forces against stopping this are immense -- there's no denying that -- but the truth that gender is determined at conception, doctors document weight, height, APGAR score, overall health of the newborn and equally important, gender, at birth and do not "assign" a gender IS the truth.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
I am so grateful I didnt grow up and go to college in a time that my future didnt depend on me dressing in a locker room with male genitlia and not being able to call BS.
Isnt it time for people to "speak out."
I graduated from HS in 1972. I think Title IX passed in June that year. That a man can compete and win trophies half a century later totally destroys women's sports. It is sold as a human rights issues, because there are thousands of people who want to sex change and compete in sports, right? Whomever is saying they are standing up for women's rights and supporting this need to STFU.
I didn't know we all had rights to compete in whatever sports event in America we wanted to. When is the next NBA try-out for post-menopausal white women? They owe me.
Actually as I watched NCAA bball the last couple of weekends, it did occur to me that a man (identifying as a woman) could easily make a try out on a women's team if he was mediocre on the men's team. It'll never end. And then we have the binary status! Nuts.
You don't need to have a degree in medicine to recognize that men generally have an advantage over women in athletics. Stop the worship of credentials, it's gone too far!
If everyone who thought this was wrong spoke up and was cancelled I wonder whether the healthcare system and scientific research would come to a screeching halt.
It's not just the medical community. I remember once upon a time where a university was a place you went to seek the truth and felt free to question orthodoxy. The Ivy League and other elite universities are destroying their reputation as well. As is social media, mainstream media, corporate america, and so on. No wonder people feel like this country is falling apart-- the people at the top are out of touch with reality.
While I get your point, it's on the people making the rules to stop it, not the female athletes that have been steamrolled by society and the people who are supposed to be looking out for their best interest.
The bureaucracies have exploded to the point that there are almost more politicians than citizens. It will be nearly impossible to clean enough house to clear the administrations involved in this shit show.
It’s morally right to expect the rule makers to stop it, but we gave up morals for “virtue” years ago. Now the only way is for females to refuse to compete.
They need to get their parents heavily involved. They should refuse to compete, refuse to pay tuition, and blackball the entirety of it. The current trans movement needs to be crushed. The real trans people that are living difficult lives are having them made more difficult by the bullshit going on. Every celebrity has a token trans kid these days, and there are actually people trying to normalize pedophilia.
Trans people are a very, very tiny minority. (unless and until cutting sex parts off can be promoted as a "fashion decision", like getting tattoos.)
The insane, rigidly dogmatic, reality-denying people wielding the "transphobic!" accusations and "you are literally killing trans children reeeeee!" claims are a much, much tinier minority. And every time I look into it, it's some repulsive ex-man enjoying the power he now wields over biological women. However society should deal with the (very few) actual trans people, what is happening now needs to be stopped.
Why do you believe the female athletes should sacrifice? Go to junior college instead of Penn? The NCAA allowed this trans woman to compete. This means every Division 1 female swimmer potentially had to compete against "her". Come on (wo)man!!
You either risk cancellation or you get cancelled because you're out-competed. I think too many competing now will regret in 5 years that they didn't fight back.
The bolstering has to come from liberal feminists or it will be used as the usual “ rightwing hatred of everybody” crap.Even though Hannity, Hilton, Tammy Bruce, Grenell, Gaetz, Jeanine, Lawrence Jones, David Webb, Kennedy, Chadwick Moore,Dana Perrino, Maria, Leo Terrell, Pete Navarro, Kash Patel,Carlos Jimenez,Winsome Sears, Charles Payne Liz McDonald,Salazar, Byron Donalds, Ari Fleischer, Horowitz and OAN all endorsed Jenner
The number of so-called liberal feminists who have drunk the kool-aid and sacrificed their last working neuron in support of men in womens' spaces far outweighs the ones who defend women's rights. Aside from a couple of small organizations, Women's Liberation Front and Save Women's Sports, which toil thanklessly with minuscule staffs and no money (WoLF just lost its funding platform, Givebutter, for "violating the terms of service" -- code words for "transphobia"), nobody gives a shit about what happens to the women. Support these orgs, folks, if you can. Every dollar helps.
The sports issue is a big deal, to be sure, but equally onerous is the national rollout, now in progress, of state-by-state bills to allow male felons, who apparently need protection from other male felons, into women's prisons. This population of trans-identified male felons has a very high rate of convictions for violent crimes and sex crimes. Good times ahead!
Women who publicly speak out about trans lose their jobs or get cancelled. Or both. The female athletes know they won't get hired or into grad schools if they complain about Lia Thomas.
The trans lobby ( is it big Pharma? There is a lot of money in this) has so successfully attached themselves to LGB rights that castrating children is fucking celebrated by parents on Facebook and in major papers. Instagram and Reddit are filled with teen girls posting pics of themselves post double mastectomy for the likes.
And the real kicker- emperor-has-no-clothes thing is that there is no good data showing these "treatments" help at all!
All of these gender affirming clinics are going on nothing but woke feelings.
I used to be afraid of getting doxxed when I posted reality based things that are labeled as trans phobic. Nor anymore. Being on the side of not mutilating kids is a decent hill to die on.
Maybe we could just let the athletes decide who they want to compete against instead of maintaining gender-based ghettos. The division between men and women's sports just reinforces the idea one gender is inherently stronger, faster, etc., than the other. #JustSayin' 🙃
Well of course the division between men's and women's sports reinforces the idea that one gender is inherently stronger, faster, etc. than the other. It's not a lie, it's not a problem, it's not a cause for shame...it is simply a basic fact of human biology. Why do you think that men and women have always competed separately? There can be no level playing field between the sexes.
I don't expect you to agree or to even understand this, because you have clearly been inculcated to embrace an absurd metaphysical fallacy, one that is so easy to overturn that only a person who chooses to walk around with their eyes closed could miss it. But just in case you feel like residing in the real world someday, I invite you to ponder the real-world statistics contained in this objective compilation of statistics put together by Duke University, which demonstrates the irrefutable superiority of males in comparison with females in the area of sports. To make the point even more poignant, comparative statistics are given between women and boys, as well as between women and men. In many instances, immature males outperform mature women.
However, you are correct in one respect: female athletes will absolutely have to step up and say "no" loud and clear to this assault on the entire enterprise of women's sports. Otherwise it will disappear. One more thing: the fact that human males are innately bigger and stronger than human females in no way diminishes the extraordinary accomplishments of female athletes. Only when forced to compete against men are all our magnificent achievements turned into a cruel joke.
By the way, I have no interest in "debating" with you further. Have at it. Have a nice day.
What we need is a similar study that targets the performance of biological women vs trans women. We also need a study that targets the differences in physiognomy between biological and trans women. Let's get some hard facts so we can make good, fair decisions. Of course, getting a study like these off the ground is nigh impossible in the current political climate. But, we still need it, regardless.
All I can do is just laugh at "true feminists" who are now getting a taste of the dog food they've been feeding men for half a century. Enjoy it, Ladies! :)
They almost certainly will lose their scholarships. You might argue that the education ain't worth it, but they are young women who believe in the importance of a university education mantra. Put yourself in their place - everything they worked so hard for culminating in a swim team scholarship will be lost. This is not speculation; they must swim without complaint or they are off the team and that means no more scholarship. It is the parents who should be making the noise!
Perspective: how much scholarship money is at risk here? The majority of non-revenue producing sports do not offer an athlete a full or even half scholarship. The athlete may receive one covering 25%, which means 75% covered with loans or out of pocket.
That in addition to being blacklisted from other universities and future employers. But at some point you gotta ask, is it worth attending these universities and working for such employers? We're reaching a level of absurdity where an increasing number of people will start saying 'No'.
If this were some nonexistential threat I would agree, but it is a great threat to our country. If we all lived our lives only for what we might get out of it short term we would not exist today.
I am pretty sure most of the female swimmers don't see this is an existential threat to the country so there's that. They may see it as unfair and a threat to their swimming competition but, from what I have read, some (if not many) of them are quite on board with the inclusion of a trans swimmer in their ranks. Honestly, I am pretty sure a large percentage of the population don't see this as an existential threat to the country...at least not yet. (P.S. Even I don't see it as an existential threat to the country and I am very opposed to the inclusion of trans women athletes in female sports.)
But this is an existential threat and the pawns are the kids who are being told not to "believe their lying' eyes" that the male they're competing against is not a male but a female. I don't expect teenagers to take a stand when the adults responsible for demanding this level of deceit refuse to do so.
This really has nothing to do with sexuality--it's a basic assault on the truth that has been established for eons. I think many people do understand this. In no way am I inferring that anyone who identifies as transgender should be treated with anything less than courtesy and dignity. That said, scientific fact can not and should not be altered to treat false assertions as true and demand that we all agree (or pretend that we agree) or else.
The female athletes at that level are on scholarships and would lose them if they refused to swim. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's up to the NCAA to do ther right thing and they won't.
The NCAA has never done the right thing. Heroes take on the burden. Founding Fathers gave up their lives so others that followed, including their children, could live free.
Haha at this point in history I don’t think i would want my hypothetical kids to go to any of these schools. The damage done by “the academy” is like viral mental-itis and there’s no vax for that.
That's unfair. The women at Penn understood well that any criticism and it was their asses - university would not support them, trans phobic label would affect job prospects, etc. Their parents feared any statements would adversely affect the young women. Adults should fight this, and are mostly silent (Martina Navratilova and Caitlin Jenner notable exceptions as athletes, and J. K. Rowling as a liberal). The NCAA is a corrupt institution that cares more about wokester criticism than the well-being of its student athletes.
OK, well how will they feel in 10 years when they look back? With bitterness, regret they remained silent? If this is a molding experience, which it is, they will accept / comply, thus submissive. Is that what women have been taught for the last 40+ years? No, this is such cognitive dissonance it should have a much more resounding push back.
It may be a molding experience, but it is absolute bullshit they were put in this position. Everyone could see this coming, yet left them to be the victims of it. Nothing changed, except that the new "female" swimmers have all the right parts to dominate the women they are competing against.
One of my workmates has two daughters in college athletics, one plays baseball, the other basketball. So Sunday night I asked him what they thought about trans athletes.
He said the consensus among his daughters and their team mates is essentially, "What's the use in playing? We'll never be able to compete."
So that's the real end result here. Real women will suffer. End of story. So why are so many women on the trans train? Has the PC part of their brain beaten their critical thinking skills into submission?
I've seen some trans twatter streams where it's quite obvious that trans folk hate women at Incel levels of bile. That hate is quite accepted.
Then you have Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, Maura Healey, who said, when asked about girls feeling uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with transgenders, that the girls should "learn to hold it.”
Let me just answer as the parent of 2 girls, "Maura, boobala. go fuck yourself."
I would love to know what motivates the mind of someone who brags about being "all inclusive." All evidence shows that they are nowhere near all inclusive. Just ask Trumpers or the unvaccinated or Canadian truckers or Tulsi Gabbard or Russians or critical thinkers or anyone who won't bow their knee to their fantasy bullshit. They literally hate you and wish you dead. Luckily most of them talk a talk they could never walk, being about as physically rugged as overcooked pasta, or I think we'd be seeing pogroms against those above groups. Instead they just run intellectual pogroms on Twatter & Fakebook.
It was such a challenge to develop an infrastructure for women's sports and now so discouraging. I would not promote competitive sports for women in the future.
Yeah, I've been checking out Mr. Lindsay for a while now. I saw his first appearance on Rogan so I read some of the papers that were published in that field just to see if he was blowing smoke up my backside.
He wasn't.
Gender, much like race, are just means to an end.
That end is Marxism.
Also they are great ways to derail criticism because no one wants to be labeled a racist or transphobic.
Lindsay should be given some kind of an award for slogging through that pseudo intellectual cesspit. Some incredibly boring crapola passing itself off as a theory.
This quote from CRT avatar & influencer, Robin DeAngelo, shows someone who has some serious mental problems.
"I had an out-of-body experience. I could tell you where I was sitting. I'm not ever going to forget that moment, where all of a sudden I was like, Oh my God. I'm white!
"And I felt so loudly white, that I remember being hesitant to go outside. I didn't want to go outside, because everyone could see that I was white."
Matt may have used this quote in his CRT article. Not sure. But I think it shows a different reality than she thinks. It shows a white liberal woman consumed by guilt about all of those black folk that SHE never befriended or, quite obviously, even looked at since she didn't even notice there were other races with different skin colors.
Problem is his content is so frikking long. Also I do think it would be helpfully to develop better nomenclature for all this. When people hear Marxism they think economic equality and state ownership of the means of productions. This is not what the billionaire class is interested in. Lindsay details the taxonomy of the branch of Marxism that broke off the original tree quite well. Anything that includes the word Marxism is going to have this problem. Cultural Marxism, race Marxism, which James coined, it’s all a red flag for newbies. Also there’s the curious fact that it seems to synthesize Nazism in its makeup as well, which was the most notorious identity politics of all.
"When people hear Marxism they think economic equality and state ownership of the means of productions."
I agree.
But you can say that about all CRT terminology. The words they use don't mean what the wider culture thinks they mean. That is essential to their intellectual smokescreen. I think that's why Lindsay developed a glossary of terms used in intersectionality/CRT/gender studies.
People need to start using the term Alt-Left for ALL that shit. It is much more descriptive when you’re trying to describe extreme and indefensible ideologies. Using terms like liberal or even Progressive are not only inaccurate, but have positive connotations for some. These totalitarians do not deserve such passes. Call ‘em what they are: nihilistic assholes who hate you: Alt-Left
That is what pisses me off the most. Supposedly feminest warriors not lifting a finger to defend women. Fifty years ago Title IX made it possible for women to have athletic competition. On the domestic violence front, we fought the judicial system for years to recognize domestic violence as a violent act, not as some kind of family dispute to be handled by social workers. And now here we are. I am sick of kids who were born 20 years ago telling us how we don't know about women's rights.
50 years ago women had only had the vote a few decades, had to quit work if we became visibly pregnant, could not have credit. Women's sports had no support.
As one commentator said, "it’s pretty fucking grim that a bunch of women can’t meet to discuss women’s rights without being intimidated and shouted down."
WNBA just signed it's first trans player last year. New Zealand had a transgender person competing in women's weightlifting in the Tokyo olympics. It's coming.
My argument has been that you are not being “inclusive” by accepting trans women in women’s sports. You are creating the world’s most exclusive club: Born male, or at least XY, competing female.
Babylon Bee just did a video where the guys were challenged to come up with something so ridiculous that it hadn't occurred in real life. They failed. Satire is dead.
The whole idea of cultural appropriation is garbage. Every culture on earth appropriates anything they find to enhance their own existence. Trade is all about appropriation of things others have that we do not or are better than we can produce. Cowboys became cowboys because Mexican Vaqueros had already established the ways and means to herd cattle.
This is a bit about when Serena & Venus Williams wanted to compete in the men's league. So a fairly washed up tennis player at the end of his career named Karsten Braasch was chosen as the sacrificial lamb. He literally drank beer before he played and smoked before & during the game.
My niece was here on spring break and she asked the same question. Presuming her to be in the target demographic, I was like, "Was it any good?" and she was like, "No, not really."
I suppose I've seen worse. As long as Pattinson kept the mask on it was watchable. But every time he slipped into Emo Bruce I felt laughter welling up inside. The last time that happened was when bad boy Kylo Ren was revealed to be a somewhat whiny Adam Driver. That time I did laugh out loud.
If I were to guess which comic artist influenced the director I'd pick Paul Pope.
The fact that The Riddler turned out to look like Bobby Riggs' forgotten love child didn't help.
Just glad they spared me the bald Joker. The little glimpse they gave looked like he wandered in from a Hellraiser film.
A man? What progressive mind cannot grasp that allowing men to compete in women’s sports will oppress women so they can once again be subjugated as God intended. Seriously, the conundrum of ‘progress’ is that it is regressive. And, it is hilarious to watch as 10% of 10% of 10% of our population finds itself tied up in its legal and underwear briefs.
What makes it even more fucked up is that the IOC has banned a female athlete Caster Semenya for allegedly having "Too much testosterone". There is no doubt she is a woman and even though she is a bit unfortunate in that she as mixed up hormones from birth she has a women's plumbing and can bear children, but according to the IOC she must take drugs to reduce a testosterone level far lower than Lia Thomas.
