The War On Humans

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

If our current “elites” were Lizard Aliens, bent on destroying us before we move off planet, what would they be doing differently?

Go on. Think about it. I’ll wait.

Bet you that you didn’t come up with anything. Or at least anything that doesn’t go “But then again.”

Oh, you might have come up with some reason they’re not lizards. The lizard is there for funsies. They seem very upset about a warming world, so perhaps they’re ice moles or something. All the same —

It is not my point to argue that our self-proclaimed better are aliens. I mean, sometimes I look at it and go “Whoa, what are the chances they wouldn’t do something beneficial to humans at least once, by accident?” But then again, you know? That’s like Biden never hires anyone who doesn’t turn out to be — literally — some form of criminal loon. Not on purpose (probably) but because of the water he swims in and what he is. So, it’s entirely possible the “elites” are just human haters without being aliens. Which is far less fun. But more likely. Though I think the time for “far fetched conspiracy theory” to become “Absolutely reality” is now three days or less.

Anyvay…. moving right along, the place where “they’re aliens and trying to exterminate us” is most obvious is the proliferation of genders.

Not only does it make it hard to reproduce (and for the people brought into physical conformance with their mind self-image often impossible) but more importantly, it betrays a complete lack of understanding of the human species and how we work.

You see, humans have two sexes. Male and female. When male and female get together, most of the time, within certain age ranges, reproduction occurs. Which means there are more little humans.

There is no such thing as “gender” except as a bizarre and twisted misnomer that conjoins sex with behavioral characteristics, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with sex; some of which are sexual, but only in the sense of “preferred style of approaching the other sex”; and some of which are outright bizarre paraphilias.

Paraphilias is any sexual interest/obsession/style which doesn’t lead to reproduction. They range from “doesn’t lead to reproduction but hasn’t been bred out of the human species so it must have some evolutionary value” — like being gay (which seems to have evolutionary value. No, I’m not going to argue it. Notice I’m not arguing the morality or rightness of it. But it seems to confer some strengths to a reproductive line) which is probably the most “Normal” in the sense of having existed everywhere at all times, including when it was against interest. — to things like “I’m a dragon kin demi-boi” which were invented yesterday and most of us would have to go consult a list to figure out, and which not only don’t lead to reproduction (or at least make it really had to find a mate) but are the result of a great deal of confusion between “Sex” in the sense of something you are and which describes your role in reproduction and “sex” in the sense of what you like — or would like, or imagine you like — to do in bed. IOW and in plain speaking, a confusion between sexual role in reproduction — male or female — and KINK, which is a preference in pleasure mode.

The “genders” multiply because they’re not genders, understood as immutable characteristics written in your DNA but social modes. And social modes are infinite and infinitely shaded. In that sense “Genders” will eventually multiply till each of us has our very own. And that, frankly is silly, particularly when enshrined into law, and mutated into compelled speech.

Let me put it another way: years ago I was a guest of honor at Penguicon, and found myself bemused by a tag that had check boxes for what you were willing to do at the con, ranging from hugging to multi-sex orgy. Not shocked. It’s SF and, well, we’ve found a bunch of work arounds for “I’m not very good at interacting with people” but bemused. I wasn’t there for that, so I left it blank, though I’m more than willing to hug friends.

The “gender” as it’s being used by activists is the equivalent of those tags. Eventually, if this goes on, everyone will have his or her very own gender and pronouns. “Hi, I’m Sarah, Sarah/Sarah, I’m a Dansexual with shades of sapiosexual and fiction-sexual.”

REALLY? What even is the point? We can introduce ourselves, right, and at long last get to whether we have any sexual interest in the other person, right?

Only we can’t. Not in a society so perverted by Freudian misconceptions (has been since the seventies, at least) where everyone who is healthy is assumed to WANT to sleep with everyone else. So, you need the definitions in your face, up front, before you even meet.

But none of this actually leads to the function of sex, which is reproduction. (Sure, and pack bonding. And stress reduction. And hierarchy establishing. NOT taking away from those, but ultimately the purpose is to make more humans.) Which is why we’re in trouble.

In fact the face-forward this-is-what-I-like-in-bed is severing bonds, rather than creating them, and interfering not only with all the not-bed forms of relationships, but also destroying our ability to form bed forms of relationships.

Dropping things like “I’m attracted to men/women” in the same pot as “I’m a woman who likes carpentry and is stronger than most women; I like women; I like wearing flannel, I MUST be a man in a woman’s body” is crazy enough. We suddenly find ourselves REQUIRED to sleep with men who are wearing women’s bodies, even if we have no interest in women, because otherwise we’re bigots. Or we find men — objectively designed by evolution (not a correct wording, but the closest I can get) to be bigger and stronger, mostly through stuff that happens before they’re even born — must be allowed to compete with women in sports because they think they’re women, and therefore it’s the same.

But if in addition you drop into it stuff like “Demi-sexual” which means you’re only attracted to people you know — aka what most of us think as normal — and “asexual” and you’re then mixing biological genre, sexual attraction, mental-only definition of sex based mostly on non-sexual preferences, AND “the very specific type of people I would consider sleeping with. And the circumstances under which I’d sleep with them.”

Then add to that a bunch of other things we’re told are genders, like “Asexual” — no that just means you don’t want any, not that you ARE a different thing — or dragon-kin — I too like to pretend I’m a dragon, but I know it’s silly and only do it online — or another of the myriad insanities, and ….

It’s all insane because you’re not comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to Ford Fieros and then throwing in some skyscrapers for funsies.

Let’s talk. There are two sexes, male and female. This is defined by the role the individuals play in reproduction and is largely unchangeable.

Now is the time for you to stop screaming. What I’ve said is only controversial if your head is full of idiocy.

Biologically, humans come in two functional sexes. Male and female. Both are needed for reproduction. Yes, there have been reports (beyond that one) of spontaneous cloning, and they might — or not — be true, but actually, ultimately, they’re one-offs and non reproducible at will. For most of humanity if you want to reproduce grab a member of the other sex and GO. You might not succeed, depending on age and health and compatibility, but you have a good chance of doing it, if those align.

Yes, there are birth defects and “indistinct genitalia” at birth are not that unusual. HOWEVER by adulthood the birth defects are a tiny percentage. And most of them are either sterile or, regardless of genitalia, function only as male or female. The fully functional ones are an even tinier percentage. Holding out for that to make humans non binary is like saying humans aren’t bipedal because some people can’t walk. Pfui. If you’re not a toddler this doesn’t pass the sniff test.

At any rate, those are the base biological sexes. You were, unless you’re one of the almost vanishing minority, one or the other at birth. Not ASSIGNED at birth. You just were.

We can’t actually change that where it counts. Not in terms of reproduction. We can change your appearance so you pass as the other sex. (Though I’m told the up-close in the pants stuff is not as exact and capable of passing as we’d like to think. I don’t know. And I’m not going to look at pictures.) That’s about it.

Even that is fairly difficult, as most people never quite pass and get stuck in this uncanny valley area where they trigger everyone’s subconscious alarms, which sucks.

I’m not saying that for some people with severe gender dysphoria NOT acquired last week in a mass event in an internet forum that is not a relief. I mean, being able to sort of pass. I can visualize that all too easily, okay? Let’s just say that.

HOWEVER that’s all. If you feel you’re the opposite sex to the point that cosmetic surgery helps, and you’re an adult, go for it. You can live as the other sex. It’s none of my actual business. You can’t actually change your reproductive sex, though. And the things done to pass as the opposite sex — hormones, etc — are likely to render you sterile. Sorry.

Also I wish to make it clear we are not capable of making you reproduce as the opposite sex nor are we even close to it. Look, if being able to reproduce as the opposite sex were the moon landing, we’d still be in the phase of looking up at the birds and making noises that indicate flying is cool. But we can’t say it better because we haven’t invented words again. I must say this, because there’s been a lot of fast stepping and lying from advocates and even “scientific publications.”

If you’re a kid — early twenties or under — contemplating sex transition, that’s fine, but make your decision with the understanding you’re giving up reproduction. Because you are. No, not even in fifty or a hundred years. It’s not even as close as “immortality” which is always fifty years away.

I must say this, knowing some people will be very upset and reflexively be mad at me for saying, and not at the liars promising otherwise, because people promising otherwise are LYING and people are making decisions based on things that can’t happen.

Anyway — so at base — there’s two sexes, male and female. Those matter for reproduction. They have bloody nothing to do with how you dress, what you like to do for fun, or even what you like to do in bed.

After that, and in a completely different sphere, there’s sexual attraction: there have always been men and women who are attracted to each other. They’re the vast majority of humanity, the reason that vive la difference, and what makes the world go round, or at least keep going. That’s fine. Then there’s men who are attracted to men and women who are attracted to women. That’s been normal throughout history (whether it’s exclusive, or they’re attracted to the opposite sex too.) and therefore is normal under “humans present this way.” Note I’m making absolutely no claims to morality much less religion. I know what my religion prescribes and I try to follow it, but in civil society I favor not discriminating against a normal variant of the human race. Or discriminating for, for that matter. It is what it is, and it should be neither reviled nor favored. Just human, okay.

The same goes for being naturally uninterested in sex. It’s happened throughout history too. Sure, in some cases it’s probably a mental or hormonal issue. But probably not in most cases. It’s normal. And we should stop treating celibates like there’s something wrong with them too, okay? They’re just part of normal human panoply.

And then…. and then we get to other things. Oh, you’re a man who likes to dress as a woman to sleep with either women or other men? Sure, whatever. But since I’m not interested in sex with you, why do I need to know that? Why does society at large need to know that?

You’re someone who wishes to have extreme mutilation body modification because that’s what your kink calls for? Whatever. You’re an adult and you’re paying for it yourself? Don’t do it on the street, and don’t scare the horses. And if your post op mutilations — I’m think the non-human ones — scare the horses, stay the heck out of the street. Because it will scare children too.

As for people who like to sleep with a lot of people of one or both genders at once… again… what does this have to do with me, since I am not now, nor am I likely to be interested in you? I don’t actually care.

We don’t need new pronouns. They’re all used in the third, not the second person, and you can’t control how people talk about you behind your back. (Mostly as “that crazy sob/b” honestly.) If you change sexual appearance, and you pass, the pronouns used for you are already the other sex. Beyond that, this game of gotcha and “I’m more special than thou” serves no purpose but create a mess and make it more difficult to establish any relationship from professional to social to, yes, sexual.

Leave the pronouns alone. If you really hate male and female there’s something seriously off in your head and you’re confusing old divisions based on reproduction with advertising to the world precisely in which way you wish to be laid.

And while we’re at it, let’s get at the source of this nonsense: Humans are not bonobos, no matter how much Freud wanted them to be. We are largely a monogamous (sometimes serially monogamous) mates-for-life species. Largely heterosexual, with the normal, understood, low percentage variations. Our hormones conspire in this, by making us bond to the people we bed. What this means in practicality is that making us sleep with everything that moves breaks us, doesn’t mend us. Our mind shatters at being forced into A LOT of meaningless sex. Yes, there are people who are not monogamous, and it seems to be inborn. BUT I’m talking the majority of people.

So, no one should be looked down on for not having a lot of sex. Or not having a lot of sex with strangers. Or not having sex at all. All of those are normal. Freud was crazy. Certifiable.

Second: given that we’re not bonobos, we need to establish sexual etiquette. Starting with “it’s always all right to say no.” And “knowing each other for a while is better” and such.

And then we need to establish ways for people to approach/get to know each other, without sex being immediately expected. (That should be as is the statistical exception. It exists. And it should have its own spaces. But its spaces are not the boardroom or the classroom, for instance.)

We need to do this. And start working on it now.

Because the opposition, the complete semantic confusion of “genders” ends up with each of us with his or her own gender, our hand against everyone else, and convinced they hate us.

It’s time to stop the crazy. Get your head clear. Then help the people next to you.

417 thoughts on “The War On Humans”

  1. In my current mood, I’m thinking that the only way to “Purge The Crazy” is to kill all of the Crazy.

    And to be quite frank, that may not be a Good Thing for a civilized society. :mad:

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    1. The Reader has pondered quite a bit whether the ‘Hadley solution’ is going to be necessary and what the aftermath might be. Mostly in the middle of the night after a nightmare.

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      1. Our “Hadley solution” would be hundred times worse than the one in Pournelle’s story. :sad:

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  2. Yeah, the whole “if you like things that are mostly liked by guys/girls you just be a guy/girl in the others’ body” thing irritates me a lot. Because not only is it not true, it robs couples of even being able to enjoy similar or compatible things.

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    1. The activists have stricter sex roles than did even the straw-Victorians so loved by later generations. (You know, the Victorians where women were only in the domestic sphere of the house, and men were always outside the home doing fun stuff, unless the men were at home oppressing their wives and four to ten children.)

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      1. It’s simpler that way. Reality is messy. Chaotic. Lots of variables to it.

