''Critical Social Justice' has infiltrated the mental health industry and spreads rather than contains wokeness's harmful ideas Public domain photo from Rawpixel Well this explains everything, I thought to myself. The fox is coaching the henhouse! Author Lisa Selin-Davis explains the perpetuation of wokeism in her recent The Free Press Substack article, How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors . I had no idea social justice had infiltrated the mental health industry, which makes me rethink whether greater resources for affordable mental health help will alleviate or multiply pervasive societal mental illness. Because wokeness is a primary driver. Selin-Davis traces the short history of how therapists got ‘woke’ and trained to view the patient as a collective part of a greater group, whether it was a ‘dominant’ group or a ‘marginalized’ one, rather than treating them, as therapists have historically have, as an individual. God help you now if you’re unfortunate enough to be white, male, or ‘cis-heteronormative’. Because you and your privilege are ground zero for what ails others. And their antidote to your mental distress is woke mind poison. The therapist training Selin-Davis describes sounds frighteningly like those hellish DEI corporate workshops we read and hear too much about. First, start with a dictatorial commitment to ‘antiracism’, whatever that means this week. Then be sure to give all the ‘right’ answers in class, or risk being shamed and penalized. What galvanized the social justice-izing of mental health counseling was the rise of Donald Trump, the death of George Floyd and street protests . One student described a ‘civility pledge’ she had to sign toward the end of her training, stating her commitment to acknowledge all the social justice warrior evils: Racism, ableism, sexism, classism, nativism, heterosexism, politically incorrect country music , etc. Vulnerable, unhappy people, oppressed by mental health struggles, come to these freshly-minted head specialists and pay for more mental poison. Mental dis-ease begins with social justice One woman in the article illustrates how Critical Social Justice ideology creates and perpetuates pre-existing mental illness. The social justice warrior cared deeply about diversity and equity, but found herself struggling with her ‘whiteness’ and her constant fear she was oppressing others without even trying. Critical Race Theory teaches a hopeless narrative for everyone, but particularly for white people: They’re born into white supremacy and can never escape it, and oppress others simply by existing. The woman felt guilt as a lesbian, too, as Queer Theory teaches ‘cis’ is “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.” WTF? She’d internalized social justice’s self-hatred lessons that the only acceptable authenticity is that of the marginalized. If you’re not—and apparently someone granted privilege to lesbians when she wasn’t looking, your only permissible response is a never-ending demand for public confession for your sins of being born ‘privileged’. Instead of working to achieve genuine social justice, and existing happily lesbian with her girlfriend, the woman became consumed with CSJ-manufactured guilt as she anguished over her alleged ‘internalized white supremacy’. Social Justice created her unhealthy pathologies that diverted her from a path of helping others, to counseling she might not have otherwise needed, and, as it turned out, might have been better off without. She found a black therapist to help her with her race and gender issues and all went very well for several months. It went tits-up, ironically, when she began making real mental health progress. Getting better weakened her ‘wokeness’ which threatened her therapist’s social justice commitment to a victim-centered identitarian worldview. When the patient criticized cancel culture the therapist accused her of assimilating ‘white supremacy culture’ and making the black therapist feel ‘unsafe’. If there’s one word that must never pass a mental health professional’s lips unless the patient has turned on them with a knife, it’s ‘unsafe’. That’s a social justice distortion most often applied to challenged ideas for which the recipient has no rational answer. Eventually, the therapist ended the relationship with the patient for being insufficiently attentive to her presumed birth-granted skin power, which was even more harmful for the patient. She was in essence ‘cancelled’, the very worst punishment for the non-conforming social justice warrior, by someone she’d trusted with her psychological vulnerability. Social justice activism drove the patient both into and then out of therapy, when the good it did her did so-called ‘harm’ to the therapist. Interestingly, a therapy modality that perpetuates the problem it seeks to reduce results in a prolonged financially remunerative arrangement for the therapist which can last for years, even decades. It’s an ironic position for a mental health professional: If you do your job well, success is rewarded with profit loss. I can’t help but think the patient could have saved herself many months, and a lot of stress and money, by reading books outside her social justice bubble that might have challenged and illuminated her in more psychologically healthy ways, especially books challenging the myopic social justice self-flagellating prison. The therapist, treating her patient as a presumed ‘oppressor’ rather than an individual with her own unique neuroses and traumas, worked to reinforce the pervasive ‘woke’ ideology of helplessness and hopeless oppression. She told the patient, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’  What a supremely bleak and depressing view of one’s future, not to mention humanity. How utterly demoralizing it must be to believe that ultimately, struggle is useless, including against genuine oppression - so why even bother trying? Why protest in the streets, why bother striving to become a better person, if you remain forever either an assigned victim or an oppressor, regardless of your most sincere efforts? Ideology vs empowerment Under the old therapy modality, the patient was guided toward healthier mental perceptions, coping, and resilience skills, along with a growing inner strength, the exact opposite of the victimist mindset, the very definition of powerlessness. In fact, it’s victimhood that often drives people into therapy, the point being to not allow whatever makes her feel like a victim control her life. In the proper setting, one is encouraged to grow mentally stronger and develop personal power, which is what the aforementioned therapy client did until her therapist pulled her back from the cliff edge of psychological health. Selin-Davis’s article notes that some ideologized newbie therapists claim they could never take on a Trump-supporting client. I can’t imagine another group of people as much in need of real mental health help as the MAGAs. They’re subject to their own toxic, victimizing, self-defeating and self-destructive ideologies, greatly resembling their social justice antagonists. MAGAs, like SJWs, need to challenge their self-perception as victims, whether they were victimized against their will with a neglectful childhood or an abusive partner, or whether they agreed, consciously or not, to adopt identitarian victimhood. But ultimately, if you can’t find a marginalized group to join, simply make up your own label! If you’re a group of one, congratulations! You’re marginalized! So none of it is your fault! Empowerment, genuine empowerment, not woke-warrior lip service, is the sworn enemy of victimhood ideology. The less you see yourself as a victim, the less you act as a victim. The more you see your power to change your life, and you engage that power, your life will most likely improve. It’s a direct threat to those who prefer to reject personal responsibility because they’re marginalized. The message of covert disempowerment promoted by emotionally unintelligent social justice warriors self-oppresses and benefits those with real power unwilling to share any of it. I wonder if the SJW’s therapist felt threatened by the very freedom from psychological pain to which she’d led her patient, perhaps longing to seize some of that freedom herself but risking her job and potential ostracism when her peers found out she questioned the core tenets of social justice ideology. It would lay to waste everything she’d been taught and believed in. Donald Trump and his lackeys play to this same mindset for Team MAGA, blaming everyone for the working class’s plight without ever challenging them to aspire higher, educate themselves, to take charge of their lives more, or to demand better politicians to address their real interests. It benefits Trump and the Republicans to keep their base feeling victimized - if the voters took charge of their lives rather than blaming immigrants and progressive elites, they might not need the GOP anymore. Who needs a saviour when you can save yourself? The futility of eternal victimhood Mental un-health is socially contagious. It includes anorexia, suicide, and depression, but happiness is also contagious. One study found that having a happy neighbor increases one’s happiness probability by 34%. Hanging out with a more positive crowd and taking breaks, whether it’s vacation or just some time off from thinking about systemic racism, rape culture or colonialism, might be more beneficial, not to mention time and money-saving, than a therapist with an unexamined sense of her own self-imposed victimhood. It’s frightening to think that people in real mental distress visit professionals who feed their pathologies and turn them away from the timeless skills of empowerment, self-challenge, coping and resilience that results in stronger psychological health. The Buddha, 3,500 years ago, taught human beings the secret to happiness and mental well-being not by wallowing in the injustices of the world, but in learning to co-exist with and alleviate it with good deeds, to strive not to contribute to others’ unhappiness, and to challenge one’s own self-harming mental perceptions. He deconstructed how our beliefs can cause us as much, and arguably more, pain than any actual victimization we’ve experienced. The more new-ish mental health treatment Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or CBT, closely resembles Buddhist teachings. CBT seeks to challenge ‘cognitive distortions’, the ‘mental constructs’ Buddhists encourage followers to root out. It challenges thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that may or may not be real, that may hurt us. One such cognitive distortion in the social justice movement (and Judaeo-Christianity) is the distasteful notion of original sin - that you can be born into a negative state through no fault of your own. It was the putative basis of the Genesis tale of Adam and Eve, purporting to explain why humanity is so ugly (it’s our fault for disobeying God!) and it’s extended into CRT-based antiracism, which teaches the cognitive distortion that you can be born into an inescapable white supremacy, just as Jews and Christians believe you can never escape the taint of Adam’s and Eve’s original sin, and all you can do is strive ever harder to be a better person. Ideological victimhood dies without validation from others, and people who abandon victimist thinking and take charge of their lives, are deeply threatening to those who won’t. The ‘woke’ and the MAGAs each hew to a toxic, self-limiting, self-destructive self-image in which nothing is ever their fault. Rejecting victimhood is the Kryptonite of ‘wokeness’ and MAGAtry. Evidence, logic, rationalism, reason and hard data are their sworn enemies. Mental health is the primary tool in the arsenal of The Silent Majority, those of us who want to take back our power from the perma-victims of modern discourse, who hold themselves, not to mention others and their social justice causes, back. Therapy can still be beneficial, and Selin-Davis’s articles lists the rebel therapists banding together to offer un-woke therapy for those who don’t want their therapists to dictate some issues are ‘off the table’ because it makes them feel ‘unsafe’. If you can’t afford therapy, no problem! Good books will challenge what you think you believe to be right in social justice. You can read them for free from the library or order them on-line, used copies super-cheap. I just saved you a whackload of money, and maybe hastened your journey to a healthier mental outlook. You’re welcome ;) Not all mental health struggles can be addressed with a few books, so if you need a therapist’s help Selin-Davis’s article offers non-woke therapy sources to start. Also research and interview potential therapists to make sure they won’t undermine your progress. It’s okay to be liberal or progressive or supportive of social justice, but the key thing to remember is they shouldn’t be pushing any particular political worldview on you. If your mental health issues come from your social justice work, start with a few of these books: The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody - Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America - John McWhorter I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism - Mark Goldblatt The Content Of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (this book is over 30 years old but it’s as fresh and relevant today as it was in 1990) - Shelby Steele Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality - Helen Joyce My Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars - Meghan Daum The Morning After: Sex, Fear & Feminism - Katie Roiphe War Before Civilization - Lawrence Keeley (On how violent pre-colonial Indigenous cultures were) Emotional Intelligence 2.0: Harness the Power of the #1 Predictor of Success - Dr. Travis Bradberry & Dr. Jean Greaves This last is one of the best damn books I’ve ever read that will put you on the road to more highly fortified mental health. 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!

