Since the Left finds racism & cultural appropriation in everything everywhere, let's stop offending everyone by going back to all white, all the time! "Praise Jesus, I'm a white man!  — Kyle Post on Flickr “Girl, I thought I was going crazy. I spent HOURS on Pixabay finding images without people for my software app. It was insane! Nuts! I began hearing VOICES, arguing in my head with people on social media! Like, they were criticizing and shaming me for having images that were too white or too this or too that!” My friend had been up until 3:00AM working on his app, a cool little trivia and educational game. “My therapist says I’m not schizophrenic,” he added. Uh…what? "Schizophrenic?” I asked. He’d never exhibited any signs — oh, wait, the mental debate. Happy white totally cis-heteronormative hikers enjoying the white sky — Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash “Arguing with potential enemies in your head is normal,” I said. Kind of a mental rehearsal for discussions or arguments you might have. Figuring out the best things to say, the best points, when you get flamed for making the woke outrage du jour. “That’s what my therapist said,” Charlie replied. “But I was going crazy last night, every time I looked at a good photo with a person in it, I started worrying how it might offend people.” Wow. Just wow. You know the Loony Left has gone Over The Top Into The Ionosphere when a black guy is worried about being called racist and white supremacist. Happily white Marilyn Monroe enchanting white men from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” — Public domain from Wikipedia Pretty fly for a white photographer 2020 was the year the whole damn world imploded. Can anyone deny it? Lockdown forced a global recession and drove Americans into double-digit unemployment almost overnight. So no surprise that anger, resentment, and just plain fed-upness with each other’s shit exploded over a knee-on-the-neck video of a white cop happily squashing the life out of a black man. Social distancing be damned, the non-Trumbfucks took to the streets in protest, masking up while ‘patriots’ gathered unmasked to show how much they’ve never given a rat’s patoot about their country. Call it The Civil War, Part Deux. Never mind the irony that wars are never civil. It’s tough enough just existing in America, even tougher as a black man who isolates not just from a killer virus but from easily-triggered Woke Police. Now Charlie’s got to worry about offending the never-satisfied, perpetually outraged far left with photos that may be ‘too white’. Like this. Happy retired white people — Nan Palmero on Flickr. We must return to white people doing white things living white lives and telling white stories. Now no one has to feel offended at how they’re represented! Because white people should stick to what they know and not stereotype and trope and appropriate other people's stuff! I pointed out that at the time, it was pretty hard to find appropriate non-white free stock photography. Finding diverse group shots isn’t too hard anymore, I expect because demand is higher. But it’s still somewhat whitewashed. Type ‘pretty woman’ or ‘handsome men’ in Google Images. It's mostly white people, although 'children’ is more diverse. Of the adults, often the fair-skinned is front and center. Kind of like Tony Orlando & Dawn, without the porn-’stache. Free images come from photographers who are willing to share their work for free, or the price of a cup of coffee. Maybe they’re white and not considering how un-diverse they are. Maybe it’s just easier to score white models. Or maybe they’re afraid of taking crap from the hyper-neurotic oversensitive left. I told Charlie why my images weren’t always as diverse as I might like. “They’re important for promoting an article. They have to be really good, unusual, speak to the subject matter. If you have a choice between a black person's photo that’s useable, and a white person's that’s really good, which better illustrates the article, I’ll use the latter photo.” But I also had begun to consider more whether I’d be accused of stereotyping or somehow misrepresenting people who aren’t like me, whether they’re non-white, or non-straight, or trans, or whatever. Skin color has become so polarized it may send a political message about an article that isn’t political. I wrote an article about belly dancing . And I used this photo: Photo from PxFuel Not as good as I would have liked, but the free pickin’s were slim for a broke-ass writer and I didn’t want to waste a morning looking for a better image when I could be writing. I’m not sure I would have used it if the torsos were black. What kind of crap would I have gotten from the Liberal Hate Police? Would I be accused of ‘sexualizing’ black women in service to the white supremacy body politic to which I am now ascribed? Would it be perceived as a sly jab at Black Lives Matter? (Uh, only shaggable black lives matter?) Would I be stereotyping African women in pre-colonial harems? (Well, I doubt they wore such cheesy costumes.) Sometimes it’s easier to just go White Like Me. The world’s whitest snowflakes My writer buddy Julia E Hubbel knows what micro-nitpicking on another media platform by the far left feels like (Read: Overprivileged overprotected largely white very pretty young women). She tags me every time she rants about the latest Social Justice Bimbette Attack. She’s written extensively about her Kiddie Corps still young enough to think they know everything, kicking up their pretty little feet in a self-righteous hissy fit because she called someone a ‘chick’ or isn’t sufficiently pro-black enough, or some such nonsense. She’s a bestselling author defending herself against children who can’t eat peanut butter because, like, four kids in the United States once had peanut allergies and now everyone under thirty has them because parents overprotected them and wouldn’t let them build up their immunity to allergenic foods. Their emotional systems are as fragile as their bodies. They’ve never been allowed to build up a protective immunity to challenging their assumptions, either. I gotcher trigger warning right here, little girl. Julia got called a ‘ fat old White Boomer ’ by, as she so eloquently put it, ‘some Young White chick in serious need of an enema.’ She describes the ‘dripping condescension’ from a ‘Young, White, Clueless, Overly-Educated and Magnificently Ignorant child’. I know the type. This particular platform she's on is hopelessly infested with Rebelles Without A Clue. Everything becomes a Crime Against Humanity when you’re young, white and ‘woke’. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure draw a direct line between the political ‘cognitive distortions’ they see in college campus protests since 2013 to the thinking distortions commonly exhibited by depression sufferers. The most famously depressed and anxious generation in probably a century or more is Millennials. The outsized campus hysterics and occasional violence originate more with later Millennials and Gen Z, the former hitting their forties now, busy with their careers and families (yes, some Millennials do get married and make babies). Haidt and Lukanioff note that Gen Z, ‘iGen’ as they call them, is the first generation to grow up all-digital. White people. We’re so pretty! And cis-heteronormative, mostly. Utterly and grossly offensive to the LBTQIAXYZPDQYOLOLMFAOMOUSE set, but white cis-heteronormative is what I know and the only thing I'm allowed to write about. CC0 photo from Peakpx The authors also point to helicopter parenting, the culture of safetyism rooted in outsized parental fears about child abduction, the ‘corporatization’ of the college university system, and a few other causes as to why mostly middle and upper-middle-class kids of any color overreact to perceived slights, particularly alleged ‘microaggressions’, and catastrophize them, turning every disagreement or innocent expression into a woke Battle of Helms Deep. Campus protests have turned violent and threatening, not unlike their compatriots/adversaries on the far right. It’s the greatest irony that the University of Berkeley, home to the Free Speech Movement in 1964, was the site of a violent 2017 protest over right-wing gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos who’d been invited to speak. I’ve never been a Milo fan but beating people and pepper-spraying them because you don’t like their Make America Great Again hat or because they’re trying to verify an event has been canceled is no better than the armed bozos who show up at town halls with guns to bitch about face masks. I strongly suspect Julia’s Clueless White Chick critics come from this particular ‘magnificently overeducated’ generational slice. I might argue, though, that today’s college students aren’t well-educated when free speech is dead lest one start a Twitter nuclear war for using a perfectly acceptable word last week that is now verboten this week. Still, I have to hand it to them, the kids are pretty glib with the academic jargonbabble, which at least labels them as someone who went to college, even if they carefully insulated themselves from learning actual critical thinking skills. Or words that actually mean something. Or mean what the dictionary says they do. Campus protests resemble those from the 1960s, except back then their grandparents protested an unjust, illegal war in a foreign country that had never attacked the United States, and ‘Jim Crow’ laws still in place in the South, and serious ecological pollution. Today, the kids are losing their minds over pronouns and not enough non-white or female literature. Not exactly My Lai. Now that George Floyd has become a household word along with Black Lives Matter, the racial nit-pickers and catastrophizers are out in full force on Twitter and Tumblr, trying to make ‘white supremacy’ a thing you’re born into, rather than something you once consciously joined because you believed in white superiority. It’s why some of us are striking back at racists and haters who claim they can’t be racists and haters because they’re not white. Yeah, nice try. Racism is nothing more than the tribalism built into all our brains to which we’re all slaves, unless we’re vigilant about questioning our assumptions. There must be something really racist about this photo, but I’m not sure what. You should ask a twenty-something. So I’m not going to use it. Public domain photo from Free Stock Photos. (Yes, I just called you a slave. You’re a slave to your tribalism. Deal with it.) Hypersensitive theatrics make a white person far warier about what they say, do, write and--what images they use. When the far left is perpetually outraged by everything, the safest, least offensive route is to go All White, All The Time. Maybe that’s what The Kids want in the end. Write what you know, right? Okay, since we white folks run the world that means we go back to #OscarsSoWhite and #WhiteLivesMatter, so maybe y’all can #TakeAKnee for the lack of people of color (not ‘ colored people’! ) in STEM or Google Images or whatever. But, POC can be as identitied as they want, listing every racial genetic label they discovered from their 23andMe report and every other single label they can squeeze into their allotted media platform profile description. “Patti Privileged: Latinx Black Sorta White-Looking Sapiosexual Non-CisHeteronormative BDSM Bottom EggBeaterSexual LibertariDemocrat Anarchist Differently-Abled Anti-Fascist” etc. etc. etc… I think everyone will be much happier this way, don’t you agree? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

There's a new global courage to call out bad behavior, culture and values of previously untouchable groups. Accountability is for everyone . Including Islam's horror-storied problems with modernity. Photo from Pixabay There’s a reckoning a-coming for Muslims in 2025. The progressive freeze on free speech is lifting, here in North America and elsewhere in the Western world. Islam has a lot of splainin’ to do. I’m not happy about the Return of the Trumpocalypse, but one windstorm of fresh air he brings is a more open environment of free speech, however long it lasts, since Trump and his woke right friends have their own censorship wish list for his incipient term. But now that people feel a little safer to speak the formerly forbidden, especially on X, Trump’s new BBF (Best Bro’ Forever) Elon Musk, during a moment of clarity, pulled a Hannibal Buress and outed the United Kingdom as a haven for pedophile rapists. It’s proving em barr assing for one UK immigrant community, and is only one of multiple reasons why the world will scrutinize the religion of Islam, and its violent bastard child Islamism, in the fresher environment of freer inquiry in 2025. Pakistani Muslim rape gangs It’s been going on in the UK for at least thirty years, and possibly since the 1960s. Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants have targeted young poor white girls as their own swappable rape toys all over England, and the government has done damn little about it, apart from a few token trials. Musk’s recent posts have especially targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who’s only the most recent PM not to do anything about the decades-long scandal of child rape gangs—one that no one wanted to touch because of the enormously uncomfortable Pakistani-Muslim connection, many of them immigrants, who regarded their thousands of victims as ‘white slags’ and subhuman ‘infidels’. But you know, we wouldn’t want to feed anti-immigrant right-wing narratives, would we. He’s not kidding. Yes. The details are sickening and I’ll leave you to research them on your own, but part of the reason why England failed its underage economically-challenged citizens repeatedly was because they didn’t want to appear ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’. While reports damn all levels of British justice and government, the decades-long elevation of racism as the most mortal of progressive human sins contributed mightily to the scandal and collaborated quite conveniently with racist rapists. Progressive feminists and the #MeToo movement mostly ignored this. One can only imagine how they would have reacted had the rapists been affluent white prep school boys and their victims underage ‘n—ers’ and ‘filthy raghead sluts’. The press calls them ‘grooming gangs’ but Helen Pluckrose rightly points out in her carefully worded and highly nuanced article How Not To Talk About Rape Gangs that they are, in fact, rape gangs. I highly recommend Helen’s Substack The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain for more extremely well-parsed liberal thought. If ‘progressives’ are to be believed, it’s a worse sin to embarrass and ‘stigmatize’ a community by calling out their racist rapists than it is to rape and gang rape underage children whom they explicitly consider worthless pieces of white filth. Who swapped their sex dolls around like baseball trading cards. Sometimes in one evening. Here’s the embarrassing part: The Muslim-y stuff. A Rotherham ‘grooming gang’ victim wrote about the Islamist religiosity behind the rape gangs, which she says are run far more like terrorist organizations than pedophile rings. She extensively describes the way these extremist psychopaths twist the Koran to cloak gang rape and sexual torture in religion, in a manner which will be familiar to Bible readers whose own holy book is also pretty graphically horrific to women and has been used to justify horrific misogyny through the ages. Elon Musk, with his global reach, tweeting the rape gangs out in the open (once again) has brought a predictable far-right backlash. Attacking Muslims who aren’t sexual psychopaths doesn’t help the victims and may drive more young Muslim men into the arms of these terrorism-with-benefits cells. But it will hopefully put real pressure on the UK Pakistani-Muslim community to address a long-festering problem they inarguably own—and brought from the mother country . It’s not just a Pakistani problem, though. Islam has a serious image problem: A clearly historically-established patriarchal obsessive desire to control women, an enduring love affair with terrorism , relentless hatred of Jews and some of the worst human rights abuses in primarily Islamic countries. Islam is accountable for their bad boys. Islam and antisemitism Violent attacks against Jews (dog-whistled as ‘Zionists’) have skyrocketed around