Transgender - The Inability To Distinguish Facts From Wishes
Matt Taibbi opines on the latest piece of transgender nonsense:
The Dumbest Cover Story Ever - Racket News, Mar 13 2024
New York Magazine's "Freedom of Sex" is the ultimate example of the lunatic nihilism that's consumed America's intellectual class
New York Magazine has a new cover story, by the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.” A jeremiad in support of the idea that children must have absolute political agency, it makes the Unabomber manifesto read like a Shakespeare sonnet. The money passage:
We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.
A lot of the piece is standard-issue woe-is-me fuck-everything cartoon nihilism you’d hear from any laptop-class liberal arts product, arguing for a generalized smashing of the patriarchy, among other things by attacking the biological conspiracy to produce those units of material labor value known as babies. Complete abolition of norms would be an “impossible task,” Chu notes sadly, but that doesn’t preclude their “collective reimagining” by an alliance of intersectional victims working toward a Marxian paradise free of “oppressive systems,” which of course include the nuclear family.
The nihilism Taibbi points to is also the major theme the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd takes on in his book "The Defeat of the West".
From its New York Times review:
This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat (archived) - New York Times, Mar 9 2024
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
...
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.
...
Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
Back in January Todd expanded on the inability of distinguishing facts from fiction, which is also the basis of trans-genderism, during an interview with Le Figaro. From its English translation:
Q: Over time, haven't you become a bit of a reactionary?I was brought up by a grandmother who told me that, sexually speaking, all tastes are part of nature, and I'm faithful to my ancestors. So, LGB, welcome. For T, the trans issue is something else. The individuals concerned must of course be protected. But the fixation of the Western middle classes on this ultra-minority issue raises a sociological and historical question. To establish as a social horizon the idea that a man can really become a woman and a woman a man is to assert something that is biologically impossible, it is to deny the reality of the world, it is to assert the false.
Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality. But, once again, I am in no way overwhelmed here by indignation or emotion. This ideology exists and I have to integrate it into a historical model. In the age of the metaverse, I can't say whether my attachment to reality makes me a reactionary.
The intentional denial of reality, as it is currently practiced in the West, is not a new phenomenon. It is the basis of neo-conservatism from where it has crept over to the progressive side.
As Ron Susskind wrote in his portrait of the first years of the Bush junior presidency:
Faith, Certainty And The Presidency Of George W. Bush (archived) - Ron Susskind / New York Times, Oct 17 2004
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove, the Bush advisor Susskind had quoted, displayed the same lunatic nihilism that is represented by those who argue that children, teenagers or people generally should can freely chose their gender. It is an attempt of "creating other new realities". It represents a total denial of actual reality and of the common values derived from it. The Bush administration failed in its endeavor to create new realities in Iraq. The current regime in the West will fail likewise with regime change in Russia. So will others who deny realities.
The author of the Todd book review, Christopher Caldwell, adds:
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
I see a very similar denial of reality, followed by nihilism and a lack of values, at the top of the current European leadership. The loss of the common view of things is splitting societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, with regards to transgenderism, some sense of reality is still trying to survive:
National Health Service England stops prescribing puberty blockers, citing 'not enough evidence' - USA Today. Mar 13 2024
"We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of (puberty suppressing hormones) to make the treatment routinely available at this time," the publication by NHS England stated.
Puberty is a natural process which often includes a temporary confusion about ones identity. Blocking a kids puberty to further some ephemeral confusion some may have during those time is in my view criminal.
I even agree with Rishi Sunack on this:
U.K. prime minister on gender: ‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman’ - Washington Post, Oct 5 2023
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserted his stance on gender identity in a speech Wednesday, stating it was “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” — a remark that sparked criticism from transgender rights activists and elicited fervent applause from attendees of the Conservative Party Conference.
I see myself, just like Matt Taibbi seems to see himself, as a progressive striving for a society based on some form of socialism and justice.
To then find myself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives, and getting attacked for it, is mildly disturbing.
Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
Posted by b on March 14, 2024 at 11:24 UTC | Permalink
next page »@Dominic | Mar 14 2024 11:38 utc | 1
Nothing. It got to do with McCarthyism, though. When the repressive measures of McCarthyism ran their course, the US establishment resorted to an EEE-like (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) policy: they faked to support some instances of socialism, through neoliberalism, then claimed that socialism was about race, gender, other non-sense, and finally they destroyed it in capitalist America.
Posted by: SG | Mar 14 2024 11:48 utc | 2
As a young man they never let me row as a Lightweight. I'm sure I would have been good. Some nonsense about me being 30Kg too heavy. Weightist.
I see myself, just like Matt Taibbi seems to see himself, as a progressive striving for a society based on some form of socialism and justice.To then find myself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives, and getting attacked for it, is mildly disturbing.
Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
It isn't left vs right anymore. It is elitist vs non-elitists. The media are on the side of the elites who think they can control opinions (to be fair they mostly do a good job of this).
Some on the Left have insights because they refuse to take what the media says as fact. That allows them to understand. The Right does the same. Sadly many who were on the left and some on the right have been co-opted (to UniParty in USA because it has real power).
The Fusion of Left and Right is a Genuine and hugely positive development. Matt Taibi and Glen Greenwald appearing on Tucker Carlson is HUGE. Likewise Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate appearing on Judge Napolitano's Judging Freedom.
Posted by: Mickey Droy | Mar 14 2024 11:48 utc | 3
>Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
Bluntly, yes.
All progressive ideas must ignore or refute some foundational reality. With most issues most people don't understand enough about them to know reality so they can believe a well crafted argument. Fervently. It's just that the trans issue takes it to such an absurd level that no serious person can play along.
Posted by: Art Wellesley | Mar 14 2024 11:53 utc | 4
To then find myself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives, and getting attacked for it, is mildly disturbing.
Posted by b on March 14, 2024 at 11:24 UTC
Serious question, but I'm curious which part you find "mildly disturbing", finding yourself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives or getting attacked for it by progressives?
Posted by: Phil R | Mar 14 2024 12:01 utc | 5
It's always funny to see the reactions of my friends who are right-leaning when I remind them that societies like the USSR, the DPRK, Maoist China and the Warsaw Pact in general never dealt with any of this gender nonsense and really only stuck to economics, class struggle and anti-imperialism. When liberals are reminded of that they call you a 'class reductionist,' but really that's what normal revolutionary minded people thought about and would push for.
Posted by: Ba'ath | Mar 14 2024 12:04 utc | 6
This has zero to do with Marx, which is a false claim that prompted me to stop reading Taibbi. This BS about "cultural Marxism" is a propaganda campaign of the extreme right fascists out there.
What really is going on what's described and named by Professor Nancy Fraser as "Progressive Neoliberalism". That is a political project whereby the Democrats use identity politics and curtail issues ("progressive") to mask pro-corporate economic and pro-war policies ("neoliberal").
Google her published papers on that term. Superb work.
Posted by: bill wolfe | Mar 14 2024 12:08 utc | 7
I agree with the sentiments here, but suggest that the big picture is missing.
Note that - as outrageous as all this 'transgenderism' is - by talking about it, we are not talking about the ongoing invasion of the United States by third world refugees (among other things). This forced population growth has nothing to do with morality, but is a vicious treasonous policy aimed at driving wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. As, in both this country and many others, it always has. Poverty will spike, crime will spike, diseases will spike, homelessness will spike... the elites don't care that we find 'transgenderism' offensive, they care only about money and power. Transgenderism, abortion, really anything not directly related to money is being shoved down our throats to distract us from things the rich really care about. I'm not saying that we shouldn't care about these things, just remember that the people in charge don't, either way.
Posted by: TG | Mar 14 2024 12:08 utc | 8
There is a material reality behind these cultural shifts: the deindustrialization of the West, the associated end of gendered divisions of labor, the geographic division in the world economy between productive and unproductive economies, the rise of finance/services/tech in the West, the death of unions, the welfare state and socialist parties, etc.