Over-inclusivity endangers women and opens the door to sexual predators intent on eroding female agency. Stop being so *nice*, girls! This is the most important word in the female vocabulary. Practice it until you can say it firmly and with finality. The 1996 movie The Crucible highlights a lose-lose Puritan ultimatum: Tell the truth —that you were not a witch and practiced no Biblically-forbidden dark arts—and be ostracized, not for witchcraft but for ‘lying’; and if you lied and ‘confessed’ to preserve your communal life, you forever damned your soul to eternal hell in accordance with Puritan belief. The truth was hateful to the Puritan community; it wasn’t the narrative they wanted. They chose—preferred—to believe in witches. When far-left blogging platform Medium declared war on truth I wondered how it could have allowed itself to become so subsumed by illogical woke idiocy. When Canadian Pride transactivists began attacking libraries I wondered how Pride let itself get hijacked by fetishistic heterosexual men. When so-called ‘progressive’ activists attacked not just libraries but bookstores and Amazon , I wondered why they practiced censorship themselves when they labeled right-wing censorship as Nazism. On the Orwellian far-left, free speech is now as verboten as on the far-right. How did we get to this place? I think progress stopped when progressives, and especially Third Wave feminists, gave up the ability to say ‘No.’ The Patriarchy thanks them for their support. Leda and The Swine MeToo dragged consent out of the bedroom and into the public square and turned ‘rape culture’ into a household phrase. A recent Unherd article debated whether the Noughties (the decade with central double-zeros) enabled Russell Brand to become a hypersexualized misogynist and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault. It’s really about rape culture. When feminists use the term they almost always mean male words or actions. They fail to consider how much women contribute to rape culture too. Like not saying No when you’re not in danger. Unfortunately, many women are raised to be nice , and far more considerate of others’ feelings than men are. It’s not entirely men’s fault when they’re raised to be the way they are, too. We all have to strive to do better after our parents’ inevitable mistakes. Women can be more forceful and assertive, and men can stop and consider how their words and actions affect others. Progressivism has jumped the shark with its obsessive largely female fetish for inclusivity: No one claiming to be from a ‘marginalized’ group must ever be challenged or considered worthy of exclusion. It’s incredible that an age that can condemn Russell Brand and Louis CK for not listening when women said No, now insist women can’t say No to more fashionably-dressed sexual predators and opportunists, and shame their sisters who do. The feminist trick, as clever misogynists have discovered, is to slap on thicker eyelashes than thou, steal their sister’s bra and stuff it like she did when she was eleven, and and whine on TikTok about how hard their appropriated ‘marginalized’ lives are. The silly little chickie-boos will suck it right up! You can even get them to ignore their fine-tuned sense of danger from strange men in enclosed, private spaces, and assure other women they should not fear transwomen in changing rooms or public restrooms. This, despite mounds of research showing the same levels of violent criminality between transwomen and men, and the growing list of busted cross-dressing sexual predators. These dizzy dames have even been persuaded we should reward convicted sex offenders who find their ‘real woman’ with female prisons, a level of punishment for female prisoners I’m guessing runs afoul somehow of the Geneva Convention. No, no, nothing to see here! These poor dear souls just feel comfortable ‘coming out’ now! Image by Long Phung from Pixabay This is not good for women. Gavin de Becker notes in The Gift of Fear, “No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’” Animals evolved over millions of years to hightail it at the approach of a hungry predator. So, to, have women developed a highly-attuned sense of danger, whether their mate came home angry from a poor hunt or drunk from the local pub. The smart human female animal gets the hell out of the way. A violent transactivist faction dictates to women that they will complain no more when penised people demand (in the historical tradition of entitled men) that women grant them access to all their female-only spaces, including even sex-segregated spaces originally conceived to protect women from male predation. Worse, women, real women, comply like good little girls and do what these men want. Because it’s always men - however fashionably dressed or passably female—who make these demands. Women are femsplained by Regressive Lefties that they should say No to some men - the ones they don’t want to have sex with - but yes to the ones who want to penetrate women’s-only spaces - regardless of how unsafe it makes women feel. Like, it’s a major colossal global human rights crisis if they don’t. This even includes rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, absolutely the last places the be-penised should ever be. Until a few years ago, they were genuine safe spaces for women directly abused by penises who could count on not encountering another one. No more. Get over your transphobia, girlfriend! The Ghislaine Maxwells of the left ‘Fauxminists’ are as dangerous to women and women’s rights as the Freedumb Convoy and red-state politics. Fauxminists are a manifestation primarily on the left, since anti-feminist women on the right are largely honest about it. Fauxminists consider themselves feminists but support anti-feminist causes, and I can’t think of anything more anti-feminist than throwing imprisoned women to the rapists, or telling mothers and their young daughters that they should just accept transwomen in women-only spaces because ‘they’re not going to hurt anyone’. This is criminally ludicrous. It directly contradicts women’s lived experience with male stranger danger, and even the ones they know. It even contradicts central progressive belief that we are who we are via environment and culture rather than anything innate. Never mind that it’s a belief contradicted by countless anthropologists, biologists and neuroscientists, but the left’s resistance to inconvenient science and recognizing contradictory hypocrisy has a lengthy history along with the right’s. We believe what we want to believe . If feminists believe we’re the product of our upbringing rather than our sex, do they really think a human male will toss out the window his prior experience growing up male in a violent, sexist society? Especially a convicted sex offender? Do they honestly believe he stops thinking like a male because he realized ‘he always felt like a woman’? And do they believe everything a man tells them? One of the biggest psychological weak spots in the female brain is the nature and nurture drive to be nice, to help others, to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, especially men’s. This is a sound evolutionary response as some men can become violent if they feel shamed or rejected, and letting them down easy is a survival tactic that hopefully prevents one from killing her. This is where the ad hoc lie “Sorry, I’m a lesbian,” comes from. Or, “Thanks, but I’m married,” when she’s not. They don’t always work but they offer the less emotional suitor plausible deniability: She’s not rejecting me, it’s nothing personal. Fauxminists naively believe that everything changes when a man claims to be female, which directly endangers others when they demand all women collaborate with primarily heterosexual transvestites and autogynephiles who are in it for the woodies. They’ll argue on X’s #MeToo that women have to be wary of all men because they don’t know which are the rapists or killers. Unless they’re transwomen. Why do they turn their brain over to Da Patriarchy when blatantly opportunistic men demand access to a rape crisis center? Not only must real feminists and progressives battle vicious misogynists on the right, now we have to battle their fauxminist allies on the left. If you’ve ever wondered why resistance to extreme trans rights get charged with being a ‘right-wing’ effort, it’s because it is. Because the right supports sex-segregated spaces, and the left, well—it supports rape culture and male sexual predation. Full stop. Fauxminists are the Ghislaine Maxwells of the left. Isn’t it interesting that Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous list included, as far as I can tell, almost exclusively Democratic politicians and progressive-leaning actors and celebrities? The left just cain’t say no. Not even to victimizing underage girls. Besides Jeffrey Epstein, the far-left and its fauxminists have a long record of enabling and supporting male criminal sexual behavior: The ILGA’s conscious inclusion of NAMBLA into their ranks; England’s infamous grooming gangs which fauxminists and Regressive Lefties ignored. Notice they condemn Epstein more than his Chief Collaborator? And now they instruct women to ignore their most critical instincts and pretend there’s no danger when a big galoot like Lia Thomas is taking his pants off. “It’s just nothing,” they tell women. If victims of sexual assault feel uncomfortable with a ‘woman with a penis’ listening to or overhearing their story at the rape crisis center, or that some guy who sort of looked like Dame Edna commented at the pool what a beauty their little daughter is, suddenly the fauxminists abandon #MeToo and tell these women to ‘just get over it,’ because, you know, women don’t molest children , and ‘transwomen are women’. Maybe this explains the real reason the dodo bird died out. Every time they thought they caught a whiff of a human in the breeze they told themselves, “Oh, it’s probably nothing. Humans are non-violent just like us.” Well, that’s what a human told her, anyway. CC0 2.0 Photo by Ed Schipul on Flickr Just Say No To No Where is this leading? Social psychologist and relationship expert Dina McMillan describes the many types of controlling, abusive men in her book But He Says He Loves Me: How to avoid being trapped in a manipulative relationship. She lists the sort of women controlling men look for. Some want the easily manipulated victim susceptible to doing whatever it takes to please the man. The ones with the lowest self-esteem are the easiest to reel in. Others want higher-value women who may require a little more work. Some prefer a real challenge: The strong, independent, feminist woman. “How well does that work?” I thought dubiously as I, a strong, independent, feminist woman read the book. Better than I might have expected. Women who think they can’t be controlled or abused by men are a World Series-level grand slam if he can get her to submit. It requires much more investment in ‘training’ her for the relationship but it can be quite successful, from his point of view. I see this same dynamic playing out in the unquestioning fauxminist support for the trans narrative. Transactivists, like other abusive males, exploit their adversaries’ weakest link. Which, on the left, is its over-inclusivity and inability to just say no. To anyone. Social psychologist Dina McMillan extrapolated the connection I just made to all of the ‘woke’, who she says are using ‘all of the tactics from my abuse series…It’s really quite frightening….It’s an absolutist totalitarian religion…I can’t even call it a social movement.” They’ve won the hearts and minds of the easiest pickin’s of the progressive chickens. They’ve persuaded misogyny’s cock blocks to stop saying No to men. And to oppress any sister who refuses to submit. What’s their next step? Not saying No to men who force themselves into women’s-only spaces puts them one step closer to no right to say No to sexual access. It’s what the incels have been preaching for years: Women shouldn’t have the right to say no to sex with any man. Even certain sexually successful men would agree. You can have sex with more women if you don’t have to waste a lot of time with consent. ‘Progressive’ feminism’s willingness to lift critical boundaries on traditional predatory male sexual behavior is why fighting trans rights has come to be identified with the right. Many of us on the left join after watching the horrifying spectacle of predatory grooming tactics by men pretending to be something they’re not. Fauxminists are silent when transwomen complain of the ‘cotton ceiling’ that prevents their penile sexual pleasure because real lesbians, unattracted to male bodies, jawlines and genitals, refuse to have sex with these pseudo-dykes with pikes. When the ‘minor-attracted persons’, the people formerly known as pedophiles come for the children, we know the Regressive Left fauxminists will do nothing to stop them. They never have before. The pedeophiles’ self-marginalized argument will stem from the far-left’s widely-accepted conviction that even children as young as three or four, ‘know’ what gender they’re supposed to be, and that no adult should stand in the way of transitioning. “Who are you to tell your child they can’t have sex with me? Children know what’s best for them! They can make up their own minds who they want to have sex with. Now get out of our business!” And the fauxminists will. 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 damn thing!

Have you ever reverse-engineered your life? What didn't you realize before? The Digital Artist, Pixabay “You have a time machine, you can pick one thing in your life to go back to. Where, when do you go, and do you just observe it from afar, or do you change something?” Well, THAT was easy. “Piece of cake,” I responded. “I know exactly what I’d go back and change. The worst mistake of my life.” The question came via my friend’s weekly Friday evening Virtual Cocktail Hour, a tradition she started during the pandemic. After chit-chat, we answer one interesting pre-chosen question of the week. So, so many times I wished I could return to the spring of 1993 and just be friends with Jerry instead of embarking upon a just-over-seven-years relationship, with a middle-break when he dried out and sobered up. So much sturm und drang before I realized he had a drinking problem. So much hope and comfort after he got serious and kicked the bottle. I thought now it was forever. It wasn’t. He waltzed in one night and said, “We have to talk.” Those ‘Bob is God’ details I love backward-engineering my life’s turning points, good or bad. This started, as I discovered, with the ‘Bob is God’ trash can in college. Ten years prior to meeting Alkie Boy, walking around campus drowning in a cloud of angsty depression over some guy and the certainty I would never be noticed by a man again, I often passed a trash can in the Psych building upon which someone had mysteriously etched ‘Bob is God.’ One afternoon the guy behind me in Psych class asked a fellow student, “Who is Bob and why is he God?” I pivoted around, blithely oblivious to the greater symbolism of escape from blander conventionality and much later, from the hell of a failing country. We laughed along with them as we speculated about a trash can. Jim was my first real love. Through him, I met a new crowd with whom I’m connected to this day. My life pivoted with new friends and an intro to geek/fan culture via a medieval re-creation society. Graduations and life travels created breaks in the friendships B.F. & A.F. (Before & After Facebook) but my life digressed from a more conventional path saving me, as I see it, from the tragedy of the commonplace. I’d been a weirdo in high school who craved ‘normalcy’ and found it in college; who knew returning the ‘weirdoes’ were my tribe? The college wallflower became a belly dancer, i.e. the post-high school equivalent of the Head Cheerleader, via the road taken. Bob, or Trash Can Vandal, you have no idea how you changed a life! Blame it on Buffy. Or Jerry. Or Ireland. For twenty years I’ve dealt with the fallout of Jerry’s ‘We have to talk’ moment. It would be unfair to lay the next fifteen years of misery on him since I’ve struggled with depression and anger issues from my early adolescence I can’t fully explain. I remember pre-school feelings of self-doubt and quiet inferiority I can’t pin on my family or, back then at least, non-existent school bullies. For the last seven years I’ve been climbing out of the mental pit I dug. Jerry handed me the shovel, but I’m the one who insisted on digging so deeply. We humans possess the most marvelous computers in the Universe between our ears, creations more complex than our most sophisticated technology, and boy oh boy it’s a shame we can’t periodically reboot, because brains ‘blue screen’ more than a Windows 98 beta. Although Jerry is behind me, he hurt me badly enough that, unlike other past lovers or partners, I want nothing to do with him. Ever. While I’m friends today with ex-boyfriends who once hurt me, if I find I’m sharing a social media platform with Jerry I block him in case he gets any dumb ideas about contacting me again as he has in the past — I’m convinced, just to be friends, but fuck you. The friend-ship sank in flames twenty years ago. I’ve kill-filed his email address and name. But… While watching the Ignited States slouch toward Gomorrah , as a great book title once put it, I’ve pondered what a favor Jerry did for me, even if I didn’t see the benefit for two full decades. He was another catalyst who changed my life. Today, I’m in a more stable place rather than what Donald Trump might call a ‘shithole country’, thanks to ol’ Jer. It’s a longer reverse engineer, beginning two years after the breakup: I tried to move to Ireland after reading a news story saying it wanted to become the Silicon Valley of Europe, and I was in I.T. Moving away for awhile appealed because I was chronically depressed and wanted to escape my nowhere life in Connecticut. When I couldn’t get into Ireland (they’d just opened it up with an EU-first policy, and every Eastern European was trying to move anywhere that wasn’t Eastern Europe), my cyber-friend near Toronto encouraged me to move to Canada because I couldn’t get into Ireland. I’d gotten email-friendly with him after we met as fans on Usenet’s alt.fan.buffy.the.vampire.slayer back in 1997. And I began watching Buffy because of—Jerry. The idea of an entire TV series based on a poorly-performing 1992 movie the critics hated sounded like a supremely stupid idea. Jerry had said, “Oh, we have to watch it! It sounds really good! Joss Whedon, the creator, hated what they did to his movie. The TV show is what the movie was supposed to be. Darker. More serious.” “I’m tired of vampires,” I said. And this was well before Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, and the endless succession of boring beautiful bloodsuckers stalking the early decades of the new century. “Let’s just watch the first few episodes,” he said. It was way better than I’d guessed, and I fell in love with Giles. Then Spike. Buffy is why I started hanging out on the Usenet group and cyber-met Larry near Toronto, eh? We transferred the friendship to email. His mother died, then Jerry and I split up, and when Ireland fell through, Larry encouraged me to come to Canada. Why did I immigrate rather than move temporarily? Canada wants immigrants, not half-assed will-they-stay-or-will-they-go semi-perms. Also, blame it on Bush. “You had the right idea! You knew what was coming all along!” Actually, I didn’t. I look terribly prescient to my American-imprisoned friends with 20/20 hindsight. Okay, I knew the country was ambling down the Highway To Hell under George W. Bush. When I saw the famous Abu Ghraib photo in the newspaper, I thought, “This is not the country I grew up in.” Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons We tortured prisoners now. Political prisoners. Republican politicians and reactionary xenophobic mouth-breathers bobbled their slack-jawed heads in terrifying approval. “I want to get out of here,” I said. My devolving countrymen weren’t the only reason why, but it added urgency. I never foresaw the state of the States today. I never imagined we’d be dumb enough to elect a moron like Trump. Or that we’d prefer conspiracy theories and fake news over reality, even as a killer virus ripped its way through a country whose collective IQ more closely resembled a residential neighborhood speed sign. During the pandemic, I counted the number of American COVID-19 deaths by units of Vietnam: 1 Vietnam = 50,000 American deaths. One little, two little, three little Vietnams, four little, five little, six little Vietnams… Today, we still lead the world in all COVID-19 statistics , as always, now at 23 Vietnams and change. We’re #1! Words fail to describe how grateful I was not to be living in the COVIDed States anymore. Now I happily go about my business every day without worrying about taking a bullet in a mass shooting. I’m barely on speaking terms with my mother country. What would have happened if Jerry and I had stayed together? I might have died in Trump’s AmeriKKKa as my compatriots committed maskless, mass suicide, pitching tantrums over social distancing and a shut-down economy, dragging out their own torturous death throes as the world slammed shut its own borders to America. Remember when Americans worried about people trying to get in? That was, like, that January. The reverse-engineering exercise Reverse engineering is figuring out how a device works by starting with what it does and tracing backward to its beginning. When you apply it to your life it can reveal hidden insights can change your perceptions. I’ve been thinking about Jerry differently since I realized I have him to thank for my life in Canada. I’m not going to send him a fruit basket or anything, but I’ve experienced a little psychological relief as a result. What would have happened if I’d never left the U.S.? I might have been mired in near-hopeless, perhaps suicidal depression. Maybe unemployed, staring down poverty with a gossamer safety net, thanks to decades of Republican meddling, and a president who didn’t care about anything that wasn’t him. I’d be surrounded by hateful Americans from both political sides whose lives had always sucked and who wanted everyone else’s to suck too. Misery loves company. I might well have felt like those remaining Jews in Nazi Germany, no longer allowed to leave, realizing they’d waited too late to follow the smarter ones out the door. Stuck in a sea-to-shining-sea prison, goose-stepping toward totalitarianism, mindlessly chanting “Make America Great Again!” instead of “Seig heil!” What would I do if I could go back in time and change one thing? Maybe I couldn’t risk messing with my life and staying in America. Maybe I’d have to let that first ill-fated dinner date with Jerry take its natural course. Maybe this was the only way my headspace could lead me to a civilized country before it was too late. If I warned 1993 Nicole about what was going to happen if she persevered with Jerry (once she stopped screaming at the sight of Senior Nicole), would she—I—have listened? What if I could go back and be Nicole, but with my 2023 brain? I suspect that scenario would work out far happier, because I’d always know I needed to move to Canada as soon as Al Gore threw the election to Dumbya by not challenging its end game at the Supreme Court. Part of me is horrified at adding thirty years to a 60-year-old life on stop of the thirty or so years I still expect to live. Who wants to live to be 120, even when you don’t show it? But—I could remake a lot of mistakes, and the breakup with Jerry launched A Series of Unfortunate Events that I can mostly blame myself for. But it doesn’t really matter, because we can’t go back and fix the past. The worst thing that ever happened to me was the best thing that ever happened to me. Who knew? 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 damn thing!