the world in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 10/07/23. It’s awakened the genuine antisemites and Nazis in the MAGA brigade in the wake of Trump’s win. ‘ Progressive’ antisemitism has crawled out from its own cesspool in North America and Europe, with many observers noticing the proliferation of the usual brown faces from their mother countries cloaked in keffiyehs, which doesn’t exactly challenge ugly stereotypes, but does effectively cloak their identities while bullying, intimidating, or outright attacking Jews. Antisemitism is both prohibited and promoted in the Koran, along with a posthumous rebranding of Abraham as a Muslim, its explicit genocidal intent against Jews, and a long, bloody history. Like the Bible, it often can’t make up its mind who to hate or when to hate them. Or not. Or something. Islam and all-purpose anti-infidel terrorism Meanwhile, in Magdeburg Germany, a far-right anti-Islam Saudi Arabian (!) barrelled his car through a Christmas market in December, killing six. He may no longer be a fanboy of his former religion but he sure terrorizes like it. And just to get the new year started off right in the United States, ISIS fanboy Shamsud Din-Jabbar likewise barreled through celebrations in New Orleans’s French Quarter early New Year’s Day, killing fourteen and injuring dozens of others. In Canada, an Islamist group is calling for a return to Islamic caliphate and Shariah law, after quickly cancelling their conference last year when their British compatriots were added to a terrorist list. All in all, it’s not looking very rosy this year for a world religion with an estimated two billion adherents, not all of whom necessarily want to eliminate Israel, prohibit women from speaking , ever, kill infidels, or rape children, infidel or not. Many of them are friends with infidels. Many of them, frankly, are closet infidels. I used to be good friends with one before porn drove him off his rocker. I’ve known others who professed atheism safely to us infidels in Canada, but would never mention it at the Eid family dinner. The violence problem is Islamist, those anal-retentive fundamentalists who think the world should be ruled by Islam and Shariah law. So is horrible treatment of women, encompassing many evils we recoil at in the modern day like wife-beating ( sanctioned in the Koran , but debated in modern Islam), FGM, child marriage, and the clear regard of women as men’s property, which directly leads to how they’re treated today. Regardless of what the Koran says, it’s always easy to make holy books justify what you want. If you’re familiar with Christianity—and I am, raised Lutheran, now apostate, and Christian fundamentalism’s severe critic when I lived in the U.S., you recognize exactly what Islamist fundies are doing. I mean, unlike Christianity, whose founder was kind of a hippie guru, the Prophet spread Islam by proselytizing and conquest. Peace and war! Like any other religion, it went through waves of freedom and oppression. Islam was a beacon of light and tolerance during the Dark Ages, for example, a time when art, science, philosophy, and lively debate flourished anywhere but Europe. Now, it’s in its own Dark Age. Islam and collective self-analysis When critics today argue Islam’s beliefs and values are ‘fundamentally incompatible with modern democracy and pluralism,’ they’re entirely correct. So, too, are the those similarly laid out in the Bible. The three world religions possess holy books full of contradictions, claim to be religions of peace (and are, sometimes), and justify practices we have largely banned today. It’s unfair to hold any ancient religion’s origins to our modern yardsticks, since democracy was only revived 249 years ago in the American colonies and our current understanding of human rights in the 20th century. However, it’s fair to ask how much each religion has, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, ‘rehabilitated themselves.’ Islam is running like a lame horse behind its brothers. Islam is the baby brother to Christianity (600 years younger), with Judaism over twice its age at 3,500 years. Both latter religions have had more time to mature. But all co-exist today in a modern age of mass media and the Internet, with channels and windows to the world we didn’t have until radio entered homes in the 1920s. Our direct exposure to others far away awakened and revived attention and promotion of human rights that Islam has been much slower to integrate. In addition to its deficient human rights for women, Islam’s anti-LGBTQ violence persists in many places, and in most parts of northern and western Africa and the Middle East, it’s a crime to be homosexual . A willingness to examine its own religion, and to challenge human rights abuses, practices, and bigotries we frown upon today, or render illegal, isn’t as pervasive in Islam as it should be, perhaps because challenging Islam in many parts of the Islamic world can get you tortured, imprisoned, or executed. That said, there are progressive Muslims and groups in the world. More on that in a future article. Like it or not, immigrants bring their values and culture with them, sometimes including oppressive practices and a greater willingness for violence. Too many ‘progressives’ and liberals have been reluctant to challenge it. The Day of Reckoning is nigh for them, too, in 2025. Scream about Christian nationalism, but ignore violent, misogynist, homophobic Islamism. Or sometimes, just plain Islam. That’s why Western countries are more closely scrutinizing Islamic country immigration applicants. Is it fair? Well, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Ba’hais, Shintoists and Rastaferians aren’t committing global acts of terror in the name of their god(s) or prophet(s). So now we’re debating whether countries should expatriate those who enter their country and commit horrific crimes contrary to Western democratic, egalitarian, and multicultural values, although that solution doesn’t address the radicalization of native citizens. It’s another reason to scrutinize Islamic-origin immigrants, since that’s exactly what some are doing. It’s not Islamophobic, especially every time an Islamist intentionally creates bloodshed, chaos and suffering, to criticize the religion it’s rooted in. Religions, cultures, and groups own their wrongdoers. We need to differentiate between legitimate criticism and debate about a frankly problematic religion versus fear-based bigotry. It does us no good to kick out law-abiding Muslim citizens, especially if it’s based on panic attacks of what they ‘might’ be plotting behind our backs. We might well raise the spectre of what any of us is doing behind closed doors. How many non-Muslims are running their own rape gangs, or ‘sex traffickers’ as we call them here ? How many people are planning non-Muslim terrorist attacks ? Who’s planning the next mass shooting? One group uses bullets, the other bombs. Who should we let into our countries? Europe finds itself targeted once again by the ‘Islamic State’ after a knife attack in Solingen, Germany, and two car bomb explosions in France, and a thwarted attempt to target a Taylor Swift concert in Austria. Authorities say seven attacks and twenty-one attempted or planned attacks have been documented since Oct. 7th. France especially has long been the target of Islamist hate, sustaining eight attacks in 18 months for 2015-2016. French think tank Fondapol recorded over 56,000 Islamist terrorist attacks globally from 2013-2014, compared to 10,459 from 1979-2012. Islam’s Islamists are a problem. Not all Muslims share our values or commitment to freedom or are willing to play by our rules. Just like every other human who wants to move here too. But some of them do, and I don’t want to toss out ‘the good ones’. Islam owns its terrorists It’s time for these uncomfortable debates. We can’t fix problems without them, and that means a lot of different groups and ‘identities’ are going to squirm, not just Muslims in 2025. We need to do a better job of protecting those who speak out against Islam’s challenges in democratic countries, or who feign concern for certain cultures while using it as an excuse to bully, intimidate, oppress, and outright attack, as we see with increasingly Islamofascist campus protesters. Free speech isn’t truly free if you have to censor yourself to protect your life, your livelihood, or your family. Progressives and liberals have proven themselves useless here. It means defeating Islamofascism won’t be as simple as rounding up all Muslims and shipping them home, or just the terrorists. Not all Islamofascists are brown anymore. The new face is quickly becoming young, white, and privileged. What, exactly, are we to do with the radicalized native North Americans who aren’t Muslim? Who we can’t send back anywhere? What will we do with them, once we theoretically eliminate all the ‘bad Muslims’? Let the debates begin. What Do Jews And All Women Have In Common? If You’re ‘Marginalized’, Make Sure It’s Not Because You’re An Asshole If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice? (about Gazan and Hamas’s attitude toward LGBTQ rights) Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

What if he doesn’t have Short Guy’s Disease? Al Pacino is eye level with Tom Cruise at 5'7", but it hasn’t stopped him from bedding some of Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Photo by Barakaldo Digital on Flickr CC0 2.0 Ladies, and by this I mean single ladies , I ask you — what is this problem you have with short men? I mean sure, okay, maybe if they have Short Guy’s Disease. Taller than me by an inch, but only with both heels on the ground. That is, as many know, the condition some men acquire when they feel they have to overcompensate for their perceived ‘short’comings by acting like a hyper-aggressive manspreader. Even if you’re small, you can act like a big dick. Short guys have a reason to be fairly irritable — they’re discriminated against by women who overwhelmingly desire tall men. On every dating site, you’ll find women who want tall tall tall tall tall tall TALL TALL TALL!!! I really don’t get that. Who the hell cares if he’s short? I sure don’t, as long as he’s still taller than he is wide. (Corollary for shallow men: Prospective women must be ‘athletic’, politically correct singledudespeak for THIN THIN THIN THIN THIN!!!) Even older women — old enough to know better — buy into this size obsession. Haven’t they been through enough bad relationships, bad marriages, and bad treatment by idiot men who are tall and strong and can act like total dicks because — well, they can? (Corollary: Good-looking women who act like bitches because the hotter they are, the more shit they know you’ll take.) But no, some women never learn. Personally, I don’t give a damn how tall a guy is as long as he’s not @#$%in’ crazy or alcoholic. I think there’s such a thing as too tall. Many years ago, when I was still living in Connecticut, I had a Summer of Tall Men. One was a guy who was 6’3, an Internet friend I had a fling with in New York. The next was 6’4, who I met through a dating service. The one after that was 6’5, also through the dating service, and I was afraid to go back because the next one might be Lurch. “So, what do you like to do for fun?” Image by skeeze from Pixabay And no, I hadn’t specified ‘tall’ in my profile. These cloud-huffers came after me. I concluded my maximum cut-off (ar ar) for tall men is 6’3″. My cut-off for short guys is —I don’t think I have one. I’m 5'3 myself and I’m not sure I even know any men shorter than I. My big concerns are: Is he crazy? Is he alcoholic? Does he do everything his dick tells him to? Is he chronically depressed/life is over? You’d be amazed how much response you get when you put in your profile, “Short guys welcome!” (At least from those short men who bother to read profiles .) A handy rule of dumb is that those with Short Guy’s Disease are like dogs. The littlest ones make the most noise. Then there’s this guy: Believe me, being short hasn’t hurt this guy none. If you must be short, cute goes a long way. The late great Davy Jones (5'3) would agree with me. Photo by Jay Tambooli on Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic You might be surprised how short many celebrities are in person. I swear a few are lying about their height, or maybe their publicists are. I met Michael Berryman briefly at Fan Expo in Toronto several years ago. He’s That Guy you’ve seen in a million movies, the one who always plays villains and heavies. His most famous role is one of the cannibal savages in the original The Hills Have Eyes. By Stefan Borggraefe — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 We chatted briefly and I was surprised how short he was — almost eye level with me. I marveled at the mastery of Hollywood that they made him look so large in his famous movie. Some sources on the Internet say he’s 6'2, others 5'11. He’s probably lost a few inches as he’s getting up there in years. So, maybe originally 6'2"? Another alleged skyscraper that made me think, “WTF? the magic of Hollywood!” was Lou Ferrigno, allegedly over 6' tall. I didn’t stand beside him, but several years ago I was just a few rows away as he spoke on a stage, and he didn’t look very tall. Like, not much taller than I. He and Berryman may be losing height in their old age, or maybe I’m just losing my eyesight in mine! Anyway, I wouldn’t kick The Incredible Hulk out of bed for needing the stepladder to reach the top shelf. Ferrigno’s still hot in his sixties. Great inspirational speaker too, having overcome deafness and bullying from earliest childhood. Other hot short guys in Hollywood include Joe Pesci (my height exactly!), Emilio Estevez, Jon Stewart, Martin Sheen and Dustin Hoffman. Martin Scorsese, a giant among movie directors, also stands on his toes in a crowd next to Joe Pesci and I at 5'3. And Woody Allen, not my cuppa shagga-shagga but he has been for millions of other women, stands at a mere 5'5, although given how old he is he might need to stand in line with me and Joe and Martin. And you too, Davy! Yeah, I know Woody’s a scumbag, but he’s been married three times and partnered with Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton, and he seems to have a knack for nailing really young women. Is it because he’s a shady predator, or because even young women have free will and agency and a yen for older men? I leave that to others to debate. Gene Simmons of KISS says everything men do, they do to impress women. He claims it’s the reason they become athletes, form rock bands and even build cathedrals. Every big-and-bigger erection, he says, is to impress women. Okay, I would have guessed God for those big-ass churches but maybe the earliest Freemasons did it for the opportunity to strip off their tunic in July for the ladies. Haply the lasses shall forbear bidding me Aldric the Smelly now! Short guys are awesome. I’ve dated plenty. Tall guys are fine, too, but requiring height is a little pointless, especially if you decry men who mandate an ‘athletic’ body. Just look for someone who’s not too crazy, doesn’t have a lot of self-inflicted health problems and who’s fun to be around. I’d rather be with a short fun guy than a tall self-worshipping egotist. Some wicked good guys won’t necessarily tower over you. And that’s a good thing. Because I have just one word for you when you’re kissing them: Whiplash. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

