But only once. Not sure what he saw in me. Surely not victimhood… Photo by Charles C. Collingwood on Unsplash He did a double take as he passed me walking through the mall, and stopped to chat me up. He reminded me a little of a young Frank Langella, so I let him. I’d just moved to Canada. “I’m sorry. I felt compelled to say something. You look so much like a friend who’s recently died.” It was one of the weirdest pickup lines ever, but I fell for it because of prior precedent in my family. My mother’s second love had done a double-take on the bus when he saw her. She said he looked so stunned she believed him when he said Mom looked exactly like the woman he’d been in love with who died back in Germany. He and Mom fell in love, but the romance went nowhere fast because he was already married. So, like mother, like daughter, n’est-ce pas? Well, except for the married part. His name was Sam, and he wanted to take me to lunch. Okay, I said, but first I have to apply for my Ontario Healthcare Insurance Program card. He went with me, and we talked in the waiting room. He seemed okay, nice and friendly, and I kind of liked him, so I thought I’d better drop the bomb that ended things quickly with a lot of Yankee men: I told him I didn’t want children. “Neither do I,” he said. Well okay, then! We couldn’t just eat in the mall, it seemed; he had some special place he wanted to take me. Foolishly, I got into the car with him and we drove somewhere. This is what I call women ‘doing dumb shit’ that puts us in danger. Dumb Shit I’ve Done Spoiler alert: Nothing bad happened. We went to some restaurant on the water — probably Lake Ontario. I had no idea where I was. He’d been pretty free with the compliments, oh how pretty you are, you’re so pretty, I just love being with you, blah blah blah. Guys say a lot of stuff. There was something not right about him. Kind of phony. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed eager to establish an early intimacy. “What are your plans for this summer?” he asked. I mentioned I was going to a family wedding in New York in September. “I’m going with you,” he informed me. “Um, excuse me?” “I’m going with you,” he stated. “Oh no you’re not.” “Why not?” I gave him A Look. “Because we don’t know each other well enough.” “We will by then.” “Why are you worried about September? You don’t even know if we’re going to make it to the weekend yet.” “Why wouldn’t we?” “You’re not going.” “But I want to meet your family.” “I’ll decide when you’re ready to meet my family.” Wisely, he dropped it. There’s nothing that sets a control freak back on his heels quite like an early sign that his victim doesn’t take any shit. Later he pushed my hand down and took the fork from me. “Let me,” he said, and he tried to feed me himself. What was I, two? “No,” I said, and I took my fork back. Did he think that was romantic? I found it infantilizing. After a little more conversation — oh yeah, we were sitting side by side, he didn’t want to sit across from me — he announced, “I’m in love with you.” Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash I crinkled up my face and said something along the lines of, “What the hell?” “It’s true,” he replied. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” “After only two hours?” “I’m serious.” “Oh, cut it out!” I spat. “You’re not in love with me. That’s bullshit.” “I am,” he insisted. I’d had enough. This afternoon was growing tiresome. I realized I was somewhere in or around Toronto, nowhere near a bus line as far as I knew, with some joker I’d met at the mall and had idiotically gone somewhere in a city I didn’t know very well. Worst came to worst, I could call my roommate to come get me, but that would be supremely embarrassing, not to mention a huge inconvenience for him. Still, I didn’t feel like I was in danger. I’ve gone through life largely convinced I’m not the sort of woman who gets raped and/or murdered. So far so good. He asked a few more questions, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he said. “What???” “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he smiled. Who the hell says that? What were my hopes and dreams? To make a new life in Canada. To find a job soon. To finish my dark fantasy novel and get it published. To be a famous writer. To meet a great guy and fall in love, after so much disappointment in Connecticut. “I don’t have any,” I stated. “What? How can you not have any? Everyone has hopes and dreams!” Sam cried. “I don’t.” “Sure you do. Tell me.” “Nope. I don’t have any. Sorry.” Stated with that smug sarcasm that says screw you, buddy boy! He tried, but he couldn’t pry any hopes or dreams out of me. I was done. I sat back. “I need to get home,” I said. “I have to start making dinner for my roommate.” Or some other stupid lie, I don’t remember. I wondered if he’d return me or just abandon me, but we got into his car and went back to the mall. He dropped me off there. The conversation was more real, less phony, so we kissed before I got back on the bus. