A Very Diverse Cake

306 thoughts on “A Very Diverse Cake”

1. As far as I can tell, to progressives, “diversity” means a crowd of people who allow all the boxes on the SJW check list to be checked off, but who will also tow the progressive line. A group consisting of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, Mia Love, Mary Cheney, and Newt Gingrich would not be “diverse” for them.

   1. They are not the “right kind” of diverse. As best I can tell, “proper” diversity means skin tone (and ancestral point of origin), genitalia, and the object of one’s sexual desire or lack thereof. The brain and heart must be progressive.

      1. Yup. “Diversity” means many outwardly-different-appearing leftists.

         1. What if they “know” that externalities are the only Real Thing, but the universals (philosophy, religion, etc.) are the ephemeral?

            We’re this the case, it might help with the call active efforts toward the mal-educated.

   2. That would be the Mary Cheney who supports gay marriage?

      1. Unless she buys into the rest of of the progressive agenda, that wouldn’t be enough to save her from progressive loathing. You know you have to buy into their whole agenda for them to avoid attacking you – unless your a radical Muslim who seeks to kill Americans, in which case you’ll likely get a free pass.

         1. I so wish I had an edit button – the “your” above should “you’re”.

         2. But I thought “gay” trumped, you should excuse the term, everything except Islam?

            1. No, political allegiance > *

               I used to have fun with one person at work by pointing out that Dick Cheney was the only person on the Rep and Dem tickets in 2004 that supported gay marriage, so if gay marriage activists REALLY thought it was that big of a deal, they’d vote Bush/ Cheney.

   3. I always called the progressive idea of diversity crayon box diversity. Countless different colors, each with their own label, otherwise they’re all indistinguishable.

      1. Oooh. Nice one. May use in the future, especially in conversation.

      2. I compare it to the Borg, myself–biological diversity, utter homogeneity of thought.

         1. Isn’t that what diversity’s all about? You travel the world meeting people of exactly your educational and social status who agree with everything you say, and after you’ve done that long enough you magically understand how the world works.

            1. I’ve been to major cities on three continents and aside from a few superficial differences like the average melanin content and the tones in the babbling around me they’ve all been remarkably similar – though at 6′ 4″ I can see much further down a crowded sidewalk in Hong Kong than I can in New York. It’s a bit like those foreigners who think they know the US because they’ve visited New York and/or LA. Sorry, but you haven’t left your bubble. Of course, these people would be among the first to excoriate someone for judging the French on the basis of Parisians.

               1. I don’t know, I’d excoriate anyone judging the French on Paris but then again my two French experiences were Toulon and Breast. I very much enjoyed the latter including teaching a french couple and their teenage daughter how to do tequila shots.

                  1. Breast? Freudian slip? or autocorrect of Brest the port?

                  2. So you can usually find an initial point of agreement with your random Frenchman by starting the conversation with, “Boy, those Parisians sure are jerks, aren’t they?”, eh? Cool. It works here too. If a German, or an Indian, or a South African came up to me and said, “Boy, those New Yorkers (or Angelenos) sure are jerks, aren’t they?” we’d immediately have a point of agreement to build on. 🙂

      3. Or you could call it “restaurant diversity” — a hundred different cuisines, with the exact same etiquette for ordering and tipping in every establishment.

         1. A slight refinement: call it Food Court Diversity.

            A bunch of different cuisines all operating under a single management.

      4. Or M&M diversity… different colors, but all tasting the same.

         Contrast that with a bag of mixed nuts like you get on our side…

         1. I resemble that!

         2. I think a good metaphor may be that they’re M&Ms, and we’re skittles.

            They all look different, but taste the same; we all look different, and have mostly different tastes, but they complement each other. There *are* some sorts of diversity that simply wouldn’t work– they’d disrupt the Skittle over-culture. There’s no ‘color’ that will disrupt the M&M culture, because they’re all chocolate flavored. You MIGHT even be able to work in the alternative M&M flavors, and consider how many in their group may have toxic allergies to the nuts exposure……

            1. I thought about using Skittles or Starburst, but couldn’t pass up the mixed nuts joke. 🙂

   4. I think they haven’t comprehended the ramifications of what they claim to support. Want to claim there are no absolutes and we cannot judge other cultures? Fine. But this also means they cannot condemn anything in that culture. That includes the demand that other cultures act like they do and support the same things. There seems to be an incredible disconnect here.

      1. They go the White Queen one better: they not only think of six impossible things before breakfast, they think of six impossible and mutually contradictory things.

         Every single thought in its own compartment, carefully padded lest it strike another and the spark cause their heads to explode.

         1. Heather McDonald had a good one in City Journal: why are the progs so determined to bring in millions of poor Colored People/POCs to the Most. Racist, economically unfair country EVER?

            1. They’ll never be able to give you an honest answer. “So we can change that unfair country for the better!” is the closest I’d ever gotten.

      2. But this also means they cannot condemn anything in that culture.

         See, that is where you go off the rails.

         They believe all cultures are equal except the internal SJW culture which is superior and there are no absolutes except the goodness of SJWs and their thoughts.

         You are wrong and can’t claim absolutes because you’re a peon. They can because they are wise and enlightened.

         1. Well, not quite. They believe all cultures are equal except their imagined SJW utopian which would be completely superior to all others, and our current US culture, which is far and away the nadir of cultures, much worse than all those precious other cultures.

            And the reason we’re wrong isn’t because we’re peons (they like peons so long as they remember their place, which is fawning at the feet of the SJWs), it’s because we refuse to accede to their every nonsensical claim and demand. Opposing them on even the tiniest matter is proof absolute that we’re evil incarnate.

2. They are mines owned by donkeys? No, such things would be far more useful.

3. c4c … yes, I am trying to write as well – trying to finish up the next installment of Luna City with an essay about their most venerable public establishment – the Volunteer Fire Department…

4. I like Ringo’s term for it in Last Centurion: in Canada and the US, there is very little racism. What we have is culturism, with outward indicators like clothing, stance, etc that have little or nothing owed to genetics.

   1. Skin color is, unfortunately, of the cultural markers. It is one of the first seen ones also. Fortunately speech is a much better marker, so once the person opens their mouth their skin color becomes much less relevant.

      1. how you dress is also a sign of your culture.

      2. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Watch the difference in reaction to a black guy in slacks, and a long sleeved button down shirt carrying a backpack vs a white guy with ripped jeans hanging low, a wifebeater, and his hat on sideways.

         Clothing trumps skin colour pretty much every time.

         1. Heck, even a clean polo shirt or heavier, clean t-shirt and clean, neat pants where both fit as designed. (Which isn’t hard, it’s what I wear every day I don’t have a geeky t-shirt on.)

            Avoid extremely large shirts, or extremely tight shirts, don’t have your underwear showing, don’t wear work-out clothing as street clothing and don’t behave like the ability to disguise your identity is of immediate importance to you.
            (I wear hoodies all the time, but I don’t do that hunch-up, hide-the-face, sort of slink around with shoulders hunched so you can’t tell size thing that so many folks do. When it’s nasty and raining is the only time I get notable attention, and that vanishes as soon as I get undercover and my body language changes.)

            1. I tell the teens I work with that ALL clothing is CosPlay.

               1. “I LARP as a responsible adult.”

                  TOTALLY need to get that shirt.

                  1. Yes. Yes we do.

                  2. I want that shirt. Also, “I can’t adult today.”

                     1. I have generally gotten past wanting my shirts to be reading material — I don’t want to draw people’s attention — but I think both ‘I LARP as a responsible adult” and “I can’t adult today” would be lovely to wear when working conventions.

                        1. I generally use those for ‘stay-at-home’ shirts, or are gifts to hubby, who wears them as ‘I am not working today’ shirts.

         2. Ayup. I’ve gotten person-of-interest stops when I’ve been dressed for working on the airplane: ripped jeans smeared with several layers of varnish, primer, and paint, extremely battered boots also splattered with same, oversize worn-out t-shirt that’s functioning as a tunic, Mechanix gloves that are “fingerless” in that sanding aircraft ribs wore out the pads on a few fingers, and oil-stained gimme cap.

            The last time that happened, the officer followed me out of the gas station, gave me that level cop glare, and then said slowly, “Don’t you work at (Airplane Mechanic X) or (Avionics Shop Y)?”

            I turned rather red, and said, “Oh, yes, I work at Y and apprentice at X. I’m so sorry; I’m dressed for sandblasting and priming! I wasn’t expecting to be seen by people! I just worked too late on my plane, and needed more coffee to make sure I’m safe to drive home!”

            The nice police officer visibly relaxed as I turned redder and redder, and smiled at me. “Are you safe to drive? If not, you make sure you sit here until the coffee kicks in.”

            Strangely enough, that kind of thing never happens to me on the early side of midnight, when I’m dressed in office clothes.

            1. My uncle the pastor, white-y mcWhite cis-Male, back in the far-more systemically racist ’60s used get stopped by the cops for walking/motor-cycling (I know) While Scruffily-Dressed Young Male all the time.

               If any lefty actually actually cared about innocent (as opposed to gangsters, druggies, etc.) Black or Brown young men getting hassled by the cops, they’d point out this phenomenon.

               Side benefit: As the good guy black, Hispanic, what-have-you young men adapted, we could more accurately spot the truly bigoted and/or corrupt cops.

               But they don’t. I wonder why?

         3. And behavior trumps clothing. The closest I’ve ever come to Condition Orange is when I was walking through the sketchy part of town and a guy came around the corner waving his arm erratically. When he got closer I saw that he had headphones on and was playing air drums. I immediately relaxed.

            There’s also an etiquette to walking around late at night. Diverting course to put someone you’re passing out of arm’s reach isn’t just a safety thing, by putting them out of your arm’s reach it also sends the message that you aren’t interested in attacking them.

5. When it comes to “Gay Rights”, the assholes can’t get it into their head that Islam is worse than Christianity. 😦

   1. Tidbit I heard about the Iranians, no idea how accurate this is: Apparently, they’ll do gender reassignment, on the theory that it’s correcting a major birth defect.

      They’ll still kill gays out of hand, mind you…

      1. It hit the news a while back that they were doing involuntary male to female mutilation on guys caught being “receivers” in male/male intercourse.

         1. Is that adult male/adult male intercourse? I understand that the Islamic world is pretty accepting of pederasty.

            1. Yes. “Pretty boys” are their own category.

            2. Yeah. Under a certain age, in certain Islamic cultures, it’s not gay. It’s only gay if you keep doing it after the beard’s grown in.

               The thing is, it’s not necessarily Islam; it’s the cultures that were conquered under Islam and never changed. There’s a very, very old ditty in Afghanistan that includes “There’s a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach, but alas, I cannot swim.”

               1. Navy analysis found that a Marine’s case would draw attention to Afghan ‘sex slaves’
                  “The Marine Corps moved to discharge Maj. Jason Brezler against his wishes after he sent classified information over an unclassified email server to warn fellow Marines in Afghanistan about an allegedly crooked Afghan police chief.”

