Well, if there isn’t one element in current events which more clearly shows up the double standard – not to mention the absolute uselessness of masks and so-called social distancing – it would have to be Barak Obama’s lavish party with six hundred of his closest and dearest friends, at his plush estate in that playground of the old-money wealth, Martha’s Vineyard. The Commie Crud virus obviously must know the difference between the enlightened, sensitive members of the elite, and would not dare afflict them, unlike those stupid, unenlightened and no doubt racist proles attending the Sturgis motorcycle rally. So, the Obummer and his guests, solo and chorus gave the middle finger to masks, and social distancing – and by their example, the rest of us ought to be able to do it too, witness the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, which occurred at almost at the same time. The time of the mask is done, although the establish media is still screeching on about it. Is anyone really still listening, out in small towns and rural areas in Flyover country, when some indignant Karen at any level, from the supermarket aisle to the state house, starts wingeing on about the dratted things, and won’t you consider the continued good health of everyone around you, you heartless deplorable, you?
I can only speak for myself and my household – but we’re seriously done with masks. (Although I can see the utility of wearing one at a doctor’s office, in a clinic or hospital. Those places are full of sick people, and in close quarters it would be easy to catch something from them. Everywhere else? No, no, and no again. We’re done.) It is amusing, though, listening to the frantic pleas, demands, urgings to get the Covid vaccines. The DOD is insisting on it, for all military members, and I’m increasingly certain that this will backfire on the Defense Department as it has with just about everyone else. At this point, it appears that everyone who made the decision to get the vaccination of their own free will for reasons which they felt to be legitimate and justified have already gotten it. Those of us holding off getting the Commie Crud vaccination, also having considered the risk, our own general health condition, likely won’t be hectored into getting it. This, no matter how loudly the headlines scream about the handful of holdouts getting sick anyway and lavish bold headlines when vax-reluctant are forced to do public penance in the marketplace for their sin of denying Holy Vax and the beneficent wisdom of Flip-Flop Fauci.
I had a wild thought the other day – why aren’t drag queens considered as aberrant and socially-unacceptable as blackface minstrel shows? Seriously, why aren’t men dressing up and burlesquing as women as offensive as white performers painting up their faces and burlesquing as black performers? They are both types of performers pretending to be something they aren’t for comic effect and to amuse the audience.
Mind you, if taken seriously, this would render a whole lot of classic movies problematic, everything from Some Like it Hot, Victor/Victoria, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Mrs. Doubtfire, and The Birdcage. Why are drag queens acceptable in this present day, but minstrel shows and blackface not? Any ideas?
In the current elite fashions, anything to do with sex (except childbirth) is to be celebrated and expanded–the partisans of each variety proselytize. I haven’t heard any BLM folks invite the rest of us to become black. Once upon a time those boundaries were enforced from without; now they’re enforced from within. (Remember Rachel Dolezal)
Cross dressing is a sort of demonic (you can look at that as being metaphorical or not, I don’t really care) caricature and destruction of real womanhood, and modern liberalism *hates* not women so much as femininity, if we are allowed to use that term to mean something distinct from masculinity. Femininity implies motherhood and motherhood implies placing the needs of another person above yourself, and that very concept is anathema to the modern liberal project, which holds that every attachment and institution must be destroyed so that nothing but the Self and the State remain, and then we will have paradise on earth.
It’s as if actual females are being … I dunno. Erased from existence. It’s purely OK, in the current woke fad, to diminish women, chase us out of sports, our bathrooms, and our role in birthing and nurturing our young.
Curious, isn’t it?
Adolescent girls, fortunately not my grand daughters, are being pressured into depression and an urge to be someone else. A few years ago it was lesbian sex, especially in college. Now it is to become boys, at least pretend to be. The same pressures do not seem to be acting on boys. The transgender movement on the other side seems to appeal to perverts,.
And that’s another thing, entirely, Mike – a straight-jacket of what is feminine or masculine, and if you don’t absolutely conform to the strict definition – then you must really be the other sex?
That’s all kinds of horrific, especially when it comes to those kids who are Odds, as Sarah Hoyt defines it. Be a bit off-plumb from standard – then you are TRANS and MUST switch over, IMMEDIATELY.
This is sick, and damaging to kids. It’s horrific, and I’d like to see the people pushing it to die screaming in a fire.
Sgt Mom: “It’s as if actual females are being … I dunno. Erased from existence.”
One of the strange features of the Feminist movement is that they promote women behaving like men — we can fly jets onto carriers and drive tanks — and denigrate women doing the essential unique thing that only women can do — be mothers. If some women want to break glass ceilings (and maybe even glass floors?), that is great; all power to them! But there is no need for women to bad-mouth “breeders”.
Back in the days of the Roman Empire (and even a lot more recently than that) a stable population required the average women to have 10 or 12 children, such was the rate of death among the young. Today, the average woman would need to have only 2.1 children to maintain a stable population — and throughout the West, the average woman is failing to meet her quota. In Mark Steyn’s famous words, “The future belongs to those who show up”. Maybe that was the agenda all along behind the de-feminization of women?
Sgt Mom…”a straight-jacket of what is feminine or masculine, and if you don’t absolutely conform to the strict definition – then you must really be the other sex?”
The Progs are all about categorization, as are totalitarians and would-be totalitarians of all stripes. Rose Wilder Lane made an important point about the tendency:
“Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes. But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings.”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/27828.html
The time of the mask is done, although the establish media is still screeching on about it. Is anyone really still listening, out in small towns and rural areas in Flyover country, when some indignant Karen at any level, from the supermarket aisle to the state house, starts wingeing on about the dratted things, and won’t you consider the continued good health of everyone around you, you heartless deplorable, you?
No one’s really listening in medium-size Democratic cities, either. Last month maybe 5% of grocery store shoppers in Denver wore masks. Yesterday it was up to 10% but no more than that. Same at the local rec center. People, even Democrats, aren’t buying into the Delta variant hype. There isn’t a huge surge in hospitalization or deaths so they’re not going back to the social distancing/mask mandates. They’re sick of that crap.