If I was a woman athlete I would be ranting incessantly about this blatant favouring of men ahead of women in women's events at the Olympics. None will say a word lest they get 'de-platformed' and lose that vital ingredient of modern olympics - sponsors.
Very interesting how there's a billion rules and regulations regarding gender in womens sports, but no woman ever tries to sneak into mens sports. Really gets the noggin' joggin'!
In general, it seems to me that if trans women really want to be accepted as women that they would give a little ground to facilitate that process across society. This would include an admission that competing with double-X-chromosome women in sports is, indeed, not fair. If they gave away just that little bit they would spare us all a lot of sturm and drang and might receive a more welcoming reception.
I have to ask, "Why is this so important to the MSM? What is the real agenda?"
How much is this like the fight over Roe v. Wade? It enflames a small group of idiots who can't think outside of their own narrow interests while those of us who are willing to discuss the situation and try to compromise are insulted. This generates a lot of "noise" which covers up the more dastardly crimes the Oligarchy is committing.
BTW: Tulsi has said in her much more diplomatic way, "This is fucked up." She took a lot of hits for that. Other's point to her (non-existent) lap-dance for Assad. I guess I'm saying that if you want someone who understands nuance.... (kind of went off-topic there.)
You just touched on the craziest part. Sometimes it feels like they want 45% so they can generate campaign contributions as the the afflicted. I’m sure I’m wrong.
I'm sure you're right. I have noticed that all the appeals that come to me are always from an underdog who has no chance of winning. I stopped contributing to them when I finally realized that (IMHO) they are just in it to scam me out of my money.
The greatest outcome of all of this will be if Thomas makes it to Olympic trials and gets destroyed by Ledecky. That said, he is pretty fast at 1500 for a girl. He beat the silver medalist at the NCAA championship.
I'll take a moment to get somewhat off-subject with Matt's piece to agree with you that we're screwed up when it comes to this trans issue. But even more confounding is the fact that solutions appear to be elusive.
So here's one idea that may be even more screwy but also sense-making: Just as we pursue a level playing field among the genders in all other fields, let's do so as well in sports. For instance, eliminate the WNBA and women's soccer, but allow women to compete for spots on what are currently the men's teams. Men would probably dominate in the NBA, but maybe not so much in soccer. And in gymnastics, to take another example, I doubt that men could compete very well with women on the balance beam or the uneven parallel bars -- and maybe not even in the floor exercises. Women might even dominate in archery and other forms of marksmanship.
Regardless, this would eliminate the current unsupportable segregation in sports and bring them in line with every other aspect of our aspirationally gender-blind society.
(BTW, I oppose my own idea here, even as I also think it's a perfectly logical solution to this problem given the moronic ideological priors that our superiors are so determined to press down upon our collective brows.)
Let's just leave things they way they are, and disabuse ourselves of the notion we have to comply with insanity. Allowing this craziness to go forward only means we will get more of it., and it will be worse. This is the hill to fight on, let the other side die on this hill.
But there would no longer be any "men's" sports teams, just teams. Granted, women would probably find it very tough and maybe impossible to make any major pro teams. But that would be just the way the cookie crumbles when sports are desegregated.
Yes, but increasingly most of the media sounds like the most annoying middle school girls. The table of loud, bossy, wanna be mean girls who weren’t athletic, smart, talented, kind, or hard working. Best I can tell they all work for the msm despite never maturing or learning much of anything. 🤷♀️
It was different and better when journalists were working class and not filtered through J-school programs.
Today they get their credential and network with all the people they are supposed to. 'Why am I not respected outside of my clique?' they whine and stamp their little feet when they find out Joe Sixpack, a plumber from Dumbfuck, Neb., knows more about the world than they do. That's almost literally what happened to NYT guy Brett 'Bed Bug' Stephens.
Agree. My dad was a journalist. He grew up poor in and abusive home with alcoholic parents. He was the oldest of 6, graduated high school at 17, joined the Marines and turned 18 trapped on a mountain pinned in by Viet Kong watching his buddies die with bullets everywhere.
He came home, went to college, got his degree in journalism, got married, and became a journalist. I love reading his old stuff. He is a human encyclopedia of history and current events and politics. He knows more than any professor I ever had in undergrad or grad. He writes beautifully and coherently and concisely. He’s still my first call to understand WTF is going on.
He also left journalism before I was born. Consolidation was starting and the pay was crap. He didn’t want to end up having to move to New York. He was offered a job by the NYT around 1980. My brother was a baby. He wanted better for his kids than to grow up in a slum in NYC (both my parents grew up very poor) or with long commutes because he was already working 70+ hours a week.
He left journalism and became a broker. He has zero typical broker personality characteristics, but he is very smart and good at the job. It was a blessing that improved my brother and I’s life immensely. Increasingly I realize that our gain was literally the world’s loss. Similar stories played out across journalism for a couple decades. It’s very sad.
He thinks are policies towards Russia have made no sense for decades. Last year he sent me stuff about the cultural/ ethnicity divide in Ukraine when I was nagging to better understand. The maps come out frequently when I have questions (I ask a LOT of questions 😂). My interest in Ukraine has largely revolves around ecology and following the Chernobyl stuff because wildlife is thriving and the civil war seeps into the coverage. I asked him about an article two days ago, via text, and I’ll paste his long (this is typical) text back below - he responded with this 15 minutes after I sent the article. He didn’t think much of the article, but felt another history lesson was due.
“Hi. I was confused about the article. In any event, the issue here is NATO. A little history is in order. First, Stalin defeated Hitler. Eighty percent of German casualties were on the Eastern front. The success of the D-Day Normandy landings were important in keeping Stalin from over-running Western Europe, which he certainly would have done had they failed. Stalin was acutely aware that in 1814, Czar Alexander I, after forcing Napoleon out of Russia, pursued him to Paris. The Napoleonic wars ended with Russian cavalry in Paris. Stalin wanted to emulate him, spreading the Communist revolution to the Atlantic. NATO was formed after Stalin’s death In 1953 but with Stalin’s aspirations still in the air. It was a defensive pact — a shield against Soviet expansionism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO changed. Instead of a shield to protect Western Europe, it became a sword aimed at the Russians. During negotiations prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, James Baker
, Bush I’s Secretary of State, promised Gorbachev three times that NATO would not move “one inch” to the East. Der Spegiel, the German magazine, wrote an article early this month saying the Germans promised Gorbachev the same thing. In 1996, NATO began accepting former Eastern Bloc countries into alliance. The last to be accepted were the Baltic states. Although formerly part of Russia, they are heavily Germanic from virtue of their creation by the Teutonic Knights in the late Middle Ages. Ukraine and Belorussia are different. Both are ethnically Slavic, the same as the Russians. Ukraine was an integral part of Russia for hundreds of years. What we are seeing in Ukraine today is a civil war. The United States might have played a productive role in peace mediations and possibly prevented the war. The neocons in charge of policy today have nixed that. I think the war will end in partition and bitter feelings all around. Our policy here is comprehensively incomprehensible. Sad.
We have no vital national interests in Ukraine except peace. We tried nation-building in Iraq, and that didn’t work out too well. This whole affair is a disaster. Ukraine is being destroyed. An idealist would say the Ukrainians are creating their own country by dying for it. The problem is, even if they win, which I doubt, they lose. Victory means winning a war-ravaged landscape with a hateful neighbor to the east. There will be no end to the animosity. The same people who took us into catastrophic wars in a Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the same thing in Ukraine, with the same results.
What’s the point? Good question. At the end of the First World War, after all the bloodshed and destruction, no one could remember what the war was about. The same thing was true in Vietnam, if not more so.”
Thank you. My parents are my heroes and I am so lucky to have them. Even at 39 we are close, and they are very close to my kids. Read comment above. I have quoted his most recent text on the subject. These are the answers I get basically daily when I nag to understand. This is also how he talked to me when I was little. Full explanations 😂
It’s all op-art. Makes your head spin.I’ve been reading amazing pieces in Tablet Mag, of all places.Particularly Lee Rich, Daniel Greenfield, Drs. Malone, Risch,McCullough,Bhattacharaya, Naomi Wolf, the Pfizer whistleblower, Ceneral Tata..
Bingo, Smokegetsinyoureyes, and Double Bingo, Matt!
Why people still pay money for the NYT, or any so-called "news" organization that willfully and continuously places opinion over facts, is just beyond me.
The past 5 years have been such a redpill moment for non-democrats regarding the media and the deep state. I truly don't trust the MSM to get the sports scores right any more, and if there is a political angle to any story my fake news antennae go up if the story sounds too good to be true.
I would also echo Glen Greenwald's point that if Big Tech is ideologically censoring content based on threats of regulatory reprisal, then it truly is a free speech issue and the government can't be let off the hook just because they managed to launder it by using the private sector.
During the Obama administration they changed the definition of "Collect" in the IC. You can thank Clapper and Nakasone. Info wasn't "collected" until an analyst looked at it. So when they hoovered up every phone call in north america, that wasn't "collected" if no one had time to listen to it. That is dirty as hell. Typical of the most transparent administration in history. Interesting that definition seemed to change back under Trump... I wonder if NSA is still operating the same way as before but without explicit acknowledgment???
I get that. Still, though...Trump knew what was going on with the IAs, and you'd figure "the enemy of my enemy..." calculation would have come into play.
Thanks for that. I didn't realize that Trump's team was even capable of identifying a non-subtle constitutional violation as oblique as that. Encouraging!
Look on the bright side. That just means there are less legal ramifications if you shoot them. I would not be surprised if they tried that in the near future.
Sure, The NY Times editorial was the equivalent of driving slowly down the middle of the middle of the road. The editors apparently thought it was a one-way street. This car crash was as inevitable as it was avoidable.
The editorial’s lack of self-awareness was, to me, the most depressing element. Some reflection about its own corporate culture that led to the firing of their longtime science writer (and union rep - which might have been the disguised reason for going after him) Donald MacNeil, the constructive discharge of Bari Weiss, and the sidelining of James Bennett that you mention, just to name a few, would have been welcomed.
But no, this too little, too late editorial was a profile of cowardice.
Damage is done. Can't ever go back. It does seem like certain forces at the NYT are trying to draw back from some of the excesses of the last few years (which the NYT was fully complicit in), but the damage is done. They unleased the hordes of woke fury, primarily to defeat Trump, and you can't bottle that back in without betraying their new generations of woke reporters and editors who do genuinely believe in their anti-racism mission.
Bryan, you're talking with your feelings, not your brain. Did Kyle Rittenhouse go to prison for "taking his gun out of the holster?" (And nor should he have gone to prison). Whatever your politics, fight the urge to just react emotionally to everything you hear or read.
Sure - how many murdered during BLM protests have seen their murders convicted? According to CNN 1 has been charged. Additionally, charges have been dropped against over 90% of BLM protestors that caused billions in damage. Fewer than 450 face charges nationally.
Conversely over 800 Jan 6th protestors remain in jail. None had a weapon. None charged with serious property destruction. Fewer than a dozen with physical assault. Zero firearms were found at the capital. Five Trump supporters died that day of various causes, the only one murdered was Ashley Babbitt which video recently released shows she was trying to stop the known BLM protestor/ plant next to her. Most remain in solitary confinement.
Bill - when they come for you, as they always do, we’ll cheer them on just as you have. 😘. Good luck to you in life. Based on your comments you are going to need it.
I just saw—but can’t think where—a roundup of where some of the BLM perps are now in regard to their court cases. It might’ve been Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. The guy who fire bombed a federal courthouse got off with no prison time. You should look for the clip, it’s a good complement to your argument.
NCmom; let's be clear that you are not defending democracy or the Constitution. Yes, there should have been more arrests and prosecutions for BLM rioting. That does not change the fact that the Jan. 6th riot at the Capitol was unprecedented and incredibly dangerous to the stability of the country. If wild-eyed radicals and conspiracy theorists feel that this kind of behavior is acceptable political activity, we are finished as a nation. You are on a road to nowhere to indulge your feelings.
I was a registered Democrat until 2015 when I became disturbed about trying to sever policy related to women’s private spaces and sports from biological reality. I wasn’t fully red pilled until 2018-2020. Now I’m fully red pilled and, while embarrassing, I own my part gullibility in choosing ideology pretty talk over actual outcomes and objective truth to keep myself from making the same mistake again.
Part of making the red pill experience less galling is to admit that you aren't really joining those awful people you had in mind when you were opposing "the right". They existed in your head and were largely the creation of DNC wonks and media propagandists. Not that many actual Nazis/White Supremacists/hard core racists in the real world. That's why they have to jigger the definitions all the time.
I mean, I've never been called conservative in my life, and I'm on the redpill side. Don't know what to call it, but it helps to know it isn't ENTIRELY "conservative", "religious right" or Republican. I know some lefties just can't bring themselves to break with the Delusional Party because of a lifelong habit of demonizing "those guys" on "the Right". And I'd be reluctant to join such awful people too!
Oh I agree. I was completely indoctrinated out of grad school. I was in the “people who vote for life hate actual babies, republicans don’t care about the poor, conservatives want women barefoot and pregnant Camp.” I am so embarrassed by that today, but it certainly extended my personal awakening by years. I had to acknowledge I believed stuff that simply isn’t true, and reduced complex and nuanced situations to 1st grade bubble test complexity. To believe what I did I had to ignore actual outcomes and replicated data. It’s a hard pill to take, but I couldn’t live with myself continuing to believe things I knew to be false, and supporting a narrative with terribly policy outcomes for those they purported to help. Still, the indoctrination worked to extend my awakening at the very least.
I now call myself a conservative. My values haven’t changed. I believe in community, we give up our time and treasure to help those in need voluntarily. I support early choice, but also pro-life organizations like room at the inn which have taught me pro life people are the first to help parents and babies in need. I am a conservationist (but please never confuse that with idiotic climate activists) because I’m passionate about conserving the environment and I lived in the woods summers during undergrad as an outdoor adventure guide. I believe in conserving the American dream. I believe in equal opportunity, not forced equal outcomes as we are all unique individuals. I don’t care who sleeps with whom, but I think it’s cruel to separate public policy from objective biological truth. I opposed the genital mutilation of tween girls in poor countries around the world growing up and I oppose the genital mutilation of tweens and teens here today. I am a free speech absolutetionist. A society cannot be free without free speech. I oppose censoring of speech - the best arguments can win on merit and dissent to them will never to be silenced by force.
I believe in personal choice and individual responsibility. I believe if you set high expectations for kids they are more likely to reach higher in their life. I am live and let live so long as you genuinely aren’t hurting anyone else, so I oppose giving men a “civil” right to women’s private spaces, little girls overnight camp cabins and pool changing facilities, women’s college dorm rooms, and athletic competitions at any time and for any reason because it’s misogynistic and demonstrably harms girls and women.
I guess I have finally realized that the values I have are actually conservative. I am not a white nationalists, homophobe, or uncaring monster. I do not wrap my personal identity up in political parties (note I am a conservative, but not a Republican). I realize now I didn’t know the actual definition of “conservative” until my mid-30’s. I would also say that the true definition of liberal, which is actual close to conservative in many ways (I am both in some ways), has also been hijacked by the exact same illiberal and totalitarian leftists who promote such false hoods about what it is to be conservative.
Well, they change last century’s temperature, and even last decades, pretty regularly............ they also tell us high the record setting inflation starting in the second half of 2021 under Biden is really because Putin invaded Ukraine in mid February 2022
It's more a realization that right/left is a cartel narrative like everything else. All, please don't make the mistake of thinking the other side of the coin is benevolent and will fix things. The cartel don't care if our republic collapses. Actual people who want to keep the republic intact must protect it by removing these traitors from office.
The New York Times sports section wrote more feature articles about Caster Semenya than Henrik Lundkvist in most years when he played for the Rangers. They had more beat reporters for the Liberty than the Islanders.
I don’t know why but I continue to be flabbergasted that people who claim to be on the Left, the idiots like Froomkin shrieking about this tepid Times editorial, don’t seem to be aware that what they are calling for is the replacement of journalism with propaganda. They don’t oppose authoritarianism; they’re drunk on the idea. They just want to be the ones with the authority.
it really is amazing and endlessly fascinating to watch the change that comes over people when they have no power vs when they get their first sniff of power. how many times in history have we seen yesterday's crusader for freedom become today's petty tyrant?