In these real material conditions of life in the West, individualism, idealism (thought over matter), alienation, and fantasy take over. Everything is an invention or "construction." There is no material reality. We are all just interchangeable cogs in the capitalist machine, with no material value in ourselves.
Trans is just the extension of post-modern culture and philosophy to gender and sex. It is rooted, as David Harvey and Frederick Jameson pointed out long ago, in the post-Fordist economic restructuring of the West after the major crises of the 70s and 80s.
It is crazy, though, how so much of the real left has embraced the more lunatic elements of the trans spectacle.
Posted by: Ringo | Mar 14 2024 12:09 utc | 9
The trans ideology functions like a form of settler colonialist ideology just like Zionism. The Zionists steal Palestinian land under guise of being natives to a land that they have no provable historic connection to. Then appropriate the cultural and material wealth of the Levant to market their fabricated "Jewish" identity. They are sponsored by non-Jewish Zionists who support the project as a means to permanently fracture Arab solidarity and trap the region in underdevelopment.
The trans ideology steals the feminine identity and debase it into a disgusting cosplay of sexual aggression and self promotion. Trans people have existed throughout history but they never identified as women but as a separate category. But now they not only assert that they are women but deny womanhood to all other women - even words to describe their bodies and circumstances, like breasts and motherhood. It's used to distract and divide women and prevent solidarity around issues like reproductive rights, affordable childcare, and general affordability of life crisis in the West.
The tell is the amazing speed and conformity that the trans ideology has been embraced by the Western power structure, and the viciousness that they attack otherwise left critics of the ideology. It's not just a sickness of our over class but a very intentional project to destroy us. I also love how every hit piece against Iran or Hamas or Russia now talk about how anti-trans they are. Whereas apparently Israel and Ukraine should be supported for being purportedly trans accepting. It's just so obvious.
Posted by: Em | Mar 14 2024 12:12 utc | 10
The Fusion of Left and Right is a Genuine and hugely positive development. Matt Taibi and Glen Greenwald appearing on Tucker Carlson is HUGE. Likewise Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate appearing on Judge Napolitano's Judging Freedom.
Posted by: Mickey Droy | Mar 14 2024 11:48 utc | 3
Strongly disagree and you have to be very careful here, or else hugely contradictory ideas can be "fused" - and hijacked by the right and right oriented Libertarians.
There is a LOT of validity to critique of elites and institutions you suggest. But the ideas behind and motives supporting that critique are critically important. Real "left" issues are being hijacked by the right and brought within the culture wars and the "fusion" you seek.
One example right now: the European farmers are being screwed economically by cheap imports. That's caused by the Neoliberal global finance capitalism project ("rules based order" is not limited to foreign policy). Yet their legitimate grievances are being used to attack climate and environmental policies. Exactly the same thing is happening in US, where deindustrialization, driven by Wall Street and corporate greed, has been used to target government, culture wars, and the left as the source of the economic catastrophe.
Greenwald is a changling opportunist. When he began his post corporate lawyer liberation career as a blogger, I got into a nasty argument with him on corporate rights (people, free speech) and he was openly SUPPORTING the Citizen' United US Supreme Court case that have formations unlimited money as speech rights. While some of his work is very good, I can't stand him and stopped reading him too a long time ago.
Posted by: bill wolfe | Mar 14 2024 12:20 utc | 11
Democracy disappeared. We can discuss whether with the assassination of JFK, whether around 1967 as a key date or whether in Clinton's time and specifically around 1997. In any case, it has been a continuous process and it does not make sense to stick to a single date.
Power has two commercial teams at its service, we can call them team Coca-Cola and team Pepsi-Cola.
As it would take an expert mosquito catcher to distinguish between them, it is necessary to exaggerate the features that differentiate the two sides of the same coin.
And so we have arrived at the current delirious situation in the West: a single Party in the style of North Korea, an incommunication media that reminds us of the Soviet Union... And a society broken into two conflicting cultural identities to hide reality and to confuse and entertain the plebs...
Posted by: Simon | Mar 14 2024 12:28 utc | 12
It goes to the foundation of the question of what is meant by the term freedom. There arw two main kinds of notion of freedom:
1. Absence of coercion from other humans in matters that should not be others' business, within a framework of serious morality and scientific understanding (e.g. no freedom to murder or wilfully or recklessly distribute poisons). Legal systems tend to present themselves as promoting such freedom, in the course of said legal systems' propaganda.
2. Absence of any restraint whatsoever on oneself, to the extent of placing burdensome constraints on others, generally coupled with a psychological need to seek freedom from reality and responsibility for one's own actions. "Thermodynamics is an unacceptable constraint on my freedom."
The second definition is often operative in law, especially in the definition of authority (aka the institutionalization of the combination of command power with freedom from responsibility for one's own actions, codified as immunity from prosecution), thereby giving lie to legal systems' pretensions to promoting the first kind of freedom.
Note Mussolini's progression from Anarchist, to Marxist, to Fascist. He clearly subscribed to the second rather than first kind of freedom.
Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 14 2024 12:30 utc | 13
Cultural Marxism has nothing to do with Marxism. It's an intentionally intellectually lazy term to categorize all the superficially radical "compatible left" sponsored by the Western power structure to attack actual existing socialism and anti-imperialism.
Taibbi has put out some good stories over the years but his support of Bari Weiss and silence over the Gaza genocide makes very clear where he stands on the American empire.
Posted by: Em | Mar 14 2024 12:34 utc | 14
One last point, following up one my analysis above.
In the neoliberal west, collective struggle (unions, socialist efforts, community struggles, general strikes) has been extinguished. The working class is entirely decomposed and there is no class consciousness.
Oppression and struggle have therefore been individualized and internalized as a matter of "subjective identity."
It is not surprising, then, why the liberal elites support trans -- it is the perfect form of subjectivity for capitalist exploitation.
The underlying principle is that none of our problems are social or structural, there are no collective agencies for resistance and revolution, everyone's frustrations can be boiled down to limits on self-expression, freedom is achieved by fluid identities, and we can just play around with identities to be perfect subjects in the labor market.
So the Marxist arguments around class, exploitation, class consciousness, and revolution are replaced by free, subject-identities in the market.
Liberals want us to be pliable play things for capital to exploit.
This is the perverse end of neoliberalism.
Posted by: Ringo | Mar 14 2024 12:37 utc | 15
Very funny for Taibbi to try to throw in a dig at Marx. This is Reagan’s world! We live under neoliberalism. Everyone is an “entrepreneur of the self,” modern US is the most atomized and individualistic society in the world, even healthcare is considered an individual problem in need of individual solutions. Of course people were going to extend that governing rationale to their own body as well.
Posted by: Gengar | Mar 14 2024 12:38 utc | 16
Sexual Nazism. A disgust and a wrenching fear of living and generally of life itself. It happens. Grotesque when it does, cataclysmic when mixed with lethal power.
Putin's war policies are obviously and dangerously insufficient.
Posted by: Elmagnostic | Mar 14 2024 12:39 utc | 17
Also worth remembering how outsized the “trans” debate is considering the actual population of trans people. Mainstream liberalism, having decided it agreed with the neocon foreign policy and neoliberal domestic policy consensus, no longer has anything to substantively disagree with the right on. So of course they’re going to push fringe social issues and pretend like it’s a huge deal in order to distinguish themselves. It helps both the right and liberal media establishments.
Posted by: Gengar | Mar 14 2024 12:42 utc | 18
"The inability to distinguish facts from wishes"
That is the main problem on all western fronts these days indeed.
Posted by: Winston, journalist | Mar 14 2024 12:45 utc | 19
There is a reasonable explanation to the absurdity of gender support from the elites.
Usually elites use minority group to create problems were they wont to change those in power. Elites support minority and those minority will give back when in power to their beneficiaries. Those minorities are often of different ethnicity than the majority of the peoples. But when there are not suitable ethnically minorities than you have to create them: transgender are a special type of created minority.
Posted by: astrofun | Mar 14 2024 12:46 utc | 20
Well, the truly astounding and depressing part of this is that a big chunk of the progressives have basically become anti-science. It's kind of hard for them to convince conservatives to agree and trust the science on climate change, when themselves shit all over science when it doesn't fit the retarded woke agenda.