                  Last fall, the Navy Department had a controversial disciplinary case before it: Maj. Jason C. Brezler had been asked by Marine colleagues to submit all the information he had about an influential Afghan police chief suspected of abusing children. Brezler sent a classified document in response over an unclassified Yahoo email server, and he self-reported the mistake soon after. But the Marine Corps recommended that he be discharged for mishandling classified material.

                  The Navy Department, which oversees the Marine Corps, had the ability to uphold or overturn the decision. However, rather than just looking at the merits of the case, Navy officials also assessed that holding new hearings on the case would renew attention on the scandal surrounding child sex abuse in Afghanistan, according to military documents newly disclosed in federal court.

                  [SNIP]

                  The Navy Department’s observation about Brezler’s case was made as another U.S. service member’s career was in jeopardy because of his response to alleged child sex abuse in Afghanistan. In that instance, Army Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland made headlines after the Army decided last year to involuntary separate him from the service because of a reprimand he had received for hitting an Afghan Local Police (ALP) official in 2011 after the man laughed about kidnapping and raping a teenage boy. The Army overturned its decision in April and allowed Martland, a Green Beret, to stay in the military after Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) intervened.

                  The Martland case opened a dialogue in which numerous veterans of the war in Afghanistan said they were told to ignore instances of child sex abuse by their Afghan colleagues. The Defense Department’s inspector general then opened an investigation into the sexual assault reports and how they were handled by U.S. military officials who knew about them.

                  Brezler’s attorney, Michael J. Bowe, said Wednesday in an email that his client is entitled to a “real review” of his case — “not a whitewash designed to avoid uncomfortable press stories about child rape by our ‘partners’ in Afghanistan.

                  “Our service members deserve better,” he added.

                  A spokesman for Hunter, Joe Kasper, said that the Navy Department is “right to be worried about granting Brezler a new, impartial review of his case” because it “can’t sustain a case based on the facts and the moral imperative” that prompted Brezler to send the warning to other Marines that landed him in legal trouble.

                  “The Navy surely watched the Army struggle with the Martland case, and the Army was ultimately left no choice but to retain Martland,” Kasper said. “The Brezler case is no different in that, at its foundation, there’s a corrupt Afghan commander that exploits children. It’s something that Americans won’t tolerate, and good luck to the Navy as it tries to explain that Brezler was better to keep quiet, avoiding scrutiny altogether, than attempt to save several Marines that were killed. On that aspect alone, the Navy loses.”

                  Do NOT Read The Whole Thing — it will only depress you.

                  1. Too late.

               2. “…but alas, I cannot swim.”

                  Not so very old — only 17th century. 😉 The poem is ‘Zakhmi Dil’ (‘Wounded Heart’) by the Khushal Khan Khattak, that is Khushal the khan (hereditary leader) of the Pathan/Pashtun/Pakhton Khattak tribe. He’s famous for leading a long, bloodily romantic Pashtun revolt against the Moghul empire, ultimately doomed because a son who was not heir to his throne allied with the Moghuls to take it, and for being the man of letters/encyclopedist/poet laureate of the Pashtuns.

                  The English army has used it as one of their marching songs. (I’d come across those lines before, and decided it was time to run and find out. Thanks for getting me started!)

      2. There was a person over in a LJ discussion blog who used to regularly use that gender reassignment being paid for by Iranian government as ‘why Iran is so much better with LGBT than the US, so many of my transgender friends have been MURDERED, it’s not safe for me here, oh I wish I were in Iran so I could get my free surgery!’

         Yeah, there were regular jaw drops about that.

         And most of the threads with him/her (I’m not sure which, quite honestly. Her I think?) in it would devolve into her crying about it, beating the rest of us over the head with that one single point, and then about her friends being murdered and or raped and summarily ignored by the police because ‘they assumed they were prostitutes.’ Whenever someone/s would point out that her basic premise was full of flaws, she’d retreat to ‘Iran is more UNDERSTANDING about intersex issues!’

         Oi. vey.

         1. Much more understanding. She should probably move there. If she wants to start a FundMeGo campaign I will offer my fiduciary services, as a professional accountant, to ensure the money is spent on a ticket and moving expenses.

            1. It was suggested, I think, that she do that, on more than one occasion. She might’ve taken it up if any one of us were wealthy enough to actually pay for a ticket, and hand her all her wants on a silver platter.

         2. In fairness, one could really get clustering of deaths/rapes that could legitimately leave one concerned.

            Someone once shared with me their concerns about acquaintances having a tendency to commit suicide. Digging into their methodology, they were counting as normal a population that in my judgement probably would have strong associations with severe mental illness and extremely poor coping mechanisms.

            1. That would’ve been fine, and all of what you said is very likely true; except that every single freaking time that person showed up in discussion, there was a 95% chance she’d bring it all up. Again and again. Wouldn’t matter if the discussion was about how the Buddhists in Thailand finally had had enough of the shit the local Muslims were pulling and had started killing them in retaliation, or the latest report of gay people being hanged in Iran, oh no. “But Iran is still NICER to transgenders and intersex people because they’ll pay for the surgery oh so fakely modern America refuses to pay for MINE and I needs it precious.’

               I’ll admit I’m not sympathetic to her because of her attitude.

               1. Well, I’d started to end that comment by doing a dissection of those of her claims you repeated, showing how they impeached her proof, but decided it went without saying.

                  I suspect the choice of associates (if true), the analytical choices, and the fixations were not healthy.

            2. Probably. I was cautioned when I started grad school that certain mental illnesses are far more common in graduate students than in the general population, so don’t be surprised if . . . We only had one major problem during my stint, but that might be because the department had become very, very careful after a certain memorable individual passed through the Ivy Halls. OTOH I encountered at least three people in their manic phases while waiting for classes with a bunch of Education grad students (classrooms near each other in same building.)

               1. There’s ‘high end intelligence often coincides with neurological issues’, and there is flat out stupid stuff.

                  A bipolar support group with regular wine tasting is probably a very bad idea. Maybe not as bad an idea as some of as some of the RL situations seem to be.

               2. The Grad school here monitors the grad students fairly closely. We get regular cautions about some of the students, particularly the foreign students. It seems that not getting a job in the US after grad school is oftentimes a very large cause for concern as there are few openings in their home countries. So if they fail out or fail to acquire employment here they have a tendency to not deal with life well.

         3. Then President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated authoritatively that there were no homosexuals in Iran:

            “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University last night in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.

            “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon,” he continued. “I do not know who has told you we have it.”

            From The Daily Mail September 25, 2007

            Cynic that I am I had concluded that this meant that those who came out were eliminated.

            1. The political useful explanation for homosexuality mutually impeaches the gender is a social construct stuff. Which means we are free to consider alternatives.

               Perhaps homosexuality isn’t uniform across populations. Perhaps there are simple behavior changes that can drastically reduce it. Perhaps Mr. Ahmadinejad speaks falsehood. Perhaps we are wrong to say that homosexuality is a real thing. Or perhaps, as you say, they are killed in Iran, and the bureaucracy is ahistorically effective at this.

               1. Sigh. In Iran they give FORCED sex changes to homosexuals. They think that “fixes” it. If you refuse it, you can get killed.
                  That’s all. no mystery. And sick beyond belief.

                  1. I understand that there are also grounds to think Ahmadinejad is a liar.

                     1. yeah. That too.

                        1. When it comes to totalitarianism there is no nadir to the Bad.

         4. See, here’s the thing about all those “rapes and murders” of the gender-confused: The majority of the perpetrators are other gender-confused people, not straights.

            You know how you can tell the closeted queers? They’re the ones talking trash about the gays, and openly discussing going out “gay-bashing”. The straights? The overwhelmingly vast majority of us could really care less–We’re not threatened, we’re not bothered, and we really don’t give a damn what you do in bed, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us.

            Back in the 1980s, there was a fairly significant problem at Fort Lewis in Washington state: Bunches of GIs were supposedly going north to Seattle and Tacoma, and doing the old “smear the queer” gay-bashing stuff. Now, from a leadership standpoint, there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could really do about it–You’d overhear people talking about having done it, making plans to do it, but as soon as you called anyone on it, they’d clam up. And, oddly enough, the numbers didn’t add up–I knew a couple of folks in the local “alternative sexuality” community, and I was pretty concerned that some of our guys were going out and doing this crap, for real. Only thing was, the amount of shit talked did not match the amount of actual events–Most of the folks I knew who were in that community were accosted a few times by unknowns, yelled at, but not beaten up. And, without real basis for criminal complaint, all you could really do was keep your eyes open, and try to stay on top of anything really bad. But, you know what? There wasn’t enough of it to really take action on. I got wind of a bunch of guys who were supposedly heading up to Seattle to “beat in a few f*****s heads”, called the Seattle PD, and they were a little less than concerned. And, when we called back? No such events had actually occurred.

            What I finally figured out a few years later was that the whole thing was basically “false flagging” by the closeted; they were making excuses ahead of time so that if they were spotted “up there” around those clubs, they had a ready-made, he-man macho excuse. And, additionally, a whole bunch of those guys who were so openly and vociferously “anti-gay” later turned out to be gay, themselves. I can think of three guys from that time frame who later “came out”, and it was like “Huh? Were not you the guy who was always going on and on and on and on about how gays were unholy, evil, abominations before God, and only fit for brutal killing? And, now you’re living with a man and agitating for gay marriage…?”.

            I honestly don’t think that the real problem here is with straights; I think the real problem is gay-on-gay violence by the ones who are conflicted, who seem to be acting out their internal conflicts by coming up with all this anti-gay BS. Think over the number of outwardly anti-gay politicians who later turn out to be quite queer themselves–Dennis Hastert, anyone?

            I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of the people who are committing crimes of violence and sexuality against gays are themselves acting out their own issues, trying to overcompensate and deny. The average straight person of my experience just looks at the gay lifestyle, gay sexuality, and goes “Hmm. Interesting. Not for me, though… Have at it, boys…”. We really, really don’t care.

            1. That poor SOB who died being dragged behind a pickup was murdered by a former lover over their drug dealing issues. (He was a thug and a freaking drug dealer, but I don’t wish death like that on anybody.)

               Still gets held up as “gay bashing.”

               It’s hardly unknown of murderers to put down false flags like making it look like someone was murdered by exactly the opposite group of that which did it.

               1. I would love someone to do the statistical investigations and research to take a look at who is actually committing these anti-gay “hate crimes”. From experience and observation, I’m pretty sure it’s not the “straights” that are doing this stuff–Most of the perpetrators, I suspect, are other conflicted gays. Straights don’t have enough emotional investment to actually commit murders, and have no real reason to send the social signals that the perpetrators think they are sending.

                  Looking back on it, every single one of the folks I knew in my twenties who were so vociferous about being “anti-gay”…? Most of them are are out of the closet, nowadays. The rest of us? While we didn’t really have much interest or enthusiasm for the issue, we’re still living our boring, plain-vanilla lives as straights. At least two of the assholes I knew from that time in my life are dead of complications from AIDS, so you can do the math on that.