In the less extreme form, it happens at all levels.The slightest increase in status changes any one of us, often so subtly it's not noticed even though it's very real.
I've moved up and down the lower levels of the status scale and noticed creeping changes in myself. It's scary.
For journalists it's really bad because they are supposed to be our check on power. Instead, because of the professionalization of the business, they now see themselves as part of the establishment and, as Matt pointed out, they adopt the same disdain for the American populace as the elite do. That's always been true geographically. Out here in the Great American Desert of the Great Plains, East Coast elites have always been the enemy. They were the bankers and railroad executives who screwed over farmers, for example. I could draw up a New York-to-Los Angeles route by car of the places they could visit if they wanted to find out what the U.S. is really like. Because they haven't any idea.
Spot on. The current trend has people appointing themselves as some sort of benevolent gatekeeper, which is just a hold onto power and their own right to their speech.
it's almost as fun watching our enlightened betters trying to finally bring this damn stubborn world and its damn stubborn inhabitants under total control as it is watching wile e. coyote chase the roadrunner.
I assume that battle has already been lost. Back to emailed newsletters or even print sent by mail. People are capable of getting off their news-by-technology addiction. I lived most of my life without it.
In the USSR "Samizdat" were very popular. Or so they used to tell me, it might even be true. Most of what we heard about the USSR was propagandistic lies.
I used to work at a K-8 school which went through that whole "evolution" from hippie-progressive to corporate-hierarchical, and I could totally see them adopting Newguard today and thinking they were treading the Righteous Path®.
They are intellectual and emotional children who never developed theory of mind. They thus have no ability to deal with the fact that other people see the world differently than they do, and that there is potential validity in those other views
If only the Left had taken Camus' suggestion to heart 60-some years ago: "We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty."
The media’s the most powerful entity on Earth. They have the power to make the innocent look guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the mind of the masses. And white liberals control the media."
I know, but it is worthy of note that he adopted it because he is a pro at controlling information inside Russia and hacking information outside Russia.
Remember, Camus was attacked viciously at the time for both his refusal to endorse Stalin (he was obviously proven correct on that) and, as a bete noir, for his refusal to condemn France's attempt to hold on to its North African colonies (he wrote at the time that nations go through stages of development, just like people, and that condemning France for its colonialist impulses was like condemning an adolescent for being surly - but still ...). Given all the proclamations and open letters being circulated at the time, he also wrote this in the same essay: "It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist."
He got lucky. And the faults he talks about were caused by letting shithead continental philosophers like the Frankfurt School members, Foucault, Derrida, and all the rest into the U.S. academy. So he can blame his fellow countrymen in advance. The idea that reality is primarily constructed from language, not by anything objectively real, came from them, and oh my God has it screwed up not only the moldy recesses of the academy, but it's leaking out into real life. The Frankfurt School members might not have inflicted all that trash on us if they had just gone down to the beach once in awhile when they were hiding from Hitler in Southern California. 🙂
In other words DNC elites completely lack both humility and discipline, characteristics that the working class tends to learn over their working lifetime.
Thanks- I just tracked down a copy and look forward to reading this in full. There is truly nothing new under the sun, at least as far as human nature/folly is concerned.
You are all going to use that quote now, with almost no understanding of the context, just to score points against a Left bogeyman that doesn't even exist. This is why I say Americans aren't capable of democracy and we are already deep into a new feudalism. Keep fighting that last war, keep sending cavalry against the tanks. The media you so glibly deride love it. They know where to find you and where each of your buttons are.
The definition, Mr. Muhammad Lee, is "an imaginary evil spirit or being, used to frighten children." The bogeyman was created for children; your Left is quite real, with little Stalins the stuff of adult nightmares and progressive fantasies.
Lol - I'd like to know what "context" you think I'm missing? I've read nearly every Camus essay dozens of times. I've read two biographies of him. I've read all four volumes of his diaries. I've ready all of his novels, most of his short stories (saving a few for my 70s, just to have something new by the man to read in my dottage), and even his play. But, pray, enlighten me ...
The left is falling all over itself to see who can be the most ludicrous cancel maven in the land--every day the list of the canceled becomes longer, now stretching back centuries to include perfectly innocent Russian composers.
yes: we are not going to perform Shostakovich any more; clearly he simply orchestrating Putin's talking points. The fact that he was born > a century earlier is no excuse.
Damn that Putin crazy war criminal! Russians = bad.
Dostoevsky. Pushkin. Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoy.
Cancel em all!
Plus it'll be easier for those ignorant or pernicious (or both) people to repeat that great country's and cultural and political mistakes with all the pesky Russians from all of time being Personae Non Grata.
Sometimes it seems they are in search of the cheapest virtue signal they can come up with. The key being, not the "zero cost to the signaler" aspect (all virtue signals have that), but the zero benefit to those they are "in solidarity with".
Except that Trump did not make things easy on Putin one bit. In fact, he was very tough on Putin. But that did not matter to the "Russia hacked our election" crowd, which simply made things up as they went along. Hate Putin? Hate Trump? They must be in bed together! LOL. Except there was never the slightest evidence for that. Multiple ACTUAL journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal exposed those lies over and over.
It won’t fix Putin but it will send a broader message to celebrities and oligarchs that support Putin that they are no longer free to benefit from luxuries and freedoms of the West while supporting brutality and war at home in Russia. Funny thing about Putin’s elites, they’ll tell you how the West if filled with hypocrites and war mongers out to undermine and destroy Russia but they love their villas, and their yachts. They work deals to get Western citizenship. They set their kids up to live here and they send them to Harvard and Stanford and Yale and Oxford. No Moscow State for those kids. Don’t worry, Linda, Netrebko will get by. So too will the Met.
Anna Netrebko has nothing to do with what Putin did or did not do. To ask her to make a public statement denouncing him is disgusting. Would an American opera star denounce Biden? I think not, and the US has invaded far more countries and overturned far more governments than Putin has. A broader message of what? That the US controls the world? How many innocent civilians did we kill in Irag? In Libya? In Syria? In Yemen? Yet I don't remember anyone asking Renee Fleming to denounce Obama.
According to the Guardian and other press, Netrebko opposes war ( anodyne and easy) but will not denounce Putin. Fair enough, she has sided with a pariah. Now she is a pariah. Whats the problem, she can still sing in that part of the world that supports Putin and his aggression. If you are suggesting that the US is a more brutal regime than the Russian’s that is a separate argument. 145 nations at the UN voted to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine at the UN. Four countries stood with Russia; Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. Even China, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela abstained. Russia is a pariah. Unfortunately for her, so is Netrebko. Linda, you’re not going to start claiming it is also wrong to go after the oligarchs too, are you?
If Netrebko should denounce Putin, then every performer from the US should denounce Biden. You don't denounce the leader of your country. Saying nothing should be fine. That the Met required that of her is despicable. I find your argument profoundly illogical.
Cancelling a country because of the acts of the country's elites would seem a bad idea. besides; who gets to choose *what* gets cancelled? the MSM, clearly. oh, and perhaps yourself, if you have been behaving.
What you are arguing for is a kind of cultural carpetbombing; to you Anna Netrebko as just - collateral. But it's not just Anna; art, music, literature, all verboten, by nationalistic decree. The casualties are really: us.
We are not cancelling Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekov or Pasternak. We are not cancelling Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff or Stravinsky. What we are doing is refusing to accept among us those artists who support and benefit from the Putin regime and its aggression. By his actions, Putin is turning Russia into a pariah state. If Russian artists and athletes continue to support that regime, they should be treated as pariahs too. Netrebko says she opposes war but will not condemn Putin. She should have no problem, then, making a living in Russia, Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. They too support Putin. As for cancellation, the US and Britain accepted hundreds of of artists and intellectuals that fled Nazi Germany. They did so to save German culture from Nazi culture.
We have swiftly arrived at the stage where we most certainly are banning 'Russian works', and neither of us have any say in the matter. Censorship starts with 'Just this'; but in the current crucible, nobody knows exactly who or what is approved, and we end with fear, confusion, and silence.
The moment I hear them all squawking, hooting, and hollering is the moment I know someone hit the "Truth" button. The only logical reaction is to bury my head in the sand until all the gobbledeegook settles down. I wonder how many of those turkeys read past the headline ... or maybe they just like reading at their own pace?
To be fair though, I rarely read past the headlines in the New York Times anymore either. It's usually pretty clear where they're going:
Covid is extremely deadly for everyone, including children. Vaccines are a gift from God. The American empire bears no responsibility for provoking Russia to invade Ukraine. What American empire? Everything is racist and transphobic. Joe Rogan is basically a serial killer. Republicans pose a grave threat to democracy. Biden is doing a helluva job and bears no responsibility for the economy hurtling towards a cliff. What cliff? Weather is the result of human caused climate change. Etc.
Except that in every one of those stories, NPR would be compelled to include the word "race" or "gender" or both. Everything else is just an aside to contextualize racism and sexism.
Coming from the other side, we have the perspective that Covid isn’t particularly deadly at all - the true number of Covid deaths is only 4% of one million, whatever that comes out to be, and all of those occurred among older-than-65’s with no comorbidities, assuming such a category exists. VAERS proves that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already died from the vaccines, even if most of us can’t seem to find the name of a single vaccinated acquaintance anywhere on the local obituary page. Oh, and the vaccines don’t protect people from dying from Covid. Even though nobody’s dying from Covid anyway.
In the meantime Putin bears no responsibility for invading Ukraine, that rant last July about “one people” was way overanalyzed by the warmongers and neocons of the deep state. Chechnya, Grozny - what “Russian empire”? Wasn’t it Brezhnev who did that? Or maybe Biden, come to think of it?
The real threat to democracy is the Democratic Party and everyone who votes for them - communists one and all, busily engaged in stealing elections and subverting local school boards to promote the teaching of the Kama Sutra in kindergartens. And serially killing babies in their spare time, or at the very least promoting legislation that will enable others to do it for them. And believing that climate change could possibly be real, which is of course the same thing as believing in communism.
The sad thing is you've just demonstrated how extremely effective propaganda carefully constructed to advance an agenda can be. Instead of asking whether the other side might have at least some legitimate basis for rejecting the approved narrative, you've just presented a caricatured version sarcastically, implicitly saying you accept everything Fauci and the CDC told you is true. Speaking as someone who reads the actual science on the subject on an almost daily basis, it's not.
I guess I’d say that YOU’ve just demonstrated something that I’ve increasingly noticed over the past few years, which is that only wholesale acceptance of the ENTIRE narrative presented by one of the two parties to the debate is deemed acceptable by the increasingly fervent loyalists on both the left and the right.
You seem to be assuming that because I believe SOME things about Covid that you don’t, I must be swallowing EVERYthing the other side proclaims - and who knows, I wouldn’t be surprised if that manichaean view of things possibly extends to everything else you might think I believe as well.
It’s not that simple. I’ve lost faith in the idea that either side is really searching for the truth so much as looking for justifications to attack and demean the other side. Whenever possible, I believe things based on what my eyes and ears tell me personally. Failing that, I search for firsthand sources. When all else fails, I search out the opinions of those people who seem to be the most widely hated, since it seems to me they’re probably the most likely to be telling the truth, LOL.
I used to say my ideal girlfriend couldn't spell "Cat" without spotting her the "C" and the "T", but had read the Kama Sutra and found all the mistakes....
There was one article recently in the NYT where the most important thing wasn't mentioned until paragraph 24 (plot twist: the Hunter Biden laptop was real after all.)
It also means I am in for a good bit of schadenfreude. By the way, this was great.
"This Times editorial is watered down almost the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a Bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic."
Are you saying that Snake Island wasn’t hit by Russian artillery fire? Or are you just pointing out what everyone else found out when the smoke cleared that not everyone was killed. Oh, and nice touch will the capitalization. We can all HEAR YOU NOW, Bill.
The Brooklyn Orthodox keep throwing this tantrum because one of their foundational beliefs (both on the political and personal level) is that THEY are the cool ones--they watch Drag Race and listen to Cardi B and are open to exotic cuisine, etc.--there's no possible way that they could have become dreary puritanical opponents of free speech, free thought, freedom of expression and association--that's for rednecks and Republicans. Cmon, they're LIBERALS, it says so in the name.
Their refusal to face the truth reminds me of when a junkie or drunk first sits down at his intervention--"It's not that bad! I only did that a few times! I'm gonna quit, I swear!" Nothing makes people angrier than when you hold a mirror up to their face, or when you try to make them take responsibility for their actions.
The truth hurts because it destroys a belief: not in itself. (Nietzsche)
Oh yay, the NYT speaks up - pass the beer nuts, my ecstasy cannot be contained - joy abounds (sigh).
The NYT has about as much authority as "Dick" Vernon from the Breakfast Club - somewhere in the depths of the editorial board room some scribe is saying "you mess with bullshit, you get the horns."
It's a good point: if you're for free speech, then put your money where your mouth is. Of course it's nearly impossible to imagine the NYT posting an "op-ed" by Rand Paul, Brett Weinstein, Adolph Reed or Noam Chomsky (to pick some random-ish names from a hat).
"Totalitarian humanism" is a good piece of shorthand. I just watched a whole series of lectures by John Mearsheimer (publicly available on YT) that contrasts interestingly with the above. Though JM is only concerned with foreign policy, he describes the restless tendencies of the blob in its quest to establish liberal hegemony everywhere and so paradoxically squash true sovereignty and self-determination abroad. ("Paradoxical" because liberalism is supposed to be rooted in freedom and choice. But if you choose fascism, socialism, religious caliphate, etc., well, sorry, we're gonna try to invade you and make you a Western-style liberal democracy).
The respective paths of the postwar neocon/neolibtard blob and woketards are of course not identical, but the weird dimensional merge going on now is making for some pretty nutso rogue waves (amplified by social media and other techfarts). While the blob is more focused on foreign policy and the woketards domestic policies, they share an insistence on "either choose my value system, or get wrecked."
There's the "free speech" right enshrined in the US Constitution, and then there's the more cultural notion of "free speech" – the ideal that we live among people who are content with arguing with you about what you have said rather than trying to ruin you for saying it.
No, not amendments. The comment I responded to was discussing two related, but different, notions of "free speech". I was asking how long the first kind (free speech as law) can hold without the second kind (free speech as culture).
Yep- I did understand that. But I thought your unintended reference was worth pointing out bc sometimes wisdom lurks in such places.
I'm finding myself thinking lately - though I grew up as left-leaning Dem of Kennedy Dem parents - that one cannot always count on culture, without the rule of law, when unchecked power dynamics are at play. And we frail humans always struggle with the temptation of power, don't we? Hence the genius of an experimental system of governance which seeks to decentralize power - even so far as to guarantee the rights of States to have their own militia...
Love it or hate it: that we have a Florida in contrast to a California is the very thing which keeps us from having a total collapse when it comes to holding even a narrow corridor open for dissenting ideas.
It remains to be seen whether our fragile experiment will survive the ever-expanding acid vat of the transnational corporate appetite for endless power and profits, but we can hope people will wake in time.
These people remind me of Victorian aristocrats, the "reformers" who assumed the mantle of edifying proles without having the slightest clue of what reality looked like at ground level.
Now it's self-appointed moral gatekeepers like our dear Mr. Watson here who believe we plebians must be punished and anathematized if we dare to dissent.
MT:"the mountains of flags and warning labels platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pile on all kinds of content now"--Have you all heard of NEWSGuard--The Internet Trust Tool???
Reliable Sources is one of Newsguards most trusted sources. Hilarious. The human thumb Brian Stelter is anything but a guardian of truth, or judge of whether news needs guarding. He's going to be fired soon but we're supposed to take him seriously in the meantime.
During the Roman Empire, the Senate once considered a plan to have all slaves wear white armbands identifying them as such. But the idea was rejected because they worried if slaves saw how many of them were working in Rome, they'd be tempted to join forces and rebel.
Academia is huge and they seem to almost all be like this. Certainly in terms of influence over the powerful, they massively outnumber normal people. Academic extremism is probably the top danger to society and we don't talk about it nearly enough.
"The underlying premise of all these formats is the conviction that the ordinary schlub media consumer will make the wrong decision if the correct message isn’t hammered out everywhere for him or her in all caps by mental superiors. This idea isn’t just insulting but usually incorrect, like thinking Lord Haw Haw broadcasts would make English soldiers bayonet each other rather than laugh or fight harder. Even just on the level of commercial self-preservation, one would think media people would eventually realize there’s a limit to how many times you can tell people they’re too dumb to be trusted with controversial ideas, and still keep any audience. But they never do."