We're at this sad state of history in which tankies might soon appear as the sanest representatives of the Left...
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Mar 14 2024 12:56 utc | 21
People seem to be focusing on the ideology of this gender fluidity craze. This is a sideshow. What's hidden in plain sight behind this distraction is big pharma who after losing it's share of the opiod market to attrition and fentynal found opportunity in children.
We are no prescribing speed to "hyperactive" children and kids going through puberty are routinely diagnosed as having mood disorders like anxiety and depression. Think about that for a minute ... kids going through puberty are given drugs because they are "moody". I mean my sister used to give her kids a big dose of gravol to put the little bastards to sleep on long road trips but this is a whole other level of medicating instead of parenting.
Gender reassignment is another big profit center. These puberty blockers and hormone therapy they give to kids are extremely profitable for the drug companies.
Just like with opiods salesmen for these companies are telling practitioners that these drugs are beneficial for kids ... they make them whole. That's bullshit just like it was bullshit oxycontin wasn't supposed to be addictive. Like Purdue pharma these practitioners are wined and dined, taken on junkets ... they pay them to write articles and speak at conferences so it's not exactly a kickback but it's a kickback.
This may sound like a conspiracy theory to some but I can assure you I get first hand information from people who work in the industry and work with this population.
Posted by: HB_Norica | Mar 14 2024 12:56 utc | 22
b-
Being on the “Left” ( or “Right” for that matter) is an irrelevancy in this day’s political conversation. There is Reality and Life vs. Wishes and Nihilism. Simply put, an atom having a single proton in its nucleus which is orbited by a single electron is Hydrogen, and will always be and act like Hydrogen, no matter what mumbo-jumbo Alchemy you believe and spout.
As to your intellectual dilemma, life is very simple. All one need do is focus on the basic process of living and getting along with one’s neighbors.”Do unto others…”
When today’s Western Elite destroys itself, Human Life will continue in those regions, peopled by regular folks, like I mentioned in my comment of the other day: “I believe in Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve!”
Posted by: OldFart | Mar 14 2024 12:59 utc | 23
"The inability to distinguish facts from wishes"
That is the main problem on all western fronts these days indeed.
@Posted by: Winston, journalist | Mar 14 2024 12:45 utc | 20
I will say that another layer goes along with that one.
The "trans movement" wouldn't gain any traction without a lot of outside support,
support from the mimics.
People, generally, are mimics in search of group acceptance.
People, mimics, will rationalize what they wish to believe
and what they believe is what they adopted from the group
that they want acceptance from.
Intelligence is no barrier to accepting wishes over facts
as a highly intelligent person can be highly skilled at rationalizing
whatever they already believe.
Posted by: librul | Mar 14 2024 13:02 utc | 24
I think Ringo got it right in the comments 9 and 16.
Although, I think I must add, even if we acknowledge the neoliberal context that amplifies the tendency of solving things via radical individual actions and distorts its significance, we must also recognize that the "trans issue" is not something new in the world. People who see themselves as belonging to a gender that is not what society attributes to their bodies existed since ancient times. They have been oppressed or (sometimes) celebrated (even had special roles in small societies) throughout History.
So, while we can speculate about how this real phenomenon is being used to facilitate some political agendas, we also should take care to avoid demonizing the real people that suffer for not feeling conformed to their identities. And bear in mind that they should have the right to deal with it however they want.
Denouncing the way that the issue is being used should not become a misguided aggression towards people who are mostly among the weakest in our societies. It's not their fault.
Having said that, any discussion can be healthy if we never lose sight of who is the real enemy, who benefits from sowing division and confusion in our planet. This blog is doing great work, so I hope that in discussions like this one we can avoid falling in the trap of seeing as enemies people that are really not.
Posted by: Thorn | Mar 14 2024 13:06 utc | 25
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’
‘Four.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
Posted by: Perimetr | Mar 14 2024 13:08 utc | 26
It seems that the all these gender-discussions aim at concealing the important political questions of today. As swiss Max Wimmer, teaching at Columbia University, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung 02.03.2024 states:
… something similar happened with the LGBTQ movement. … According to this thinking, the essential categories with which to understand society today are race, gender and sexual orientation.Q: For example, economic criteria are forgotten.
Yes, the aspects of income, wealth and the distribution of educational opportunities are central to understanding the USA. If one wants to examine inequality in American society, the most important criterion is still class, not race or gender.
...
Q: So the discussion about identities obscures these hard, economic facts?
One could even go one step further and consider whether this is precisely the function of these discourses. At the moment when, for example, Amazon sponsors an institute for “racial justice” with millions of dollars, but at the same time resolutely suppresses nascent trade union movements, one wonders whether this is not connected. It is the elites who benefit from increasing inequality. It will benefit them if public attention is instead focused on the issues of sexual orientation, gender and skin color rather than on the concentration of power.
(Google translation)
https://www.nzz.ch/international/interview-mit-andreas-wimmer-schweizer-ethnologe-und-professor-an-der-columbia-university-ueber-wokeism-ld.1776821
Posted by: Udkanten | Mar 14 2024 13:10 utc | 27
Does anyone also see that nihilism is also the basis of the WEF 2030 plan? What should one see in deindustrialising, vaxxing mandate tyrannies and trans sexual policies, depopulation goals as anything but nihilism? All too often the WEF is not even mentioned even as most of the EU and NATO vassals and the USA itself is captured by WEF "progressive" values that have already done so much damage. Can people even wonder if the destruction of the Nordstream Pipelines was a geostrategic deindustrialising even for the EU and beyond rather than a simple attack on Russia and Germany? Look and admire the attack on the carbon footprint that this represents for this WEF political movement.
Posted by: Larry P. Johnson | Mar 14 2024 13:10 utc | 28
Geez, is MoA a nest of old reacs? How many here believe in vaccination? In anthropogenic global warming? In recent sex biology findings? This is not nihilism, get over it. And, b, I'm now reluctant to financially support someone blinded by its ideologies.
Posted by: proflutz | Mar 14 2024 13:12 utc | 30
Even then they knew....
From Monty Python's Meaning of Life - 1983
OBSTETRICIAN: Jolly good.
MRS. MOORE: Is it a boy or a girl?
OBSTETRICIAN: Now, I think it's a little early to start imposing roles on it, don't you?
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 13:15 utc | 32
Reality. Priests and priestesses of modernity are of course onto something, but questioning reality becomes quickly a deeply moral question: are you ready to protect the weakest, or do you prey on them like a wolf in a sheepskin.
Samsara-nirvana is an essential concept in Buddhism. There too, no nirvana could be attained by hurting a being, any being, or even life itself.
So, although "reality" is a groundless, perhaps floating concept, there're still principles that should be followed, otherwise one would sink even deeper into "samsara/sansara", into hell.
So "they" are not entirely wrong, and that's what makes their evil so efficient and dangerous. Nobody should hijack happiness.
Posted by: js | Mar 14 2024 13:19 utc | 33
The irrefutable fact is there are 4 biological sexes - male, female, both (medically referred to as intersex) and neither (born with no reproductive organs). Granted, the last 2 are rare, the last being extremely.
Gender does not refer sex, it refers to masculinity and femininity- and before the early 90s or so - was used in reference to language not people. Gender and feelings of same can run the gamut from one end to another, hence the fluid designation. No one here can say they didn't know a 'tom-boy' when they were kids or a guy that was more effeminate than others.
Maybe people just need to shut the fuck up about everyone else and live their own lives. The logical conclusion to not doing so is the genocide in Gaza.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 13:24 utc | 34
Yes, the flame is lit, and the purple haired dupes and so-called leftists will keep fanning it.
Posted by: Hahajizzjizz | Mar 14 2024 13:26 utc | 35
More people should read the writings of Nicky Reid.....
https://www.counterpunch.org/author/nicky-reid/
Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 13:27 utc | 36
Thorn | Mar 14 2024 13:06 utc | 26
"So, while we can speculate about how this real phenomenon is being used to facilitate some political agendas, we also should take care to avoid demonizing the real people that suffer for not feeling conformed to their identities."