                  I’m thinking that most of the “problems” encountered by the gay community actually stem from other, still-closeted gays, who are essentially “virtue signalling” whenever they do their gay-bashing things. Maybe I’m wrong, but the more I think about it, the righter this idea feels. Not least because I don’t think most straights have the emotional investment necessary to really take up gay-bashing as a hobby–Most of us are really completely disinterested and utterly non-threatened by the “gay”, while the folks who have conflicts about their sexual identities have a strong interest in demonstrating their bona-fides as “straights”, which manifests in anti-gay militancy. Every time I see someone making noise about that shit, these days? I’m thinking “There’s another one, still in the closet… Wonder how long before they come out?”.

                  1. That was one of the points made in Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” – that the most vocal anti-homosexuals were perhaps those who were horrified and in denial about their own inward inclinations.

                  2. Some anti-gay militancy might not be gay. They might have other sexual issues.

                  3. Problem with the theory:
                     all it takes to be “anti-gay” these days is to be a member of a traditional religion, have a philosophy based on science/natural law, or be three weeks behind on the new fad for what is “supportive.”

                     Remember when Elton John got a lot of bashing on him because he didn’t think SSM was a good idea?

                     1. Heck, just the reaction on any gay person who has reservations about SSM or adopting. Or people within the transgender community who don’t think rushing into reassignment surgery is necessarily good for the person. It wouldn’t matter if they had very reasonable examples for WHY they have this opinion (fabulous example: Milo Yiannapolous on gay marriage), it is VERBOTEN that they even entertain this line of thought.

                        1. If they don’t rush in, they might change their mind.

                           An enormous number of “transsexual” boys and girls will just grow out of it if not encouraged, for instance.

                           1. But if we allow them time to fully consider things, how will we be able to demonstrate our open-mindeness and tolerance?

                           2. Sometimes, it’s a kid mimicking someone they admire or adore.

                              When my son was 4, he watched me pull and tie his elder sister’s hair up into twintails (very high twin ponytails.) He cried bitterly, because he wanted to have the same hair. Now, I’d been indulging in his wanting to copy his sibling when she wore ponytails by tying one of his curls into a tiny tail at his nape or a tiny topknot, but I warned him that if I tried to do the same thing to his hair, it would hurt. No, he wanted it anyway. So I did, and he was pleased – for a little while. A few hours later, he asked me to remove the two little twintail curls he had on top of his head, because his ‘head hurt now.’

                              He never asked for his hair to be tied again, though he continued in wearing a colorful bracelet of beads for a few more weeks. Then he gave those to a little girl he was playing with and forgot all about it. He never tried to copy his sister again.

                              My trick was not to make a huge fuss about it, reasoning that he wanted to just copy his big sis for a while. Naturally his sister thought he was a silly little thing, but we told her it was because he loved her that he wanted to copy her for a little while.

                  4. I got hit with the “you’re gay” thing a lot because I objected as much to females acting like bores as I did to men, and I didn’t think it was just awesome to have the lesbians assigned to the same room making out, loudly, all night.

               2. I think you’re confusing two cases: Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence and left outside Laramie, Wyoming in winter. He became a gay cause celeb and over a decade later an investigative reporter dug into the initial drug story and found out not only was it true but larger than brief early reports.

                  To their strong credit the reporting was funded and published by The Advocate, the leading gay magazine, under a story which discussed what do you do when you discover your foundation myth is a lie. Sadly very few people have been willing to face that question.

                  James Burke (sic) was dragged by three racists who sat out to kill a black man until his body came appart. Two are looking at the chair (or have met it) and one isn’t who I believed turned on the other two This did not stop the NAACP where his daughter claimed G W. Bush failing to sign hate crimes legislation was like killing her dad again…guess she wanted them executed twice.

                  1. Quibble: Shepherd was tortured nearly to death before being hung on the fence, but the only detail I could find in a quick search (which was mostly searching his name and clicking on a story about the story by the honest journalist you mention) was that he left the bar in a pickup and was at the very least pistol whipped.

                     Very likely they did get conflated, or I conflated Shepherd with another murder; dragging to death behind a vehicle is hardly an original means of torturing someone to death. (Vaguely remember that my English teacher mentioned that the treatment of Paris’ body was notably unusual because he was dead before the mutilation by dragging behind the chariot started, and thus it was a gratuitous insult rather than a means of execution.)

            2. > We really, really don’t care.

               That’s too alien for a certain mindset to accomodate. *They* care, so *you* must care; you’re aggressing them by lying about it.

               It’s fun to watch this in action with Vox Day vs. the Torlings. I believe Vox really *doesn’t* care; he keeps them stirred up with the innocent joy of a child raking a stick across a picket fence, getting all the dogs to bark.

               1. Not caring == hate to the modern leftist.

            3. Even those of us, who take it as read that homosexual behaviour is sinful, because God Said So (as well as all the philosophers, stoics, and Lutherans who can make cogent arguments on what amounts to the same thing) don’t consider it any more or less worse than any other sin.

               Okay. It’s not as bad as tax fraud, and it’s much worse than adultery (because treason & Dante) but you get my drift.

               Honestly, the whole “beat up the sexual wierdo” thing smacks of adolescence and those who never outgrew it: I.e. progs.

               1. Hmmm.. 2nd thought honesty requires me to add: it occurs to me that there is a civilizational imperative that would make beat-up-the-sexual-weirdo a viable universal above and beyond the love-hate tribal relationship with Odds.

                  Don’t have the time or the inclination to get into it here, however.

         5. Oh, HER. My God she was annoying. EVERYTHING was about the persecution of TG people. Though most of her friends WERE actually prostitutes, so it was more about the persecution of prostitutes, really.

            And I don’t know that any competent police department is going to let serial killers keep killing prostitutes, even if they despise prostitutes, because eventually the serial killers will probably start killing non-prostitutes.

            Not that all police departments are competent, of course.

            1. Serial killers are SERIAL killers because they are good at not getting caught. This may or may not prove the competence of the police department. But I don’t know of a police department anywhere that won’t attempt to catch them.
               By the way, prostitutes are a favorite target of serial killers, because they are some of the few people (and women in particular) who are willing to get into a vehicle with a strange man.

               1. There was a guy who decided to write a book about catching serial killers, and ended up not doing it. Turns out the way was: a victim gets away and describes the killer to the police. ’cause it’s really, really, really hard to catch a killer who has no link to his victims.

            2. Yeah, her. And yes, your blog.

               TBH I wondered about her complaining about the prostitute killing – in “I have my doubts about the veracity of your complaints” way – because of the supposed ‘don’t give a crapitis’ she described. As you’ve have pointed out above, it’s not a stretch for a serial killer to jump from prostitutes to ordinary women.

               But yeah. EVERYTHING was the persecution of TG and intersex all the time no matter what the topic.

               1. Unless she gave a geographic location, we don’t know the how much work and people the police department in question had. If she wasn’t lying, we do not know that her interpretations of deaths/disappearances and of police interest are correct.

                  1. Like I said; I’m likely biased because of her attitude – personally, getting the ‘Iran is so much better because it’d give me what I want’ nearly every single bloody time she showed up made her rank just slightly above troll level. About the only time she wouldn’t do this was when the discussion didn’t involve the Middle East or RL politics. It was very much like Clamps (who we first encountered on the same blog; Jordan Bassior’s) bringing up a murdered Muslim girl every time there was a discussion about the Middle East/ hostile Muslim actions in the world/ racism/politics – even if said death had nothing to do with the topic at hand. So if with regards this particular person, if I’m coming across as unfairly harsh in my ‘sorry, out of fucks to give’ – you’d have to have been there. Eroded any sympathy.

                     It also had the air of -for me- trying to steal someone else’s venue to vent her grievances. There were long threads where people gave helpful advice, or discussion of her claims, or even trying to be reasonably polite in steering the conversation back on course. It didn’t matter; only her experiences mattered on the subject, nobody dare doubt what she says or else. I am unsure if she ever did back up her claims or gave a geographic location; she might have for all I know because I kind of remember a few of the more ‘facts pls’ folks asking.

                  2. One of the things that I remember twigging the ‘not sure of the claims’ was her claim that the police didn’t even try to investigate these murders, which didn’t sound plausible. When pressed, I think it would vary between ‘not investigating it as a hate motivated crime against transgenders, and only as ‘murdered prostitutes’ to ‘they did, but never caught anyone because the cops didn’t give a crap about my friends.’

                     – sorry that got left out of the copy-from-text file.

                     1. There are people in crappy situations that should attempt to get out of them. There are people with emotional disorders that have great difficultly not thinking with their feels. There are dishonest trolls.

                        I’ve not convinced I need any more possible models for the person described.

                        1. Ok. She could be all of the above. And…?

                           I’m not sure what you’re looking for from me. I’ve already explained why I have no sympathy for this particular individual – someone who the blog owner also recalls as ‘annoying’. I can’t help but have the impression you are unhappy with the lack of sympathy – which, as I’ve repeated above, she lost – implying that I did, at one point, feel sympathy for her plight. I could be wrong. But I am honestly not ‘getting’ what your point is.

                           But in case it wasn’t clear: I don’t have a problem with the person being transgender, or intersex, or that her friends were prostitutes, and if her story about their murders were true then yes they freaking deserve justice like anyone else; I had a problem about her standing on their graves every chance she got to beat us over the head with how much better it would be if the US had forced / ‘sponsored’ sex reassignment surgery.

                           Let me put it this way – if I came here and cried about my loss and pain and the loneliness and depression that came from losing two infants in a row every time I came here, no matter what the topic of the post/comment thread I’d sincerely deserve someone, especially Sarah, to tell me to give it a rest, or perhaps suggest that I’m at the very least out of line. And I’d rightly annoy people if I’d pulled such antics.

                           (And please, fellow Huns and Hoydens, if I do something like that or step out of line, let me know, with a clue by four, if necessary.)

                           1. I wasn’t looking for anything from you. I was trying to signal that or something. My apologies.

                           2. Okay. And no, we got that she had issues, and tried to be kind about them. I ran out of fucks to give after she used her friends’ deaths as a soapbox once too many times.

                           3. Lots of people have issues. If one argues with the big kids, one’s arguments will be held to big kid rules. One of the rules on the Bar for borderline flame wars was ‘address the post, and not the poster’.

                              Not having experienced that person directly, I mostly was interested in the quality issues of their arguments.

                              In hindsight, I’m unsure what I was actually trying to do with many of my comments this thread. I certainly wasn’t putting smilies where I felt them. It seems the log in my eye need quality control. 🙂

                           4. That’s fair enough; and I’ll admit that I wasn’t getting your point, and wasn’t sure how to respond. So if I seemed a bit cranky about it, I apologize too.

                              But no, my main issue with that particular person was her behavior with regards to that particular point, and her gravestanding. Some of her issues I could accept, some shrug off as understandable / I don’t get it so I’ll let it slide types, and ‘you’re nuts on this part, and no you’re wrong, that’s no excuse.’

                              Hugs? ^_^

      3. In their minds, it cures gayness. Now that the victims are “female”, the attraction to males is OK.

         1. Yep.

            1. In a weird way it is accepting of TG although not homosexuals…they just view the homosexuality as a manifestation of being born wrong, a standard TG statement.

         2. The thought still makes me shudder. OTOH, some might take it up simply to not end up dangling from the business end of a crane.

