Bioluminescence at American Digest
Some thoughts on storytelling
Peer influence among adolescents as a driver of transgenderism
Sarah Hoyt: “Have most institutions, stores and corporations, most large human organizations, gone stone stupid?”
3-D printing in the manufacture of GE’s new turboprop engine
Jim Grant, the well-known observer and analyst of interest rates, asks “what will futurity make of the (so-called) PhD standard that runs our world?” and suggests that, after a major market crash, explanations will include “My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and fix interest rates.”
Reminds me: Danielle DiMartino Booth, who took a job at the Fed following a successful career on Wall Street, remarked that she did not experience discrimination on account of her sex…but she did face serious prejudice against her on account of not having a PhD.
Re: transgenders, it is my impression from reading a bit about it, and unfortunately from extended family experience, that if you send a child to therapy for depression and other mental health issues at this point, there is a very good chance they will “discover” that they are transgender. I don’t understand why therapists shouldn’t have to document (i.e., record) their discussions with minors. I think it is clear there is an agenda at work here.
Re: your last two links on the economy being destroyed by economists, I don’t understand why I should look at this plot with anything but horror:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2013-1
All three West Coast states now have mandatory queer sex ed starting in the 7th grade — for all the kids, not just the sexually dysfunctional few (as though they should be encouraged, instead of cautioned). Washington State is teaching gender theory starting in kindergarten. Their new curriculum is online, if you want to verify this.
After you’re through being sickened and saddened by that, go look at the CDC stats on health issues in the queer community. 75% of all new cases of syphilis and AIDS, damn near half of all the VD, drug use and self-harm way above the general population, and so forth.
Your tax dollars are grooming an entire generation of American schoolchildren. This is real. It is ongoing. No tinfoil hate required.
Stop tolerating the intolerable. Or watch your civilization get torn down around your ears, what’s left of it.
The transgender thing is a form of insanity. It is being aided and abetted by the psychiatry profession which has lost its moorings.
The hysteria resembles the recovered memories thing and the day care child abuse thing. None of those hysterias exist outside a therapeutic culture, which is what modern leftism consists of.
I don’t know what these children who are protesting and excluding reality from their world will end up doing. I don’t see them learning any usable skill.
Eventually, the free market will reject these Gender Studies majors as HR department heads since they will be unable to choose useful employees or keep them.
This is a house of cards that will collapse. Will the US economy collapse with it ?
I don’t know.
I do think some people genuinely feel that they are the ‘wrong sex’, without being insane and while being safely past childhood and adolescence. For example, there is writer Deirdre McCloskey (‘The Bourgeois Virtues’, among other works), who started out as Donald McCloskey. There is also Lynn Conway, who had made *major* contributions to electronics, particularly VLSI design.
These are serious people, who shouldn’t just be written off as fruitcakes. (It was not wise of IBM, from the standpoint of its own self-interest, to fire Conway when they learned of her transition.
But I’m pretty sure that the number of *genuine* gender-dysphoric people than there are people who have been drawn into *thinking* that they are in that category due to fad-following and aggressive marketing.
Deirdre McCloskey
Lynn Conway
As with the recovered-memories and day-care Satanic child-abuse panics, follow the money. There is usually an ecosystem of govt subsidies, consulting fees, sensationalist journalism, academic sponsorships and anticipated corporate payoffs and litigation awards underlying these fads.
It appears about 10% of humans are gay. It’s widely observed in the animal kingdom and there is little reason to believe humans are different.
With this fact in mind, and the general America cultural dislike of gay people, one might conclude many people hide their real sexual orientation. As this is true it would not be unusual to find many people who have repressed this, have problems.
Some people should do a lot more repression.
You are among that 10% who are annoying beyond tolerance.
“These are serious people, who shouldn’t just be written off as fruitcakes.”
Most transgender people end up as gay. There may be some, a few, who for one reason or another never quite get the transition complete.
I am suspicious of those who, while asserting their transgender status, do not have the surgical procedures to make the change real.
Even so, Mother Nature is not fooled. Christine Jorgenson died in our hospital of prostate cancer.
The interesting thing is how wrong the average person is about the percentages. Most people, when questioned on the issue, will say that the quantity of gays in the general population is around 25%. The actual percentage? Somewhere around 3%.