Is this the same conversation as weightlifting and swimming? Are women at a biological disadvantage competing against men in chess tournaments? Them’s fightin’ words for many feminists. Those familiar with science must acknowledge men’s biological advantage over us in physically competitive sports which is why the world’s weirdest controversy rages over transwomen on women’s athletic teams. But chess? No physical advantage required, unless it’s sitting in a chair for hours on end. Then, points for women with more fat in our butts. Mostly, women and men compete regularly in chess tournaments, and no one questions this. We know that intellectually, there’s virtually no difference between male and female brains, although it was a male conceit until the last few hundred years that male intelligence outranked pinkie-boo brains. It’s kind of hard to fault them when they didn’t have sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists armed with MRIs to refute their contention. Women’s intelligence had been oppressed and marginalized for so many thousands of years it truly must have sounded bugspit insane to suggest otherwise. History offered a few intelligent, capable, and sometimes despotic women to challenge that view, but were largely regarded as outliers. Even today one might suspect it’s the truth if you’ve ever watched—or been—that woman who folds under male authority or succumbs to a crappy male argument without enough information or confidence to properly challenge or refute it. Hell, I sometimes more cynically wonder about it myself as I watch so-called intelligent, enlightened, otherwise feminist women fall into line like good little girls under the spell of far-left narratives that marginalize, stereotype and patronize women just like men did before Second Wave feminism. A woman’s job was to be pretty, hygienic, dress well, wear uncomfortable shoes and possess the waistline of an 8-year-old. Public domain image History’s widely scattered accomplished chickie-boos with seeming outlier brains include Ada Lovelace, who powerfully contributed to Charles Babbage’s early pre-computing Analytical Engine, and recognized it possessed uses beyond mathematics; so of course the Babbage Machine shares no hyphenated glory with her. Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood, pioneered today’s WiFi, invented a tablet that could turn a glass of water into a soda drink, and improved traffic light design. She spent her off-time in her workshop rather than nuzzling Clark Gable or guzzling champage at star-studded parties. And let’s not forget the black brainiacs who helped put white men on the moon in Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson in 1966. She died a few years ago at 102 and she was STILL smarter than most of us. Public domain photo by Adam Cuerden on Wikimedia Commons Given a fair shot, intellectually and cognitively, women can often go toe-to-toe, or maybe cortex-to-cortex with the boys. Although there’s no sex parity in the STEM professions yet, and may never be for reasons that may or may not have to do with cognitive ability (the jury will be out on this for awhile), women’s undeniable achievement in science, business, education, and on the Supreme Court indicate that what we lack in weightlifting and swimming speed, we make up for in cognitive competition. So why, then, has the International Chess Federation placed a moratorium on transwomen competing with women? Are transwomen worthy competitors? I can’t stand Will ‘Lia’ Thomas, but if he wants to compete with women in chess, as a man or a woman, I support his right to do so. He’ll probably get his ass kicked, since it’s not his thing, and identifying as a woman won’t alter his advantage. The chess article on a Reality’s Last Stand Substack argues women may not ever be truly competitive chess players against men, supported by a clearly established cognitive skill men customarily have over women. A female Harvard evolutionary biologist speculates that “males have a large spatial-ability advantage over women,” and offers legendary hockey player Wayne Gretzky’s visualization skills as one superlative example. I acknowledge men customarily have this advantage over female brains; which themselves possess certain advantages over male brains, like with language processing and emotional expression, not all of which can be explained by socialization and growing up in ‘patriarchal’ culture. Neuroscience has come to show that parts of our respective brains work differently , including the hippocampus and the amygdala. But I find the RLS article unpersuasive that women may not have just the right cognitive skills to defeat men in this challenging game of the mind, despite never having won a world championship, and the very best female player only ranking 116 worldwide. Women have been competing with men since the ‘80s without political drama, and while there’s still a big performance gap, we can’t say with any certainty that female brains simply can’t comparatively perform. Of course, we can’t say that they can, either. I find unpersuasive the argument’s ultimate contention that perhaps transwomen, and ergo other men, shouldn’t compete with women, because it fails to address questions I considered while reading the article. Let’s start with the least persuasive, in my own opinion (bearing in mind that I don’t play chess). Women’s brains may not be as refined and optimized as men’s The Patriarchy wasn’t built in a day and it’s been only 150 years or so since women began chipping away at the fortress. I’ve never seen evidence women are less smart than men, but thousands of years of organized civilization designed by men, for men, and assigning women to serve men, lays out valuable skills exercised by men that I don’t see in women, and I have no reason so far to believe it has to do with brain matter rather than evolutionary mapping . Like: Women may not yet have the confidence to win Testosterone production in men may fuel the commonly observed male desire to compete, dominate, and win at all cost. The RLS article cites a child prodigy and chess champion as the ‘Terminator’, who ‘will not stop, ever, until you are dead’. How many women have this drive? How many of us hold ourselves back, valuing wanting to be ‘liked’ and approved of, often preferring to preserve relationships over achieving what we really want? And do we have the confidence to win? We certainly witness countless female sports champions exhibiting the same drive and relentless desire for victory, and it’s absolutely critical they cultivate the ‘growth mindset’ male athletes exemplify to achieve it. But until recently they only ever competed against other women. Removing the Lia Thomases, the drive to win may well work better psychologically against female competitors. Global chess champion Gary Kasparov beat Deep Blue, an IBM-designed chess player in 1996, although he lost to it in a rematch in 1997. I wonder how women might compete against it? CC BY 2.0 Generic photo by James the Photographer on Wikimedia Commons For chess, where the physical advantage is removed, does perhaps the subconscious female fear of challenging a man, wired into the female brain for protective purposes over thousands of years, play upon her? Does the knowledge that the world’s eyes are upon her in this ‘battle of the sexes’, that she’s letting her ‘sisters’ down if she loses to her male opponent (including trans) play upon her? Does, deep within the recesses of her brain, she fear losing to a man? Are his ‘psych out’ strategies more successful, especially against her own skills to do the same? And does she even have those skills? Women may still have some unfortunate catching up to do I’m not convinced that certain clear male cognitive advantages (like spatial visualization) mean that women can never learn them. Men must surely have doubted Catherine Elizabeth Brewer Benson, the first American woman to receive a college degree, in the years leading up to her graduation in 1840. They must have laughed their asses off forty years later, while Mary H. Graham worked toward her philosophy degree, the first American black woman to earn a university diploma. Now women attain more university degrees than men. But men still earn more STEM degrees, and many valid theories hold both the nature and nurture hypotheses. It’s possible women simply have a lot of catching up to do. We don’t have the long established history of female accomplishment as do men, often misunderstood by traditionalists who point to men ‘having invented everything’, forgetting that they had time to do it because their wives were busy with the household, and even if they had servants, women weren’t allowed the education or employment efforts to acquire the knowledge, skills and experience men customarily did. God only knows where Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr and Katherine Johnson got it. I don’t know if women will ever achieve parity in chess, and I’m as equally uncertain whether we will in STEM professions. It’s possible that male brains truly are more adept, overall, at both. Perhaps the goal should be not that women must be equally represented everywhere in order to acknowledge we’re equal, but that each individual be permitted to achieve whatever their talents are best suited for. We know that countless ridiculously bright people will achieve, given the opportunity, but nevertheless will likely never achieve the heights of accomplishment as Albert Einstein. Where does that bring us with women’s chess and competition with men, regardless of how they identify? With as much information as I have, I lean towards women’s chess performance gap possibly being rooted more in long-established brain wiring affecting their confidence, underdeveloped strategy skills and behavior under pressure. I suspect ingrained (but not permanently rooted) self-doubt residing like a negative little Terminator in their amygdala’s fear center. There’s a clear male competitive advantage in physical sports that female athletes can never overcome, but perhaps women’s inability to even approach the global chess championship finish line is a longer-term goal requiring several, or many generations of progress. There’s no better way for women to do so than to compete with men regardless of pronouns. I don’t know that parity is the real objective, in either chess or STEM professions, as long as every female brainiac is given the opportunity to maximize her brain’s potential, and thrive in an environment, however short on females, that’s not a boys’ club. Can we develop Gretzky-level visualization skills? Can we compensate by developing other strategic skills? Can we become better psych-out masters than the guys, trans or not? After all, women are downright evil at manipulating others when we want to be. A skill developed over thousands of years of patriarchy in which it was the only way to get what we wanted or needed for ourselves or our families. Stay tuned, for the next couple of hundred years or so. 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 damn thing!