The anoymous psychos who call for others' assassinations are a direct threat to democracy and public safety. Threats are NOT free speech. From GoodFreePhotos I didn’t wake up this morning in the Soviet Union! To cadge an old conservative belligerence from the 1980s. If calling for the murder of people you don’t personally like isn’t despotic, oppressive hate speech, then I don’t know what qualifies. Luigi Mangione has outed the ‘progressive’ left (once again) as being every bit as vicious, malicious, and pro-hate speech as any uni-browed MAGA who wanted to rape Nancy Pelosi and hang the Vice President. They applaud the cold-blooded murder of a man whose role in healthcare they understand as little as they do who decides who’s denied coverage. They goad each other on with their Anonymous Coward Power by legitimating the call for others to murder their adversaries, since they don’t want to spend their own lives in a filthy prison with filthier examples of humanity eyeballing their butt. Woke progressives are customarily so obsessed with ‘hate speech’ they perceive it in every verbal utterance, and won’t be happy, we assume, until every human being is rendered mute after declaring every word in Noah Webster ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘anticolonialist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘toxic masculine’, or ‘anti-Swiftian’. No, not Jonathan. Woke ‘progressives’, unhappy with how the emotionally unstable Elon Musk has run X since he overbought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, have flocked off to Bluesky. Those departing cite the preponderance of ‘hate speech’ on X and alleged censorship of themselves, by which they mean Musk doesn’t work too hard to police MAGA hate speech, or provide progressives an unencumbered hate speech online ghetto of their own. I don’t actually have an opinion on Taylor Swift, but if nothing else delivered negative attention I figured that would. But, it was my first post so no one likely saw it. Also, my name isn’t Jessie Singal. On Bluesky, the new ‘kinder, gentler’ alternative to Elon Musk’s X, they can power-vomit however many death threats and doxxing spatial coordinates they like with near-impunity. I’m not surprised. My own personal experience with another progressive experiment in ‘kinder, gentler’ social media with another then-Twitter alternative, CounterSocial, led to my getting kicked off for unspecified reasons, but it happened the day after I shared my article It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t. Hate speech, clearly. I figured Bluesky was, or would soon turn into, another fact-phobic, irrational and ideological woke-progressive shithole. This post isn’t illegal, and ‘silver posting’, appealing to the moderators, appears to be asking them to suspend or ban the account rather than literally kill him. But it’s not illegal to state you hate certain groups of people, however distasteful. It’s a mortal sin in ProgWorld Nailed it. Turns out Bluesky moderation is nearly nil. Supposedly, they’ve been kept very busy, having sorely underestimated the average amount of left-wing hate speech reports they’d need to investigate. At the moment, they’re doing a piss-poor job, and have vowed to quadruple their moderators. Who knew kinder, gentler progressives could be so—hateful? Isn’t that, you know, a right-wing thing? You’d think open calls on Bluesky for murdering others post-Brian Thompson would be top priority, right? Not so much for investigative journalist Jesse Singal, who’s pissed off the TransKlan for a decade critiquing largely science-free child sex change operations. So of course they called for his immediate and literal murder. Singal was harassed and doxed on Bluesky for publishing his work, and reports that Bluesky dragged its ass on doing anything about the death threats. He’s been targeted for years by transactivists with a perpetual harassment campaign involving, besides threatened violence, countless lies and smears. For example, they commonly claim he should be banned for being a ‘pedophile’ with zero corroboration, which probably explains why he hasn’t been banned for this. This is on X, not Bluesky Singal claims X is better at suspending and removing violence-provoking accounts and threats, but not so’s anyone else can notice , which is why so many have left the platform or explored others while perhaps staying somewhat active on X. The former-Twitter wasn’t any more friendly to free speech under the auspices of co-founder Jack Dorsey, which might explain why Bluesky has become the pre-Musk Twitter; Dorsey founded Bluesky. Meanwhile, Musk famously found a closet full of T-shirts that pretty much validated the accusations of Twitter’s critics and which its staff, back when they had jobs, denied: That they were super-‘woke’. https://twitter.com/i/status/1595250835096621057 Dorsey’s Twitter had been criticized for years as politically biased against, and censorious of, conservative and other opinions ‘unfavorable’ to the woke agenda. That much was true; back then, the quickest way to get banned was to annoy transactivists by saying something factual, as Canadian feminist and activist Meghan Murphy found when she was ‘permanently’ banned for identifying a trans-identified man using male pronouns. Such was the state of ‘hate speech’ and censorship on pre-Musk Twitter in 2018, which blithely ignored the years-long transactivist hate campaign against J.K. Rowling for her support of women’s right to be, and define themselves as women apart from those given a lifelong sentence of being male from conception. Three years later, then-President Donald Trump was suspended in early January 2021 for allegedly ‘glorifying’ and ‘inciting’ January 6th violence. After Musk took over he reinstated Trump soon after and Murphy got her account back eventually, too. Let’s talk about content moderation The gloves against any pretense of progressive civil society came off in 2023 on October 7th, when many ‘progressives’ unleashed their Jew hate like the unholiest Kraken, and more recently the disgusting Luigi love for the healthcare CEO killer. Progressive bigots made it clear that progressive hate speech was 100% acceptable after Hamas’s vicious attack, when, in the finest tradition of right-wing violent political expression, progressives donned their own swastika—the keffiyeh—and violently attacked all things Jewish, be they buildings or people, and justified it with the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit about how the victims ‘deserved it’. Very, very few ‘progressives’ challenged or stood up against the explosion of antisemitic ejaculate spraying humanity like a genocidal bukkake video. Just imagine how they’d have reacted if Luigi Mangione had been a Christian right-winger who murdered a transwoman en route to the beauty parlor to get his balls waxed . Pretty certainly, the toxic right would have exploded with near-similar hate on both platforms while progressives clutched their pearls and fainted on the Whole Foods Market Hot & Salad Bar floor. La plus ça change. The naked calls for assassination force us to rethink anonymity, and the cowards who call for criminal acts without fear of retribution. I write this not to call for censorship but to argue legitimate free speech stops at violent threats or encouragement of violence against others (including encouraging someone to commit suicide). Most of which is banned under typical ‘Terms of Service’ or ‘Community Standards’, but mostly lackadaisically enforced. X and Bluesky are positively medieval In less enlightened times and places (medieval Europe and the modern-day Middle East), one could make anonymous accusations against others, not be required to provide a shred of evidence, and the accused would stand before a court that didn’t even rise to the standards of a modern-day ‘kangaroo court’. It’s why the ‘Confrontation Clause’ was added to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights stipulating that the accused has the right to face their accuser. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also stipulates similarly unless the accuser is deemed ‘vulnerable’, such as from intimidating threats by the accuser or other safety issues. But on social media, the normal rules don’t apply. You can falsely accuse someone like Jesse Singal of pedophilia, and ruin peoples’ lives and careers with other anonymous lies. When you do libel or slander someone under your real name, as George Stephanopoulos was found liable for recently with Donald Trump’s successful lawsuit against him and his employer NBC News, there are consequences. None for the anonymous cowards on social media claiming, as Stephanopoulos did, that Trump raped accuser E. Jean Carroll. Which has never been proven in court, even though he lost a defamation liability appeal which awarded her money, and then again when he defamed her under his real name on social media. Dumbass. Do we live in a dual-justice system, not the kind for the moneyed vs the poor, but where you can say damn near anything and get away with it as long as no one knows who you are? Allowing people to blatantly threaten, or encourage threats to people they’ve deemed ‘evil’, or entire industries like healthcare, will do more to quell free speech and keep the entire population cowed into silence than any ‘cancel culture’ campaign we’ve seen in the last twelve years. Crazy extremists running around armed and dangerous represent the supreme coalescence of the very worst of the left and right to destroy what remains of democracy by ensuring no one dares speak truth to power. Just like, you know, in Hitler’s day. If content isn’t the responsibility of the platforms, and the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from moderating public speech, whose responsibility is it? Because what’s illegal offline shouldn’t be legal, officially or not, online. Social media platforms have been accused many times, credibly, of doing a milquetoast job of policing genuine violent threats, so it’s up for legal argument whether they could ultimately be held responsible for pretty close violations of the First Amendment, a legal argument that hasn’t found much traction so far. Anonymous accounts truly must be protected for whistleblowers and truth-tellers, but those whose truths contain more lies than truths should be accountable for libelous accusations. So far, the courts haven’t been supportive of verifiable identification for age. Theoretically, one might need to provide a driver’s license or some other ID to get an account not under their real name but currently, the courts haven’t ruled that way. But it’s what’s likely needed to hold users accountable. If the DorseyMuskerbergs aren’t responsible for a post or tweet encouraging someone to kill the next healthcare CEO or investigative journalist, then the responsibility lies with the individual. That’s near-impossible under present circumstances. A kinder, gentler solution would be to induce and encourage social media companies to hold their users accountable for their speech by offering tax incentives to those platforms which do an audited, verifiable good job of suspending or banning users who clearly violate their standards or ToS with clearly defined threats: “Here’s the address of a journalist whose work I hate, go teach him what the business end of a Glock looks like,” versus “I really wish someone would punch to death Joe Blow at the New York Times.” Wishes aren’t the same as GPS destinations. Elon Musk, Make People Pay To Be Assholes! Encouraging or ordering others to kill without getting your own hands dirty, is ‘conspiracy to commit murder’, as Charles Manson found out in 1971. At least from a hippie commune in California. Not sure what would happen if he’d agitated for rich-people murders from @helterskelter1969. Clearly, if you want to commit a murder, or get others to do it, sign up anonymously. No one will pay attention unless you directly threaten the President of the United States. Peoples’ lives are put in danger on social media where it’s been horrifically clear for many years that many of its denizens suffer from serious mental health problems and a complete break with morality. What must happen before we take these obvious threats to the social order more seriously? When someone does, in fact, kill a journalist? Or another random CEO? Anyone deemed ‘evil’ by the self-appointed Holy Inquistitors becomes fair game. TERFs. MAGAs. Muslims. Immigrants. Feminists. Nickelback fans. Nickelback. Today a healthcare CEO, tomorrow, perhaps, a Hamas campus cheerleader. Or an Israel supporter. Or a YouPorn star. Or a sex trafficker. Or a genderwoo-friendly school board member. Or you. Pick yer evil, and then ask whether you really want to see a Death Wish world in which many self-appointed someones go around liquidating people they have deemed unworthy of life. No arrest? No due process? No assumption of innocence? Every dystopian futuristic science fiction movie you’ve ever seen in which might makes right? A Boy And His Robo-Dog? It’s begun on social media, a largely unregulated Wild West of opinions, expressions, false information, misinformation, wrong views, immorality, rank psychosis and a Dark Triad free-for-all. I don’t yet know how this proposed content moderation would work. I don’t know or understand the legal technicalities established so far or in which direction we could take this drive to hold someone, or something, ultimately accountable for clearly unprotected speech that creates a clear and present danger to all of us. It’s probably premature anyway as we first must acknowledge there’s a problem before we can go about solving it. Understand: I’m not arguing for censorship. I support your right to spew, but, knowing that someone at X or Bluesky or Facebook or Instagram knows exactly who you are, and will turn your contact information over to law enforcement upon request through the proper channels. The progressives loooooove ‘consequences’ for ‘hate speech’. Let’s properly define hate speech, and provide exactly that. Which Online Platforms Don’t Censor Content Creators? I Went Nazi-Hunting On Substack. Now I Ask: Whose Nazis Are We? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts

Brand-new management, same as the last! But the bipartisan UnWoke have the recent accumulated observation to help call out the same-old-same-old Wokeness never dies. It’s rising again. Public domain image from Wallpaperflare Party while you can, Syria. Ding dong, the bastard’s gone, and Russia’s li’l Putie-Pie is further disabled by losing his Big Orange ally (and now having to stick Bashie and his wife in the spare bedroom for God knows how long!) while Syrians do that deposed-dictator thing and storm the palace. The liberation process for detested dictators is similar to that of the fall of detested dictatorial ideologies, but the end result is the same: New management takes over and looks much like the last. America is stepping out, breathing air again, and boldly jumping on X and Bluesky to poke the woke folk. Transnutzis are a little muted, sensing that the jig is up for ‘ladydicks’. And what will the right do with the campus Keffiyeh Klanmaids? Embrace them or turn them over to Matt Gaetz? Yeah, the sheriff’s back in town after a four-year sabbatical and he’s brought a lot of his friends. AOC’s so terrified she’s removed her pronouns. Is this it? we ask ourselves. Finally? The end of the Woke Reign of (T)Error? Can we all live free and pull the First Amendment out of Anne Frank’s bunker? Party while you can, America. Yes, let’s celebrate the demise of the Woke Left. But just keep in mind the hootenanny ends on January 20th when the Woke Right rises like insufferable, holier-than-thou zombies from the tainted baptismal pool. The far right is everything we’ve seen in the Loony Left Never mind the original meaning of wokeness. Today it’s associated with everything it claimed to fight—racism, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism and, as an added bonus, antisemitism. Progressive wokeness is about to be replaced by the returning personality cult headed by The Oversized Baby. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m happy to wave bye-bye to evidence-free ideologies consciously embraced by Vice President Harris and cluelessly followed by a President I could tell had no understanding of its dangers. I envision a line of dejected losers exiting the White House on January 20th—a pink-haired nose-ringed gender-confused kid; a Black Lives Matter protester dragging his I Stand With Hamas sign behind him and clutching an IRS audit notice; a man pulling off his wig and tossing it away in anger because Rep. Nancy Mace forced him to use the men’s room; a fauxminist in a Handmaid costume, a seig-heiling Montrealer . Well okay, maybe not that last one. But this is only winter break, folks. Donald Trump is no friend of freedom, either. Or science. Or reading. Or free speech. Or the law. And neither are his woke-right supporters. Trump says he’ll go after campus antisemites , but will he go after his own? Are you kidding me? Attack his base? He won’t do it any more than Justin Trudeau , you know, the Governor of Canada, the 51st state! What the jubilants don’t yet understand is now the metaphorical gunsights turn on all of us . The Reds are returning to power. They’ve been given a clear voter mandate to rule America. Those who dance to celebrate the departure of they/them and obsessive ethnic ingredients lists aren’t yet aware of those straining to turn cancel culture and free speech suppression back on the left. Elon Musk has got their backs! The Woke Right isn’t much different from the Woke Left. Authoritarianism is non-partisan. What is the ‘woke right’? Definitions vary. It’s commonly associated with Christian nationalism and I can see its roots now, fifty years ago when I was a young whippersnapper in Ohio grappling with the weird omnipresent ‘I Found It!’ campaign from the mid-’70s, opening conversations with everyone who wasn’t ‘saved’ by a personal commitment to Jesus. These were the birth pangs of the modern revived Christian fundamentalist movement, drunk on and then disappointed by Baptist Jimmy Carter, followed by Ronald Reagan, who brought geezer dementia to the White House long before it was cool. Reagan professed Christianity and mused about Revelation being nigh. Stories leaked out of the White House about Reagan allegedly speculating that maybe a nuclear war was God’s fulfillment of the prophecy. This concerned those of us who were in the first act of our lives who didn’t want to end it prematurely in a blazing nuclear holocaust. I fought conservative politics and Biblical literalist dumbfuckery for the twenty years between the birth of my political consciousness and moving to LiberalWorld Canada (part of its appeal, actually). The God Squad never achieved power as pervasively as the woke cultists today. The grand irony is both sides are using the same formal structure: Christianity, the religion most commonly known and practiced in America, although other religions bear a passing-to-close resemblance to it. John McWhorter was one of the first to identify the Christian model adopted and adapted by antiracists in his book Woke Racism. The essential elements are: A rigid adherence to dogma and banishment (‘cancellation’) of heretics, questioners and unbelievers; Self-appointed arbiters of morality and truth whom McWhorter calls ‘The Elect’; Reliance on faith-based belief (critical race theory) and dismissal or outright hostility to anyone challenging it with reason, rationalism, or critical thought; Original sin: White skin, for which the sinners (skinners?) must forever atone, for they can never be truly cleansed of their s(k)ins; A ‘Day of Reckoning’ akin to Revelation’s ‘End Times’ in which white people will be finally held accountable for their collective sins (not sure who does this since the Woke Cult doesn’t have established leaders or a deity). Maybe we’ll have to kowtow before Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole-Hannah Jones; ‘Clergy’ in the form of fashionable influencers for antiracism (or feminism, transactivism, etc.) The need to ‘tear it all down’ (white, Western society) and rebuild it from scratch (as God will do after all the sturm und drang of Revelation is fulfilled. Replace key words and concepts in McWhorter’s analysis of ‘woke racism’ and you’ll find equally religious ‘woke feminism’, ‘woke transactivism’, ‘woke queerism’, ‘woke anticolonialism’, etc. The Woke Right already laid the foundation for a rigid, dogmatic empire half a century ago but became unseated by TV evangelist sex scandals, violent anti-abortion activism and the rise of a sexy new Democratic President with a charming southern accent. Liberalism arose again, hiking over the failures of Christian fundamentalism. And, as political movements are wont to do, went way too far as their right-wing forbears had done, and ‘progressivism’, a label we all proudly wore twenty years ago (in fact, it was adopted after the Reaganauts turned ‘liberal’ into a negative connotation), has since become its own negative marker, not from the right this time but from its own ugly regressive tendencies and hate speech which actually resemble the worst of the far right. ‘And so it goes,’ as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Each iteration of the resurrection (more religiosity!) of either political canon builds upon the successes and failures of the other, but the essential theological structure remains the same. Public domain photo What the UnWoke can do This is just a very brief overview of the Woke Right, which most people have probably never heard of. I expect I’ll be writing about it a lot more in the next four years. It doesn’t fit all right-wingers any more than wokeness describes all left-wingers. It does seem to be emerging as a faction of the far right and will likely encounter resistance from conservatives not prone to religious fanaticism. Less extremist Christians are already speaking out against it, I guess while they can, since woke extremists don’t tolerate dissent for long. This Christian Apologetics article deeply explores the similarly racist, antifeminist, and discriminatory path woke rightness is appropriating from the woke left and discusses how other Christians can challenge these people with the Bible. You don’t need to be a Christian to challenge the new wokeness, because wokeism is essentially secular. The left has never understood its religious roots. Extremist Christians adapt wokeness now to serve their own purposes, and are already well-schooled in faith-based belief. ‘Literalist’ Christians pick and choose what to believe from the Bible’s countless contradictions and counter-arguments that provide a simplistic way to live for those who prefer not to think too hard about the glaringly obvious questions. Woke rightness will appeal to the bigots on the right just as liberalism was adapted and transformed into wokeness for the left’s bigots. Rational righters, those who don’t hew to more hard-right views, who ‘lean to the right, but not so far their brains fall out’, will find themselves challenged by these people, and perhaps cancelled, censored, fired, and oppressed just as level-headed liberals and other dissenters have been by the woke left. We’ve spent the last fifteen years observing, critiquing, and dissecting the woke left, so we have a recent foundation of knowledge to understand exactly what the Woke Right is doing. And fight it. Many conservatives and liberals aren’t as far apart as their respective extremists, the mainstream media and the flame wars of social media would have us believe. Get non-crazy liberals and conservatives in one room, and they’ll disagree, but also agree on other points. For liberals like myself, we’re exploring conservative ideas that, like anything else, can work well on certain levels as long as they don’t go too far, like any other good idea. Maybe two-parent marriage isn’t so bad after all; maybe porn really has become toxic; and frankly, I’m so tired of hearing so-called liberals tear down my mother country that I’m ready for some mild Old Glory-waving national pride. Neil Shenvi, the Apologetics website owner, found a spot-on quote that really hits home on what’s been wrong with woke antiracism. Uncomfortably, he quotes a pseudonymous writer at a Southern, far-right wing website rife with ‘White pride’, hysterical accusations of ‘genocide’ and a barfable photo at the end of the About section showing pretty white Southern belles with a quote about ‘fair maidens so pretty’ which I guess tells you all you need to know about wimmin’s place in the return to Dixie they envision. But even racists can sometimes cut to the quick, and I have to admit the author has one bastard of a good point as he calls out Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility : If your White skin and genes confer the guilt of your ancestors, then they also confer the pride of your ancestors, as well as, their accomplishments, victories, virtues, rights, liberties, freedoms, heritages, lands, and more. The anonymous wuss may be a racist asshole, but you’ve got to admit, it’s a bastard of a good point. I wish I’d thought of it. It shows you that even people we would never invite to dinner can still produce occasionally what the French call a bon mot: A witty or trenchant remark. The author notes that the woke left also do their ideological enemies a favor by resurrecting old art and writings of the Hated Old White European dudes, “digging up the gems of our ancestors for us and placing them on platters before our eyes.” Touché again, Monsieur le Raciste. As I lamented in my earlier article Is There Any Real Joy In Learning Anymore? today’s students will never be introduced to Voltaire, as I was in college. Maybe that’s how folks will now be introduced to the beauties, and not just the faults, of Western civilization: Through their worst critics, directing our attention to the works they most want us not to read. So I guess the Woke Left is good for something. So too, however unconsciously, may be the Woke Right. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Oh no! Not another Messiah! CC0 public domain Just what we need. Another bloody Messiah. The name’s Flatulous. I’m a Roman soldier in Tiberius’s army. I’m stationed here in Jerusalem. My job is to keep the Jews in line, and the gods know those people are always agitating about one damn thing or another. Pontius Pilate is forever downing Medea’s herbal remedies for his migraines. As if I don’t have my hands full dealing with the damn Philistines. So the latest thing to rile the Jews is the news that some forthcoming kid in Galilee is their prophesied Saviour. Third one this week, and it’s only Wednesday. And they’re saying he was born of a virgin. Yeah. As if. I may not be a learned man, but even I know when someone’s feeding her betrothed a major line. Anyway, I hear ol’ King Herod is absolutely ripshit. He, uh, liquidated a bunch of the Jewish boys a few years ago — that was before I joined the army — because he believed one of the prophecies. Why he picked  that prophesy   to favour I’ll never know. Cripes, if he murdered the sons who fit the profile of every Messiah divined from sheep’s entrails or reading the fires, there’d be nothing but Jewish chicks left. Look, I don’t believe in Messiahs. I was raised in a household that favoured Mars. My brothers were all soldiers, my dad Leprous was a soldier, his dad was a soldier, and his dad was too. Even my mom, though never a soldier, could kick your ass. We had a little altar in one corner of the hovel devoted to Mars. We made burnt offerings and other sweet scents in an effort to gain and keep his favour. He watched over us, too, because no one in the family died in battle except for my brother Scrofulous and that was his own damn fault for converting to that Yahweh guy when he married Rachel bat-Dinah. See what happens when you don’t keep the faith? is my kinda god. Manly and heroic and he's bangin' Aphrodite! Photo by Andrea Puggioni - Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Generic I do my job. I’m a good soldier. I don’t rough up the Jews like some of these guys. When they get out of hand I push them back with my spear and a few times I’ve had to use my sword, but I’ve never drawn Jewish blood. I don’t believe in unnecessary violence, which is kind of weird coming from a Roman soldier, I guess. Out here in the hinterlands, our main entertainment is the Jewish priests who keep us laughing with their ridiculous laws for their people. Who could ever trust a god who forbids the eating of a good side of roast pork? The other day, three guys on camels showed up asking for directions to Bethlehem. Pretty rich and fancy guys too, all from faraway lands. They were carrying some pretty nice cargo and I offered to send a few guards with them to make sure they didn’t get waylaid en route. They turned me down. They were following this really bright star they said marked the spot of the Saviour. I asked them which Saviour and they didn’t think that was very funny. You mark my words, no one’s gonna remember this kid a year from now. Merry Christmas! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The experience of 'The Bearded Lesbian' reminds us some folks really do need to transition; and how LGBTQ can fail them I began following Aaron Kimberly , ‘ The Bearded Lesbian ’, because she struck me as a genuine transgender person—someone who chose to become a man rather than stay in in her biological body, not for messed-up ‘woke’ reasons, not because she wasn’t properly raised to understand the answer to misogyny and male objectification is to fight back, rather than become a man; not because she had psychological morbidities that predisposed her to fix them with psychological snake oil; but because she seemed pretty genuinely masculine and dysphoric from an early age and didn’t outgrow it. She identified as a butch lesbian, but the It as she describes it—her inherent ‘manliness’—has always been there. Kimberly transitioned in her thirties and came to regret it. Typical of the ‘trans’ medical profession, no one warned her about the health and surgical problems that reside permanently with transitioners. Or that pro-trans websites delete unwelcome pictures of trans surgery gone horribly wrong and that surgical complication rates are woefully under-reported. She de-transitioned. Recently, Kimberly decided to de-detransition  and go back to being a male. He believes his inherent maleness—which has been with him for as long as he can remember—is due to the discovery that his ‘unrecognizable’ ovary was a mass of both ovarian and testicular tissue. Kimberly has a congenital disorder called Ovotesticular Disorder of Sex Development. As a fetus, he was exposed to testosterone at a particular time in development and which continued into early adulthood. As a result, Kimberly has always demonstrated a distinct maleness and manliness that has created much confusion and disorder throughout his life. Kimberly identifies as a butch lesbian but can’t backtrack on the changes. He looks, talks, and can only pass for a man. No one will hassle him in the men’s room, and he would for sure create chaos in the ladies’. Fortunately, he’s not the transactivist type, not that that matters much since transmen are markedly less activist and much quieter than transwomen. The only way you know Kimberly isn’t originally a male is in the way he expresses himself in his distinctly masculine voice. Kimberly is still, to a certain extent, a socialized woman between his ears. And he has no desire to harm, threaten, or intimidate women by pushing himself where he knows he will create fear. Which is how you can tell the bio boys from the bio girls. The way they think. Biology matters, and it’s real I’ve always kept in the back of my mind, as I harshly criticize the misogynist, morally bankrupt trans movement, that there may be real, biological reasons why at least some people might want to change sex. That maybe there were physical/medical reasons why they genuinely felt ‘born in the wrong body’. We know there’s a tiny fraction with various chromosomal ‘intersex’ disorders which make them more bi-sexual (as opposed to bisexual) than others. Some already 'identify’ with what appears to be their conception-determined sex and are surprised to find they’re a little less cut-and-dried as they thought. Like Caster Semenya, the South African Olympics runner who had no idea  she possessed far more testosterone than a typical woman. Aaron Kimberly appears also to be someone who didn’t know he possessed a little of the other sex’s physiology. He simply lived as he was—a very boyish girl—as authentically as he could in the 1970s and 80s when ‘trans kids’ were unheard of, and he was so super-tomboy he once accidentally, but happily, was included on a boys’ baseball team. Transition in Hindsight: Aaron Kimberly’s Story  - Genspect, 07/26/21 So biology matters. Differences in sex development, or DSDs, are, according to USA Today, “a set of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that can cause the sexual development of a person to be different than others.” Two ‘female’ boxers were at the heart of an Olympics controversy this summer for allegedly testing as male rather than female, though neither identified as transgender. It points to a diversity of physiology that won’t be easily solved with a gender certificate or ‘feeling’ and raises the need for more finely differentiating how male an athlete is before that person can be permitted or barred from competing on female sports teams. Kimberly cites research by the author of a book on testosterone and its impact on girls with DSDs. Carole Hooven notes that over a hundred studies since the late 1960s of girls with a DSD called CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia), another condition which exposes female fetuses to testosterone, shows that female CAHs’ toy preferences digress from ‘typical’ girls’ preferences; they prefer to play with trucks, blocks, and prefer rougher ‘boys’ games. They don’t outgrow it; it continues into adulthood with an attraction for more traditional male roles involving things rather than the human relational professions women gravitate toward—teaching, nursing, child care, etc. It’s not all ‘socialization’ that makes us, to one degree or another, ‘gender stereotypical’, but the way our brains and physiology develop as well. Especially by still-poorly-understood DSDs. Many find it noteworthy that female-identified men, i.e., ‘transwomen’, are the most public and vocal and aggressive in their demands to be ‘accommodated’ in places previously reserved for biological women. They’re driving the trend to allow men claiming to be women to compete on women’s sports teams, where to the surprise of no one except the denialists in the woke left, they’re stealing prizes and awards from real women who simply can’t compete against biological males. Transmen? They sit quietly on the sidelines, just like, well—women. Male and female brains are more dude-y and chick-y than many want to acknowledge, and even trans people who successfully ‘pass’ as the sex they’re not, out themselves eventually. It’s the way they move, their relational communications style. Biological females simply are more sensitive to others’ moods and feelings when they communicate; I say that observationally, not critically. Males are more assertive, more aggressive, and sometimes more manipulative. It’s kind of like when a woman meets a man who seems fairly dude-ish and masculine, but after a few minutes of talking to him she gets the sense he’s gay. It’s something different about him, a slightly different way he relates to women he has no romantic or sexual interest in. Straight guys, on the other hand, who aren’t attracted to a particular woman don’t usually come across as gay. The hidden caveats of ‘acceptance’ For all the lofty speeches Team Rainbow gives gender and sex, and how no one is really one thing or another and we’re all fluid and should just accept each other for our various identities, they’re remarkably uncomfortable and even a little intolerant of The Bearded Lesbian. Kimberly writes of the initially cordial online relationship he had with Holly Lawford-Smith, a New Zealand university professor and gender critical feminist. Lawford-Smith, it seems, is annoyed that Kimberly acts very much like a man sometimes and should stop. He writes of how he was asked at a women’s festival if he couldn’t girl himself up somehow (with a ‘pink bow’? So much for smashing stereotypes!) as he warned young lesbians about the regret levels in transitioning. His ‘manliness’ seems to discomfort those who need a small symbolic pacifier to remind them that Kimberly is, in fact, a biological woman. Reading of Kimberly’s struggles makes me wonder how the world could be more accommodating of people like him in the future. Could he have lived happily dude-ily female or however he felt without medical intervention in a world that truly accepts each one of us as the truly unique individuals we are? Isn’t that what LGBTQ preaches? Humans naturally gravitate toward ‘tribes’, people who are like them in one capacity or another, but what if we stopped assigning so much value to our various labels? It’s one of the greatest failings of today’s LGBTQ movement: The horrific authenticityphobia  that encapsulates the very worst of our modern hyper-competitive world. You are born not good enough.  You need to be better. You can’t be you, because ‘you’ are fundamentally imperfect. The last time I went to Toronto Pride, I felt like a quiet enemy walking among them. I used to feel quite at home with LGBTQs, despite being relentlessly heterosexual. People are what they are and as long as they’re not hurting anyone, what do I care? That changed several years ago when T and Q began harming people, especially women and children, and now they’re marginalizing gayfolk. I no longer feel comfortable around anything LGBTQ. I see pink hair, pierced eyebrows, rainbow backpacks and I’m immediately on my guard thinking, Avoid, avoid! They look like a giant pain in the ass! I can’t even know whether the cis-gay person in front of me is a ‘normie’ or someone who’s drunk the explosive woke Kool-Aid. LGBTQ has become the very face of ‘wokeness’ which is why Donald Trump chose to exemplify his opponent’s allegiance to it with, love it or hate it, one of the most highly effective and spot-on  political campaign ads we’ve ever seen. Betcha a lot of those new female Trump voters noticed how vicious, angry, hateful, misogynist transactivists vilify and abuse biological women with impunity, demonstrating what you have to do to get away with that in our so-called ‘feminist’ world. Don’t think many men aren’t donning dresses and overdone makeup for the ‘privilege’ of beating up women. If Team Rainbow could ‘do the work’  and move beyond its near-psychopathic narcissism and just chill out, we’d all be able to live and work together more harmoniously. Meeting someone like Aaron Kimberly or a non-binary wouldn’t induce stress at first sight because you know what you need to know and if you don’t, all will be revealed shortly: Kimberly is a man. And the normie non-binary, if such a person can exist, and I believe it’s possible, would be, well, non-binary. When you speak to them your pronouns are I, me  and you. No drama. I’m drawn to Aaron Kimberly’s Substack because he’s just so real, and his perspective reflects both sex experiences . He’s a dude born in a bi-sexual body who’s trying to navigate life as best he can, just like the rest of us. Most importantly, he’s sensitive to the impact he has on women, recognizing that strange men can be perceived as a threat by many women. He has no desire to make someone’s wiz more stressful by occupying the stall next to them with his convincing manliness. Kimberly makes me think  about sex and gender in more productive ways than hateful transactivists ever will and illuminates what I love about transgenderism, even though I spend more time criticizing than praising it: Genuine sex-changers have much to teach us about what it truly means to be male and female, when they’ve literally lived on both sides of the divide. I also hope women and others can come to accept Kimberly for what he is without needing to ‘girl it up’ for them. He’s a biological woman (mostly) who truly feels and believes he needs to be a man. These are the genderfluids who truly ‘slip through the cracks’, the ones who need our support and help. I’m good with that. I don’t need his pink bow. Hell, I’ll even share a bathroom with him without dragging the U.S. Supreme Court into it! ‘Coz I’d feel comfortable with him. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

This is your life. Now who’s going to clean that up? Relax, it's just a sculpture. CC0 2.0 photo by Guano (of course!) on Flickr) “Someone just dumped a big pile of shit on your porch. What are you going to do about it? The people who dumped it aren’t coming back to clean it up. No one else is going to clean it up for you. It’s unfair, but life isn’t fair. Are you just going to leave it there to stink and get worse, or are you going to clean it up?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what Ajahn Brahm, the funny, non-reverential monk and Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia says about the problems, obstacles and injustices in one’s life. It makes you part of a highly non-exclusive social club. It’s called the Human Race. Which means you have to clean up your own massive mega-deuce, regardless of how much or not you contributed. Of course, as Ajahn Brahm points out, shit is critical for real growth. In fact, mud that little fishies and turtles and froggies crapped all over, maybe even some alligators depending on where you live, lies at the very core of what Buddhists believe. The lotus flower symbolizes the beauty that springs joyfully from the mud. That messy, messed-up mental muck is where the beauty of the lotus — enlightenment — lies. This is a lotus flower in mud. This is your enlightened brain on mud. Any questions? Creative Commons CC0 photo from Pxfuel It doesn’t necessarily mean sitting-under-the-bodhi-tree-while-the-kundalini-energy-shoots-up-your-spine-like-a-newly-plumbed-spigot enlightened, but more peaceful and insightful than you were before. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this, of course. Christians have a ‘born again’ experience, which is when you take your faith and beliefs more seriously and actively strive every day to be a better Christian. What Would Jesus Do? I don’t know what other religions call a similar enlightening experience, but I’m sure they have it even if they use a different name. Regardless of your label, once you consciously commit to becoming a better, more enlightened person, you’re confronted with a big pile of shit you may have largely ignored most of your life. Which is, your life. Nobody likes dealing with it, and feels fairly resentful because we prefer to blame everyone and everything else for it. But…you can’t spiritually grow without that life-giving shit. In fact, you waste a lot of energy railing against a cruel world that dumped it on your parietal porch because absolutely everyone who has ever lived has had to deal with their shit (or not). Even Jesus had to struggle against the Temptations of Satan in the desert and doubts about his own divinity. Buddha famously spent an entire night, according to legend, assaulted and attacked by the demon Mara while he was meditating. Mara ended by lobbing his final thermonuclear-level self-doubt Buddha bomb, “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” Needless to say, both Masters survived the onslaught. They famously grew to be great teachers before their deaths. But both were cursed at birth with a human brain, and they couldn’t escape having to clean up their own shit. Neither can you, which is why your deity or Darwin’s biology gave you, quite conveniently, your own cortical caca from which you can grow and flourish and turn into something as lovely and sweet-smelling as the lotus. Thank God! You’re welcome. (Or just be grateful for evolutionary biological bullshit, if you’re an atheist.) Plus, we all play our part in the spirit of cooperation by generously dumping more shit on each other in the form of family dysfunction, social and economic inequality, bullying, abuse, war, crime and a wide assortment of extremely unfair conditions into which we’re born without any say in the matter whatsoever. The big Pile O’ Poo springs from different places. Some you control, some not: Your default cavecritter neuro-circuitry Your genetics Your environment and proximal humans The circumstances you were born into Mental illness (psychological disorders) Mental illness (more common — depression, anxiety, stress, maybe PTSD) “Some are born shitty, some achieve shittiness, and some have shittiness thrust upon them.” — William Shitespoor It’s not fair, but there it is: We all have shit to deal with. One reason why I like writer Ayodeji Awosika is because he reminds us over and over that life isn’t fair. That people rage against government, inequality, the machine, politicians, unfair employers, and anyone else they can blame their problems on. He acknowledges these obstacles are real; but he questions how much they have to control you. Social media certainly seems to be Ground Zero for the permanently outraged. I’m frustrated with the relentless negativity of both political sides in the United States, from whence I came, and Canada, to which I’ve come. Folks rage about a lot of real and systemic odds unfairly stacked against them, due to unfair interpretations about their biology or merely the circumstances into which they were born. Then there’s the other side, railing against having been left behind economically, a changing world they didn’t have time to keep up with, stagnating income, and getting really, really, tired of this so-called privilege others say they have which they legitimately can’t see sitting in their trailer park home with a fifth baby on the way, no health insurance and an employer that just cut their wages again. Also, very real and systemic challenges. “That is one big pile of shit.” — Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park Many writers expose us daily to the challenges they face from their own traumatic upbringing, including rape, other forms of sexual abuse, neglect, crazy religious and cultural traditions, and sometimes just poor decision-making by young people born into this world without a reliable user’s manual or effective parenting. It’s fair to differentiate who’s responsible for your shit, because blaming yourself for it all, as many do, is counterproductive and downright toxic. But…blame is the name of the game in our divided and hyper-individualistic culture where assigning it means never having to assume any responsibility. I.e., having to clean up your shit. You can debate whose fault it is, and how much you added to the shit pile, and dissect the intersectional subtle and overt institutional and systemic aggressions and microaggressions that obstruct your maximal self-potential, and you can fight this white cis-centric patriarchal power structure with protest signs and pussy hats but in the end (or out of it, ar ar)… It’s still your shit, and no one’s going to clean it up except you. Or not, as you choose. The good news is, as the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach likes to say, if you shine the light on the deepest wounds, therein you’ll find healing. Buddhist monk, poet, activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of Encouragement, the second turning of the Four Noble Truths wheel. “Our suffering — depression, illness, a difficult relationship, or fear — needs to be understood and, like a doctor, we are determined to understand it. We practice sitting and walking meditation, and we ask for guidance and support from our friends and, if we have one, our teacher. As we do this, we see that the causes of our suffering are knowable, and we make every effort to get to the bottom of it.” — The Heart of the Buddha’s teaching: Transforming Suffering to Peace, Joy and Liberation He doesn’t differentiate between the pain we’re born with, or created ourselves, or which was forced upon us by others. It is our unique pain, ergo our responsibility. CC0 Public Domain by Linnaea Mallette It’s not easy, and usually pretty damn scary, and sometimes our shit is so critical we require professional help in handling it. Sometimes, it’s best not to go too deeply into the shit-wounds without a trained professional, or at least a very good friend, to accompany us. It may be hard to let go of our shit. It’s been with us all our lives; how can we live without it? Who are we if we’re not defined by our shit? What if we’re supposed to forgive those who tres-pissed against us? Are we seriously expected to just let them off the hook? Forgiveness isn’t for those who dumped a lot of that shit on you; it’s for yourself so that you no longer suffer from it. The good news, the great news, is that truly letting go of your shit, learning different coping mechanisms, perceiving the world in a different light with a less egocentric point of view, and taking life and perceived slights less personally can be marvellously healing and reduce the negative emotions and reactions that now darken your otherwise astounding life. CC0 Public domain on PXhere The reason I call myself the Crappy Buddhist is because I’ll never finish shoveling my shit, and I sure as hell will never become an enlightened kundalini-spewing spine spigot. But a couple of years ago I decided to face my anger management problem and have been actively working on becoming less triggered, correcting my Wrong Perceptions as best I can, and thinking before I speak. I’m far from perfect but I’m less easily triggered than I had been, and I recognize now which triggers to avoid and sometimes I even stop myself before an emotional hijacking kicks my tongue into high gear. I must do my Buddhist duty, dodge the fecal finger of fate (not to mention my colonoscopy-obsessed doctor), and shovel more of my own shit, but there’s room for a few lotus blossoms now. Here, take a few seeds. I want you to have some lotus blooms too. Namaste! Public domain photo by Namair on Needpix This shitty article first appeared on Medium. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Can students even experience learning something intriguing or unexpected? Or are they only told what to think? "Just kill me now!" CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 image by Konrad Adenauer-Gemeinschaftschaupteschule Wenden on Flicker. Say THAT five times real fast! Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning? - George W. Bush, 2000 What an incurious little dipsy-doodle I was when I entered university at the dawn of the Reagan Era. My original life plan after high school was to move back to Florida and make bad horror movies with my mother’s best friend’s daughter. But Dad said ixnay on the upidstay idea. So there I was, sitting at a long, curved classroom table at Kent State instead of sweating my ass off in a Florida swamp. It was a Sociology class. Whatever that was. It had to do with society. Or something. I avoided taking anything boring . That meant no history, hard science, classic literature, business administration, and definitely no math classes. I took Rhetoric (what was that?) instead, and Environmental Geology, which seemed less hard. I liked science but it was ruined by mediocre high school teachers, and arguably my lack of interest in any science that didn’t involve animals. Something weird happened. Sociology fascinated me. People were interesting! Who knew? It led me to Psychology. I pushed myself and took a Literature class, in which we read classics, not the pap they assign today written by some obscure mixed-recipe woke chick who can’t figure out her belly button from her heinie. My new friends and I engaged in brainier discussions than in high school, because we were all so intellectually engaged for the first time. The next semester I took Philosophy (it sucked, but I had the world’s worst prof) and speech class, along with History, because, like, why the hell not? A great prof introduced me to Voltaire and other 18th-century mavericks, from whom I embraced speaking truth to power. Dr. S taught me there was real context around history, an evolution of understanding humanity and social cohesion, and especially not remaking its mistakes. My brain became an awakening octopus, unfurled, stretching its langorous tentacles in pursuit of a greater world that six months prior had contained mostly me. My octopus embraced a plethora of interesting people, places, times, books, and most importantly, ideas. I finished my freshman year with a bad case of intellectual snobbery, arguing with my mother that you can never really know something, and how can you truly know it when—I forget what the epistemological argument was but Philosophy was useful for something, primarily annoying my mother. I remember the sheer dopamine rush of becoming engrossed in a book I’d thought I wouldn’t like and reminding myself I had to stop as I had other homework. I checked out additional reading, spurred by new interests provoked in class. I posted my favorite Voltaire story over my typewriter because it was just so damn badass. Science no longer needed to provide cute furry things to hold my interest; I became engrossed in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which Dad and I watched together on Sunday nights. I devoured science fiction and looked up at diamonds scattered across the night sky, pondering cosmic necklaces of other worlds and galaxies, where the alien life was. I longed to live hundreds of years in the future, when I could travel on spaceships like the characters in Heinlein’s and Asimov’s books. My friends and I cracked intellectual jokes, not out of pretension but via a shared inside knowledge. “I require a spoon because I have an oral fixation,” one of my fellow Psych students said in the cafeteria, and we both laughed. Creative Commons image by Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia “Teaching is dead.” Can modern college kids even experience joy? They crawl social media feeds, their curiosity reserved for strangers’ carefully curated lives. It keeps their chronic anxiety on life support, relieved by instant coolness and cred when adopting the mental health pop-identification du jour. Millennials and Zoomers suffer the worst mental health problems and demonstrate fewer social skills than we had just half a generation ago. The ones actively engaged with politics seem mostly preoccupied with pretending to give a shit about Gazans. They graduate, seemingly, several magnitudes more ignorant than they entered. Critical thought makes them feel ‘unsafe’; as in, their friends will hate them. They render the campus more dangerous for anyone daring to question whether the Renaissance was truly an orgy of privileged white male Eurocentric supremacy. They will never be introduced to Voltaire, a hated old white European dude. Maybe they’re afraid of him and his maverick buds. I know I sound like an annoying “Kids these days!” grandma and maybe I am; but students aren’t taught to think anymore. Not that my gen was a bevy of untamed original thought. Nearly forty years ago Garry Trudeau famously lampooned us Xers in a classic Doonesbury comic featuring a college professor assigning an essay on independent thought. Touché , Mr. Trudeau. We deserved that. Ultimately, we can’t blame today’s students. Blame the parents, the teachers, and out-of-control woke ‘progressives’ that regard the young as brainless little bots that must be programmed with leftist, self-defeating, mental health-reducing cultural Marxist theology to function correctly. It reminds me rather a lot of the spectre of the old Soviet Union with which I grew up. Russians and other Communist students were taught what to think, not how to think. As were, to be honest, American kids who went to conservative religious schools. Both were anti-intellectual, and I was anti-anti-intellectual. Education was power. Thinking was power. Not so anymore. Social justice constipation The most brainless, doughnut degree you can get, I suspect, is ‘social justice’. I have an ex-friend who defriended me on Facebook, I assume because he didn’t like my Substack article headlines. He had just gotten a ‘social justice’ degree. He had a brain before he went back to school to get an MBA. I helped him out. I think I proofread his application essay. Unfortunately, he minored in ‘social justice’. They turned him into another insufferable programmed wokie-bot. ‘Social justice’ wonks are like the pretentious Philosophy-major pedants I used to encounter in college. They considered themselves morally superior, they were boring as hell, and they never, ever shut up. My job was to sit there and placidly listen, but I wasn’t very good at it. Eddie would call, often late at night and ask, “Have you got a couple of minutes?” which meant, if I’d valued our friendship over sleep, two or three hours of the dreariest social justice gibberish. I poked his self-importance by challenging his silly-ass sermons. Like making fun of the pronouns obsession. He archly informed me such thinking was ‘colonization’ of others’ identity, and a marker of my white privilege (isn’t everything?). I asked if he even knew what ‘colonization’ was, because it didn’t mean what he thought it did. Then I’d chastise him for supporting ‘colonization’ of women’s identity, sports teams and private spaces by men in dresses. That’s typical misogynist thought, I informed him. When he blathered about American white privilege I reminded him that he hailed from the original imperialist, cultural oppressors, the Chinese civilization, the oldest in the world. “Yes, I know but—” He wanted to talk about white privilege, not the Chinese conquest, colonization and subjugation of large swathes of Asia during the Han and Tang dynasties. Another ‘social justice’ friend got mad because I wasn’t convinced George Zimmerman had muttered the N-word just before he shot Trayvon Martin. Later he got peeved when I failed to insufficiently condemn the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi who was only fifteen minutes into being accused of physically assaulting dates. (Evidence? SJWs don’t need no stinkin’ evidence!) He defriended me too. It wasn’t as painful as he’d hoped. He was another one for calling for ‘just a few minutes’ and regurgitating a dog’s breakfast of woke balderdash. Like, he didn’t even stop to breathe! It won’t kill kids to read The Great Gatsby College kids have always been intolerant of ideas they don’t like. Hippie protesters shut down classes in the 1960s and 1970s. But they still got to talk, debate, disagree, get mad, and no one ever lost a career for saying something someone else didn’t like, even if they supported something unpopular like the Vietnam War. Just like we expostulated at Kent State twenty years later. Today KSU ranks 44 on FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Ranking s, ‘slightly above average’. Uh, yay? Students miss out on some of the greatest literature and art ever produced because of racist, misandrist hatred of anything white and male, replaced with culture created by ‘marginalized’ people whose experiences don’t resonate as universally as do the Old Dead White Dudes’. We need to learn those stories of genuine marginalization, but when one is preoccupied with one’s self and one’s out-group, it doesn’t leave much room for considering the greater, broader questions about humanity’s many commonalities. Group narcissism has its place, but so do the ground-breaking ideations of the educated European classes. “When assigned classics such as The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird , both of which are set in the early to mid-1900s, students often find the text difficult to comprehend as they are written in a language and style that’s much different than what most teens are accustomed to,” writes Tisyah Singh, online editor for a high school student newspaper. Cripes, girlfriend, Harper Lee isn’t Chaucer! Singh gets points for writing a more cogent essay than many of her classmates probably could, but demonstrates why assigned reading is important. Neither novel is lengthy, and easy to read with a little historical context to illuminate the times in which they’re set. Both novels address themes of interest to today’s students: Gatsby handles the American Dream, capitalism, white supremacy and gender role expectations. Mockingbird feeds the modern obsession with racial inequality. Push yourself a little, Tisyah! Students might find they actually enjoy required reading. If not now, then later. Fahrenheit 451 reads relevantly today with both progressives and conservatives f ighting over which books to ban from schools and libraries. Read enough, and you’ll be keen to swap insights with anyone who’ll listen. Curiosity leads you down unexpected paths. My obsession with Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers led me to the works of the Founding Fathers, who were much inspired by their European contemporaries. That was how I learned what a hoot Ben Franklin was, especially his sarcastic commentary on the unpleasant treatment by Americans of the original inhabitants. Public school has always been a bit of a drudge and that used to be a selling point for college: To educate, inspire, and instill a sense of wonder and curiosity. How much can you truly learn while you’re scratching out notes from the professor’s lecture, secretly wondering why colonialism and imperialism by Africans wasn’t mentioned. Or why Indigenous bands are never asked to provide their own land use acknowledgements, since they too stole the land from others. But thou darest not ask, lest ye be called a racist and shamed into dropping the class. Moving beyond groupthink Learning is torturous when you worry more about your grade point average than whether it’s righteous to pull down statues of men erected because of amazing things they wrote and did, simply because they owned slaves at a time when everyone with wealth did, especially in slave-mad Africa. Thou shalt not ask obvious questions. How can you value knowledge when you’re constantly policing others’ speech rather than attempting to leave the world a better place than you found it, based on what you’ve learned from your own ever-stretching octopus? How can you support anything other than the fascism you claim to despise when you don’t believe in the fundamentals of democracy, free speech, free thought, racial equality, women’s rights, and children’s right to just be, as they were born? How can you know you’re on the ‘right side of history’ when you can’t even summarize the millennia-ancient history of two sides fighting over a slice of land caught between a polluted river and a sea you can’t even name, let alone spell? Kids can’t learn anything valuable when they passively consume ideological drivel, regardless of whose. Decades ago, conservative Christians figured out that getting elected to school boards was the best way to subvert education with religious dogma. Later, woke SJWs applied a similar, quite ‘successful’ strategy. I don’t know if President-Elect Trump will destroy the Department of Education or not, or whether it wil be a good thing, or not, but what North America needs is for everyone to work together to create a better education system, broader, more nuanced, that awakens the octopus in everyone. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image license by h-e-d on Flickr Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Please consider reading this and not just scrolling past. I ask you to re-embrace genuine liberalism. Purple America needs you! Yes, I'm serious! Clockwise from the top left: Photo by Petr Kratochvil at Public Domain Pictures; by Rawpixel; by Rawpixel ; the Gender Spectrum Collection I can well imagine how scary it must be to live in the United States today. The last time Trump won, I snarkily referred to it as the Ignited States, but that doesn’t feel accurate when so many voters slid right, and those who didn’t vote or voted for a guaranteed loser third party candidate are still trying to figure out whether they did the right thing. I understand your fear, wokefolk. I do. I felt the same fear during Bush II’s America as we embraced POW torture and I thought, “This is not the country I grew up in.” This was not the America into which I was born, the same summer in which Martin Luther King, facing the distant Washington Monument, electrified a nation. I imagine you must be thinking the same. This was not the country you were born into. You’re not alone. I felt so strongly about it at one time that I actually did move to Canada. Democracy decline wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of it. But here’s your horse pill, wokefolk. We lifelong liberals believe, along with our brothers, sisters, and occasionally crazy cousins on the right that you have completely gone off the rails. That you back insane policies that exemplify everything you claim to be fighting against: Racism , misogyny , antisemitism , colonialism, and your own ‘woke’ Project 2025 , begun around 2012. (Question for you: Was antisemitism ever part of antiracism? Seriously asking.) Wokefolk, a confession: A few days after the election, many of us felt weirdly hopeful. Just a little. And we can’t stand Trump either! But I’d think while exercising, Well he DOES say he wants to deport all the illegals, starting with the criminal element. Which happened under Harris’s watch! It would sure help with the crime problem! The sex trafficking of minors has skyrocketed in the US since 2021 - Why? - Podcast, Meghan Murphy at The Same Drugs Friends, that really really bothered me. Do you have any idea what these victims go through? Mostly underage girls, but some underage boys too? And some of legal age? Do you know what these filthy psychopaths do to these children so that sick fucks everywhere can wank off to it on YouPorn? Do you have any idea how they’re tortured and sexually abused in ways you can’t even imagine? Wokefolk, you asked us— demanded of us!