Given the vast apparatus of ideological-political spectacle the liberals have conjured around the "trans" onslaught, how is it any longer possible to distinguish allegedly real transsexuals from the vastly greater amount of free-floating mental illness (caused by a psychopathic society) which latches onto "transgenderism" as a cathexis? Not to mention all the con artists cynically claiming to be "trans".
"And bear in mind that they should have the right to deal with it however they want."
Adults individuals, yes, within reason. But they have no right to inflict it upon others, ranging from the bureaucracy of "pronouns" to men invading women's bathrooms, sports, prison cells and on. (It's striking how radically misogynist the whole "trans" offensive has been from day one.)
Posted by: Flying Dutchman | Mar 14 2024 13:27 utc | 37
@29 Larry Johnson
I wonder to what extent nihilism is the correct framework, versus throwing toys out of the cot. Take e.g. the matter of AGW, and put aside the popular scientific controversy.
If one subscribes to the notion of the scientific validity of AGW (as do I, though unlike some people, I am quite willing to accept that if I want to convince others, the burden of evidence and argument is on me), then one must make a choice as to how one conducts oneself, and how one wishes society to conduct itself, in addressing the issue.
There is the "let's throw our toys out of the cot" approach (ban motor vehicles and internal combustion engines and farming; Pol Pot was an appeaser; et alia).
There are of course, also adult alternatives, e.g. hydrothermal liquifaction of food waste and weeds (develop weed harvesting please), although that would require developing lower energy desalination, as the water fraction is highly saline...
Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 14 2024 13:29 utc | 38
Freedom is the ability to raise yourself to a higher level.
or
Freedom is the right to feed your lowest nature.
or
Freedom has nothing to do with levels. It is action unbridled.
If we are beasts be beasts, if we are men then choose true freedom.
Recall the movie 'American Sniper' about a much beloved Hero.
An American Hero motivated by revenge is sent to fight in a Iraq war created from falsehoods.
Our Hero was a hard drinker and loved bar fights over any provocation.
He was a free man and respected your right to freely speak your mind in a bar
and then he would punch you in the face.
He met his wife while helping her vomit out a night of drunkeness.
He was free to be moved by revenge and joined an army of invaders and he set his beast free.
He was a Hero Sniper and freely killed and killed and killed.
After returning stateside he encountered a fellow freedom fighter who was scarred by his experience protecting our freedoms.
The Hero and a buddy befriended the scarred freedom fighter and the three exercised their rights
to carry guns. They went together to a shooting range and their inner beasts were set free.
Only one of the three survived.
How American.
Posted by: librul | Mar 14 2024 13:35 utc | 39
Transhumanism will overcome. Eat energy. Shit destruction.
Posted by: too scents | Mar 14 2024 13:42 utc | 40
The people who insist this has nothing to do with Marx and/or decry the term “cultural Marxism,” really ought to spend half an hour learning about the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory - which are on the road to where we now are.
if you don’t see Marx’s hatred of all things traditional and western and not devoted to the state (and its central bank) - it’s because you don’t know how to look.
Posted by: Jim C | Mar 14 2024 13:46 utc | 41
Posted by: proflutz | Mar 14 2024 13:12 utc | 31
So now Scientific American is turning to graphic design editors for its science?
Posted by: Mary | Mar 14 2024 13:53 utc | 42
Transgenderism is a major salient in the war being waged on humanity in the name of transhumanism. It brings the decades-long changes in Western primary and secondary education, which aimed at the ascendancy of human appetites and emotions over the human intellect, to a level just prior to full dehumanization.
Israeli Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab’s guru and Barack Obama’s favorite author, has revealed the ultimate goal, claiming that humans have no soul and are merely machines to be programmed and reprogrammed according to the behaviors that those in authority would like them to have, making them obedient slaves of the Great Reset, which represents a totally transformed digital society, an end to which Musk’s Neuralink lends itself all too well.
Posted by: Ciaran | Mar 14 2024 13:53 utc | 43
@38
The life expectancy of trans people in my country is 35 years old. Less than half of our average. The notion that these people are "inflicting" something on others is a fantasy. They are mostly powerless, exposed to brutal violence and prejudice. They are much more likely to be poor and get murdered. So I strongly suggest that you get to know more about their difficulties and maybe even talk to them, so you can see more clearly how they usually live.
The discourse around how they are "inflicting" negative things in society is pure myth. They don't have the political means to do that. People in the left and in the right talk about the issue in ways that are convenient to their objectives, but they seldom really try to address the real problem, which is: some people are dying for not conforming.
We can spend infinite hours debating how their bathrooms should or shouldn't be, but this is a distraction. This distraction is part of the strategy of those hungry for power and determined to avoid discussions about economy, war, inequality and the environment. You know, the subjects that put their sponsors in a bad light.
Posted by: Thorn | Mar 14 2024 13:55 utc | 44
Thorn, yes.
what Todd said "the fixation of the Western middle classes on this ultra-minority issue" is why i generally don't enter into online discussion about trans issues. the topic has become overwrought and i prefer to stay out of it with the exception of messing with kids puberty(England made the right decision). Mostly, i think of gender as a private personal issue and it feels like there's a peculiar social pressure for everyone to weigh in on it and come to some sort of public consensus about something private. however, when that "ultra- minority" become outspoken activists it changes the dynamics.
anyway, i'm going back to staying out of it!
Posted by: annie | Mar 14 2024 13:57 utc | 45
“The inability to distinguish facts from wishes”
What an awesome definition of religion or, equally applicable for exactly the same reasons, insanity or stupidity. The three are nearly identical in cause and in effect, with close to 100% overlap.
Like many others, I have absolutely no problem letting LGB - and everyone else - do whatever they like with whoever they like, so long as everyone directly involved is happy with it, while at the same time thinking this brainless “T” crap is despicable. I have no sympathy for deliberate liars and frauds making a profit off of stupid gullible idiots, and very little sympathy for their victims either. Astrologers, priests, ‘prophets’ (piss be upon them), ‘doctors’ selling ‘gender-affirming care’ (by which they mean gender-denying ‘care’), and any other such liars and frauds, all of them ought to be fined on the first act of fraud and imprisoned on the second and subsequent acts. I have difficulty reconciling this view with freedom of speech, sometimes, but freedom of speech should never be twisted to excuse freedom of theft, which is what the pushers of religion and other frauds (like “T”) use it for.
Posted by: Dalit | Mar 14 2024 13:58 utc | 46
Geez, is MoA a nest of old reacs? How many here believe in vaccination? In anthropogenic global warming? In recent sex biology findings? This is not nihilism, get over it. And, b, I'm now reluctant to financially support someone blinded by its ideologies.
Posted by: proflutz | Mar 14 2024 13:12 utc | 31
Apparently. I wont be so eager to see what is posted here next.
Perhaps this clarifies the only solid example of nihilism I know about.
Bathing with weasels.
Taibbi needs to be ignored, shunned, maybe vilified.
Not over this ludicrous crap, but as well.
Paper hanger nonsense.
divisive personal freedom hating is not a good look, no matter which direction you turn your head.
how disappointing.
So many posts in so many threads looking for suggestions how to respond to the organized horrors running rampant.
The answer is as simple as "solidarity".
The opposite of this.
Posted by: Not Ewe | Mar 14 2024 14:00 utc | 47
Jim C
Marx says that it is capitalism which destroys all "fixed frozen relations," and makes "everything solid melt into air."
You are confusing his diagnosis of capitalism as a revolutionary system, with Marx's politics.
Marx was in fact an anarchist -- he despised the state, both analytically and personally given his own experience of persecution and displacement by state power. He argued that the state would eventually disappear in a society without class exploitation. He was correct to say that a Dictatorship of the working class was a necessary first step.
You don't seem well versed in the nuances here.
A good rule of thumb is to laugh at anyone who rants about "cultural Marxism" and "central banks." They usually don't know what they're talking about, and never provide details.