            1. Yes. Of course. Any life over no life.

            2. Wouldn’t escaping Iran be a better idea?

               1. It probably would be, but I would guess that there are other reasons why they don’t leave.

                  I would guess that one of them is: the closest place they would find any safety or acceptance is one they’d like to see removed off the map: Israel.

                  1. Yep.

         3. I wonder what the suicide rate is for their post-ops?

            I know that for transgender people in the States the post-operative suicide rate is higher than the pre-op suicide rate. They think getting the surgery will solve all their problems, instead of, at best, just giving them new problems.

            1. I seem to recall a 1 in 5 figure being bandied about, but I have no knowledge of its provinence.

            2. This has been a known issue with plastic/cosmetic surgery for at least 40 years. It led to the creation of the psychocybernetics approach to mental health therapy: the creator was a plastic surgeon who found that fixing the exterior only helped a patient’s well-being if the interior (self-perception & attitude) was healthy.

            3. I remember reading that there IS a fallout for the surgeries; such as the newly made woman losing the relationship that existed pre-op because well, the other guy wasn’t attracted to women after all, and leaving. There’s also a high likelihood of having lost family and friends in the interim leading up to the surgery.

               I’d imagine it’d be much higher than in the US.

   2. At this point outside of concern for a few of those I consider mine (as in “me and mine”) I’d be fine with them learning the hard way.

6. c4c

7. C4c

8. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me’. Whatever happened to that sentiment? I don’t even think all the various people screaming about racism and sexism are even that serious about. They’ve found a way to shut off debate on their policies and otherize anybody not of the left.

   Even with triggers and micro-aggressions the ism is coming from the person triggered. They are the ones bending and mangling innocuous sentences so they can get all outraged and not talk about the actual issues.

   If we were as horrible as they try to make us out to be the bodies would already be about 3 deep.

   1. Many on the left are rageaholics, addicted to the endorphin and adrenalin rushes they get when they get a good outrage on. I mean addicted pretty literally; they don’t feel totally awake and alive unless they’re shrieking about some imaginary slight done to them (or to someone else, it doesn’t matter, so long as they can get mad about it).

      1. Trigglypuff comes to mind

      2. would things be better if their rage was over sports or TV shows instead?

         1. Not really; but if they’re just screaming at their TV, we wouldn’t get their brand of stupid inflicted on the rest of us that much; it’d be confined to sports/tv show related stuff, as opposed to spilling over into things that affect people’s livelihoods.

            1. I wish the SJZs were interested in TV shows rather than public policy.

               1. They usually end up ruining other people’s enjoyment of it because ‘everything is political.’

                  1. too true! but they’d annoy fewer people if they did.

                     1. I was going to type up a lighthearted response, but realised that the sad reality is, anything the zealots focus on, they try to force to change to make more acceptable to them. We’ve hit the point where their love of trying to make everyone who doesn’t conform to their insanity lose their jobs is, well, everywhere. From education https://thelibertyzone.us/2016/09/01/what-in-the-blue-hell/ to entertainment (See, the Ghostbusters ‘reboot’) and the anti-Gamergate idiots and the CHORFing ASPies.

                        Removing the social and natural consequences they’d normally suffer for their antics kind of helped them spread; and I don’t know what would bring those consequences back.

                        1. If the world, especially the 1st world, was much poorer and edge of the daily world to disaster much closer, the consequences would re-appear. In other words, if we lived as a society, where famine and plagues were common and there was little surplus the SJZs would disappear. I hope I made myself clear.

                           1. Yeah.

                              It seems a bit sad that it’s a side effect of prosperity; where the idle and untalented parasites seek to destroy that which ultimately supports them. Then again, that’s why they’re parasites.

                           2. If they weren’t socially destructive they’d be symbiotic with society.

                           3. Yeah, in the ‘this is the kind of person you don’t want to be like’ examples that ideally would push society toward self-betterment.

         2. Yes. It wouldn’t influence our governance.

   2. What drloss said, and some of the “special Snowflakes” really have been so coddled and sheltered that encountering something new and uncomfortable really does knock them over and cause major distress, because they have nothing to gauge it against. They blow words out of proportion because they have nothing to measure them against. Not all of them, and you bet your bottom, top, and middle dollar that there are more who are taking advantage of the situation for every perk and treat they can wring out, but there really are some folks who have been too sheltered for our own good.

      1. In those cases, I think it’s important to make them uncomfortable for their own good. A bit of desensitization therapy should help them cope with the real world. So let’s annoy them–we’re just helping them!

         1. But then they’ll need bigger and bigger aggressions to get their rage on.

            1. But the snowflakes aren’t the rageaholics, are they? The ragers scream at you, the snowflakes just cry and moan about how hurtful you are. In any case, there’s no reason not to make them uncomfortable. The snowflakes need it for desensitization, and the ragers are going to scream anyway, so why not just say what you want?

         2. You mean this is what happens when a generation is raised without winners and losers and everybody gets a ribbon/trophy? Remove all challenges from a their lives and then everything is a challenge?

            Makes sense 🙂 I think their is even a fancy psychological term for it but I can’t remember it off the top of my head.

            1. It’s rather more than a generation, the folks that are younger now (who tend to get tagged as “millennials,” even when they’re post-millennials) just happen to be the ones with a lot of people who were unfortunate enough to be mostly raised by someone other than their parents. (And I don’t mean other family members, I mean schools, daycare, etc.)

               Look at the behavior described– if you don’t recognize it in people who are Boomers on down, then it’s not because it’s not there.

               It’s the behavior that you learn to get your own way when the primary goal of the person who is raising you is to deal with stuff in the easiest way possible. You cry more, you are automatically in the right– if they fight back and you end up just as hurt, you know that at the least they’ll be punished as much as you, the attacker.

               Some of it is recognizable as the social norms exploitation that Alinsky promoted, too.

               1. You may be on to something there … although my own daughter who is now thirtyish and was raised by me as a single parent – is even more ferociously conservative than I am. She does retail items for a local band formed of younger people, whom I suppose are classified as millennials. They are … she thinks — well on the way to being considered as conservatives.
                  But then – this is Texas. A whole ‘nother country.

                  1. Basically, everyone under 35 and over either 20 or 25, depending on what measure you’re doing.

                     When you actually INTERACT with people, when they don’t have to worry about protective coloration, it’s a lot different.

                  2. I should probably point out that I can’t imagine you being the sort to farm out the parenting to a school, reguardless of how much time the kid spent there. 😀

                     A whole lot of folks here have told variations of stories like “then you tell them you mom says that no, in our house and with our daughter THEY Do NOT.”

                     1. No – the Daughter Unit may have spent time with other influences – they were of my choosing, and my own authority was unquestioned.

9. The US has the world’s worst PR department. Followed closely by the educational establishment. It is a wonder that some vague semblance of our founding fathers vision remains at all.

10. Evil Space Princess, you have one GREAT advantage. YOU can speak to those fools and convince them that your friends in the party are all Russki mafia, and will be following them around to make sure they’re “OK” and “don’t get into trouble”.

    Most of we Americans have been more than 25 miles from our birthplaces (wife of a friend had lunch with women from Holland, MI, who were very proud of NOT having done so) for most of our lives, have met odd/peculiar/strange/wonderful people wherever we’ve been. I’ve met people of Armenian, Ukrainian, Polish, African, various western European, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, subcontinental Indian, American Indian, VietNamese, Thai, Phillipine extraction or native, mostly in the service or where I’ve lived. YMMV, but I’m guessing not too much.

    1. Well, to be fair, countries in Europe DO have large immigrant populations now. Admittedly, of recent vintage, like within the last twenty or thirty years, so the acculturation and assimilation hasn’t had time to work.

       Also, I think there’s something to be said for removing oneself from the areas where things happened, as one does when immigrating, especially to the U.S. Going for a walk with one’s child or significant other and being able to point to “the place where *insert name of enemy culture* did *bad thing* to us six hundred years ago” on basically every street or area isn’t really possible here, the way it is in the Old Countries. It’s also true that past generations of immigrants had to cut ties almost entirely– burn their ships, as it were, due to a lack of communication ability. Not so true anymore. When you see people volunteering to be doormats, small wonder you decide you need a new rug.

       1. Well, they have the recent massive wave of immigrants, and then the massive wave around 400AD.

          Funny that we don’t have the vendettas and revenge killings and such by the native Roman Gauls and Iberians against those Frank and Vandal invading bastages…

          1. Eh, the Slavs and the Magyars still glare at each other, although that might be a bit more recent. And now they’re both glowering at Brussels.

             1. Anything that gets Slavs and Magyars going in the same direction is likely to get spectacular by the end.

       2. This. I used to work with a tech who would come up to my desk looking like a whipped puppy. It was really difficult to not kick the puppy in this case since he seemed to have a rather hard time figuring things out.

11. You see, she got detained at passport control and sent back after her significant other came to collect her.

    Oh, thank God!

    I was being rather horrified that you were laughing at their situation, because… well, I’m not a total idiot and I’m not totally ignorant of what kind of treatment “she” would regularly have gotten.

    That is the UAE passport people being incredibly nice, much nicer than I’d even considered as a possibility.

    (possible double post, doesn’t seem to have popped up…)

    1. I’m not sure if that was niceness by the passport people, or if their bosses simply prefer to avoid the type of ugly incident that could interfere with tourism and deal-making. Whatever the explanation, it was no doubt for the best.

       1. They are more polite to incoming fools, and would hide the local handling of such situations for your last reason. the UAE tolerates more outwardly to ensure the income of tourist $$$. The need to make money not relying on oil almost trumps their religion.

          1. Almost? Nobody I knew ever had a problem getting beer in Dubai, and that’s not counting the beer garden in the sandbox.

             Another example of stupidity in cultural appreciation: Pulling into Dubai we were told over and over again how important it was to dress modestly, to the point that people in shorts and T-shirts weren’t allowed off the ship. Also, the importance of not standing out as military was stressed. Walking around the souks and malls it was easy to identify the Sailors. They were the Americans who weren’t walking around in shorts and T-shirts.

    2. They might not have been so nice if “she” had been a less known persona. And I had similar thoughts…

    3. I’m laughing at the petulant reaction this youtuber is described to have. Because escaping with her life, and not being quietly taken away for execution, is not good enough, she wanted to just go shopping in this exotic rich people playground, people! No appreciation for the fact that the passport people decided, perhaps in the interest of business, that she be simply sent away, instead of following their religious laws…

       I have no sympathy whatsoever for the willful ignorance she had about the UAE, or any excuse rendered by her ‘multicultural cultism’ thinking a jaunt to UAE would be no different from flying to say, New York, or Tel Aviv. Heck, this idiot should’ve gone to Tel Aviv instead, she might’ve gotten her shopping binge in; but I wouldn’t be surprised if the youtuber didn’t want to go to exotic Israel because waaah Palestine, or it not being posh ‘enough’ compared to Dubai.

       People who don’t even bother trying to read up on local prejudices because that would be JUDGEMENTAL oh noes, instead of say, reading up on it so you don’t put your foot in it (or end up dead) as being a polite guest…really should suffer consequences. Horrible examples and all that.

