The Myth That Kills – A Blast From The Past from October 2012

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sorry to do a blast from the past.  There’s stuff going on.  Nothing bad.  Well, mildly bad as apparently minor-surgery-the-saga will have to be repeated in six months.  But mostly stuff I have to get done/finished/written that is getting in the way of even having a blog idea.  And, well, this seems apropos. – SAH*

The Myth That Kills – A Blast From The Past from October 2012

I’m very afraid this is another of those posts that will get me accused of being a “gender traitor.”

That’s just fine.  If you think a gender – the fact that you were born with one piece of physical equipment – demands your loyalty and forces your opinions to be the same as those people with the same piece of equipment, call me a traitor.  Guilty as charged.

You see, I tend to think of people as people.  This has largely been a handicap in writing fiction in the current age, because I’m expected to view women as saints-and-martyrs and men as oppressors-and-satyrs.

Have I met some examples of those?  Oh, heck yes.  Hasn’t everyone?  But I’ve met the opposite too.  Hasn’t everyone?  So why is only one of those the “correct” thing to put in a novel?

Ah, but you’re going to tell me that pushing women as victims, as saints, as nurturers is the way to go, so we can carry on with the feminist victory and equality of the sexes.

(Looks across the computer at you)  I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

Equality means, in this as in anything else, equality before the law not equality of results.  This is something that we keep forgetting.  Look, that was the ultimate difference between the American and the French revolutions.  Americans wanted equality before the law.  The French wanted equality of results.

They had justifications, too. They were dealing with an historically beaten-down peasantry, starved, uneducated (though not nearly so much – the revolution happened because education had started to spread.  Never mind. We’re going with how they viewed themselves) used to being deferential.  They needed more than just equality before the law, they said.  They needed to redistribute some of those advantages, to enforce equality of results for a while.

We all know how that ended up, right?

It always ends up that way.  Humans are individuals, not groups.  When you empower the groups, you empower the worst in any group. The power-thirsty, the aggrieved, those who want to manipulate group-outrage for their own purposes.

It is the same with women.  It’s lots of fun to read the more sentimental writers of centuries past (and the not so sentimental and totally un-ironic feminists of the last century) go on until your eyes bleed about women being kinder, gentler, softer, nicer.

Poppycock.  Poppycock with powdered speciousness.  Yes, women presented that way.  This was the result of centuries where women had the subservient position.

The first one of you to open her mouth about how this is the injustice feminism needed to correct is going to go to the corner with the dunce cap, so help me bog.

The reason women were “oppressed” for “six thousand years” (longer, for certain values of women) had NOTHING to do with men dethroning the goddess myth and destroying the perfect matriarchal society because they’re evil or any other re-writings of the Judeo-Christian myth of Eden.  Marija Gymbutas was – yes, I’m crossing Godwin, and I have a reason – as much of a fabulist as Hitler, and about as good a scientist.  She didn’t have armies at her disposal, but those who believe in her might in the end bring down civilization as effectively as the Nazis would have done, so I do not apologize for using the analogy.  (If you don’t think convincing women that all men are their enemies, handicapping boys in school, running men out of the teaching profession, and generally making men guilty-until-proven-innocent is a civilization-killing meme, you need to go out and meet some real men and some real women.)

Women were subservient in society due to that horrible oppressor: biology.  When you were going to have to be a celibate or spend half of your life pregnant, you missed out on other aspects of life.  Yes, I love those of you who had no problems in pregnancy.  I had to diametrically opposite experiences: the first pregnancy would have killed me without strict bed rest, for the second I kept forgetting I was pregnant.  HOWEVER in both of them in retrospect, not at the time, I missed vast chunks of intellectual function.  There is an hormone cocktail that is supposed to make you fat, happy and dumb during pregnancy.  It is what it is.

Worse, even for women who never get pregnant, until modern hormonal treatment, we women were prisoners of our hormones.  Even now I have more than a friend who hit menopause and… became someone else.  In very rare instances, the change is for the best.  Most of the time it’s a “What on Earth happened to your brain?”

I thought I had dementia for a long while – I literally couldn’t remember the names of my characters or what had happened from a chapter to the next.  And if I wrote it down, I’d have to go look at the notes, and then when I came back to the book I’d forgotten what I’d looked up.  For a while (most notably the last Musketeers mystery) I had to have a friend check my work because I’d forget what I was doing and had tons of internal inconsistencies.

Turned out it was an hormonal problem, not dementia and not menopause, as I thought.

Now, that’s an extreme case, mind you.  But it’s not unusual.  And though men, too, can have this type of issue, it is considerably more common in women.  What makes us women — the ability to generate new life – also makes us cyclical creatures, both in the monthly sense and in the life-cycle sense.  And if you think your hormones don’t affect the way you think, let me tell you the only reason you think that is that you’re inside your skull and being affected.  Until my experiences with hormonal insanity I too thought I was impervious.

Anyway, the point is until modern medicine with contraception and hormonal supplements, women were swimming with an iron vest strapped on.  Add to that that only women can be sure that their children are theirs.  This made men – of course – wish to make sure women were controlled, to make sure the kids they were providing for were their own.  It made for a society where women were somewhere between children and chattel and men had all the responsible positions. (Though even then some women managed to break through.  Individuals are… individual.  It’s one of their characteristics.)

Does any of that still apply?  No.  Thanks to modern medicine, we even can figure out whose daddy is whose without keeping women in purdah.

And though it took a little while, society changed. Women started taking the place of equals in society.  Like the French peasantry, which would have come along once barriers to their equality under the law were removed, we have started taking intellectual callings and sometimes physically intensive callings.

We are now, if we want to be, equals.

The problem is that most of us don’t want to be equals.  And the reason for that is that most of us have been sold on the feminist creation myth of the great mother and the perfect society with men as the spoiler of paradise and the villain.  And most of us are stupid enough to buy it.  (Yes, I know men worshiped goddesses.  If you think that made the society feminist, you have birds in your brain and you probably also believe there’s some magical herbs that are as effective as the pill and have no bad side effects.  (No.  There aren’t.  There was a bush that had similar properties, but it went extinct in Roman times).  Societies that worshiped goddesses often demanded the most control over women and engaged in temple prostitution.  They also had a marked tendency to child sacrifice.  On the other hand, most societies worshiped both.)

Also, most men are of course bigger than us.  Stronger. And there’s the whole historical inequity.  Just like the French peasants.  So we demand laws that favor us and more importantly we demand the blood of our enemies.  And we demand to be treated with a respect and a care that would have scared Victorian maidens.  We use the slightest thing as a weapon.  Because only when the oppressors are gone, will we be free.

This was bad enough when it was the French peasantry.  But men are not some aliens dropped on the Earth from afar – they’re our fathers, brothers, sons and husbands.  They’re an integral part of what makes humans humans.  They’re not a monolithic group, just like women aren’t, but statistically they’re better abstract-and-visual thinkers and the people who are more likely to think outside the box, just like statistically we’re the socially-oriented people, more detail-specialized and better at cooperating.

Society – a civilized society – needs both to survive and go forward.

But women have been sold on males-as-the-boogeyman and therefore they see evil intention and coordination and conspiracy behind males’ being people.  Meet one abusive male, and you’ll go through life convinced that all men are like that.  Does anyone do the same when meeting an abusive woman?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve had bosses from hell in both genders.  So, why is only one accused of being “oppressive”?