I think what's missing here is the actual intended audience for these "contextualizations" and anxieties over allowing people to be misled. Ostensibly, the audience is as you say: the poor everymen and -women out there who will read something out there and might draw a conclusion other than the one the elite gatekeepers, tastemakers, and rightthinkers agree is the correct one.
However, that's not really what's going on. These are performances by these elites for *each other*. They're not thinking "if I just condescend a *little* bit more, I'll win some extra support from the middle or the right as they now clearly understand the rightness of my position." They are thinking "I need to make sure none of my fellow progressives pillory me for being insufficiently explicit in my awareness of and obeisance to the orthodoxy."
Is it any wonder, then, that they are persuading no one but themselves? They're not even trying to persuade anyone else of anything else. The idea that they are is window dressing.
My God, I had no idea who Adam Davidson was until now...writer for New Yorker.
What a drama queen! He also tweeted in recent days for examples of cancel culture because, no, he doesn't think it exists...talk about epistemic closure.
He is a special kind of disingenuous twat. This is a technical term, of course.
He is in the midst of maybe getting canceled himself for some innocuous comment on trans issues. He is currently at the stage of groveling about what an ally he really is.
Remember, the word "ally" is disingenuous itself. The LGBTQIAQWERTY activists don't want "allies", because that word denotes a reciprocal supporting relationship. They actually want tributaries, vassals, or -- dare I say it -- slaves.
I rarely read the Times, but I happened to come across a piece this weekend featuring 6 «thinkers» on ThE fUtUrE oF dEmOcRaCy. That seems like it should be an awfully big tent topic, right?
Well, they're supposedly having a free and wide-ranging roundtable discussion, but nobody seems to notice how narrowly described their limits of discourse are. While I abhor identity politics, it's helpful to look at which individuals were actually selected in order to consider their interests and the territory they are defending: almost all of them seem to be Dem party insiders, with one or two Republican-adjacents for "balance". None of them are pro-Trump/pro-deplorable. None are pro-Bernie. None are libertarian. But the tone throughout underscores that "these are the limits of acceptable discourse, anything else is nutcase."
Amusingly, if you Google "Adam Davidson trans" you'll get a globalist pro-TPP piece he wrote for the New Yorker. (Get it, trans?) Also a bunch of links to him getting dragged on Twitter.
We're not talking about shamming or shunning only, we're talking about people losing their jobs/careers for having an opinion that is not liberal orthodoxy. When did we start demanding an end to your career for having an offensive opinion? And where does it end?
Expelling heterodox views, even jf unsavory, is fascist and un-american. I don't want to live in a country where liberal orthodoxy is enforced militantly. Whenever I hear a liberal say the word diversity, I automatically ask myself if they would accept someone with a maga hat into the fold under the guise of diversity. It's a good barometer.
Oh no no no. You misunderstand! These are merely expressions of how “opinions have consequences”, don’t you see??
Serious question after reading the Twitter rant by Jarvis that MT linked: is it possible that these blithering blowhards are really and truly under their own spell to the degree their pompous vehemence would suggest? Seriously, do they really NOT see that the actual consequences of their (totally disingenuous bullshit) moralizing vis a vis literally robbing people of the ability to make a living in the manner they wish is, in very practical ways, much MORE harmful to both the individual AND society than anything our government may bring to bear? This seems so painfully obvious, I can’t believe these people don’t see it. Rather, I think they know it, and they Just. Don’t. Care.
There is zero assumption of good faith in anyone, it seems. Because, it turns out, people are just as horrible (or obtuse) as we feared, I guess. Damn.
When the woke say "diverse," it's code for "high on the woke totem poll." That's why you find HR departments valuing a "diverse individual." One person can't be diverse literally. It's code.
Traditionally liberals and free speech were intertwined. The right was more censorious. So who is going to defend free speech nowadays? The judiciary? Maybe.
The fastest woman swimmer is a man. And no one who makes a living in the public eye can say out loud “Goddamn that’s fucked up”. That’s where we are.
Well, Babylon Bee-- but I think they've been cancelled for saying Rachel Levine was Man of the Year.
it's becoming a badge of honor to be expelled from twitter.
The Republicans are too stupid to realize they aren’t alone in the censorship.
Never imagined being anti-war, questioning an unknown DNA altering substance in your body, repeating already proven facts and documents, repeating song lyrics written thirty years ago, criticizing allowing a 6’4” trans with his junk intact, a shoulder span the size of Montana, bone and muscle density that you can see through his effing skin and had swam on the men’s team is “ transphobic”.
I was cancelled for calling out Biden’s press conference boasting that he’d given a list to Putin of who not to hack. Can’t make it up.” “Hate speech and misinformation”
I got cancelled two years ago for a snarky comment about college level trans athletes. What really hurt is that it wasn't even controversial from the perspective of where I live(d) in one of the bluest cities in NorCal.
I just quit Twitter
I'm going to sad it was wondrous for awhile
Strange, I just began uploading selected posts to Twitter. I expect to be cut off shortly.
I shall never earn one, and that constitutes my sole regret to never having joined Twitter in the first place.
I got banned for a mildly rude remark. No honour there.
It actually just may be a mark of honour to be canceled.
Lol. Same happened to me a couple of years ago. I’ve lost no sleep over it. Good riddance.
We'd be much better off as a society if there weren't so much focus on getting and wearing "badges of honor". None of those I most admire had or claimed or needed any such "badges." They knew--without worrying about others' approval of them or the lack of it--whether they were honorable or not.
"Badges" of honor go with a society lost in empty, stupid virtue-signalling as a substitute for genuine virtue.
Now for a comment on the substance of Matt's article: The New York _Times_--as he aptly pointed out--had alreadly forfeited any claims it might have once had to respectability as a daily newspaper and would-be opinion-leader. This tempest smacks of alarm and outrage that Hitler's driver turned right on red without stopping.
Banned for posting I would like to see someone slap Maxine Waters across the face. NOT “I would like to slap her,” (even though I would like to) NOT “I will...” but I would like to witness it. I don’t care either way.
Then I am ahead of the game times three....
If only that were true…
I question her trans status.I’ve had trans friends for 40+ years.They share one commonality.. vanity. Perfect hair, makeup, jewelry.. uber female. Cases in point, Caitlyn Jenner, Chelsea( blanked out on her last name), the one who had passed government classified docs
There's speculations in certain quarters that Lia Thomas is pulling one over everyone and will revert back to being man once all the trophies have been won.
He get's to shower with the team > Smarter than the average bear Boo Boo!
That would be something…she returns the trophies and says “this was a protest against biological men in womens sports! Let’s go Brandon!”
Whatever the reason, it’s terribly selfish. Perhaps Thomas couldn’t cut it as top tier on the male team. Regardless, it is the antithesis of fair play and the very concept of competitive sports. These girls have worked for years to complete and play by the rules among others within well established guidelines.
It’s tantamount to pitting Tyrus against Oscar side la Hoya in a boxing match.No matter how skilled de la Hoya is in the lightweight category, ever if Tyrus was not the front runner as a heavyweight, one punch and La Hoya’s down. And that’s two biological males!
In the seventies, a male tennis player suddenly decided to become a female. Renee Richards. Richards had actually gone the full surgical route. In a non- professionally deigned matchup, he and Billie Jean King played on a bet. King was the female world champion, gay and not exactly the typical poster girl for the feminine standard. Richards beat her handily. Richards was also enormous. The issue was put to bed.
What's happening now is merely the logical conclusion of the postmodern idea that gender is nothing more than a social construct. A couple of years ago I was having a conversation with a large group as we watched Phelps hoover up gold medals at the Olympics in Tokyo. During our discussion the topic of women vs men came up, and I stated that it would be virtually impossible for a women to hold the overall world record in any swimming event. Cue the outrage among all the women present. If you go look at world record times for female athletes, in many cases those times wouldn't even meet the Olympic qualification times for men.
Example:
Womens' olympic qualifer time 200m free: 2:08:43
Women's fly 200m world record long course: 2:01.81
Men's olympic qualifier time 200m fly: 1:57.28
Men's fly 200m world record long course: 1:42.00
Finally society is coming back to the idea that maybe women and men really are different. I still bet most that most college educated women would reflexively take offense at my statement, though. What elite athletes can or cannot accomplish says absolutely nothing about the value of men or women.
"the logical conclusion of the postmodern idea that gender is nothing more than a social construct"
A thing that completely baffles me is that, according to the mass media, declaring yourself to be a sex other than your biological one gets you on glossy magazine covers (e.g. Caitlyn Jenner, Elliot Page) but making a pretense to a racial identity which you do not sufficiently* possess (e.g. Liz Warren, Rachel Dolezal) is a big no-no and merits contumely. I mean, if your identity is whatever you say it is, anything should go, right?
I am not making judgments or calling for any laws to be passed. I merely observe that one of these things, for whatever reason, is not like the other in the arena of public spectacle.
(*If I really wanted to get myself in hot water, I would opine that "race" is much more of a social construct than biological sex, but whatever.)
100s of high school boys every year beat Flo-Jos incredible time in the 100m.
I wonder about lia Thomas’s mental state and not even from the perspective of wanting to be trans. I can’t see actually believing what she’s doing is righteous. I think she’s some type of full blown NPD sociopath or something
I'm holding out for that moment when he collects his diploma and says " I can't believe you let me get away with it"
"She" has a penis.. That's a Man!
a penis is removable a vagina can have an “extension” but XX or XY is forever (so far). Why call yourself “trans?” If you want to “identify” as a woman or a man go for it but why identify as trans? if that’s how U see yourself then establish trans-sports teams and competitions. Why not? BECAUSE NO ONE WOULD WATCH!
I think the goal for most trans people is to pass without having to identify as "trans." I think that's why trans lobby wouldn't ever consider making a "trans" category. The reason some trans people identify that way is to usually make a political statement and/or because they know they aren't passing...yet. I know plenty of trans people who absolutely do not want anyone to know that they were born the "sex" that they now reject and don't identify as.
"Piece of shit Manning" Narcissistic child with mental issues given access to classified material.
Chelsea Manning is a true world hero. You're the piece of shit.
Only to the mentally unhinged.
She indeed was a hero for what she did. It does appear she has some mental issues, as documented by her treatment of Greenwald.
Yes, the military made a big mistake when they gave access to someone with actual morals.
Perhaps she exposed the documents on moral grounds or perhaps she had other motivations. One thing seems clear though, her moral compass broke when she turned on Glenn Greenwald, who helped her immensely through her travails. Her reason for very viciously turning on Greenwald had something to do with his alleged swing to the "far right." Greenwald was quite gracious: "Friendships that depend on political agreement were never 'friendships,' just cynical transactions." Some alleged that Manning released the documents to impress an online romantic relationship she (at the time still a "he") was pursuing. Given her behavior towards Greenwald, that speculation seems more plausible to me.
Gargle that statist cock harder, baby!
Oh, that's good!
Twss
If that's what it takes to expose the crimes of the empire, I'm all for it.
You missed one more thing - your likes of my posts.
Correct.
I want to scream!
Exhibit A
If the female athletes don't fight this, well it's on them. I know it will be uncomfortable, but if you are going along, you fortifying insanity.
I think there's a case to be made that becoming trans and using it to beat women in sports is no different than drug enhancements, which are prohibited.
I get your point, except trans-cheating is more like mainlining meth right before a race. They wouldn’t even bother testing you, just eject you from the sport…
"If the female athletes don't fight this, well it's on them." A more accurate statement would be "if the medical community doesn't fight this ("this" being the lie that men (XY) can simply declare themselves female (XX) and it goes unchallenged), they will ultimately lose professional and personal integrity.
We all need to say something. Martina Navratilova went out on truth island on this subject . When the insanity tide canceled her the lesson we learned was don’t go to truth island. We can all own a little bit of that
The people who are not standing up for the female athletes are the coaches, the parents and, most of all, the medical community that knows males are anatomically advantaged in sports. Until courage trumps the fear of being cancelled, losing employment and being out there on a limb by yourself, this will continue. The forces against stopping this are immense -- there's no denying that -- but the truth that gender is determined at conception, doctors document weight, height, APGAR score, overall health of the newborn and equally important, gender, at birth and do not "assign" a gender IS the truth.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell
I am so grateful I didnt grow up and go to college in a time that my future didnt depend on me dressing in a locker room with male genitlia and not being able to call BS.
Isnt it time for people to "speak out."
I graduated from HS in 1972. I think Title IX passed in June that year. That a man can compete and win trophies half a century later totally destroys women's sports. It is sold as a human rights issues, because there are thousands of people who want to sex change and compete in sports, right? Whomever is saying they are standing up for women's rights and supporting this need to STFU.
I didn't know we all had rights to compete in whatever sports event in America we wanted to. When is the next NBA try-out for post-menopausal white women? They owe me.
Actually as I watched NCAA bball the last couple of weekends, it did occur to me that a man (identifying as a woman) could easily make a try out on a women's team if he was mediocre on the men's team. It'll never end. And then we have the binary status! Nuts.
LOL! 😃
You don't need to have a degree in medicine to recognize that men generally have an advantage over women in athletics. Stop the worship of credentials, it's gone too far!
If everyone who thought this was wrong spoke up and was cancelled I wonder whether the healthcare system and scientific research would come to a screeching halt.
It's not just the medical community. I remember once upon a time where a university was a place you went to seek the truth and felt free to question orthodoxy. The Ivy League and other elite universities are destroying their reputation as well. As is social media, mainstream media, corporate america, and so on. No wonder people feel like this country is falling apart-- the people at the top are out of touch with reality.
While I get your point, it's on the people making the rules to stop it, not the female athletes that have been steamrolled by society and the people who are supposed to be looking out for their best interest.
Can't rely on politicians for anything, it has to come from the people, that in turn will throw out the politicians because they didn't do the job.
The bureaucracies have exploded to the point that there are almost more politicians than citizens. It will be nearly impossible to clean enough house to clear the administrations involved in this shit show.
It’s morally right to expect the rule makers to stop it, but we gave up morals for “virtue” years ago. Now the only way is for females to refuse to compete.
They need to get their parents heavily involved. They should refuse to compete, refuse to pay tuition, and blackball the entirety of it. The current trans movement needs to be crushed. The real trans people that are living difficult lives are having them made more difficult by the bullshit going on. Every celebrity has a token trans kid these days, and there are actually people trying to normalize pedophilia.
^ Very much this.
Trans people are a very, very tiny minority. (unless and until cutting sex parts off can be promoted as a "fashion decision", like getting tattoos.)
The insane, rigidly dogmatic, reality-denying people wielding the "transphobic!" accusations and "you are literally killing trans children reeeeee!" claims are a much, much tinier minority. And every time I look into it, it's some repulsive ex-man enjoying the power he now wields over biological women. However society should deal with the (very few) actual trans people, what is happening now needs to be stopped.
Maybe some sacrifices need to be made. Junior colleges aren’t so bad and those Ivy League schools suck anyway 
Why do you believe the female athletes should sacrifice? Go to junior college instead of Penn? The NCAA allowed this trans woman to compete. This means every Division 1 female swimmer potentially had to compete against "her". Come on (wo)man!!
You make a good point
You either risk cancellation or you get cancelled because you're out-competed. I think too many competing now will regret in 5 years that they didn't fight back.
Sounds perfectly reasonable. Aside from the fatal gunshot to the heart of the concept of "competition". I mean.
As long as a woman with junk wins, that's all that matters.
The bolstering has to come from liberal feminists or it will be used as the usual “ rightwing hatred of everybody” crap.Even though Hannity, Hilton, Tammy Bruce, Grenell, Gaetz, Jeanine, Lawrence Jones, David Webb, Kennedy, Chadwick Moore,Dana Perrino, Maria, Leo Terrell, Pete Navarro, Kash Patel,Carlos Jimenez,Winsome Sears, Charles Payne Liz McDonald,Salazar, Byron Donalds, Ari Fleischer, Horowitz and OAN all endorsed Jenner
The number of so-called liberal feminists who have drunk the kool-aid and sacrificed their last working neuron in support of men in womens' spaces far outweighs the ones who defend women's rights. Aside from a couple of small organizations, Women's Liberation Front and Save Women's Sports, which toil thanklessly with minuscule staffs and no money (WoLF just lost its funding platform, Givebutter, for "violating the terms of service" -- code words for "transphobia"), nobody gives a shit about what happens to the women. Support these orgs, folks, if you can. Every dollar helps.