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Today, that would be the end of it, but back then I was trying to turn over a new leaf. My last five years in Connecticut hadn’t been good after my ex and I split up. I call them my Angry Drunken Bitch years. But, there was enough about Sam to like and we’d talked a lot, so when he reached out for another date I agreed. I wanted to be less picky and judgemental. I’d been rather unfair to men, and my last foray in Connecticut, with a customer I’d met through work, hadn’t gone anywhere. The second time Sam called, I had planned to get a haircut. “Cancel it,” he said. “Let’s go do such-and-such.” I was a little taken aback, but I was flattered he wanted to see me so badly, so I did. The next time, I was en route to the salon when he called. “Let’s go do something." “Not this afternoon. I’m going to get my hair cut,” I said. “Cancel it.” “No. I did that last time.” “Do you have to do this today?” he asked. “No, but I cancelled it last time for you. This time I’m getting my hair cut. Some other time, Sam.” For some reason, he expected me to just drop everything when he decided we should go do something. Once or twice I reached out to him, but he said he had other plans. I didn’t ask him to cancel them. I wondered if it was another woman, but I didn’t ask. None of my business; he wasn’t my steady boyfriend. One day we went out to lunch. No annoying comments or pushy suggestions this time. Then we went to see the movie Cinderella Man. All was fine until he tried to push my head down on his shoulder. I pulled it up again. He pushed it down again, more forcefully. “Stop it, that’s annoying,” I hissed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he trying to force this intimacy? It was like when he tried to feed me. And told me he was in love with me. He’d said the love thing several times since but I never said it back, and he didn’t ask why. I didn’t believe him either. Five years of bad dating experiences taught me not to believe anything men said anymore. We went back to my place and made out on the couch a little, then he had to go. And after that, I heard nothing. Not a thing. I was pissed. Still quite insecure, I had outdated ideas of how dating was supposed to work. I’d been out of it for awhile. The ex and I were together for over seven years, with a split in between, so by the time I moved to Toronto things had changed a lot, but no one cc’d me the memo. I thought if Sam really cared he’d call. It was out of the question that I call him. I don’t remember if I was just being an idiot or testing him. The silence drove me insane. My roommate and I decided to spend a weekend at Algonquin Park, a huge nature preserve north of Toronto to shoot some moose. Relax! This is the only way we shoot moose. Although that mofo does look like he’s contemplating pulling some shit with me, doesn’t he? Photo by the author's moose-obsessed then-housemate I enjoyed myself, but I also stewed a lot. I never believed Sam’s love bullshit, but it always aggravates me when men meet my low expectations. So much for his great love if he couldn’t be bothered calling! Then I accidentally almost dialed him since I’d either forgotten or not gotten around to deleting his number from my mobile. I hung up quickly. A day or so later, he called, seemingly out of the blue. “I’m so glad I found you!” he exulted. “I’d accidentally deleted your number, and I couldn’t remember it. I tried everything to get it again but I couldn’t remember your last name either. Finally I saw you called!” “How come you didn’t have my number written down somewhere?” I asked as I rode the bus. “I never thought to do that, I’m sorry.” “I thought you were madly in love with me. If that were true you’d have made damn certain you wouldn’t lose my number.” “I should have, I apologize. “Or bothered to learn my last name.” “Uh, yeah. Where are you?” “On the bus.” “Well get off. I’ll pick you up wherever you are. Let’s go out to dinner.” “I can’t. I just got a job offer and I have to go do the paperwork.” “Can’t you do it some other time?” “NO! Sam, for god’s sakes, it’s a new job!” “Okay. I really want to make it up to you for losing your number. I’ll take you out to a really nice place I know. I’ll pick you up tonight, then.” “No, I have plans tonight,” I lied. “Cancel them,” he said. “Fuck you,” I replied. “What?” “Thursday night is better. We’ll go out to dinner Thursday night.” “I can’t. I have plans.” “Cancel them,” I said. “I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because I can’t.” “Just call her and tell her you’ll meet her some other night.” “It’s not another woman.” I highly doubted that, but I honestly didn’t care anymore. “Thursday night is best for me. If you want to go out, that’s the night to do it.” “I can’t. I told