        But the things that are definite are usually quite solid, with very very tiny percentages of wiggle room. Light. Gravity. Electromagnetism. Chemistry.

        Then there’s biology.

        Complicated. But pretty discrete when it comes to sex, for the vast majority of life. And sex is pretty danged old, evolutionary speaking. It’s at least a billion years old, if not two. That’s billion with a B.
        Dinosaurs are toddlers compared to the biological age of sexual reproduction itself.

        When you’re making up a fictitious role, it helps to keep things simple. Cuts down on the confusion and making a fool of yourself with contradictions.

        If I had to guess, I’d put it down to an intersection (the weirdos just love that word. I’m stealing it back) of mental illness and cynical political opportunity/deleterious and garbled psiops program from decades long dead enemies.

        The mental illness is obvious. You can’t have people claiming to be unicorn pansexuals without sane people getting wise to the fact you’re loose from the loony bin. Or stubbly bearded fat guys claiming to be born in the wrong body, they were meant to be pretty little princesses.

        The world could use quite a bit more blunt honesty towards such foolishness. The Gods of the Copybook Headings were strong in the folks what raised me. Himself only knows what kind of foolishness I’d have to up to if not for a goodly bit of hard wisdom keeping me grounded.

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      2. Hence the term of abuse ‘TERF’, meaning ‘any feminist who believes what feminists have believed all along, and did not wake up on Tuesday proclaiming that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia’.

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  3. I hate to say it, but I do rather enjoy watching the radical feminists try and deal with all this. I remember when they forced the NYAC first to let the women in, then to let the women use the pool, then to require bathing suits in the pool because they’d let the women in in the first place. Now their little clubs have to let in blue haired crazy men and now their darling daughters are missing out on Scholarships because men seem to be better at women’s athletics than women are. They’re getting exactly what they asked for. Good and hard.

    It’s all a variation on the old advice about “staying away” from crazy. These people decided to fly the freak flag and now they’re reaping the results”

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    1. Unfortunately all other girls and women, including the majority who aren’t radical feminists, are suffering due to the same insanity.

      One of these fine days I expect that a “transwoman”, who likes to hang around in womens’ locker rooms and showers, will learn the lesson of “Murder on the Orient Express”. And maybe the jerks who like to beat women in sports will get the same in the locker rooms they like to “share”. I’ll cheer.

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  4. Thank You for writing this. This exactly articulates how I feel about the matter.

    I don’t care what you call yourself or your preferences sexually, unless your sexuality directly pertains to me – which it will not in the vast majority of cases. I actually do not want to know up front! I would rather get to know you as a human, and once I have a reasonable grasp on your personality and preferences in other things, I might possibly be induced to care about sexual preferences. But if you shove it in my face I am not going to react well and in fact will probably avoid getting to know you better, because you’ve made your sexual identity your whole identity, and that is not healthy in the least.

    Also, speaking as a woman, I do not appreciate men playing dress-up with an innate aspect of my identity. I don’t like drag or the trans movement for that reason. They are doing violence to the meaning of words. And femininity, which is about so much more than a woman’s body shape, types of clothing/makeup, and genitalia. It’s insulting, frankly, in so many ways.

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    1. “Womanface” some people call the current drag stuff. It’s aping being a woman but everyone knows it’s a guy pretending to be a woman in a badly exaggerated way. Like the old Vaudeville minstrel shows did with blacks was called “blackface.”

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    2. Except it isn’t necessarily even a sexual identity. They’ve conflated biology, sexual attraction, and other things that have actually varied from culture to culture, and they just CALL it sexual identity.

      As Sarah said “It’s all insane because you’re not comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to Ford Fieros and then throwing in some skyscrapers for funsies.”

      This is important, because young people are throwing away their ability to have children because they’re gay or tomboys or don’t like stereotypes or think that being male is toxic or that being female is being a victim.

      And that’s before you even start with the kids who actually do have mental illnesses.

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        1. Simply put, trans is just the latest cause du jour that the progressive left has jumped on to ride in their never ending quest for ever more money, power, and control. They did it with race, again with gay, and now want that same vehicle with trans, thus turning two separate issues a)transvestites as a kink and b)transgender (aka gender dysphoria) as a mental problem into something they can benefit from.
          My considered opinion in a nutshell:
          Transvestites, rock on dude, whatever floats your boat. Just don’t force me to play along.
          The medical modification of minors in support of gender dysphoria, often mostly in support of virtue signaling by twisted parents, is child abuse, pure and simple.
          And permitting biological males to compete as equals with biological females in women’s sports is and always has been nothing less than cheating. As I recall there were Eastern Block countries many years ago that got slapped down hard by the Olympic Committee for attempting similar shenanigans.
          Of course I am in my seventies so I am compelled personally to identify as a dinosaur.

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          1. Of course I am in my seventies so I am compelled personally to identify as a dinosaur.
            ………….

            Not in my seventies, yet (though it is a lot closer than it was). Hubby and his brother are in their ’70s, and they identify as older than dinosaurs – “Older than dirt.” Mom, who is still alive (88 1/2, do not leave off the 1/2) identifies as “Not dead. Phuuttttty.”

            The rest? 100%

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          2. Although I am somewhat younger, I could make a claim to being a dinosaur. Although I usually identify as some other species of lizard being. (no, not the political kind, those can go back to whatever alien planet they came from, they’re no kin I claim. ). I’m a respectable BookWyrm, so more dragonkind. Although a warmth-loving torpid version.

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    3. I agree with E.C. Trans and drag is a mockery of womanhood. Plus in addition to residing in the uncanny valley, many of the men LARPing as women come across as creepy and/or threatening.

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      1. Creepy? You ain’t kidding.

        I mean, I’m weird enough myself, not very perceptive socially, and miss a lot of cues that trigger my wife’s threat radar — many’s the time I’ve been told, “look threatening!” and wondered why — but some of these people trigger an “I don’t want to get anywhere near you, but I’ll kill you with my bare hands if I have to” kind of feeling.

        There are people who really do have a deep-seated mismatch between what their physical body and their perception of what it is. (I think it could be a proprioceptive thing.) I know a few trans folks personally, and it’s a fiendish torture that they didn’t choose. In my limited experience, they run about 50/50 between sweet damaged souls and totally deracinated.

        The current trans mania is not only cruelly damaging a lot of innocently vulnerable people, but also a magnet for the deranged and sociopathic. And it’s being purposefully exacerbated by some of the most vilely evil people humanity has ever produced.

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        1. I’ve seen comments on Gab that the autists (those who haven’t weaponized themselves) seem to be targeted for the trans-genocide. I assume that’s likely anybody on the spectrum could be put under pressure. I suppose anybody presenting as Odd gets the same pressure.

          Agreed on vile evil nature of those pushing it. Not sure they qualify as “people”. Infiltration by Satan’s minions, perhaps.

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          1. Also tween girls – the sort who are especially vulnerable to peer/social contagion.
            I guess being Odd (as in, ignored/shunned/hassled by the other girls in my age group) is actually immunizing.

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          2. Sarah herself has made that observation many times, that this whole thing is resulting in Odds in particular getting sterilized.

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            2. I was saying being left out of the in group resulted (in my case) in my attitude becoming, “You’re all going over a cliff and you want me to come? Nope. Don’t think so.”

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          4. In my teens, I was frequently asked if I was gay. In my sheltered innocence, I didn’t even know what what that meant. By the time I figured it out, to say definitely not, people stopped asking. But yes, even back then, if you were both Odd and chaste, it was a common suspicion. I can only imagine what it’s like now.

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            1. Oh, I was bullied for being gay, even though I wasn’t and never had the slightest inclination that way. This taught me an Important Life Lesson:

              Many apparent bigots are nothing of the kind. They’re just bullies, and will latch on to the nearest convenient excuse to do what they do.

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              1. Oh, I had been bullied for being Odd. long before the question of whether I was queer or gay ever arose. Those came from a new school, new crowd,, slightly more mature and mild in comparison. The lesson I learned was to never try to appease a bully, because if you bend over backwards for one, he will push you the rest of the way over and walk on your face. Which comes around to internet crybullies…the ones who scream ‘bigot, racist, homophobe, hater” loudest are usually the worst offenders themselves.

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              2. I had two boys ambush me in isolated corners and call me a “queer.” I had no idea what they meant. They spit on me and tried to trip/knock my books away. It was not a good time.

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        2. A really fun part of growing up (it’s a process that doesn’t stop) is suddenly having things click— “Oh, THAT is what that meant-” some of which have resulted in urgent “Hon? Do thing.” comments.

          Some of them I still don’t get– there’s some times when I go “I should not be in this place at this time” and I just GO because not worth it– but often times I can “see” the route that resulted in the outcome, like someone doing a monkey-dance before doing an attack.

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          1. doing a monkey-dance before doing an attack
            I don’t remember where I read that described, but it was a light-bulb moment – and oh so obvious in hindsight.
            I’m not a monkey-dance person. I’m a do or not do person.

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            1. I first saw it here– I think Sarah did an article that mentioned it, would have been… hm… somewhere around ’13 by the house I was living in when I saw it IRL and went “Hey, that IS right.

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        3. There are people who really do have a deep-seated mismatch between what their physical body and their perception of what it is.

          This isn’t just sex related– and no, this isn’t an “old men thinking they are young men” joke, even if it easily could be.

          There are a TON of conditions that boil down to “the me in the mirror isn’t the me in my head,” and the solution is NOT to get out an axe.

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          1. Yep. Nobody knows what the cause or the true nature of the trans thing is (at least as far as I’ve heard), but for the people who truly have this dysphoria and haven’t “acquired” it via social contagion, it’s a deep-seated thing that involves the fundamental, unconscious understanding of what you are.

            For a few of them, surgery and hormones seem to help. For the majority, it’s a fool’s errand. Pushing it on everyone, especially on children and teenagers, is evil with a capital E and stupid with a capital S. I don’t know what the success rate of psychological therapy is or if it’s been tried and studied consistently enough to have any useful data; it’s kind of a moot point right now anyway, because nobody’s even allowed to consider it.

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            1. Yep, either through overt repercussions or emotional blackmail of “But your kids will commit suicide if you don’t let them transition!” And when a lot of them do anyway because of the unholy mess of surgery, hormones, and perhaps a realization of “What have I done?!” after seeing that it didn’t help? The blame is on societal transphobia of course, especially from those evil Reich Wing Christofascists! It just simply can’t be taking a chainsaw and sledgehammer to a developing human being, no.

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              1. These poor young folks are in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. The people driving that Hobson’s choice situation are absolutely evil.

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            2. I don’t know. Apparently my deep seated understanding of what I am doesn’t include ‘human” except under duress.
              When I fell and got concussion, I woke up staring at my legs. But they were human, so they couldn’t be mine. I had to argue with myself to convince myself they were mine.
              I have no idea what the alternative was? Cat didn’t seem to be on the differential.

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            3. For a few of them, surgery and hormones seem to help.

              Even in those cases, I’d lay money they didn’t get the therapy that should be step one– it’s like helping an anorexic lose weight that isn’t there to lose.

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              1. According to one gentleman on Baen’s Bar, his wife was born a male.

                He said that “she” went through plenty of therapy (basically to see if the surgery was what she really needed) before they put her “under the knife”.

                And yes, neither he or his wife think much of the current day nonsense.

                She transitioned decades before this nonsense.

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              2. It’s likely…but I don’t know. I don’t even know if they were really mostly okay; all I can go by is what I saw, which is that they were kind, decent folks who seemed reasonably at home with who they were.

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      2. There’s also an element of hysteria. Wave after wave, each wave crazier than the last. I remain grateful that so far, they’ve been relatively non-violent. Relatively.

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  5. Sex of the human is assigned at fertilization, proveably and incontrovertably by simply noting pair 23. That person is male, or female, or sex-broken in fairly rare cases. But sex is there at then.

    Now why would they avoid saying or arguing -that-, versus arguing about
    “at birth”.

    Hmmmm.

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    1. I can’t give a crap about someone misgendering me. If they can look at me with my hairy arms and legs, facial hair and Adam’s apple and can’t figure out I’m male, that’s their problem, not mine.

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      1. I am 5’3, a double D, have definite hips and usually a child hitched on to one…and still get called “sir” because I tend to “walk like you’re military,” as best someone has told me. (I do love my stompy boots, but I wasn’t wearing them.)

        what folks “read” for sex is weird.

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        2. I’m 6’2, 285 lbs, bald with a beard. Masculine, almost stentorian voice.
          But because I am a librarian, I am called “ma’am” on a regular basis.
          Their is little logic involved. People are just complicated, and broken.

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    2. It’s part of the “Not human until born” argument, and also supports gender as a social construct rather than a biological fact.

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  7. I find the Assigned At Birth (AAB? reverse sheep?) business to be quite amusing, looking at it from the outside. Assigned? By whom? The doctor?

    If the doctor is not a deity, then no. Because it just so happens that the way the baby comes with an innie or an outie ain’t up to any mortal man. That’s Himself’s business, if anyones.