The sports issue is a big deal, to be sure, but equally onerous is the national rollout, now in progress, of state-by-state bills to allow male felons, who apparently need protection from other male felons, into women's prisons. This population of trans-identified male felons has a very high rate of convictions for violent crimes and sex crimes. Good times ahead!
The number of feminists supporting this insanity outnumbers those feminists against it? Sez who?
Good question. I think most women are deeply offended, but silent.
Women who publicly speak out about trans lose their jobs or get cancelled. Or both. The female athletes know they won't get hired or into grad schools if they complain about Lia Thomas.
The trans lobby ( is it big Pharma? There is a lot of money in this) has so successfully attached themselves to LGB rights that castrating children is fucking celebrated by parents on Facebook and in major papers. Instagram and Reddit are filled with teen girls posting pics of themselves post double mastectomy for the likes.
And the real kicker- emperor-has-no-clothes thing is that there is no good data showing these "treatments" help at all!
All of these gender affirming clinics are going on nothing but woke feelings.
I used to be afraid of getting doxxed when I posted reality based things that are labeled as trans phobic. Nor anymore. Being on the side of not mutilating kids is a decent hill to die on.
Maybe we could just let the athletes decide who they want to compete against instead of maintaining gender-based ghettos. The division between men and women's sports just reinforces the idea one gender is inherently stronger, faster, etc., than the other. #JustSayin' 🙃
Well of course the division between men's and women's sports reinforces the idea that one gender is inherently stronger, faster, etc. than the other. It's not a lie, it's not a problem, it's not a cause for shame...it is simply a basic fact of human biology. Why do you think that men and women have always competed separately? There can be no level playing field between the sexes.
I don't expect you to agree or to even understand this, because you have clearly been inculcated to embrace an absurd metaphysical fallacy, one that is so easy to overturn that only a person who chooses to walk around with their eyes closed could miss it. But just in case you feel like residing in the real world someday, I invite you to ponder the real-world statistics contained in this objective compilation of statistics put together by Duke University, which demonstrates the irrefutable superiority of males in comparison with females in the area of sports. To make the point even more poignant, comparative statistics are given between women and boys, as well as between women and men. In many instances, immature males outperform mature women.
https://law.duke.edu/sports/sex-sport/comparative-athletic-performance/
However, you are correct in one respect: female athletes will absolutely have to step up and say "no" loud and clear to this assault on the entire enterprise of women's sports. Otherwise it will disappear. One more thing: the fact that human males are innately bigger and stronger than human females in no way diminishes the extraordinary accomplishments of female athletes. Only when forced to compete against men are all our magnificent achievements turned into a cruel joke.
By the way, I have no interest in "debating" with you further. Have at it. Have a nice day.
You may have whiffed on a sarcastic comment there, bucko. The upside-down smiley 𝑐𝑎𝑛 be used as a /sarc tag.
So, I agree with both of you, obviating any refusal to "debate" further.
What we need is a similar study that targets the performance of biological women vs trans women. We also need a study that targets the differences in physiognomy between biological and trans women. Let's get some hard facts so we can make good, fair decisions. Of course, getting a study like these off the ground is nigh impossible in the current political climate. But, we still need it, regardless.
Well said.
You’re really dumb as a soap dish, aren’t you?
One gender is stronger, faster, etc....all because of biology.
All I can do is just laugh at "true feminists" who are now getting a taste of the dog food they've been feeding men for half a century. Enjoy it, Ladies! :)
They almost certainly will lose their scholarships. You might argue that the education ain't worth it, but they are young women who believe in the importance of a university education mantra. Put yourself in their place - everything they worked so hard for culminating in a swim team scholarship will be lost. This is not speculation; they must swim without complaint or they are off the team and that means no more scholarship. It is the parents who should be making the noise!
Perspective: how much scholarship money is at risk here? The majority of non-revenue producing sports do not offer an athlete a full or even half scholarship. The athlete may receive one covering 25%, which means 75% covered with loans or out of pocket.
100% of whatever non-threatening amount you choose of scholarship money is at risk.
That in addition to being blacklisted from other universities and future employers. But at some point you gotta ask, is it worth attending these universities and working for such employers? We're reaching a level of absurdity where an increasing number of people will start saying 'No'.
I hope you’re right. No one is going to save the day. It’s becoming increasingly apparent - we need to save ourselves
If this were some nonexistential threat I would agree, but it is a great threat to our country. If we all lived our lives only for what we might get out of it short term we would not exist today.
I am pretty sure most of the female swimmers don't see this is an existential threat to the country so there's that. They may see it as unfair and a threat to their swimming competition but, from what I have read, some (if not many) of them are quite on board with the inclusion of a trans swimmer in their ranks. Honestly, I am pretty sure a large percentage of the population don't see this as an existential threat to the country...at least not yet. (P.S. Even I don't see it as an existential threat to the country and I am very opposed to the inclusion of trans women athletes in female sports.)
But this is an existential threat and the pawns are the kids who are being told not to "believe their lying' eyes" that the male they're competing against is not a male but a female. I don't expect teenagers to take a stand when the adults responsible for demanding this level of deceit refuse to do so.
This really has nothing to do with sexuality--it's a basic assault on the truth that has been established for eons. I think many people do understand this. In no way am I inferring that anyone who identifies as transgender should be treated with anything less than courtesy and dignity. That said, scientific fact can not and should not be altered to treat false assertions as true and demand that we all agree (or pretend that we agree) or else.
They’re on board with it because these institutions and all of the schooling they’ve ever had, brainwashes them to be on board with it
The female athletes at that level are on scholarships and would lose them if they refused to swim. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's up to the NCAA to do ther right thing and they won't.
The NCAA has never done the right thing. Heroes take on the burden. Founding Fathers gave up their lives so others that followed, including their children, could live free.
You mean they weren’t afraid to give up their scholarships?
George Washington never made the NBA, did he?
At 6'2" he was freakishly tall for the time, but I guess it's true what they say -- white men can't jump (unless they are Croatian).
Haha at this point in history I don’t think i would want my hypothetical kids to go to any of these schools. The damage done by “the academy” is like viral mental-itis and there’s no vax for that.
That's unfair. The women at Penn understood well that any criticism and it was their asses - university would not support them, trans phobic label would affect job prospects, etc. Their parents feared any statements would adversely affect the young women. Adults should fight this, and are mostly silent (Martina Navratilova and Caitlin Jenner notable exceptions as athletes, and J. K. Rowling as a liberal). The NCAA is a corrupt institution that cares more about wokester criticism than the well-being of its student athletes.
OK, well how will they feel in 10 years when they look back? With bitterness, regret they remained silent? If this is a molding experience, which it is, they will accept / comply, thus submissive. Is that what women have been taught for the last 40+ years? No, this is such cognitive dissonance it should have a much more resounding push back.
It may be a molding experience, but it is absolute bullshit they were put in this position. Everyone could see this coming, yet left them to be the victims of it. Nothing changed, except that the new "female" swimmers have all the right parts to dominate the women they are competing against.
Are you going to pushback?
Honey, I been pushing back since I left my mothers womb.
Then keep punching.
it is on all of us
Comedian Kyle Dunigan has created a "trans Trump" character. Pretty funny.
Damn right
One of my workmates has two daughters in college athletics, one plays baseball, the other basketball. So Sunday night I asked him what they thought about trans athletes.
He said the consensus among his daughters and their team mates is essentially, "What's the use in playing? We'll never be able to compete."
So that's the real end result here. Real women will suffer. End of story. So why are so many women on the trans train? Has the PC part of their brain beaten their critical thinking skills into submission?
I've seen some trans twatter streams where it's quite obvious that trans folk hate women at Incel levels of bile. That hate is quite accepted.
Then you have Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, Maura Healey, who said, when asked about girls feeling uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with transgenders, that the girls should "learn to hold it.”
Let me just answer as the parent of 2 girls, "Maura, boobala. go fuck yourself."
I would love to know what motivates the mind of someone who brags about being "all inclusive." All evidence shows that they are nowhere near all inclusive. Just ask Trumpers or the unvaccinated or Canadian truckers or Tulsi Gabbard or Russians or critical thinkers or anyone who won't bow their knee to their fantasy bullshit. They literally hate you and wish you dead. Luckily most of them talk a talk they could never walk, being about as physically rugged as overcooked pasta, or I think we'd be seeing pogroms against those above groups. Instead they just run intellectual pogroms on Twatter & Fakebook.
It was such a challenge to develop an infrastructure for women's sports and now so discouraging. I would not promote competitive sports for women in the future.
Watch James Lindsay. Diversity equity and inclusion all mean the exact opposite: conformity, inequality, and segregation.
Yeah, I've been checking out Mr. Lindsay for a while now. I saw his first appearance on Rogan so I read some of the papers that were published in that field just to see if he was blowing smoke up my backside.
He wasn't.
Gender, much like race, are just means to an end.
That end is Marxism.
Also they are great ways to derail criticism because no one wants to be labeled a racist or transphobic.
Lindsay should be given some kind of an award for slogging through that pseudo intellectual cesspit. Some incredibly boring crapola passing itself off as a theory.
This quote from CRT avatar & influencer, Robin DeAngelo, shows someone who has some serious mental problems.
"I had an out-of-body experience. I could tell you where I was sitting. I'm not ever going to forget that moment, where all of a sudden I was like, Oh my God. I'm white!
"And I felt so loudly white, that I remember being hesitant to go outside. I didn't want to go outside, because everyone could see that I was white."
Matt may have used this quote in his CRT article. Not sure. But I think it shows a different reality than she thinks. It shows a white liberal woman consumed by guilt about all of those black folk that SHE never befriended or, quite obviously, even looked at since she didn't even notice there were other races with different skin colors.
Problem is his content is so frikking long. Also I do think it would be helpfully to develop better nomenclature for all this. When people hear Marxism they think economic equality and state ownership of the means of productions. This is not what the billionaire class is interested in. Lindsay details the taxonomy of the branch of Marxism that broke off the original tree quite well. Anything that includes the word Marxism is going to have this problem. Cultural Marxism, race Marxism, which James coined, it’s all a red flag for newbies. Also there’s the curious fact that it seems to synthesize Nazism in its makeup as well, which was the most notorious identity politics of all.
He is long and incredibly prolific and even though I subscribe, I skip most of his podcasts and articles. But some of his stuff dives deeper into root cause than anyone else I've read. These two are especially incisive: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/02/paulo-freires-prophetic-vision-education/
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/05/bourgeois-overproduction-problem-fake-elite/
Thanks. I’ve got to figure out a strategy for catching up. I learn a lot from him but I can’t make this my life.
"When people hear Marxism they think economic equality and state ownership of the means of productions."
I agree.
But you can say that about all CRT terminology. The words they use don't mean what the wider culture thinks they mean. That is essential to their intellectual smokescreen. I think that's why Lindsay developed a glossary of terms used in intersectionality/CRT/gender studies.
People need to start using the term Alt-Left for ALL that shit. It is much more descriptive when you’re trying to describe extreme and indefensible ideologies. Using terms like liberal or even Progressive are not only inaccurate, but have positive connotations for some. These totalitarians do not deserve such passes. Call ‘em what they are: nihilistic assholes who hate you: Alt-Left
My point is just about communications. When you’re trying to redpill, make it easy to swallow.
That is what pisses me off the most. Supposedly feminest warriors not lifting a finger to defend women. Fifty years ago Title IX made it possible for women to have athletic competition. On the domestic violence front, we fought the judicial system for years to recognize domestic violence as a violent act, not as some kind of family dispute to be handled by social workers. And now here we are. I am sick of kids who were born 20 years ago telling us how we don't know about women's rights.
50 years ago women had only had the vote a few decades, had to quit work if we became visibly pregnant, could not have credit. Women's sports had no support.
Here's a woman's group meeting in the UK while a crowd of protestors shout out "Women's Place UK are the place for hate."
https://twitter.com/LucyHunterB/status/1507093091362250752
As one commentator said, "it’s pretty fucking grim that a bunch of women can’t meet to discuss women’s rights without being intimidated and shouted down."
I am sick of kids who were born 20 years ago telling me pretty much anything.
To be completely fair I feel the same way about politicians no matter what their age is...
Waiting for the first trans man to show up on a NC2A woman's team. It's coming.
WNBA just signed it's first trans player last year. New Zealand had a transgender person competing in women's weightlifting in the Tokyo olympics. It's coming.
Sad to see more nonsense is on it's way.
My argument has been that you are not being “inclusive” by accepting trans women in women’s sports. You are creating the world’s most exclusive club: Born male, or at least XY, competing female.
Did you ever see South Park's "Go, Strong Woman, Go"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URz-RYEOaig
I think that was season 21? Possibly the best tv ever
"Board Girls" S23
Thank you so much, incredible
I have said it before and I will say it again. Reality killed parody.
Right? We should take up a collection for members of Local 47: Union of Satirists and Parodists. They’re out of work.
Babylon Bee just did a video where the guys were challenged to come up with something so ridiculous that it hadn't occurred in real life. They failed. Satire is dead.
Satire is dead. Long live… satire…?
I would argue that they switched sides. South Park is just *accurate*
It’s a documentary
A long time ago, great satirist Tom Lehrer said, "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."
Then he committed to that by basically retiring from that business.
The left loses their shit over cultural appropriation but has no issue with those who appropriate gender. Crazy times.
The whole idea of cultural appropriation is garbage. Every culture on earth appropriates anything they find to enhance their own existence. Trade is all about appropriation of things others have that we do not or are better than we can produce. Cowboys became cowboys because Mexican Vaqueros had already established the ways and means to herd cattle.
And it's all good!
It's cultural evolution. I am certain the wheel was invented somewhere first, those that didn't take / use it would be noncompetitive and doomed.
Exactly.
I got banned from Twitter for calling Adam Schiff a political whore. Of all the shit that is on Twitter I get banned for telling the truth.
Twitter abhors truth. It's that platform's kryptonite.
About a year ago I submitted a meme about Devin Dunes being a political whore but did not share your same good fortune.
And soon enough every single woman's record will be held by a 6 foot four inch tall women. "We love it!" - all the papers
Looks like it's time for me to come out of retirement and win some gold!
https://twitter.com/hardhatludwig/status/1505751027185856512?cxt=HHwWgMC9-ZqlwOUpAAAA
This is a bit about when Serena & Venus Williams wanted to compete in the men's league. So a fairly washed up tennis player at the end of his career named Karsten Braasch was chosen as the sacrificial lamb. He literally drank beer before he played and smoked before & during the game.
Long story short, he kicked both of their asses.
This is an inspiring story. I'm off to drink beer and smoke.
Exactly what I was aiming for. If I can be a burst of inspirational sunshine in a gloom ridden world I consider myself fulfilled.
Or not.
So did you happen to see Pattinson's Batman?
My niece was here on spring break and she asked the same question. Presuming her to be in the target demographic, I was like, "Was it any good?" and she was like, "No, not really."
DC/Warner Bros./TIME Media/America Online can wake me up when they finally make a Batman movie with Colonel Blimp as the antagonist. https://townsquare.media/site/622/files/2016/09/Blimp02.jpg?w=630&h=965&q=75
I suppose I've seen worse. As long as Pattinson kept the mask on it was watchable. But every time he slipped into Emo Bruce I felt laughter welling up inside. The last time that happened was when bad boy Kylo Ren was revealed to be a somewhat whiny Adam Driver. That time I did laugh out loud.
If I were to guess which comic artist influenced the director I'd pick Paul Pope.
The fact that The Riddler turned out to look like Bobby Riggs' forgotten love child didn't help.
Just glad they spared me the bald Joker. The little glimpse they gave looked like he wandered in from a Hellraiser film.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying said just that (or very nearly) during their latest Dark Horse podcast. Check it out!
GAWD they have been on 🔥 lately.
A man? What progressive mind cannot grasp that allowing men to compete in women’s sports will oppress women so they can once again be subjugated as God intended. Seriously, the conundrum of ‘progress’ is that it is regressive. And, it is hilarious to watch as 10% of 10% of 10% of our population finds itself tied up in its legal and underwear briefs.