The failures of Black Lives Matter Chicago, Ibram X. Kendi, gender-switching doctors and impotent Scottish transactivists suggest common sense may be at the gates. Finally. Once they finish off what’s left of the woke idiotology, we can get back to the business of progress. CC0 public domain photo by Jean Beaufort on publicdomainpictures.net I can’t say there’s any good that can have come out of Hamas’s indefensible intentional slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, but a by-product may be the beginning of the end for wokeness. The authoritarian political ideology from which genuine social justice and plain common sense departed several years ago appears to have jumped the public acceptability shark. The hard left’s uncritical applause for terrorist perpetrator Hamas, under the guise of ‘supporting’ the Palestinians, leaves many of us on the right and left shaking our heads like wet dogs. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE??? Whether it’s just-below-the-surface anti-Semitism that has always lurked darkly in the hearts of virtue-signalling leftists, or just a dimwitted allegiance to the essential tenet of what passes for Critical Race Theory - dark good, white bad - the ‘woke’ left, which always assumes ‘marginalized’ people are victimized angels, looks deeply deranged to those of us who haven’t filed for moral bankruptcy. I guess the woke left is having its ‘there are many good people on both sides’ moment. Hamas groupies should ask themselves, “Would I approve if these actions were taken against ‘oppressors’ and ‘land-stealers’ I like more?” Like, say, if the aggrieved were America’s Indigenous? What if a band of well-armed, well-trained Indigenous terrorists wasted a New Mexico town, swarming in on hang gliders to gun down New Mexicans running through the desert - let’s bear in mind that white people are only 36% of New Mexico’s diversity - and mowed down everyone white, black and brown running from the Albuquerque, say, annual balloon festival? That the ground troops moved in and brutally raped New Mexican women and girls so hard they broke their pelvises? Burnt families alive in their homes, slaughtered without mercy everyone from babies to grandmothers, tortured others and kidnapped a few to be tortured, raped, or murdered for later? Think about it, wokies. What I’ve noticed, just within the last week to ten days, is that with or without Hamas, encouraging signs indicate ‘peak woke’ may be declining like Donald Trump’s net worth. Here are a few indicators I’ve observed recently that a frightening siege of common sense may be amassing outside the Wokeness Wall. This will be easy, guys! They won’t have guns! Image by AmeliaNVS on Deviant Art, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DEED Wokeness is cancellable, especially for being a terrorist-loving butthead Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: When it’s possible to cancel far left deplorables without having to be on the far left one’s self. Turns out over-privileged, entitled, money-grubbing little college campus shits scurry like cockroaches when one of them loses a plum law firm job offer because, well, she publicly supported violence and terrorism. Even more ironically, their First Example is a more-marginalized-than thou black female ‘non-binary’. In a sign of how weird the world’s gotten, none other than a hedge fund billionaire emerged as the hero to offer chemoscare-apy to treat Stage 4 metastasized wokeness. Bill Ackman discovered an open letter signed by over thirty student groups at Harvard blaming Israelis for Hamas’s mass slaughter. He quickly accrued a mob of his own, a dozen CEOs who asked Harvard to release the names of all signatories of all the groups, and the names quickly circulated among Ackman’s powerful buddies. Subject line: Let’s make sure we never offer any of them a job! Then the law firm who had extended a job offer to the non-binary human rescinded it—who the hell wants a terrorist lover working for them?—and the woke woke up to the other side of the cancel culture bully cannon. The signatories scampered to remove their names from the letter, their commitment to the Palestinians extending only as far as the looming prospect of living with their parents until senility, saddled with crippling student debt. It’s called ‘accountability’, children. And remember: In accordance with your own values, you must never, ever be forgiven. No matter how much you apologize, grovel and cry on TikTok, no matter what you do or accomplish after this, the only thing that should ever define you is your youthful, ill-considered applause for mass slaughter and rape culture. The BBC calls a man in a dress accused of raping a woman ‘a man in a dress’ To be fair, Kay Georges, né Andrew Miller, gave the Beeb permission to refer to him in their news reporting as he/him for ‘simplicity’s sake’, which goes to show you how committed he was to the whole ‘I’m a chick’ thing in the first place. The Beeb reports Miller is accused of abducting and repeatedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl while dressed as a woman after he offered to give her a lift. It would have been more laudable had the Beeb had the balls to take a stand for hard science and truth-telling without permission, which is supposed to be their job, but hey, it’s a start. We should encourage, oh fuck it, high-pressure journalists to tell the truth about rapists appropriating womanhood: If it has a penis and shoves it into an unconsenting orifice, it’s a him/he-man. Calling a man a man? Further evidence peak woke is crumbling. Speaking of men in dresses, transactivists fail to shut down a feminist event in Glasgow or to terrify J.K. Rowling The FiLia group, part of a larger Scottish feminist organization, scheduled a women’s conference at the Glasgow Platform, which, being as pussy as any other venue that deplatforms women’s conferences at the last minute when hopelessly male-looking guys in dresses stomp their feet and threaten to rape and murder everyone in the United Kingdom if the conference isn’t cancelled, backed down like frightened little girls. At least until FiLia lawyers cited a recent favorable decision for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association against a different Scottish venue who canceled the Billyboys. The result? The conference went on as planned and J.K. Rowling showed up to look bored while she listened to the usual rape, bodily harm and death threats we’ve come to associate with ‘the most marginalized people ever’ and later spoke at the conference. Washington University makes it hard for aspiring boy/girl wannabes because, I dunno, the threat of detransitioning lawsuits on the horizon? Scientifically deficient ‘gender-affirming care’ is in the cross-hairs of Republican politicians and circling lawyers in what is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal in North America. St. Louis’s Washington University gender clinic announced in September it’s discontinuing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for everyone, not because they realized they don’t have enough data to determine whether these treatments are safe on otherwise healthy children, but because of the ‘unacceptable’ threat of legal liability. Here’s where the rubber hits the road for ‘gender-affirming care’ doctors and hospitals: Missouri’s new emergency rule makes it harder for medical professionals to prescribe life-altering treatments willy-nilly for both minors and adults, and returns the transitioning process to the much lengthier and considered path that worked beautifully for decades before 2015. Otherwise, script-happy docs could find themselves on the business end of the existing Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, designed to prevent and prosecute fraudulent business practices. It’s about damn time. And a little Republican Attorney General shall lead them. Ibram X. Kendi goes down when he can’t explain where the money went Hey Dr. Kendi, have you erased racism yet? No? Well how about $43 million? The author of How To Be An Antiracist, Stamped From The Beginning and Antiracist Baby, who could find white supremacy in a basket of kittens, can’t ‘splain what happened to all the money lobbed at him by corporates with catapults to fight racism. Junior members of the Kit Klaws Klan. Image from Public Domain Pictures Boston University is investigating Kendi’s Center for Anti-Racism Research which just laid off over half their staff, and it’s not like no one ever saw this coming. Many at BU raised concerns whether the extent of Kendi’s anti-racism research was producing anything other than fuck-all. Instead, he delivered, while on an ‘extended leave of absence,’ and all of which earned him money, a graphic novel detailing racist ideas, a podcast called Be Antiracist and an embarrassing five-episode TV show for ESPN that went viral when black Olympian athlete Gwendolyn Berry, interviewed by Kendi, remarked that “Athletes are literally the new slaves,” and compared sports contracts to ‘the new slave chains’. Fortunately for her, this iteration of slavery is more voluntary than the last, so she is free to throw off her chains, give the finger to The Man and get an honest job at Wal-Mart. None of the above was in the Center’s stated objectives. Kendi finally found his way back to the Center without explaining where he left to or leaving anyone in charge since it seems he’s allergic to delegating authority. It’s important to note he isn’t accused of stealing the money; just squandering the fuck out of it. What makes this story particularly galling is finding out podcast host and writer Coleman Hughes, famously common sense-y about fighting racism, was invited by TEDx to give a talk on the need for more conscious color-blindness , and which looked suspiciously downranked by TEDx when a small group of woke staffers allergic to ideas that require them to entertain an alternative view, complained it was ‘racist’ and ‘dangerous’. TEDx: “Ideas Worth Downranking’. Meanwhile, throw more money at the guy who claims you’re a racist if you say you’re not racist. Just don’t ask where it goes. Black Lives Matter Chicago told by X to STFU for demonstrating Israeli lives don’t matter After the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the civil rights group formed to protest the killings of a few dozen black men a year tweeted an image of a hang glider as their knee-jerk response to omni-victimized dark people slaughtering 1,300 whiter-skinned people primarily belonging to a religion long unpopular with many Americans, including black Americans. When the shit hit the terrorist fanboys, they quickly walked it back: What a wussy ‘We’re not, strictly speaking, sorry for that image,’ response, and while they could be talking about the grieving mothers and rescued babies from one side or the other, I’m going to take a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess and suggest they’re still really only thinking of the side that cheered and danced for Hamas until the IDF and Israeli civilian settler thugs reminded them of Part II of violent terrorist attacks. I wonder how tolerant Black Lives Matter Chicago would be if the #BlueLivesMatter set tweeted an image of a knee and ‘BACK THE BLUE’. That is all that is it! You guys should go grab a coffee together American hard-right conservatives severed their last tenuous ties to common sense and reality when they voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. His bottom-feeding fan base still support him, and threaten violence against anyone daring to hold him accountable for anything. They’ve even invented a new, more humane form of torture: The non-violent molesting ‘like you’ve never imagined’: “We are now antifa….We’re gonna, we’re not like the left, we’re not violent [!!!] but we’re gonna follow your ass…you’re gonna be fucking molested like you’ve never imagined. And again, non-violently.” The American left could always crow: “We don’t believe sex is real, we do believe economy-sized white supremacy can be purchased at the Bulk Barn for all your systemic oppression baking needs, and we expend way too much energy on pronouns, but at least we’re not violent.” Excusing violence in others is one step closer to embracing it one’s self, and with the wokies’ new-found terrorist love in the guise of ‘supporting the Palestinians’, they’ve now sunk to the same moral level as their Confed’rut-lovin’ adversaries. Je ne suis pas Hamas. If there’s nothing else that screams the left has hit peak woke, it’s hating Jews as much as the right hates Muslims. It’s no longer hard to imagine left-wing ‘woke’ extremists could, in fact, instigate Nazi-era pogroms, eagerly joined by members of a particular religion famous for its historical hatred of Judaism long pre-dating the creation of Israel. There’s so much that’s gone wrong with the left; one must wonder where it all went, if you’ll pardon the expression, tits-up. Perhaps it disintegrated along with the poor mental health of young women and girls hailing from progressive-thinking families whose parents couldn’t say no , or the unemployed kids on social media devising endless, evermore divisive labels to suit every quirk, mood or ugly thought that flittered through their fevered over-educated brains. Other suspects include universities who sought to retain spoiled children who’d never been challenged by critical thought before and weren’t about to start now, who therefore decided they were customers rather than students, and the customer is always right. Let’s not forget those who treat ‘intersectionality’ as a bottomless grievance well, and who feign endless victimhood while bullying others into submission; while others squat under the bodhi tree aspiring to ‘marginalization’ rather than spiritual enlightenment. The anti-Buddhas. I know the Israelis aren’t pure-hearted themselves. They’ve inflicted many heinous crimes against the Palestinians for generations. They HAVE stolen their land. They HAVEN’T made as good-faith efforts as they could to bring lasting peace. They HAVE inflicted many atrocities and human rights abuses against them. I don’t believe they’re willing to make the sacrifices to accomplish that, nor will the Palestinians. It’s all for nothing for both of them. The Palestinians hail from a violent culture and religion. To pull an anti-Trump, “There are bad people on both sides.” But when you jump on the social media terrorist train to blame families for their own slaughter and proclaim your allegiance to a filthy, specifically genocidal terrorist group and cheer their heinous brutalities against civilians, however you feel about their righteous cause, you have jumped the shark. You have met the enemy and he is you. Shake hands with your compatriots in MAGAland and Canada’s emerging right-wing extremists, the Freedom Convoy. Maybe you guys should all go grab a coffee. Yeah, there are some real Nazis in those groups. Look in the mirror, ‘progressives’; you’ll find plenty there, too. 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 damn thing!

It's about gratitude and giving thanks, not beating yourself up over the what-they-did-to-the-Natives narrative. Especially since they were pretty awful, too. Especially to each other. Two turkeys conspire to murder Farmer Brown before Mrs. Brown gets home from the Piggly Wiggly with the cranberry sauce. The one on the ground was a mole for The Big Guy. So they iced him. Photo by Public Domain Pictures on Pixabay Only the Regressive Left could take issue with a holiday promoting arguably the most sublime, uplifting, most selfless of human virtues - gratitude. Regressive Lefties frown on Thanksgiving; they live in a world much darker than ours; their sworn enemies are humor and fun. You can’t even enjoy your dinner because they find fault with everything on the table. They’ll claim white supremacy is as baked into the social structure as the pumpkin in your Thanksgiving dessert (Heads up: pumpkin spice is an emblem of white privilege). And of course there’s their obsession with Native conquest. We all know the first Thanksgiving story is a highly sanitized version of a much darker history that ended very poorly for the existing inhabitants. Howevermuch the original dinner party guests may have gotten along with each other with a few ground rules (‘Thou shalt not bring up the heretical new version of Our Lord’s Bible the King is working on back in England or there shalt be another Hundred Years War. Nor shalt the young men try and slip the roasted eel down thy sister’s dress”), felicitous feelings deteriorated soon after and hundreds of years of genocide and mass buffalo destruction ensued. I think we can all agree that was an especially embarrassing development in European history, coming as we were off of our very most vicious phase, the late medieval period. Not exactly our finest moment. Mild, hygienic, highly sanitized museum re-creation of one of medieval Europe’s most popular torture devices, the iron maiden. European Christians raised the practice of torture to a literal high art form in the 15th century, in which the very best torturers understood human anatomy and the applications of agony to a degree we can’t comprehend today. Although to be honest the western North American Comanches could have given the Inquisition a real run for its money. CC BY 2.0 DEED Photo by Cliff on Flickr But still: Thanksgiving is needed more than ever at a time when gratitude is one of the few demonstrated, scientifically-backed responses to hardship, depression, stress, and difficult times that actually makes us feel better. Instead of cavilling about how the Indigenous were treated by the new settlers, we can be grateful for what we have today, and work to be better humans than we’ve been. Even if we failed the original Thanksgiving mission about as badly as can be imagined. So, too, can the descendants of yesterday’s Natives self-reflect. Because their ancestors weren’t exactly peaceful little angels themselves. It’s not 1621 anymore…thank God(s)! We’re not slaughtering Natives for fun and profit like our ancestors. In Canada, we move slowly toward reconciliation with the First Nations, Metis and Inuit. In the U.S., whole chunks of land in many states are set aside for Indian reservations and the Natives are left alone (finally!) to govern themselves. ‘Progressives’ should acknowledge the injustices of the past and work together to help those descended from the original victims without turning a holiday that takes the focus off our own narcissistic selves for just one friggin’ evening a year, fer Goddess’s sake, and turn into a political nightmare. Enough already with the hoary moral flagellation. At a time when others may have a helluva lot less to be thankful for than years past, we need to recognize our blessings, however great or small. This includes the Indigenous, too. Let’s move beyond the absurdity of the sinlessly-conceived holiday and recognize pretty much anything humans ever endeavored was almost always accomplished with mindless violence and slaughter. C’mon, Abel couldn’t even sacrifice his sheep without getting murdered. By his own brother. It wasn’t exactly Apocalypto before Columbus, but neither was it Pocahontas. There aren’t many books detailing how vicious pre-Columbian humanity was, but a classic in the field is Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, and a more comprehensive global history of human suckage is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The first details not exactly the finest moments of Indigenous people, everywhere, when they had only each other to slaughter, mutilate, rape, torture, enslave and, occasionally, cannibalize, and the second details how pre-state societies were overall far more violent than we are today . How pre-Columbian Mexico was a dangerous place with a 5% murder rate, but only about a third to a fifth as violent as many of its neighbors. If a mad time machine inventor wanted to drop you in either a hunter-gatherer society or an ancient civilized one, pick the latter. Even it it’s bloody ratbastards like the Romans, your risk of dying a violent death is only 2.7 percent, but 13.4 percent in the woods or on the plains with the locals. Those archaeological figures are based on 900 Native skeletons from the top of Canada to South America, all pre-Columbian. This isn’t ‘whataboutism’, this is historical honesty. This is about recognizing that what happened four hundred years ago happened everywhere, in one capacity or another, for nearly half a million years at least. The world’s oldest murder victim would be 430,000 years old today if some asshole hadn’t whacked him upside the head with a blunt weapon. Native societies today have a much lower violent trauma and murder rate than they did before the arrival of You-Know-Who. I’m not justifying, excusing, or nullifying any horrors visited upon the Indigenous by Europeans. We stand accused: We sucked. But so did Indigenous people, and today everyone’s got something to be thankful for, this year, right now, no matter who they are. Natives can be grateful we’re not still trying to kill them all off (or ‘kill the Indian’ anymore in residential schools), but just as much, they can be grateful they no longer have to fear each other : The hideous cruelties inflicted by the most warlike Native tribes around them including the Apaches, the Seminoles, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Plains Indians and others. Just to put things in perspective, according to Keeley’s book, raiding other settlements has been one of history’s most time-dishonored methods for effectively reducing the land population of one’s Indigenous resource competitors. Whether it was the Bering Straits Eskimos attacking villages at dawn while everyone was asleep, or British Columbia’s Chilcotins killing everyone in the village for their food, or the relentless murderous hate-on Quebec’s Cree had for the Inuit, life was as brutal and tenuous for Native tribes living near other Native tribes as it was for the palefaces who arrived centuries later. This is all going to go pear-shaped the moment someone asks the Chief where their church is. Public domain photo on publicdomainclip-art.blogspot.com Prehistoric burials in central Washington state reveal projectile points embedded in skeletons, believed to have been implanted there by foreigners for 1,500 years. And if you think South Side Chicago is a dangerous ‘hood, what’s now central Illinois contained ancient human remains of which 16% were clear victims of violent deaths. Keeley notes the pre-Columbian murder rate there was 1,400 times higher than that of modern Britain and about 70 times that of the United States in 1980. And massacres? Well there’s South Dakota’s not-so-famous Crow Creek debacle, a mass grave of 500 men, women and children, mutilated, scalped, murdered, and left to be eaten by scavengers before their enemies finally piled them all into a hole and buried them. This is like 150 years before the Italian’s galleons. Northern Canada’s Dogribs, who were pretty damn fed up with the Yellowknife band’s chronic raiding shit, wiped out a Yellowknife camp with the intent to get every last one of those murderous bastards. They missed a few, but the Yellowknifes never recovered and the few survivors were absorbed by other bands. The Kutchin, elsewhere, intentionally left one Mackenzie Eskimo alive during their genocidal spree, so he could warn any other humans he met not to fuck with the Kutchin. Every evil that Europeans have visited upon each other, the Indigenous everywhere have done likewise. That goes for the Asians, the South Americans, the Africans (those inveterate slave traders!), the Pacific Islanders, the Papua New Guineans, and just about everyone else. There were a very, very small handful of tribal humans in a few parts of the world who weren’t plotting raids and genocide every spare minute, but only because they were so isolated they didn’t have any neighbors. We don’t suck as much, but we do steal cars Today’s Natives can be quite thankful they will never witness the Comanches roasting their loved ones alive, or be raped, enslaved, or their hearts gouged out by the Aztecs, or be displaced by the Chippewa as happened to the Sioux in a pre-Columbian Trail of Tears tale. Nor will any Natives today suffer death by torture over several days as practiced by the Iroquois over any warriors unlucky enough to a) Lose a battle to the Iroquois and b) Survive long enough to be captured. Don’t let progressives tell you this shit didn’t happen until the white man showed up, and they learned it all from us; they did not. They invented this shit all on their own, without any training from Europeans. Or space aliens. If North American virtue-signalling land acknowledgements demanded as much honesty from the Indigenous as they require of white people they’d read something like this: Today’s Europeans and their descendants can remember that we don’t suck nearly as badly as we did just a few hundred years ago when we believed the only good Indian was a dead Indian. We can remind ourselves that even though Natives did a lot of the shit we did back in the day, it in no way excuses what we visited upon the New World, especially as we were supposed to be all enlightened and shit with Christianity. Given how brutal the fifteenth century was back home, spearheaded and administered by so-called men of God, seventeenth-century Europeans had no goddamn business judging the Indians. But humans really are alike. We will always steal each other’s stuff. Which is why you get to drive your new car off the dealer’s parking lot into your driveway, where it stays for maybe fifteen minutes until it gets jacked. I’m thankful this year I don’t own a car. Perhaps, as we sit down with our loved ones tomorrow, even the ones we can’t stand, maybe, after saying grace, we should present the family with a list of words and phrases thou shalt not use or utter so as not to ignite yet another Hundred Years War over the sweet potatoes. Israel Hamas Dobbs decision Trump Biden AOC Mark Johnson AR-15s Ukraine carbon tax election feminism Jesus transgender woke MAGA Elon Musk indictments AI Khardashian they/them Image by Monika from Pixabay 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 damn thing!

