Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 17, 2022: shabbos for Jewish cats and also National Maple Syrup Day, one foodstuff that you can pay less and get a better version. Don’t get the pricier “light color” version but the “dark color, robust taste” version, previously classified as “Grade B”. (They’ve eliminated the grades A, B, and C for obvious reasons, but if you ever see “Grade C”, buy it. Otherwise, go for “the “very dark color strong flavor” version if you can find it) Here’s what I order from Amazon (click on screenshot):
It’s also Wright Brothers Day, celebrating the first airplane flight in a heavier-than-air craft powered mechanically, which took place on December 17, 1903. Fortuitously, there’s a photo of that flight, with Orville at the controls and Wilbur running alongside:
Finally, it’s the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, National Day in Bhutan, and Pan American Aviation Day in the U.S.
Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) celebrates the life and work of Ana Mercedes Hoyos (29 September 1942 – 5 September 2014), identified by Wikipedia as:
. . . a Colombian painter, sculptor and a pioneer in modern art in the country. In her half-century of artistic works, she garnered over seventeen awards of national and international recognition. Beginning her career in a Pop Art style which moved towards abstract, her trajectory moved toward cubism and realism as she explored light, color, sensuality and the bounty of her surroundings. Her reinterpretations of master painters led her to an exploration of Colombian multiculturalism, and her later works focused on Afro-Colombian and mestizo heritage within the Colombian landscape.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Putin and his goons launched a major missile attack on Ukraine yesterday, committing additional war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure.
Ukraine’s capital came under one of the biggest attacks of the war on Friday as Russia’s invading forces fired dozens of missiles across the country, triggering widespread power outages, Ukrainian officials said.
Gunfire from air defense systems and thudding explosions combined with the wail of air-raid sirens as the barrage targeted critical infrastructure in cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporhizhzhia. The head of the Ukrainian armed forces said they intercepted 60 of 76 missiles launched.
“My beautiful sunshine. What am I going to do without you?” wailed Svytlana Andreychuk in the arms of Red Cross staffers. Her sister Olha was one of three people killed when a missile slammed into a four-story apartment building in Kryvyi Rih.
“She was so cheerful in life. She was a beauty. She helped everybody. She gave advice to everybody. How I love you so,” said Andreychuk.
In Kyiv, city council member Ksenia Semenova said 60% of residents were without power Friday evening, and 70% without water. The subway system was out of service and unlikely to be back in operation Saturday, she said.
. . .Friday’s attacks took place after the United States this week agreed to give a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine to boost the country’s defense. Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned Thursday that the sophisticated system and any crews accompanying it would be a legitimate target for the Russian military.
. . . More than half the Russian missiles fired Friday targeted Ukraine’s capital. The city administration said Kyiv withstood “one of the biggest rocket attacks” it has faced since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly 10 months ago. Ukrainian air defense shot down 37 of about 40 missiles that entered the city’s airspace, and one person was injured, it said.
*Will Twitter be banned in Europe? Elon Musk is facing a lot of criticism for his latest round of bannings. The ostensible reason was to prevent doxxing, and that’s okay because it’s a form of harassment, but Musk seem to be using this excuse to get rid of journalists he doesn’t like. From the WaPo:
The fate of the accounts — which Musk has said were suspended for posting location data in violation of new rules — could be resolved by late Friday, when a Twitter poll on reinstating them immediately or in seven days he launched was scheduled to conclude. The unscientific poll so far is leaning toward reinstating the accounts immediately, although it was unclear if Musk would do so considering he scrapped the results of a similar poll the night before. He has previously restored accounts following such polls.
Accounts that were suspended include @ElonJet, which tracks the location of Musk’s private plane through the use of publicly available data, as well as other accounts that track helicopter and plane locations. Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists on Thursday night, including from The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN.
Musk later accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family — although he provided no evidence that any of the journalists had done so.
Also on Friday, the account of Linette Lopez, a journalist who has written critically of Musk and Tesla also appeared to be suspended. It was not immediately clear what had prompted the suspension.