you. I have plans.” “I’m expected to drop everything when you call. Now, I don’t actually give a damn whether we go to dinner or not. I’ve over you. You want to do this, we do it Thursday night. We do it on my time now. Otherwise forget about it.” “I can’t cancel.” “Okay, we’ll just forget about it, then.” “I still want to take you out!” “Nah,” I said. “I’m over this. You disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind." Not true, but I’ll bet he believed me. I always wondered what Sam’s deal was. Everyone’s obsessed with narcissists, so I wondered if maybe that was his problem, but I tend not to go with pop-psychology labels, so I figured maybe he was just a manipulative little bastard. At any rate, I lost no further sleep over him. That Cancel them crap had gotten on my nerves more than anything else. It wasn’t until I watched a TEDx talk by a domestic violence social psychologist named Dina McMillen that I realized there was a possible explanation I’d never considered: That I was being groomed for an eventual abusive relationship. McMillen tells of over 630 violent domestic abusers, (95% male) she’s interviewed over the years in a client-doctor relationship in which she’s prohibited from telling on them. Without fear of punishment, these men have ‘dropped the mask’ and spoken with her quite freely about what they did to their partners, displaying male privilege at its ugliest and often evincing no empathy for their objectified partners. McMillen believes our solutions to domestic violence are too reactive rather than proactive. She advocates teaching young girls and women ‘in about two hours’ the ‘secrets’ abusers don’t want women to know about their psychological manipulation techniques. The mind-blowing, eye-opening takeaway for me was when she ran through the list and Sam ticked off several. Like: He needs you to trust him, plan a future with him, and fall in love with him. He pulled ‘too much, too soon.’ Early claims of love; artificial intimacy attempts; telling me what we were going to do; planning for our future together. All at the first meeting . I wondered if he’d read The Game or something that told him women think you’re serious when you speak about the future with them. McMillen spoke about pushing for constant contact but Sam didn’t do that. He did, however, want my attention like a cat: When it was convenient for him. He tried to get me to confide in him before he’d built trust. He expected me to drop everything and be at his beck and call, although he didn’t get mad when I wouldn’t. However, McMillen noted that often women go along with the little decisions these guys constantly make for you because we want to be liked and thought of as easygoing. Which I did. I’ve long believed our need to be ‘liked’ by men is one of the biggest vulnerabilities in female psychology. Whenever I’ve done dumb shit that put me in danger, like getting into a strange man’s car, it’s been because I wanted him to ‘like’ me. She offered several other red flags but you can watch the video for yourself. I strongly encourage it; it’s not graphic with no descriptions of violence. She was only able to speak very generally about her subjects and not identify anyone. “Holy fuck,” I said as I watched. She didn’t even list all the warning signs. It would take too long. She wrote a book about it, though. "But He Says He Loves Me!" - The Women's Abuse Prevention Manual Sam complained a few times about my ‘walls’ when he tried to get too close to me. He was right, but I felt pretty justified. He telegraphed his phoniness at every turn. I wonder what might have happened if I was more of a victim. Or what I might have done if I’d met him when I was more emotionally naive and trusting. Would Sam have had better luck taking advantage of me? Maybe, although I don’t think it would have advanced to emotional or physical abuse. I’ve never been abused by a man and don’t believe I’d have tolerated it from anybody. Do You Have A Thing For Abusers? Knowing the red flags will help you avoid them When I was young, I was, like many women, easier to manipulate with the carrot-and-stick approach. It’s unconscious and not specifically male; women do it too. It’s when you give someone just enough attention to keep them interested but you’re really not that interested yourself. Didn’t understand that one until I read the book He’s Just Not That Into You. I recognized how this had been done to me several times, but also, that I’d done it a few times myself. Wish I’d had this book when I was younger. I hope others will take lessons from this and realize that abusers can’t abuse you unless you let them. First and foremost, recognize their need to control and establish authority and resist it. And get out early. Because they can’t control a woman who won’t take their shit. This article first appeared on Medium in January 2020. 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!