    So are the backwards sheep backdoor admitting the existence of Himself?

    Of course not. But watch ’em squirm when you point that out…

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Well, all the good students turned in their assignments correctly and on time. I suppose all those little boys and girls, er, did their homework?

        Like

      2. I have read that there are activists who campaign for all children to be put on compulsory puberty-blockers until they are legally of age and can choose their own sex. Because, you see, it’s cruel and tyrannical for biology to give them a sex they didn’t ask for, but massive chemical intervention to make them clinically unsexed is just tickety-boo.

        Like

        1. …and the fact that it will permanently screw up their endocrine systems is just a happy little bonus.

          Here’s an idea, let the ‘activists’ take the puberty-blockers and leave regular folks alone.

          I know, I know, if they could leave folks alone they wouldn’t be ‘activists’.
          ———————————
          The world is full of self-important, self-righteous, obsessed assholes, endlessly tormented by the conviction that Somebody, Somewhere is Doing Something they don’t approve of, and driven by a compulsion to Do Something About It at any cost.

          Liked by 2 people

    2. “Sex asigned at birth” assumes you are not a person before birth.

      Sex is determined at fertilization, not birth.

      Liked by 3 people

  8. To be honest? Lizard people from Proxima Centauri would probably be easier to deal with. Just apply the Three S rule and move on.

    [Yes, I’m plotting out a fight scene today. How can you tell?]

    Liked by 3 people

    1. “Three S Rule”?

      I’m thinking of the First S is shoot.

      The Second S is shovel.

      But I can’t think of the Third S.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. On the bright side, we have “The Hero with the Backpacks” (le heros aux sacs a dos) who went after the Annecy toddler stabber.

    He is Henri d’Anselme, a 24 year old Catholic social media guy, hiking around visiting French cathedrals and relying on Providence. So Providence put him where he could hit the stabber guy (and use one of his backpacks as an impromptu shield).

    He said he just instinctively protected the children, “as a Frenchman should.”

    Liked by 2 people

    2. I had heard nothing of this yet– looks like because it’s new, which is awesome.

      Also, I’m glad to see a dude doing the “rely on Himself to help me” thing instead of a woman, it’s more … fair?

      “I didn’t even think about it. The brain turned off,” he told French television.

      “It was impossible to let people be attacked by this person who seemed to be a furious madman. He tried at one point to attack me, our eyes met and I realised it was someone not in any normal state, there was something very bad in him that had to be stopped.”
      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/09/france-backpack-hero-henri-annecy-knife-attack

      Liked by 1 person

  10. The very worst part of the lizard plan was to tell young women to act like young men, and fail to marry and have children before their fertility cycle is done.

    Al Pacino is having a baby at 83, I think, but his pregnant wife sure isn’t 83. She’s in her twenties. I know so many women who are childless and regret it, because in their 20’s they were indoctrinated to pursue a career instead of marrying and becoming a mother. You can always have a career. But you can’t have a baby when your female fertility cycle is over.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. A couple of weeks ago, the movie thread over at Ace’s blog covered a 2022 film in which a “strong, empowered women” gradually came to the realization that her life was a mess amidst her attempts to fix herself. One of the scenes has her going to a clinic to have her eggs frozen, and apparently the director basically tells her (paraphrasing the paraphrase) “It has a 1% chance of working. Why are you believing all of the silly stories you read about fifty-year-old women having babies?”

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Even when you have a long fertility cycle (very true on both sides of the family; think into one’s 50s), it’s harder on the body later. I had three kids with no issue in my 30s and even without undue difficulties, the physical strain for the third was noticeably worse than that for the first.

      Good thing we’d only wanted three, because I would have had to call it quits regardless.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. You got that right, sister. Our last baby was when I was 37 and this is called a “geriatric pregnancy” in the ob shop. Baby girl came out perfect and healthy and I rallied, but it was like an aging quarterback getting back to his feet after a hit. Ouch. Groan.

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        1. My mom had my youngest sister Carolyn at 41. I could say that this wasn’t considered unusual, but I’d be lying. They were bringing in nursing students…..

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          1. Grandma had her last 2 at 40 and 42. (Six children altogether. 18 years between first and last. Would have two close together, then long stretch of none, two more close together, and repeat.)

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  12. All you really needed to do for a visual of the war on humans was to paste in an image of the Boston city hall. Yours does look super cool, and to be fair is more likely to draw readers in (which is the real point of having an image, after all), but it fails to convey the malevolence.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. The war on humans began a long time ago. I could cite Malthus, Sanger, Ehrlich, Freidan, and numerous others who have been preaching warfare against our own offspring for the past century. However, the sexual revolution has created a generation of adults who are confused about the biological and socially responsible role of sex, and who are projecting this confusion onto children. Often, not even their own children, That’s where lines are being drawn.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. It’s not so much that they’re aliens, it’s that our elites hate being human.

    They want to be gods. Namely, the massively asshole Greek and Elder One-type of gods. “Do something I don’t like, even if a thousand people have done it before and you’re annoying me? Turned into a spider for you and you’ll eat your kids first!”

    They want to be Zeus and shag anything that they want, and their wife will punish the woman responsible.

    They don’t have to be logical, reasonable, or consistent-because why should they?

    They’re horrible creatures. And if there is a reason to burn down Heaven, they’re the ones for it. (And don’t say “they are reigning in Hell.” Hell in all of it’s forms has more respect than these people.)

    Liked by 2 people

  16. One thing that gets me is the casual acceptance of gender ideology by mainline churches. This is helping to split the Methodists right now. (The big fight is whether to allow/not allow sexually active guys to be ministers).
    But how do they reconcile scriptures like, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” with, “You’re in the wrong body, but we can fix that.”
    Along with reinforcing the most rigid possible gender roles: if you like trucks and planes, you must be a boy! If you like dolls, you must be a girl! C.S. Lewis commented long ago on how pitifully people’s worldviews must be if they associated frankness and assertiveness in a woman with being masculine, or gentleness in a man with being feminine.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. The property clause and absolute power of bishops also played a role for some congregations. Not all, but some. It certainly was a hot-button around my part of the world.

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    1. And according to C. S. Lewis, he can look worse than that even if he didn’t want to. :twisted:

      Liked by 1 person

  18. Related if alighted OT, Naomi Wolf has a very disturbing piece out about the smoke in Manhattan. I admit, my first response to the, “Oh, this is awful,” posts was, “Well, you didn’t seem to care when the smoke blanketed Montana a couple of weeks ago, I guess it only matters whe. It happens to you.”
    But if she’s right, there was something off about that smoke. And she’s convinced our wannabe lords and masters are trying to kill us.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. They all leapt on the bandwagon of blaming forest fires on the fossil fuel industry with remarkable coordination.

      Liked by 1 person

      3. I don’t do video, but somebody posted satellite visuals of fires breaking out in Quebec. A bunch (17, I think) lit within seconds of each other. (should have several minutes of slop for the smoke to show, but lightning fires don’t do simultaneous.)

        Other folks were wondering about the orange smoke and the missing ammonium nitride cargo.

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        1. Can we get a confirmation on the video? Not that I doubt that there’s shady stuff afoot, but something like that would be easy to fake and I suspect that someone out there is trying to get the public wound up and paranoid for their own purposes.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. An outfit called “Lead Stories” claims that the video is based on 1 pic per 10 minutes, so lightning is plausible. OTOH, that same outfit specializes in “fact checking”, so take both sides with a grain of salt… To beat WP’s link moderation, try searching on quebec wildfire video and go to the Leadstories article

            I haven’t seen the following video (bandwidth issues), but it’s supposed to be the source for the one posted on Tik Tok (AKA, rumor central).

            Sounds as if it could be lightning. Our biggest fire in S Oregon two years ago was attributed to lightning, though that required a week or two smoldering in duff. I’ve witnessed a duff-fire that emerged several weeks later, so it is possible, though rather unusual.

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            1. Duff/stump smoldering from lightening is attributed to the 2003 Big Lake fire that shut down Hwys 126/20/22 at the top pass (after the 3 merge). Lightening can strike quickly in multiple locations. In the ’70s smoke was watched for. Rarely did multiple smoke show per storm, and most of those were nothing by the time two person crews showed up to check. Now the policy is to not even check unless a fire actually starts and even then, depending on location it is “monitor”. Multiple fires where it was jumped on immediately? Is almost guarantied to be suspected not-natural.

              Note. Not disputing RCPete’s take or the video’s (which I have not watched, yet) speculation on the Quebec fires, just stating my (admittedly very old) personal experience. Experience that was related to overtime (1.5x) (because storms hit late afternoon and crew was held over JIC) and hazard fire pay (1.75x) if location found fire. Pay, back then, was $2.35/hour … Big money! :-) Note, rarely saw hazard pay. (Without mentioning the area specifically, it is one that has a number of huge lightening caused fires over the last 10 years. So concern was/is warranted).

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              1. I’m going to go with the fact-check. With a frame rate of 1 picture per 10 minutes, a dry forest would appear to go up “instantaneously” if you weren’t paying attention to that frame rate.

                And yeah, I wouldn’t rule out arson–we had an amazing amount of fires in odd locations on various red-flag (extreme fire danger/ability to get crazy quickly) conditions. Combine with lightning starts and the sinal salute is warranted.

                Our FD didn’t work the delayed duff burn; it was ODF/USFS-protected land, but we were told that the owner said there had been a slash-n-trash burn two months previously in that area. Our property has some banks where the duff is a few feet thick. Whee.

                Flyover County gets a fair number of lightning strike fires each summer, though the Southern OR Cascades have been getting far more–who gets it from a given storm is dependent on the wind directions. Westside, it’s from storms from the W or NW. For us, it’s SW through NE. Nobody seems to get lightning from northerly storms, at least not in our region. Orographic lifting is a major factor for us. The joys of mountain and intermountain terrain.

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            2. Smoldering fires are weird. I know someone who discovered a smoldering stump right next to the cabin he lived in all summer for camp—and given how deep the fire was, there’s a good chance it was actually volcanic in nature. (Yes, close enough to an active Cascade to be possible, but kind of freaky and weird. Oh hey kids, looks like we got a magma finger right under your camp.)

              Like

        2. Canada has already arrested a bunch of arsonists. But our would be masters don’t talk about it. Lol.

          The AN was lost to an unsecured hopper gate. Such loss happens occasionally. Look at tracks that handle coal mines or grain elevators.

          Smoke is wrong color for AN
          Smoke from a mere car of AN wouldnt cross a continent. Etc.

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          1. ‘Canada has already arrested a bunch of arsonists.’

            Cool. I got called a communist yesterday because I dared to suggest that the Canadian government itself had not deliberately set the fires just to foul up New Yorkers’ lungs.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. They’re unhinged enough to think so, yes.

                Nobody, not even a Communist, sets fire to his own country merely to inconvenience other people with the smoke. The idea that anyone would is perfectly insane.

                Like

    3. Over the last few years when smoke obscured the Tetons. Or we had hot ashes raining on us and we were breathing smoke here in Oregon. All because of Their forest practice of mismanagement. And odds are the fires will reoccur here in Oregon because they’ve left the standing burned dead timber; that is what historically happens. It is possible that the sticks standing won’t carry burn. But with the brush undergrowth occurring, especially prevalent is the grease in fire Scotch Broom invader, not something I’d bet against.

      Regarding how the smoke looks? Looks just like what we saw.

      Like

      2. When our eastern Oregon smoke gets up close and personal (a couple of fires since I left the rural FD many years ago), it’s been brown or grey, though that’s usually our local fuels; lots of pine and dvarying amounts of. (North slopes here don’t have much, southern exposures a fair amount; we’re right at the edge of the active zone for juniper.)

        One of the worst parts of the Bootleg fire here was when it hit a big stand of beetle-killed ponderosa pines.

        I mentioned the Biscuit fire (2002) fueling a more recent fire because the “environmentalists” applied lawfare until the standing dead trees had no economic purpose. That was malice aforethought.

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        1. Those. FUCKING. ….

          Snarls

          I don’t have words for how much I hate the fools who did that. And I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a fire that’s started there and hit the Rogue Valley floor since.

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          1. hasn’t been a fire that’s started there and hit the Rogue Valley floor since
            ………..

            They tried. They wiped out (most of) Phoenix & Talent Oregon.

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            1. A lot of South Medford got hit. As I recall, it was supposed to have been a lone nut. Could have been worse. There’s a medium sized city near there that combines poor escape routes with a “trees and brush are essential, and OK if overgrown” attitude. I avoid that place as much as possible.

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      3. You can get 90% of my family into tears by talking about what will happen WHEN the pine-bore dead timber burns.

        Because it’s not an “if.”

        And it will sterilize.

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        1. We saw the results (multiple fires) east of Jasper. One big fire from Fall 2022. Luckily the prevailing wind is NW to SE and spared the town (they lost power infrastructure). Same fire starting NW of them and the town will be gone. The burned area is reverting to meadow (they aren’t in the high prairie ecosystem of Edmonton further east).