The EU has a stringent “Digital Services Act”, and Twitter could be sanctioned or even suspended if Musk doesn’t settle down. For if Twitter dies in Europe, it’ll die everywhere
Students at the University of California, Davis recently took a decidedly less conversational approach to their disagreement with fellow students. On Nov. 29, several Sacramento area chapters of the student organization Turning Point USA met on the public university’s campus to watch a screening of the controversial documentary “What is a Woman?” The film, which delves into conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s challenges to “gender ideology,” has sparked outrage on a number of university campuses. But nowhere have people lost their shit over this movie quite like a few detractors at UC Davis.
Roughly 30 minutes into the screening, the door to the meeting room swung open, revealing two black-clad masked figures.
Wielding a large garbage bag of manure.
One of those figures launched the excrement through the door. It landed harmlessly on the classroom floor, without striking any of the gathered students. However, two TPUSA members chased after the would-be assailants, who then pepper-sprayed the students. One TPUSA member was injured.
These protestors have abandoned conversation as the tool to convey disagreement. They have dropped the pen, and found the poo (or the pepper spray) mightier. But at a public school like UC Davis, bound by the Constitution to protect free expression, these tactics are an affront to the First Amendment, which was conceptualized as an antidote to violence
FIRE goes on to recount increasingly frequent cases of students contesting free expression. It’s grim in academia!
* Bari Weiss’s Substack has been renamed “The Free Press,” but Nellie Bowles’s Friday news summary continues. Reader her latest, “TGIF: Just Another Week in the U.S.A.” here. I’ll give you three of her patented snarky bits of news.
→ Layoffs at the Washington Post: Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan was shouted down after he announced to his staff that there would be layoffs. He said he wouldn’t “turn the town hall into a grievance session” before he walked out to a chorus of jeers from reporters. Here’s video:
NEW: @washingtonpost publisher Fred Ryan refuses to take staff questions after announcing Q1 layoffs in “Town Hall” @postguild pic.twitter.com/C4HOXb6y2C
— Annie Gowen (@anniegowen) December 14, 2022
The Post is in trouble: It has lost more than 500,000 subscribers since January 2021. And the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, doesn’t seem to want to humor his children with more cash to burn. Now, I’m not entirely surprised that the Washington Post is hemorrhaging readers. Sports fans might have trouble connecting with a story like this week’s: “Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?” (The article’s answer is that it is racism. The real answer is that Argentina is less than 1% black.) And TV watchers may be confused by last week’s critique of Shark Week:
Here’s a take: Just replace all the male Discovery hosts with literal sharks. It will go a long way in healing the generational trauma we’re seeing here. Take it or leave it WaPo.
→ Well that antisemitism came out quickly: All it took was one Kanye West breakdown for the very popular right-wing YouTube host Steven Crowder to go on an openly antisemitic tear and just ask questions about why there are so many Jewish bankers. Steven Crowder, silly though he may seem, is a bellwether. I think it’s useful to actually read or watch what was said: “I don’t think he hates Jewish people,” Crowder said of Kanye. “He’s not wrong about everything. Look, is there a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names in Hollywood exploiting people in positions of the performance arts, talent? . . . Is there a disproportionate number of people with Jewish last names in higher banking? That’s an argument that can be made.” Didn’t take much to get Crowder sounding a little like Farrakhan.
→ Iran continues to crack down on protestors: The brutal regime that Biden desperately wants to cut a nuclear deal with continues to torture and kill its own people, who have been protesting for basic freedoms. The 23-year-old Iranian protestor Majidreza Rahnavard’s last words before his execution: “Be joyful. Play happy music.” An Iranian soccer player who campaigned for women’s rights has been sentenced to execution.
They are heroes.
*Here’s a NYT op-ed by Michelle Goldberg highlighting a new essay about how the Left eats its own. Her title is “The Left’s Fever is Breaking,” and she links to an essay about progressive authoritarianism that I haven’t read but she thinks is pathbreaking. The link is in the following excerpt:
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.
In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.
That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics. But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.
. . . Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.
Well, a long essay by one guy might be good, and I’ll read it, but one man’s opinion is not an indication that the Left’s fever is breaking!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t want to compromise, of course:
Hili: What is democracy?A: Freedom to seek compromises.Hili: It’s not for me.
Hili: Co to jest ta demokracja?Ja: Wolność szukania kompromisów.Hili: To nie jest dla mnie.