Twice. You owe me big-time for this, dude. "Can I have a growl with my agent, please? WTF did she get me into?" If George Lucas had had his way, the whole damn show would have been about Wookiees and nothing but. Public domain image from Rawpexels The gawdawful, highly execrable, seriously damaged, WTF-were-they-thinking 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is a TV extravaganza best watched with friends who are as seriously damaged as yourself. Preferably with lots of beer, which is what Darryl and Dev and I did. Problem is, I drank too much and couldn’t remember most of it. The next year, Darryl found the Riff Trax version. We invited Dev, but he declined to join us. So it was just me and Darryl facing a horror worse than hostage-holding by a morbidly obese slug-blob thingy that eats live frogs, while wearing a copper bikini and becoming wank material for two generations of sticky-fingered adolescents who probably won’t lose their virginity until well into their thirties. Well, we had the lifesaving beer, at least. No magic brownies. But I tell you, O my brothers and sisters and non-binary fellow Star Wars fans, if you watch this in an altered state of mind, it’s best left to the psychedelics set. Seriously, this thing is beyond marijuana. It demands magic mushrooms or hardcore acid. The SWHS combines the very worst of glitzy, low-budget 1970's-era variety show special effects with a trippy appearance by Jefferson Starship, sans Grace Slick. She’d left the band a few months earlier, while it was still Jefferson Airplane, after an embarrassing drunken rant at a concert in Germany. Thus she was spared embarrassing herself further. Diahann Carroll appeared as Wookiee wank material in a pseudo-porn viewing experience, because I guess Itchy, Chewbacca’s grandfather, was into cross-primate porn. Watch THIS in an unaltered state and you may be damaged for life. You’ve been warned. I’d include stills from the SWHS if I could find any that are free, but I can’t, and if I do anyway, Darryl, an aspiring movie producer who knows more about loopholes than I, says Lucasfilm will sue the snot out of me. Look, I put my mental health at serious risk for you. I’m not going into bankruptcy for you, dude. So instead here’s a perfectly legal still of Darryl and I before detonating a disco-era nuclear bomb of a bad trip in our brains. What I can offer you is... Answers to the SWHS burning questions you don’t have “How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage? ”―Art Carney WTF? Like, seriously, where’s the actual Star Wars? The biggest WTF is why the characters from the actual movie get very little screen time as the story revolves around Chewbacca’s family in their big-ass treehouse preparing for Life Day, which is like the Wookiee Thanksgiving or something. (This show in its one broadcast moment of vainglory aired mid-November.) George Lucas would have you believe he had little to do with the making of this Wookiee Dookie, and he’s sort of right, although he found Wookiees far more compelling than most. Wikipedia notes he wanted a “film just about Wookiees, nothing else.” The SWHS was cadged together by about a bazillion people and he received the dailies for approval. He wasn’t happy with this magnum oh-please but he’s implicated as an accessory. If you’re old enough, you might remember a Sunday-only Star Wars newspaper comic that began with a storyline about Wookiees and Life Day. It sucked. WTF, Harrison Ford? He looks pretty embarrassed the entire time and you can almost see the ‘This is going to ruin my career and I’ll be on Hollywood Squares [Millennials: The era’s equivalent of Dancing With The Stars ] for the rest of my life’ thought running behind his pained expression. WTF Did they do to Mark Hamill? He looks like Rocky’s younger brother. Horror, not Balboa. Hamill sports surfer dude hair and someone had to hide his plastic surgery work after a recent auto accident. Why this necessitated mascara or eye liner or some damn thing is between Frankie’s new squeeze and the makeup artiste he clearly pissed off. WTF was Carrie Fisher on? She looks like high in every scene. I can’t confirm she was doing drugs while making SWHS (I would have stipulated it in the contract if I’d read the script first) but it’s likely, since she had a notorious drug problem. Suspects: Cocaine, marijuana, LSD, HDACi . WTF? Is Harvey Korman in BLACKFACE??? Harvey Korman, then from The Carol Burnett Show , played several roles including a multi-armed TV chef. Is it just me, or does he look like he’s in blackface? This was one of my biggest WTF moments. You decide! How’d they get an Oscar winner to agree to this? Did he get into Fisher’s stash? Academy Award-winner Art Carney may have lost a bet or did this at gunpoint. His unbuttoned shirt is straight-up 1970s Larry the Lounge Lizard. He plays an electronics salesman who hooks up Itchy, Chewbacca’s pervy grandfather, with a hair dryer-like thingy so he can watch Diahann Carroll do a dance as forbidden as was permitted on TV in Carter country. It went on for longer than the Clone Wars unless you had a major jones for Carroll or had downed some good shit for the integrated kaleidoscopic special effects. Darryl and I debated whether she was wearing body glitter or sweating like a stevedore. Diahann Carroll: She’s got what your hairy old granddaddy wants! “Ohhhh yesss…I can feel my creation! I’m getting *your* message, are you getting mine?…Oh! Oh! We are excited, aren’t we…Now…we can have a good time, can’t we?” It's actually remarkable how porno this was for 1978 broadcast TV. Are Wookiee families otherwise all this barf-cutesy? Then there’s Chewbacca’s annoying, cloying family. As you well know, Wookiees convey ridiculously complex communications with grunts and growls. Much of this stupid story revolves around Lumpy, the irritating kid with Darth Vader’s stooges’ and stormtroopers’ home invasion, looking for the Walking Carpet who’s stuck in galactic traffic somewhere with the scruffy-looking nerf herder. Maude? Seriously, Maude was in this? Oh, and let’s not forget Bea Arthur, a singing bartender getting macked on by Harvey Korman, who ditched racist Julia Child and is now a lovestruck sleazebag who pours alcohol into a hole in his head. How were the Nielsen ratings? If you’re old enough to have looked forward to, then felt righteously skunked by this disappointment lo these many years ago, you probably bagged out long before the end. My brother and I, rabid fans, were so bored with Wookiee-speak and Lumpy’s holographic toy acrobats that we, like millions of others, switched the channel. Nielsen ratings showed a big chunk of the audience departed for The Love Boat at the start of the second hour, right after the inexplicable WTF-is-this-doing-in-the-middle-of-this-Wookie-soap-opera cartoon that introduced Boba Fett — Vader lackey and Han Solo stalker. It’s considered a fan classic, for reasons Darryl and I don’t understand as its only saving grace was no damn Wookiee family. Because everyone furred off so early, almost no one saw the culty grand finale, where the Wookiees in creepy Buffy-style let’s-sacrifice-the-naked-virgin red robes walked into a bright strobe light, without having to die first. Twenty minutes before the end I got up to go to the bathroom and Darryl said, “Hey, you want me to pause it for you?” and I was like, “No, no, don’t pause it! I’ll be right back!” While I no longer have to worry about being an acceptable sacrifice those red robes looked kind of Inquisitorial and us Pagans are allergic to burning stakes. So when this thing was finally over, about eighty years later… Wait! I’ve got one more question! Okay, go ahead. Why did Princess Leia sing a saccharine Life Day song at the end? Maybe she did it to show up Bea Arthur's performance. Carrie Fisher insisted on singing, although she didn’t like the song they gave her. So be careful what you ask for, the network gods may grant your request. Because it sucked. Here’s a side fun fact about someone who wasn’t cool enough to be in the SWHS. David Acomba, the original director who had the good sense to dump this disaster and leave the mess for replacement Steve Binder to clean up, or not, wanted to feature a talented but relatively unknown comedian named Robin Williams. However, he wasn’t famous enough. I’m not sure whether the guest stars casting began before Williams’s breakthrough appearance as Mork from Ork in Happy Days , an episode which aired in January 1978. Sucker casting may have been completed, or Williams might not have been famous enough yet. Here’s a grand irony to that fateful decision The Mork Happy Days episode was born because Garry Marshall’s Star Wars-obsessed son kept bugging his father to do a space episode. The comedian signed to play Mork was so bloody awful, and the rehearsals so atrocious, that the entire cast grew depressed because they had to ‘put something in the can’ and it was too late to ditch it or fix it. Then, the comedian himself, understanding this was going to monumentally redefine the term ‘suckage’, dropped out two or three days before air time, leaving them Morkless In Burbank. Cast member Al Molinaro mentioned a talented kid in his improvisation class who might be able to sub, and Robin Williams so impressed them with his ability to riff on damn near anything and go off-script so hilariously that he got the role and the rest is history. That Happy Days episode, which occurred during the season where ‘jumping the shark’ became a cultural reference to something having hit its peak and sliding downhill, became an all-time classic Great Moment In TV history rather than, ironically, the Star Wars Holiday Special of TV sitcoms. Mork the Dork. (Wikimedia, public domain) The dropout comedian was John Byner, who Boomers and Gen-Xers mostly remember as the guy who put the ‘square’ in Hollywood Squares. Could Robin Williams have saved the SWHS from its Night That Will Live Forever In Infamy? We will never know. This is an old post from Medium I wrote in 2019 and republished here with only a few minor changes. If you liked this post you can always subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! I only write goofy stuff like this only once in a while but you can find my other humor pieces under the Silly Science, Humor category. Otherwise, I mostly write snarkily about the nation's culture wars.