You need to think further about how actually existing American capitalism makes family life -- "traditional" values as you say -- almost impossible for most people.
You might find Marxism helpful in that regard.
You are angry at the wrong targets. Typical American conservativism.
Posted by: Huh | Mar 14 2024 14:06 utc | 48
Well - I wrote a post on previous thread addressing some of this but it also fits here so have it again.
What is clear is that this is just another of a string of Neo-Religious inventions of the historical peoples who crafted Money as a controlling mechanism.
What we are expected to believe?
A false credo of Left/Right, Rich/Poor, Capitalist/AntiCapitalism; cultural superiority, Malthusian nonsense, saviour complex on and on - just means of keeping the Fascist world order in place for the very few gods who ‘must not be looked at in the eye’ at the risk of extreme punishment of death!
As the absurd literal beliefs of the Bibles were no longer credible to keep the masses controlled in fear of a Jealous God, a certainty of a Hell and a promise of a Heaven for those who lived their lives as vassals to the walking gods as willing slaves.
As the uncontrollable learning and exploitation of Science , Maths, Technology - that could no longer hide the fact that Some Men are not the centre of the universe around which all others and the heavens revolve.
Such desperate new paradigms are invented.
But they fail faster and faster.
No matter how hard they try and how many newer more absurd religions they invent - including the Freudian Fraud that leads not to sexual liberation but the woke depravity of Transhumanism now; including of course the latest desperate new faith based embrace of Climate apocalypse and the worship of the new church of GND and Carbon Free! None of which must be seen for what they are - neo-religions.
The failure is even expected! because ultimately the aim is not to get every human to believe the same thing but to have a few who see themselves as the highest order of human and they serve the masters. To live behind a mental wall of superiority. Superhumanism…
Which some so willingly ply the Narratives for.
Which always stifles dissent of Fascism - which is also Zionism, imperialism, xenophobia.
Posted by: DunGroanin | Mar 14 2024 14:11 utc | 49
Posted by: bill wolfe | Mar 14 2024 12:20 utc | 11
I get a weird "failed download" when I follow your comment link bill. Wtf?
Posted by: David G Horsman | Mar 14 2024 14:11 utc | 50
The whole "progressive" vs "conservative' labeling thing is, well, history. The "sides" are changing, with too many "progressives" today calling for censorship, burning down America, canceling any speech they can label "hate", and supporting regime change wars just because they're started by Democratic presidents. In other words, the Democratic party has captured the definition of progressive, and twisted it to conform to their globalist agenda. I would feel great shame calling myself a "progressive" today. As for "conservative," there's less change, but the same irrelevancy. Damn all labels, and just pick your values no matter which "side" espouses them.
Posted by: Janet | Mar 14 2024 14:12 utc | 51
It is just a distraction and to cover from how the Western elites are running us into the ground. They don't actually believe in this stuff.
Posted by: phenon | Mar 14 2024 14:12 utc | 52
@ b
"Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
No. It is not impossible. But it is becoming increasingly difficult.
Most disturbing for me is that the sublime innocence of childhood is being savaged by the nihilism noted in this most important post. Thank you.
Posted by: Don Firineach | Mar 14 2024 14:14 utc | 53
Yeah, when I say the quiet part about tranny ideology out loud, everyone says I’m being mean.
I guess it’s ‘cuz I’m Gruff
Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 14 2024 14:19 utc | 54
Maybe people just need to shut the fuck up about everyone else and live their own lives. The logical conclusion to not doing so is the genocide in Gaza.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 13:24 utc | 35
This. Gender is sociological; sex is a biological.
Society organizes around the average, not the outliers.
We all have limitations around what we want to do or be & what we can do or be. Ranging from lack of innate ability to saboteur parents from hell.
Deal with your own issues; don't make them mine. I have my problems to deal with.
Posted by: Mary | Mar 14 2024 14:19 utc | 55
"It goes to the foundation of the question of what is meant by the term freedom. There arw two main kinds of notion of freedom:
1. Absence of coercion from other humans
...
2. Absence of any restraint whatsoever on oneself, to the extent of placing burdensome constraints on others,
...
Note Mussolini's progression from Anarchist, to Marxist, to Fascist. He clearly subscribed to the second rather than first kind of freedom."
Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 14 2024 12:30 utc | 13
Although I place freedom among my three top criteria, it is actually a fairly meaningless word. Even within the two very good views you list here there is a lot of variation.
But you very much nailed in one respect freedom to do what? To who? At who's expense?
Posted by: David G Horsman | Mar 14 2024 14:21 utc | 56
I find the left right dichotomy useless. I used to think it was different in Europe and America. In America, left v. right meant big v. small government. Whereas in Europe both left and right seemed to lead to a totalitarian powerful central government. But that simplistic view was unworkable. Both sides always seemed hypocritical on one issue or another.
The dichotomy that works best for me now is individual rights v. social welfarism — the right of the individual to do whatever he wants v. the right of society to protect itself from the excesses of individual freedom. But even this dichotomy gets muddy as one views the interest of “social welfarism” from a local, County, state, National, international or global level. As you evaluate the interests of “society” from a larger and larger scope, the greater intrusion upon the rights of the individual can be justified. So, to evaluate the politics of a person or party, you need to understand their scope of society, and their relative preference for the rights of the individual or the rights of society. Reframing your view of politics like this can help you figure out where you really stand.
Posted by: tommylotto | Mar 14 2024 14:21 utc | 57
Udkanten - Mar 14 2024 13:10 utc | 28
Exactly what I've been saying for years. US-minded liberals and other idiot wannabe progressives just can't understand that, in any given Western society, class disparity is bigger than all other "privileges" of race, gender, sex, religion and whatever put together. So, yes, class struggle is still the key socio-economic element of our societies, and all other struggles are side-shows until the key one has been solved. Because as long as the class issues haven't been dealt with, most people will be in shitty economic situation, and fighting like mad to improve the lot of 0.5% of the people while not bothering at all about the plight of 80% of the people and their key issues isn't just stupid or misguided, it's willingly siding with the ruling oligarchic predatory elite (or with "patriarchy", or with "old white cis males").
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Mar 14 2024 14:27 utc | 58
You are angry at the wrong targets. Typical American conservativism.
Posted by: Huh | Mar 14 2024 14:06 utc | 49
The problem is that Marx wasn't right about much. His intellectual successors proved that, over and over again.
So your typical 2024 AmCon Chud, lost in his feelings, tends to get things more right than wrong, especially when he can access information sources outside of the corpo legacy media. And the internet has enough holes left in it still for people to find things and this is a big reason why the Globalists have lost legitimacy.
It is long past time would be vanguardists moved beyond left and right, anti fascism and fascism, socialism and capitalism, atheism and religion. These dichotomies restrict thought and action. Let's move forward!
Posted by: Northern Observer | Mar 14 2024 14:31 utc | 59
I will say one last thing in this damned thread:
People who are saying that trans people "deny reality" don't have even an ounce of the courage or the honesty of Chelsea Manning.
She risked everything to give the world a piece of truth about her country. At least, in her worst moment she found the courage to become who she genuinely wants to be. That's real commitment to reality.
People who want to seriously discuss the lives of others should have the minimium care of studying a bit instead of just repeting old tropes from lazy, dishonest conservatives or leftists.
Hate against trans people is very popular now. Maybe Matt Taibbi is just using this trend to pivot his career, like so many others are doing.
Posted by: Thorn | Mar 14 2024 14:32 utc | 60
Thorn | Mar 14 2024 13:06 utc | 26
"The life expectancy of trans people in my country is 35 years old. Less than half of our average. The notion that these people are "inflicting" something on others is a fantasy. They are mostly powerless, exposed to brutal violence and prejudice. They are much more likely to be poor and get murdered."
I think the life expectancy of any young person manifesting mental illness is going to be lower than the average. I've known a few transgender males and only one of them seemed happy. Can't speak about females. But, for example, if you go out to a bar and get picked up by someone with beer goggles on, giving them a nasty shock at bed time is a pretty dangerous thing to do.