—that we vote for a woman who is directly responsible for that and never addressed what she’d do to change it. In fact, she couldn’t even think of any mistakes she’d made. Not admitting one’s mistakes sounds fairly Trumpian. Has he ever publicly done so? Wokefolk, we’ve been frustrated for decades by progressive liberalism’s softness on crime and terrorism. You illiberals are the softies. Antisemitism has risen dramatically around the world not just from the Islamofascist right, but from you, who embraced it so readily. Real liberals know antisemitism is racism . It’s bigotry. Violence is not free speech. You condemn January 6th, but excuse your antisemitic Islamofascist overlords. The Middle East generates hate like it does oil. And you embrace it. You—the ‘Defund the police’ set— made excuses —for riots, for smash ‘n’ grabs, for property theft. You called it ‘distributive justice’. Trump calls it—and he’s right— criminal theft. He’s always been short on the details of how he’ll fulfill his promises, but Harris offered only Trump-worthy word salads when asked what she’ll do about, well, anything. If you look at the charts of how much the Republicans gained with men, women, the working class and almost everyone else, even gay people, it’s dark days for ‘progressives’. Only two demographic groups voted blue rather than red, those over 65 and college-educated white women. Elitist, privileged, and deeply out-of-touch white women. The rest voted for Trump. Or third parties. Or not at all. Do you know why gay people voted Republican? I do. You should ask a few. Red voters weren’t all right-wing. Or racist. Or misogynist. But you were widely perceived as being so. Please come back to us, wokefolk. We need you I’m serious. You were once liberal, too. But then you ran so far to the left as the famous meme shows, that you thought everyone else was right-wing. That’s because literally everyone is to the right of you, but many of us are still left of center. You’re not a liberal if you don’t adhere to the traditional values of liberalism. You don’t get to re-define them as you have racism, misogyny, the meaning of ‘woman’, and everything else. I state as fact rather than my personal opinion that you can’t re-define liberalism , because this election proved you couldn’t and you didn’t. Plenty of people you regard as your fellow but Bad Liberals just proved you are not in step with us liberalism-espousing liberals. You are, in fact, a very small part of the left, our yappiest chihuahuas. You arrogantly assumed your Project 2025 was a done deal. Yet you forgot that elections periodically trump (ar ar!) everyone’s ideological fantasy projects. Woke friends, your hearts are in the right place but your brains have taken an extended vacation. You are deeply out of step with Purple America. You don’t ask the obvious questions, and cancel those who do. But the jig is up. You can no longer pretend men are women and women are men because we’ve all just called you out on it. It’s, to be frank, pseudo-scientific bullshit. I’ve covered the problems with the trans movement extensively (some would say ad nauseum). You don’t support women’s rights; you support men’s rights. We liberals know it, even if you don’t. To be painfully clear, only you , the 8%, believe this. It was a huge losing issue for you. And we’re not even sure you believe your own narrative either. We, the traditional liberals who would rather make wicked fun of Trump and the MAGAs than ‘cancel’ them, because true liberals don’t believe in censorship , request that you abandon your authoritarian illiberalism and rejoin us. Even as we know Trump may actually do some positive things for America this time around, it’ll only be if he can personally gain from it, and he’ll probably FUBAR it no matter what. And everything else will be disastrous. He’s already nominating some of the lousiest Americans we’ve got to his Cabinet. I mean, here we go again. He wanted to appoint a suspected sex trafficker and alleged child molester as the nation’s Attorney General, and a woman who’s squoodgy-woodgy with ugly people like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Donnie’s li’l Putie-Pie. Not surprising for a president-elect who admires some of the filthiest dictators on the planet, but while we’re on the subject…. Why do you, as well? Trump may admire Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, and Xi Jinping, but wokefolk, many of you worship Hamas, Hezbollah, and stand with Iran: Terrorist groups and governments who hate everything you claim to stand for, especially free women and LGBTQ rights. So seriously, you’re on the same moral platform as Trump’s Christian Nationalists. In many respects, you are no better than they. But we know you can be. You used to be. We need you to find your moral compass and rejoin us. Because Trump is a wannabe dictator. Because Project 2025 is scary, and I for one remember the nasty Christian Right during the Reagan-Bush years. Trump plays well to these people because they’re as morally bankrupt as he. We liberals don’t want to replace your authoritarianism with theirs. America voted against you—literally, against you — on November 5th, less a pro-Republican election as an ‘anything but Democratic’ election. I’ll be blunt, wokefolk: Americans can’t stand you, but there is, in fact, something in this little black bag for you, Dorothy. It’s called redemption. It’s a Christian word derived in the 14th century meaning ‘delivery from sin’. Redemption happens if one is genuinely penitent of one’s sins which, in woke progressive parlance, might be described as ‘grievance’, ‘oppression’, or ‘offense’. Every culture understands redemption whether they’ve heard of Jesus or not. The only human culture we don’t find it in is woke ‘progressivism’. You folks are famous for forgiving no one, especially each other . You cancel, i.e., ruin lives over the slightest transgressions. You’re censorship-mad, and you force self-censorship among those who don’t want to lose their jobs or reputations over the most piddling First World ‘microaggressions’ you can imagine. We despise you for this. It’s social justice psychopathy; the perps feel no compassion or empathy for their victims. They’re objects, to be destroyed on a self-righteous whim like a child who breaks things for fun. Say what you like about the most authoritarian Christians in America, but they are better than you in one way: They understand the concept of forgiveness. There is nothing more sublimely moral than to accept a miscreant back into the fold if they committed a real offense, one that violates the fabric of decent society, and then genuinely regrets, apologizes, and makes amends. An Amish community famously extended compassion to the family of a man who shot and killed five of their children and injured five others. A mother forgave her young son’s killer. The Forgiveness Projec t collects stories of people who forgave ‘those who trespassed against’ them. Forgiveness is found in most religions, and is part of reconciliation. It’s easiest to offer when the person who harmed you apologizes. Forgiveness never happens in ‘cancel culture’. No matter how much one apologizes, the mob piles on even harder. Is it a big success when you drive a young person to suicide ? Does it make sense now why you are despised throughout America? I ask you, wokefolk, to please deviate from your finger-pointing election excuses and honestly address your own faults and mistakes. We know the Democrats didn’t lose for fear of a black President; we’ve already elected one, twice. We know it’s not fear of a female President, because we voted for Biden and Harris in 2020 knowing he might easily die in office. So please, stop it already. Trump lies, but so do Democrats: They pretended for far too long what was an open secret in Europe: That President Joe Biden was fuzzy, unsharp, prone to forgetfulness and mixing things up. The truth is, wokefolk, America didn’t vote for Trump or Project 2025. They voted anti-Democrat because of you. There’s still a place for you at the American table, but you’re not allowed to throw mashed potatoes at Grandma for voting for Trump or call your dad a fascist because he listens to Joe Rogan. We need you to exit your bubble, read books and watch videos that weren’t produced by people who never challenge you, and to self-critique. We need you to challenge yourselves with points of view that diverge from your own—and acknowledge that too often, the hate speech is your own . You can choose real progressivism, or, you can stay back there with your fellow social regressives. You’ve demanded penitence from others and rejected it—and we ask for penitence from you now but we will not reject you if you’re sincere. You have harmed many in your climb to political dominance and you do, in fact, need to apologize to many, just as you demand governments apologize to others. We may be divided, but we’re still on the same side, and I ask you to rejoin the America that rejected you soundly on November 5th. We’re not perfect, and neither are you. We don’t know everything, and neither do you. We’re not right all the time, and neither are you. We need to parse the difference between righteous and self-righteous. Let’s talk! Breaking Bread With My Republican Ex-Boyfriend What If New Hires Had To Take A ‘Snowflake Test’ To Get A Job? What Went Wrong With Wokeness, The Left’s Authoritarianism It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The South Korean feminism project will be dead in the water. Like it or not, we need men, and they need us. Maybe we just need to reform #MeToo. The South Korean feminist 4B movement began several years ago in response to revenge porn and spy cam events targeting women by, guess who, misogynist men. South Korea has a lot of them , it seems. The movement galvanized further when an incel, irritated that women ignored him, killed a stranger in a public restroom. In the wake of the Red Tide washout in the U.S., progressive feminists are considering adopting 4B, so-named because in Korean, they name the four things feminists must renounce: No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. They’re sick of Korean men’s shit and they’re not going to take it anymore. It’s particularly irritating to Korea’s not-exactly-feminist president who blames the movement for the country’s declining birth rate (the lowest in the world), and that may be true. But his response has been stiffer penalties for women filing false sexual assault claims, rather than addressing the violence, male sexual predation, large wage gap between males and females, and the near-non-existence of women in high-level positions. Korean attitudes towards women appear still stuck in the ‘60s . Many blame women, their revealing clothing, and their sexuality for the sex crimes committed against them, a lot of it digital. It’s no wonder they’re forswearing men. Do Americans really need 4B? Of course American ‘progressive’ feminists, the very ones who practically chauffeured so many young men to Trump rallies, think they’re going to ‘show those Trump guys’ a thing or two—or not. 4B is a pointless protest for #MeToo Americans. Especially when Gen Zs are having less sex than even Millennials. Both generations are marrying less, dating less and ergo aren’t popping out kiddos. An American 4B movement will be dead in the water for another reason, too. The women who drove 4B Google searches 450% higher in the days after the Democratic trouncing are part of why Republicans won both the White House and all of Congress. Trump, love him or hate him, exemplified the masculinity so many of his voters feel, with some justification, has been under attack by man-hating feminists, and that Trump responded to the modern man’s very real crisis with sympathy, rather than rebukes. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris played to her educated blue feminist base, little realizing that progressive liberalism (as opposed to traditional liberalism) constitutes less than 10% of American political thought. Well, she won the progressive chickies anyway. Yay, Kamala. The wanna4Bes forget something else: A helluva lot of women voted for Trumpistan. What the 4B gang simply haven’t realized yet is how small a minority they themselves are, identified as part of the detritus many Americans felt the country needed to eject. For better or for worse. The Red Tide was unquestionably, but not solely, a mandate against progressive ‘woke’ ideology. 4B is a movement for the young, not the already-married and -bred. Marriage and commitment may even make a comeback under Trump II. For the rest of us, there’s the rotting carcass of #MeToo which jumped the shark years ago. A refreshed feminism is clearly in order for the U.S. It offers a good opportunity for liberalism— real liberalism, not woke déclassés —to inaugurate a lighter ‘blue wave’ for North American feminism. Grownups who honestly believe in women’s agency, power, and free will can sweep aside the babygirls who don’t, and embrace those who do along with those men who haven’t yet decamped to the other side, to move feminism to a new level—one more embrasive, less combative, and willing to cross the lines and open dialogue again. It’s simply unnatural to contemplate otherwise. As Magdalene J. Taylor asked on her Many Such Cases Substack, Why Is It So Hard To Admit We Need Each Other? She observes that ‘men and women no longer seem to like each other’ and identifies the intimacy crisis succinctly. “Every post about hating the opposite gender is fundamentally saying the same thing: they’re all so desperately trying to prove just how badly they don’t need anyone else.” She notes how irrational it is and against our natural state. Let’s remember, the core purpose of life on Earth, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with how it evolved, is to perpetuate life. We are social animals who evolved toward group cooperation as a survival tactic. It’s worked brilliantly; we are now the planet’s apex species. Only humans, inarguably the brightest of them all, have managed to screw it up so badly. Any movement predicated on not connecting with the opposite sex (or same sex, even if baby-making requires a third party), that demands we renounce the literal meaning of life is doomed to fail. Just ask a Shaker . American women are not in the same place as Koreans. The progressive left’s, at this writing, still-unwillingness to examine the misogyny on its own side for the Trump travesty, and the lousy candidate anointed by Democratic pols, without a primaries mandate, makes it clear they still Just. Don’t. Get it. It’s only been a few weeks, so maybe in a few months, or after the inauguration, ‘progressives’ will be more amenable to less extremist feminists who will find themselves self-marginalized if they don’t join us adult-ers in reaching across the divide. We liberal-but-not-crazy-feminists can hope to coax a few men away from the manosphere, and these angry young progressive women locked in their own ‘femosphere’. We traditional liberal women can embrace a more mature feminism over their self-infantilizing mental and emotional prison based on regarding men as our equals , not enemies. The Trump Train? It’s on us, too, not just their obviously-flawed voters whose candidacy requirements are as bottom-feeding as the Dems’. The piss-poor choices both parties offered this year appalled many, enough that some voted for neither. Or not at all. It truly does go against our nature to go solo, as tempting as that may be. Even men, who more famously pretend they’re self-reliant and individualist, still rely on women far more than they admit. They tend to jump into another marriage sooner when the previous one fails; wives function primarily for emotional support. And of course you can’t make babies without a woman. The Dalai Lama, and countless psychologists, observe that every sentient being seeks pleasure and avoids pain. While the marriage first, babies later model may make a comeback—and it’s not such a terrible idea—conservatives need to understand not everyone is wired to be that way, and that’s fine too. They disliked the authoritarian dictates of the woke-left forced on themselves, now they’ll have to consider their own mandates and whether it’s fair to force them on others. Shouldn’t it be mind-bogglingly obvious by now that the solution to the never-ending sexual battleground isn’t more division, but less ? That nothing will be resolved as long as men and women hate each other? That when two groups hate each other long enough, they inevitably wind up at war—literal war? Will the GOP declare a war on sex? On the other hand, if Republicans make good their Project 2025 fantasies to restrict or eliminate birth control, it may be worthwhile to revive