At 5'4", perhaps James Madison is just peevish that his dream of an NBA career was a non-starter.
And my Dolly was taller than me, which kept things spicy!
What makes it even more fucked up is that the IOC has banned a female athlete Caster Semenya for allegedly having "Too much testosterone". There is no doubt she is a woman and even though she is a bit unfortunate in that she as mixed up hormones from birth she has a women's plumbing and can bear children, but according to the IOC she must take drugs to reduce a testosterone level far lower than Lia Thomas.
see: https://www.npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/07/28/1021503989/women-runners-testosterone-olympics
If I was a woman athlete I would be ranting incessantly about this blatant favouring of men ahead of women in women's events at the Olympics. None will say a word lest they get 'de-platformed' and lose that vital ingredient of modern olympics - sponsors.
Very interesting how there's a billion rules and regulations regarding gender in womens sports, but no woman ever tries to sneak into mens sports. Really gets the noggin' joggin'!
In general, it seems to me that if trans women really want to be accepted as women that they would give a little ground to facilitate that process across society. This would include an admission that competing with double-X-chromosome women in sports is, indeed, not fair. If they gave away just that little bit they would spare us all a lot of sturm and drang and might receive a more welcoming reception.
I have to ask, "Why is this so important to the MSM? What is the real agenda?"
How much is this like the fight over Roe v. Wade? It enflames a small group of idiots who can't think outside of their own narrow interests while those of us who are willing to discuss the situation and try to compromise are insulted. This generates a lot of "noise" which covers up the more dastardly crimes the Oligarchy is committing.
BTW: Tulsi has said in her much more diplomatic way, "This is fucked up." She took a lot of hits for that. Other's point to her (non-existent) lap-dance for Assad. I guess I'm saying that if you want someone who understands nuance.... (kind of went off-topic there.)
You just touched on the craziest part. Sometimes it feels like they want 45% so they can generate campaign contributions as the the afflicted. I’m sure I’m wrong.
I'm sure you're right. I have noticed that all the appeals that come to me are always from an underdog who has no chance of winning. I stopped contributing to them when I finally realized that (IMHO) they are just in it to scam me out of my money.
Actually, he’s a lot slower than Katie Ledecky. Now imagine if she decided to start taking testosterone and contemplate surgery…
The greatest outcome of all of this will be if Thomas makes it to Olympic trials and gets destroyed by Ledecky. That said, he is pretty fast at 1500 for a girl. He beat the silver medalist at the NCAA championship.
TIME Man of the Year: Lia Thomas
nice
I'll take a moment to get somewhat off-subject with Matt's piece to agree with you that we're screwed up when it comes to this trans issue. But even more confounding is the fact that solutions appear to be elusive.
So here's one idea that may be even more screwy but also sense-making: Just as we pursue a level playing field among the genders in all other fields, let's do so as well in sports. For instance, eliminate the WNBA and women's soccer, but allow women to compete for spots on what are currently the men's teams. Men would probably dominate in the NBA, but maybe not so much in soccer. And in gymnastics, to take another example, I doubt that men could compete very well with women on the balance beam or the uneven parallel bars -- and maybe not even in the floor exercises. Women might even dominate in archery and other forms of marksmanship.
Regardless, this would eliminate the current unsupportable segregation in sports and bring them in line with every other aspect of our aspirationally gender-blind society.
(BTW, I oppose my own idea here, even as I also think it's a perfectly logical solution to this problem given the moronic ideological priors that our superiors are so determined to press down upon our collective brows.)
Let's just leave things they way they are, and disabuse ourselves of the notion we have to comply with insanity. Allowing this craziness to go forward only means we will get more of it., and it will be worse. This is the hill to fight on, let the other side die on this hill.
Unless there were required ratios, no professional men's sports team would take on female players. full stop.
But there would no longer be any "men's" sports teams, just teams. Granted, women would probably find it very tough and maybe impossible to make any major pro teams. But that would be just the way the cookie crumbles when sports are desegregated.
Technically, the NFL is already co-ed.
You nailed it
I find it amusing that the NYT has an official op-ed section. Isn’t all their stuff op-ed?!
Yes, but increasingly most of the media sounds like the most annoying middle school girls. The table of loud, bossy, wanna be mean girls who weren’t athletic, smart, talented, kind, or hard working. Best I can tell they all work for the msm despite never maturing or learning much of anything. 🤷♀️
It was different and better when journalists were working class and not filtered through J-school programs.
Today they get their credential and network with all the people they are supposed to. 'Why am I not respected outside of my clique?' they whine and stamp their little feet when they find out Joe Sixpack, a plumber from Dumbfuck, Neb., knows more about the world than they do. That's almost literally what happened to NYT guy Brett 'Bed Bug' Stephens.
Agree. My dad was a journalist. He grew up poor in and abusive home with alcoholic parents. He was the oldest of 6, graduated high school at 17, joined the Marines and turned 18 trapped on a mountain pinned in by Viet Kong watching his buddies die with bullets everywhere.
He came home, went to college, got his degree in journalism, got married, and became a journalist. I love reading his old stuff. He is a human encyclopedia of history and current events and politics. He knows more than any professor I ever had in undergrad or grad. He writes beautifully and coherently and concisely. He’s still my first call to understand WTF is going on.
He also left journalism before I was born. Consolidation was starting and the pay was crap. He didn’t want to end up having to move to New York. He was offered a job by the NYT around 1980. My brother was a baby. He wanted better for his kids than to grow up in a slum in NYC (both my parents grew up very poor) or with long commutes because he was already working 70+ hours a week.
He left journalism and became a broker. He has zero typical broker personality characteristics, but he is very smart and good at the job. It was a blessing that improved my brother and I’s life immensely. Increasingly I realize that our gain was literally the world’s loss. Similar stories played out across journalism for a couple decades. It’s very sad.
What does your dad think about current affairs?
He thinks are policies towards Russia have made no sense for decades. Last year he sent me stuff about the cultural/ ethnicity divide in Ukraine when I was nagging to better understand. The maps come out frequently when I have questions (I ask a LOT of questions 😂). My interest in Ukraine has largely revolves around ecology and following the Chernobyl stuff because wildlife is thriving and the civil war seeps into the coverage. I asked him about an article two days ago, via text, and I’ll paste his long (this is typical) text back below - he responded with this 15 minutes after I sent the article. He didn’t think much of the article, but felt another history lesson was due.
“Hi. I was confused about the article. In any event, the issue here is NATO. A little history is in order. First, Stalin defeated Hitler. Eighty percent of German casualties were on the Eastern front. The success of the D-Day Normandy landings were important in keeping Stalin from over-running Western Europe, which he certainly would have done had they failed. Stalin was acutely aware that in 1814, Czar Alexander I, after forcing Napoleon out of Russia, pursued him to Paris. The Napoleonic wars ended with Russian cavalry in Paris. Stalin wanted to emulate him, spreading the Communist revolution to the Atlantic. NATO was formed after Stalin’s death In 1953 but with Stalin’s aspirations still in the air. It was a defensive pact — a shield against Soviet expansionism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO changed. Instead of a shield to protect Western Europe, it became a sword aimed at the Russians. During negotiations prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, James Baker
, Bush I’s Secretary of State, promised Gorbachev three times that NATO would not move “one inch” to the East. Der Spegiel, the German magazine, wrote an article early this month saying the Germans promised Gorbachev the same thing. In 1996, NATO began accepting former Eastern Bloc countries into alliance. The last to be accepted were the Baltic states. Although formerly part of Russia, they are heavily Germanic from virtue of their creation by the Teutonic Knights in the late Middle Ages. Ukraine and Belorussia are different. Both are ethnically Slavic, the same as the Russians. Ukraine was an integral part of Russia for hundreds of years. What we are seeing in Ukraine today is a civil war. The United States might have played a productive role in peace mediations and possibly prevented the war. The neocons in charge of policy today have nixed that. I think the war will end in partition and bitter feelings all around. Our policy here is comprehensively incomprehensible. Sad.
We have no vital national interests in Ukraine except peace. We tried nation-building in Iraq, and that didn’t work out too well. This whole affair is a disaster. Ukraine is being destroyed. An idealist would say the Ukrainians are creating their own country by dying for it. The problem is, even if they win, which I doubt, they lose. Victory means winning a war-ravaged landscape with a hateful neighbor to the east. There will be no end to the animosity. The same people who took us into catastrophic wars in a Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the same thing in Ukraine, with the same results.
What’s the point? Good question. At the end of the First World War, after all the bloodshed and destruction, no one could remember what the war was about. The same thing was true in Vietnam, if not more so.”
*our* policies towards Russia 🤦♀️
Your dad sounds like a good man and cool guy.
Thank you. My parents are my heroes and I am so lucky to have them. Even at 39 we are close, and they are very close to my kids. Read comment above. I have quoted his most recent text on the subject. These are the answers I get basically daily when I nag to understand. This is also how he talked to me when I was little. Full explanations 😂
Had to laugh. A lot of truth there. The internet and social media gives them a microphone.
Burn. So true.
It’s all op-art. Makes your head spin.I’ve been reading amazing pieces in Tablet Mag, of all places.Particularly Lee Rich, Daniel Greenfield, Drs. Malone, Risch,McCullough,Bhattacharaya, Naomi Wolf, the Pfizer whistleblower, Ceneral Tata..
Meant Lee Smith
Op-ART! Oh! 👏 And yes been meaning to check out Tablet. They often mention it on the Darkhorse. Thanks for the reminder!
Bingo, Smokegetsinyoureyes, and Double Bingo, Matt!
Why people still pay money for the NYT, or any so-called "news" organization that willfully and continuously places opinion over facts, is just beyond me.
Because it mimics their worldview. they want and need to be right and the NYT gives them that fantasy.
It was also a Quadruple Yahtzee. People who pay for it do so because it affirms their peculiar set of opinions.
Very good word choice, IMHO: "peculiar" instead of "particular".
Their puzzles
Well, I think you nailed it, proving once again that brevity is the soul of wit.
No.
The past 5 years have been such a redpill moment for non-democrats regarding the media and the deep state. I truly don't trust the MSM to get the sports scores right any more, and if there is a political angle to any story my fake news antennae go up if the story sounds too good to be true.
I would also echo Glen Greenwald's point that if Big Tech is ideologically censoring content based on threats of regulatory reprisal, then it truly is a free speech issue and the government can't be let off the hook just because they managed to launder it by using the private sector.
It's like government hiring private security to go through your house without a warrant to get around the Fourth.
I believe the CIA calls anything they pull off a big tech server "open intelligence."
During the Obama administration they changed the definition of "Collect" in the IC. You can thank Clapper and Nakasone. Info wasn't "collected" until an analyst looked at it. So when they hoovered up every phone call in north america, that wasn't "collected" if no one had time to listen to it. That is dirty as hell. Typical of the most transparent administration in history. Interesting that definition seemed to change back under Trump... I wonder if NSA is still operating the same way as before but without explicit acknowledgment???
I wish Trump had at least pardoned Snowden and Assange.
You've got a lot of company. But that might've confused his conservative base (just my theory).
I get that. Still, though...Trump knew what was going on with the IAs, and you'd figure "the enemy of my enemy..." calculation would have come into play.
Missed opportunity.
That! ^
Thanks for that. I didn't realize that Trump's team was even capable of identifying a non-subtle constitutional violation as oblique as that. Encouraging!
Look on the bright side. That just means there are less legal ramifications if you shoot them. I would not be surprised if they tried that in the near future.
Sure, The NY Times editorial was the equivalent of driving slowly down the middle of the middle of the road. The editors apparently thought it was a one-way street. This car crash was as inevitable as it was avoidable.
The editorial’s lack of self-awareness was, to me, the most depressing element. Some reflection about its own corporate culture that led to the firing of their longtime science writer (and union rep - which might have been the disguised reason for going after him) Donald MacNeil, the constructive discharge of Bari Weiss, and the sidelining of James Bennett that you mention, just to name a few, would have been welcomed.
But no, this too little, too late editorial was a profile of cowardice.
Damage is done. Can't ever go back. It does seem like certain forces at the NYT are trying to draw back from some of the excesses of the last few years (which the NYT was fully complicit in), but the damage is done. They unleased the hordes of woke fury, primarily to defeat Trump, and you can't bottle that back in without betraying their new generations of woke reporters and editors who do genuinely believe in their anti-racism mission.
Thomas nailed it, they unleashed something they can’t control.
Its the regret of the gatekeepers who let in the Trojan horse. The soldiers inside have no regrets at all.
Only leftists and their mascots get to shoot people. Ordinary people go to prison for just taking their gun out of the holster.
Bryan, you're talking with your feelings, not your brain. Did Kyle Rittenhouse go to prison for "taking his gun out of the holster?" (And nor should he have gone to prison). Whatever your politics, fight the urge to just react emotionally to everything you hear or read.
Prove it with statistics.
Sure - how many murdered during BLM protests have seen their murders convicted? According to CNN 1 has been charged. Additionally, charges have been dropped against over 90% of BLM protestors that caused billions in damage. Fewer than 450 face charges nationally.
Conversely over 800 Jan 6th protestors remain in jail. None had a weapon. None charged with serious property destruction. Fewer than a dozen with physical assault. Zero firearms were found at the capital. Five Trump supporters died that day of various causes, the only one murdered was Ashley Babbitt which video recently released shows she was trying to stop the known BLM protestor/ plant next to her. Most remain in solitary confinement.
Bill - when they come for you, as they always do, we’ll cheer them on just as you have. 😘. Good luck to you in life. Based on your comments you are going to need it.
I just saw—but can’t think where—a roundup of where some of the BLM perps are now in regard to their court cases. It might’ve been Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. The guy who fire bombed a federal courthouse got off with no prison time. You should look for the clip, it’s a good complement to your argument.
"Only leftists and their mascots get to shoot people.
You think that this is an operative statement?
Really?
You're going to cheer them on when they come for me? Really? Why not just save some time and do it yourself? Are you okay?
Those are anecdotes that prove literally nothing.
NCmom; let's be clear that you are not defending democracy or the Constitution. Yes, there should have been more arrests and prosecutions for BLM rioting. That does not change the fact that the Jan. 6th riot at the Capitol was unprecedented and incredibly dangerous to the stability of the country. If wild-eyed radicals and conspiracy theorists feel that this kind of behavior is acceptable political activity, we are finished as a nation. You are on a road to nowhere to indulge your feelings.
you say that like it hasn't happened already. LEO's have been known to take "evidence" acquired thru dubious means from third party players.
Terrific analogy, spot on
Very good analogy
Well, I was a registered Democrat in 2016, so some of us have been red-pilled as well.
I was a registered Democrat until 2015 when I became disturbed about trying to sever policy related to women’s private spaces and sports from biological reality. I wasn’t fully red pilled until 2018-2020. Now I’m fully red pilled and, while embarrassing, I own my part gullibility in choosing ideology pretty talk over actual outcomes and objective truth to keep myself from making the same mistake again.
Part of making the red pill experience less galling is to admit that you aren't really joining those awful people you had in mind when you were opposing "the right". They existed in your head and were largely the creation of DNC wonks and media propagandists. Not that many actual Nazis/White Supremacists/hard core racists in the real world. That's why they have to jigger the definitions all the time.
I mean, I've never been called conservative in my life, and I'm on the redpill side. Don't know what to call it, but it helps to know it isn't ENTIRELY "conservative", "religious right" or Republican. I know some lefties just can't bring themselves to break with the Delusional Party because of a lifelong habit of demonizing "those guys" on "the Right". And I'd be reluctant to join such awful people too!
Oh I agree. I was completely indoctrinated out of grad school. I was in the “people who vote for life hate actual babies, republicans don’t care about the poor, conservatives want women barefoot and pregnant Camp.” I am so embarrassed by that today, but it certainly extended my personal awakening by years. I had to acknowledge I believed stuff that simply isn’t true, and reduced complex and nuanced situations to 1st grade bubble test complexity. To believe what I did I had to ignore actual outcomes and replicated data. It’s a hard pill to take, but I couldn’t live with myself continuing to believe things I knew to be false, and supporting a narrative with terribly policy outcomes for those they purported to help. Still, the indoctrination worked to extend my awakening at the very least.