You're also ignoring the phenomenon of the autogynephile, an often stereotypically heterosexual older male who is excited by the thought of themselves as a woman. These people tend not to be young or poor, and can be former Olympic champions, Army officers or well known boxing promoters. They often don't have an op, and continue a heterosexual lifestyle.
Posted by: YetAnotherAnon | Mar 14 2024 14:33 utc | 61
I find the left right dichotomy useless.
Posted by: tommylotto | Mar 14 2024 14:21 utc | 59
---
It is all about ownership. A trivial dichotomy about property rights.
In the extreme those on the 'right' believe that there should be no restrictions on property rights, to the obvious extent that slavery is acceptable. The opposite 'left' extreme is that all property should be shared as a community common good.
The 'right' wants to own the 'left'.
Posted by: too scents | Mar 14 2024 14:35 utc | 62
And the good or otherwise deeds of Chelsea Manning aren't (I assume) related to her gender identity. I'm grateful to her, but I can see her boss might feel differently.
Posted by: YetAnotherAnon | Mar 14 2024 14:36 utc | 63
Todd says it's just one indicator of the West's nihilism and collapse. Just one.
Todd's analysis of the West indicates deep and unsolvable problems.
Posted by: Sal | Mar 14 2024 14:44 utc | 64
@Jim C | Mar 14 2024 13:46 utc | 42
The people who insist this has nothing to do with Marx and/or decry the term “cultural Marxism,” really ought to spend half an hour learning about the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory - which are on the road to where we now are.
The Frankfurt School was a fringe, so called neo-Marxist movement that emrged some 40 years after Marx's death.
Many thinkers of the Frankfurt School emigrated to the USA, where their theories were adopted and promoted by American mainstream institutions. Max Horkheimer wrote his Critical Theory while he was in New York. Now spend half half an hour thinking why US institutions promoted that particular "leftist" thought, instead of, say, traditional Marxism, or Eurocommunism, or Marxism-Leninism or whatever.
Posted by: SG | Mar 14 2024 14:48 utc | 65
Thorn: I have every appreciation for what Bradley Manning did. His act took courage and had a positive effect on the world. Good for him. Doesn’t make him a genius, though.
Posted by: Dalit | Mar 14 2024 14:56 utc | 66
I recently had a newborn child here in the USA.
The birth certificate didn't ask about mother and father. It asked about the person who delivered the baby and the other parent. It was confusing to read because in a lot of traditional cultures "person who delivered the baby" id known as "the doctor".
But hey, we can feel progressive even though parental leave is short, daycare is $2500/month, and child tax credits are small.
Posted by: Afro | Mar 14 2024 14:57 utc | 67
As a transgender individual, and an active member of my community, I can speak to the "reality" of my identity.
I grew up in a time when the concept of "transgender" - or even the word - didn't exist. Yet I knew at an early age in grammar school that I didn't identify with my biological sex, as experienced by practically every one in my community.
The "common sense" that "a man is a man and a woman is a woman" in fact forms the basis for quite a substantial portion of the MALE population, b, to bully, assault (as I've been), discriminate against, and even murder trans individuals. It's a FACT of life we in the trans community live with, EVERY DAY. Another fact, b, you might want to digest is that many native societies recognize and honor transgender individuals.
The really bad news for old white men upholding the patriarchy like you, b, is that many young people DON'T CARE one whit about so-called "common sense" and are happy to let folks be themselves. If it wasn't for folks like yourself trying to force their "common sense" down our throats, everyone would be a lot happier.
But the western male ego is so fragile and easily triggered, isn't it?
Posted by: Trisha | Mar 14 2024 15:00 utc | 68
Posted by: Elmagnostic | Mar 14 2024 12:39 utc | 18
"Sexual Nazism. A disgust and a wrenching fear of living and generally of life itself. It happens."
This comment/ fallacy of resort ad Nazium exemplifies
"one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality."
"Nazism" was a revolt against the sexual perversion that dominated Weimar Germany, in favor of a conservative, reality-based advocacy of traditional family mores.
Posted by: ChasMark | Mar 14 2024 15:01 utc | 69
Transgenderism is a money making, political wedge issue that is very destructive to families. I am not suggesting that there isn’t a tiny fraction of people that are afflicted with the condition, that should be neglected or mistreated. But it has become a cultural movement that is the latest attempt to separate kids from families. Try talking to a 20 year about the exploitive goals of people behind this movement and they will respond to you with contempt and find one more reason to ignore their parents and wholeheartedly embrace the DNC machine.
Posted by: Turk 152 | Mar 14 2024 15:02 utc | 70
I see myself, just like Matt Taibbi seems to see himself, as a progressive striving for a society based on some form of socialism and justice.To then find myself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives, and getting attacked for it, is mildly disturbing.
Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
I think it is not possible to be reality based and on the left side of things. When you are on the left side of things you dream of an ideal world, an ideal society, an ideal people, your leftist ideology guides you to try and alter the natural course of events.
"a society based on some form of socialism and justice". Capitalism is simply not interfering with people that can save some of the fruits of their work thus forming capital to invest, while socialism is the ideological intervention that precludes people from saving and thus forming capital. Capitalism lets economic reality flows unimpeded. Socialism tries to change the course of nature.
LGBT is another form of trying to change the course of nature, to reject reality. It is not biological to desire sex with people from your own gender. Simply not natural, i.e. detached from reality.
I note also that our societies here in Europe are not producing sufficient children just to keep our population size due to our females becoming ambitious for success in professions, business and politics. LGBT is a further attack on an already serious path toward demographic deterioration. Those deviant couples do not produce new children, of course, since their habits are unnatural. Their deviant habits need to be discouraged in order to keep our population size.
Posted by: Johan Kaspar | Mar 14 2024 15:06 utc | 72
"But it has become a cultural movement that is the latest attempt to separate kids from families."
Posted by: Turk 152 | Mar 14 2024 15:02 utc | 71
You mean just the catholic church and settler/colonizers in US, Canada, Australia, and NZ?
And now the US again with immigrants, under the orange menace and genocide joe, as well as the neocon anti-trans fascists in red states that are eliminating child labor laws so they can have slaves and cannon fodder.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 15:08 utc | 73
For the guy who doesn't think this has to do with Marxism. All feminism and pro-homosexuality has been pushed by Marxists from the beginning. In the 1920s they set up homosexual, transvestite shows in Europe's big cities.
”Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.”
– Germaine Greer, Marxist, lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, columnist at The Sunday Times
”All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.”
– Catharine MacKinnon, Marxist, professor of law at the University of Michigan
”I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
– Robin Morgan, Jew, Marxist, editor of MS Magazine
”You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.”
– Catherine MacKinnon, Marxist professor of law at the University of Michigan, visiting professor of law at Harvard
“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one and the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.”
– Catharine MacKinnon
”The nuclear family must be destroyed … Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.”
– Linda Gordon, Professor of the Humanities at New York University, appointed to the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women during the Clinton administration
”Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession … The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.”
– Vivian Gornick, Jew, feminist author, University of Illinois, The Daily Illini, 1981
”I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father’s concubine. What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What’s more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal.”
– Sylvia Fraser, Canadian journalist, served on the Arts Advisory Panel to the Canada Council for the Arts
”Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole – patriarchy!”
– Gloria Steinem, Jew, Marxist, pro-homosexual activist, columnist for the magazine New York, editor of MS magazine
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:09 utc | 74
Posted by: proflutz | Mar 14 2024 13:12 utc | 31
"Geez, is MoA a nest of old reacs?"
Some of us.
"How many here believe in vaccination?"
Almost all do.
But half don't support human experimentation using ineffective mRNA gene therapy though.
"In anthropogenic global warming?"
Another mixed bag where a lot question the methodology and data. Neither the General Public, nor most people here including myself, have the appropriate background to evaluate this science. This is again a highly politicized issue.
"In recent sex biology findings?"
Recent science is reflecting what we already knew. I'm not clear how your chart relates to what is a political issue, nor how it proves gender dysphoria requires a pharmaceutical solution to be applied to children.
"This is not nihilism, get over it. And, b, I'm now reluctant to financially support someone blinded by its ideologies."