Because it’s the myth.  And it’s a myth the power-hungry people who took charge of the feminist movement (one that initially only wanted equality under the law) are happy to perpetuate.  It’s a myth every college, every entertainment gatekeeper cherishes.

It’s a poisonous myth.  It’s also a stupid one.  No one in their right mind would talk about “War on women” for instance.  Are you insane?  Why would normal men – yes, your husband, your brother, your son – want to make war on women?  And yes, that means you, your sister, your mother.  Hell, even my gay male friends like women and have mothers and women friends.  And yes, for those of you about to be stupid, even males on the opposite side in politics have all of those, and no, none of them hate women.  (Except perhaps the occasional pathological case.)

(If you bought that wanting to not pay for contraceptives out of the public purse and at the expense of other people’s religious conscience is a “War on women” you might want to inform yourself.  Not giving you something for free is NOT restricting access.  Otherwise, people are restricting your access to food, housing and entertainment.  Is that a war on humans?)

I’ve watched the rise of this myth with slack-jawed amazement.  HOW can you even think that.  Guys, my men – and I live with three of them, husband and two sons – couldn’t “conspire” to keep chocolate hidden from me (they’ve tried.) And they’re all three of them brighter than the average bear.  WHY would you think men in general would want to conspire to keep you in submission?  Most modern guys wouldn’t know what to do with a truly submissive woman.

Oh, I know.  It’s the myth you heard, from Gimbutas and her sisters in school all the way to the latest movie you watched.  Males want power over you.

Well, some males maybe.  Those who belong to a religion that dresses women like upholstered furniture.  But it’s just one culture and there’s reasons for that (including but not limited to a culture of scarcity and a tradition of bride kidnapping.)  It’s not all men, and it’s certainly not MOST men of the western world.

Like the women who no longer remember why women were “historically oppressed” the men alive now were never in a society where men had the upper hand.

I have a friend who believes that it’s a pendulum.  Men had the upper hand, now women do, then it will swing back.

Unless science has some sort of pendulum too, I don’t see where she’s right.

What I see is women who were freed by tech advances and who THINK they were freed by marching shoulder to shoulder and taking permanent offense.  These women live in a state of paranoia, dreaming up male privilege that is invisible to anyone but them, and taking offense at ever more ridiculous things – even things that have nothing to do with gender – because they’re so terrified of men taking the upper hand again.

I look at them going to war with spelling: Womyn, Herstory.  I look at them dancing around dressed as vaginas (!) because apparently the most important thing in these women’s lives is their sexual organs. I look at them acting as a pack and attacking whoever they’re told to attack because “so and so is anti-woman” and I think… these are humans?  These are civilized people?  Don’t they see they’re being tools of the Marxist divide-and-conquer strategy?  Don’t they see the end of this is either societal destruction or TRUE backlash for the sake of saving civilization?

Apparently not.  So… carry on.  Dance around in your little fabric vaginas.  Think that all men are out to get you.  Refuse to have children, because some of them might be male.  And scream, scream, scream about made-up outrage.

That’s the way to bring civilization down and destroy the technological advances that brought us equality.  If that’s what you want, DO carry on.

Apres nous, le deluge.

199 thoughts on “The Myth That Kills – A Blast From The Past from October 2012”

  1. No such thing as “minor” surgery, unless it’s something you can do yourself. Take care of yourself first. You can’t take care of your loved ones if you’re the one out for the count.

    Get well soon!

  2. “Does any of that still apply? No. Thanks to modern medicine, we even can figure out whose daddy is whose without keeping women in purdah.”
    True. The problem is though that all it means is that you know that you are raising someone else’s child. Legally, you still have to raise them. Best interests of the child you know. I am not sure that this is an improvement.

    1. I don’t have a problem raising another guys kid; but I demand to be able to squeeze him for every red cent I think I need, and not what the state or anyone else says, to provide that child everything he or she needs.

      2. In that situation, it’d depend on whether providing for the other guy’s kid meant I couldn’t provide for my own…

        1. Neither my Uncles step children’s father, nor my cousin’s ex, paid a cent in child support. First “father” don’t know why. Second “father” the guy skipped the country to avoid paying child support. Luckily both step father are relative to extremely wealthy. They both would have preferred that the fathers willingly surrender their rights. Neither did. In the second ones case both boys legally took their step-fathers last name the day they turned 18; would have preferred to use the name change to cap their Eagle Court of Honor, but they each had to wait until they turned 18.

          OTOH already recounted how a step father is trying to get visitation rights based on 2 years of marriage to the child’s mother. Did not adopt, had a chance to adopt, adoption was in progress which was stopped cold on his request. Will not pay any child support, as the child is not his. But he wants visitation. Wrong, in so many ways. That is one of the risks of being a non-adoptive step parent. Step parents have no rights beyond what the biological or adoptive legal parent grant them. Those rights are not legally enforceable.

    2. It isn’t an improvement, it’s a time bomb. Unless the Socialist Ninnies make a HUGE comeback (which, Media pash notes to that little idiot in Manhattan to the contrary, I don’t see), sooner or later some changes will be made and the harder the Feministas fight them, the more,extreme they will get.

      The idea of “If you want to be treated fairly, you must treat others fairly” has no traction with the Left. Which is why, in the end, they wieated UNfairly.

  3. And if you think your hormones don’t affect the way you think, let me tell you the only reason you think that is that you’re inside your skull and being affected.

    Anyone who doesn’t believe that needs to read the experience of trans people undergoing HRT and some people with natural hormone unbalances. Forums for transwomen all warn newbies to HRT that you will experience a lot of stereotypical female reactions in terms of being emotional, crying, etc and that’s just life.

    As for transmen, this is my favorite:

    https://www.thisamericanlife.org/220/testosterone/act-two-0

    The subway quote alone is worth the 17 minute listen.

      1. I recommend the whole episode. The other two parts, the guy whose body quit making testosterone and he had no initiative, and the staff getting their levels testing (holy reinforce stereotypes in some cases Batman) were just as interesting.

        1. I should. I’ve been thinking lately that we don’t often test to find a baseline or to find out if people are all out of wack. I mean, no doctor I’ve ever had has suggested finding out what my estrogen levels are and while my husband’s doctor asked him if he subjectively *felt* like he was low-T, he never just ran a blood test to find out. No doctor has said “before we put you on oral contraceptives, lets find out what your levels of those hormones are”. My one kid who had the classic list of bad (but not “medical emergency” bad) reaction to oral contraceptives so we didn’t go more than three days never once had the doctor mention that some people did, nor suggest testing natural levels if more than normal side affects occurred. And *now* I’m wondering how much that plays into depression or anxiety, self-harm, and everything else plaguing teenagers.

          1. I’d bet that hormone manipulation and dang near denial is a big problem– of course, we’re not really sure what “normal” is, and there’s a lot of interactions.

            1. Estrogen and Prozac in the water… Maybe someone ought to find out what “normal” is before we can’t anymore.

              1. Also the estrogens and estrols from modern industrial farming, which may actually be more than the human input into the environment. After all, one of the leading estrogen replacement therapies for many years was Premarin, a name that was short for PREgnant MAre uRINe. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair-sized cow-calf operation or farrowing house produces about as much waste estrogen as a small city’s worth of women on the Pill (or pregnant).