          Now Waterton 2017 fire that swept in from a lightening fire west of them (wilderness area just over the Alberta border in BC) they were extremely lucky to not loose the town. The burned areas, not sterilized (rocky cliff areas) are reverting to prairie. The ecosystem there is was a unique representation of high elevation prairie meets high steep mountains with trees. Took out Aspen Groves, Pines, and Spruce, indiscriminately. Heard more than a few stories from locals (grew up in area and now own/work businesses).

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      4. Back when we had actual forest management, I remember “bad” fires being a couple of days of bad air.

        I survived the Tubbs FIre and people were calling me all SORTS of names when I pointed out that there was no real forest management being done in California for YEARS. We’re lucky we didn’t get firestorms sweeping across most of the state. It has happened before, and even without the help of non-native euclaypus trees (suckers are pure trash-they grow fast, very sappy so that they are useless for most things and they burn hot).

        I’d revel in the East Coast’s suffering, if it wasn’t for the fact that the people that should suffer…aren’t.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I spoke with a forest management expert last summer (amusingly, he’s one of those guys who looks super-young, so he looked like one of the scouts and not one of the counselors.) He said that the best forest management in California is all private industry, particularly timber company lands.

          And that you can prove it by matching fire perimeters with land ownership borders.

          (He was teaching Forest Management among other things and one of the things he was doing was showing the proper way to build burn piles that he was going to come back and burn in winter. “My job is to set the forest on fire.”)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. A thing that I have heard of being done on federal lands is that somehow the piles of removed trees/slag turn out to magically end up in piles that are good for exactly that kind of burning.

            They tend to weirdly catch on fire after the first big snow, too.

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        1. Last 2 summers (hasn’t hit yet for 2023) triggered “Wait? What? I thought we did away with fall burns!” Grass field and logging piles/slash burning. Okay, really the latter went away because they freaking stopped public logging, and private went to just pulling slash out for firewood finders burning for electricity (I am not kidding – Seneca, now Sierra. OTOH the plant isn’t dependent on wind or solar and they get it for free-ish).

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    4. One item that I’m guessing she’s either not aware of, or has forgotten – a couple of years ago, when California’s wildfires were once again running out of control, I saw a picture of San Francisco with a bright orange sky. I sent the picture to a friend of mine who lives just south of San Francisco, and she confirmed that the picture was accurate.

      At the same time, the sky here where I live in LA County was a very dirty brown, something that I don’t recall seeing in the past. It wasn’t the smog that I’d seen growing up. It was very definitely something different.

      Like

      1. Inland northwest had that kind of sky with the big fires that took out a bunch of apple orchards… five years back now?

        Make Spokane look even more hellish than usual.

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          1. Hey, so was I!

            Last thing I did at the convention before going to visit our local friends was to win a poster from John Picacio’s Loteria game.

            Like

      2. One of those times when knowing the correct answer to “why is the sky blue?” is useful.

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        1. Nah, this is just the lead up. If we have another Dark Day that will be more impressive.

          Like

    8. There’s nothing amazing about that smoke, I’ve been breathing it all week. About what you’d expect at a provincial park around dinner time, maybe a bit less. Smells like there’s a fire somewhere, reduced visibility.

      This is from fires in Quebec and I’m basically down by Lake Erie. So, big f-ing fires. First time I’ve seen anything like it here in Ontario.

      Of interest is the media response. I’ve been getting AIR QUALITY WARNING!!!!! on my phone all week. Media is saying if you go outside you’re gonna DIEEEEEEE!!!! for sure.

      Also of interest, the government including the PM Shiny Pony are all in lockstep claiming this is Glowball Warmening and Evil White Colonists! are responsible.

      This at a time when you can SEE that it is arson by the map. Quebec, so many fires. Ontario, right next door, same weather same forest mismanagement, very few fires.

      So here we are treated to the freaking Prime Minister of the freaking country blaming arson fires on climate change and racism, with the media cheering and eating it up while telling us all to lockdown and stay inside and wear a mask. Not even kidding. Because the dentist mask can protect you from wood smoke, uh huh.

      Business as usual here at Chez Phantom. The days of heeding warnings from the government are over. That’s the net result of all their crying wolf since the 1990s, nobody answers the call anymore. Good job, Liberals.

      Liked by 1 person

  20. IMO, much hyper-specific disclosure has the conscious or not purpose of speeding shopping for an “encounter”. Why the hurry? Perhaps terror of being “left out”.

    Like

  21. I wish your readership was routinely in the millions. And I wish I could write as coherently as you do. Thanks. This was one of those articles that hits the targets and makes you think regardless of where you believe you stand.

    Like

  23. June 15, 2024: White House releases message intercepted by NASA.

    “Greetings people of Earth! We of the planet Malthus have been monitoring your world for many of your news cycles. We have grown very concerned about your climate change and opposition to gender-affirming care (we have sixty genders our selves). But we are impressed with the intelligence and wisdom of such leaders as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and now feel the time is right to help usher your world into the People’s Socialist Democratic Union of Planets. Acting in partnership with your leaders, we will assist you in the vital process of population reduction, social credit and neopronoun enforcement. This process will take more than one human lifetime, but we believe the end results will be worth it.”

    Liked by 1 person

  24. The problem I have with drag or trans is that they raise the cost of finding compatible members of the opposite sex with whom to form a life-long relationship with the intention of having and raising children. Which is probably why I prefer gays stay in their gay bars, and not flood other venues for meeting members of the opposite sex. I don’t know of any guy who is going to drop $100+ on a date and be happy to find out that Lola isn’t a girl at the end of it (unless of course he is gay and picked heshe up at said gay bar.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Over at Ace’s blog, I’ve seen people state (note that I haven’t confirmed it myself) that violence against the trans types is often men belatedly discovering that the “woman” that the man in question picked up for a little action is trans, and not biological. The man gets angry at what he sees as being tricked, and takes it out on his “date”.

      Like

    2. I once saw a meme where a “woman” was messaging “her” date about how “she” had a great time and wanted to confess that “she” was trans. The guy was supportive and things were great until he admitted that he was bisexual, at which point the “woman” went off the deep end because he wasn’t accepting “her” as a woman, he was seeing it as hooking up with a guy.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. LOL

        Sounds like the trans version of the pre-meet-up texts where the guy accepts all of the woman’s physical shortcomings, but she flips out when he reveals that he’s short.

        Liked by 2 people

    1. You too? I thought it was just me, because I changed my E-mail address. Now everything’s gone wonky, a lot of avatars keep changing. I had one locked in, now it’s playing Musical Monsters with me.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It switched my monsters as well. For a while it was flipping back between old and new. The new ones differed between whether I started the thread, or was replying to someone else’s comment. Now they’re all the new reply monster.

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        1. Yep. New avatar monster. I thought it looked weird for a moment, then shrugged and put it down to WP being broken as usual.

          I am SO glad I never paid money for WP. Wow.

          Like

    1. Never mushroom gravy. Proper mushroom soup can be made into a decent enough gravy for biscuits, bacon, and eggs (with sufficient pepper, flour, and salt). But the stuff masquerading as mushroom gravy has not impressed me to date.

      Like

    2. Any opinions on fava beans, paired with a nice Amarone?

      (I’m given to understand it was Amarone in the book, switched to Chianti in the movie because more people would recognize it.)

      Liked by 1 person

  27. Dropping things like “I’m attracted to men/women” in the same pot as “I’m a woman who likes carpentry and is stronger than most women; I like women; I like wearing flannel, I MUST be a man in a woman’s body” is crazy enough.

    Natural extension of the “male brain” nonsense I was given as a teen– my mom got it, too.

    See, we were too rational… so we’d never date, never marry, and never had kids.

    Yes, we are all three the highest child producers for our generation in our family.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Oof. I don’t know if that bit of pseudoscience was concocted by leftists or not, but it’s dumb enough to fit the pattern.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I didn’t even watch Saturday Night Live and I could recognize half of the Pat skits, because my school had a lot of motherless fers.

        Like

    2. ‘too rational’.. Are you freaking kidding me? You can pry my mind from my split skull.

      Like

        1. My understanding was that they already had that idea. ‘Zero Emissions ‘ goals and all.

          They will, of course, have to work for it. And might be well advised to grab some stakes and garlic if they want it to stick.

          Liked by 2 people

        1. Very Off Topic

          Several years ago, I read of a woman who was talking about “why men don’t commit (to relationships with woman).

          The one thing I remember was that she talked about women attempting emotional manipulation of men in order to “change the men into what the women wanted them to be”.

          The problem was that the men knew what the women were doing and considered the women dishonest not only for denying it but by using “emotional manipulation” in their denial.

          The woman’s point was “why should men commit to women who aren’t honest with them and attempt to emotionally manipulate them”. :lol:

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Sometimes, definitely A Thing.

            For those curious, the more common guy version is lying to make her “happy”– like, she asks, ‘do you want to do X,’ and you say Yes because she wants you to say Yes, and then you do everything you can to sabotage it. Because then she’ll still be sad, and actively beaten down, but it wasn’t your fault, and you might actually say that, too.
            Humans being human, they can both be done by anybody.

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            1. Yep. Rather than trying to get to know your partner, and learning their likes and dislikes and where you differ… you cheat and pretend to like something for a little bit. Then do other stupid shenanigans.

              Proper human behavior, civilized behavior, is not like this. Anti-civilized people are to be avoided like the cultural plagues they are.

              Liked by 1 person

  28. It just occurred to me…

    Tucker Carlson is poised to become the replacement for Rush Limbaugh.

    Maybe this has already occurred to others. But I haven’t seen anyone suggest it yet.

    Like

      2. More than Tucker have wanted to become the next Rush. All have failed so far, in my book.

        But TuCa might make his own mark. Give him time. He is now, I think, where he needs to be.

        His own boss. Away from Fox. Unfettered, unfiltered, and unafraid.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I think Tucker Carlson will do well if he sticks to being Tucker Carlson the reporter guy and keeps reporting what’s actually happening. He’ll have the field virtually all to himself.

          Liked by 1 person

      3. From just listening to with half an ear his virgin voyage….

        He can keep on wishing, and also piss off.

        Rush had a … perspective, we’ll say.

        He was honest about it.

        Carlson?

        I haven’t watched him before (we don’t have cable), in the roughly fifteen minutes I listened to while my husband was on his channel, I ticking off rational violations pretty much constantly.

        Well, I called them Stupid Rhetoric Tricks.

        Rush used them, sure.

        As SEASONING.

        On solid meat.

        Not the main dish.

        Liked by 1 person

              1. It’s more righteous payback for putting up with my weirdness every day. (“Ten mile long spaceships made of ice, and they talk!” That sounds -so- weird when you say it out loud.)

                I’m told it was decided some years ago that I’d be allowed to live. I’m weird, but handy for cutting grass, dealing with things that go bump in the night, and getting stuff off the top shelf. ~:D

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                  1. I’m my wife’s 2-legged jar opener and litter box cleaner. Among so many other things.

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  29. Hum. Not a subject I give much thought to or spend any real time considering. I do allow we’re living in an age of mass psychosis regarding and including sex and just about everything, but such doesn’t affect me much.

    I would be quite willing however, if one demands I utilize curious pronouns address them, to consider the all inclusive pronoun when we’re conversing; she/it/he, said fast.

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    1. More and more, I’m think that if somebody wants me to use some strange pronoun to refer to them that I’d just call them “it”.

      On the other hand, if I’m annoyed enough, I’d call them jerk or assh*le.

      Like

      2. Depending on the being in question, I would go with “Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla” or “Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla.”

        If some dim bulb asks me for my pronouns, I think I’ll go with “Albert Andreas Armadillo.”

        But then, I’m helpful like that. ;-)

        Like

    2. I’m actually thinking about putting together a parts list to build your own guillotine. Optional slide option for getting rid of the bodies as a separate list. And a warning that “this is a novelty item and should not be built…”

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      1. They are supported by tinpot tyrants who want any excuse to boss somebody around, by bootlickers looking for easy boodle, and by cowards who will go along with anything to get along.

        It’s a combination very similar to the people that supported Julian the Apostate’s official pagan ‘church’ in fourth-century Rome. He thought he could get rid of those nasty Christians by organizing the old religions into a monolithic body. Instead, he created a money-sucking bureaucratic monstrosity that died the day he did.

        In a great many cases, the crazy is only influential because it is subsidized.

        Liked by 1 person

  32. Along these same lines, but talking about body modifications ……. I am a person with tattoos. However, my tattoos come about because I am part of a culture that is outside the norms. I served a career in the Army and I am a combat veteran of multiple wars. And an NCO, not an officer. Put that all together and I’m part of a small culture outside the mainstream that gets tattooed. Like Bikers. And Rockers. And Japanese Gangsters. And so on.

    Except somewhere in the 2000’s this started changing. And I started seeing “normal folks” getting tattooed. And now it has become a norm. Which is fucking weird, to be honest.