Just like their adversaries on the right. Even I didn't think they'd embrace violent extremism this quickly. And it's gotten pretty racist. Let your anti-Semitic freak flag fly. CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Creative Commons image of a protest at Trafalgar Square by Alisdare Hickson on Flickr I’ll admit, when I predicted earlier this year that the far left was showing early signs of a growing willingness to adopt violence as political expression, I didn’t expect it to take the penultimate, all-at-once giant step, like, before Thanksgiving. An armed lefty went gunning for Brett Kavanaugh last year but lost his will to kill him. While some point to this as evidence the left isn’t as violent, it might also offer evidence it’s becoming emboldened, taking a cue from the right and embracing gun violence as political expression. Our side just isn’t very good at it. Yet. - Me, It’s Getting Hard To Tell The Left From The Right Anymor e - March 2023 I thought it would be several baby steps toward standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their then-distant MAGA-capped competitors, the Jan. 6th insurrection gang, but no, it was only two—one very long stride and now, and we’re waiting with held breath, just another quick hop over the line. The left’s incomprehensible love affair with Hamas and their deeply flawed pawns, the Palestinians, expose further its facile Holy Dogma that the world is divided into two camps, oppressors and oppressed. Ye shall know them not by the color of their hats but by their biology: White skin (the bad guys) and dark skin (the good guys). Hamas’s little cheerleaders’ brains have been been baked with imbecilic critical race theory’s obsession with biologically-assigned power and hierarchized victimhood: The more weak-ass ‘marginalized’ groups you can self-claim, the more paradoxically powerful you are. This is why we’ve got fake racial white people - pseudo-African Americans and ‘pretendians’ like Joseph Boyden , Jordan Peterson , and Buffy Sainte-Marie , along with appropriated men and women. The horrific support by so-called ‘social justice’ warriors for the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7 has laid bare the truth about woke ideology: It’s no better than Trumpism. And they’re every bit as vicious and racist and lacking in compassion as MAGAs. Whether one’s sympathies lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, it should be an unequivocal no-brainer to condemn Hamas’s vicious attack on civilians, and to stay faaaaaar away from associating one’s self with this demonstrable vicious, soulless, fanatical and genocidal death cult. One with no compunction against using Gazans as human shields and locating their command center or a weapons cache under a hospital or a school because they score soooo many brownie points when Gazans die after the IDF bombs a hospital to eliminate the terrorists. (Did Israel bomb a Gazan hospital or did Hamas do it? Was it even in Gaza? Or in 2023? Liberal media, drink the Hamas Kool-Aid!) Mindless, witless ideologues lap it up from uncritical legacy and social media like grateful doggies, wagging their tails with gratitude. You’d think the ‘progressives’ who claims to favor racial equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and who are fond of comparing everyone who disagrees with them to ‘Nazis’, would find fault with a terrorist group whose original charter explicitly called for the extermination of Jews and whose 2017 update sanitizes the language by fuzzing the goal of ‘eliminating Israel’. Never mind that charter or not, Hamas leadership has many times since called for the killing of Jews. Just like, you know, the you-know-whos. That’s how you get a young man calling to brag to his father, “I killed ten Jews today!” Social justice warriors woke up to their inner Nazis. Pro-Palestinian protests around the United States have been peppered with violent calls to action. This has resulted in a steep rise in hate crimes against Jews and to a lesser extent, Muslims. And speaking of Jan. 6th, the Democratic National Headquarters had to be evacuated on Nov. 15 when a rally of pro-Palestinian protesters turned ‘chaotic’ and six police officers were treated for injuries - this from a crowd of about 150. Well, at least they didn’t try to hang the Vice President. The role of woke racism and ‘anticolonialism’ Protesters, especially on college campuses, are bleating on about ‘decolonizing’ the Gazans so they can ‘live free’ or some such bullshit. Blissfully un-self-aware how their support for burning people alive, #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew , turning children into unrecognizable mounds of bleeding meat, terrorist-documented atrocities on video uploaded to Israeli families’ Facebook pages, applies a yardstick North American Indigenous might utilize against Canadians and Americans if they cadged terrorist tips from Hamas. Colonizers, settlers and other left-wing oppressors waving their Nazi freak flags to support eliminating an Indigenous population while supporting a death cult 10,000 times more toxic than the Trumpanzee gang is about as 180-degree, anti-liberal as they can get. The left’s New Nazis never tolerate Christofascism from America’s Bible-thumpers, but they’re all squooshy-wooshy for Islamofascism. The Oct. 7 attack was not, as the Loony Left would have you believe, because of ‘colonization’ and ‘oppression’ and checkpoints and yaddayaddayadda. This shit has happened before, before the existence of Israel, with many strong similarities to the Oct. 7 massacre, primarily the sheer brutality and desire to inflict as much human suffering as inhumanly possible on Jews: The 1929 Hebron Massacre . Including rapes, beheadings, torture, castrations, and burning people alive, no matter the age. When Palestinians hate you, they want you to die screaming in prolonged agony. How much can you hate another people so badly you would commit, or support the commission of, brand new Nazi-worthy atrocities like Oct. 7? I don’t know. Ask a college student. They understand this stuff better than people with morals. Jews, the left’s new white people, are in the left’s cross-hairs as these increasingly racist Hamas groupies and Palestinian apologists ramp up hatred that may soon expand to other white people. Woke racism plays a substantial role in uncritical support of the Islamic fanatics. The anti-Western ‘postcolonialism’ madness has inflamed many academic departments and germinated the culture wars of the last fifteen years, particularly with the help of race-baiters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo: White supremacy is everywhere, only white people can be racist because they have all the power, anyone who says otherwise is a racist. For them, white people possess near-magical powers of domination while denying personal agency, resilience and strength for everyone else. Lord Voldeblanc vs Harry Pathetic. In fact, Kendi believes that in order to balance the books, POC should discriminate against white people. Kendi redefines ‘antiracism’ to be, paradoxically, racist. Since the dark side of antiracism has already established appropriated innocence by stating that ‘black people can’t be racist’, it clears that path for the real agenda: Anti-white racism. Directly in contradiction to how Martin Luther King Jr. fantasized in 1963 about his four little children etc. etc. For so-called ‘antiracists’ like Kendi, people who believe that shit are, in the parlance of King’s time, ‘chumps’. For today’s kaffiyeh-clad protesters on North America’s college campuses, painting Jews as ‘colonizers’ ignores their indigineity to the land and that many of the Palestinians’ ancestors, coming from the historically imperialist and oppressive Isl amic empire, settled and colonized the land themselves in the seventh century. Members o f both groups have existed there uninterrupted for thousands of years, regardless of how or when the newer residents got there. It ignores that non-Native Americans and Canadians, including nearly every single loudmouthed protester, regardless of color, is an eeevull colonize r who should be pushed out of North America, by their own standards, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Let’s repeat: Palestinians and Jews have been there in one capacity or another for 3,000 years; and they share DNA . Empty-headed college protesters, with near-zero understanding of history or other human societies, or Middle Eastern genetics, blanket-ascribe white skin color to Jews in general and darker skin color to Palestinians. Remember, oppressors are white and oh-pressed are not in Ignorantland. Let’s review more recent history, like why that part of the world is so jam-packed with Jews. Many of Israel’s inhabitants came from Europe in the last century, but the Middle East also pushed plenty of population there too. While Ashkenazi Jews fled post-war Europe, nearly a million Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews were pushed out of their birth countries by hostile Muslim governments in Africa and Asia. Today’s college kids know the least about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, with the sheer arrogance of youth (I remember it well), think they know everything about it. Their puerile critical colonialism theory ignores volumes of historical data on the oppression and imperialism of Indigenous cultures and societies who dominated whoever they could. Including and especially the 1,400-year-old Islamic Empire, founded by a military commander. For a non-magical explanation for why white Europeans emerged to dominate the world, consult the Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies to understand why some human societies ‘evolved’ farther than others; and why the latter didn’t develop technologies to our level or move past hunting/gathering or farming culture. The short answer is not all human societies grew up with the same resource advantages: Early regional ‘privilege’ was accorded to those living in Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent, from whence white people emerged, and the fewest to the Australian Aboriginals still living in the Stone Age when Europeans landed. There simply wasn’t much to work with on a largely desert continent. The greatest insight I received was the realization that humans from Mesopotamia to Australia were remarkably innovative no matter where they landed; they made the most of what they had and evolved and progressed as far as they could given the resources haphazard birth fate dealt them. White people came to dominate the world not because we were the smartest but because we began with the most animal and farming resources available to us; human civilization would likely have been little different had anyone else emerged, instead, from there. So not all Jews are white, some Palestinians are, and the Mizrahi Jews are darker overall. Yet WokeWorld identifies oppression not by the content of anyone’s character, actions or values, but by what they look like. And ignore the ones who don’t fit. Which is how they can condemn the Trumpers as ‘Nazis’ while jumping up and down with excitement for genocide. Just like so many Germans eighty years ago. Wokeism’s big lies and their hard-on for people who hate them Palestinians are some of the most homophobic people on the planet, and there is no sight more ludicrous in America today than the alphabet soup gang waving their multicolored signs and flags in support of people who think nothing of decapitating a gay man . Then there’s the classic Middle Eastern misogyny: Gazan women face not only the threat of violence from Israel but also from their own men : Patriarchal norms and intense misogyny define their lives. Wokies who bitterly criticize conservative Christianity clearly have no idea what conservative Islam looks like, especially fuelled by the mindless violence ideology of groups like Hamas, where the noblest act one can commit is dying in the cause of killing others, especially Jews. Six dozen virgins await one in the afterlife. It’s why the rest of us have woken up to wokeism’s Big Lies: That they’re liberal, progressive, or socially just. They’re self-boiled frogs; they slowly moved toward extremism and radicalized themselves, and they can’t even see it; they now believe their illiberal beliefs and values are progressive. They’re not; they’re regressive. And reactionary. They’re not antiracist; they’re racist. Not KKK, neo-Nazi, lynch all the blue-eyed white devils racist—yet. But they’re flirting with it. If those of us closer to the center, whether right-thinking righties or levelheaded lefties, challenge and stand up to these illiberals and their proto-left fascism, we can perhaps rein them in before they form their own Proud TransBoys. They’ve got the far-right’s blueprint for violence, including a few more recent lefty-ish mass shootings from the LGBTQ set . Sure, today most mass shootings are committed by right-wingers, but remember when they were exclusively white? That was awhile ago! Eventually, mass shooters and other domestic terrorists may not be exclusively ‘cis-het’, or right-wing. Hell, lefties just cos-played Jan. 6th at Democrat Central. Don’t be too surprised if future racist murders target Jews, and not by Team MAGA. I don’t worry about my white ass walking down the street; I live in Canada. But I wonder whether, for white Americans, the day will come that my Jewish friends in both countries now face: Fear of being identified as THAT ‘OTHER’ when you go to the grocery store and get chased out by a bunch of violent left-wing bigots. Today the Jews, tomorrow the you’s. 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 damn thing!

In order to reduce domestic violence, one must first recognize and challenge the source, and those who agree to it. The latest campaign misses the mark, as usual. Royalty-free photo from Pickpik “Women have been carrying, through community-based organizations, the burden of protecting women almost exclusively for far too long,” a man on the Mass Casualty Commission commented regarding ‘femicide’, the first problematic word I found connected to a new Canadian campaign to eliminate violence against women. The Commission just issued a report investigating a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia committed by an established domestic violence perpetrator, although his rampage wasn’t about women specifically. Related: ‘Private’ Domestic Violence Is Now Everyone’s Business There’s a place for men, for sure, in preventing and reducing primarily male domestic violence, but a new campaign launched by grassroots women’s non-profit Aura Freedom International to bring attention to the ‘femicide’ problem in Canada typically fails to address the primary role women can and must take to end domestic violence. Same Ol’ Shit Different Campaign. They offer no recognition of the real female power to leave early, or better yet, avoid abusers in the first place. The ‘reasons’ given for violence against women and domestic homicide are the same old tired excuses: Patriarchy, male entitlement, male privilege, colonialism, oppression. What are they going to do about it? Fuck all, as far as I can tell. Nothing new to see her. Aura’s campaign fails to understand that victims drive change, not perpetrators, which is why they should be targeting women and their power, but never do. Anti-abuse advocates customarily deny that intimate partner violence, or IPV, is one area where women possess an ability to take back their power to change the world themselves simply by making better choices. Related: What If Women Refused To Have Sex With Abusive Men? Like not allowing abusive partners into their lives. Like getting rid of them the moment they turn abusive. Like recognizing that controlling behavior, called ‘coercive control’, a behavior Canada is considering criminalizing , is an early warning sign to a woman that her partner may be or could turn abusive. Laying down the rules early to a partner exhibiting ‘coercive control’ determines whether he’s a keeper. Is he willing to respect your boundaries? If not, find someone who does. Enough already with ‘Don’t blame the victim’. I want to hear more, ‘Don’t BE the victim’! I will keep asking the irritating question, “Why doesn’t she leave him?” until so-called feminist activist groups and non-profits recognize the power women have to avoid domestic abuse. The earlier she gets out, the easier it will be, and less dangerous. This ain’t 1970 anymore. Aura Freedom International is dedicated to ending violence against women including human trafficking. It employs all the usual emotion-laden words, and offers Indigenous women, who suffer IPV at much higher rates, nothing more than hand-wringing. There are a few ways this campaign could have been so much more effective. What is ‘femicide’, exactly? Let’s start with Aura’s misunderstanding of ‘femicide’, which they define as ‘crimes committed against women and girls purely for the crime of their gender’. Women in domestic violence environments aren’t killed because they’re women, but because they’re the physically weaker domestic partner. Homosexual male couples suffer the same dynamic, as do lesbians. ‘Femicide’ more appropriately describes Canada’s previous mass shooting record-holder, Marc Lepine, who gunned down fourteen female engineering students specifically because they were female in Quebec many years ago. He forced all the male students out first and mowed the women down like Al Capone, screaming about how feminism ruined everything, believing they were there and not him because of affirmative action, rather than that they might all have been better engineering students than he, a frustrated failed male. Alex Minassian, the incel who attacked women with his car in Toronto a few years ago is another example. And what is an ‘epidemic’? Another closely related Aura exaggeration is calling the rise in Canadian domestic violence—which did occur during the pandemic—as an ‘epidemic’. By their statistics, a woman is killed by a domestic partner every 48 hours in Canada, which works out to 182.5 women a year. Not good in the slightest, but it constitutes .0005% of the population in a country of 40 million people, roughly half of which are females. It’s troubling, but hardly an epidemic, and I confess I can’t feel the urgency because I always have, and always will, regard IPV as being quite distinct from stranger danger - women choose their domestic partners but not their stranger rapists and killers. If domestic violence is an ‘epidemic’, then it’s one 182 Canadian women a year agreed to every step of the way, for many complex reasons, rather than get out early enough. It’s why I’d like to see more campaigns organized around prevention, and specifically women’s power to say no to abuse, to refuse a partner who starts to act like an asshole. We see near-zero focus on the woman’s right, power, and agency to refuse abusive treatment, long before he comes to