                And then there’s the fact that the sterols (the family of hormones that include the sex hormones) appear to go back to the very beginning of multicellular life, since the corresponding hormones in plants have pretty much the same effect on animals (including Homo sapiens) that ingest them. Many pesticides used in row-crow agriculture involve estrogen mimics to disrupt the life cycle of the target pest — and runoff from fields gets into our waterways.

                Not to mention the plastics and other industrial processes that are churning out enormous quantities of estrogen mimics, making things even more messy. But we can’t get a good study on the relative contributions of human, livestock, row-crop, and industrial sources of estrogens and estrogen-like chemicals, because the issue has become so politicized. So many sides want their pet hate to be the primary culprit, and is willing to fudge the results in hopes of getting laws passed to ban whatever they’re after, so it’s impossible to do an objective study.

                1. Cow-calf operations are usually going to be a long, long ways from any water that would hit city treatment factories. Dairies, maybe– I’m not sure how they handle the pregnant cows.

                  Natural hormones also break down differently, if not isolated and carefully controlled.

                  1. Which means that estrogen mimics from plastics may actually be even more dangerous than agricultural runoff — especially when we have no idea how much leaching happens in ordinary use, or in reuse of plastic bottles, tubs, etc. that are meant to be single-use (I’m sure I’m not the only person who saves margarine and yogurt tubs and reuses them as containers for leftovers). If they don’t break down normally, whether in the environment or the body, they have a potential for messing things up for generations after they’re replaced with plastics that don’t leach estrogen mimics.

                    1. They have actually looked into that for single use bottles and such– IIRc, basically the dose is so tiny it doesn’t matter. You probably have more from touching heat-print paper, like grocery receipts.

                    3. Single use plastic containers are fine as long as you don’t use them to heat things up in. You put them in the microwave to heat the food, THEN you get outgassing of those chemicals. At the very least, the food tastes off.

          2. You know, I had a bad reaction to oral contraceptives, enough so that after a few months, I simply threw them away. Does make me wonder how many of the issues that I’ve had since then might have been prevented if the doctor had said, “Woah, this isn’t normal, let’s see if there’s something else going on here.”

            1. Right?

              Three DAYS and we’re searching the internet and come up with a list of common *serious* side affects that darned well match exactly and quit the pills on the spot.

              Add to the fact that said individual almost never has a period…

              1. Didn’t have the benefit of the internet way back in the distant past (1979). But, getting up from the coach & having a “2×4 slammed against my head”, after monthly more severe than normal headaches, gave us a clue. Emergency room, where stroke was ruled out, I was 22, not over weight, & scans found nothing. Emergency room physician suggested get off the pills. FYI. First experience with “give you a shot for the pain” out for the next 3 days. And, yes, pills were stopped immediately. Migraines didn’t disappear but they went back to historical frequency & pain levels.

                2. Ouch! Glad you were okay.

                  And doctors will *still* actively avoid even mentioning possible side affects they’re so hot to get any teen or young woman on the pill, all for the greater good.

                  Hasn’t changed a danged bit in 40 years.

                  1. I can almost see the reasoning, that DOESN’T have to include the ritual invocation of ‘The Greater Good’; the side effects are not often nearly as serious as an unintended pregnancy, even if terminated. And the serious side effects of a terminated pregnancy are Not To Be Discussed (I expect that a doctor could get in serious trouble for mentioning them, even if she stuck strictly to the known facts). Add to that the social conventions that treat Doctors a great deal more like High Priests than mechanics, and you have a recipe for a lot of doctors steering young women to The Pill.

                    Not sure, mind. Just throwing it out there.

                  2. Heck, I just recently found out that most people DON’T know about the blood clot risk, and associated deaths, of hormonal birth control.

                    1. That surprises me, since (at least in the US) they are required by law to list all those side effects in he advertisements.

                    2. Nobody listens after the “here is the desired effect!” part.

                      OK, not really nobody.

                      But a heck of a lot of folks.

                      And doctors usually explain it by having a print-out, which about half the time they forget to hand you.

                      It’s not helped by those print-outs being stripped of risk rates, either– “can cause” a sore arm, and the stuff that’s one in 100k is listed the same as one in five hundred? Ouch.

                    3. Yeah, but they don’t have to list… rates or anything, although I’m not sure that would actually help. So you get this long list of small-print/fast-spoken side effects that happened to somebody while they were testing it, and unless they make a specific point of adding, “If you experience X, it could be a serious problem, call your doctor immediately,” I think it tends to get shrugged off. Plus I’m not sure how much people really pay attention to birth control commercials at all; you get a prescription, figure it’s the same stuff tons of people are taking, and probably don’t pore over the scary bits all that closely.

                      I freaked myself out reading the toxic shock syndrome warnings on tampons and had to be gently talked down — as long as you don’t make a habit of leaving them in there a ridiculously long time, you’re probably fine, but the material on it is very emphatic. But nobody really emphasized the blood clot risk with hormonal birth control until something like my third or fourth gynecologist.

                    4. I’m one to actually read the literature that comes with prescriptions; & hubby’s mother & sister were both nurses. Plus back then my physician actually went over the side effects to watch for. What I didn’t know as a 22 year old new bride was my sensitivity to medications. Even alcohol, the “wine flip” incident hadn’t occurred yet (I had ONE! I was sick for 2 days.)

                    5. WebMD (https://www.webmd.com) is a good place for side effects of any particular drug. There are a couple of other good sites too; and they’ll often have off-label uses for the meds listed. Basically in those cases, they’re being prescribe for their side effects.

                    6. My OB/Gyn mentioned it rather offhandedly. Didn’t find out the actual numbers (4 in 10,000 for the one I was on.) until after I’d gotten out of the hospital from a PE (Irony: I’d had to reschedule my annual check up with her because of that hospital trip). It’s apparently more common for for a PE to happen during pregnancy (75 in 10,000) which is why they tend to think of it as ‘safe’.

                    8. Yeah, I thought I had pneumonia. Mine came with Plursey or it likely would have killed me. (Thanks to my regular doc who got the test results from a ‘on the off chance’ blood test and called us at 11 o’clock at night. Then calling my husband when my phone didn’t ring.)

                3. 1975, my mom had a very similar reaction to the Pill. Her headaches were so severe that I have vivid memories of being handed baby middle brother and bottle because Mom’s headaches were so severe she couldn’t even sit upright to nurse him. The doctor changed her to several different types, while I did a lot of fill-in Little Mommy for her (which may well have left me with a definitely un-romanticized view of being the mother of an infant). After youngest brother was born, other measures were taken, since Mom was reaching the age at which another pregnancy risked serious complications for both mother and child.

            1. I had the doctors do a PSA test when I retired from the military as part of my outgoing physical. With 4 close male relatives with various types of prostate cancer; I wanted a baseline for that condition. It was practically zero at that time. It ain’t zero anymore, but so far, no sign of the big C.

          4. No doctor has said “before we put you on oral contraceptives, lets find out what your levels of those hormones are”.

            I’m thinking that for most accurate results on estrogen level, you’d need a daily sample for at least one cycle.

            … do they make hormone testers that work like blood sugar meters?

            1. Not yet– thanks to Fertility Awareness methods, Amazon has ovulation testers by the mass box, although I see they use a different hormone for that.
              Someone could probably do a decent job by taking a short class on fertility charting and comparing it to something like this:
              https://www.myhormonology.com/female-hormone-cycle/
              to figure out if and where things go wonky, narrow down what you need to test.