    It’s not that tattoos are inherently good or bad (except according to some religions). Instead it is that we have moved the goalposts. But, as in all things that are fads, whether we are talking about “gender identification” (whatever that means) or being tattooed …. Ultimately, these things are cultural fads driven by peer pressure, media, culture. We can go back to the Roman era and see similar craziness.

    I believe that people who get tattooed because it is part of the cool mainstream and people who become transgender because it is part of the cool mainstream will live to regret it. Indeed, we are already seeing that today with “normals” who are tattooed. And it won’t be long before we see similar with “normals” that chose to be transgendered.

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  33. What would the lizard aliens do if they wanted to destroy us? Well, Manny, they’d throw rocks.

    I’ve long said that the whole “gender non-binary” movement is just pathological sexism, but I can see where it’s coming from. Imagine you’re a person somewhere near the start of your third decade on the planet. Your entire life you’ve been taught that the collective is the most important thing and that you need to sacrifice for the greater good (THE GREATER GOOD). But you still have this pesky ego that insists that you’re different from him and her and those jackwagons over there. So how do you reconcile this discrepancy? Well, you can create a new group that ultimately only has you as a member, that allows you to satisfy the demands of your ego while letting you believe you’re working for a collective of some kind.

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      1. I imagine they could figure out the number and spacing of the rocks to wipe us out without completely destroying the planet.

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      2. Perhaps the Lizard People evolved on this planet when the dinosaurs ruled the place, then the asteroid hit so they booked to another planet and now when they return the place is over run by hairless apes. No doubt they feel the planet is theirs, sorry pal your kind bit the dust, it’s our turn now. Personally I just think they are insane, if there are Lizard people I doubt they’d want anything to do with us. We be crazy.

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          1. I mentioned Robert E Howard’s Serpent Men before and one aspect of them was that they predated “hairless apes” and hadn’t left Earth.

            So they aren’t returning to retake their home.

            They’ve been fighting humans secretly for thousands of years and now appear to be on the edge of victory. [Very Big Grin]

            And of course, as King Kull showed them, being on the edge of victory just means that us “hairless apes” can see who/what we need to kill. :twisted:

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  34. We were spirits long before we started animating human bodies. The conceit that life begins at birth limits the information one brings to bear on the problems of sex, gender, and the rest of the human condition. We can reincarnate as either sex, any race, and evidently any species. Our ability to forget this fact makes for interesting discussions.

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    1. As the lawyers like to say, ‘Cites facts not in evidence.’

      To clarify: I agree with the Aristotelean definition of the soul as ‘the substantial form of the body’, where ‘form’ is a term of art taken from Plato. By that definition, even if you contain some spiritual substance that existed before you were conceived, that substance in the past was not you: just as the atoms in your physical body were not you before you ingested them and incorporated them into your tissues. No advocate of reincarnation has ever shown me, in any rationally intelligible way, how one person’s existence could be said to be the continuance of the life of another person long since dead.

      I am afraid that after long consideration, on the balance of the evidence and arguments, I take the same view of reincarnation as that taken parenthetically by G. K. Chesterton: ‘Egypt (with its enormous population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of an unnecessary number of novels.’ How many people claiming to have lived past lives also claim to have been royal or famous personages in those lives? There have not been enough princesses (Egyptian or not) in the history of the world to go round for all the lunatics who claim to be reincarnations of one.

      Mrs. Hoyt has offered sound arguments from science and from everyday human experience. You attempt to contradict her with unsupported mystic woo-woo. Sir, you do not convince; though I do not doubt that you will persuade yourself that you do.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Until you have communicated with spirits, your referencing of long-dead scholars in defense of your existence as a meat body is a commendable effort at self-delusion. You probably even believe that we originated on this planet. Mrs Hoyt’s arguments are based on her personal observations which I respect. Your arguments are based on other’s opinions and the idea that if you can’t see spirits, they don’t exist. This idea falls apart on the most cursory observations of spiritual activity.

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        2. 1. Have you, personally, ‘communicated with spirits’?

          2. If so, how do you know they’re not just the voices in your head?

          Have ‘spirits’ ever imparted to anyone, anywhere, at any time, verifiable information which could not reasonably have been obtained from mundane sources? Has any actual evidence which specifically supports the existence of ‘spirits’ ever been presented? Evidence which could not have a dozen other explanations within the bounds of known phenomena?

          Philosophers, scholars and crackpots have been trying to find evidence of ‘spirits’ for all of recorded history, and likely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before that. None have succeeded. I know, you will claim that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ but if you say there’s an elephant in the room and no elephant is visible, and none of the furniture is remotely big enough to conceal an elephant, a reasonable person would conclude that you are mistaken.

          If you want me to accept something as true, I require unambiguous evidence. “Because I say so!” is not evidence of any kind.
          ———————————
          Facts do not depend on opinions. Unfortunately, for far too many people, opinions do not depend on facts, either.

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          1. Philosophers, scholars and crackpots have been trying to find evidence of ‘spirits’ for all of recorded history, and likely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before that. None have succeeded.

            If there had actually been no results, that would suggest that the standard should be examined for flaws– a smoke alarm that never goes off is not necessarily indicating there is no smoke, for example.

            However, there have been formal investigations that found evidence of “spirits.”

            They’re saint investigations.

            Also studies about demonic influence.

            The contrast between the results for those, and the ones for reincarnation, are highly suggestive.

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          2. If spirits do not exist, the purely material explanation for various phenomena is that human psychology is as weird as all get out.

            For a sufficiently weird but purely material human psychology, spirits effectively exist.

            You do not get to claim ten thousand years of testimony, if you first ignore the evidence of behavior that is a bit outside of your personal experiences.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. If spirits do not exist, the purely material explanation for various phenomena is that human psychology is as weird as all get out.

              –
              Ummm…yeah? Have you been paying attention for the last few years? The weird has gone downright exponential. If there is any limit to the weirdness of human psychology, it is not apparent. People can, and do, fool themselves into the most bizarre beliefs even when the proof that they’re wrong is staring them right in the face.
              ———————————
              When reality fails to conform to your theories, it’s not the universe that’s wrong.

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        3. In fact, you are completely wrong about what my arguments are based on. But you don’t have any argument at all, merely a bald assertion based on an idea (reincarnation and spiritual pre-existence) that most people do not, in fact, accept and are under no obligation to accept.

          The fact that you use a loaded term like ‘meat body’ places your entire screed beneath the level of serious discussion. Bodies are not made out of meat; meat is made out of dead bodies. I don’t know about the culinary practices on the planet you claim to have originated on, but here on Earth, we do not serve live cows as beefsteak.

          Sir, I have investigated these phenomena for forty years and have seen nothing, nothing, either in theory or experience, to support the views you proclaim so dogmatically. Yet you have the crust to accuse me of ‘self-delusion’.

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          1. Meat body is pure, distilled Gnosticism. One has to wonder if the discussion here on that topic has attracted its adherents.

            Liked by 1 person

        4. Assumes things unprovable by the scientific method, so I will have to dismiss from THIS rational public forum.
          You are free to believe whatever you want to, but not to state it as fact, sorry.

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        5. Scientology?

          We exist in this world in our bodies. Those are the observed facts. All else is speculation, not observation. If you can’t see it, and you can’t see its effects or measure them, then there’s a problem with the theory.

          My views on the subject are my own and I shall not share them, but I will say that starting with observed reality will seldom steer you wrong.

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      2. TBF the population was so much smaller, that everyone reincarnating now could have been famous.
        OTOH it assumes facts not in evidence by definition.
        Also, as a gateway writer, I can tell you there is not much difference between getting the subsconsciously built voice of an imaginary creature and “past life memories.” Feel wise, I suspect it would be exactly the same. So– again, the thing is unprovable.

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        1. Was there enough previous population to supply the currently alive? Didn’t we start with two? Where did the other nine billion come from? Recycling can only get you so far, right?

          And has there ever been anybody claiming to be the reincarnation of Feckless Bob the dimwit stable boy? ~:D

          Liked by 2 people

            1. Bleach! ~:D The Soul Society is running out of souls! Bankai!

              Off off off topic, I’m trying to find a way to work “Bankai!” into my current WIP. For when the ten mile long starship does her party trick, pointing the drive at something and hitting the “Engage!” button. I just feel the need for her to scream it at the top of her lungs. Probably stupid, but moments like that are why I write my own. Because who else is going to do it?

              Liked by 1 person

              1. From an SFRPG (Traveller is my preferred game/setting) perspective, I found it highly amusing when I read of a gaming party of “ethically-challenged merchants” naming their pirate starship She’s One of Ours, Sir.

                Liked by 2 people

            2. Barovia, I believe, has a similar problem. Half the populus are supposedly soulless shells wandering around repeating the same rote phrases/actions ad infinitum.

              You know your D&D world is in a bad place when some NPCs are even more NPCs than the others.

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            1. To be fair, the Buddhists and the Hindus both have all of us making our way up the ladder from the lowest to the highest, so theoretically a new human can be the highest expression of last generation’s best dog. When humans ascend they get off the Wheel and rejoin the All.

              Or they find out the Wheel is bigger than we thought, and humans aren’t the final step. Then they’re stuck going through it as a Higher Being, stuck at the bottom of the Higher Being pecking order. Again. ~:D

              “Oh, you’re the reincarnation of Mumbo the Magnificent, honored saint and priest-king of all the Earth? Congratulations, well done. Here’s your shovel, the stables are over there.”

              Liked by 1 person

              1. You only wish you were previously a dog. Mathematically speaking, if cross species reincarnation is a real thing we all spend a LOT more time as nematodes than as every other type of creature combined.

                Liked by 2 people

              2. I have read an Asian writing (sorry, forget the exact country) that wailed about how many human WASTED such a valuable thing as a life as a human.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Yeah, I’ve read things like that too. Some guys get all wound up about it. The “Righteous!” finding yet another reason to belabor the commoners. Brahmins make a living out of it in India to this day, scolding the lower castes.

                  In that regard, I’ve always liked Monkey King. Steal peaches off the Tree of Life, let all the horses out of the Celestial Stable, then beat the ever-loving frack out of Super Righteous God Of War Guy when he comes to object. Monkey King is a jackass, but he’s my kind of jackass. ~:D

                  Liked by 1 person

          4. Not just numbers of souls, numbers of interesting souls. I’ve never heard anyone who was a mine slave or slave prostitute in their previous life. For that matter, I’ve never heard anyone who was a peasant and we’re all from the King of England to, well, me descended from peasants.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. When I was in high school a friend of mine was of the opinion that I was the reincarnation of an old Chinese boat captain. Reincarnated because he died of crashing his boat with valuable cargo on board.

              We were all smart-asses in high school, right? ~:D

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            2. “I’ve never heard anyone who was a peasant”

              About the only person I’ve heard of would be Patton, who claimed memories from everything from a prehistoric hunter to a steppe tribesman, Greek hoplite, Roman Centurion, up to one of Napoleon’s Field Marshals.

              Liked by 1 person

            3. Common joke; was actually made by people at the time who believed in this stuff, but didn’t accept everyone was telling the truth.

              Short version of their writings, first off folks tend to favor the cool stories (“Why don’t we see toilets on Star Trek?”) and secondly if you recycle enough you are GOING to have at least ONE FREAKING COOL STORY, JUST ONE.

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              1. (I absolutely do not believe in reincarnation in the faintest degree, I may be persuaded of some kind of historical memory so stuff actually echoes through human memory; I just think the context is super cool. Although no I don’t know WHICH at least from the 70s probably older books it was I inhaled.)

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            4. Chesterton once complained that they were all tales of ancient Egyptian princess and their lovers. Not, oh, ancient Chinamen, or Chaldeans, or even ancient Europeans.

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              1. And only from the extremely short interval of recorded history. Nobody remembered being Gronk the Caveman in 170,000 BC. Or Horg the Homo Habilis from a million years ago.

                Modern humans have been around for more than 200,000 years. Compared to that, ‘Ancient’ Egypt is mighty recent.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Robert E Howard documented the past lives of a gentleman who remembered lives in pre-history.

                  In one of these stories, the prehistorical man fought and killed a giant worm-like monster. He died in the slaying but his story appears to have been the origin of stories about monster-slayers.

                  Another in another of these remembered past-lives involved a fight with a winged-being that was the last remaining of its kind, a species predating the rise of humans.

                  Much more impressive than Egyptian Princesses and their lovers. :grin:

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                  1. Parsimonious explanation: Patton had a better imagination than the hordes of reincarnated princesses. His inventiveness on the battlefield is sufficient to confirm this.

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              1. Ah, but you can make that work for you: you’re not making mistakes, you’re doing things that would have worked in your previous life, but things have changed enough now, that they don’t!