think he ‘owns’ her and can do whatever he wants with her. Don’t abandon your Indigenous sisters Aura refuses, with classically far-left cowardice, to call out the root cause of domestic violence for Indigenous women. Do identity labels really matter when we’re talking about IPV? What if the problem is less ‘intersectional’ than we think? It illustrates exactly why we need to retire these antediluvian so-called anti-female violence campaigns: They too often dance around the real problem. Statistics Canada reports that Indigenous women are the victims of 21% of IPV, despite constituting only 5% of the national population. Indigenous domestic violence rates are, in keeping with the required narrative of the day, attributed to prior genocide, colonization, mistreatment and forced assimilation. Never do we hear Indigenous ‘patriarchy’ suggested as a potential cause. That would ‘stigmatize’ Indigenous men, who constitute 80% of physical or fatal attacks on Indigenous women, but the illiberal left only cares about white rapists and gynocidists. Now, we don’t know what pre-Columbian domestic violence rates were here on Turtle Island, although archaeology and anthropology reveal North American Indigenous societies bore all the earmarks of traditional, male-dominated, patriarchal values and behavior, so let’s just stop pretending to care who’s raping and killing Indigenous women and show we care by naming the culprits: Yeah, these guys. Image by Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan on publicdomainpictures.net Indigenous men who batter, rape, and murder women are no different from men in other cultures. They primarily kill their intimate partners and family members. They do it for the same reasons all other abusers do: Because they can. Because women are weaker, and men feel entitled to their bodies, and to ‘make her’ do what he wants if she resists his coercive control or fails to treat his needs and wants as primary. It’s patriarchy, plain and simple, but liberal anti-violence campaigns are shy about calling out non-white rapists, batterers and murderers for a lot of stupid, identity-driven reasons, which serves Da Indigenous Patriarchs very well, thankyouverymuch. Grow some labia, girls! All such campaigns outside Indigenous culture aren’t going to offer Indigenous women any support apart from the usual virtue-signalling. White feminists are NOT going to call out Indigenous men on their patriarchy and misogyny. You can shut them up pretty quickly with the whole oppression rap, as most white feminists are suffering from morally debilitating ‘white guilt’. They will, as ‘progressive’ feminists are wont to do, throw their Indigenous sisters under the bus where they can continue to suffer because their white sisters won’t address the primary cause of assault and murder among Indigenous women: Indigenous men. Cultural history matters, but not when an Indigenous man makes the decision to smash his fist into a brown face, when he shoves his dick up an unconsenting Indigenous woman’s vagina or down her throat, when he picks up a blunt instrument and smashes her head with it. We shouldn’t give a flying fuck whatever his excuses - residential schools, hundreds of years of genocide, the Sixties Scoop, irritating sports team mascots or personal trauma. Those are topics for his therapist. First and foremost, he needs to take responsibility for his personal agency and choice to harm his partner or family member, who isn’t responsible for any of that. There are no excuses for male battery. No, not even for Indigenous men. Patriarchal domination is the primary cause of IPV, no matter what the culture or skin color. So what is Aura Freedom Foundation doing to address this? With a typically but ultimately useless gesture to try and maybe kinda sorta get women to think about what the campaign should be screaming from the rooftops: DON’T WAIT. GET OUT NOW. AND NEVER ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN AGAIN. EDUCATE YOURSELF! We see a similar dynamic in the shoddy excuses so-called ‘feminists’ use to excuse the gross slaughter and mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7. Ask them why Hamas was so horrendously cruel to women and they’ll give you their standard bullshit about ‘colonialism', ‘oppression’ and ‘settling’. When in fact Hamas is a vicious, psychopathic terrorist group steeped in misogyny, as are, it seems, many ‘feminist’ groups and the United Nations, which currently refuses to condemn these war crimes against women. Let’s be clear: The primary cause of IPV is men who make the decision to harm or kill, not their personal sob stories. Don’t conflate transwomen and real women Marissa Kokkoros, the executive director spearheading the Aura campaign, cited “an increase in homophobia and transphobia…an increase in misogyny and hate in general,” and made the mistake of including transwomen. Transgender people do suffer an increased risk of IPV, particularly with a male partner (go figger), but it’s inaccurate to include them with violence against women statistics. Transwomen are not the same as natal women, regardless of how they ‘feel’. Their lives are no less significant, but if Aura’s campaign doesn’t include gay and lesbian domestic violence, it should recognize that transfolk are a different class of people too - their lives no less important, but they’re ‘women’ with male bodies and brains who are in a better position to defend themselves against violence, if not always successfully. (After all, men are the biggest killers of other men, once again go figger). The reason why women as a class shouldn’t be erased is because men and women are different and all the surgery in the world can’t change that, or the maleness that remains between the ears. The challenges transfolk face from largely male partners are similar, but without the physical weakness challenge real women face. If one wants to argue, “But transgender women are primarily assaulted by males just like natal women,” then include gay male domestic violence as well. Take a cue from Nancy Reagan, Aura! Aura created a video to make some sort of a point about violence against women. Hey, makes a nice Christmas gift for the relentlessly clueless friend of yours who zeroes in on a bad man like a bloodhound on an escaped convict hunt. Gender-based violence increased 14% in Canada over the pandemic, as women and girls were trapped with their abusers in lockdown. I wonder how effective a campaign might have been had it been offered at the end of lockdown, which in Ontario was the second quarter of 2022: Get Out Before The Next Pandemic! Kokkoros complained to CTV News about the lack of proper data for “ underlying sociocultural or systemic factors”, adding, “Prevention efforts really must be focused on the root causes.” Anti-IPV advocates love examining tangential ‘root causes’ because it excuses them from having to address what they can do to protect women better from men who don’t give a damn about the cute pink body bag campaign. If they feel entitled to hit, slam, rape, and even murder their partner, no anti-IPV campaign will stop it. They won’t even watch. The people who will pay attention to it are women, and, hopefully, the ones who need it most - those who are or have been victims of IPV. What if Aura and others organized their campaigns around a new message? Kokkoros wants more men to speak up and be part of the change against male violence. I agree, but I don’t think Aura is serious about wanting to push it. They’re willing to do anything except encourage the people with the most power to Just Say No to abusive partners. That goes for everyone - not just female partners of domestic violence, but also for male victims, lesbian victims, and transgender victims. In the end, we need to work together to eliminate intimate partner violence no matter who the victims or perpetrators are - all lives really are equal and even when females perpetrate domestic violence, the dynamics are frightening similar to traditional M2F violence. I’d like to see fewer irrelevant labels and more recognition of female power. Like I said, this is 2023, not 1970. Not all victims agree to abuse. But after the first strike, if they stay, they’re a volunteer. 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 damn thing!

Because the rainbow flag gang has been cheering for their enemies since Oct. 7. Killing off identified LGBTQ people has been a thing in Gaza for many years Don’t pull this shit in Gaza or you will know the *true* meaning of the word ‘genocide’. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto The colorful folks who lose their minds when Republicans and conservative Christians enact anti-transgender laws give genocidal, homo-hating psychopaths a free pass because, I guess, at least Hamas hates Jews as much as the other unleashed bigots on the left . If there’s one thing that doesn’t exist in the West today, it’s ‘trans genocide’. That’s a fantasy cooked up in brains housed in overprivileged, unmarginalized, mostly male bodies desperately seeking cultural relevance. If anyone implemented an actual genocide campaign against the genderfluid set, evidence so far indicates it would miss their gaydar. It’s true that transfolk are at higher risk of violence than other groups, but it hardly approaches the level of ‘genocide’, a very much-abused word that used to mean something super-serious, like the conscious attempt to exterminate a group of people based on certain characteristics. We’ve seen it in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Chinese Revolution, the 20th-century Russian attempt against Ukrainians in the ‘30s, and of course the ‘gold standard’ for the most systematic attempt ever to eliminate Others, Nazi Germany. Pre-Columbian Indigenous groups everywhere occasionally attempted genocide too; and it was a lot easier back then when tribes and bands were a few hundred members at most, rather than today’s cities, states and countries. The most recent example of a limited attempt at genocide was Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel in October. It’s linked and locked to genocide because Hamas’s charter is quite explicit on their mandate to eliminate Judaism from all of what is now Israel. ‘From the river to the sea’, that’s what it means. Don’t let Hamas apologists tell you otherwise. Hamas’s 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement is pretty plain-spoken: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). It quotes the Koran: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem). There’s more anti-Semitic genocidal crapola, but let’s not get off on a tangent. In case you’re wondering if Israel’s uncomfortably disproportionate defensive response, which has killed a ton more Gazans than Israelis on Oct. 7 is ‘genocide’, as the Islamofascist cheerleaders on North American campuses insist, Time Magazine weighed in on the matter in November. Defining genocide gets very tricky without the evidence of a specific intention to destroy the group, it says, but notes, “That can be a high bar because very often people contribute to genocidal policies, even if that's not their direct intention.” That renders allegations of Israeli genocide of Palestinians a little less abstractly. While Israel’s explicit purpose is to wipe out Hamas, they’re taking a helluva lot of civilians with them, and with the Gazan death toll now estimated around 20,000 since October 7th, the carnage can no longer be blamed solely on Hamas’s use of the civilian population as human shields. With a massive human rights crisis of displaced people and countless neighborhoods reduced to rubble, Israeli forces are squandering whatever moral righteousness for response they possessed for October 7. When defining genoicide, most experts refer to the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which created the definition in 1948. If the Israeli government has genocidal intent toward the Palestinians themselves, they’re less explicit than Hamas, or many other antisemitic genocidists of the Arab/Muslim world, for whom the elimination of Jews and ergo the State of Israel has been boldly stated for generations. In North America, the last genuine genocide attempt was the centuries-long effort to eliminate ‘the Indian’ from what they called Turtle Island and what we call ‘the United States’ and ‘Canada’. There have been no genuine genocide attempts here since, and the ‘trans genocide’ one sees repeated ad nauseum on social media is merely hypervole rooted in very few expressions of a few sick individuals who either genuinely would like to eliminate all trans people, or just crank them up. Either way, there’s no concerted effort to eliminate them, and the violence against them isn’t remarkable compared to many other groups. The Human Rights Campaign notes that last year in the United States, 32 transgender people were murdered , 81% of them non-white, 59% of them black. They claim to have documented 302 violent deaths of transgender and ‘gender non-conforming people’ since 2013. Those numbers aren’t good, but they’re no evidence of genocide. A fair chunk of them may be genuine hate crimes (although there could be other reasons, like a john who doesn’t want to pay his transgender prostitute). Like so-called ‘hate crime’ hoaxes against black people, when you drill down to the meat of the story, you often find that there was less evidence of a hate crime than initially alleged in the legacy/social media. Some transfolk are killed by police (go figger), some in prison, and a few in ICE detention centers. About 2 6% are killed by intimate partners . Welcome to WomanWorld, fellas. This is what you signed up for. Happy to join you in the fight against intimate partner violence, everyone has the right to not be murdered by a partner! I can’t find statistics specifically for Canada on transgender murders. The U.S. numbers do seem to be going up, but whether that’s a response juiced by ‘anti-trans’ information in the media, as transactivists allege, or other reasons (it’s hardly uncommon to get murdered by the police or in prison) is unclear. It could be that trans numbers grow every year as more jump on the Trans Train. I can’t help but wonder whether violent, aggressive transactivism has something to do with it. “Can we just start stabbing transphobes?” Transactivists are pretty famously aggressive and violent against women, particularly in Europe where they’ve been documented physically attacking feminists at public protests, in the time-honored tradition of men attempting to shut down women’s speech. La plus ça change, n’est-ce pas? Some things never change. Feminists were also violently attacked by transactivists and Antifa in Portland, Oregon in November. But I suspect transactivist woman-haters have little to do with it. Partner violence, prison violence, sex worker violence - also, la plus ça change. But the LGBTQ cheerleader section for Hamas makes me wonder if they’d even notice if anyone launched a genuine trans genocide. While even Gaza isn’t guilty of a concerted, systematic effort to eliminate transfolk or other LGBTQ people, they sure do love to push them off buildings when they identify someone who doesn’t adhere strictly to Islamic dictates about who and what to shag. It’s a little better on the West Bank where homosexuality has been decriminalized since 1951 (yes really!). The status is far more confusing in Gaza, with a patchwork of laws covering who may do what with whom. Homosexuality is not specifically banned, but don’t expect any help from the police for homophobic or (genuine) transphobic violence in action. Prison is the customary punishment for gay activity, but can also include the very occasional flogging for ‘adultery’. Not sure what you get when you murder gay or trans people in Gaza. High fives? People do get killed there for partaking of Oscar Wilde-style love. This includes a Hamas commander executed for allegedly partaking in an act of ‘moral turpitude’ (their euphemism for gay sex) and theft, although some allege he was tortured into making a confession. This sounds suspiciously like what happens in other parts of the Middle East all the time for women - ‘honor killings’ executed by family members, or stoned by the community, on rumors of alleged non-chaste behavior with a male, no evidence required. Wagging tongues get women killed all the time in the Middle East for such alleged sex crimes, just as they did in medieval Europe for alleged witchcraft. Gay Palestinians can avoid getting murdered by turning informant for the authorities (including Israeli authorities who blackmail them to become Israeli collaborators). Still, Israel has actually become a bit of a gay retreat for Palestinians trying to escape Gazan homophobia, and is the only place in the Middle East where one will find Pride Parades. If you’re going to be gay in the Middle East, Palestine is one of the worst places to do it. And Israel is the best. Even so, Palestinians aren’t attempting anything approaching ‘trans genocide’, or even ‘gay genocide’, but if it was to start anywhere Palestine would be in my top three guesses. And I wonder: Would Western transactivists even notice? And if they did, would they dare, with typical Regressive Left cowardice, to call out dark-skinned homophobes and transphobes? Would Western condemnation of Gazan homophobia be regarded with embarrassed looks as ‘cultural imperialism’? If they can’t identify the rampant homophobia and genuine transphobia in Palestine, and they cheer for the equally homophobic Hamas, I’m not sure they’d recognize an actual genocide if fluorescent-dressed corpses started dropping on their heads. It’s possible the rise in trans murders in the West is a consequence of rising violence and murders overall. The numbers may also be rising because more people are ‘going trans’, so there are simply more of them to run afoul of others, whether it’s due to transphobia, ‘trans panic’, or police arrest. But it’s certain the West’s claims of ‘trans genocide’ is an effort to inflate the emotionalism of the debate, as so many movements are wont to do (including on the right). We see the same inflation from the ‘antiracist’ set when they claim black deaths by police are ‘the new lynching’ or ‘genocide’ against blacks. Ironically, more trans people (and white people) are killed every year by the cops than black people. And interestingly, the Black Lives Matter website has fuck all to say about Israel, whereas on Glenn Loury’s Substack , they’ve discussed the anti-Semitism problem in the black community, not to mention in the DEI industry , where most DEI consultants are black women. What’s worrying is how much violence against everybody is growing, not just transfolk. Whether they’re murdered for their lifestyle choice or for the common reasons so many others are murdered, it’s not okay. But it’s not genocide either. And I’m not sure any of them would notice if it turned into one. 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 damn thing!