    4. It’s policy these days. I forget exactly when, but it was about 10 years ago, the morality police caught a western transsexual who made it through customs and sentenced her to a year in prison and it took the government about 9 months to get her out before deporting her, which caused a big international stink. since then the UAE has adopted a policy of detaining western transsexuals for a short period at passport control so they know they’re not welcome then deport. mind you, if not caught while trying to enter the country transsexuals run a serious risk of encountering the morality police, but the government usually gets them out after a week or two with a suspended sentence and a strong warning never to come back in order to avoid causing an international incident.

12. Totally off-topic, but I just registered for LibertyCon. *does a little dance* It finally worked.

    1. Cool! See you there!

    2. hope to see you there!

    3. You got my spot!

       (j/k, can’t make it next year.)

13. What is it with women who maybe weigh a buck o five soaking wet expecting others to dive out of their way?
    I’m a compact 260. Sisterfriend, even if I’m nice and check my forward momentum, you’re still going to bounce. (The same goes for most of the guys trying the same stupid stunt. Except I’m much less likely to be nice.)

    And it’s so bloody stupid. All it takes to get the right-of-way is a bit of basic civility. A smile and a nod work wonders.

    1. As one of the occasionally-cane-enabled Americans, or whatever we’re calling gimpy folks like myself this week, I find eye contact and a smile, often with a nod, to be priceless at negotiating the way without tangling up with people. It’s not a one-way street, either; the normal body language is for both oncoming parties to break right by slightly more than one-half body width, so they pass with a minimum of disturbance to each side.

       Crutches not only widen the wheelbase, they also make sidestepping very difficult, so people have to break wide to get out of the way, and disrupt the whole flow of traffic. The easiest way to get that is to make eye contact, smile, and say things like “excuse me, pardon me.” and mean it!

       The little (or land whale) officious asses who expect everyone to break way for them annoy me, because they’re expecting the tolerance given to cripples… Which says something, now doesn’t it?

       1. They’re activists.

          That means their purpose is to demand others give them a thing, as a basic entitlement.

          People are generally going to be willing to pretend that 2+2=5, if the person that is implicitly asking them to do so makes the effort that recognizes that the equation is SUPPOSED to be 2+2+1. Making eyecontact, smiling, saying excuse me– or for more big-deal things like a “widow” whose child’s father does infact still have a pulse, putting on the appearance as if the claimed situation is true. People aren’t perfect, so charitas/brotherly love/Christian charity will generally result in that polite pretense.

          These guys are demanding that we say 2+2=5, as a basic right, and the failure to already be doing so is wronging them.

          Nope, my generosity don’t work that way.

          1. That there kinda describes one way I tend to be socially obnoxious. I might not pick up on the 1, and really want to spend a long boring-for-others time rambling about 2+2=4.

             1. Oh, I miss the more subtle ones, too, but for most of these it’s like…. oh, the “lady” who works at an office store, who has long hair, wears tasteful shoes, thick nylons, obvious make-up…and has an adam’s apple, and after a very long day a bit of a shadow coming through “her” facial concealer. I’d address “her” as something like “Miss Alice” (from “her” nametag) because even though I think it’s really, really obvious that dude’s a dude, it’s possible I’m wrong and if I’m not, the poor guy is sick in a way I can’t help but that doesn’t hurt anybody else, so I’ll go along with what “she” is claiming.

                I suspect my great grandmother was a “widow” of that sort– she divorced and moved from Kansas to flippin’ Oregon, because she found out her husband was an outlaw. He was dead to her, to do an Obi Wan. (notably, she never did enter into another romance– Catholic)

                It’s like how no matter how horrible grandma’s cookies were, you said thank you and that you enjoyed them. (Even if the enjoyment was purely on the “she cares about us” level.)

                1. THIS

                2. I also think peoples names are one thing. They have a right to a name they like. (and after all can you name one catholic prince now living that doesn’t have maria or some other version of Mary as one of his names) It is the weird pronouns that one can only use if one believes that gender is a total social construct, that are offensive to me.

                   You want a strange name fine, you want me to agree with you, not fine.

                   1. Truth. “Miss Alice” could be just an incredibly unfortunate XX lady, who does her best to make it clear to others that she is what she is— I’m willing to go along with that.

                      Some dude wanting me to talk about how “zee” does this and “zey” or “zem” did that, booger off.

       2. I’m cane enabled on occasion also. One time, I was crossing the street (slowly) and some guy in a car honked at me, and called out, “Could you go any slower?” I answered, “Yes,” and did.

          1. *wicked grin* Well, he can’t claim that you didn’t do as he so kindly requested, hey?

       3. Plainly, you have the wrong cane. http://www.budk.com/Blackthorn-Shillelagh-Fighting-Stick-27712

    2. I don’t get the idiots who think that because they’re moving, they’ve got an advantage and you’ll have to bounce aside– male or female, it takes a good bit to get me to move when I’m standing still. (I have small children; I constantly expect 1-3 30+ pound balls of muscle to launch themselves at me without warning.)

       1. It doesn’t seem to stop until they get big enough to pick *you* up. I’ve still a few more years of being a human jungle gym left in me for the godkids (second time around for me, I was the oldest male of my generation).

          On moving courtesy, perhaps it’s just the area. But seems to me the more you demonstrate proper manners, the more folk remember how they ought to act anyway. I know we get compliments on how courteous the kidlets are when out and about- and other folk get to acting better, just after. I didn’t notice this myself, though, my father had to point it out to *me.*

          1. Makes the “cost” of good manners lower– it’s like how my mom won’t let folks know she’s nice unless it’s desperate, or she’s really sure that they won’t take advantage.

14. Fair is that place where every food is fried and on a stick. And Orvan is on display.

    1. Oh, I’ll finally get to see him? (Tri-State Fair starts in three weeks. Yeah, funnel cake and deep-fried thing-on-a-stick!)

       1. Or his family member

       2. CHEESE CURDS!

          1. I am always a bit amused at the excitement over cheese curds, having grown up in Wisconsin where they are ever-present. A sort of WI background radiation.

             1. what are cheese curds? dry cottage cheese? farmer cheese?

                1. Small blobs of cheese. If truly fresh, they squeak when bitten into. That is, if they are not deep-fried.

                   1. I’ve only read about that, and rather wish I could try. Closest thing I’ve got here I guess is store-bought cottage cheese.

                      Oooh. Deep fried? My mouth is watering now.

             2. They are carrying them in the grocery stores now, and you can get them at a couple of the fast food burger joints now. But growing up in ND, the only time we got them was during the State Fair. Now days though, the best ones I’ve had (that are close by) are at the Western Steam Thresher’s Reunion, which is more like what I remember the State Fair being when I was a kid, minus the concerts.
                http://www.rollag.com/

                1. > Western Steam Thresher’s Reunion

                   I think I watched waaay too many of those BBC Fred Dibnah steam documentaries… I think I’d enjoy something like that.

             3. Available in Oregon at The Tillamook Cheese Factory.

15. I wonder where that transgendered youtube star comes off judging other cultures and demanding they change? The microaggression conveyed by such arrogance is appalling.

    Being a youtube star is a mixed achievement —

    — as people often tune in to watch emotional trainwrecks and laugh.

    1. The thing to do with assholes is not to embrace them to your chest as a precious that proves you can’t get ahead because everyone is against you. It’s to go “oh, asshole” and move on.”

       Regrettably, some sons of -itches believe the proper response to meeting an asshole is to stick their nose up in it.

    2. Bwahahahahahaha that driver and the other passenger was fucking awesome.

    3. CONTINENT OF HAWAII

       *dies laughing*

       1. In fairness, Hawaii might have been a continent before European-descended cultures invaded and looted.

          1. still too busy laughing to form coherent reply.

             1. Climate change.

                1. clearly. I mean, too much monocarbon dioxide (deliberately mangling it) has caused crippling brain damage to the idiot who recorded her flaming stupidity for all of us to see.

                   1. It’s something in the water. Dihydrogen monoxide poisoning. Or possibly one of those rare, deadly bowel disorders wherein gasses in the GI tract build up and cause blood-ox levels in the brain to drop from the pressure…

                      1. Atmospheric pollution which prevents naturally occurring meteoric lead from reaching the necks which have a pathological deficiency.

                      2. The deadly bowel disorder also backs up the refuse normally stored in the large intestine and puts it where the brain would normally be.

                         (This makes sense, as the SJZs clearly know as much about human physiology as they do about geography.)

                         1. Fair point. Bonus points if you can link it to the climate change movement via methane to accuse them of harming the planet with their antics… Hey, all that swamp gas has to escape somehow.

          2. Nope! The menehune dragged the islands up from the sea bottom with ropes! I read it inna book! You aren’t disputing the indigenous reality, are you? *hairy eyeball*

             1. I have a conundrum that perhaps someone here could help me solve. Were the pyramids built with space alien technology — as some books published in my youth reported or were they built by flying Africans as other books reported?

                1. Why not both? Africans flying with alien technology!

                   1. Those wacky Wakandans!

                2. yes

          3. DICK CHENEY STOLE ALL THE REALLY GOOD PARTS TO MAKE EXECUTIVE LOUNGES FOR HALLIBURTON, MAN! CARVED THEM OUT WITH BLACK ISRAELI NUKES! AT NIGHT, SO NO ONE WOULD NOTICE!

             1. No no no. Let’s be reasonable. Dick Cheney didn’t steal them.

                He might have looked the other way though.

             2. ❤

          4. Aftereffects of being tipped over, like Guam is in danger of because of too many US Marines.

             1. Won’t bother the Marines if it does tip over, I reckon…

                1. “Great, we don’t have to watch it anymore.”

       2. Writing prompt:The planet’s population is not majority islander, and one of the continents is named Hawaii.

          1. Do we have volcanoes on this continent? Does it have dense jungle filled with exotic, but not necessarily dangerous wildlife?

             Australia, without the deadly? Except for the volcanoes, which are there for prettyness.

             *tongue firmly in cheek, smiling*

             1. You write it, your choice. There’s enough to go around for all of us.

       3. Perhaps she’d been doing some hipster listening to Donovan:

          “The continent of Atlantis was an island …”

          1. Ha! Australia’s existence probably blew her mind away.

             She probably shouldn’t visit. Blue ringed octopii are cute and pretty, but I reckon that the SJZ doesn’t have the self control to not pet the lethally poisonous sea critter.

             1. You say this as if it might be a *bad* thing.

             2. How would the poor cephelapod deal with the trauma?

                1. By biting the hand that pets it I imagine.

       4. You mean it’s not Norway? 😉

    4. …

       There are no words for that level of idiocy. It really WAS like watching a trainwreck. I couldn’t look away (or rather, stop reading). Also couldn’t help but think: That twit had no idea how likely it was for one or both of the other people in the car to just smack them silly. I mean, honestly. That driver (and the other passenger) had a crap ton of patience. AND remained polite, with no name calling. Unlike the ‘correct thinker’.