                XD

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          5. I’ve often stated that if reincarnation was a thing, I wouldn’t have been Caesar. Given my proclivities, I’d have been the slave boy smearing goose grease on the axles of Caesar’s chariot before he went on parade.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Nothing of course about it. You could have been Catskin, or Little Catskin, or Mossycoat, or Cap O’ Rushes, or Maid Maleen or Catherine or Kari Woodengown

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        2. Well, the population then was so much smaller that most of the people reincarnating now would not have been human in the past, let alone famous. And one very rarely hears of people who claim to have been peasants or hunter-gatherers in their past lives, even though that’s what the overwhelming majority of the human race was until quite recently.

          If I understand what you mean by ‘gateway writer’, I have tendencies that way myself, and I fully agree with you. In any given instance, are you (1) remembering something that, by its nature, cannot be fact-checked, or (2) subconsciously making it up? There is no reliable way to distinguish the two.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Years ago, I read a short SF story about an overpopulated world that faced a problem.

            An extreme number of children were being born lacking human intelligence.

            IE They were just animals mentally.

            One of the characters believed that because there were some many humans on Earth that there were not enough non-incarnated souls left to be reincarnated into human bodies.

            Obviously, there was no way to prove it, assuming that all humans were reincarnated from people who lived earlier, it made some sense. :wink:

            Liked by 1 person

              1. Or as Jerry Pournelle put it when Doom came out with the first playable demo:

                “Heroinware: the first taste is free.”

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    2. Gentle reminder from a member of the Raiding Party: specific questions and comments about religious beliefs and theology are OK for discussion, but getting into broader religious debates is not allowed. It gets ad hominem and slips into argument and talking past each other very quickly. Sarah prefers that we not do that.

      You (in the broad “all y’all” sense) are more than welcome to believe what you believe and to mention those beliefs. Arguing from faith and things that can’t be proven is where the problem lies. [See the FAQ and BBQ page for more details.]

      Thank you, and we return you to your regularly unscheduled programming.

      Liked by 1 person

  36. It is all designed to pit us against each other and to once again attack God by attacking the church. They attack the church and God because god made them different, More Self Loathing which is what this is all based upon. They hate themselves because they think somehow they are not right, duh, no one fits the insane view Liberals and Elites have of the world and themselves, because it is insane.
    While everyone fights about sex and sexuality, they steal the treasury and make themselves richer, which is another problem in itself. Once you have more than you need the rest is just another form of mental illness. The Scrooge McDuck Syndrome. The solution is simple, don’t play their game. Walk away, because it may be fun to be around crazy on occasion, but it is no place to live.
    I don’t care what you do as an adult, with other adults. I don’t care what you play with as an adult so long as it is consensual and with another adult. Just don’t do it on my coffee table or my front yard. You want to claim to be a duck and live in a pond, fine by me. None of us really care what you do, none of us.
    But once you start mutilating children to feed you pocket book or your own perversions, yep you need to be purged from society and society will have no problem doing so. The dirty secret the elites and others won’t tell you is. ‘You either help society move forward, or you will be purged by Society, period, dot, end of fking story.
    Culture is not the elites, it’s the rest of us all together. Just ask Bud light and Target. If they actually controlled society they would see every hula hoop and frisbee, innovation coming. They couldn’t even predict Beanie Baby’s and Cabbage Patch dolls. Not to mention every other fad that made people millionaires, people not them. They suck at everything and only occasionally make head way, then once again they are thrown back into their holes.
    Don’t play their game, and ignore them, they really go crazy then. Crazier, because to put it simply, they are F    king insane, and they know it.

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  37. I read this post, and it occured to me to wonder if the newspapers in Germany around 1932 were filled with crazy sh*t like we see now.

    For example, this year unlike other years, there is finally pushback against the rainbow steam-roller. School kids in Canaduh, in suburban/semi-rural Quebec no less, are rebelling against the mandatory rainbow celebration. Kids in York region in Ontario are getting in big trouble with the teacher, also rebelling against the rainbow enforcement and daring to protest -against- the school board letting boys in the girl’s bathroom.

    Not to mention the brand destruction wrought by Target and Bud Lite against themselves. Epic.

    So, what do I see in the papers this week? UFOs. For real, freaking UFOs with a new acronym and a new marketing push.

    Why now? Well, the plague seems to have come to nothing, and the tranny thing is clearly over. Labeling Moms as terrorists for raising hell over pedo-grooming at school did not work out the way they planned, Trump has not knuckled under, and the economy is pretty well F-ed. The electric car thing is not going well, the windmills and solar are basically over just like the tranny thing.

    The Normies are moving on. Tucker Carlson drew more eyeballs with a YouTube video than ALL the television news combined. (I have yet to see that by the way, but anything that includes Obama’s “strange and highly creepy personal life” is a must see!)

    Numbers do not lie.

    What’s their go-to plan? Killing livestock and scaring the Normies with UFOs. Oh, and more electric cars. Also the Air Force is determined to have all black, female and black female pilots flying their F-16s because EQUITY!!!

    Better than dwelling on the reasoning behind leaving so much inventory of vehicles and etc. in Afghanistan. Which was a distraction for something worse, I’m sure.

    This is psychological warfare against us, the general population. Straight up. We are the enemy now. I’m defending myself by reducing my exposure.

    Speaking of which. In the interests of defeating the psyop, I want to encourage one and all -NOT- to look up “top surgery” and “bottom surgery”. Such bland and every-day names for procedures which are anything but. I know very little about it, because I’ve tried as hard as I can to not-know. From what I’ve been unable to avoid, I assure you ignorance is bliss. You do not want to know.

    I do know quite a lot about surgery in general, from the what-happens-afterward perspective. Physical therapists are the ones you call when things don’t really work out right. In my considered opinion, these “gender” surgeries are fraught with peril. A knee replacement would be less dangerous. You -really- don’t what to know what happens when it doesn’t turn out right.

    Literally everything in the media about “transitioning” is a psyop. The people selling it are evil perverts. The people caught up in it are victims of evil perverts. That’s all one really needs to know.

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    1. TPTB are expecting “There be UFO’s! Really! Honest! We are not alone in this universe!” to be a distraction? For this crowd? Others?

      Are they nuts? Oh. Wait. Never mind.

      Topic is a nothing-ville. Duh. Of coarse we aren’t alone. The idiots.

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      1. They’re already backpedaling. I read today where all this secrecy is -aktchually- due to bureaucrats bureaucrat-ing about crashed drones. “Was it Title-10 or Title-50 secrecy?” type things.

        Is there somebody else out there somewhere? I sincerely hope so. Are they so lame they crashed after crossing light years to get here? I strongly doubt it.

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          1. To be fair, such ‘primitive technology’ might pick up on them because it’s so primitive. (Assuming they traveled through our neighborhood.) The spacecraft in question are built to fool ‘modern’ detection technology, but no one sufficiently advanced even remembers the radar they used in the Dark Ages.

            (Getting around comms jamming by building radios type solutions.)

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Even a tiny realistic starship decelerating into the system would be seen coming for years with even basic telescopes.

            Anything big? That is going to be visible with the naked eye. Exhaust plumes aren’t stealthy.

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            1. IMO you’re correct that any spaceship near our tech levels should be detected at long range. (See Niven’s & Pournelle’s Footfall for an example.)

              But IMO any spaceship using extremely advanced technology, might not be detected at long range.

              The spaceships in David Weber’s The Apocalypse Troll were not detected (for good reasons) until they entered Earth’s atmosphere.

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              1. The only assumptions I am making are that there is no FTL-cheating, and that thermodynamics applies.

                And if thermodynamics fails to apply there are much larger issues in play than a puny little starship.

                Antimatter pumped fusion drives are NOT anywhere near our tech level. Not even under 50 years of SpaceX level development.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. I’ll just remind you of Clarke’s Third Law.

                  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

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                    1. That idea depends on us understanding all that is possible based on our understanding of the Laws Of Nature.

                      Too much of what we know is possible would be considered impossible two hundred years ago but the Laws of Nature haven’t changed.

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                  2. Clarke wrote that without any working definiton of the word ‘magic’. Humans spent thousands of years trying to develop magic before realizing that it just doesn’t work, at least not in any useful way. It was a completely different method from technology, and if it had worked, there would have been no possible way of confusing the two.

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                    1. His point was if you understand it, then it’s not magic.

                      And if you don’t understand it, then it might as well be magic.

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                    2. Actually, if you define magic as the ancient Romans defined magia, you are definitionally right: magia was unexplained causation.

                      (Contrasted with goetia, trafficking with evil or chthonic spirits, and theurgia, trafficking with gods.)

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                    3. His point was wrong, because he had no idea what magic is beyond ‘things I don’t understand’. The people who used to practise magic thought they understood what they were doing; there was an extensive body of theory on the subject.

                      Clarke did not define ‘sufficiently advanced’; he did not (and could not) define ‘magic’. He was, upon analysis, saying that one undefined thing is indistinguishable from another undefined thing, which is a silly thing to say.

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                    5. I get tired of people quoting semantic nullities as if they were the wisdom of the ages, and using that to support their arguments. It’s every bit as bad as people quoting made-up garbage off the Internet and attributing it to Einstein.

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                    6. If I was a nasty person, I would say “Bug Off”.

                      But then I also get annoyed when somebody claims We Know Everything There Is To Know About Science.”

                      Clarke’s Three Law reflects the idea that “We Don’t Know Everything There Is To Know About Science” WHICH IS TRUE TODAY AS IT WAS IN HIS DAY.

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                    7. The day we know everything there is to know about science will mark the death of Science Fiction. What will there be left to write about?

                      What G’Kar said about the Walkers of Sigma 957: “Yes. They are a mystery, and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not yet explained everything. All we know is that they walk at Sigma 957, and they must walk alone.”

                      Liked by 1 person

                    8. There were plenty of great lines that came from that show and those are part of the great lines. :grin:

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                    9. ‘Clarke’s Three Law reflects the idea that “We Don’t Know Everything There Is To Know About Science” WHICH IS TRUE TODAY AS IT WAS IN HIS DAY.’

                      Then he could have said that. But that would not have been quoted as a bogus ‘law’ with his name on it. In this matter he could be either original or right, and he chose to sacrifice the latter to gratify his desire for the former.

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                    11. ‘Yes Tommy.’

                      I already knew you were an arsehole. You didn’t have to call me a name I have despised since early childhood to prove it.

                      Here’s what I see: you’re sore because you wanted to use Clarke’s so-called law as a nice knockdown argument, and someone refused to be knocked down by it. You thought you were being witty and were only half right.

                      Here, by the way, is another howler from you:

                      ‘If I was a nasty person, I would say “Bug Off”.’

                      You ARE a nasty person, and you did, in fact, actually say that. And then doubled down on the insults.

                      But if you imagine any of that makes you right, you’re not only nasty but delusional.

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                    12. Oh, I hurt your feelings. Too Bad.

                      I used Clarke’s Third Law as reflecting a concept that any intelligent person knowledgeable in Science Fiction would understand.

                      Good Bye.

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                    13. Tom, Drak’s not being an ass.

                      He’s point out that you are being at best highly abrasive, and over a long period.

                      If you don’t want to have it dished up, stop dishing it out.

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                    14. ‘Oh, I hurt your feelings. Too Bad.’

                      You did that entirely deliberately. Own it. While you’re at it, own the fact that you have no argument except for insults, and somehow think that being rude will compensate for being wrong.

                      ‘I used Clarke’s Third Law as reflecting a concept that any intelligent person knowledgeable in Science Fiction would understand.’

                      An intelligent person would understand that it’s a silly concept badly expressed. You obviously aren’t capable of seeing that. Your entire argument is that interstellar spacecraft would be undetectable to us because of unspecified laws of physics which you assume a starfaring civilization must have discovered. This is a load of hooey. You were called on it, and tried to answer back with ‘But Clarke’s Third Law!’

                      Clarke didn’t know what he was talking about, and clearly, neither do you. You’ve lost the argument, Buttercup. Man up and concede defeat.

                      ‘Good Bye.’

                      I’m not going away at your say-so. Try to make me.

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                    15. You believe that any intelligent person will agree with you? Seriously? In this group? We’ll argue about purple.

                      (And, no, Drak just said that most people would recognize it, whether they agreed or not.h

                      Liked by 1 person

                    16. We often don’t agree with ourselves.
                      Also, seriously? Don’t give a fricking heck about the definition of “magic” or whether it exists. For the purposes of writing SF i.e. sending someone forward into the future or bringing them to our time from the past, technology looks like magic.
                      Which is all the law was saying. Spare me metaphysical bloviating, semantic dissection and etymological meanderings.
                      That’s all it means, and it is true. Touch the wall, light comes on? To a medieval man, that’s magic.
                      Actchually can discuss it forever. It doesn’t change IT.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    17. Foxfier:

                      ‘Tom, Drak’s not being an ass.’

                      Well, he could certainly play one on TV.

                      ‘He’s point out that you are being at best highly abrasive, and over a long period.’