Are you voting for someone with a fuzzy grip on reality? Or against your own interests? Independents will never win, but why not send a message? Image generated by Poe AI, after a lot of effort to get Biden to not look like Trump, and to grasp the concept of ‘two devil horns each’, not each with one devil horn “I’m voting for Trump this time.” Really? “I guess I’ll vote for Biden again, anything’s better than Trump.” Are you sure? I mean, I’ve got food in my fridge older than these two codgers! (Okay, maybe it’s time to throw out the meat loaf.) Acting grand-dadly is the latest fad in D.C amongst the 75+ set. Mitch McConnell ‘freezes’; Trump and Biden have both been scrutinized for potential dementia, and not only by their adversaries and critics. A Washington pharmacist claims he is regularly filling and hand-delivering prescriptions for treating Alzheimer’s disease—to many members of Congress. Anyone who’s a baby boomer is already pretty damn old, but our two truly serious candidates from the two biggest parties are from the friggin’ Silent Generation . Or maybe Trump is a very early boomer. Born in 1945, he’s on the cusp, although no one has ever accused him of silence. A guy who worships dictators and admits he wants to be one himself is the worst possible choice ever, with or without his cookies. He gave us four years’ experience with his petty and morally corrupt presidency, incapable of telling the truth, obsessed with his own petty grievances, issuing crazy directives ignored by his staff , spending more time tweeting than running the country, and insulting and disrespecting everyone, including military veterans. Except deplorable dictators, with whom he may have shared sensitive American intelligence—and kept it unsecured in his bathroom. Remember the days when Republicans lost their shit when someone burned a flag? Now they wipe their shit with the American flag. I think Biden is a somewhat less demented choice in both senses of the word but—I’m not voting for him either. God/dess help us if he dies in office. President Kamala Harris: Another reason to Just Say No to Joe. I expected the former San Francisco district attorney to set fire to her enemies the way Congresswoman Katie Porter does when she traps a hapless CEO in the Senate chambers hot seat. Harris has a glare that could melt steel but not, apparently, her critics. She’s too Hillary Clinton: Stiff, robotic, unwilling to speak her mind and there’s no way she could ever utter an actual sarcastic zinger. Not publicly, anyway. She’s a bright, smart woman, but too hyper-conscious of her burdensome identity labels: Female, black, Asian etc. and first Vice President to be all that stuff. I think most of us would like to see someone younger than either of the two acuity-challenged Methuselahs. I mean, I want a President I don’t have to explain the difference between a boy and a girl to. And ffs, Donald Trump thinks Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi! We bitch about shitty candidates but how is this not our fault? We get what we vote for in the primaries. The Republicans run in fear from any candidate with a brain because their voters do . The Democrats scream on sight at any candidate who isn’t woke because hating all the people the Republicans don’t and wanting to censor as many library books as Moms for Liberty is what passes for ‘progressivism’. And who do we vote for? Whoever we think is the lesser of the two evils. Even when they’re both against our own interests. So I wonder. Why vote for either? What if those of us fed up with both extremes voted for some independent candidate we know will never win but at least doesn’t stand in contradiction to our own interests, and who possesses more conscious thought than a jellyfish? I’m not alone. Bari Weiss’s The Free Press recently covered how voters from both sides are switching in The Great Scramble . It reminds me of Afghanistan before 9/11. Their choices were only the Taliban and the Northern Alliance; voters constantly changed the reigning party and received brand-new violence, same as the other. Would you prefer Mao or Hitler? Sound familiar? The article mirrors exactly how I feel: Politically homeless, abandoned by the party I voted for all my life (Democrat). Not wanting to see either side win. Seeing violence and repression no matter which doddering old man leads his younger, toxic party to victory. What message would it send if a whack of Americans voted, but not for either major party candidate? What if the winning geezer won with, like, 38% of the vote? Even though all those independent candidates came nowhere within megaphone-shouting distance of winning? I asked that question on Quora recently and most argued against voting indy. A fellow named Mark Stinson described how the states’ elections require a plurality of the vote and how even a 38% winner (the person with the most popular votes) wins all that state’s electors, and how, in the current state of Congress, the Republicans would probably get the votes needed to win in the 26 primarily Republican House delegations. His full answer is here (you have to scroll down). But we’ve got to do something. There aren’t a lot of declared Democratic challengers to the incumbent’s reign, who’s widely regarded as the only person who can beat Trump, since he did it once before. Elections are about many different issues, but at the core we care about our own, and our tribe’s, interest. In my position, my tribe under threat constitutes half the country. The same threat I perceive from the right, although expressed differently. I don’t consider the Democrats pro-women’s rights anymore. Why should anyone vote against their own interests? You’ve got abject whackjobbery in the GOP, and abject wokejobbery in the Dems. As a feminist, I find myself increasingly resistant to voting for any candidate or party who’s not. The ‘woke’ Democrats are in thrall to a transgender religion which signals a much deeper problem so-called liberals have with women’s rights. The Squad and other woke-ass-kissing politicians are willing to put women in serious danger in service for the votez for sexual fetishists cosplaying womanhood for the wanks. Sorry, Dems, but supporting women’s right to abortion is no longer enough to prove feminist credentials. I believe the unquestioning loyalty too many in the party express towards ‘trans rights’, a subject on which I’ve spilled many words already, exemplifies a pervasive left-wing misogyny no less threatening than historical conservative hostility to women’s rights, and I wonder whether the pledged allegiance to restore Roe is mostly Democratic efforts to distract female voters from an uglier agenda: Namely, the right to say no to aggressive men. I’m not at all sure misogynist souls are any different riding an elephant or a donkey. Men seem pretty willing no matter how they vote to protect male sexual interests, even if it’s not their own. Help out a bro’, could you, buddy? Roe seems to be the only policy point on which Democrats aren’t actively trying to harm women. The only policy point on which the Republicans support women is by resisting the transgender cult, including ‘gender-affirming’ care. But I can’t vote for them, either. Not when culty Trumplove is the intellectually deranged equivalent of ‘Transwomen are women’. Got this for Christmas. It explores how the left is moving toward the right, the very people they claim to fight. Women are half the population, and our safety, equality and interests far outweigh what suspiciously predatory men want. Wokeness = misogyny, exemplified by disbelieving Hamas’s own documented livestreamed rape and atrocity videos. The Squad’s refusal to support Israeli rape victims makes the Epstein-friendly pussy-grabber look like Harry Styles. And denying that men who grow their hair long don’t possess any physical advantage over their female teammates demonstrates conscious stupidity on the same level as that Biden stole the election because it’s simply impossible not enough Americans voted for Trump the last time around for him to lose. Even as Republicans don’t support ‘transing’ children, they’re the ones who destroyed Roe, and many are want to eliminate birth control , like Clarence Thomas, who’s also against gay marriage (I wonder how he feels about returning 1968’s anti-miscegenation law? ). Republicans also voted against the Violence Against Women Act. There’s so much wrong with both misogynist parties, but Donald Trump ? Again? With all the other lib-hating, reason-averse, censorship-happy, misogynist, racist, homophobic, but more mentally acute candidates Republican voters have to choose from, why does it have to be the dictator-lover who clearly hates democracy? What does it tell us about what’s really wrong with this country? Hint: It ain’t Trump. I know there’s a lot more to an election than women’s rights. Trump is killing the Democrats, rightfully, on immigration . One of the massive delusions of the illiberal left, as I’ve pointed out many times before, is its unwillingness to just say no to anyone. Not just sexual fetishists seeking to bend women to their will, but to any old Mexican rapist who wants to immigrate to the U.S., because guaranteed, there will be rapists and other ‘bad hombres’ as Trump has put it, when you allow unfettered access from any place on the planet. Related: They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants. - The Free Press Voters have plenty of economic concerns too, and I also recognize I don’t live in the U.S. anymore so I don’t have to live with whichever bad decision y’all make. What does bother me is that the only decent Republican candidate worthy of considering was the guy who entered not to win but to try and warn Americans about what an unqualified human being Donald Trump was to allow into power again. Chris Christie knew he had no chance of winning; and it’s a shame because he was the only candidate with a brain not addled by ideotology. I’ve liked him ever since he ate a doughnut on Letterman in response to his many fat-shamers But every time I think about holding my nose and voting for the sort of less toxic party, I feel ashamed. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. Fuck it, America. I’ll ‘throw away’ my vote on some candidate or party who has no hope of winning. I can’t, I won’t, vote against my own interests. Ranked voting There’s a better way to conduct elections. It’s too late for 2024, but we should start talking about it now. Someone answering my question on Quora pointed out the idea of ‘ranked voting’, which sounds like a better way to elect a candidate rather than by which one drools the least . With ‘ranked voting’, a voter ranks three or more candidates from most to least preferred. Vivek Ramalamasalami was still in the race when I designed this Ranked voting is a little more complicated, but Rankedvoting.co , which believes it’s promoting a more pro-democracy electoral reform, claims ranked voting “determines the candidate with the strongest support, encourages civil campaigning, reduces wasted votes, and eliminates the need for multiple elections.” In other words, your vote does count, since you’re not just voting for your fave, but the ones you’d rather see if s/he can’t win. It’s already in practice in some states and municipalities. In 2022, Alaska’s new non-partisan primary system offered all candidates on a unified ballot. Voters ranked who they wanted, which advanced the top four candidates to the instant runoff. Supposedly, it reduced extremism and encouraged greater cooperative governance. Voters are believed to have made more nuanced decisions rather than strict party-based ones. After all, no one knows who will make the Final Four or whether any will be Your Party Humanoid. I could sneak in a rank for Chris Christie. Because the elections were more ‘meaningful’, meaning “ballots cast in competitive elections that are not effectively pre-determined based on party affiliation alone,” a higher percent of Alaskans (35%) cast them, more than any other state. The ‘cooperative governance’ comes into play when campaigning candidates have to cooperate with each other after an election ends, as it did in Alaska last year, with an unusual bipartisan majority coalition in the Alaska Legislature’s two chambers. The result is that lawmakers have to work together now, and when they run again have to appeal to a broader swathe of voters rather than just playing to their base. That bit interests me even more about ranked voting. It’s an interesting idea for creating greater voter engagement, and other options if you’re not that keen on the candidate of your own party. And we could all do with more ‘civil campaigning’. It’s ten months until the U.S. federal election. What are your thoughts or opinions? Since we won’t have ranked voting, will you vote for one of the Paw-Paws or will you send a message to Washington? I might still try writing in Lyndon Larouche , Ross Perot or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf . Yeah, I know they’re all dead, but if I’m asked to rank three of the candidates in the poll at the top of this article my choices are: Death by chocolate Death by George Clooney-shagging The bullet. 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 damn thing!

THIS is how they can take back their power from their accused rapist in court--and win! Trump image public domain photo; Carroll image CC0 4.0, both from Wikimedia Commons Yanno, Donald Trump could have saved himself a total of $88 million dollars if only he’d chosen to prove his innocence. E. Jean Carroll, who’s accused him for decades of having raped her in a New York department store changing room, kept his salvation in an evidence drawer somewhere. It was a you-know-what-stained dress. Trump could have exonerated himself in a heartbeat and made this aaaaaaallll go away years ago, and even more importantly, saved himself $88M. He merely needed to provide a DNA sample that failed to match the DNA on the dress, at a critical juncture in his life when he’s about to lose a substantial portion of his real estate assets, may be permanently barred from the real estate industry in New York, and will need all that’s left of his dough to pay off the lawyers, since his legal troubles may outlast his life. And they’re doing such a fine job for him, aren’t they. I mean, even Tacopina has dropped him. When the guy who looks like a Sopranos reject leaves you alone with the blonde who’d rather be pretty than smart (Tee hee, giggle giggle! Mission accomplished, Barbie!), you are, well, rhymes with ‘tucked’. “She’s lying!” said Trump. “He’s lying!” said Carroll. “And I’ve got the dress to prove it!” So of course, like any innocent man would do, Trump refused to supply a DNA sample to settle the case without all this courtroom drama and $88M + lawyer fees. (Although granted, they’re probably working for free and just haven’t figured that out yet. They should ask any New Yorker .) There’s a very strong, powerful lesson here for rape victims, especially future victims, feminists, anti-rape advocates and others who bemoan the very real problem of victims not being believed and not receiving justice in court: PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! There’s only one other semen-stained dress more famous than Carroll’s and I suspect it forced another President into an embarrassing admission. Monica Lewinsky famously kept her dirty dress, not to prove rape—she made it very clear her affair with Clinton had been consensual, and instigated by her—and he stopped claiming he’d ‘never had sexual relations with that woman’ after America began debating whether he should be forced to provide a DNA sample. And you don’t even need a little plastic cup for it; a blood sample will work just fine. So here’s something a rape victim—or her friend or roommate dealing with the immediate aftermath—can do. Put the evidence in a plastic baggie! Semen evidence on clothes can apparently last for decades, so the victim doesn’t have to report it immediately if she’s distraught, ridiculously traumatized and too ashamed to admit what happened, although it would be better for her case if she did. But still—evidence in a baggie weeks, months, or even years later is a lot better than she said/he said. Granted, if she files charges the man will invariably claim the sex was ‘consensual’, but DNA evidence proving something happened between them is better than her word alone, and will refute, “I’ve never even met the woman!” By the time many women get around to reporting, the bruises are gone, her memories may be fuzzy or dissipated, witnesses in the vicinity scattered, and there’s no point in conducting a rape test now. A suspect who refuses to provide a DNA sample for comparison looks an awful lot like he’s hiding something, and that will sit quite differently with a jury. THIS is how we bring justice to rape victims. THIS is how victims only have to take twenty seconds to protect their interests when they’re sobbing in a fetal position. THIS is how rape victims can take back their power. Take off whatever provides incontrovertible evidence that Mr. X had sex with you, put it in a plastic bag, seal it up and put it somewhere safe. This is something women’s activists need to broadcast from the rooftops: PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! 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 damn thing!