       1. Taken from a different context, National Review’s David French offers a related observation:

          Millennial idealism is often on overdrive — careening away from respectful and thoughtful discourse into an overpowering self-righteousness that simply can’t conceive of good faith disagreement. They seek help because when they experience dissent they often feel as if they’re in the presence of a malevolent evil.

          Some of this fragility is fake, however. It’s a contrivance designed to facilitate the will to power. True snowflakes don’t launch movements, occupy administration buildings, and stampede to the nearest available television camera. Yes, there are people who emotionally collapse in the face of dissent. Then there are those who loudly exploit or even fabricate that collapse to get what they want.

          Still, Brooks is on to something. Self-righteousness is a form of self-love, and idealistic millennials’ intense personalizing of political disputes has echoes in the ways that many can’t withstand the slightest rebukes in their professional lives. Millions of millennials are cause-driven, they feel great tenderness towards their allies, and they are filled with larger hope for social justice. But they also feel just great about their own virtue. They still don’t — ultimately — love anyone more than they love themselves, and they love themselves in part because they are just so darn good.

          1. We’ve gone from “victims’ rights” to “victim’s right…”

       2. Good God, consider yourselves fortunate that you have Annaliese Nielsen to abuse, for no sane woman would tolerate it!

          1. I can imagine a sane woman’s response, based upon the hard nosed practicality of not a few women I deeply respect.

             At most perhaps a slightly raised eyebrow, mild flaring of the nostrils as if some foul stench dared waft near. A mild shake of the head, for a Christian woman holds herself above such slights. And a determined facing of the problem square if such should continue.

             Such confident femininity is beyond the Annaliese Nielsens of the world, whose paucity of mind is, like, totally betrayed in every thought she speaks. A feminist as I am sure this Annaliese presumes herself to be can only fumble weakly after the tools she might, if she were lucky, have seen her grandmother wield effortlessly. Such deficiencies of character become all the more difficult to correct the older one gets, as paddling their bottoms and sending them to bed without Facebook is hardly practical today no matter the good it would do them.

             A better woman than she would chose her battles with care, and indeed with some malice aforethought to be sure of winning. This is not even tilting at windmills. It’s leveling a lance made of limp spaghetti at churchmice. Who then fail to flee when subjected to a “threat” not more dangerous than a spot of light rain on a Thrusday afternoon.

       3. The other passenger is much more polite and restrained than I might have been under the same circumstances.

          You know when they say that the stupid burns? This was a thermonuclear blast of stupid.

          1. I am glad not to have found myself the fellow passenger in that situation. I suspect that AN would not have responded well to an initial quiet, ‘You have made your point. Chill.’ I have no idea what would have happened on, ‘Whatever point you may have had has long since been negated by your harangue. Now please do get your head out of your ass. Stop berating the man; we are riding in his car. I’d like to get to my destination safely. Let him drive.’

    5. What a twit. Seriously. That poor driver had the patience of a saint.

       1. Reportedly Lyft fired him for this complaint.

          1. Shame on Lyft then.

          2. Then the video went viral and he was reinstated.

          3. I’d hire him in a second after seeing that video. Anyone who can put up with that kind of douchebaggery without getting violent deserves a raise.

          4. Brandon Morse has a good piece on this at Red State. Apparently, the driver got his job back, and the SJW deleted her Twitter account, tried to justify it on her Facebook page, and otherwise has gone into hiding on social media. Brandon suggests that standing up to bullies would be a better strategy for companies in the long run, rather than folding. http://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2016/08/31/every-businesses-respond-confronted-sjw-bullies-like-lyft-driver/

             1. Some apparently do:

                In May, 1996, Sister Doris Gormley wrote a letter to T.J. Rodgers, the founder and then-CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. She argued that Cypress ought to diversify its board by adding some women.

                Replying to her, Rodgers wrote, “Choosing a Board of Directors based on race and gender is a lousy way to run a company. Cypress will never do it. Furthermore, we will never be pressured into it, because bowing to well-meaning, special-interest groups is an immoral way to run a company, given all the people it would hurt. We simply cannot allow arbitrary rules to be forced on us by organizations that lack business expertise.”
                http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2016/08/30/the-s-e-c-shoves-the-u-s-a-further-into-the-p-c-swamp/#9e76b7e1a6df

                Emphasis added.

             2. Someone got banned on youtube for making negative comments about said SJW.

    6. ‘No, on, you will be … published on Gawker. And you’ll be like the next Internet meme, it’s going to be super funny.’ – Very likely, but not for the reasons she thinks.

       1. Hi! Ho! The Gawker’s dead! The Gawker’s dead!

          1. (Adjust apostrophe as needed. Margarita was maybe more potent than ox expected.)

          2. I feel no joy over the death of Gawker. Asking me to be happy of Gawker’s demise is like asking me to be happy that water flows downhill. A company that acts like a complete asshat even during testifying deserved to be put down like Old Yeller.

             What it did gave me was an almost perfect litmus-test to screen for SJW’s.
             It has been amazing to see so many people unwilling or unable to write the following fact in this way :”Gawker outed Peter Thiel as a gay man.”
             Look for any way to portrait this fact as non-fact or as less-fact with innocent sounding words that are stripped of all meaning like allegedly or the innocent use of “”.

             1. Nit – I believe he was out already, and that it was his friends they outed.

    7. BTW:
       Annaliese Nielsen (real name: Lara Nielsen) is founder and proprietor of GodsGirls, a California-based alt porn website featuring softcore nude photography and video. The website also serves as a social networking community, featuring model and user blogs, email, discussion forums, original writing, and interviews.

       [SNIP]

       In July 2009, Canadian newspaper Le Soleil stated that French-Canadian singer Cœur de pirate was a nude model for GodsGirls while she was a minor, using the name Bea.[17] In the article, Annaliese Nielsen claimed not to know Cœur de pirate or Bea. But in November 2009, Cœur de pirate, then 20 years and 2 months old, said on the Quebec television show Tout le monde en parle that photos she appeared in on the Godsgirls site were taken 2 and a half years earlier, apparently confirming that she was in fact a minor when she posed for the photos. However, GodsGirls has never been indicted for the publication of the photographs.
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GodsGirls

    8. What a thoroughly annoying nasal voice. Could she sound any more stereotypical?

    9. A petty concern with constancy is the hobgoblin of little minds — and they really want to show what GREAT ENORMOUS minds they got, as easily as possible.

16. “Some people in a diverse society WILL be assholes. It’s not a crime, as such. …The thing to do… is not to embrace them to your chest as a precious [token?] that proves you can’t get ahead because everyone is against you. It’s to go ‘oh, asshole’ and move on.”

    This is, of course, the biggest question: is the assholery merely accumulative, or is it cohesive? Assholery is universal; the only time it becomes dangerous is when the assholes in question hook up together and start making a point of conscious principle out of their particular common forms of assholishness, because then the people who ignore or challenge that assholery aren’t simply temporary inconveniences — they’re existential threats, examples of a greater danger that has to be faced down and ultimately extirpated, or at the very least permanently shackled.

    Unfortunately, the terrible Catch-22 of this fear is that when expressed carelessly it is one of the best possible ways to create for itself its own boogeyman: nothing turns people into willful assholes faster than being falsely accused of that assholery for no reason. (And now I’m imagining another version of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, in which the Boy is not a prankster but a paranoid canophobe who keeps mistaking his master’s sheepdog for a wolf; he thus drives it away whenever it tries to go to eat the food the master left for it, and as a result makes it so hungry that it winds up attacking the very sheep it was meant to help the Boy guard.)

17. “how many of [internet sites colonized by the alt.right] are Russian agent accounts no one knows”

    I wonder how many are false flag Proglodyte accounts.

    But I do not invest much energy in it.

    1. Well, progs will find it easier to flase flag the alt-right. The thought processes are much the same, after all.

    2. Do Not discount the FSB/SVR/GRU as active players in this stuff, both online and in meatspace.

       Ever since the petrodollars started coming in and Putin came to power (chicken and egg, there), the Russians started spending a lot to advance their interests.

       Plus, The Shirtless Tsar has a bug up his donkey that the US under Bush was interfering in Russian elections, so he views the US Elections as fair game.

       Really, Do Not Discount The Russians.

       1. Yeah. The Russians probably aren’t the whole of what is going on this cycle, but their involvement might not be trivial. I’ve reservations about my judgement, and really don’t want my worst models to be true.

       2. I don’t discount the Russians, but the two state election site hacks seem to have too many fingerprints on them to be a government-sponsored attack. They started with a simple port scan, then used a common tool that looks for vulnerabilities. Then they left footprints in the log, something better hackers would delete. (The log entries were of a similar type, enough so that the FBI sent log samples to other states as part of the warning.)

          Yes, the IP addresses were registered to Russia. They might even be there – Or not. (When I worked for Nortel when it still operated here in North Carolina I sometimes found myself blocked from certain sites while at work because they were only for US customers, and my IP address at work belonged to Nortel, and was part of a block issued out of Canada.)

          But here’s a list of public proxy servers located in Russia. (Note that these are only the ones easily available to the public. You can buy a private proxy server for bitcoins.) http://www.proxynova.com/proxy-server-list/country-ru/

          So while I don’t discount the Russians, I’d say that the evidence that they hacked IL and AZ election servers appears inconclusive.

          1. A lot of the pro-Trump twitter bots apparently showed indications in their grammar of having been written by non-native English speakers, possibly native Russian speakers.

             Some of the document dump sites allegedly used by the Russians have screwed up and shown evidence of tampering with documents to insert pro-Russian propaganda.

             The Podesta group was hired as a lobbyist by an SVR front.

             On the Trump side, Manafort, and Trump’s investors. (It is said that American banks stopped loaning him money after a round of bankruptcies.)

             There is a lot of suggestive evidence and hearsay. The two examples you cite were not even on my radar for possible Russian involvement.

18. The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
    Josef Stalin (attributed)

    Against stupidity the very gods
    Themselves contend in vain.
    Friedrich Schiller

    Many — Left & Right — seem incapable of imagining a world large enough for them to not matter.

19. BUT I only started achieving when I stopped obsessing on what they might be thinking/saying behind my back and decided that biggoted or not, they were {mines owned by donkeys}, and the best course of action was to ignore them and do what I wanted to do.

    This is where being someone on the Engineering Spectrum set me up well to succeed: I was basically clueless that such things were happening, let alone were directed at me, until very much later – they were ignored, and I proceeded, and only figured out much later that that stuff lying past was poo, and it was being flung at me.

    And as Sarah notes, that’s the best way to deal with it.

20. OK, I worked for an asshole once. He didn’t like it that I was old, and smarter than him. Once I figured it out, I bought a book entitled: “How to Work for an Asshole,” and left it on my desk. Then I kept on keeping on. One day he noticed the book, and asked, “Is that about me?” I answered, “If the shoe fits.” Nothing else happened. Then he left for a different job.

21. excellent post, Sarah.

22. Voting time:
    https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/141508-what-theme-should-we-read-for-our-october-book

23. When my son used to complain about not getting everything his own way, I would tell him “you’re not the only pebble on the beach”. He hated hearing that. It didn’t make it any less true. So I put on my Dad face and repeated it anyway, when the occasion called for it. I learned the skill from my parents, who got it from theirs, and so on back.
    What, did these specially privileged characters who expect everyone else to conform to their fancies not have parents who were vertebrates?