********************
From Bruce:
Since it’s the Sabbath, I couldn’t resist adding this one from the FB site America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:
From Malcolm—more pets encounter snow:
A groaner from David:
When you go to Twitter to link to God’s new URL on Mastodon, you see this:
From Masih:
.#MajidrezaRahnavard was executed in Dec 12th by the regime in Iran.
In his final words, he stated he doesn't want Quran to be read or prayed on his grave, just celebrate.
If he was alive he’d be labelled as #Islamophobic. #Sharia is the reason for his execution.#IranRevoluttion https://t.co/NWJMywMrXN pic.twitter.com/5I5bh1vSci— Mahsa/مَهسا (Mooniter) (@Mooniter) December 15, 2022
I found this one, retweeted by Bette Midler. Trump announces his trading cards! Watch the video to see the man himself.
You won't see a more hilarious video today.
Spread Trump's humiliation everywhere.pic.twitter.com/s9cxisnfpR
— Really American 🇺🇸 (@ReallyAmerican1) December 15, 2022
From Malcolm. You know that cat is itching to attack the parrot!
A parrot plays peekaboo with a neighbor's cat.pic.twitter.com/RTn48NRpAt
— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) December 7, 2022
First Cat Willow’s first Christmas at the White House (sound up if you want to hear “Jingle Bells”). Surprisingly, Willow’s acting just like a cat:
Willow can't get enough of her first Christmas at the White House with @FLOTUS pic.twitter.com/QyeQNqQMHd
— The Dodo (@dodo) December 16, 2022
From the Auschwitz Memorial:
17 December 1904 | A Czech Jewish woman, Vlasta Lamplová, was born in Prague.
She was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt Ghetto on 18 December 1943. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/BBHshIr41Q
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 17, 2022
Tweets from Professor Cobb. More about the Exeter Cathedral cat door, with the name of the current occupant:
He looks like the gaoler. Here are the renegades hiding from the cops: pic.twitter.com/1nMC5anTMa
— Steve H (@sfh300) December 16, 2022
A funny thread of tweets (there are eight) between the Deputy Head Girl and the Headteacher. This is serious stuff: no Yorkshire pud at Christmas dinner? OY!
We think it’s really important to own your mistakes and fix them. (Thanks to @pauldixtweets for this approach!)
(2/8) pic.twitter.com/IWN5QdElZ8— Dave McPartlin FCCT 🇺🇦 (@dave_mcpartlin) December 15, 2022
Cat Cartel in Alabama https://www.al.com/news/2022/12/archibald-cat-food-cartel-busted-in-bama.html
I don’t see the movie as “nasty”. Matt Walsh is indeed right wing, but the movie just highlights that today’s woke-activist academics don’t have a definition of “woman” and consider even discussing the topic to be “transphobic”. Embarassing such academics seems like fair game to me. Is it really “right wing” to know what a woman is these days?
PS I’m impressed by Musk’s ability to get the mainstream to be suddenly interested in free speech and against arbitrary bans on social media.
Took them a while, but better late than never.
Though it being reported on in the NYT without a collective meltdown by the staff just might be.
If they were professional journalists, in the traditional sense of the word, they would view free speech as sacred an unassailable, even that which they disagree with. Additionally, they would place the highest priority on making sure that their reports were verifiably factual.
That is not who these people are.
It is interesting to see the same people who casually and frequently called for censorship and shunning of people whose views differed slightly from their own, are now claiming to hold almost Jeffersonian views on free speech. Not enough time has elapsed between the two for it to be a believable change of fundamental beliefs.
A principled person would be deeply ashamed when such comments are revealed, and shown side by side.
I also believe, at least personally, that people are way too attached to labeling things left or right, equating that with good or evil, and doggedly holding those beliefs even as the parties continuously change their positions on things as fundamental as free speech.
Reply to Coel / Matt Walsh’s in-person questioning doesn’t seem any worse than Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper’. Goal of both is to ask questions to make their other side look bad.
What Is A Woman? is offered by the Daily Wire ($8.50 month, billed annually) but I won’t give $ to them. Found it for free on YouTube, but seemingly in four parts, and I haven’t looked at it yet, as I found another “controversial” suppressed film, also for free, on YouTube.