I now call myself a conservative. My values haven’t changed. I believe in community, we give up our time and treasure to help those in need voluntarily. I support early choice, but also pro-life organizations like room at the inn which have taught me pro life people are the first to help parents and babies in need. I am a conservationist (but please never confuse that with idiotic climate activists) because I’m passionate about conserving the environment and I lived in the woods summers during undergrad as an outdoor adventure guide. I believe in conserving the American dream. I believe in equal opportunity, not forced equal outcomes as we are all unique individuals. I don’t care who sleeps with whom, but I think it’s cruel to separate public policy from objective biological truth. I opposed the genital mutilation of tween girls in poor countries around the world growing up and I oppose the genital mutilation of tweens and teens here today. I am a free speech absolutetionist. A society cannot be free without free speech. I oppose censoring of speech - the best arguments can win on merit and dissent to them will never to be silenced by force.
I believe in personal choice and individual responsibility. I believe if you set high expectations for kids they are more likely to reach higher in their life. I am live and let live so long as you genuinely aren’t hurting anyone else, so I oppose giving men a “civil” right to women’s private spaces, little girls overnight camp cabins and pool changing facilities, women’s college dorm rooms, and athletic competitions at any time and for any reason because it’s misogynistic and demonstrably harms girls and women.
I guess I have finally realized that the values I have are actually conservative. I am not a white nationalists, homophobe, or uncaring monster. I do not wrap my personal identity up in political parties (note I am a conservative, but not a Republican). I realize now I didn’t know the actual definition of “conservative” until my mid-30’s. I would also say that the true definition of liberal, which is actual close to conservative in many ways (I am both in some ways), has also been hijacked by the exact same illiberal and totalitarian leftists who promote such false hoods about what it is to be conservative.
This was very good.
same!
I don't trust the MSM to get yesterday's weather right.
Well, they change last century’s temperature, and even last decades, pretty regularly............ they also tell us high the record setting inflation starting in the second half of 2021 under Biden is really because Putin invaded Ukraine in mid February 2022
God I hate that red pill blue pill shit. Can we use adult words?
Necessary to move away from the useless "right/left" dichotomy. Sry.
LOL. It's only the most appropriate metaphor available. So there's that.
It's more a realization that right/left is a cartel narrative like everything else. All, please don't make the mistake of thinking the other side of the coin is benevolent and will fix things. The cartel don't care if our republic collapses. Actual people who want to keep the republic intact must protect it by removing these traitors from office.
The New York Times sports section wrote more feature articles about Caster Semenya than Henrik Lundkvist in most years when he played for the Rangers. They had more beat reporters for the Liberty than the Islanders.
NYT is in the social engineering business.
I don’t know why but I continue to be flabbergasted that people who claim to be on the Left, the idiots like Froomkin shrieking about this tepid Times editorial, don’t seem to be aware that what they are calling for is the replacement of journalism with propaganda. They don’t oppose authoritarianism; they’re drunk on the idea. They just want to be the ones with the authority.
it really is amazing and endlessly fascinating to watch the change that comes over people when they have no power vs when they get their first sniff of power. how many times in history have we seen yesterday's crusader for freedom become today's petty tyrant?
In the less extreme form, it happens at all levels.The slightest increase in status changes any one of us, often so subtly it's not noticed even though it's very real.
I've moved up and down the lower levels of the status scale and noticed creeping changes in myself. It's scary.
For journalists it's really bad because they are supposed to be our check on power. Instead, because of the professionalization of the business, they now see themselves as part of the establishment and, as Matt pointed out, they adopt the same disdain for the American populace as the elite do. That's always been true geographically. Out here in the Great American Desert of the Great Plains, East Coast elites have always been the enemy. They were the bankers and railroad executives who screwed over farmers, for example. I could draw up a New York-to-Los Angeles route by car of the places they could visit if they wanted to find out what the U.S. is really like. Because they haven't any idea.
Spot on. The current trend has people appointing themselves as some sort of benevolent gatekeeper, which is just a hold onto power and their own right to their speech.
That's why they are all using Newguard. They will save us with NewsGuard https://www.newsguardtech.com/
god, Kathleen, that is terrifying!
[insert Orwell reference here]
It is and it's being pushed on libraries:
https://www.newsguardtech.com/news-literacy/for-libraries/
It really needs to be discussed. Lots of Big Players on Advisory Board--Arne Duncan, Jimmy Wales.
it's almost as fun watching our enlightened betters trying to finally bring this damn stubborn world and its damn stubborn inhabitants under total control as it is watching wile e. coyote chase the roadrunner.
sadly they have got a lot of people under control....so far Substacks haven't made it to library subscriptions..while the NTY and WaPo are everywhere.
I assume that battle has already been lost. Back to emailed newsletters or even print sent by mail. People are capable of getting off their news-by-technology addiction. I lived most of my life without it.
In the USSR "Samizdat" were very popular. Or so they used to tell me, it might even be true. Most of what we heard about the USSR was propagandistic lies.
Libraries are one place it can be effectively banned. At least until the screaming toddlers at Yale School get on the bench.
I used to work at a K-8 school which went through that whole "evolution" from hippie-progressive to corporate-hierarchical, and I could totally see them adopting Newguard today and thinking they were treading the Righteous Path®.
I think it--Newguard--is a back door to control.
interesting link, how did *that* sneak under the radar. one look at the ominous partner list shows how ubiquitous our 'saving' might become.
Wtf is that??!!
It is a new way to stop misinformation: https://www.newsguardtech.com/
Here are the advisors: https://www.newsguardtech.com/our-advisory-board/
It seems to be a very widely supported platform. I have seen it cited as the new way to identify misinformation. Heavy hitters.
They are intellectual and emotional children who never developed theory of mind. They thus have no ability to deal with the fact that other people see the world differently than they do, and that there is potential validity in those other views
Left and right don't mean anything anymore. Not since 2016. It's the establishment against everyone else.
If only the Left had taken Camus' suggestion to heart 60-some years ago: "We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty."
— Albert Camus, "Socialism of the Gallows"
The media’s the most powerful entity on Earth. They have the power to make the innocent look guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the mind of the masses. And white liberals control the media."
-- Malcolm X
Putin said “Information is power”.
Malcolm X said White Liberals are the big problem for America and, in particular, Black Americans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdc-q3biLm8
I say this as a former White Liberal in recovery.
Today Chairman Mao would say political power comes from the barrel of a pen
That phrase well predates Putin.
I know, but it is worthy of note that he adopted it because he is a pro at controlling information inside Russia and hacking information outside Russia.
“The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.”
Unfortunately, anyone who tries to apply any of these in any measure is now literally Hitler.
Great and very relevant passage, Jim. It should be widely disseminated. Thanks for sharing.
Remember, Camus was attacked viciously at the time for both his refusal to endorse Stalin (he was obviously proven correct on that) and, as a bete noir, for his refusal to condemn France's attempt to hold on to its North African colonies (he wrote at the time that nations go through stages of development, just like people, and that condemning France for its colonialist impulses was like condemning an adolescent for being surly - but still ...). Given all the proclamations and open letters being circulated at the time, he also wrote this in the same essay: "It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist."
France still bombs Africa most days.
No big deal, not like Russia was doing it eh?
Dostoyevski made pretty much the same point in "Demons" in 1872.
Wonderful perspective, Jim.
He got lucky. And the faults he talks about were caused by letting shithead continental philosophers like the Frankfurt School members, Foucault, Derrida, and all the rest into the U.S. academy. So he can blame his fellow countrymen in advance. The idea that reality is primarily constructed from language, not by anything objectively real, came from them, and oh my God has it screwed up not only the moldy recesses of the academy, but it's leaking out into real life. The Frankfurt School members might not have inflicted all that trash on us if they had just gone down to the beach once in awhile when they were hiding from Hitler in Southern California. 🙂
Better alternate reality: "Frankfurt Surf School."
Mind you, Camus has been dead since 1960. Imagine what he'd think of today.
Wish he’d died in 1960.
Bingo!
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Lmao
In other words DNC elites completely lack both humility and discipline, characteristics that the working class tends to learn over their working lifetime.
Thanks- I just tracked down a copy and look forward to reading this in full. There is truly nothing new under the sun, at least as far as human nature/folly is concerned.
You can't have too much Camus. ;)
Thank you for that, Jim. Brilliant.
You are all going to use that quote now, with almost no understanding of the context, just to score points against a Left bogeyman that doesn't even exist. This is why I say Americans aren't capable of democracy and we are already deep into a new feudalism. Keep fighting that last war, keep sending cavalry against the tanks. The media you so glibly deride love it. They know where to find you and where each of your buttons are.
"A Left Bogeyman that doesn't even exist."
The definition, Mr. Muhammad Lee, is "an imaginary evil spirit or being, used to frighten children." The bogeyman was created for children; your Left is quite real, with little Stalins the stuff of adult nightmares and progressive fantasies.
Lol - I'd like to know what "context" you think I'm missing? I've read nearly every Camus essay dozens of times. I've read two biographies of him. I've read all four volumes of his diaries. I've ready all of his novels, most of his short stories (saving a few for my 70s, just to have something new by the man to read in my dottage), and even his play. But, pray, enlighten me ...
The left is falling all over itself to see who can be the most ludicrous cancel maven in the land--every day the list of the canceled becomes longer, now stretching back centuries to include perfectly innocent Russian composers.
yes: we are not going to perform Shostakovich any more; clearly he simply orchestrating Putin's talking points. The fact that he was born > a century earlier is no excuse.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trinity-and-ucd-orchestras-ban-russian-works-in-solidarity-with-ukraine-dhxv09hqp
Meanwhile US handgun deaths plummet as proud Americans stop playing Russian roulette . . .
If only that were true.
that pun deserves a health warning :)
Or at least a good dressing down.
Russian dressing?
Damn that Putin crazy war criminal! Russians = bad.
Dostoevsky. Pushkin. Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoy.
Cancel em all!
Plus it'll be easier for those ignorant or pernicious (or both) people to repeat that great country's and cultural and political mistakes with all the pesky Russians from all of time being Personae Non Grata.
The goal is to make you hate RUSSIA, and everyone who ever lived in it. Putin will die, but Russia can be used to whip up fear and hate forever.
Sometimes it seems they are in search of the cheapest virtue signal they can come up with. The key being, not the "zero cost to the signaler" aspect (all virtue signals have that), but the zero benefit to those they are "in solidarity with".
So by that metric, they may have a winner.
How long do you think the Neo-Bolsheviks (oh, the irony) will wait before hinting at interment camps for Russians?
The thought of firing or cancelling some artist who won't publicly denounce Putin is beyond stupid.
Matt attracts some real dumb shit comments. Please give me a "cultural Marxism" before I sign off, you stupid twat. hahhahaha you're doomed.
Lol - yes, yes he does, doesn't he ...
Used to be called Xenophobia. And that was hurled at Trump and supporters A LOT.
Different now though of course. Warmongers couldn't make war on that Xenophobia of long (2-5 yrs) ago.
Oh and I'm sure the Biden and deep state connections to Ukraine are coincide too. 😉
Interesting that I haven’t heard of anyone trying to ban AKs made outside of Russia.
Maybe getting hit with War and Peace hurts more?
They are, but they have been at it for a while and are trying to ban everything else that goes bang along with them.
Of course here is what they do to Russians who actually believe in gun rights.
https://newrepublic.com/article/153036/maria-butina-profile-wasnt-russian-spy
Yes, and firing Anna Netrebko from the Met will I'm sure fix Putin for good.
Quick. Ban those little dolls. It’s basically HitlerPutins inside a larger, more sinister HitlerPutin!
The last one is Trump sporting his trademark Trump-a-dore hair, with tiny hands at his sides
https://mate.substack.com/p/russiagate-has-no-rock-bottom?s=r
Ummmm ... would "/sarc" help?
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=iba&hsimp=yhs-syn&type=asbw_8923_CHW_US_tid32016&p=Matt%20Taibbi%20on%20Russiagate¶m1=6fyup6tixkKaRUfZwMPVSqwHV07agjknhgEdjrWqDPLme097SPnLZyFkkWA0%2FNra¶m2=9dUI1n2R0BLDxNuWfiP4aWyjOZc2NBa%2Bx2opBYQCDMSB7nBAfwbAzkkglZNKi5o21u72Jm8TatlnU7NDGbP7Fz%2BaruUm0%2F%2FUuApqRgaIAyjv%2FbuI%2FnRHyek57pGIRvzgCK6dg%2BWG81EEjptMivQ%2BtY%2FmccsScqa5roaiFmsDN1Z%2BArDez%2F%2Bq9FLcpxsdJbmvntEDm%2F%2FduBpZEhYA17R44CNintkaONJa0SSefFhxbIetIfJDsRZUksZS3fOOp%2FfC5zuN5uqflqIXM0ZWpLeH6g29tBE2VktIDT2Uoq7Zxlw%3D¶m3=NwVEMR%2FzKcG52XsVBYEh2zk2Yklq85vdfspZPoqz2M1qypHRDDTed5vIiOf0QJloIYNIhURx5ygk43IbuWBmnSO6VJi0Lg%2BHXK15j4L%2FFbtWkrI4tZva2CSdO%2BO8zcxNbLhvWNCxu7qqZlXKkcHyRPDoYBuU5OfIcNLutO%2FVbA4pHV9KZ2I2KfllKV0zAGHYNZWqYCIBFSUDJsAJ40shUTmtYTBQ2pTyrLXLMsquhR2Ioq7SN4PfUlF5Yvzi4FxjuFtEloemcKflEkzzd%2Bk%2FOABdurJSYmM6a8sk3FR%2BKiKwDMo05NF6eXdKMSFdX0a0105mn6YV3Hsy7yj0MDx1u8pH%2FxqPMvHof73CacOg8old6AWmKuBvRO6LBO8EB5U2QKpGwQwA5FJCE%2FU2KB8PCg%3D%3D¶m4=uWSqvQG2rQeo3qCr8LF%2FDajJvNCtC0TogWq1Obsi4Ms%3D
Except that Trump did not make things easy on Putin one bit. In fact, he was very tough on Putin. But that did not matter to the "Russia hacked our election" crowd, which simply made things up as they went along. Hate Putin? Hate Trump? They must be in bed together! LOL. Except there was never the slightest evidence for that. Multiple ACTUAL journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal exposed those lies over and over.
That was just a joke.
It won’t fix Putin but it will send a broader message to celebrities and oligarchs that support Putin that they are no longer free to benefit from luxuries and freedoms of the West while supporting brutality and war at home in Russia. Funny thing about Putin’s elites, they’ll tell you how the West if filled with hypocrites and war mongers out to undermine and destroy Russia but they love their villas, and their yachts. They work deals to get Western citizenship. They set their kids up to live here and they send them to Harvard and Stanford and Yale and Oxford. No Moscow State for those kids. Don’t worry, Linda, Netrebko will get by. So too will the Met.
Anna Netrebko has nothing to do with what Putin did or did not do. To ask her to make a public statement denouncing him is disgusting. Would an American opera star denounce Biden? I think not, and the US has invaded far more countries and overturned far more governments than Putin has. A broader message of what? That the US controls the world? How many innocent civilians did we kill in Irag? In Libya? In Syria? In Yemen? Yet I don't remember anyone asking Renee Fleming to denounce Obama.
According to the Guardian and other press, Netrebko opposes war ( anodyne and easy) but will not denounce Putin. Fair enough, she has sided with a pariah. Now she is a pariah. Whats the problem, she can still sing in that part of the world that supports Putin and his aggression. If you are suggesting that the US is a more brutal regime than the Russian’s that is a separate argument. 145 nations at the UN voted to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine at the UN. Four countries stood with Russia; Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. Even China, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela abstained. Russia is a pariah. Unfortunately for her, so is Netrebko. Linda, you’re not going to start claiming it is also wrong to go after the oligarchs too, are you?
If Netrebko should denounce Putin, then every performer from the US should denounce Biden. You don't denounce the leader of your country. Saying nothing should be fine. That the Met required that of her is despicable. I find your argument profoundly illogical.
Lmao
Because the UN is a moral paragon of virtue.
Fucking fuck stick.
Only our celebrities and oligarchs deserve those luxuries of course!
Cancelling a country because of the acts of the country's elites would seem a bad idea. besides; who gets to choose *what* gets cancelled? the MSM, clearly. oh, and perhaps yourself, if you have been behaving.