My feeling is that Democratic politicians are getting desperate about their chances in next year’s congressional elections so they have to dream up a new crisis to distract voters. That probably won’t work again.
I think that what we’re living through is a state of flux surrounding the very issue that Gavin points out–The absolutely amazing and game-changing shift in fertility and survival rates for women.
Time was, you had both this outrageous death rate surrounding reproduction, and the fact that the minority of women who didn’t die in childbirth were just that–A minority. Because of that, society adapted and set up social structures and strictures adapted to those rates and ratios. Thus, the “lower” status of women in societies, which I would submit was more perceptual than actual. After all, even in a lot of supposedly “patriarchal” societies…? Who the f**k is deciding who gets laid and whose kids survive? The women are, that’s who. And, in the end, isn’t that actually a hell of a lot more “power” than who is deciding matters of industry and diplomacy? Men will, I am sad to say, do damn near anything to get “access” to that which is unique to women, and to get emotional support from them. The amount of actual “power” that grants women in a society…? Far greater than any of the idiot feminists and suffragettes ever imagined. I think the real deal with them wasn’t that they wanted “equity”, they really were not very good at being “women” and playing the game effectively. So, they essentially did what any other spoilsport would do, and upended the table, destroying the “game”.
I mean, look at it–WWI-era women were never, ever going to get drafted. Ever. No way in hell were they going off to war–And, yet…? Do a search on “White Feather” and “WWI” or “Boer War”, and what you’re going to find are hordes of women who thought it was neato-keeno to “shame” men into going off to get killed. If that’s not one of the most disgusting and immoral displays of “female privilege” ever, I don’t know what is. And, that’s from a supposedly “patriarchal” society, one that “suppressed women’s rights”.
In the end, what we’re going to wind up with is a social situation where there are precisely zero gender- or sexually-based differences. And, I predict that women are going to hate it, because that situation is actually one where they’ve got far less in the way of “privilege” than they had in classically-organized societies.
All I can say is, “Welcome to the game, ladies…”.
Ignace Semmelweis did more to change society than just about anyone within the last few centuries, and nobody even recognizes his name in popular culture.
True gender equity is on the way. The thing that will put the final nail into the coffin is going to be the arrival of a perfected means of external gestation, Bujold’s “uterine replicator”. That happens, and there are going to be an awful lot of women finding themselves holding the same shitty end of the stick that only young men were burdened with, in days of yore. I suspect that a lot of them are not going to like it, at all…
Not advocating, just observing. It’s going to be more of a social disruptive thing than even birth control or the car.
Kirk: “In the end, what we’re going to wind up with is a social situation where there are precisely zero gender- or sexually-based differences.”
Depends on who “we” are in that statement. “We” in the West — for sure! “We” in China — no way!
I have posted versions of the China 2018 Army Day video before. It is still worth observing & meditating. Look at the clearly defined gender roles — the aging mother missing her son, the beautiful wife missing her husband. And men training for combat — men!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qr-4AKM18
There are lots of Chinese women in the military, doing useful work. But China’s military does not pretend there are no differences between men & women. Let’s hope our rulers are never stupid enough to start a kinetic war with the Chinese Communist Party — because the CCP’s leadership is serious & means to win, ours are frivolous, unrealistic, and divorced from reality.
@Gavin,
I don’t think the Chinese are going to do any better, or somehow magically escape the issues surrounding what we’re talking about.
What’s happened here is that the entire basis for how we’ve arranged matters between sexes is based on a sexually dimorphic set of circumstances that no longer obtain. They don’t obtain in China any more than they do in the West–We just got here first.
The question is, how will we adapt? The only way I can see is to clearly recognize and state the underlying conditions, and then work out what will actually work out fairly for all concerned. You want to know one of the key reasons behind why we’ve got such a low reproductive rate? It’s not the women, necessarily–The fecundity of the ghetto classes show that clearly. The real problem is that men have recognized how hard they’ve gotten screwed by things, and they’re simply opting out and not forming families, carefully avoiding becoming inadvertent fathers roped into economic serfdom.
This is not a good thing, either–More unattached and uncommitted males? More social unrest and far less cohesion. It’s a fruit of the poisoned tree, once women demanded “equal rights” in the workplace, and when most jobs no longer relied on brute strength in the workplace. You remove the ability of the lower tiers of intellectually-defined abilities to find meaningful work that can support a family, and what do you get? Massive social dislocation and instability.
I don’t look at these things through the lens of righteousness, all I do is observe and state what I see as clearly as I can. No social “customs”, “values”, or “mores” exist in a society without there being some actual reason behind them; you look at the “rules of society” that obtained back in the days of yore, and what you’ll find is that most, if not all of them, were upheld and enforced by women. There was a reason for that–A situation wherein the average male had no idea for sure if his kids were his own? That’s hugely destructive of any organized society, because without that assurance, men will not marry nor will they work hard to support their supposed children. Successful societies figure out how to make things work, and if things don’t work with the customs of the day…? Customs shift.
What’s happening to us is that the underlying conditions have changed, and our customs haven’t kept up–The usual short-term dislocations like a war wiping out a generation of young men? Those are nothing, when compared to birth control and DNA testing proving fatherhood. I think that massive changes like those two are things that only get worked out over the course of generations on at least a century-long scale, and we’re only here at the beginning of it all.