                      One of the frequent characteristics of modern people is an inability to tell the difference between being told they are in error and being personally attacked. To such people, any disagreement will be ‘at best highly abrasive’. I long ago learned not to be silenced by this form of emotional blackmail. I don’t expect anyone to like me for it, but I’m still here and kicking.

                      ‘If you don’t want to have it dished up, stop dishing it out.’

                      I’ve been insulted by experts. Drak isn’t that. He certainly isn’t expert enough to insult me into backing down from pointing out that his argument doesn’t hold water.

                      He can dish out whatever he likes. I freely admit to being a jerk. He can look in the mirror to find another one, if he ever cares to.

                      As it happens, I find a world of difference between ‘dishing out’ facts and arguments in a tone that others may find insulting, and ‘dishing out’ pure insults without any accompanying content.

                      Like

                    18. One of the frequent characteristics of modern people is an inability to tell the difference between being told they are in error and being personally attacked. To such people, any disagreement will be ‘at best highly abrasive’. I long ago learned not to be silenced by this form of emotional blackmail. I don’t expect anyone to like me for it, but I’m still here and kicking.

                      I didn’t say, he feels you’re being abrasive.

                      I said, you are being abrasive.

                      As I am not the person you were being nasty with, your argument fails, because it addresses the wrong asserted (but not supported) cause.

                      You want him to freaking history read that you don’t like being called Tommy, and you can’t even do a basic charitable reading of what he says?

                      Meh, grats, you hung yourself.

                      Liked by 2 people

                    19. If it makes Mr. Simon “feel better”, I’m completely ignoring any of his comments.

                      Of course, even if it doesn’t, I’m completely ignoring his comments. :wink:

                      Liked by 1 person

                    20. ‘You want him to freaking history read that you don’t like being called Tommy, and you can’t even do a basic charitable reading of what he says?’

                      He clearly said that to dismiss me with a patronizing remark. What charitable reading is there? None at all. Offence intended; offence taken; case closed.

                      He did not know how much offence he was giving, and could not be expected to know; but once he found out, he was very happy to have given it, and made no bones about it.

                      ‘Meh, grats, you hung yourself.’

                      That’s funny, I’m not seeing any rope here, and my neck feels fine.

                      Now, do you agree with him that Clarke’s Third Law is a knockdown argument in answer to any discussion of known physics? Or are you just sticking your oar in to play tone police?

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                    23. Now, you are calling me that on purpose, knowing in advance that it offends, and there is no possible charitable reading of that. But I was never silly enough to imagine that you were well-disposed towards me in the first place, so I lose nothing by this confirmation that you are not.

                      I deny the implicature that I ‘picked a fight’. I suppose it is good rhetoric to slip in the main accusation under cover of smoke, but you are being a little too obvious about it and I doubt it will play in Peoria. It certainly doesn’t play with me.

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                    24. Now, you are calling me that on purpose, knowing in advance that it offends

                      Yes, because you went and ACTIVELY TRIED to hurt Drak for several comments running.

                      This is definition of “shoe pinches on your foot.”

                      Grow the heck up, old man.

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                    25. Scot:

                      ‘You need to learn the first rule of holes:

                      ‘If you’re in a hole, stop digging.’

                      I don’t know you from Adam and you evidently don’t know me. Did the Tone Police send for backup, or are you just a busybody?

                      I note that as of even date, nobody has addressed the substance of what I said: which is that ‘Clarke’s Third Law’ is not a law, has in fact no propositional content, and does not give carte blanche to assume that all currently known physics will be proven false so that some proposed technological advance can occur.

                      Instead, every one of my interlocutors has accused me of being various kinds of nasty person, which is both uncontested and irrelevant. Being nasty while presenting a case doesn’t make me wrong. Being nasty while not bothering to present a case certainly doesn’t make anyone else right.

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                    26. Except it’s not just Drak, or even just Drak and Fox. Your nasty posts are annoying multiple people. You know what they say: “If one man calls you a jackass, well, that’s just one man’s opinion. If five people call you a jackass, it’s time to get fitted for a saddle.”

                      Like

                    27. Consider the saddle worn, and if you like, the jackass beaten to a pulp.

                      Does being a jackass make me wrong as to matters of fact and logic? And does calling me a jackass make other people right as to those matters?

                      ‘It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched.’ —George Orwell

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                    28. Consider the saddle worn, and if you like, the jackass beaten to a pulp.
                      Does being a jackass make me wrong as to matters of fact and logic? And does calling me a jackass make other people right as to those matters?

                      Shoe pinches your foot?

                      Maybe you shouldn’t shove it on others.

                      Like

                    29. Shoe doesn’t pinch.

                      Now, is anybody going to address the actual point? Because I can sit here and be called names all day and the rest of the week.

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                    31. To show me how what works? Clarke’s Third Law?

                      Again, that’s where the whole argument started, and nobody has said anything to the point, except for Drak sneering at me because ‘anybody intelligent who knows anything about SF’ would immediately recognize it, and apparently playing that card is an automatic win in any argument.

                      Stipulated that the child was rude to keep saying, ‘But the Emperor is not wearing any clothes.’ Does that improve the Emperor’s couture?

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                    32. Yes, the ‘argument’– you being rude to Drak because you didn’t like the point he made, followed by acting hurt he responded to you almost as harshly as you address him– goes back to the classic rule.

                      That doesn’t change what you actually did, nor you falling short of your demands for others.

                      Liked by 2 people

                    33. Oh, good. You’ve started to notice that you’ve chosen a hill to die on that nobody else cares about. Well, you do you, but stop expecting us all to do now to you because of that.

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                    34. Jasini:

                      ‘Oh, good. You’ve started to notice that you’ve chosen a hill to die on that nobody else cares about.’

                      Apparently not, because people care enough to keep attacking me on that hill; and more of them keep coming out of the woodwork.

                      It is not in dispute that I am rude. But I will maintain to my dying breath that being rude, or even (gasp!) being unpopular, does not make my case wrong. That hill is worth dying on, unless you want to surrender yourself and your society to the very same people who (as Mrs. Hoyt says) are making war on humans. Everything said in the main discussion would be censored by the trans advocates because it’s Not Nice To Talk Like That.

                      I shall quote Orwell again:

                      ‘The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.’

                      At present, the enemies of intellectual liberty (and every other kind of liberty) present their case as a plea for good manners versus rudeness. Certain truths must never be spoken because they will offend people. You can, if you like, join them in applying that standard; but it will leave you with no defence when they apply it to you – as they will – as they do now.

                      If the worst anyone can say against me is that I am rude, I shall never concede that I am thereby proven to be wrong. And nobody has even attempted to address that question yet. Therefore I remain in the field. I admit that I make a nuisance of myself by doing so; but the process of discovering the truth, in any sphere of life, routinely involves just that kind of nuisance. If you can’t put up with it here, how will you manage when really serious issues are at stake?

                      ‘Well, you do you, but stop expecting us all to do now to you because of that.’

                      This sentence does not parse. If I had any idea what ‘do now to you’ meant, I could frame to answer it.

                      Like

                    35. Most folks here are familiar with Clarke’s Law, and understand what it means. If you took a time trip to medieval Europe, most of the gadgets we take for granted today would get you thrown in prison for witchcraft. None of them are magic, but nothing in their experience would allow them to believe that an iPhone is just an enormously complex machine. So, as far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

                      It’s like a story I read in which a pompous lawyer is badgering a scientist specializing in genetic engineering to ‘explain yourself’. He finally says: “I can answer your question in thirty seconds — but it will take you thirty years to understand the answer.”

                      Liked by 2 people

                    36. ‘Yes, the ‘argument’– you being rude to Drak because you didn’t like the point he made,’

                      He actually made no point. He invoked ‘Clarke’s Third Law’ as if that trumped all known science, and was butthurt when I called him out on it. I note that still, to this point, nobody has addressed the substance of that disagreement.

                      ‘followed by acting hurt he responded to you almost as harshly as you address him– goes back to the classic rule.’

                      You misread me.

                      You appear to believe that it is rude to tell people they are in error, but perfectly OK to insult people without telling them anything at all. I disagree vehemently with this view.

                      ‘That doesn’t change what you actually did, nor you falling short of your demands for others.’

                      I beg your pardon: I make no demands for others. And what I ‘actually did’, it appears, was to slaughter someone’s sacred cow. I beg your pardon; if I had known the cow was sacred, I would have used a bigger knife.

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                    37. ‘Most folks here are familiar with Clarke’s Law, and understand what it means. If you took a time trip to medieval Europe, most of the gadgets we take for granted today would get you thrown in prison for witchcraft.’

                      If you think that, you need to learn something about mediaeval Europe. The stories you have been told about the treatment of witches have virtually no truth in them.

                      ‘None of them are magic, but nothing in their experience would allow them to believe that an iPhone is just an enormously complex machine. So, as far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.’

                      From this, Drak inferred that an alien starship would enter our solar system undetected right up to the moment when it crashed into (of course) a deserted area of the U.S., because, according to him, none of our understanding of physics is correct, and spacefaring aliens of course will be able to violate basic physical laws at will and in a specific way, and will choose to do so in such a way as to crash their ships undetected. (For what purpose, he does not say.)

                      ‘It’s like a story I read in which a pompous lawyer is badgering a scientist specializing in genetic engineering to ‘explain yourself’. He finally says: “I can answer your question in thirty seconds — but it will take you thirty years to understand the answer.”’

                      I am perfectly familiar with Clarke’s Third Law. It is in the same category with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics: a saying that seems profound to the sort of Whiggish antinomian that tends to be attracted to Campbellian science fiction, but upon closer examination, turns out to say very little and be applicable to even less.

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                    38. ‘Yes, because you went and ACTIVELY TRIED to hurt Drak for several comments running.’

                      I addressed his points in the same way that he addressed me, starting from when he called me a nitpicker. I make no claim that I was polite about it; and I took offence only at his brazen dismissal of me with a patronizing, ‘Yes, Tommy.’ That, in my books, was pure rudeness without any payload of argument to excuse it. —And the same when you repeated it just now.

                      ‘This is definition of “shoe pinches on your foot.”’

                      If my motives are what you assume them to have been, instead of what I clearly state them to have been, then yes. I reject the implicature that I am a liar.

                      ‘Grow the heck up, old man.’

                      Says the person who has just descended to the level of the schoolyard taunt.

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                    39. From this, Drak inferred that an alien starship would enter our solar system undetected right up to the moment when it crashed into (of course) a deserted area of the U.S.

                      –
                      If you had read Drak’s post more carefully you would have seen that he was arguing that an advanced alien spacecraft, which had just successfully crossed tens or hundreds of light-years of interstellar space, would be most unlikely to crash on Earth, anywhere, deserted or otherwise. Which is why all the UFO conspiracy theories about crashed flying saucers at Area 51 are ridiculous and can be dismissed with prejudice unless somebody presents some convincing evidence.
                      ———————————
                      Leo Bloom: “Well, if we assume, just for a moment, that you’re a dishonest man—“

                      Max Bialystock: “Assume, assume!”

                      Liked by 1 person

                    40. Minor correction, I was saying that a highly advanced alien spacecraft might be able to enter our solar system undetected by current technology.

                      I said nothing about it crashing on Earth.

                      For that matter, I referred to a Weber novel where the alien spacecraft managed to enter our atmosphere without detection but were detected operating inside our atmosphere.

                      On the topic of ufology, most (if not all) of the stuff I read about ufology is complete nonsense.

                      I see no reason to believe that Earth has had thousands of alien visitors, especially ones doing “medical experiments” on humans.

                      My mention of Clarke’s Third Law related to a comment here about how alien spacecraft “had to behave” nothing more than that.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    41. ‘If you had read Drak’s post more carefully you would have seen that he was arguing that an advanced alien spacecraft, which had just successfully crossed tens or hundreds of light-years of interstellar space, would be most unlikely to crash on Earth, anywhere, deserted or otherwise. ’

                      He was arguing against Mr. Bruene, who was pointing out that such a spacecraft would be exceedingly unlikely to approach Earth undetected. Mr. Bruene based his argument on the laws of physics, particularly on the law of conservation of energy. I quote him:

                      ‘The only assumptions I am making are that there is no FTL-cheating, and that thermodynamics applies.

                      ‘And if thermodynamics fails to apply there are much larger issues in play than a puny little starship.’

                      It was to this that Drak replied by quoting Clarke’s Third Law. In other words, he was arguing that of course the laws of thermodynamics will be found to be wrong, and wrong in such a way as to allow spaceships to accelerate and decelerate drastically without any possibility of detection.

                      I have just wasted several minutes trying to put Drak’s argument into syllogistic form, but I find that it simply will not go. As nearly as I can paraphrase it, he is making or assuming the following points:

                      Everything we know about physics will eventually be proven wrong, so you can’t base any arguments on that.
                      ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
                      Magic can accomplish anything.
                      Therefore, any sufficiently advanced technology can violate all the physics we know, because it will be based on a completely different physics that we don’t know. And it will do so in ways that I can predict here and now.