              (Note, some of the stuff on that page looks to be happy-clappy BS, but the objective stuff like hormone levels and “perfect” cycle description appears correct.)

            2. Incidentally, this is the thing I’d want one of those “labs on a chip” for– I’d be totally willing to be a test subject and have them get 24/7 stats on my blood hormone levels. 😀

              1. Count me in too on being a test subject. I wouldn’t mind knowing how much of what’s going on with me right now is Change of Life hormonal wonkiness, how much is stress from financial woes and Too Busy, and how much is still working out my grief for my mom, with whom I had a complex and often complicated relationship.

                1. “Change of Life hormonal wonkiness”

                  Yes. Me too. I’m not risking hormones again. Not. Happening. On top of that some of the symptoms a mimicked with the Reactive Hypoglycemia. Keep latter in check, & I can deal with the former.

                  When I was working, between the stress of the actual job, what was happening not related to the job at the job (why I said enough is enough), stupid change hormones, sleep apnea, the fact I was totally ignoring the RH despite the symptoms, I was a mess. Things starting to look up: Retirement, sleep apnea has a tool, & using tools to keep RH in check. Things are a lot better now. Part of it is knowing what is going on & knowing what I can do & can not do.

        2. Was one of the kitchen sink tests my pcp threw at me to see if something was supplementing other issues. Thyroid, vit b, vit d, test and more.

    1. Eh, I oppose mandatory testing as well, unless it’s made anonymous and coupled with maternity testing, and not publicly funded. Notation on if the parents used reproductive aid, too.

      A massive test on how accurate the tests are, since we know they’re wrong some of the time.

      1. The issue is the state will happily come after whoever mom claims the father is and if he doesn’t protest in a certain time in some states he loses recourse to paternity testing.

        This would be fixed by requiring a paternity test to list a father on the birth certificate.

        I’d be happy without required testing as long as there could be no legal action against a man for paternity without a test, even a husband (there are multiple cases of men paying child support for children not theirs and at least one where he is paying child support to a biologically intact family as the wife married the real daddy after the divorce).

        We tore down all the rules designed around that problem because “progress”, but left all the requirements that were the reason for those rules to begin with. That is not sustainable in the long term.

        1. Who the hell is “we,” Kemosabe? I’m from the group that had an encyclical predicting all these bad results, even if we’re going to ignore the issue that neither of us was old enough to be involved in these choices.

          Doing even more damage to the only innocent person in the whole shebang– the kid– in hopes of preventing wrongs to innocent parents (when it’s very obvious that it would actually end up wronging innocent parents, just different ones) is really not a great idea.

  5. “Most modern guys wouldn’t know what to do with a truly submissive woman.”

    Got that right. And guys need to be careful when faced with a woman who acts submissively; she might just have you wrapped around her finger without you even knowing it.

    Oops! Excuse me for a moment. My wife needs me to rewire the oven.

      1. Eventually, yes. Probably for LED lighting at lower voltage and current; except the existing wiring is fine for that. Just has to be split off from the outlet lines, and stepped down before being distributed throughout the house; rather than every bulb doing the step down.

        But particularly the oven right now. Either something dripped into one of the screwcap connectors, or some bug crawled into it and caused an arc to burn through. I think it was a condensation drip due to some slight copper corrosion I found on the wires.

        Easy fix with a simple trick. Open the connection box, screw the wires together, bend the caps so they all point up. Anything getting into the box and dripping on the wires is either deflected by the cap, or runs away from the cap and connections.

          1. Probably. The current bulbs that fit in to standard lightbulb sockets basically have their own mini-step down transformers in them. Transformers produce a lot of heat. So without a good way to dissipate the heat, the bulbs burn out faster. Standard table lamp with a wide open top, no problem. Enclosed, recessed spotlight (like a couple in my kitchen)? Usually reflects the heat right back to the bulb and burns out in half the time.

            1. *scribbles down and adds to ‘household good-to-know’ file* RedQuarters is afflicted with potlights. And chandeliers with bulbs-of-miniscule-size.

              1. Replaced the minilights in the chandeliers with mini-CFCs and haven’t had any issues with those. But then chandeliers are wide open with good ventilation so cooling isn’t an issue.

            2. So glad our house was built before the fad for recessed can fixtures (although we have some enclosed in glass globes), but my dad’s place has one right over the kitchen sink. I’ll have to mention it to him when we’re over there next month on the way to our next two conventions.

            4. Most of the heat is from the LED’s themselves, not the electronics driving them. They do much, much better than the 5% efficiency of incandescent bulbs, but I doubt they’ll ever get more than 50% efficiency.

              Second, the lifetime of an LED depends on the temperature of the semiconductor junction inside, and it has to be much, much lower than the normal operating temperature of incandescents and flourescents. It’s best to keep LED’s under 110 degrees F, and even lower improves the efficiency. Over 110, every 10 or 20 additional degrees cuts the lifespan in half.

              Third, unlike incandescents and flourescents, which radiate the waste heat away, for LED’s the heat has to be removed from the back by conduction into the circuit board and then to an aircooled heat sink. A good LED bulb is a marvel of design, with half the volume and nearly all the weight being that heat sink – but it won’t work if the air flow around it is restricted. Lamps should be re-designed for LED’s, rather than using a light fixture that was designed to protect the surrounding area from a bulb running at several hundred degrees.

    2. Hey, if she appreciates you, gives you hugs and makes you cookies in the newly rewired oven, I think you’re ahead of the game. 🙂

    3. Most guys running around the kink community saying they want a submissive woman don’t know what to do with them.

      Why would I think the general population would be different.

      1. I remember a wonderful post I wish I’d saved (Blog disappeared completely) about people with truly submissive personalities. The blogger pointed out that you still have to be able to defend yourself until the dominate half (or someone else) can help you, and you have to be able to support and assist the dominate partner in order to have a good, healthy relationship. IIRC from the comments it ruffled a few feathers from the “I’ll pretend to be submissive” crowd. [The blogger was talking not about sexually submissive, but that 10% or so of the population who really need to have someone giving orders and making the major decisions, and who are not retarded or otherwise mentally incapacitated.]

        1. Dominant and dominant partner.

          Dominate is a verb.

          You laugh, but that’s a first line “they aren’t worth my time” cut in reading kink personal. It’s kind of our version of “no Uhauls”.

  6. Don’t they see they’re being tools of the Marxist divide-and-conquer strategy?

    Most of the feminists that I’ve had to deal with would see the furtherance of Marxism as a feature, not a bug.

    1. As ever was the useful idiots simply cannot conceive of the fact that comes the revolution it will not be them in charge. In truth their use mainly consists of adding quantity to the movement and serving as metaphorical cannon fodder only to be discarded once that usefulness has ended.

      1. Revolutions must get rid of the revolutionaries. They led one revolution- therefore they could lead another and are therefore dangerous.

        1. And most revolutionaries don’t realize they’re the cannon fodder, not the leadership.

          Mainly because they are much more idealistic than ruthless.

    2. That’s largely because nobody has rubbed their noses in the death tool of Marxism, amd when they’ve heard it mentioned some other idiot has trotted out the ‘real Marxism has never been tried’ excuse. Now, unless they are thinkers (and most people aren’t, most of the time) it’s too late. They’ve drunk the coolaid .