It’s actually a questionable thing, whether or not our society will survive this stuff in any recognizable form. I’m not sure it will, and if we manage to retain the technology, well… It will look very different, how we arrange sexual matters in a few centuries–And, I’m not talking about the whole girl/boy boinking thing, either. Everything surrounding sex is gonna change, once all this crap works through. Imagine what difference it will make, with artificial wombs; you won’t have to have your females maintain their physical sexual dimorphism, at all–Mainly because that whole “get large baby head through pelvis” issue won’t be a thing, any more. Once most women don’t have to actually carry a child? One thing that will undoubtedly change is that we’ll cease selecting for those adaptations, and then it’ll be “zero dimorphism” eventually. You might even see genetic engineering taking place that enables that long before natural selection would have…
It’s all up for grabs, TBH. I am uncertain that what we’re doing is at all sustainable, or that it will even work out at all, over the long haul. Short-term? LOL… Not even sure about that, looking at the demographics of it all in Japan and Europe. It may well be that we’re gonna be telling young women that they’re drafted into the reproductive wars, the way we did men during the World Wars, telling them that they’re mandated to produce at least 2.1 children. Once most countries and cultures are staring death by “birth dearth” down the barrel? It’s gonna get uuuugggly…
Kirk — you make a powerful case. I tend to think that our economic stupidity (exporting jobs and freshly-printed IOUs) is going to knock us in the West down before the social issues around reproduction do. But societies which survive the coming collapse and retain their technological prowess will certainly have to deal with the change from a 19th Century world in which most women had to spend much of their lives pregnant to a later 21st Century world in which pregnancy may not be necessary at all. The issue of transforming babies into functioning members of society will still take 15+ years, and require a lot of adult attention & investment.
Echoes of the past. Apparently in later days of the Roman Empire, there were laws requiring men (at least upper class men) to marry, because of concerns about the lack of babies. Maybe a lack of interest in reproduction is a characteristic of a declining civilization?
@Gavin,
Or, that a civilization which has reduced the incentives to form families and reproduce has caused it’s own decline.
Most of the problem in the Roman situation came down to the greed of the Boni class, the one that got rich off of impoverishing the rural yeomanry that formed the bulk of the Republican Legions, and then buying up their land, turning it into vast slave-operated latifundia.
The parallels between those idiot Boni and our own MBA class are there to be drawn. They’ve destroyed the backbone of our nation’s economy by selling factories and business to the cheaper labor markets, and what have we to show for it…? The same sort of urban dysfunction that the Romans got with their dispossessed yeomanry.
This isn’t inevitable. This is self-willed and entirely self-chosen by the elites of both periods, entirely out of self-centered, self-interested greed. Today’s internationalist MBA class has the same mentality as the elites of the late Roman period, and much the same short-sighted blindness to the effects of their decisions. I wager that some future historian will be making the case I am, but with much more data and likely a better vocabulary.
It’s never really the base that commits civilizational suicide. It’s the elites. Every. Single. Time.
Party hearty for them; party hardly for us.
@Erisguy,
Don’t worry; it will catch up even to them, eventually. Successful parasites don’t kill their hosts; our parasitic elites? LOL… They’re killing that which supports them, and they think that somehow, they’re gonna do better once all those pesky boogie middle-class types are either co-opted or gone.
Reality? China will want less than nothing to do with them, should they somehow survive and take things over. As well, there won’t be anyone even remotely interested in keeping them going here, so they’re gonna go exactly the same way that the Roman elites went–Straight into the slave pens whenever our version of the Goths descend upon Washington DC.
It’ll be fun to watch, at least. The yammering and squawking about how this is all so unfair will be an amusement, in the next pen over.
Here is a thought, though… From “our” perspective, as members of the non-elite? It might profit us to take up managing the assholes, culling the stupid, venal, and self-destructive types before they ruin the system as a whole, for everyone. You look back at history, and what you’ll find is not that the commons went corrupt first, but that it’s been the friggin’ elites, every time. Every. Single. Time.
Think about it–There were probably solidly middle-class and lower-class Romans who never wavered, yet the elites drove them into penury and poverty, shortsightedly bankrupting the yeoman class in order to profit from turning all those Legionary small holdings into massive latifundia. How long did that last, though…? In the Western Empire, you could see the whole thing collapse as the contradictions swept in on them. The Eastern Empire lasted longer, but if I remember rightly, someone along the line realized that they needed those yeoman small holders as soldiers, and set up the theme system, which did a better job of keeping that institution going–Up until the plagues and Muslims swept in.
The elites go first, dragging the rest of us down with them. We might want to contemplate that, and conduct some judicious culling of those types, before they do unto us what they did unto Rome and other societies.
Do remember–It was the elites that came up with nine-tenths of the stupidity throughout the 20th Century. The middle and lower end? We just keep right on muddling through, sighing heavily with ever new stupidity inflicted on us.
So the Afghanistan “government” appears as if it will completely collapse within days, and guess what–no one cares. There will be no US domestic political betrayal narrative as there was in Vietnam, no matter how humiliating the images might be that we see in the days to come. The difference makes clear the difference between America 2021 and America 1975. There’s no hope for revitalization at this point…
…As I’ve said before, I grew up in the military in the 80s…and I don’t care any more about things like “our” total humiliation in Afghanistan. I don’t feel the slightest bit of attachment to Joe Biden, or Anthony Blinken, or Mark Milley, or Lloyd Austin, or any group or organization that their ilk “lead”. They are no longer my countrymen, as a wise man says…
Brian, I’d point out that none of us ever wanted to be in Afghanistan in the first place, and nobody saw any rational reason to be there.
Most of the low-on-the-food-chain types looked at Afghanistan and recognized that the majority of the problem was flowing in from our supposed “ally”, Pakistan. This was the blindingly pink elephant in the middle of the room, the one that nobody talked about, and carefully walked around. No ISI support from Pakistan; no Taliban. That’s as simple as I can make it.
And, we were providing billions in fungible military aid to the Pakis, even after we took out bin Laden in Abbottabad, blocks away from their military headquarters and primary military academy. What does that tell any rational human being, of any pay grade…?
We should have turned Pakistan into a parking lot, and left Afghanistan the hell alone. Same with Saudi Arabia, but good ol’ George W. Bush wanted to play ju jitsu and dislocate the entire Arab world and force reform–Forgetting that was a multi-generational project, much like reforming German militarism. He never openly stated what he was doing, allowed dissension, and then when the Democrats did their usual stab-in-the-back thing, we got what we got. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia should have been the direct object of our post-9/11 attacks, and we should have clearly made the point that sponsoring third-party attacks on Westphalian nation-states would not be tolerated. Instead, what Bush did served to allow Saudi Arabia to get away with paying for it, and Pakistan to provide territory for it to be planned and launched. The Taliban has always been a creature of Pakistani military intelligence, and there was no damn way those 15 Saudi citizens got clean passports and vetting by the Saudi government to get their visas without someone in the Saudi government being knowledgeable of it happening.