    1. Exactly!

24. This post reminds me a bit of the discussion we had here a while back of “historical” novels where all the characters tended to shrug at behaviors that would have been considered scandalous in that time and place, spout SJW talking points, and generally act nothing like the people of that historical period. Someone pointed out that what these authors really wanted wasn’t a historical romance but a 21st century romance played out in period clothing, something like a Renaissance fair.

    Something similar seems to be going on with the “diversity” crowd. They claim to want multiculturalism, but what they really want is modern liberal America with some exotic touches. You take a lady of darker skin tone, put her in a sari, and have her talk about dharma and the like, but ultimately you still want her to be a typical college feminist, with conventional beliefs about the virtues of lesbianism, the flexibility of gender, and the wonders of Marxist economics. Her best friend is perhaps of Middle Eastern descent, speaks a melodic Arabic, and does those interesting prayers 5 times a day, but at heart he’s got the same beliefs as a New York Times reporter. “Diversity” is a lovely costume, but the last thing that you want is the reality of the Hindu caste system or the Sharia subjugation of women or any of the many unlovely things that come with the reality.

    1. Diversity also excludes white Mormon males, which are the root of all evil. In SF&Fdom, anyway.

    2. This post reminds me a bit of the discussion we had here a while back of “historical” novels where all the characters tended to shrug at behaviors that would have been considered scandalous in that time and place, spout SJW talking points, and generally act nothing like the people of that historical period. Someone pointed out that what these authors really wanted wasn’t a historical romance but a 21st century romance played out in period clothing, something like a Renaissance fair.

       I wish they’d just write freaking Fantasy novels.

       At least there you can magic the difficulties away.

       (Right now, I’m hammering on how to get a fantasy style culture that won’t have the “we can’t be that nice, or we’re all going to die because there aren’t the resources” effect.)

       1. Hmmm… Maybe. What would the social effect be of making birth control spells widely cheap and available? Other than increase the STD related demand for healing and curative spells? Perhaps the decrease in babies would offset the decrease in deaths due to magical healings? How would the Fertility Goddess Cult react to that?

          1. I’d have to pay attention to how it worked, and that would mean that the spells would either be breaking a functioning system– mutilation– or they’re killing the child to get it out of the way, both of which are pretty freaking black magic.

             Even if I’m only at the philosophical level on the magic, symbolically it’s death magic. You’re preventing the very formation of life.
             Contrast with, say, food preservation where you are trying to keep the essence of the food incorrupt, “birth control” magic would be actively blocking the very essence of sex.

             Yeah, not fun reading. And it would just piss folks off without making them think.

             1. Just a thought: A more ‘neutral’ answer would be a divination spell that would allow a woman to know with more certainty than just the math when she was most fertile.

                1. That *would* be quite handy– and a logical thing for a Fertility Goddess to have around, in a “have sex now, you’re very likely to have a child” way.

                   NFP by Fantasy. 😀

                   But that only counts as birth control when one of the pro-abort groups is trying to prove that there’s no difference between religious and non-religious in “birth control” use. All other times, it’s counted as “no method used.”

                2. Oooh. I like that idea. Mind if I use it?

                   1. Go for it.

             2. The Black Jewels did something like that – where a woman’s body would be able to abort a child born of rape specifically but it also carried a high price* – the woman in question would become barren. A young woman who’d been raped and conceived fighting against the ‘instinct to abort the result of her rape’ was a plot point.

                Rape was also a way of breaking a woman’s access to the full potential of her power (if she was a virgin). The ways of breaking a man were implied to be significantly more brutal. (So I guess consensual sex = positive magic? Loosely?)

                (*”Everything has a price” is one of the themes of the series. One of the others is that men and women have their own specific strengths and weaknesses, and ideally, the sexes were supposed to support and protect the other regarding those weaknesses, using those strengths. Also, those who tried to seek power, recognition and praise beyond their capability to actually earn such fairly were portrayed as a destructive force in society.)

                1. That sounds like Bad Think™ and I doubt very much anybody would publish such evil triggering work. The very idea! Women & Men different? Everything comes at a cost? All Good People™ know that women and men are exactly the same (except womyn are better) and that the Best Things in Life are FREE.

                   And that last part, about “those who tried to seek power, recognition and praise beyond their capability to actually earn such fairly were portrayed as a destructive force in society” sounds very threatening to Dwellers In Safe Spaces everywhere.

                   1. The thing that boggles my mind is that her works are considered feminist fantasy. Men and women being different but equal in partnership is a recurring theme in her work. About the only thing that makes it vaguely feminist (to me) is that her worldbuilds tend toward giving women more magic powers (in terms of strength) but hoo boy she doesn’t hold back on giving them problems. The prices she has her protagonists pay at times are nightmarishly traumatic. Her villains remind me very much of the SJZs.

                      My favorite character out of all the ones she’s made is Saetan, the High Lord of Hell. Somewhat overprotective patriarch of the family, who also gets dragged into his children’s and adoptive nephews and nieces’ shennanigans, lovingly bullied by his household staff (well, more the cook, really, but nobody really dares mess with her) because it gives him a sense of not being so alienated from the people he rules over… a simple man, really, with a simple wish: for a wife and children to love and a place to call home.

                      1. Yes. I don’t quite understand the women who got all “ohhhh” over the other male protagonists. Saetan is the most interesting – complicated, thoughtful, terribly aware of the power he has access to and what could happen if he really goes to the limit (countries disappear. Literally. Everything associated with the offending party disappeared from the world as if it had never been. It was justified, but yeeeesh, the kind of man who could carry that sort of power and knowledge of it, and stay on the side of Good . . .)

                         1. I know! And it took a ridiculous extreme to have Saetan snap and it left such huge scars for him. I rather wish that Anne Bishop would write his story; how he rises from being a literal son of a street whore to the most powerful, elegant and cultured, honorable man in fifty thousand years of the history of the Blood. How does he end up ‘wearing the gentle chains of honor and Protocol’ willingly? His rise to Cassandra’s court…?

                            I wonder what Tersa was like before she was broken. She and Saetan would’ve been interesting to see together – not as a romantic couple, but I can see her as something of a ‘best female friend’ to him. (Certainly, his power didn’t seem to scare her…)

                            Second most interesting male character to me was Lucivar, then Khary – if nothing else I kind of wanted to know what mischief Khary could come up with.

                            I also liked Lucivar because well, while Daemon may have been shitloads scarier in how he would ‘make discreet graves’ Lucivar, it seems to me, bears his scars and traumas somewhat better than his brother does. Lucivar’s scenes with Tersa made me cry. Her winged boy indeed.

                            But gah. Hekatah. She and Dorothea embody for me everything wrong with SJZ feminazis, with the thin veneer of ‘moral rightness’ stripped away.

                            1. Oh yes, everything that the SJZ feminists find so laudable, literally stripped of any last shard of beauty.

                               I sort of wonder if Bishop decided that trying to write Saetan’s back-story would be too complicated for her to take on (or if her publisher pushed for “more with Daemon. Daemonon’s ssseeeeeexxxxyyyy. Sexy sells.”) For a while I thought that dinner and a discussion over drinks with Saetan SaDiablo would be a fascinating way to spend an evening. On the other hand, getting confused in SaDaiblo Hall when coming back from the “ladies’ lounge” and accidentally opening the door into hell . . . eh, notsofun.

                            2. Frankly? I found Saetan sexier than Daemon, though I did find how Daemon and Jaenelle dealt with each other’s issues and ‘sharp chalice edges’ very real.

                               Thinking about it, how the Blood that sided with Hekatah stripped their world of wonder – they didn’t enjoy the small uses of magic (reflected in how Jaenelle used Craft to make snowballs and have a snowball fight with Daemon) and only used it as a weapon against their foes, as well as how joyless and hollow their relationships and even sex was, to the point that the only way many of them found pleasure only in subjugation, slaughter, or rape… reflects a lot of how SJZs act, really. SJZs, like the twisted Blood, seem to need to be hurting someone, or destroying something in order to ‘feel good about themselves’. There is no love, only rage, fear and hatred – and because they don’t know those things, or perceive them as weakness (Hekatah and using children as a weapon against Saetan’s heart, for example – and oh gods, what she did gave me nightmares) – really hammers home that they’ll always be unsatisfied, always hungry for more, that nothing will ever be good enough.

                               Sometimes, I find myself feeling a little sorry for how empty they are, then I remember how the SJZs try so desperately to fill their emptiness by destroying what other people have and cherish, and that little spark of pity flickers and dies.

                2. If magic is life, that makes sense– even trying to do more than you are able to do is destructive. Sex creates life, rape is a violation of it, self control is a strengthening force….

                   1. I meant more the part about the spells breaking a functioning system. At least, for that particular instance of the woman’s own body (I’m assuming it’s magic – related because the non-magic humans cannot do that) magically breaking her own reproductive system to abort the product of a violation. It was never explained why this was the ‘natural reaction’ of a Blood female, and I guess in this case magic is a force of life (though it wasn’t explicitly said as such). The Blood were supposed to be – or styled to be – caretakers of the land and the people and of magic. Queens (more a caste than an actual rank) specifically were called ‘the heart of the land and cultural heart of the Blood’ and their magic was intrinsically tied to the land and the people – a good Queen could ensure fertile harvests, strong, righteous and fair laws, and had a strong instinct for improving the lot of their Court (implied to include the land which they’re caretaker of.) A bad Queen could sour land, people, Court, and by decree bring about many abuses. I suppose that means that the bad Queens made the land barren, and even wells from lands that had been cursed by such women had water that ‘tasted like bitter tears.’

                   2. …Er, I kinda wandered off into the bushes there.

                      In other words, yeah, what you say makes sense, and I agree. ^^;

                      1. Text is cheap, elaborating to make sure folks understand is good.

                         Plus, it may get folks to read a book they’ll enjoy– or avoid one that they won’t, which is nearly as good.

    3. I’ve noticed that most of the people who yap about “diversity” have never actually encountered any…

       1. Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

          Side note: my gravitar has changed. I don’t like it.

          1. I dislike what happened to mine also.

          2. Yesterday The Spouse, on opening an email of a posting of mine, observed that my gravitar had changed, and not for the better.

             I was working on from the site, so I scrolled down the page to check. I was relieved when I saw that on the blog I retain my one-eyed-heart-shaped-acid-green-unicorn-horned-elephant-trunked-stick-figure-legged-robotic-armed character.

             Apparently Word Press (delenda est) is now attaching a different gravitar in the email notifications from the one shown on the page.

             1. Right now it’s not showing a gravitar for anyone. This site is nuts.

                1. This site is nuts.

                   Well, then, as we are ODDs, I guess you can say that it is made to order for us.

                   (With apologies to those with nut sensitivities and allergies — and I do not mean the cultivated ultra sensitive soul of the special snowflake SJW.)

                2. I suspect we might more accurately assert this site is displaying multiple personalities.

                   But be assured, et Posner est moron.