                      It does not hang together. There is no logic in it, from beginning to end.

                      My error, other than that of bad manners, was to jump in at the middle, and object to his claim #2 instead of #1. I supposed that it was not even necessary to begin at that point. Everyone with any knowledge of physical science knows that particular models may be invalidated, but the phenomena they describe remain the same. Einstein corrected, but did not abolish, Newton: Newtonian mechanics are a very accurate approximation of how physical bodies behave at ordinary velocities and accelerations, where relativistic effects are very small. Likewise, classical mechanics provide an accurate approximation of the motions of macroscopic bodies, where quantum effects are similarly small. We may assume without fear of contradiction that whatever physical models replace ours, they will produce the same results as ours under the conditions where our models have been observed to be accurate.

                      I assumed that all that would be granted, and perhaps I was right to do so. But then I began my objection with point #2. Technology and magic are not the same kind of thing, and don’t work in the same way. For one thing, magic explicitly claims the power to suspend the operations of physical law; technology is explicitly based on the expectation that any device we build will conform to physical law. Magic can be conceived of as causing a heavy object to float in the air without any means of support and without any expenditure of energy; technology cannot. At bottom, magic is

                      Drak then made this claim:

                      ‘His point was if you understand it, then it’s not magic.

                      ‘And if you don’t understand it, then it might as well be magic.’

                      This point is fundamentally false. The definition of ‘magic’ is not ‘things that a particular person happens not to understand’. The dictionary I have nearest to hand gives this as the first definition:

                      the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

                      This will do to go on with: as long as we lay sufficient emphasis on the word ‘supernatural’. The magicians of the past thought they could alter the course of nature by summoning powerful spirits to do their bidding; or else command some occult force underlying, but not identical with, nature – the difference is chiefly one of psychology and technique. It turned out, of course, that they were wrong, and as C. S. Lewis points out, the magicians died out and the scientists (who were on the right track) thrived. (Many people, back in the day, were both. Francis Bacon was just as interested in magic as in natural philosophy; and even Newton, though no magician, first became interested in physics because he wanted to investigate astrology ‘to find out if there was anything in it’.)

                      Technology builds machines that harness and exploit the forces of nature. Magic uses spirits to command and override those forces. There is no danger of their ever being confused in practice; and the men of the Middle Ages, who studied both methods, were the least likely of all people to be misled. The example of an iPhone was offered at one point in the conversation. An iPhone, at bottom, is a computer; well, computers have been built out of clockwork, and mediaeval Europeans had clocks.

                      If you handed an iPhone to a mediaeval peasant, he would not have been liable to jump to the conclusion that you were a witch. More likely, he would have crossed himself and said something like, ‘God have mercy! What will these scollards get up to next?’ A more learned mediaeval would have been inclined to ask questions, and then say: ‘’Tis some kind of engine, you say? I do wonder how they made the works so small, and how they contrive to wind it up.’ (He would, you perceive, have taken it for granted that it did need ‘winding up’: that any piece of machinery, however cleverly made, does not go of itself. Within a day or so, the battery would run down and he would see his assumption confirmed in practice.) They would only be likely to jump to the conclusion that it was a work of witchcraft if you told them so; in which case you would be lying to prey upon their simplicity, and the consequences would be your own fault.

                      In my own simplicity, however, I did not imagine that anyone would take ‘Clarke’s Third Law’ as a kind of holy writ, and assume that I could only disagree with it because I had never heard of it, or was too ignorant to understand it. Bless me, it’s not a knockdown argument; it isn’t an argument at all; it has no place in any argument, except an argument about literature in which Clarke’s work should happen to be on topic.

                      This, ladies and gentlemen (and anyone of the other 475 so-called genders who may be reading), is why it so seldom pays to dig into a fallacious argument. It always takes many times longer to demonstrate the fallacy than to commit it, and you will get no thanks for taking the trouble. But damn it, it’s often got to be done; and those who do it are nearly always, in our time, castigated for being rude. Well, I would a hundred times rather be rude and right than polite and wrong, if those are the only choices on offer.

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                    42. eh, only some of it doesn’t work. then, nowadays, we call the part that does work — willow bark tea for headache anyone? — science

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            2. Much depends on how it arrives. Any superluminal speed will, of course, mean it arrives before anything could spot it — and leaves, too. Once it arrives, it would have to slow down.

              Like

  38. Reality will take care of the problem over time, as the ‘gendered’ can’t/won’t propagate. Much like the drug crisis, a self cleaning toilet, if you will.

    Like

    1. It’s like the “mercy on criminals.” Where you let a murder out after seven years.

      Yeah, it’s self limiting.

      But the folks paying aren’t the folks deciding.

      Like

      2. Mercy, for criminals…

        That’s when you break the legs of the crucified on the second day, not fifth, right?

        (Grin)

        Liked by 1 person

  39. The problem with “demisexual” as it is used now is that people are using it as a defense against people thinking they should be interested in sleeping with everything in sight, rather than its actual strict definition which is something closer to “I will sleep with this one person that I deeply love because I love them, but to be honest, I’m not really interested in sex aside from that.” (I know several folk in their 40s and up who spent much of their first couple of decades being told that they were broken for those kinds of feelings, so I don’t want to deprive them of a term that other people are badly misusing.)

    The real truth is, though, that my sexual orientation is None Of Your Business, Twerp. And my pronouns are Why Are You Talking About Me in the Third Person to My Face Anyway?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. These days my pronouns are “Get off my lawn.”

      I give thanks ever day that I don’t work in Academia or Fortune 500 companies. It means I don’t get memos demanding I update my pronouns on the company website. That might be awkward.

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      1. Yes, it certainly would. I’m “[Ing’s real name] Attack/Helicopter” in our project management software, and I do NOT want to change.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. FWIW, right now most of the culture is being told they’re broken if they are not looking at people and frequently going “Oooh, I’d hit that. No, really.”

      <= has been annoyed by this for years.

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  40. Camille Paglia on pronouns. (Note: the questioner is wrong. Peterson did not refuse to use the idiopronouns. He said he did not want to be compelled by law.)

    End: “But this political agitation to change everyday common speech, are you kidding me? People shouldn’t be putting up with this for one second. What kind of nonsense is this? Absolute nonsense! These people who are searching for their own identity and want to impose on others, that’s not my philosophy as a libertarian. That is an invasion, intrusion into other people’s personal rights. Why? The English Language is owned by everyone! It was created by great artists: Chaucer and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Joyce and so on!

    “How dare you, you sniveling little maniacs, to tell us how we’re going to use pronouns! Go take a hike, I say to them!”

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  41. @ The Phantom > “it occured to me to wonder if the newspapers in Germany around 1932 were filled with crazy sh*t like we see now.”

    The crazy was there, regardless of whether or not it was recorded in the newspapers.

    Christopher Isherwood, a British writer, published some fictionalized memoirs of his time in Weimar-era Berlin, which eventually became the basis of the musical (and movie) “Caberet.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berlin_Stories

    The Berlin Stories is a 1945 omnibus by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood and consisting of the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The two novels are set in Jazz Age Berlin between 1930 and 1933 on the cusp of Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power.

    Berlin is portrayed by Isherwood during this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national catastrophe that awaits them.

    Like

    1. The reason I mentioned it was I saw a study a few years ago regarding “depressive language” in literature. They used a machine learning algo to look for phrases that were associated with depressive thought markers. They used a sample that went back to the start of the 20th Century.

      There was a graph which struck me as important. Generally, according to their findings, literature hasn’t been as depressed or negative as it is now since Nazi Germany. This was in three languages too, English, German and Spanish.

      So it makes me wonder if their news media were as full of obvious madness as ours is now, and how much of that was deliberate propaganda.

      Stories of what pervs the Nazis were are many, they ranked next to modern Hollywood for disgusting from what I’ve read over the years. Knowing that such disgusting creatures were running the show must have been depressing.

      Liked by 1 person

  42. @ Paul Howard > “Years ago, I read a short SF story about an overpopulated world that faced a problem. An extreme number of children were being born lacking human intelligence. … there were not enough non-incarnated souls left to be reincarnated into human bodies.”

    I remember that story quite distinctly, but no longer recall the title or author, and am not home to ransack my library looking for it.
    The premise seemed quite frightening to me: that bodies could be created without spirits.
    It violates some rather basic Christian beliefs about humanity (that there is only one incarnation per soul, rather than repeated cycles, looks the same, if the pre-mortal “pool” has been emptied).

    Like

    2. The term for a body without a soul is “corpse.” If it’s moving about on its power, you add the descriptive clause “diabolically possessed.”

      The soul is the animating principle of the human body. No soul, no life.

      (You may have heard of rational souls. This contrasts with vegetive souls, and sensible souls, which have purely natural and finite aims and so are finite themselves.)

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Another word for an animated corpse might be Resident of The United States, or, as I like to characterize, ROTUS.

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            1. To me, FICUS conveys something living and growing, whereas ROTUS, coined though it be, does reach to decay and stink.

              Like

            2. New term replaces old terms.

              “Did a Biden” -> replaces “Did a Reagan” -> replaces Elderly person fell down.

              ;-)

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  43. One reason I hate “drag queens” is because they are so damn grotesque. Female impersonation is a specific skill, used in some kinds of theater (if you’re doing authentic pre-Restoration theater, you have to have boys in female roles because that was how they did it back then. To this day, female roles in Kabuki are played by men who specialize in such roles), and these lunatics do not have it. They camp it up worse than Dr. Frank N. Furter, they slather on so much makeup that they look like they’re either cosplaying Tammy Faye Bakker or want to be rodeo clowns, and they dress up in clothes that no self-respecting streetwalker would wear.

    Speaking for myself, I am so disgusted with romance and relationships that I would, if I could, stick to paying cash for sex and demote my soi-disant “girlfriend” ALL the way down to “friend” status. That’s what they all seem to want. I can’t count the times when I’ve been fobbed off with “Can’t we just be friends?” I understand why women value platonic male friends, but I’m not in the market for platonic female friends.

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    1. Speaking for myself, I am so disgusted with romance and relationships that I would, if I could, stick to paying cash for sex and demote my soi-disant “girlfriend” ALL the way down to “friend” status. That’s what they all seem to want. I can’t count the times when I’ve been fobbed off with “Can’t we just be friends?” I understand why women value platonic male friends, but I’m not in the market for platonic female friends.

      Maybe part of your problem is that you’re getting a girlfriend for sex?
      That’s going to get a different group of women than if you’re looking for a wife.

      I know I married my best friend, and he says he’s happy about it….

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      1. I married my best friend, and he says he’s happy about it….
        …………………..

        Us too. We met in college. We’ve known each other almost 50 years. We’ve been married almost 45 years.

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    2. “ALL the way down to “friend” status.”

      You’re already there, dude.

      “Can’t we just be friends?” means “get away from me” in Passive/Aggressive. The next line after “can’t we just be friends” is “its not you, its me.” Which means “its totally you.” Ask me how I know.

      Maybe don’t keep picking the same type every time? Just a thought.

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  44. It seems to me that many of the public sexual indentifiers are defensive in nature, that is, signaling that that person is not open to sexual congress.

    That used to be expected of unmarried people, especially children and young people. I know, is has been very fashionable for some time to claim that humans are “sexual beings,” etc, but that ignores the protection offered by opting out of the mating game, or at least providing a “safe space” for young humans to mature. (And notice how many anxious young people are clamoring for “safety” these days.)

    Spinster aunts. Bachelor uncles. “Confirmed bachelors.” There used to be a role for this lifestyle which did not assume that they were secretly having affairs with other people. At one point in the 19th century, an ancestor of mine was one of 8 siblings. Only 3 of the 8 married and had children.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’ve frequently though that’s what “lesbian until graduation” was: a socially-acceptable way to not put out for the guys in the young communists club. (“From each according to her ability, to each according to his need”)

      I think it doesn’t quite have the same utility these days, hence the multiplicity of “genders” that specify exactly what you want – or don’t – in a potential acquaintance.

      Because apparently all acquaintances fall in the category of potential bed partners.

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  45. That’s another of my issues with the gay movement: that if two people of the same sex live together it’s now automatically assumed they’re lovers. How about siblings? Or good, platonic friends? Or even two people who are using one another as protection? Not wanting promiscuous sex, and needing a roommate to share expenses?

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    2. Same sex roommate. Different sex roommate. Presumption is you are a couple and romantic. With housing as expensive as it is? Why move out of the parental homestead if you still live in the same area? At least you know your roommates are going to pay their share without complaint (they might nag you, but …) As far as the more recent traditional take from a potential mate? If that person has any smarts then they’ll appreciate your old fashioned traditional approach. Heck. They are probably doing the same.

      I know of couples with children who ultimately had to move in with one or more set of now grandparents. Now are staying. One couple the only reason they aren’t with the grandparents is because the benefits they need are unavailable; if they do because then the parent household income counts against the benefits. Easier for the couples parents to help in other ways.

      Liked by 1 person

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