But what if those questions could set them free? What if it led to greater freedom, happiness, more trustworthy friends and--increased status? Pixabay public domain image I didn’t want to be one of those right-wing bigots , of course. It was my last days of blogging on Medium in late 2021, slowly becoming aware of the toxic transactivism that had consumed the liberal mind while I challenged wussy feminism. I was arguing with a popular uber-feminist writer, more learned about the history and philosophy of feminism than I. She said my remarks about transwomen were harmful to a vulnerable, marginalized population when I voiced obvious questions, and I felt guilty; maybe she and the trans-allies were right? She said they needed our compassion, not our judgement. A few times, I acknowledged that transwomen were women, uncomfortably. I wanted to agree with her, but my knowledge of basic biology precluded it. I said to her: I'm also disappointed in your frankly bigoted approach to J K Rowling, who has been quite supportive of the trans community if you're not an entitled dude in a dress (I don't know if she sees them that way, but I see some of them that way). Maybe we should just start labeling the indisputable facts? People with XX chromosomes menstruate and carry babies; people with XY chromosomes don't. We can accept transgenders for what and who they are but please, don't gaslight us about who can menstruate and who will never carry a baby in their belly, until transgender surgery/treatment gets a helluva lot more sophisticated. “Where’s your compassion?” she asked. “Where’s your common sense?” I countered. How could a highly educated, grown-ass woman assert that transwomen were no different from women? She fancied herself a feminist expert! How could she not see the classic abusive male personalities that simmered beneath transactivist Etsy-sourced frillies? I asked all the glaringly obvious questions she wouldn’t. Five days later, my account was suspended. I didn’t petition to get it back. I was already used to the pointlessness of trying to reason with Medium’s woke unreasonables. I still wonder whether my former feminist foe actually believed her own B.S. Not all Believers are as True as they pretend. They know deep down what they profess is wrong-headed, or maybe even downright harmful to others. But preserving positive self-regard offers less psychic pain than a personal integrity unpopular with the maddened crowd, and so they persist, pursuing their personal poison the way alcoholics and drug addicts obsessively seek that which makes them feel worse rather than better. This article focuses on the cognitive dissonance that tortures the human spirit arising from beliefs and narratives one professes, but which one knows on a deeper level to be untrue, when one’s actions don’t align with them. When intelligence and education isn’t enough For woke progressives and liberals, part of our narrative is that we’re good, empathetic people who don’t want anyone to feel the pain of exclusion, which many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps throughout our lives. When everyone else professes X and agrees that’s the correct belief to be a good person, the crowd is always right, right? But I’m addicted to reality. I’ve never been very good at not challenging those who deny what I know to be factual. I try to keep an open mind, but not so much my brains fall out. I knew it was wrong from the get-go to claim that transwomen are the same as women because they claim that’s how they feel. The more I explored trans issues, and encountered transactivists, I realized not only weren’t they ‘the same as biological women,’ but they were about as male and misogynist as the guys I wrote women should avoid on Grow Some Labia. The reality-denying Medium feminist didn’t understand that compassion and inclusion can quickly turn into complicity and cruelty. Where was her compassion for women who felt uncomfortable sharing private spaces with the be-penised? Or for female athletes who had to compete against hulking men like Will Thomas? Or lesbians accused of ‘genital fetishism’ by transwomen with a penis? She may not have known about the growing awareness of medical harms potentially visited on ‘trans’ children, or the sudden spike in trans people coinciding with the rise of gender-questioning content on social media, and the creeping influence of queer theory public education. Maybe she didn’t know about Tumblr’s role as a queer factory for gender-morphing labels, pronouns and ‘microaggressions’ pulled out of thin air to be weaponized against people who didn’t adhere to queer mythology. Maybe she didn’t have friends with teenage kids coming home with weird ideas about whether they were actually the immutable sex they were born with. She would have, though, if she’d asked those glaringly obvious questions, and Googled. On some level, she feared what