  8. Most of this has aged pretty well, but this line…

    If you think a gender – the fact that you were born with one piece of physical equipment

    Silly, Sarah! Don’t you know that gender has nothing to do with your physical equipment. It’s all about your feelings!

    (Come to think of it, perhaps that’s how the puppy kickers justify considering you a Mormon male. After all, that’s what they FEEL you are, and it doesn’t specify that the gender is all about the feelings of the actual person involved.)

    1. We laugh, but more and I more I hear we need to “stop assigning gender at birth” and even that “gendering children is violence and thus child abuse.”

      I hope the grand-daughters (great grand-daughters at best) of these people like the burkas their parents fought to put them in (oh, I know they don’t think that’s what they are doing, but…)

      1. Saw a great meme yesterday about activists who want to prevent farmers from giving hormones to livestock but insist that you can dose human kids with hormones if you want to. *facepaw*

        1. Was it a re-purpose of that one where hormones for cows was to be forbidden, but hormones for reproduction age human females was to be mandatory?

      2. People who are into burkas tend to have children and grand children and great grandchildren.

        Biology deniers are playing roulette with their baby’s reproductive organs, which *are* a scientific and biological reality and *not* a social construct.

        1. I have come to believe that many of these people are so far down the post-modern rabbit hole that they believe science is socially defined and change society and you change science.

          I mean, Mage: the Awakening is a great RPG. I have all four versions and most of the supplements. But I know it is not reality and does not show us how to change reality.

          1. Using their illogic, since their beliefs are scientifically derived*, it’s only logical that science will eventually prove their beliefs to be true.
            Any science that doesn’t mesh with their beliefs is tainted by patriarchy and is a relic of old thinking.

            *from Marxism and the arrow of history

          2. Getting everyone else to cowtow to their will is what interests them. That is why so much of the aim is to make protected classes and let them define reality. Whether it is the worst of the gender stuff (make no effort, made up names, etc) or even just the “I believe the victims” (only if female against a non special class member) like Murkie’s pushing.

            They don’t care about real science or even reality. When it all crashes down it’ll be with a ‘did I do that?’ Urkel look.

          3. Blame Gary Gygax for popularizing the use of statistics in RPGs? Lots of people confuse the fact that something can be described with mathematics, even though that something has no basis in reality.

        2. But that isn’t their means of reproduction. They are like reverse mockingbirds. They steal your children (for those sadistic enough to inflict this world on a child) and make them their own.

    2. I heard someone (it was in response to Jordan Peterson) explain that biological sex was a social construct and this person had a PhD and extensive medical research to prove it, should someone have the time or honesty to examine the issue.

      I figure of the two of them, he was the one delegitimizing transgenders, not Peterson. After all, if biological sex isn’t real, then how can someone be trans? How does “he” or “she” even matter at that point? All that Peterson was arguing was that no one ought to be compelled to keep a daily scorecard and be punished by law if he or she didn’t use the currently correct made-up pronoun. Pronouns which, according to the other guy, don’t even describe something that exists.

        1. Seriously, honest to gawd, it takes a PhD and a lifetime of focused effort to get that lost.

          And to think he might have done something constructive with all that effort instead.

          2. I agree with the first, but not necessarily the second.

            I think “studies” degrees exist so the people with the work ethic but not the smarts to get a PhD can get one for social reasons.

            1. Okay, maybe not cure cancer but build houses or grow gardens or keep elderly people from getting bedsores.

              I still think that a high degree of “smarts” is necessary though. A person with normal intelligence would check his or her pants and announce, “Wow, that is the dumbest thing I’ve heard today.”

              2. Hrm. I have lately become a firm believer in “social Darwinism” – i.e., evolution that does not occur through genetic recombination.

                You do not need to get by a person of normal intelligence to become a PhD in “studies.” You only need to get by your doctoral examination committee, which will be composed of the prior “generation” of “academics.”

                Which appears to only require the appropriate expressed melanin levels or “identification” – and, maybe, not drooling on the table while they are examining your thesis. I’m not truly sure about the latter.

                Heinlein, Kornbluth, Burgess, Orwell, along with quite a few others, tried to warn us a long time ago. Sigh…

      2. And, you’re right. If there is no biological basis to gender why HRT and GRS? If it is all a social construct why not just socially transition and be done with it?

        To be honest, I suspect if we did open up a “Female-male” and a “Male-female” social roll the even theoretical value of GRS would disappear as treatment.

        Some cultures historically have had a Female-male role (the Khanith in Arabia are the ones I always remember), but they seem to all be cultures where polygamy is or was allowed so I assumed they were evolution to support that (and now want to retcon them into TMiaHM).

        1. I think that in some ways there used to be more flexibility in roles. You might get raised eyebrows for being a manly woman, but you could be a manly woman. I think there was a bit less freedom to be an effeminate man, but still some. And then we decided that anyone more comfortable that way was gay.

          1. By which I mean… there were two boxes and they were somewhat constricting boxes which was difficult for some people, and for a while our society seemed interested in making those boxes a bit larger and less constricting. But we’ve given up on that.

            Now there are dozens and dozens of boxes but they are TINY. Tiny little boxes that you’ve got to shove yourself into. Or else you need to define a new even smaller box that exactly and precisely circumscribes your life.

    3. Gender has nothing to do with “physical equipment” OR feelings. Biology and psychology are both irrelevant.

      Gender is GRAMMAR. Jeez.

        1. Bonus, boni, bono, bonum, bono…
          Bona, bonae, bonae, bonam, bona…
          Bonum, boni, bono, bonum, bono….

        1. I’m studying Polish right now. Don’t even talk to me about %^&*ing grammer! Gender is the easy part!

          At least there are only 3 (vs the what is it now 52? 54? that Facebook has discovered). It’s the 7 noun cases and corresponding pronouns that really suck.

          1. RE; the multitude of genders thing. If you can’t be speshul because of accomplishments, well, there’s always taxonomy.

          2. You want lots of genders (or more technically, noun classes), try the Bantu languages. They have around ten.

            And then there are classifiers or measure words in Chinese, which aren’t exactly the same as grammatical gender, but number in the dozens or hundreds (although about 20% of them account for 80% of everyday usage and most of the others have become literary and obscure).

            1. Oh, there are definitely more complicated grammars out there. Just not in European languages. People bitch about German grammar. German is straightforward.

            1. That part I can almost manage. Although the fact that the combination przszcz is fine on the Polish tongue but anywhere you might get the final combination ‘śk’ (sounds like shk to us silly po angielsku speakers) due to a declination it’s considered too difficult and therefore must be changed to ‘żek’ (IDK? zhek, maybe? to transliterate?) is one of those things designed for no other purpose than to screw with foreigners.

              1. Actually after 8 months or so of practice I can say the syllable ‘przszcz’ without too much trouble, which I guess is something. Not something useful 99.99% of the time, but something.

            1. It’s actually worse sadly. Very similar grammar to all Slavic languages but a few forms that the Russians have given up over time are still stubbornly clung to. Hubby speaks Russian and he isn’t familiar with all of the Polish oddities. And the verbs of motion work the same in both.