Adult Human Female, is a nice, calm, “UK documentary feature to look at the clash between women’s rights and trans ideology” with feminist speaking as individuals, and is available on YouTube: https: //youtu.be/94HFMSm-JBo
Best comments was “When I was a teenager I never could have imagined a group of amazing women would need to make a film in which they explain, very patiently that sex is determined at conception and usually observed halfway through pregnancy.”
Great whites, presumably.
All social media companies have to make a choice between principle and profit in regard to free speech. In order to be global companies, they have to comply with laws in all the countries, which inevitably means that they must censor. Unfortunately, all of them have chosen to comply with local censorship laws.
As for Musk suspending journalists, the most instructive aspect of the affair is the shrieks of outrage leveled at the idea that liberals might now be banned. I think doxxing is as good as saying to someone “We know where you live” and “Will no one rid me of this priest?”, and shouldn’t be tolerated. I hope that Musk applies this rule evenhandedly.
That joke about five beers has me wondering whether Romans really did that, or whether they crossed two fingers to indicate “ten” rather than holding up two hands with fingers spread. They would have been one up on us by being able to indicate 100 with one hand by forming a “C”.
I don’t know about Roman counting systems but Italian merchants circa 1200’s had complex finger counting systems, according to Keith Devlin’s boom on Fibonacci, “The Man of Numbers”. I can’t quickly find the method in the book, but it was taught in Fibonacci’s book “Liber Abbaci” with illustrations showing various finger positions that represented different whole numbers (I can’t make sense of them but a photo of a page is in Devlin’s book, you could probable find it online aomewhere). Devlin also talks about a syllabus from the 1400’s that has an entry “Then he is taught how to keep numbers in his hands, that is his left hand units and tens and in his right hand hundreds and thousands.”
it is a very interesting book if you are mathematically inclined. I am not, and get easily confused but still got a lot out of it.
Dunno about Italian merchants circa the 1200s, but in my old neighborhood as a kid, sometimes we’d see the old-timer Italians playing Mora on the street corner:
Rock, paper, scissors?
Pretty close, I think. The younger Italian guys in my neighborhood simplified the game to “odds & evens.”
“Rocks, paper, scissors” and “odds & evens” were how we’d decide who got first pick on choosing teams at the playground.
Behind Worden Road Elementary (now Jindra Park) we’d always use the hand over hand up the bat to see who got first choice, three fingers at the end of the bat counts as a whole hand and you got first choice.
I wondered whether that might be you, bubba, first time I saw the screen name.
If you got hold of the knob at the end of the bat, the other guy got three chances to kick it out of your hand. Don’t forget that.
“Rock, paper, scissors” was mainly to see who got first pick in street football games on Enid Road. “Odds or eves,” we used to pick teams on the blacktop behind Mt. Carmel at recess.
PS – Tell our sister I said “hi” when you talk to her tomorrow. 🙂
My understanding is that the ‘V’ derives from five splayed fingers; the two lines represent the thumb and pinky finger.
Yeah, I, II, III, IV,V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X is kinda cute. There is also this Butcher coming into the bar sticking up his thumb and pinky: five beers please.
Most of us in the U.S. assume that freedom of speech is a principle that is universally held here—an indelible part of our shared culture. This belief is so pervasive that we never even think about its legitimacy as a principle. We assume that we are all on the same page. Free speech *is* America.
It is not. The fracas at UC Davis proves that it is not. The speech police on university campuses—the DEI apparatchiks—prove that it is not. The cancellations of those who dare question the new authoritarian left prove that it is not.
Free speech is under attack and it seems to be losing.
That said, it’s nice to see a cat in the White House.
Meanwhile, conservative groups across the country have pressured school districts to ban books that have anything to do with LGBT characters. Cancellation is non-partisan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/books/book-bans-libraries.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Education
I suppose it depends on if the books contain T characters or just LBG characters. These days I assume that anyone yelling about prejudice against “LGBT” is just mad that “T” isn’t being valourized, and to hell with the homosexuals.
I would be willing to give the conservatives the benefit of the doubt that books promoting transgenderism (whether as a “better” way to resolve homosexual feelings or for any other purpose) ought not to be in school libraries, any more than books that promote other maladaptive adolescent activities such as cutting, bulimia, drug use, and shoplifting.