it would mean about her, her values, the hills she’d died on, the public stands she’d taken, and the testament to her intelligence. Who wants to admit they were gaslit, the ‘expert’ who could cite endless highly-regarded sources in support of feminist theory but somehow missed the angry Twitter invitations to ‘suck my ladydick’? Who frequently dissected ‘the Patriarchy’ but missed the ‘cotton ceiling’ whiners , formerly the entitled heterosexual men of our youth accusing women now of being lesbians if they wouldn’t have sex with them? ‘Trans-allies’ are in for several years of high-level, self-inflicted psychic torture, beginning with the death of sex changes for children. The Trump administration’s HHS has issued a ‘best practices’ report for treating confused ‘trans’ children beginning with therapy first. According to Jay Battarcharya, the National Institutes of Health Director, “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.” ‘Gender-affirming care’ is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal. Not only will woke progressives increasingly face a hostile mob of ‘normies’ turning accusing fingers, demanding to know how they could let his happen, but also the realization that the Trumpoids were right and they themselves were grievously wrong. They thought the science was settled. They trusted progressive media outlets that turned out to be deeply incurious. They didn’t question, and explore for themselves. They didn’t wonder how a respected periodical like Scientific American could issue a mind-bogglingly brainless article like Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobia, or wonder about the credentials of the author, a dude named ‘Simón(e) D Sun’? Scientific American, like other science periodicals, used to believe in evidence. But now, belief is the evidence. Progressive ideologues eliminated inconvenient science, just like their compatriots on t’other side, the fundamentalist Christians. A social psychologist and the UFO cult Dr. Leon Festinger was an important figure in social psychology who infiltrated a doomsday cult which believed a UFO was going to pick them up and save them from a forthcoming apocalypse. He developed the theory of cognitive dissonance after infiltrating the cult to study the members’ actions, behaviours, and thoughts once the expected continent-destroying flood failed to materialize. He examined the psychological distress they felt and how they coped when reality didn’t align with their expectations. Many refused to acknowledge they’d been wrong and rationalized away what went pear-shaped, instead spreading their message and seeking more Believers, each new recruit vindicating them. Their founder helped them rationalize away their pain and disappointment, by relaying the aliens’ convenient new message that their faith had saved the world and therefore, given humanity a second chance. Others, less committed, left the group egg-faced. Monty Python nails the cult mentality in 1979’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball To achieve cognitive consistency, the opposite of cognitive dissonance, one must rationalize the contradictions away, or change one’s mind. In other words, be willing to acknowledge new data has invalidated the old. Rationalizing is easier than thinking things through. “The experts say that if trans kids aren’t allowed to transition they’ll commit suicide. But why didn’t any do that when I was growing up?” The Pain of Asking — and the Greater Pain of Not Asking A far healthier way to achieve cognitive consistency is through learning a very simple but difficult life lesson: Knowing when to acknowledge one is wrong. The sooner the better. It’s extremely hard on the ego to admit you’ve been misled, or simply haven’t done enough research, but the longer you wait to admit what shames you, the worse your future. Being ‘wrong’ is often just a matter of believing what you do with the best available evidence , until more comes along that contradicts, disproves or simply changes the story. You weren’t wrong before; now you’re demonstrating intellectual honesty thanks to newer or better data. This is the whole foundation of scientific inquiry. The Trump years will be sheer hell for ‘trans-friendly’ progressives. They’ve denied the evidence, refused to ask the glaringly obvious questions, kept themselves as insulated as possible, and blithely dismissed facts as ‘right-wing propaganda’. They’ve rationalized their critics were vile TERFs, carefully sealing their ears, eyes and minds. Many, like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers, will cling to their original beliefs, because it’s awfully late in the game to pretend they didn’t know. The consequences of admitting error are high. Achieving cognitive consistency relieves irritating moral hypocrisy, but introduces the new threat of ostracism by unenlightened friends and family, because if Cousin Martha