I sometimes disagree with b, the whole point is for us to discuss the topic. While supporting trans freedom of expression I am EXTREMELY opposed to sex change therapies for children as do many if not most trans people.
What I am not clear on is if you support this based on the genetic variations and defects found in your chart. Thanks very much for providing that.
You seem to have some strong feelings on this, perhaps you could provide your argument here.
Posted by: David G Horsman | Mar 14 2024 15:11 utc | 75
Chelsea Manning was brutally tortured by sadistic monsters. His flight into fantasy was an effort to escape the horror. This is tragic and disturbing beyond words, but pretending the delusion he fled to is some valid reality does nobody any good, not even Manning himself.
Transgender people are certainly victims who deserve sympathy, but the victimizers are equally certainly not the ones who refuse to use their preferred pronouns. The victimizers are those who enable and encourage these damaged people’s descent into delusion and insanity.
One of the traditional challenges of growing into adulthood has always been confronting reality without the comforting illusions of childhood. Transgender people are among those who have never bested that challenge (or have become damaged and reverted to infantilism). Oddly, Millennials and Gen Z have a neologism, ”adulting”, to label the process, doubtless because it is a huge hurdle that many spend decades of their lives trying and failing to overcome. Embracing an imaginary gender identity is just one of many expressions of the failure ”to adult” (yeah, that’s a verb these days).
Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 14 2024 15:15 utc | 76
Those who were flashers in the past are now transvestites.
They get to be in-your-face with sick sexuality forced on everyone else, but especially on children, and no one is allowed to stop them. When the same kind of people were flashers, they were arrested. Now they are protected.
So at a cultural event in my town, when all sorts of clubs have displays in the center, you see grown men with their hair shaped to tiny pigtails colored in rainbow colors, with rouge and lipstick, wearing skirts - always going where the children will be.
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:16 utc | 77
67 - In the 1950s, approximately 100 university and college teachers in the USA were fired for membership of the Communist Party, or for pleading the Fifth Amendment when questioned about their political views. There was one case of students being sent to a public library to consult Marxist texts for a sociology course, as the college library did not have enough copies, and the public library insisted on recording the names of the students. Complaints about "Marx books" were rife during the Red Scare period. It is odd that Frankfurt School ideas were actually promoted.
Posted by: Waldorf | Mar 14 2024 15:20 utc | 78
Tenet, you were obviously raised as a catholic and abused by pedo priests who coincidentally wear dresses.
And I'm glad Gruff knows so much about growing up trans without the benefit of being one their self.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 15:23 utc | 79
”Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual woman’s erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos. Those definitions, regulations, values and taboos are about male fraternity and the oppression and exploitation of women.”
– Adrienne Rich, Jew, homosexual, poet, member of New Jewish Agenda, professor at Brandeis University, Rutgers University, UC Santa Cruz, Scripps College, San José State University, Stanford University, Cornell University, ”one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century”
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:24 utc | 80
”[W]e must regain the power of the cunt.”
– Germaine Greer, Marxist, lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, columnist at The Sunday Times
”If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood. If it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.”
– Germaine Greer
”Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
– Germaine Greer
”The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.”
– Germaine Greer
”Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.”
– Germaine Greer
”I believe in permanent revolution.”
– Germaine Greer
”Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.”
– Germaine Greer
”What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.”
– Germaine Greer
”I’ve always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I’d fall in love with a woman.”
– Germaine Greer
”The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
– Germaine Greer
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:26 utc | 81
All part of the globalist WEC plan for one world government.....first destroy Judeo Christian ethical behavior, second destroy the faith communities and the influence of Western and Orthodox Catholicism, third disarm the populace, make sure they have no power to revolt against draconian edicts from Orwellian governments, fourth employ devious fake scientific data to justify extreme socialist green policy that destroys the farming communities in the EU and the US (farming communities always being steady sources of independent thinking).
We see this in the Ukraine where nuns and priests are being held under house arrest or worse; monasteries and shrines and churches seized; where trans genders hold high government office, where the President is an avowed libertine.
In the US we see an excommunicated Catholic POTUS deny his faith and the sanctity of human life; defend surgical mutilation of children; require hospitals and prisons to issue sex change hormones; attempt to seize all privately held semi auto firearms.........etc.etc.etc.......total societal insanity.......massive election fraud has massive consequences......stay tuned......
Posted by: Tobias Cole | Mar 14 2024 15:27 utc | 82
”All this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban housewife. But is not her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp?”
– Betty Friedan, Jew, one-time member of the Young Communist League, co-founder of NOW, author, founder of modern feminism
”All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”
– Marilyn French, advisor to Al Gore’s presidential campaign, assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts
(Percent of reported rape or near-rape incidents = 0.07%, FBI Uniform Crime Report, 1996)
”Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.”
– Andrea Dworkin, Jew, feminist author, homosexual activist, former prostitute
”Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
– Andrea Dworkin
”Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman,”
– Andrea Dworkin, Liberty, p.58
”Sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and impossible.”
– Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
”When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression.”
– Sheila Jeffreys, homosexual activist, professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, Australia
”The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist”
– Ti-Grace Atkinson, homosexual scholar and advocate of ”political lesbianism”, early member of NOW
”[Acquaintance rape] is more common than left-handedness, alcoholism and heart attacks.”
– Naomi Wolf, Jew, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, on Bill Clinton’s re-election team, campaign advisor to Al Gore; quote from The Beauty Myth
(In the attempt to build a case that ”one in four” women have been raped in America)
”[R]ape represents an extreme behavior, but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”
– Mary Koss, psychology professor at Kent State University, 1982
”Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”
– Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life, quoted in Time, 1991
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:28 utc | 83
Tenet, the quote spamming is a little tiring. And just because you put MARXIST! in bold doesn’t make it so. Gloria Steinem? Yeah, the CIA famously loves to employ Marxists. MacKinnon’s major work is all about a feminist reforming of America’s liberal capitalist court system—hardly a Marxist take. And Germaine Greer, who you keep quoting, is anti-trans. What point do you think you’re making?
Posted by: Gengar | Mar 14 2024 15:29 utc | 84
At the University of Maryland, some female students posted the names of male students selected at random, young men about whom they knew nothing, under the heading ”Potential Rapists.” The message was that all men are potential rapists, though the men actually named probably did not find much comfort in that …
– John Leo, ”De-escalating the gender war” U.S. News and World Report, April 18,1994, p.24
”We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.”
– Robin Morgan
”I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.”
– Robin Morgan
”In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men - but in the short run it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers”.
– Robin Morgan
”Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of sperm. [Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny.”
– Cheryl Clarke, highly prominent homosexual activist, on the graduate faculty of the Rutgers University Department of Women and Gender Studies, quote from Lesbianism, An Act of Resistance
”Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”
– Valerie Solanas, homosexual, Marxist, feminist writer, SCUM founder (Society for Cutting Up Men), who attempted to murder Andy Warhol
”To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”
– Valerie Solanas
”The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”
– Sheila Cronin
”I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
– Andrea Dworkin
”In my own life, I don’t have intercourse. That is my choice.”
– Andrea Dworkin
”To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.”
– Andrea Dworkin
”Could women’s liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?”
– Andrea Dworkin
”Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”
– Ti-Grace Atkinson, homosexual, New York chapter president of NOW, member of Daughters of Bilitis
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:30 utc | 85
Gengar, it is a cry for help from a very frustrated little mind.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 15:31 utc | 86
”In my own life, I don’t have intercourse. That is my choice.”
– Andrea Dworkin
Have you seen her? No one in their right mind would hit that!
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 15:32 utc | 87
”Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
– Susan Brownmiller, Jew, news writer at ABC, published in The New York Times, Vogue, The Nation etc, quote from Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
”It is not only men convicted of rape who believe that the only thing they did that was different from what men do all the time is get caught.”
– Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989, First Harvard University Press
(a legal treatise regarding feminism and socialism)
”Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive … women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.”
– Jodie Foster, actress, homosexual, quoted in The New York Times Magazine
”The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men.”