          1. If I didn’t have a trip to Warsaw planned I’d be diving back into my German instead, which I enjoyed a lot more. But it has been interesting and (presumably) good for my brain to do a deep dive on something so foreign (no pun intended) to my experience. Spousal unit used to be a fluent Russian speaker, and the differences between the two is fascinating to me (while mostly just p!ssing him off).

              1. We will be there 2 wks so Krakow is on the list too. And their Kristkindlmarkt should start before we leave so we are going to try to make that part of that side trip, maybe the salt mine too . Spouse wants to go to Łódź and see the zoo where they hid Jewish children during the war. There is never enough time for all of it but it will be a start.

  9. Societies that worshiped goddesses often demanded the most control over women and engaged in temple prostitution. They also had a marked tendency to child sacrifice.

    It is hard to look at the lengths feminists go to allow abortion at any time and their increasing celebration of it (tee shirts, comedy skits, etc) and not think we’ve reaching that part of goddess worship.

    Thinking for practical reasons abortion should be legal for at least part of a pregnancy is one idea. Modern American abortion rights activism is a completely different animal.

    2. And temple prostitution– well, look at how they treat teen girls who aren’t having sex, as well as the glorification of the hook-up culture.

      1. And the celebration of slut walks.

        The odd thing is all those handmaids forget even Atwood saw the slut culture of today and saw it as a prelude to the dystopia she imagined. I’d have to go back, but it seems it also implied the feminist sexual revolution was optimized to please men which echos the argument that the only winners of the sexual revolution were 15 years old boys of all ages.

        1. …”implied the feminist sexual revolution was optimized to please men…”
          Sure. Skeezy men get easier access to the goods without commitment, and she has to deal with the spawn should she get knocked up.

          1. That and the ability to create 30+ year old infractions to use for political character assassination. Who knew that promoting consequence free and relationship free sex and shaming the body shamers would turn drunken shenanigans into sexual harassment?

            “Only prudish throwbacks to the inquisition would object to seeing penises all over, free the nipple! Rawwrrr!”
            “I saw a penis! I’m going to die!”

            And from the same people, too.

              1. If he’d gone to Occidental and some other colleges, it would be “sexual harassment/assault” if he’d turned down a girl.

                Rod Machado – “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.”

              2. “Virgin-shaming to start”?

                It’s already started. Granted they are mocking because they don’t believe it … but hey. A female, they would have HAD to believe, but a male, nope, not believable.

                1. Being a virgin in the mid 1980’s was like being a circus freak. Of course the actual numbers were probably on the side of the virgins, male and female, but no one believed it. For a short while in college I was an RA at a nearby boarding high school. I had more than one conversation with a high school aged girl that involved telling her that she didn’t have to have sex, that I hadn’t ever done so (and I was engaged at the time) and I was near certain that the other female RA had never had sex and that it was okay not to. There were a *lot* of virgins but everything in our culture was pushing and pushing and pushing this idea that only complete throw-backs hadn’t been sexually liberated, that ALL teenagers had sex, and that it was stupid and counter productive to ever tell them not to. Apparently, and obviously in hind-sight, this was the same thing as telling them that they didn’t HAVE to.

                  1. I think it was in the ’80’s that I began to wake up to the realization that society is far too obsessed with sex. EVERY historical person of importance was judged by how much sex he (or she) indulged in and what kind, and if nobody really knew they would make up something.

                    This crystalized for me when I read Charlton Heston’s autobiography, in particular his account of researching the character of Michelangelo for THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY. Heston was aware that there were people who insisted that Michelangelo was homosexual, and others that wet to torturous lengths to prove that he was straight. Heston read what he could get his hands on in the time he had and came away with the impression of a man who tried both, because people made such a fuss about the business, and found both less interesting than carving marble.

                    Why should somebody who had next to no ‘sex life’ necessarily be ‘repressed’, especially since even the stereotypical ‘repressed’ societies always referenced by the Left usually weren’t anywhere near as repressed as the Left says? Why cannot such a person simply have found something that meant more to him (or her) that the appeasement of distended glands?

                    BTW; that last isn’t original with me, I stole it from Patrick O’Malley.

                    1. I blame the whole “sexually repressed” thing on Freud.
                      I think a lot of people latched onto the “sexual repression= bad” as an excuse to pressure other people into sex.

                    3. Joe:

                      Yes, indeed. Like a lot of eggheads of his day Freud was probably nowhere near as clever as he thought he was, but he sure caught on. He told a bunch of people something they could USE.

                      I think psychiatry and related arts can be useful, but science they ain’t.

                    4. I understanding that most practicing psychologists are not Freudians.

                      Psychiatry is giving crazy people pills that maybe dial the crazy down to safe for themselves and others. Widely abused, giving very dangerous drugs to people that aren’t messed up enough that the tradeoff really makes sense.

                    5. Why should somebody who had next to no ‘sex life’ necessarily be ‘repressed’, especially since even the stereotypical ‘repressed’ societies always referenced by the Left usually weren’t anywhere near as repressed as the Left says?

                      As the Left says.

                      Hell, with TItle IX tribunals, #MeToo, and so on, don’t you mean as repressed as the Left wants?

                      They want it to be okay to theoretically do any sexual act and realistically impossible to do any sexual act without being punished.

                2. These days kids have to invent a sexless gender to excuse them from having to have sex. Clearly nothing has improved.

              3. What I’ve seen isn’t shaming, it’s literal incomprehension that anybody could choose to be a virgin, so OBVIOUSLY all his repressed sexuality made him a terrible, terrible predator to be feared. Ptui.

                1. Different version than what I’ve seen, which is that Kavanaugh is lying. Which…he might be, given that apparently he was something of a party animal back in the day.
                  On the other hand, my source for that doesn’t like Republicans, so…yeah.

                  1. I don’t like parties, but I do not see why the desire to be social to that extent must correlate to being a womanizer. Intercourse is of more significance than a handshake, right?

                    1. Remember; the Progressives project all their flaws on others. They are, by and large, sexually incontinent. As examples like Ira Einhorn and Roman Polanski show, they produce a significant number of sexual predators. They judge everybody by what they themselves do…which is fine in upstanding Progressive SJWs, but deplorable in everybody else.

                  3. Heh. From what has been said by Ford and her supporters, they were pikers compared to my summer between freshman and sophomore years (summer of ’75). “Several” parties? Every night, frequently at lunch break, two AM, whenever we could sneak off campus. (No, I can’t point to the places myself, any more than she can – but that is because all of those were in the surrounding desert, and are probably where someone’s kitchen, bathroom, living room, etc. now sits in the subdivisions.)

                    I was a physical virgin, though, until marriage at 26. (Once the hormones rev up, I don’t think any teenage boy is a mental virgin.)

            2. THAT’S IT!!!
              I was wondering why that whole thing was bothering me, and you joggled my brain cells into putting it together.
              Sexual harassment is seeing male genitalia.
              Seeing female genitalia is not sexual harassment; after all, it’s completely PC to have people prancing around wearing vagina costumes.
              So we need to charge Kavanaugh’s second accuser with sexual discrimination!

              1. “Accuse Kavanaugh’s second accuser of Sexual Harassment”

                Works for me. And tell the first one of false accusation of rape or attempted rape. At worst what she describes is something that started as “fun” then one party chose to break it off, at which point the other quit too. Both were under age & illegally drinking. If what happened is wrong for one, it is wrong for another.