Those two facts? You can derive the rest of what I’m saying, there–And, it’s all open-source. I don’t know why George Bush made that choice, but he did, and the shitshow we have now resulted. Obama consciously chose to release the Camp Bucca internees, most of whom made up the cadre of ISIS, and he also chose to short-change both Iraq and Afghanistan for military training teams and anti-corruption efforts. The results of that are before us–I don’t know if what we were on track to do during the end stages of the Bush administration would have worked, but I can blame Obama and his crew of sycophantic freaks for consciously sabotaging what we thought needed doing on the military side. It’s Vietnam all over again–Blame the military for losing, after Congress cut off the necessary support for South Vietnam. This time around, they were far subtler in their sabotage, but they bear responsibility all the same.
I suspect that were a forensic accountant to go in and examine things, they’d find all sorts of Burisma-like deals with Pakistan, and a bunch of “foreign aid” siphoned off into similar sweetheart deals with Congressional family members on both sides of the supposed party line. Basically, we’ve been paying the Pakistanis to pay the Taliban to kill American soldiers, and I’m actually glad that bullshit is over with.
I would also point out that they’ve never actually done anything about that deal where Wasserman-Schultz had that set of Pakistani nationals doing IT work for the Democratic delegation to Congress. That’s been kinda swept under the rug, and ignored–Just like the OPM breach under Obama.
Raw fact is, we’ve been sold out by our “elites”, and haven’t even begun to see the consequences of that fact. You wonder why the Chinese have been able to roll up our networks, and identify every single agent we’ve put into Asia and Africa? LOL… OPM breach, baby, OPM breach. That was the crown jewel, the Pearl Harbor of the era–And, nobody noticed or cared. It’s just us minions, after all, who will pay the price. The elites will never see consequence one, ‘cos they don’t do the dirty work where getting your cover blown will kill you.
End of the day, we’re going to have to do something about these disloyal self-centered freaks, from top to bottom. What that is? I shudder to think, because I don’t see it ending without a lot of suffering and horror.
Kirk: None of that’s relevant to my point. About Vietnam conservatives felt communism was worth fighting and the Democrats has shamefully betrayed the South Vietnamese and dishonored America, which was a personal affront to us as loyal patriots. About Afghanistan there is no great cause, no betrayed allies, and no dishonor, because we feel no personal loyalty or attachment to this government anymore. And for *conservatives* to be thinking that now is pretty shocking…
I never saw any earthly reason for us to be in Afghanistan … other than letting it be the Special Forces and drone-operator’s playground. Behave yourselves, or fire and brimstone, capiche? I can only assume that Obama, the Stuttering Cluster* Of A Miserable Failure (as they used to term him on Ace of Spades) malignantly wanted our best, most dedicated and ate-up troops to be fed into the chopper for no good reason, and his pet chosen high leadership in the military to get their cushy post-retirement gigs as a kind of side advantage.
Keeping Iraq from going sideways, I thought in 2003, was a bit of a gamble – but what if it could be turned into something like South Korea? Safe, mostly stable … a place where our military could have a comfortable accompanied tour? A stable anchor in the Middle East, a somewhat reliable ally. And instead, the SCOAMF pulled out, and left most of the place to the tender mercies of the militant Islamics.
Yeah, our so-called elites are selling us out. Cheerfully, and without any sign of acknowledgement or regret.
I only hope that they are in the next tumbril.
Raw fact is, we’ve been sold out by our “elites”, and haven’t even begun to see the consequences of that fact.
Speak for yourself. I rather think I felt the consequences pretty thoroughly over my lifetime and I’m quite certain millions of other Americans have also. I suspect most Americans. And we do anticipate the future consequences, alas.
That’s why so many people voted for an orange-haired reality TV star with no political experience and enormous baggage. That is, because he noticed what was going on and reacted accordingly.
What can’t go on forever will end. The entire post-WWII international order has been based upon the willingness of our so-called elite to expend the wealth and power of the United States to do nice things for foreigners. At one point that made good sense, but not for decades and not this century.
I shudder to think, because I don’t see it ending without a lot of suffering and horror.
The suffering and horror is already baked into the cake. The real question is what we can do to pick up the pieces and “move on.”
Getting out of Trashcanistan is wonderful and awesome, as we will no longer be forced at gunpoint by the cancer on the Potomac to subsidize the swarms of 9th century savages infecting that portion of the Eurasian landmass who by-the-way hate us.
Let the Taliban turn that not-country into an abattoir.
I’ll add more, seeing newer comments.
I remember soon after the 9/11 attack reading that the Taliban and their terrorist friends were afraid, because they had quite rationally concluded that the military forces of the world-spanning hyperpower that they had attacked were coming to kill them.
For a while, that looked to be true. Then, our so-called elite stopped being personally afraid and resumed their usual practice of paying for the world and our enemies realized that they had no real reason to be afraid, either. Our presence in the nation-state that had attacked us degenerated into a multi-trillion dollar foreign aid extravaganza.
Plus, I still recall watching Shep Smith live saying that there were possibly forty thousand dead under the wreckage of the World Trade Center, on the night of 9/11.
Bluntly, we owed these people not a single fracking cent in aid, assistance, training, welfare, anything, anything at all. They attacked us and attempted to kill as many of us as they could.
We owed them nothing but death and hatred, and I say we still do.
Hence, the absolute last thing we should be doing is subsidizing them so that they could develop into another competitor on the order of South Korea.
And yes, I know I’m lumping a discussion about one foreign country I don’t care about into mention of another- but I will assert that we need to worry more about defeating our enemies in actuality than making them prosperous after our imagined victory.
Pitiful.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1425855870957768710
“The U.S. Embassy in Kabul urged Americans who were not working for the U.S. government to leave Afghanistan immediately, as American negotiators try to get assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if the capital is overrun.”
I predict future GOP candidates (most likely Trump in 2024, for better or worse) will run on slashing military budgets in order to use the money to try to fill other gaping holes in the bankrupt national budget.
Brian: “About Afghanistan there is no great cause, no betrayed allies, and no dishonor, because we feel no personal loyalty or attachment to this government anymore.”