What you are arguing for is a kind of cultural carpetbombing; to you Anna Netrebko as just - collateral. But it's not just Anna; art, music, literature, all verboten, by nationalistic decree. The casualties are really: us.
America has hated Russia for over a century.
We are not cancelling Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekov or Pasternak. We are not cancelling Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff or Stravinsky. What we are doing is refusing to accept among us those artists who support and benefit from the Putin regime and its aggression. By his actions, Putin is turning Russia into a pariah state. If Russian artists and athletes continue to support that regime, they should be treated as pariahs too. Netrebko says she opposes war but will not condemn Putin. She should have no problem, then, making a living in Russia, Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. They too support Putin. As for cancellation, the US and Britain accepted hundreds of of artists and intellectuals that fled Nazi Germany. They did so to save German culture from Nazi culture.
Well; though i would disagree even with that, please check my initial link:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trinity-and-ucd-orchestras-ban-russian-works-in-solidarity-with-ukraine-dhxv09hqp
We have swiftly arrived at the stage where we most certainly are banning 'Russian works', and neither of us have any say in the matter. Censorship starts with 'Just this'; but in the current crucible, nobody knows exactly who or what is approved, and we end with fear, confusion, and silence.
The gold rush is still on! (Although you should probably substitute "shit" for "gold")
The moment I hear them all squawking, hooting, and hollering is the moment I know someone hit the "Truth" button. The only logical reaction is to bury my head in the sand until all the gobbledeegook settles down. I wonder how many of those turkeys read past the headline ... or maybe they just like reading at their own pace?
To be fair though, I rarely read past the headlines in the New York Times anymore either. It's usually pretty clear where they're going:
Covid is extremely deadly for everyone, including children. Vaccines are a gift from God. The American empire bears no responsibility for provoking Russia to invade Ukraine. What American empire? Everything is racist and transphobic. Joe Rogan is basically a serial killer. Republicans pose a grave threat to democracy. Biden is doing a helluva job and bears no responsibility for the economy hurtling towards a cliff. What cliff? Weather is the result of human caused climate change. Etc.
There, I've save you all a lot of time.
That's basically what I experience every time I try to listen to NPR (since 2016).
Except that in every one of those stories, NPR would be compelled to include the word "race" or "gender" or both. Everything else is just an aside to contextualize racism and sexism.
Coming from the other side, we have the perspective that Covid isn’t particularly deadly at all - the true number of Covid deaths is only 4% of one million, whatever that comes out to be, and all of those occurred among older-than-65’s with no comorbidities, assuming such a category exists. VAERS proves that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already died from the vaccines, even if most of us can’t seem to find the name of a single vaccinated acquaintance anywhere on the local obituary page. Oh, and the vaccines don’t protect people from dying from Covid. Even though nobody’s dying from Covid anyway.
In the meantime Putin bears no responsibility for invading Ukraine, that rant last July about “one people” was way overanalyzed by the warmongers and neocons of the deep state. Chechnya, Grozny - what “Russian empire”? Wasn’t it Brezhnev who did that? Or maybe Biden, come to think of it?
The real threat to democracy is the Democratic Party and everyone who votes for them - communists one and all, busily engaged in stealing elections and subverting local school boards to promote the teaching of the Kama Sutra in kindergartens. And serially killing babies in their spare time, or at the very least promoting legislation that will enable others to do it for them. And believing that climate change could possibly be real, which is of course the same thing as believing in communism.
The sad thing is you've just demonstrated how extremely effective propaganda carefully constructed to advance an agenda can be. Instead of asking whether the other side might have at least some legitimate basis for rejecting the approved narrative, you've just presented a caricatured version sarcastically, implicitly saying you accept everything Fauci and the CDC told you is true. Speaking as someone who reads the actual science on the subject on an almost daily basis, it's not.
I guess I’d say that YOU’ve just demonstrated something that I’ve increasingly noticed over the past few years, which is that only wholesale acceptance of the ENTIRE narrative presented by one of the two parties to the debate is deemed acceptable by the increasingly fervent loyalists on both the left and the right.
You seem to be assuming that because I believe SOME things about Covid that you don’t, I must be swallowing EVERYthing the other side proclaims - and who knows, I wouldn’t be surprised if that manichaean view of things possibly extends to everything else you might think I believe as well.
It’s not that simple. I’ve lost faith in the idea that either side is really searching for the truth so much as looking for justifications to attack and demean the other side. Whenever possible, I believe things based on what my eyes and ears tell me personally. Failing that, I search for firsthand sources. When all else fails, I search out the opinions of those people who seem to be the most widely hated, since it seems to me they’re probably the most likely to be telling the truth, LOL.
Kama Sutra would be better for children than the grooming porn they allow in schools. Vast stretches of Kama Sutra are boring AF. So to speak.
I used to say my ideal girlfriend couldn't spell "Cat" without spotting her the "C" and the "T", but had read the Kama Sutra and found all the mistakes....
but I've grown since then
4% of 1 million? Does the percentage change with quantity?
There was one article recently in the NYT where the most important thing wasn't mentioned until paragraph 24 (plot twist: the Hunter Biden laptop was real after all.)
It also means I am in for a good bit of schadenfreude. By the way, this was great.
"This Times editorial is watered down almost the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a Bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic."
True. Great writing by Matt T.
Flak indicates proximity to the target.
I've read that about 70% or more of people only read the headline and another 15% or so read the first paragraph.
REMEMBER SNAKE ISLAND!
Wait, what? There was a correction?
"Yes, on Page 1454"
I see.
Are you saying that Snake Island wasn’t hit by Russian artillery fire? Or are you just pointing out what everyone else found out when the smoke cleared that not everyone was killed. Oh, and nice touch will the capitalization. We can all HEAR YOU NOW, Bill.
Finding out the Snake Island defenders weren’t killed to the last man takes the meme out of it’s sails, doesn’t it?
In any case, how many planes did the Ghost of Kiev shoot down today?
How is the weather in Langley today?
"Never waste time by seriously by engaging lying state trolls"
Words to live by.
How’s it working out for ya?
The Brooklyn Orthodox keep throwing this tantrum because one of their foundational beliefs (both on the political and personal level) is that THEY are the cool ones--they watch Drag Race and listen to Cardi B and are open to exotic cuisine, etc.--there's no possible way that they could have become dreary puritanical opponents of free speech, free thought, freedom of expression and association--that's for rednecks and Republicans. Cmon, they're LIBERALS, it says so in the name.
Their refusal to face the truth reminds me of when a junkie or drunk first sits down at his intervention--"It's not that bad! I only did that a few times! I'm gonna quit, I swear!" Nothing makes people angrier than when you hold a mirror up to their face, or when you try to make them take responsibility for their actions.
The truth hurts because it destroys a belief: not in itself. (Nietzsche)
Substack says this is an 8 minute read. But it’s not because of the laugh breaks.
This is the cutest review I’ve read in a long time.
Oh yay, the NYT speaks up - pass the beer nuts, my ecstasy cannot be contained - joy abounds (sigh).
The NYT has about as much authority as "Dick" Vernon from the Breakfast Club - somewhere in the depths of the editorial board room some scribe is saying "you mess with bullshit, you get the horns."
Not to mention they are just about as fake as the actors ages in that movie.
Haha, one more comment like that mister and I am coming in here cracking skulls. Hey Emilio put away the cocaine.
I heard a ruckus
Could you describe the ruckus?
Ms. Sun: "It was ruckus...it sound...like man-ruckus."
It's a good point: if you're for free speech, then put your money where your mouth is. Of course it's nearly impossible to imagine the NYT posting an "op-ed" by Rand Paul, Brett Weinstein, Adolph Reed or Noam Chomsky (to pick some random-ish names from a hat).
"Totalitarian humanism" is a good piece of shorthand. I just watched a whole series of lectures by John Mearsheimer (publicly available on YT) that contrasts interestingly with the above. Though JM is only concerned with foreign policy, he describes the restless tendencies of the blob in its quest to establish liberal hegemony everywhere and so paradoxically squash true sovereignty and self-determination abroad. ("Paradoxical" because liberalism is supposed to be rooted in freedom and choice. But if you choose fascism, socialism, religious caliphate, etc., well, sorry, we're gonna try to invade you and make you a Western-style liberal democracy).
The respective paths of the postwar neocon/neolibtard blob and woketards are of course not identical, but the weird dimensional merge going on now is making for some pretty nutso rogue waves (amplified by social media and other techfarts). While the blob is more focused on foreign policy and the woketards domestic policies, they share an insistence on "either choose my value system, or get wrecked."
NYT is CIA
NYT is CIA
There's the "free speech" right enshrined in the US Constitution, and then there's the more cultural notion of "free speech" – the ideal that we live among people who are content with arguing with you about what you have said rather than trying to ruin you for saying it.
And how long can the first kind hold without the second?
As in - the First Ammendment, without the Second?
No, not amendments. The comment I responded to was discussing two related, but different, notions of "free speech". I was asking how long the first kind (free speech as law) can hold without the second kind (free speech as culture).
Yep- I did understand that. But I thought your unintended reference was worth pointing out bc sometimes wisdom lurks in such places.
I'm finding myself thinking lately - though I grew up as left-leaning Dem of Kennedy Dem parents - that one cannot always count on culture, without the rule of law, when unchecked power dynamics are at play. And we frail humans always struggle with the temptation of power, don't we? Hence the genius of an experimental system of governance which seeks to decentralize power - even so far as to guarantee the rights of States to have their own militia...
Love it or hate it: that we have a Florida in contrast to a California is the very thing which keeps us from having a total collapse when it comes to holding even a narrow corridor open for dissenting ideas.
It remains to be seen whether our fragile experiment will survive the ever-expanding acid vat of the transnational corporate appetite for endless power and profits, but we can hope people will wake in time.
These people remind me of Victorian aristocrats, the "reformers" who assumed the mantle of edifying proles without having the slightest clue of what reality looked like at ground level.
Now it's self-appointed moral gatekeepers like our dear Mr. Watson here who believe we plebians must be punished and anathematized if we dare to dissent.
MT:"the mountains of flags and warning labels platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pile on all kinds of content now"--Have you all heard of NEWSGuard--The Internet Trust Tool???
with an unbelievable group of advisors that includes (Ret.) General Michael Hayden. https://www.newsguardtech.com/
Reliable Sources is one of Newsguards most trusted sources. Hilarious. The human thumb Brian Stelter is anything but a guardian of truth, or judge of whether news needs guarding. He's going to be fired soon but we're supposed to take him seriously in the meantime.
Newsguard is everywhere all of a sudden.
Like a herpes flare-up. I'm sure it's shangri-la in the "newsguard" bubble! Lot of deep thinkers over there.
Do they actually have any idea how outnumbered they are by said plebeians?
It's funny that you say that.
During the Roman Empire, the Senate once considered a plan to have all slaves wear white armbands identifying them as such. But the idea was rejected because they worried if slaves saw how many of them were working in Rome, they'd be tempted to join forces and rebel.
Academia is huge and they seem to almost all be like this. Certainly in terms of influence over the powerful, they massively outnumber normal people. Academic extremism is probably the top danger to society and we don't talk about it nearly enough.
Yes.
If the situation were hopeless, their propaganda would not be necessary.
Well, the situation is looking less and less hopeful for them by the day.
Release the Jacobins!
The most unstable power structure is an occupying army of a different religion. They trigger insurgencies that never end.
Woke is the religion of the privileged. The peaceful phase of resisting them is nearing an end, I predict.
Oh yeah, good call. That's actually very relevant.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
As long as they're making sure nobody is talking about who's on the take and where all the wealth is going, no amount of sanctimony is too much
"The underlying premise of all these formats is the conviction that the ordinary schlub media consumer will make the wrong decision if the correct message isn’t hammered out everywhere for him or her in all caps by mental superiors. This idea isn’t just insulting but usually incorrect, like thinking Lord Haw Haw broadcasts would make English soldiers bayonet each other rather than laugh or fight harder. Even just on the level of commercial self-preservation, one would think media people would eventually realize there’s a limit to how many times you can tell people they’re too dumb to be trusted with controversial ideas, and still keep any audience. But they never do."
I think what's missing here is the actual intended audience for these "contextualizations" and anxieties over allowing people to be misled. Ostensibly, the audience is as you say: the poor everymen and -women out there who will read something out there and might draw a conclusion other than the one the elite gatekeepers, tastemakers, and rightthinkers agree is the correct one.
However, that's not really what's going on. These are performances by these elites for *each other*. They're not thinking "if I just condescend a *little* bit more, I'll win some extra support from the middle or the right as they now clearly understand the rightness of my position." They are thinking "I need to make sure none of my fellow progressives pillory me for being insufficiently explicit in my awareness of and obeisance to the orthodoxy."
Is it any wonder, then, that they are persuading no one but themselves? They're not even trying to persuade anyone else of anything else. The idea that they are is window dressing.
My God, I had no idea who Adam Davidson was until now...writer for New Yorker.
What a drama queen! He also tweeted in recent days for examples of cancel culture because, no, he doesn't think it exists...talk about epistemic closure.
He is a special kind of disingenuous twat. This is a technical term, of course.
He is in the midst of maybe getting canceled himself for some innocuous comment on trans issues. He is currently at the stage of groveling about what an ally he really is.
Groveling never works.
Always appreciate folks using technically correct terminology!
Remember, the word "ally" is disingenuous itself. The LGBTQIAQWERTY activists don't want "allies", because that word denotes a reciprocal supporting relationship. They actually want tributaries, vassals, or -- dare I say it -- slaves.
I rarely read the Times, but I happened to come across a piece this weekend featuring 6 «thinkers» on ThE fUtUrE oF dEmOcRaCy. That seems like it should be an awfully big tent topic, right?
Well, they're supposedly having a free and wide-ranging roundtable discussion, but nobody seems to notice how narrowly described their limits of discourse are. While I abhor identity politics, it's helpful to look at which individuals were actually selected in order to consider their interests and the territory they are defending: almost all of them seem to be Dem party insiders, with one or two Republican-adjacents for "balance". None of them are pro-Trump/pro-deplorable. None are pro-Bernie. None are libertarian. But the tone throughout underscores that "these are the limits of acceptable discourse, anything else is nutcase."
Epistemic closure FINAL FORM: mission complete
Amusingly, if you Google "Adam Davidson trans" you'll get a globalist pro-TPP piece he wrote for the New Yorker. (Get it, trans?) Also a bunch of links to him getting dragged on Twitter.
What an asshole.
We're not talking about shamming or shunning only, we're talking about people losing their jobs/careers for having an opinion that is not liberal orthodoxy. When did we start demanding an end to your career for having an offensive opinion? And where does it end?
Expelling heterodox views, even jf unsavory, is fascist and un-american. I don't want to live in a country where liberal orthodoxy is enforced militantly. Whenever I hear a liberal say the word diversity, I automatically ask myself if they would accept someone with a maga hat into the fold under the guise of diversity. It's a good barometer.
Oh no no no. You misunderstand! These are merely expressions of how “opinions have consequences”, don’t you see??
Serious question after reading the Twitter rant by Jarvis that MT linked: is it possible that these blithering blowhards are really and truly under their own spell to the degree their pompous vehemence would suggest? Seriously, do they really NOT see that the actual consequences of their (totally disingenuous bullshit) moralizing vis a vis literally robbing people of the ability to make a living in the manner they wish is, in very practical ways, much MORE harmful to both the individual AND society than anything our government may bring to bear? This seems so painfully obvious, I can’t believe these people don’t see it. Rather, I think they know it, and they Just. Don’t. Care.
There is zero assumption of good faith in anyone, it seems. Because, it turns out, people are just as horrible (or obtuse) as we feared, I guess. Damn.
Eric Weinstein has for at least four years been alluding to the "should Republicans be allowed to use streets" position on the insane left.
Good point about diversity =
accepting maga hat. I’ll use that!
When the woke say "diverse," it's code for "high on the woke totem poll." That's why you find HR departments valuing a "diverse individual." One person can't be diverse literally. It's code.
Thank Jeebus that there’s no orthodoxy among MAGA hats.
Traditionally liberals and free speech were intertwined. The right was more censorious. So who is going to defend free speech nowadays? The judiciary? Maybe.
One must never confuse a progressive for a liberal.
Agreed. Maga has their own issues with limiting free speech. Not excusing one for the other.
I prefer "deranged leftists". They have zero claim to the word "liberal" anymore.