But I could be wrong. The story is paywalled.
There was a time when, at least if you had asked me, I would have told you in very unambiguous terms that people who want to pull books from classrooms and school libraries are monsters.
They were almost always religious zealots, which made the judgement easier.
It got more complicated when super progressive types started banning books because of “outdated views on…”.
To me, they were just different monsters, and still needed to be strongly opposed.
These are new times. People are putting books in schools, not to educate or enlighten the kids, but to subvert western and capitalist notions of sexuality and gender, as a revolutionary act.
The teacher or counselor who is promoting this stuff probably does not see it in those terms. They have been sold the ideology with a more palatable sales pitch. Or so I hope. It seems insane to imagine teachers at some conference bragging to each other about how many of their students have resorted to self harm or actual suicide.
Similarly, there is no reasonable advantage for 10 year olds to be taught about what sorts of lubes are best for anal sex, much less shown graphic images of sex acts.
I guess it is similar to putting the writings and videos of Anwar al-Awlaki into the hands of Islamic kids. Their purpose is to turn people into soldiers and martyrs for Islam. Some percentage of those kids are going to absorb and act on that message.
In all of these cases, there is no benefit to the kid to being exposed to the material. There is instead significant likelihood of harm. Of course, the reasonable concerns of parents are taken advantage of by the same zealots who want to push their more sinister censorship goals.
“DEI apparatchiks” is the right term, spot on. That is *exactly* what they are. No more DEI “administrators” or “officers’, just “apparatchiks”.
Regarding God’s new URL on Mastodon being blocked, I think this is true of all links to Mastodon. Elonoman doesn’t like competition much.
I don’t do Twitter myself, but it seems whatever cockamamie rules were enforced by the old regime have merely been replaced by the capricious whims of a plutocrat.
So much for Mr. Musk’s promised unfettered free speech.
Elon is getting battered from all sides. A lot of this is simply due to Tall Poppy Syndrome. Yes he’s eccentric and yes he leans in too hard on Reputation Defender, and he’s gonna have fits & starts and starts & stops. I say let’s give the dude a chance and see where this lands. The enormity – scale, complexity, nuance – of this mission vs 1st amendment rights is unprecedented. And for sure I’d rather have him at the helm of this massive vessel than say a Whoopi Goldberg or the like… who think that speech is free only when it’s speech they agree with.
My understanding is that the new Twitter rule is “no posting of the real time coordinates of famous people.”
I hope everyone can see the difference between this rule and a rule like “no discussions of the lab leak hypothesis.”
“Real time coordinates of famous people” is a bit misleading. What was posted is publicly available information about the location of planes. Musk’s “rule” here is not something he makes as you seem to understand it. He turned around and posted a photo and license plate of someone urging his followers to “do something” about it. He’s fine with doxing as long as he’s the one doing it.
Musk:
Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Was this the licence plate you are referring to? The plate of the person who blocked a car carrying Musk’s child and climbed on the hood?
And what is misleading about “real time coordinates of famous people”? Meaning seems clear to me.
My overall point is that just as the Constitution is not a suicide pact, reasonable moderation policies are perfectly consistent with free speech *principles.*
Google is your friend.
I gather (I’m open to correction) that locations of private jets in terms of ID codes are indeed public info, but that the FAA allows the ID codes to be anonymous. Thus, which ID code is Musk’s jet is *not* public. It seems that Jack Sweeney (the person responsible for the live-tracking account) had hacked that info.
Musk could thus rightfully object to live tracking that IDed him. There seems no legitimate “free speech” rationale for accepting live tracking. If one wants to highlight jet use with regard to climate change (Sweeney’s claimed motivation) then there’s no need to do it in real time.
Get yourself some flight tracking software. You can see where all the planes are when they are taking off, flying, and landing. This is public information. There is no information as to WHO is on the plane. This is not “real time coordinates of famous people”.
The flight-tracking software just gives plane code IDs, it doesn’t tell you which one is Musk’s jet. Thus an account that labels one as Musk’s jet is not just using public information, but can be regarded as “doxing”.
Plane code IDs are not secret. You can find pages of them listed on Wikipedia. If this was a real violation Elmo could sue the pants off Jack Sweeney. It would be an easy win.