I agree with you that the Political Class has destroyed the loyalty & pride many of us used to have in our Government — a loss that will certainly have massive consequences at some point in the future. But that probably is not the key issue with respect to Afghanistan vs Vietnam.
Big difference was the Draft. It gave a huge slice of the population a direct or indirect personal stake in the Vietnam conflict. In contrast, most Americans probably hardly knew that the US had been fighting a real war in Afghanistan for two decades; it affected only active military, and the Best & Brightest and their media dogs don’t care about people whom they see as gap-toothed yokels instead of as the cream of the country.
Speculations:
One possible reason for cross-dressing getting different treatment is that blackface could sell claims about “This is what blacks are really like,” while too many men knew too many women too well for drag queens to be taken seriously as selling “This is what women are really like.”
Another is that cross-dressing has a “sauce for the goose” factor going for it. Women cross-dressing as men is common enough and tolerated enough to limit how harshly men dressing as women get treated.
Idle thought:
Does makeup for portraying a drow or a klingon count as blackface?
Re the situation in which no-one in the US (and NATO) much cares about Afghanistan, there is an interesting article in Russia Today, comparing NATO’s failure with the earlier USSR failure.
https://www.rt.com/russia/531958-american-defeat-afghanistan-soviet-union/
“Western powers flooded the country with money. Pour cash into an impoverished country without adequate controls, and the consequence will be mass corruption. So it was in Afghanistan.”
The government of Afghanistan lost legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people, and now it is being swept away. This ought to be a warning for the denizens of the US Deep State who are messing up as badly at home as they did in Afghanistan. But they are too smart to learn from experience.
“Re the situation in which no-one in the US (and NATO) much cares about Afghanistan”
Again, my point isn’t that anyone should care about Afghanistan, my point is that I feel zero attachment to “American” institutions.
And why should I or anyone else?
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/biden-eyes-tougher-vaccine-rules-provoking-backlash-79435161
“Still, while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.
That’s not to say they won’t be implemented in the future, as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy.”
Where the hell is the GOP, saying you will never under any circumstances even attempt to do this, and if you even try, there will be massive civil disobedience and anyone involved will be impeached the instant it is possible to do so? Why is the only place you see any outrage about this from crazies on twitter?
Big difference was the Draft. It gave a huge slice of the population a direct or indirect personal stake in the Vietnam conflict.
I agree with this completely. The Vietnam protests were draft protests. The Afghan War has been fought by Trump voters and nobody cares about them. The generals, of course, are not included and they did not count as fighters. They were more in the mold of REMFs.
Mike: The generals sandbagged Trump on his attempts to withdraw from both Syria and Afghanistan, which in a sane world would have been a massive public scandal–as if the president can be overruled by these idiots! Either they assumed that they could influence Biden to never withdraw, or they are just all Democrat partisans, either way the Pentagon is clearly massively rotten.
Brian: “my point is that I feel zero attachment to “American” institutions.”
You and me both, brother. But surely the point is that we still feel attachment to the true American institutions — limited government; equality of all before the law; government of the people by the people for the people; avoidance of foreign entanglements.
We do not feel any attachment (or respect) for the current perversion of those principles — Democrat insiders exemption from the laws; indefensible election practices leading to dubious election results; permanent Political Class, with effective lifetime offices; vast unaffordable intrusive regulatory overhead; enshrined overwhelming incompetence.
The only bright spot is that the current insanity cannot continue — Democrats & Republicans salivating about spending $Trillions they do not have. Collapse is now certain, just as soon as the first exporter to the US decides not to accept those depreciating dollars. What follows — we shall have to wait & see. In that respect, the US is now on the same slippery slope as Afghanistan.
“…they are just all Democrat partisans, either way the Pentagon is clearly massively rotten.”
Alternatively, and this is just me guessing, what we have going on here is the equivalent of the payola scandals in the music industry.
One of the first thing these guys taught me about counter-insurgency was that you had to isolate the battlefield from outside influences. No safe harbor, no outside money coming in, no outside equipment sources. That’s counter-insurgency 101.
That is doctrinal. It’s in the manuals, and all of the training materials.
Yet…
What did we do, from day one? Knowing that the Taliban were entirely creatures and creations of the Pakistani ISI?
Not a Goddamn thing. So far as I can tell, there’s been exactly zero effective effort to prevent Pakistan from doing what they’ve been doing and supporting the Taliban. We caught bin Laden in fucking Abbottabad, the “military city” of Pakistan, for the love of God… What did we do? Nothing. They may have had some back-channel wrist-slapping going on, but absolutely nothing effective was done, as witnessed by the Taliban being able to do what they’re doing right out in the open. You simply cannot operate the way they are without some source of outside logistics and money, and we’ve not only let the Pakistanis get away with it, we’ve actually been subsidizing it, paying them to pay the Taliban to kill our soldiers.
There’s really no other explanation. We’ve been betrayed by our elites, to include the people running our military and diplomatic efforts. And, it’s been bipartisan, which you can tell because nobody, nobody at all has come out and stated any of this openly. If the worthless parasite traitors like Mattis really cared about their troops, this point about Pakistan and the Taliban would have been brought out in Congressional testimony and the media.
Ask yourself if you’ve seen a single flag-rank officer come out and fall on their sword in the name of saving the lives of their soldiers. You haven’t. And, why? Because, my friends, they’re part of the problem–They’ve betrayed their trust, both implicit and otherwise. The bounds of honor don’t even enter into their calculations–It’s all their sacred careers, which they are building on the dead bodies of our soldiers.
I spent 25 years as an enlisted minion. At this point, I feel quite the fool, a literal Judas Goat–I watch what’s going on, and I reflect on the lives lost from those men I trained and influenced, and I feel sick to my stomach at what I participated in. They never intended to win, or even benefit the Afghanis–It was only ever about making money from God alone knows what sort of kickback schemes, and “enhancing their careers” through getting that “combat experience” that every officer needs to advance.
The whole thing is a farce, and what is most painful is recognizing it while everyone else continues to ignore the dancing neon pink elephants in the middle of the room.