                People will scream “she was 15, he was 17.” There could be less than 13 months difference in age, or less. Plus, the age difference is not an indication of different grades; who knows the actual age of most of your classmates?

                As one of the youngest early junior year, I was 15, the oldest would have been 17. Not as common when I was a kid, for parents to hold back kids from starting school whose birthday was mid summer or later, but VERY common with my son’s class.

                Personally all accusers are damaging their own reputations, as well as their lawyers.

          2. Nah. Moloch. The old pagans never fed him half so well as a Christian civilization does.
            Christians can be shamed into doing the right thing, or for that matter the wrong thing, because we’re supposed to adhere to a higher standard. Looking back, I think that’s that’s a lot of the reason the civil rights and suffrage movement succeeded, and it’s certainly why the anti-slavery movement happened. That doesn’t work on atheist or pagan cultures. The anti slavery and civil rights movements succeeded in the rest of the world only because force, and the threat of force from the West made clear the consequences of not going along to everyone else. What worries me about the millennials and the generation behind them is that they’ve been thoroughly de-Christianized and conditioned to believe that the only morality is immediate pleasure.
            What happens when they start taking over the political system as we age out? What happens when the only thing available to fill that God-shaped hole in the soul is Islam, and they embrace it with the fervor of the convert? The early signs from Europe aren’t encouraging.

            1. Nah. Moloch. The old pagans never fed him half so well as a Christian civilization does

              While a great line, we do NOT have normalized abandoned-for-animals-to-eat as a solution for unwanted children, or other forms of sacrifice.

              And the abortion rate is, slowly, as the truth gets through, going down.

                1. Heard an awesome story the other day– a judge dismissed charges of something like property invasion and harassment against a bunch of middle-aged ladies, as well as denying a claim for whatever you call it when someone unlawfully damages your buisness.

                  The went into a waiting room at an abortion clinic and gave each lady there a rose, and told them God loves them. They left after doing so, even though the folks had told them to leave shortly after they got there

                  75% of the ladies left and never came back.

                  The abortuary was suing for lost income…..

              2. From your lips to His ears. I just wish folks would grasp that the arguments for abortion are the arguments of the early to mid 20th century eugenicists, dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint as if Aktion T4 were suddenly ethical as long as it is carried out pre-birth and referred to as “women’s rights”.

              3. Have to disagree with you there. We’ve turned infanticide in to an enormously profitable and powerful business, then sell the remains for medical experiments. I think that’s worse. I take it personally, though, I was an infant adoption in ’76. Official Feminism prefers me dead, which focuses one a bit.
                There may be hope, as you say the rate’s falling. Probably due to the way pro-abortion demos fail to reproduce while pro-life demos keep having kids.

                1. There is evidence that infants were bought for sacrifice; it’s known that girl-children were sold for temple prostitutes.

                  I’m glad your mom made the right choice.

                2. I think the reason the rate goes down is on my kitchen fridge– I’ve got long rolls of pictures of the Contessa for weeks before she was born.

                  I got to see her sucking her thumb, on a machine so cheap the doctor who only works part of the week can afford to have it, and a trained technician, in her personal office.

                  For fairly well off folks, or those in the city, teens now have baby photos that were taken well before their birth– it makes it much, much harder to tell a persuasive lie about how the kid isn’t really a human, no matter how scared the target is or how handy it would be to not have that kid around.

                  1. Oh.

                    Despite all the times they try saying it’s just a bit of tissue, despite their reluctance to let moms considering abortion see an ultrasound, despite my own child asking “Can I see a picture of me a baby in your tummy?” and being able to show her one from less than six weeks into her existence… I hadn’t thought of that slowing people down.

                    1. Honestly, I didn’t think of it– I just hang in circles where I heard about the value of letting women see what their so-early-some-women-think-it’s-just-a-diet-induced-missed-couple-of-periods baby looks like.

                      Or the prior even cheaper option, hearing the kid’s heart.

                      I’ll never forget when I went to the doctor for a checkup and the heart beat wasn’t there– it is powerful.

                    2. “I’ll never forget when I went to the doctor for a checkup and the heart beat wasn’t there– it is powerful.”

                      It is devastating. Heart breaking devastating. I didn’t know I wasn’t truly pregnant, neither did the OBGYN until the supposed fetus broke apart naturally & a DNC had to be performed to prevent infection. No embryonic sack. Just an egg that implanted & started dividing. I would have been 12 weeks had it been real. My body thought it was. Hormones were present. Until the last week, everyone thought there was a baby, that there wasn’t a chance … doesn’t help. I can only imagine with a real fetus that has a heart beat, then doesn’t.

                      Or what a mother has to decide when the pregnancy is endoscopic & to carry the live fetus to term is to kill both you & the baby you are carrying, leaving your other children motherless. Which my sister had to do, twice; once between the 2nd & 3rd, and again between 3rd & 4th. Full disclosure – actually between every other live successful pregnancy, the first was adopted. Doctors told them she’d never have kids; boy were doctors wrong & the doctors had pictures why she couldn’t.

                    3. Doctors told them she’d never have kids; boy were doctors wrong & the doctors had pictures why she couldn’t.

                      Which goes a round about to why I look like a puffer-fish at the idea of mandatory paternity tests– we do not actually know what we “think” we do. We know science is a “well, works pretty well” thing.
                      (which dang near made me hate science, thank goodness I was prepped with stuff from my folks about evidence that didn’t fit)

                      What’s that old joke– you’re one in a million, there’s a half dozen of you in New York city?

                    5. I’m sorry about your little girl.

                      Pretty sure what happened to me the first time, happened at least another 6 times over the next 5 years. I guess it is not that uncommon. But never went more than a couple of weeks, which is normal, not 12 weeks, with all the hormones. Never has happened in next 30 years AFTER kid was born, & counting. Kids officially not possible now.

                      When we finally got pregnant for real. It was really different. We weren’t going to say anything until we were past the first trimester, to anyone. But FIL had a major heart attack at the end of October, was essentially sent home for the last final one to occur, likely before Thanksgiving, definitely before Christmas. So, we went over for Thanksgiving. We had to tell everyone “not to worry, I don’t have the flu … just having problems keeping food down, it’s not contagious.” MIL was a retired nurse, like we could pull that one over on her. OTOH FIL was determined to see that baby born. Didn’t make it by 6 weeks but he tried. Kid was born late June …

                    6. I remember reading a story about a young woman who very cheerfully got early abortions any time she got pregnant, until the last time, she asked to see what they’d taken out.

                      According to the story, she was shocked and kept saying, “But that’s a baby!” and broke down crying.

                      Proper information slows down the innocent. The only ones it doesn’t slow down are those with seared consciences.

                    7. Fox: I’m pretty glad of that too.
                      Generally: Why not both? I think it’s telling how desperate they (Planned Parenthood and feminists generally) are to stop their customers seeing ultrasounds or hearing those heartbeats, or even seeing a fetal development timeline. The worst thing that can happen to an ideology of oppression is to start seeing their targets as being just as human as the oppressor.

                  2. Not only the pictures persuasive. But, news about multiples because of fertility problems. The worry that they might not be able to have children later.

                    My doctor was surprised that I said no prenatal invasive tests. Possibility of miscarriage was minimal. Key, it was possible, & didn’t matter what the tests showed, no matter the small chance of false positives. Even though I was a late first time mother. Abortion. Was. Not. Happening. Why bother with the tests.