I don’t understand the lengths Muskovites go to defend this man’s chaotic behavior.
Well, lots of people who seem to know what they are talking about are saying that the FAA allow anonymous ID codes on request, and that Musk was indeed using that facility, and that Jack Sweeney had hacked that info to track Musk’s plane, and thus that he not using solely public info.
And lots of people can’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that Elmo is quite off his rocker and behaving in an incoherent manner. He’s now banning accounts that post links to Mastodon, Post.news, Facebook, and other competing platforms. He’s banning reporters who report on him, Twitter, and Tesla.
This thread had pretty much run its course but I did run into an interesting tidbit this morning that is relevant, or at least worth noting. Musk doesn’t own the plane(s). They belong to SpaceX. And Tesla is paying for the costs when they are used. Life as a billionaire means you don’t really have to pay for things.
Horrible news from Iran, I hope they will topple the Ayatollahs, after 33 years of their disastrous rule. But I won’t hold my breath. Contrary to the Shah’s soldiers , who refused to fire on revolutionaries hiding behind women and children, these guards have no such compunctions. After all, Allah is supporting them.
I have a question about the delicious boneless smoked ham. I grew up in an area with a high Jewish population, so I interacted with lots of children from Jewish families. Some of them did eat ham, which surprised me. They didn’t eat pork, but ham was OK (something about its being cured, was one explanation I received).
Is this common, or did I just have weird friends.
These ridiculous “Trump cards” at U$D 99? Trump has descended to the level of a card peddler? A former US president? Seriously? If I were a US citizen, my toes would be cringing, in fact, they already do.
Reading from a teleprompter robs him of any charm he might have had claim to.
I can’t shed a tear I’m so fucking angry.
… and what pray tell are you angry about ? Iran’s old men executing young men for freedom of expression, women rights, what a brave young man.
I ordered the maple syrup!
Pope Francis was born on this day. Happy birthday, Jorge!
You can watch Adult Human Female for free on Vimeo:
utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email . I haven’t watched it yet, but I hear that it’s a good critique of gender ideology.
That was really good. No hate. No trans propagandists.
There is also a good point made by several speakers that even the courtesy of respecting pronouns is dangerous. Once you agree that a male-bodied person is a “she”, (i.e., that “transwomen are women”) it becomes linguistically difficult to articulate why you don’t want to admit this “her” into the violence shelter to mingle with all the other “her”s. The common-sense answer, “because she’s a man!” is absurd, because “she” is the personal pronoun that refers to a woman.
So if your employer says you must refer to Sarah in the third person as “she”, whether she shaved that day or not, do what you must to avoid getting fired or punched in the face. But that should be the only reason.
The first airplane flight is rather hard to define as well as substantiate. There is a good case to be made for Richard Pearse of NZ pre-dating the Wright brothers by several months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
> “To be sure, the movie [What is a Woman] sounds like a nasty, right-wing piece of work, . . .”
The link embedded takes one to a report by the University of Wisconsin newspaper covering his speech there, which followed a screening of the movie. The story does not describe any basis for saying the movie is nasty; it only reports that its creator offends a lot of people who tried to get the university to cancel his talk. The reporter was covering the speech, not the movie. But there is no need to read a second-hand report. The whole speech and the Q & A are available on YouTube. I’ll leave it for readers to find. When I post a URL as set out in Da Roolz, it embeds instead of just appearing as a URL, which I think our host doesn’t like.
As for the movie itself, a Google search includes a review/comment by some trans person that is so glowingly negative (and long!) that I feel compelled to try to find it somewhere. Can’t say I’d pay US$8.50 to The Wire just to watch it but you never know. Spoiler alert: other videos describing the movie give away at the end that the only person interviewed who was scripted as able to answer the question was Walsh’s wife, Alissa: “An adult human female”.
Matt Walsh, the guy behind the “What is a Woman” film, is himself a nasty piece of right wing garbage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Walsh_(political_commentator)
Thank you for setting us straight. What would we ever do if we didn’t have moral authorities from the Left to provide ad hominems for us to save us from thinking?
Glad to be of help. If you bothered to read the article, you’re still free to think about it, or not.