Yeah, “Osama was living in Abbottabad” is up there with “Covid first broke out in Wuhan” in the category of, “Things that We are all supposed to pretend don’t mean what they obviously mean”…
Sayeth Kirk: “At this point, I feel quite the fool … I feel sick to my stomach at what I participated in. They never intended to win, or even benefit the Afghanis–It was only ever about making money from God alone knows what sort of kickback schemes, and “enhancing their careers” through getting that “combat experience” that every officer needs to advance.”
You and me both, Kirk. You and me, both. Creatures like Austin, Milley, even Mattis and dozens of others … they built their careers on a stack of flag-draped coffins. I honestly wouldn’t spit on any of them, if they were on fire.
The other obvious “tell” here is how they slow-walked Trump on getting out of both Syria and Afghanistan.
Then, the minute Biden gets in? LOL… Any excuse they had for “strategically ignoring the President in order to create a smooth transition…” goes right out the window, because they’re not even doing what Trump was doing, which was forcing the Taliban to live up to their commitments.
The bureaucracy and the generals prevented Trump from withdrawing, but when Biden is (supposedly…) calling the tune, they suddenly want to dance.
Yeah, they’re co-opted and corrupt. No question about it.
Sickening to observe, TBH. I don’t know why I ever expected anything different, as venal as most of the flag-rankers were that I encountered personally. I guess I’m just stupid and credulous by nature.
the boys of aapbara, (that’s the shorthand for isi, )they recruited and trained the taliban, selecting them from the afghan arabs and the other members of the peshawar circle, they told the us who to fund in large part haqquani, who is the godfather in that part, khalis who was omar’s mentor, and a few others, this began earlier on, although hamid gul was the orchestra leader, a thinly disguised hamid gul, is a protagonists in simon conways’ the agent runner, now the scorpion does bite on occasion, once they’ve fed on the carcass of afghanistan, they will turn on the more promising meal that is pakistan, but that is for another time,
The French say, “It takes ten thousand dead to make a major general.”
How many stars have been awarded in twenty years of no-win effort? The US bodycount is certainly lower per general, but if you still lose . . .
Cousin Eddie
Not to worry. I am sure — well, maybe kinda sorta perhaps sure — that Nancy Pelosi will organize a big Congressional inquiry into what went wrong in Afghanistan while she and Bozo Biden* were in Congress approving every dollar spent. Just as soon as she has finished her 3 year inquiry into whatever happened in Congress back in January when the people petitioned their government.
When the USSR gave up on Afghanistan in 1989, Euroweenies did not take advantage of that obvious weakness to attack Mother Russia — quite a change from prior centuries, when blood in the water from obvious weakness was treated as an open invitation to invade. Instead, the Euroweenies & the US correctly surmised that the USSR was in the early stages of collapse, and they stood back to let it happen. It would not be surprising if a similar assessment is being made in Moscow and Beijing today.
So much depressing & true. Here’s something about the erasing women in Commentary.
I’ve probably given this anecdote before, but it was one of those moments (few and far between) when in my youth I was caught up on one of my stupider unfilered, repeating cliche, moments and forced to re-examine: Looking at some of the Italian masters with a guy I’d met in a hostel, I said something about oppression or male chauvinism or God knows what; he wasn’t very filtered either, staring at me and spitting out, you get to have the babies, how can you complain? He went off and I turned another way; he was kind of a jerk on the one hand, but he was clearly in the right, and I started looking at a masterpiece and feeling the beauty and respect that went into those paintings – and much in our culture. I wouldn’t say that moment made me sensible, only a long and sensible relationship could – but I never again felt oppressed. As crappy as many experiences for the next two or three years were. I knew that I was lucky to be a woman and when a man denigrated it, I would (now this became crazy, too) console myself with the thought that it was womb envy rather than male chauvinism.
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I dunno, Ginny. I’ve always found the idea of either “penis envy” or “womb envy” as being projection by the other party, more than anything else. Most sane straight males look at all the issues attendant with that womb that some women theorize they covet, and the reality is that they thank God above that they were born male and don’t have to cope with it all. Envy doesn’t come into it at all.
Similarly, the supposed feminine “penis envy” that knotheads like Freud theorized may exist in some women, but the majority of sane females just look at you like you’re insane when you propose such a thing. They want precisely nothing to do with the male demense, demonstrating a level of wisdom that most of the nutters on either side of the dividing line between male and female fail to achieve.
I don’t think it’s a thing, in either direction, for the sane among us. Who seem to be a diminishing number, thanks to the amount of delusional propagandizing going on these days.
I think that the majority of all this BS comes from a small number of men and women who just aren’t all that good at being men or women. Because they’re incapable of effectively working the role, they turn on those roles and tear them down. What they envy isn’t something real, but their erroneously conceived perception of what those roles actually are, and that’s what they’re reacting against.
I’m sure that there are truly oppressed women out there, but I’d like to propose that they’re oppressed mostly because they are not effectively deploying the tools nature gave them, because in almost every society I’ve been around (which includes some supposed profoundly sexist Eastern European ones…) there are levers of power there to be taken up and used by the women. Indeed, what I’ve often observed as an outsider is that it’s the men who’re oppressed, all the while possessing the supposed outward significant power in society, whilst being ridden like rented mules by the women in their lives. You watch that happen, and it is a thing of wonder to observe, as your incredibly sexist white male oppressor peer finds and marries his perfect “submissive” Eastern European beauty… And winds up the actual submissive in the relationship, wrapped effectively around her finger as she manipulates his every move in the bedroom and outside it.
Meanwhile, all the American chicks he used to date are whining about sexism and oppression, never grasping that they actually could have achieved the same victory in the war between the sexes, had they the wit and wisdom to actually use the tools God gave them instead of whinging continuously and annoyingly.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the reality is that the majority of the whinging about sexual roles and “oppression” comes from the loses on both sides, the ones who don’t know how to be women or men effectively. The same syndrome exists on the male side, expressed as “incels”.