It points out the essential innumeracy of the average person, though–That’s for damn sure. You walk them through the implications of what they’re saying, and even then, they’re like “No, that can’t be right… They’re all over TV and the media…”. Which points to another issue, but, still… Here we are.
The prevalence of this misconception is due in no small part to the credibility that was lent to the idea, starting with Kinsey and his crew. Whose perversions of science were nearly as bad as the sexual perversions they were trying to justify. You actually go looking at the studies, and the background information that’s come to light, of late, and you really start to wonder how many people were actually, y’know, reading his work, as opposed to glancing at it, putting it on the coffee table, and then using what everyone else was saying about it to comfort themselves as they buggered the neighbor’s cat.
There’s a tremendous amount of just plain lousy thinking in this arena, and I have no doubt but that the current mania for “gender dysphoria and reassignment” is going to eventually blow up in the faces of the people responsible for it, just as the mania for Satanic cults and childhood sexual abuse blew up in the faces of the maniacs responsible for that. The public seems to go through these periods of insanity, and watching it happen in real time around you makes it a lot easier to understand things like the witch hunts of the early Colonial period. The insane are ever with us, sadly. And, all too many of them are running things in public life.
Transgenderism is another fad; give it a generation, and they’re going to be looking back on this period and think we were all insane, much as we do looking back at Salem.
The really amazing thing is how a fringe minority group has managed to punch so far out of its weight class, in terms of warping the general path of society. I suspect that this is an aberration, and will likely do what such things always do, and blow up in their faces. The pendulum swings, and the further you push it off center, the faster, harder, and further it goes on the backswing. We’ve got thousands of years of history where we pushed homosexuality into the closet, so to speak. This appears to be the default position, and we’re starting to see the reasons for it. I’ve no doubt that I’ll see the closet door swinging shut again in my lifetime, or shortly thereafter–The excesses are going to demand it, and I don’t see any sign of the necessary self-discipline on the part of the general gay population to rein in their crazies, which will drive much of the pressure to put them back into the closet.
Tell a young man that he’s wrong for being “hetero-normative, and cis-gendered” long enough and hard enough, don’t be real surprised when he starts listening to the siren call of the people who tell him that he’s normal. It’s not going to take much for anyone to put together an attractive program for these people the SJW want to disenfranchise, and whoever does it is going to have a tremendous opportunity to make their causes felt. Islam is probably going to be provided a huge opportunity here in the next few generations, as the traditional churches transition to SJW-centric institutions. Their former members are going to go somewhere, and the traditional values of Islam are going to be there with welcoming arms. If you can’t be a “normal straight male” in nominally Christian public life here in the US, then the cults are going to have a recruiting heyday.
Followed, of course, by the pogroms.
I think homosexuality is also subject to cultural forces.
Ancient Greece had a society where, at least in the classical period, women were cloistered in harem-like circumstances. An aphorism in Classical Athens was “A woman’s honor was to never have her name mentioned in public.”
The result of this cultural norm was that, like in prison, homosexual relations among males was much more common. The same circumstance attains in Muslim countries although they are at great pains to stop it or deny it. The Greeks, at least the Athenians and Thebans, had a culture of the Erastes and Eromenos, an adult man and a pubescent boy, who were lovers and who served together in the army.
The Theban “Sacred Band” was a force of lovers that were never defeated in battle until Chaeronea.
At Chaeronea they were all killed and buried together. In our planned trip to Greece in 2015, we had planned to visit The Lion of Chaeronea.
Under the statue, which has been restored, lie the skeletons of 254 men.
There’s a tremendous amount of just plain lousy thinking in this arena, and I have no doubt but that the current mania for “gender dysphoria and reassignment” is going to eventually blow up in the faces of the people responsible for it, just as the mania for Satanic cults and childhood sexual abuse blew up in the faces of the maniacs responsible for that.
The people most badly harmed won’t be the fad’s promoters.
@Mike K,
Trying to reach back and fully understand the nuances of ancient Greek and Roman sexual mores is a bit difficult, mostly because they didn’t write about it explicitly–Which ought to tell you an awful lot about just what the position of homosexuality actually was.
And, like modern homosexual practices, a great deal of it was actually tied up more in dominance than sexuality. The position of a male who liked slinging it to other men in Roman society was just fine; he was a man’s man. The male “taking it”? Quite the opposite.