– Sharon Stone, actress
”The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.”
– Sally Miller Gearhart, homosexual activist, lecturer in Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University, quote from The Future - If There Is One - Is Female
(The above is "discussed" at Women's Studies)
”And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.”
– Susan Griffin, homosexual activist, Emmy Award winner, quote from Rape: The All-American Crime
”If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”
– Mary Daly, homosexual activist, professor at Boston College where she refused to admit male students to her classes
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:32 utc | 88
”If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them.”
– David Angier
”As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women … he can sexually molest his daughters … THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE.”
– Marilyn French (her emphasis)
”My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.”
– Marilyn French, The Woman’s Room
”I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”
– Barbara Jordan, Black, homosexual, congresswoman, adjunct professor at University of Texas
”Men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out. Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, even if she does not feel forced.”
– Judith Levine, Jew, columnist, board member of the Vermont ACLU, quote from My Enemy, My Love
”Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence.”
– Judith Levine
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:34 utc | 89
”All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck”.
– Statement made by a University of Maine feminist administrator in 1995, quoted by Richard Dinsmore. Richard had protested the quote and was dismissed thereafter on the grounds of harassment. He responded by bringing suit against the university.
”If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal - a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students - I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment – of persuading students that women are oppressed”
– Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University
”I do want to be able to explain to a 9-year-old boy in terms he will understand why I think it’s OK for girls to wear shirts that revel in their superiority over boys.”
– Treena Shapiro, Jew
”The White race is the cancer of the human race.”
– Susan Sontag, Jew, homosexual, feminist icon, philosophy teacher at City University of New York, teacher of the Philosophy of Religion at Columbia University, PEN president, author
Posted by: Tenet | Mar 14 2024 15:36 utc | 90
"Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?"
Certainly not.
But to determine what's actually "left", you must watch what they do, not what they say. If a party promotes world war, backs neo Nazis, supports genocide, attacks the social position of working people and is a mere tool of finance capital...can we call thay party left just because it claims to be?
Of course not.
The ruling elite in the west (both parties) are doing all of the above, so why would anyone refer to them as the left just because one of the two pretend to care about racism, sexism and trans rights? In fact, those are just cynical campaigns to appear left (virtuous) while carrying out right wing policies on a global scale.
So, there is no "left" wing on any ballot in the west. None. That's what were dealing with. You have two right wing parties. One wants to leave the traditional culture somewhat intact, the other wants to obliterate it in a perverse way to appear progressive. They are all hard right wing parties regardless of the cultural window dressing.
I've said it many times, but the west requires some new founding fathers to actually rebuild a genuine left of, by and for the global working class, against all imperialist war, the billionaires, and capitalism, more broadly. Win power, strip the billionaires of their wealth and make all banks public property. That's the left wing goal, in reality.
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Mar 14 2024 15:36 utc | 91
Gengar, it is a cry for help from a very frustrated little mind.
Posted by: hedlykarok | Mar 14 2024 15:31 utc | 86
The way he’s still tilting at second-wave feminist windmills—many of whom have not been relevant in academic, political, or other circles in decades—suggest he’s been absolutely fuming about anything tangentially related to feminism writ large for about 50 years or so.
Tenet, please just take a deep breath and go on a short walk or something. For your own health.
Posted by: Gengar | Mar 14 2024 15:36 utc | 92
This macabre and ghastly conjured adventure designed by 'the chosen few' has been in the making for nearly two decades. The plan is to break societies, cause discord and reap humanity apart, using the so-called replacement theory as main platform. And who benefits most from all of it, you may guess? The National Zionists in the US.
Posted by: AI | Mar 14 2024 15:43 utc | 93
All progressive ideas must ignore or refute some foundational reality. With most issues most people don't understand enough about them to know reality so they can believe a well crafted argument. Fervently. It's just that the trans issue takes it to such an absurd level that no serious person can play along.
Posted by: Art Wellesley | Mar 14 2024 11:53 utc | 4
Wrong. Marxism is the last word in genuine leftism and it is militantly grounded in hard reality.
When war begins again, intelligent people look at the military technology that was most effective in the last major war, which becomes the starting point.
When class war breaks out again, it's the same idea. One must go back to the perspective that was most effective in the last war and begin from there.
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Mar 14 2024 15:47 utc | 94
Gengar | Mar 14 2024 15:36 utc | 92
I think it's quite salutary to be reminded of some insanities of the feminist movement. These weren't voiceless cranks shouting at the attic wall (except maybe Shulamith Firestone), these were professors, journalists, honoured talk-show guests, best selling authors. People who were given a platform (often tax-funded).
Posted by: YetAnotherAnon | Mar 14 2024 15:47 utc | 95
It's always funny to see the reactions of my friends who are right-leaning when I remind them that societies like the USSR, the DPRK, Maoist China and the Warsaw Pact in general never dealt with any of this gender nonsense and really only stuck to economics, class struggle and anti-imperialism. When liberals are reminded of that they call you a 'class reductionist,' but really that's what normal revolutionary minded people thought about and would push for.
Posted by: Ba'ath | Mar 14 2024 12:04 utc | 6
True and absolutely necessary to win a class war. The next revolutionary party will have to reject all divisive bourgeois idpol, which is designed precisely to prevent all required class unity.
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Mar 14 2024 15:50 utc | 96
b,
Please define what you mean by "socialism." I assume that you do not mean government ownership of the means of production. Do you regard Sweden as socialistic? The Netherlands? Is Switzerland beyond the pale? According to the "degree of capitalism" measure used by many economists--the Fraser Institute index of "economic freedom--on a scale from 0 to 10, Switzerland is at 8.5, Sweden is at 7.8, the Netherlands is at 7.7, Russia is at 6.3, China is at 6.2, and Venezuela is at 3.0. The US is at 8.1 and Canada is at 8.0.
Posted by: greg | Mar 14 2024 15:51 utc | 97
Hey b, thx for the great work.
There was a file leak regarding the "World Professional Association for Transgender Health", the WPATH Files which i find most relevant in this context.
Posted by: wasntme | Mar 14 2024 15:52 utc | 98
Among all these interesting comments, I have not seen one of the things I find interesting about the whole notion of "gender" in this context which is the essential conservatism at the heart of it.
The silly and extremely conservative idea at the heart of gender idealogy which leads to the modern Trans movement is that there is a way to be a "woman" and a way to be a "man" and that therefore male humans and female humans who feel more comfortable with one way than the other are actually "men" and "women" based on their behavior rather than sex.
This is mostly happening in a very un-conservative modern society where, more than ever, women and men can look as they want, perform whatever jobs they are qualified for, have sexual relations with whomever, etc ... in other words, this is happening in a society where there are no prescriptions on How women and men are supposed to look, act like, and do.
The very conservative idea seems to be if you like or act STEREOTYPICALLY feminine, you are a woman and if you look and act stereotypically masculine, you are a man ... this is just idiotic. We all know women who are strong, tough, don't wear makeup, work in "male" fields, etc. and they don't cease to be a "woman," an adult human female, because they don't look/act like someone's stereotype of a woman.
To me, trans ideology is actually a very conservative reaction against the modern freedom from sexual mores/roles developed by western women and men ... that it has become a cause celebre of the progressive side is interesting in a gallows humor kind of way.
Posted by: Caliman | Mar 14 2024 15:53 utc | 99
"Hate against trans people is very popular now. Maybe Matt Taibbi is just using this trend to pivot his career, like so many others are doing."
Posted by: Thorn | Mar 14 2024 14:32 utc | 60
I've been expecting a backlash against trans people from the point where this all started a few years ago. It's a pretty consistent phenomena.
When the state attacks parental rights, when former men are kicking the crap out of women in sports, and when imposed speech laws are applied re pronouns, there is going to be pushback against this.
This form of extremism not only harms trans people globally, but it harms them locally. A more moderate approach would have helped trans people.
Posted by: David G Horsman | Mar 14 2024 15:54 utc | 100
The comments to this entry are closed.
What's it got to do with Marx?
Posted by: Dominic | Mar 14 2024 11:38 utc | 1