I would suggest, strongly, that a lot of this comes out of society and the signals that all the varied authorities send out. We’ve elevated not-men and not-women into these positions of authority, and they’ve projected their personal idiocies out into society-at-large, broadcasting their dissatisfaction at their inability to fulfill the roles in society that nature fit them out for in the womb. This has resulted in some serious dysfunction as people try to put their ideas into effect, because they simply don’t work.
Due to the drastic sexual dimorphism we have going, as a species, what are now termed “gender roles” are not; they’re sexual roles, because of biological constraints. Men are never going to bear children, and women are never going be able to achieve the physicality and aggression typified by the male’s role as protector and combatant. Speaking in broad terms, that is… Because of this, attempting to operate in denial of our essential biological natures is never going to end well, and we’re eventually going to run up against some hard stops when the slack comes out of the system and we have to start paying attention to reality again.
Lotta people going to have rude awakenings, come the day.
Mencken: A man be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Also Mencken (paraphrased): in America, one sex is flighty and romantic and the other is hard-headed and practical. (Men and women, respectively, if you hadn’t guessed.)
I’m with Kirk–too much unreality gliding about with no place to land. Crash inevitable.
Cousin Eddie
“A man may be a fool” Sheesh. CE
Yeah, Mencken had it right, with that one.
The thing that has always struck me, observing the world around me, is how blind most people are to the realities they live, every day.
Friend of mine went on and on and on about how her “poor mother” spent her entire life browbeaten and abused by her father. When I met them, I expected to meet little meek mama and nasty old papa–What did I actually encounter? A verbally and emotionally abusive harridan who’d made her husband miserable his entire married life, constantly belittling him and saying things to him that would have earned a male peer a serious beating. With her, he just took it–Water off a duck’s back. The daughter didn’t see it, at all–Until I pointed it out to her, and then it was as if the scales fell off her eyes and she realized how much of her childhood conception of reality was wrong. I had to go down the list of “abusive behaviors” and tick off every one that applied to her mom, the one we’d gotten every time we did “spousal abuse recognition training” in the service. It was an ugly experience for her, and I think that played a pretty large role in the end of our friendship. Nobody likes having their noses rubbed in being wrong about something like that.
Most women don’t recognize what they’re doing as exerting power or inflicting abuse in their relationships. They focus on the things they see as “male power prerogatives”, and ignore the things they do which exert equal or superior power. It’s nothing to some of these women to deny intimacy and expressions of love, or to validate their husbands–And, yet, they think they’re powerless, all while driving the male partner into suicidal depression.
In many cultures, men have the outward power, the sort visible from the public square. The other powers, the ones exerted behind the closed doors of the house and bedroom…? They’ve got nada. Many of them don’t even recognize the fact that they’re being led around by the penis, trained seals performing on cue. All the while, the women in their social circles are laughing behind their hands, egging them on into more and more gratuitous displays of power assertion behavior.
If you think about it, every time there’s a “stupid redneck” thing on YouTube, there’s invariably some equally idiotic little chicklet in the background, instigating. That’s how they exert their power–It’s like they’re Pokemon masters, finding their victims out in the wild, training them, and then flinging them at Pokemon belonging to other trainers in the social circles they habitate… The whole thing is really bizarrely congruent with the cartoon, once you make the connection.
Personally, I’ve long since abandoned the “game”. It’s for children, and I’ve yet to encounter an unattached grownup I’d want to keep company with.
Astute comments, Kirk.
Kirk..”If you think about it, every time there’s a “stupid redneck” thing on YouTube, there’s invariably some equally idiotic little chicklet in the background, instigating.
Here’s a song about an “instigator”, set about 150 years before YouTube:
thttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bz-PxB_4iA
While Kirk is carping against women as the root of all evil, and others nod & applaud, this little nugget appeared on DHS site
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/dhs-extremists-covid-vaccines-stolen-election-pose-national-security-threat-ahead-9-11/
So, Kirk, how are you going to fulfill your role as protector and combatant? Forget women, how are you going to protect America?
Tatyana — As a male, I read Kirk’s comment to be more of a critique of his fellow males, not so much of females. Too often, we males mislead ourselves and allow ourselves to be manipulated. As Shakespeare might have said … the fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our women, but in ourselves.
“While Kirk is carping against women as the root of all evil, and others nod & applaud, this little nugget appeared on DHS site
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/dhs-extremists-covid-vaccines-stolen-election-pose-national-security-threat-ahead-9-11/
So, Kirk, how are you going to fulfill your role as protector and combatant? Forget women, how are you going to protect America?”
See, this is a perfect example of what I speak of, with regards to the feminine perception on these matters–The least little criticism of the female, even when even-handedly applied to what is going on with regards to both sexes conduct and relations, and it’s automatically taken as an attack on just women, then the sleazy wench starts attacking the “manhood” of her critic, thinking that it will cut to his very core. Frankly, I’m past it, baby–You and yours voted for this shit, right from the dawn of the era you got the vote you agitated for, absent the duties and implied responsibilities of that vote, so as far as I’m concerned, y’all are on your own. Lie it the bed you made, darlin’–I’ve no interest or desire to rescue you from your folly.
You wonder why I’ve written the majority of that sex off as being worth any time whatsoever. Tatyana demonstrates why.
Also… America? Bitch be on her own. I gave 25 years already, and I’m done after you feckless felching morons voted in Obama and then Biden. The Republic I served was obviously dead before my birth, and I mistook the corpse-twitching for signs of life. The nation is going to pay the price for a full century of folly, and I’m not invested one little bit in the outcome. From where I sit, this is all self-inflicted foolishness, and I’ve got zero obligation to “protect” anyone from what’s coming down the pike.
Which is an attitude that people like Tatyana have carefully cultivated and encouraged, I might point out. You think your words don’t cut, don’t have weight, when you “insult the manhood” of critics? Well, darlin’, they do and they don’t. On the one hand, I don’t know you past that one post, so I care nothing for your words. On the other, the reinforcement of things I’ve already observed and experienced…? LOL… Oh, yeah… I’m gonna go running to sound of the guns, again. Emphatically the fuck NOT.