                   1. “Moron”, from μωρός, is of Greek origins; the phrase “Moreover, Posner is a moron,” should perhaps be back-translated accordingly.

                3. My old one is showing now, but this post looks like it will be the new one. Strange.

                   1. I had that once. Funny thing is that there are signs that it is machine specific, and I don’t think anything has changed on this one machine. (Which is again the one that shows the new purple one.)

             2. Similar browser on a different computer is showing the old images now. I’ve seen a mixture of the old and new images at various times. I dunno.

                1. Same here.

                2. Yesterday evening I discovered that different computers are showing different images as the gravitar. On my way to the bedroom I wandered into the room where we keep the computers in order to say goodnight to The Spouse. I noticed that on The Spouse’s computer I have an altogether different image from the one with which I am familiar. Disconcerting. I don’t like it one bit.

25. I hope you don’t hate me if I say I love you. Love your bravery, your truth telling.

    PS. went to Alex Jones website. Made me wonder, too, about how many commentators might be Russian/foreigners feigning a gruesome racism that I have very rarely seen in America. Maybe hate and rage are more common than I think, but I think Americans really don’t give a crap about those outside their bubble.
    Wish we could find out how much of the “alt right” comments/volume is coming from overseas. Ironic if it is the majority, with foreigners helping Hillary.

26. “I tan, and younger son tans much more than I,,”,
    Everyone in SoCal is trying to tan,

    1. We don’t have to try.

       1. Good friend of ours, who is a Rhode Islander of Portuguese descent has a permanent olive complexion, as do 3 of her 4 kids, including her carbon copy daughter.

27. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 09.02.16 : The Other McCain

28. As someone who stayed up until 2am to meet a deadline, then got up at 6am to get the yard ape off to school, then went back to bed because “…am too old for this nonsense,” I concur. It really does throw you off.

    On a side note: I hope you’ll reconsider lumping the alt-right into one swear-word aggregation. If only because you’re playing into the same hands as the folks who submarined the Tea Party. We were unequivocally the Good Guys as a huge chunk of those on the alt-right are not, and it made bally-all difference.

    The fact that various traditional conservative outlets are using much the same methodology as the various dinosaur media did when they were “investigating” and describing our campaign to End Puppy-Related Sadness ™ ought to give you pause. It has me.

    One caveat: I am most familiar with the men’s rights section of the alt-right. From PUAs, to MGTOWs through various allies including places like Art of Manliness, and 10 years worth of Vox Day’s WND columns (Oy.) It’s entirely possible that the other heresies: race and sexual variance, don’t follow the same pattern that the soi-distant anti-woman set do. I belong to the church of run-and-find-out, but there’s only so much time in the day. Maybe. But what I know of the former, this “I mean, sure, people might think women are inferior, or might hate gays, but unlike the internet sites colonized by the alt.right is Just Not So.

    When it comes to those of us acccused of thought-crimes: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”

    1. Your whole comment+1000.

       I think it’s also a bit unfair to paint all ‘men who go their own way’ as unreasonable women haters – I think they should be taken on an individual basis, or small group at the worst. Certainly, I understand a number, if not most/all of the reasons why these men choose to simply not to risk their lives/livelihood. I personally also don’t begrudge some bitterness being voiced – some of the stories I’ve read, as well as some of the ones Rhys and I saw happen – are nightmarish in how skewed against men so many laws are. As the parents of sons, we aren’t happy at how dangerous it is for men now.

       Believe me, I offer up prayers of thanksgiving that my brothers found good, strong, and loveable women who make them ridiculously happy. (I’m quite happy to say that they’re my sisters!)

    2. I’ve been running around in comment sections for a while now, mostly on The Federalist and The American Interest, and, well, I wish I could join you in that sentiment, but I can’t.
       I think a lot of the people who identify as alt-right aren’t actually racists–they see them as an alternative to what they perceive as a largely spineless GOPe and an actively hostile Democratic Party–but frankly, that mirrors BLM in a lot of ways.
       The hard core of the movement? Racist to the marrow.
       http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2016/4/8/the-pro-life-temptation?utm_content=buffer364dc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

       “Not only is the pro-life movement dysgenic, but its justifications rely on principles we generally reject. The alt Right is skeptical, to say the least, of concepts like “equality” and “human rights,” especially as bases for policy. The unborn fetus has no connection to anyone else in the community. If it is not even wanted by its own mother, criminalizing abortion means that the state must step in and say that the individual has rights as an individual, despite its lack of connection to any larger social group. This is no problem to those in the conservative movement, who decide right and wrong based on principles like “the right to life.” It is no coincidence that some of the most pro-life politicians are those most excited about adopting children from Africa and those in their movement are among the conservatives most likely to denounce the “racism” of their political opponents.”

       1. The problem are people who know everything they learned in school is wrong, but don’t know any better than believe the exact opposite. WHICH IS NOT anything else but a fun house mirror, still with authoritarian evil at its center.

          1. Perzactly.

          2. Agree with Ms Hoyt in spades, but 60builders: who decides who the “core” of the alternative (emphasis added) is?

             I seem to recall a similar problem with the “puppies” I distrust that impulse profoundly.

             1. Because the initial leadership of the Puppies (Sad) was provided by Larry Correia and then Brad Torgersen, who at worst could be described as insufficiently anti-racist because they weren’t willing to ritualistically denounce VD (which is ludicrous). That is to say nothing of the SP4 troika, who could only be accuse of such by the truly deranged. Think of the Sads as the Tea Party.

                Now imagine if the initial leadership had been provided by VD, and the initial footsoldiers had been the more…unsavory types who hang out over at Vox Popoli. That’s the alt-right.

                1. I’m imagining. It still would make Correia, Torgersen, Paulk et al brave and admirable reformers.

                   Worse, for your argument, Vox Day would still have been right to take up that gauntlet, and many of the types who hung out at Vox Popoli would still have been honorable footsoldiers.

                   And so by using “puppies” as every element in that bag as such is playing into the hands of the progressives. Which in fact was done. Successfully.

                   Progressives have used conservatives very successfully to police our own, and silence our effective voices when they have never had any intent on doing the same.

                   We need to stop playing into their hands. Especially since I suspect we are all one heretical blog post away from becoming alt-right ourselves, whether we want to or not.

                   1. Pretty sure we’re not.
                      Fact: the alt-Right would never accept Mrs. Hoyt. Torgersen would be turned away at the door, although VD might be willing to argue on his behalf. Correia might be let in. Maybe.
                      You have to try to end up actually being alt-Right.

                      Also, the Tea Party =/= alt-Right, despite claims by the Left and the latter that it is so. Furthermore, I’m not at all enthused about allying with Beelzebub to take on the Devil.

                   2. “Progressives have used conservatives very successfully to police our own, and silence our effective voices when they have never had any intent on doing the same.”

                      The progressives make use of their Brown-Shirts extremist elements as a cudgel, threatening “Deal with us or you will have to deal with Them.” This was explicitly stated by (IIRC) Malcolm X in regard to his presence forcing Whitey to treat seriously with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Sixties.

                      Because the Progressives refused to engage with the T.E.A. Party they empowered the Alt-Right and it is not the responsibility of the “reasonable” conservatives to rein in the dogs which we did not unleash.

                      OTOH, while it is not our responsibility, it is to our benefit as they are as much a threat to our goals of Constitutional Constrained Government as are the Progs. But we can only do that if the Progs acknowledge that we are, in fact, reasonable, and reign in their own Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi attack dogs. (An assemblage of their defamatory quotes ought not be necessary for this assemblage.)

                      I am not holding my breath, although I am holding my fire in hope that when the dust settles between the battle between Proglodytes and Troglodytes there will be opportunity to shoot the survivors. Until then, like the “Moderate” Syrians, inserting myself into that fight will achieve at best nothing useful and at worst my own destruction.

                      1. Simply means we have to be clear: we can use the alt-right to destroy the Left, as long as we never forget that they’re going to have to be next. I assure you they’re thinking that way about us.

                         1. And I think you keep missing the point about the “alt” in the “alternative” right.

                            And your willingness to let progs define things for you. Oy.

                            But I was born contrary. Most folks have more social graces.

                            I will leave you with an exercise for the student. If you imagine that the alternative to the establishment conservatives and right wing media won’t ” let you in ” what is stopping you from starting a rebellion to change that?

                            Why are you allowing “Beelzabub” to define your terms for you?

                            1. Why are jumping to the conclusion that I’m using any definition but my own, oh Kettle?

                               The alt-right exists. It isn’t the Tea Party, and it isn’t Vox Day, and it isn’t Donald Trump supporters. But there’s a group of people, and more coming all the time, who have their version of Left statism.

                            2. ..there’s a group of people, and more coming all the time, who have their version of Left statism.

                               As a subset of the alt-right? I haven’t seen it, but I don’t doubt it.

                               But the first bit confuses me. Of course you’re using your definition… But where’d THAT come from?

                               But say it’s an indie conclusion drawn from messing around the white nationalists section of the alt right… OK, I’ll take it as read for the sake of the argument

                               How does it changeover fact that the one element you’re focussing on isn’t the whole of the movement, because, see again: Alternative.

                               And why is this putative subset THE most important aspect?

       2. I can’t speak as much to racism. I only directly saw a small portion of those who identified as alt right. The open racism was not widespread enough to be what first caused me to decide that we had no goals in common.

          Thinking xenophobically, why do they pick and choose which foreign elements are acceptable the way they do? Why would white skin make Russians any less the enemy than Chinese?

          Foreign influence is foreign influence. If one foreign interest does not get a pass for skin color, than neither should another.

          I decided I had the measure of the alt-Right when I saw them endorse, early, a lyin’, thievin’, alien lovin’ liberal squish.

29. Raylan Givens says it more succinctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laFGAp6Ip40

    (Not a criticism, this is a great piece, but it made me think of that.)

30. But the people who shriek about “diversity” all day long view the world as sort of their own backyard written large.

    Whereas those who have spent a lot of time overseas realize that their own backyard can be quite different from the rest of the world.

    I am reminded of Laurie Berenson, who recently returned to the US after serving a 20 year sentence in Peru for collaboration with a terrorist organization. She assumed that the “progressive” catechism prevalent at universities in the US gave an accurate description of the realities of Latin America. Without doing much comparison of the “progressive” catechism with the realities on the ground in Latin America, Laurie Berenson assumed she was doing Peru a favor by assisting a “left wing revolutionary movement,” a.k.a. terrorist organization. She did not realize that most Peruvians- not just the government- had justifiably very low opinions of “left wing revolutionary movements,” a.k.a. terrorist organizations, courtesy of the decade and more of depredations of Sendero Luminoso, and of the organization that she assisted, the MRTA.

    I suspect Laurie Berenson also assumed that her US passport gave her some sort of diplomatic immunity to engage in “political activism” against the government of Peru. She found out differently. Berenson admitted that MRTA was a “revolutionary” organization. Anyone with any knowledge of Peru would have known that self-styled “revolutionary” organizations in Peru at that time had a rather violent record. When she allied herself with MRTA, she allied herself with violence. Only a fool would have thought otherwise.

    1. Heh.

       
       There’s a meme for that.

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