                    Yes. Son’s baby book as a baby picture from well before he was born.

                    1. My summary to doctors: I only want tests where there’s something we can do for the kid. And “kill them” isn’t an option.

                      The “hit between the eyes with a two by four” look is oddly popular.

                    2. Same. Hell, they told me Robert was going to be mentally retarded. Don’t care. He was mine, and I was keeping him.
                      (He MIGHT be mentally retarded, mind, but he’s in medschool anyway. Would hate to see him non-mentally-retarded.)

                    3. Hell. We wouldn’t throw away too young kittens (actual, raised more than one) or puppies (theory), what makes them think I’d risk my baby? After all we did to get him?

                      The ONLY thing I regret is not working for another one. Well we did, just didn’t take extra measures.

                    4. Yep. Same.
                      We got so lucky. Second son was conceived after I got a prescription for clomide. I had it in my book, as a bookmark. Then we bought a house, moved and I found out was six months gone. When I found the prescription I was almost due to pop….

                    5. “clomide”

                      Yes. That is what I took for a year to finally get kid. It was a hail mary. Doctor, then, wouldn’t put me on anything stronger. Had to beg for that.

                      No “medical” reason for us to have had problem conceiving. Had to be obviously, the medicine just hadn’t caught up yet. Yes. Would have used something stronger, risk multiples … you bet.

                      Was risking twins anyway. Paternal grandfather was a twin. He had twin sisters. Cousin on dad’s side had twins. Cousin on mom’s side ended up having twins.

            2. I’m an agnostic (the details hardly matter), but I observe that cultures with a solid foundation in Protestant Christianity tend to b preferable to most of the alternatives. The Jews have not had Israel long enough to be a valid test, and they have been besieged most of that time, too. Otherwise they have mostly been guests, tolerated to one degree or another at best. Buddhism sounds wonderful, at first glance, but produces cultures that treat the common people like farm animals. Catholicism is still stuck on the Peasant/Aristocrat model, and right now seems poised to jump right over to Progressive Socialism, which says a lot about Progressive Socialism, most of it bad. I’ll listen to the Hindus once they get rid of that disgusting Caste system and not one moment sooner. Islam is currently running down a path to extinction, because ultimately if they tolerate nobody else, nobody with a lick of sense will tolerate them.

              And atheistical cultures, to the extent that have existed at all, have been horror shows.

              Does this mean I am about to accept a certain carpenter turned rabbi as my personal Savior? Not at the moment. But it does mean that I view anyone who runs down Protestant Christianity with deep suspicion.

              1. FWIW, English Catholicism shared the good points of English Protestantism, and in as much as Catholic cultures go in for the progressive junk, they ain’t Catholic. It is seriously amazing how much is not a required belief in Catholicism….

                Just different weaknesses expressing themselves; Christianity, basically “normed” by Catholic theology (basically just to avoid the really, really strange stuff that calls itself Christian), is an extremely flexible and basically sound system of belief, though it can of course not magically fix people entirely.

                1. Orthodoxy is similar to Catholicism in that respect: the minimal set of beliefs is, if anything, smaller. Lack of a Pope who can speak ex cathedra means less of a body of belief (you need to get all the bishops together still) and a strong support for lay theology keeps things churning with interesting ideas you can take or leave.

                  Culturally, it isn’t the most freedom loving of the Churches but since 1453 it is also fairly a political, especially in a country where it is an immigrants and coverts faith like the US.

            3. Do not assume that what you see of the thirty ish cohort is all that there is. No one but God knows what the heart of the ten year olds will be. Socialism would have only force if not for residual Christian impulse in our society. So long as that residual impulse abides, we are both vulnerable to the attraction of socialism and may yet have another Awakening. And when socialism has only force, socialism will see how few truly faithful it has gathered.

              1. I was an infantry NCO until a couple years ago. One of the biggest reasons I’m OK with getting out is “no more being in charge of millennials.” And you can make a case that the kids I was in charge of were the top end of the generation.
                So no, not a lot of hope.

  11. “Not giving you something for free is NOT restricting access. Otherwise, people are restricting your access to food, housing and entertainment. Is that a war on humans?”

    The Proglodytes, Sandersistas, and Atifasc Fascists think it is. Don’t you hate being a good prognosticator?

      1. Freedom means that the other guy has to have the same freedom you want for yourself. If you want to keep your own things, then he also has the right to keep his own things.

        1. One of the worst things we’ve done to upper middle class kids is tell them a job in HS is a bad choice because it interferes with what you need to get admitted to a “good” university. It is true, a job scores you zero points for Harvard/Yale/etc (unless it is a social justice job, which usually isn’t paid).

          However, what you are sacrificing is learning early the idea of your own things, earning your things, and not living on the Rents. I suspect there is a direct relationship between rich socialists looking for government to be new Rents and not having a job. Yes, working class people with jobs have become socialists in the past, but they seem to be socialists of a very different stripe. The earliest version I know of this is the movie Car Wash.

          But looking back, even though I didn’t go to one of the fancy schools I wanted to attend, the only thing I regret about my HS job is I didn’t get it sooner.

          1. Reason in HS to have a job when I was a kid was to pay for that car, to keep said car running, &/or fancier clothing that folks wouldn’t pay for. Umm, no thanks, rather just read, library worked for that. Now, if I’d had to maintain a horse …

            Kid was too busy with sports & scouts. OTOH, Scouts, at least the unit we were involved with, had an expectation that scouts paid their own way in scouts. That is registration, dues, gas fund, summer camp, & needed gear. To do that the unit had 3 major fund raisers each year(*). Two were product sales through the local council. The third was Christmas tree pickup. Christmas tree pickup was ran as a business. After expenses (tree dump, gas for rigs, advertising, 50% troop cut (paid for troop gear), etc.) Scouts earned as high as $12/hour worked to go into their scouting accounts.

            Kid paid for: Two packs (first one he out grew), sleeping bag, pads, uniforms, 5 years of summer camp, Philmont High Adventure camp for both himself & his dad (camp fees & transportation), AND two National Jamboree’s with council contingent. What his scout account couldn’t cover … well there was Grandma & Grandpa’s wood pile that had to be split, as well as Mom & Dads, etc. (in those 5 summers he split & stacked over 50 chord of wood between the two households).

            So, kid never had a “paying” job in HS. He did however learn the value of money, time, & to deal with demanding “bosses”. Yes. Kid is an Eagle.

            (*) Yes. In spite of these opportunities, there were parents who complained they couldn’t afford to send their kids to summer camp or do other “extras” & whined about dues. Guess whose scouts didn’t participate in fund raisers …
            Yes. We could have afforded to pay for kid’s scouting activities … not the point. Not only that he paid OUR way to be volunteers, granted that was only registration & meals on camp outs (adults only, scouts dues paid their meals).

            1. It is not a paying job but it was work.

              I don’t see the same in the upper middle class kids (say my coworker’s children). They are learning the money = work equation.

      2. “We really need to return to the idea that freedm means the freedom to pay for your own goddamned choices,…”

        I wonder if that’s why the major tactics of social control now are economic. If someone is a bad thinker, if they have wrong ideas, they have to be made *unable* to pay for their choices. Unable to pay their bills. Unable to feed their children. They can’t be allowed to be employed at all, until they think the right way.

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