You and people like you broke the social contract that kept people like me loyal to the system and participating in it. Credulously, I might add. Now that you’ve pulled off the sheepskins, showing yourselves for the wolves you are, the sheepdogs aren’t so interested in sacrificing themselves to protect you or your interests. Good luck finding other patsies, ‘cos men like me are out here pointing out what you’ve been up to. I think I’ve personally prevented about a half-dozen enlistments in the last half-decade or so, simply by pointing out the contradictions to other potential victims, ensuring that they’re witting victims rather than unwitting.
In short, you’re going to get the “service” you deserve, Tatty-dear. And, I suspect that it’s gonna be one that provides a thorough “servicing” to us all, in the other sense of that word.
Me, I’m a happily married fool.
Kirk makes his points about the country, and how we got here, very eloquently and from experience. My ‘military experience’ consists of lifelong study of wars, two years of (mandatory) Army JROTC in high-school, a year of (mandatory) AF ROTC in college, and
listening carefully to the guys who were there.
The most decisive factor in turning me against enlisting during the Vietnam era (hell, I had written off for the catalog from West Point when I was 16) were the stories told by, among others, the lifer noncoms with combat as far back as WWII and as recent as Vietnam. And
the many other , younger guys I knew–volunteer or draftee. Even if they were proud of their service and thought the cause was good, they saw Vietnam as a deliberate no-win conflict serving the interests of ambitious politicians and officers.
I just read Gen. Smedley Butler’s reflection on his career (quoted in Ferguson’s Colossus).
The more things change . . .
I, too find the DHS pronouncement troubling.
Then I balance it against the long line of similar statements made from the inception of the agency. Maybe, this time they mean it, but it’s hard to see this as anything else than an attempt to justify their existence while carefully avoiding mentioning any of the myriad politically protected entities. As the saying goes, white men are the only people you’re allowed to hate. What politician wouldn’t want to criminalize opposition to their heaven sent policies?
Then look at their work product. They’ve had more than seven months since the Jan. 6 “insurrection”, abundantly documented on video which they have so far been unable to process and catalog. They have yet to prove a single charge in front of a jury. Even the normally complacent and clueless federal judiciary is starting to ask embarrassing questions.
All of this, while resolutely ignoring the numerous, also abundantly documented, interstate conspiracies that resulted in hundreds or thousands of building burned and several deaths.
Stop bloviating. All your verbose indignation means zero. Nil, nada.
I admit, I haven’t read past 1st paragraph:it’s all so predictable and full of stupid assumptions. “I” vote for? WTH you’re presuming that you know what and who I’ve voted for? Certainly not for the current usurper-in-chief. But I would equally not want anybody with your views on women to be in any however minimal level of power.
I might have brought YOU as a perfect example of what’s wrong with today’s American males – whiny, domineering losers, unable to accept an idea of being a woman’s partner, not her master – and blaming her for his own inability to think with his head (the one above the waist) – but it’s useless, at your age. Besides, I’m not paid for it.
Whatever grievance you nurse against some wom(e)n who rejected you, it’s way past it’s importance. The branch you’re sitting on is about to collapse, and you’re still seeing not far than your..nose, so to speak.
No wonder the end of the Republic comes near. There are no men left in Rome.
And don’t call me Tatty, Shirley.
Kirk’s latest post is really way, way, way out of bounds. I know you in general don’t ban or censor posts, but it’s pretty vile.
I think tensions just in general everywhere are reaching a boiling point. You can on a daily basis read eliminationist rhetoric from the MSM, the sort of stuff that was only found on extremist message boards a few years ago, these “vaccine passports” that are being implemented more and more places are, when schools start up again fights over masks and testing are going to heat up, and when more employment mandates come in, I am really quite worried about what’s going to happen in the coming months, since we know there will be more “outbreaks” in blue states, that are already eager to put in more and more restrictions. If I were only a tiny bit more paranoid I’d say that all this, plus Tatyana’s link, point towards the authorities being really hopeful that someone’s going to snap…
People – can we all take a deep breath and calm the heck down? This weekend, with the final debacle going on in Afghanistan has everyone, ESPECIALLY veterans with long memories on the edge and ready to snap.
Brian: my conclusion, too. Trying to provoke, so as to have a seemingly-legit excuse to martial law (or whatever is the correct name) – the same pattern used 01.06.
Celia: just saw this:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/us-abandons-american-citizens-afghanistan-tells-go-hide/
Unbelievable.
There are no men left in Rome.
The men of Rome have been forced out to make room for the endless diversity hires demanded by the cancer on the Potomac.
Don’t expect me to feel bad when that shambling charlie foxtrot which by-the-way hates me finally collapses.
It will be a bad end well deserved.
You think when it collapses, it will somehow miss you?
Right. Sit on your couch and mope, then, and feel righteous.
You think when it collapses, it will somehow miss you?
Right. Sit on your couch and mope, then, and feel righteous.
Tatyana, no one gets out of this alive. Events certainly will not spare me, and ugly events already haven’t. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, goes an old song.
I get the sense that you are trying to perhaps shame me and others into- well, something.
I can tell from your blog that you’re an immigrant and I suspect you’ve missed decades of the cultural context that inspires me- and perhaps Kirk, whom I obviously cannot speak for- to react as I have.
Bluntly, the regime can go **** itself.
It has spent my entire life striving to screw me over, in every way it can, and it has invented entirely new ways, unimagined by sane people who existed in recent memory here and still do in other countries.
Including the country you came from, apparently.
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Is being an immigrant somehow disqualifies me from forming an opinion? I’ve lived in America exactly same number of years as in “country I came from”, and I am as much an American as you are. Cultural context is not that relevant as you think. And you don’t know the things I’ve seen and lived thru (and still do) – so what? We all have our struggles, ce la vie.
Yes, the progs and GOPukes are out to get you – and me, and all of us. Somehow you concluded I’m defending “the regime”? Huh?
You bet I think it’s a shame, the reaction – or rather, the lack of – I see widespread. It makes me re-evaluate my views, no – principles I thought to be stone-strong. I thought the advantages of capitalism, individual liberty, rights and freedom, civil society – especially in those raised with them – will make people want to defend them when threatened.
I was wrong.