Harvey Weinstein would have fit right into upper class Roman or Greek society, with his bevy of “clients”, and implementation of “power”. The fact that we now find such behavior as no longer acceptable is, again, telling. Blame the Judaeo-Christian values, I suppose. As we regress towards paganism, one presumes that much of this will become more and more acceptable, and likely end in a situation where today’s abnormalities are tomorrow’s mandates.
It’s really rather disturbing to watch society forget the lessons of the past, and will he, nill he, be abandoned without a solitary thought to lessons of Chesterton’s Fence. The oh-so-tolerant of today are going to be shocked, shocked I tell you, when they discover that there were actual reasons that society of old had the rules it did, and that they weren’t necessarily based in outright “abuse of power”.
“You are among that 10% who are annoying beyond tolerance.”
It is my calling. Thank you.
A very worthwhile post on gender dysphoria, at Ricochet.
LINK
Thanks, David. That is an excellent post.
A little straw, hi ho. Its my experience that most serious homphobes are gay themselves and fighting with it. I know several people fit this description well. Anyone secure in their sexuality, has no real problem with homosexuality, as far as I can tell.
OMG – I am about to agree with Penny! According to Eric Hoffer (in The True Believer) this is pretty much the case: the most ferocious homo-haters are those who have felt the attraction, and deeply buried it, being shamed and revolting against that attraction. I don’t know absolutely that this is the case … but I suspect it, based on what I have read.
And Kirk has an excellent point; the general public has been gas-lighted about the actual numbers of gay among us, based on the media occurrence. Deliberate, or just wishing to be trendy, edgy? Who knows. In real life, gays are only about three percent, give or take (which tracks with my own life experience.) And trans is a relatively tiny proportion, and very likely a mental health issue at that … a mental health issue which has suddenly become the favored-cause-of-the-moment. Another trend, generated by …? And for what purpose?
I swear, these days, you can never be too suspicious of what the establishment media serves up.
Sgt. Mom,
Been saying the same thing, for years. Actual, y’know, straights? They don’t give a flying ‘eff in the wind about gays. The life has no attraction, and is so bizarre to them that it doesn’t even really register as being something worth getting upset about. Of course, if someone who is gay won’t take no for an answer, things can get intense and weird.
By far, however, the most virulent homophobia I’ve ever seen demonstrated all came from people who later “came out” as gay. The knuckleheads I knew who talked about going out “gay bashing”? They wound up coming out of the closet some time later, and I kinda-sorta wonder if the “we’re going gay-bashing” might not have been protective coloration in case someone spotted them near those clubs and hang-outs…
As well, the chick who was the furthest “out there” when it came to lesbianism…? Like, she would discuss them in terms that had hatred dripping off the words? Yeah; lesbian.
I’m convinced that the majority of the really nasty anti-gay types are usually repressed gays themselves, and they’re pissed off more because the gays are doing what they want to, but feel constrained against, and they’re also actually attacking themselves when they attack other gays, as kind of a perverse self-punishment.
Most actual straights I know are like “Oh, OK… You’re sticking your what, where…? In who? And… You like that…? Well, not for me, but whatever floats your boat…”. They don’t feel threatened by the gays, because they utterly lack the interest in that sort of thing. The ones who do feel threatened, and who act out? They’re the ones who feel the attraction, and who are kind of jealous of the gays who’ve got the strength to do things openly.
I would wager large sums that were we able to see into their hearts…? Most of the virulent gay-haters would actually be deeply attracted to same-sex behavior. They’re projecting and acting out against what they secretly want for themselves.
“Most of the virulent gay-haters would actually be deeply attracted to same-sex behavior.”
Maybe it’s my years in California but I have not seen “gay haters” in so long I can’t remember the last time.
What is much more common, in my own opinion, is the person who is tolerant but does not want to have it thrown in his face every day,
Not on TV, which I avoid, or in movies, which I rarely see.
Just in life where the most aggressive seem to delight in harassing those who just want to be be left alone.
Those who are very religious, unlike me, may be the targets of most harassment.
^^^
What Mike said.
And like Haley’s Comet every 86 years or so sometimes Pengun makes sense.
David – just found this blog today through one of the Lexicans (as a long time NA265 driver, I was friends online with Carrol for several years). There is some incredible writing here. Thank you so much. Author L.B. Johnson (Brigid) in Chicagoland.
Thanks, and great to have you here!