the 4B chastity practice. Not that that’s gonna happen. America wants jobs, not blue balls. What would really cut close to the boner, though, is a No Blowjobs protest. I wrote about a Lysistrata-style strike, tongue-in-cheek, after the Roe loss, but if women lose access to birth control too, men must be forced to share the pain. This time, it’s personal. “NO MORE BLOWJOBS!” A New Feminist Protest Trump has no future in Washington after his second term is over, but the Republicans around him do, and wouldn’t it be grandly ironic if 2028 turned into a Blue Wave with reformed Democrats promising to make sex less risky and enjoyable again? Adopt, or reform? What if American feminists simply reformed or rebooted #MeToo? Purge it of the crazy woke nonsense, stop labeling everything even vaguely male as ‘toxic’, de-emphasize anonymous accounts of sexual assault, since ‘truth’-tellers’ may be lying to share the attention of the victimized sisterhood, recognize that women have a responsibility to themselves to improve their own lives, be ambitious, and not blame ‘patriarchy’ for their own shortcomings? What if feminists stopped talking about ‘microaggressions’ and encouraged young women to grow up and learn resilience and assertiveness, that if they want something, they should earn it, not ask nicely? Another way we can fight the crazier political wank fantasies of Trumpism is for women to agree to have each other’s backs. Relations between the sexes is likely to get worse before it gets better and the danger comes from those newly-Trumpified male voters who rallied around, yes, a known sexual predator. At least some of whom will likely feel emboldened to take out their hostilities—and sexual frustrations—on women more. I wrote about that a few years ago too. What If Human Women Challenged Male Aggression Like Bonobos? If you’re not up for the TL;DR version, here’s the synopsis. All primate species evolved a male dominance model except for one: Our cousins the bonobos, whose social model is more female-dominated. Despite physically larger and stronger males, bonobos are famously pretty peaceful. Yet when a male gets out of hand and behaves too aggressively, the females immediately band together and subdue him (there’s a video of it in the article). The primary reason for why this promotes more egalitarian social dynamics (which involves a helluva lot more sex than you will ever have!) is female bonding and friendship, including outside their own groups. Women have the power to drive a more co-equal social evolution, but we have to first acknowledge we have that power, and then unite to use it. We have, as I’ve always maintained, the power to end male aggression, if only we choose it, and the bonobos prove it can be accomplished. Women are fighting back even one-on-one. These attackers were alone when they fought back. What if women banded together and fought back against assaults in public? Whether verbal, sexual, or physical? Women won’t be alone. Many men still sympathize with the women’s rights movement and empathize with the challenges women still face. If feminists were less antagonistic to all males, rather than the truly problematic ones, we will have more male support too—and we absolutely need it. ‘The Patriarchy’ Just Saved Me From The Patriarchy What we don’t need is another feminist movement, borrowed from a culture observably behind our own on women’s rights. Trumpocalypse II is an opportunity for #MeToo to level up and emphasize personal development and power, helping younger, self-infantilized feminists still stuck in victimhood mentality to take charge of their lives. Take back their power. Grow some labia! And defend your sisters! Maybe we will need to borrow from 4B if the GOP really does limit, restrict, or ban birth control, but those are very big ifs. I don’t believe the numerous American women who voted red this month want a birth control ban. They want a return to protections for women against the predatory men of the left’s transactivist movement. Kamala Harris made a huge mistake emphasizing abortion rights which she was never going to be able to do much about. We don’t need our own 4B; we need to fix #MeToo. We need men, and they need us. That’s how life evolved and it’s not going to change. We need to re-accept nature, and reality. Because believe me, sex was a lot more fun back when I was your age. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The foxy fauxminist has gone missing in recent years. No movies. No fauxminist outbursts. Not even any trans love tweeted. I investigated. And then she trended. I got to wondering what happened to British actress Emma Watson with the new explosion of JK Rowling hate after the Harry Potter author gave a giant middle finger to the Scottish government by daring them to arrest her for properly gendering cross-dressing men, and especially fake-ass rapists. A new Scottish ‘hate crime’ law gives men carte blanche to hate on, threaten, and abuse women while threatening with imprisonment any woman who fights back or protests. Or calls a man a man. It doesn’t mention any repercussions for trans-misogyny against real women. Carry on, boys. Fake or real. It’s kind of reminiscent of that Pakistani law that jails women for adultery if they report a rape to the police. Women should be fucked and not heard. As always, when the transmisogyny hit Rowling full steam, Ms. Fauxminist had fuck all to say about it. But then I got to thinking: Watson’s had fuck all to say about anything, recently, and is she still even making movies? The last one I saw was Beauty and the Beast. So I checked her out on X. She’s there, but she doesn’t tweet much and when she does, it’s about her family’s hooch business. They run a French Chablis winery and Watson has debuted her own Chablis-flavored gin, Renais. That got my attention! I like wine! I like gin! I like anything that distracts her from defending misogynist cross-dressers! I have never seen Renais gin where I buy good hooch, probably because I live in Canada rather than the U.K. But I would totally try it. It’s gotta be better than ‘Success Distilled’ Trump Vodka, which folded after six years because apparently it was, like many other Trump brands, distilled with less success than advertised. I never tried it, or even heard of it until recently. I imagine it tasted like failure and criminal tears. I remembered that Watson had been appointed, in 2014, as the UN Women Ambassador. Was she still in that role? I couldn’t find much about it. The UN posted something in March sounding like she still was, but didn’t mention any recent work. She worked quietly on a few non-UN feminist projects just before the pandemic, but after that she goes silent in the media. If there’s one thing Emmy-poo isn’t tweeting or talking about much anymore, it seems, it’s feminism. Which is a good thing, since she abandoned it several years ago to become a men’s rights activist for clever fetishists. Her last personally embarrassing scandal was in 2017 when she declared women shouldn’t sexualize themselves right around the time a Vanity photo emerged of her with her naked but (almost) nipple-obstructed breasts. It was a silly dust-up, fairly anemic potatoes in a world where transactivist cross-dressers sexualize and fetishize women and threaten to physically shut the fucking mouth of any ‘TERF’ who dares to challenge them. And they can get away with it now in Scotland. And next, as I fear, in Canada. Watson has fuck all to say about her fauxminist support for her pseudoscientific ‘Transwomen are women’ nonsense, too. And then, hours after I scheduled this article for publication, Emma Watson was trending on X. Why isn’t she speaking out on feminist issues anymore? The trans-misogyny was at full-blown OJ-New-Year’s-Eve level. That Rowling bitch was standing up for women’s rights again. Emma Watson trended, not Daniel Radcliffe, I assume because of her public fauxminism. I watched, waiting to see if she would respond. So far, she hasn’t. Nadda word. One must wonder why. Watson used to be such a promising feminist. I always loved her as mouthy, assertive Hermione Grainger, but when she first became a global face of feminism— real feminism, not the trans-pandering she turned to a few years later—I loved how she condemned feminist ‘man-hating’. “Thank you! Thank for saying that!” I said, because I was sick of the misandry too. Social and political movements always have their haters , and unless there’s someone exercising some sort of messaging control, the movement gets quickly hijacked by extremists, as happened to feminism somewhere in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. At least the early ‘90s is when I stopped identifying as a ‘feminist’ and began calling myself a ‘humanist’, sort of an ‘All sexes matter’. It was just too embarrassing to associate myself with those women . Then Watson got woke, checked her brain at the door and began catering, witlessly, to the Holy Sacred Boner that lurks underneath transactivist dresses. She lost me. I still love the actress, but couldn’t stand the person. The thing that really aggravated me about her was that if she’s going to call herself a feminist, if she’s going to purport to speak for so many of us, if not all, she needs to address the biggest threat to women today: Trans-identified males so far doing a very good job of rolling women’s rights back. To zero. Frankly, they’re frighteningly more effective than the far right. Allow me to digress for a moment: Trump scares me less than the Transmafia. His biggest crime against women—and it’s a big one—is appointing three conservative Supreme Court Justices who finally gave the right’s misogynists their wank dream. Otherwise, he’s accused but never convicted of rape, of unsuccessfully paying off a porn star to shut up about an affair, and of confessed but consensual pussy-grabbing. He has not, to my knowledge, for all his famously offensive and often misogynist tweets, ever sent out anything like the following: But check it out: He’s against trans-identified men in women’s private changing rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams. And I ask semi-seriously: How much will the Zoomers need abortions anyway? Progressives have been sterilizing them for ten years with ‘transitioning’, and now they’re sterilizing themselves with tubal ligations and vasectomies because they don’t ever want to be faced with enforced pregnancy. Donald Trump is an utter failure with women in just about any way you can think of, including two failed marriages, relentless philandering, daughter-lusting, and I’m not blowing off the rape accusations, especially E. Jean Carroll’s . I suspect he’s got plenty of ugly misogynist policy up his sleeve which only the traddiest wives would approve of if he wins, and I won’t vote for him, but I won’t be voting for Biden either. In the Bizarro States of America, Donald Trump is the more feminist candidate. It seems pretty obvious why Watson wouldn’t want to change her tune and stand up for women like Rowling under attack. It would mean professional death. The Transmafia would silence her in a heartbeat. They could and would destroy her career. She doesn’t dare, and I am sympathetic to, her desire to preserve her career and not be subjected to far more credible threats to her life that already come packaged with fame, beauty, talent, and a prominent role as a women’s rights advocate. She received frightening threats after her famous UN speech. And that was when she was asking for something reasonable. My Emma hate comes from her horrendous hypocrisy: Feigning feminism while refusing to call out the Western misogynist backlash led by men who get stiffies in dresses. Watson was in a bad place: Speaking out against misogyny, but only when it didn’t offend the entitled who could afford the luxury of alternative pronouns. And so, I hope and pray, she may finally have realized she had become the very worst sort of hypocrite. Maybe defending her boobies are as feminist as she cares to get. It’s lowball. It’s safe. It’s old-school. Second wave feminists, who are more inclined to go after her newer fauxminism, can at least get on board with her sexualization-is-bad message. It was one of the first memos sent out during the ‘Women’s Libber’ era. “My eyes are up here!” I don’t think you can be a successful careerist and speak out on real feminist issues unless you’re ridiculously wealthy, like Rowling, or are ready to retire, which is what you’ll do as soon as your first pro-women tweet includes the #TranswomenAreMen hashtag. I’m speculating, of course, because I can’t ask Watson myself and because she’s keeping mum about transgender rights. And JK Rowling’s latest shot. I’d thought maybe I’m missed something since I don’t live in the U.K. or follow celebrity news, but I don’t think I have. I’m okay with her not speaking out against transactivism if she shuts up about feminism overall. It’s a matched set. Speak out against the most critical issue facing women’s rights, or clap that pretty little trap shut. Maybe she finally had a come-to-Jesus moment. Just how feminist am I, anyway? And how much did she value her career? I wonder (hope!) that’s she’s taken a cue from her mentor and realized that money is power , the very definition of ‘power feminist’ in Naomi Wolf’s classic Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century. Power, and wealth privilege, can be used for good as well as evil, as Wolf points out. That’s where salvation lies for women. Hey, it’s always worked for men! The future of feminism What’s Emma up to when she’s no longer mouthing platitudes directed by her (perhaps former) transactivist masters? When I first Googled her name and ‘2024’, I found she was doing a lot of modeling work. She’s also engaging in some quiet feminist personal empowerment that makes Grow Some Labia smile and wonder whether perhaps we might welcome her back to the feminist fold one day. Watson hasn’t made a movie since 2019 (Greta Gerwig’s Little Women ) because she became uncomfortable with not having any say, power, or control about the projects she was in. She felt ‘caged’. She took what she claims is a break from acting and intends to return to it eventually. In the meantime, she’s done a perfume commercial for Prada and directs her own projects. I found one quote which suggests she began experiencing cognitive dissonance over what she was promoting and what she believed in. She doesn’t offer an example of what made her feel inauthentic, but she told Variety magazine she took ‘flak’ from journalists as she promoted this or that who asked, “How does this align with your viewpoint?” She didn’t like having no say in the process that created something she now had to promote. “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say. And I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.’” I don’t know if she was challenged on, or thinks about now, her past public genderwoo. The questions were directed toward her projects. But if her answers were making her ‘hate herself’, did she also question whether, as she famously alleged on then-Twitter, that “Transwomen are women”? She’s directing. She’s producing. She’s fixing what she complained about years ago: The lack of female directors and producers in the movies. Well done, Ms. Watson! She’s also taking creative writing classes, as of the fall of 2023. She’s taking charge of her life and producing things on her own, including her own brand of gin. She’s become an entrepreneur. I like lady entrepreneurs. My niece is thinking of becoming one. Don’t depend on Da Man (or Da Woman), be the mistress of your own fate! She’s still promoting liberal, progressive causes. Emma Watson is still alive. Her feminist evolution appears to be more self-directed now, as she reclaims her power, or perhaps truly seizes it for the first time. I dislike her less than I did when I wrote an angry polemic about her abrogation of feminism in the face of a clear and distinct Woke War On Women. She’s doing now what I advocate for her: Shutting up about feminism, if she can’t defend trans-misogynists anymore, and especially if she’s figured out that human sex is biologically immutable. I’ll wait to see what she does or says next. In the meantime, Ms. Watson, we’re working on the current feminist challenge: The right to be a public, challenging feminist without rape and death threats or career suicide. You’re welcome. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!