confesses she thinks she was now wrong about something, by extenuation she damns them all. What awaits the Questioners on the other side? The upside for Cousin Martha, if she chooses honest cognitive consistency, is immense psychological relief. Especially if she can avoid talking about it. One way she can re-reconcile her vision of herself as a Good Person is to work with the group she feel she’s harmed. If her intellectual mistake was to support gender-affirming care, she could help detransitioners facing angry backlash from transactivists for publicly admitting they made the wrong decision and now want out. Martha’s experience with her former community would be invaluable for smoothing the detransition backtrack. She’d bring compassion to her new community who tragically bought into a pseudo-scientific narrative detrimental to their health, their mental well-being and their ego. If Martha is brave, she could publicly speak about her personal journey. She could explore why she chose to believe what she did and why she no longer supports it. If she doesn’t want to do it publicly—with good reason—she can do it anonymously on a Substack or an X account. She’ll receive negative feedback, criticism, and outright flaming, but she’ll be safe from personal or professional ruin. Learn how to admit your errors and correct your mistakes. Recognize that changing your mind in light of new evidence makes you honest, not a ‘flip-flopper’. Few actually realize the power —and the optics —in being strong enough to admit and correct mistakes, especially publicly. We all understand that children blame others and everything else rather than accept responsibility. People who act like what we believe adults to be are the obvious adults in the room. And we admire their courage and integrity. There’s increased status to be found in changing your tribe from the fact-fearing to the Questioners. Achieving cognitive consistency starts with asking those glaringly obvious questions. Realigning one’s sense of self with reality may lose some friends and family, but there’s a whole other community of the intellectually and morally responsible waiting for them. Maybe the solution to losing former friends is finding wiser, truer ones. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

The battle for democracy's soul in the ICE Age is beginning to look less like good vs evil than Alien vs Predator. Guess who the losers are? By Elkman on Flickr - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 It’s been distressing to watch Donald Trump’s depressingly predictable strong-arm response to violence during the Los Angeles ICE protests. He’s been itching for just this sort of fight so he can prove to his voters he’s the manly-muscular he-man to protect the nation from illegal wrongdoers and anarchic criminals. So of course the more violence-prone on the left handed him his golden justification and demonstrate just how much moral confusion and decay rots the souls of the left as well as the right. The ICE protests are legitimate acts of free speech and began, as always, much less violently than Trump’s Himmlerian response justified, when the damage was still easily within the purview of the LAPD and Governor Gavin Newsom. But the tired pattern we saw with the George Floyd/BLM protests emerged yet again like the Alien from John Hurt’s chest: First Amendment actions degenerated into violent riots and what was once peaceful was now a legitimate reason to bring in outside help. Naturally, Democrats and liberals condemned Trump’s response rather than also the violence that justified  calling in the Guard which, just a tad too early, certainly were necessary not long after. Nadda word from the Demmies against torching shops that put people out of business, or Waymos, arguing that no one drives them so it’s okay. I doubt the firebugs would feel so sanguine if someone torched their cars as a political ‘statement’. Watching political shenanigans in the Trump II era looks more like Alien vs Predator. “Whoever wins…….we lose.” Fetterman stands alone Americans may largely agree on the need to control illegal immigration and remove criminals, but less so on Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional response. On January 22 , about half of U.S. adults thought controlling illegal immigration should be a high priority and only 20% didn’t care. It was a winning campaign promise. Most approved of removing violent offenders, but not how Trump’s executive orders dictated. Today, according to new Pew Research Center findings , while many Americans approve of suspending asylum applications and deporting illegals, 61% disapprove of shipping them to a foreign nation like El Salvador. Support for the the ICE raids is at 54%. One wonders how much higher it would be if the raids were conducted in a methodical, strategic, and properly targeted manner. Support for a border wall is also higher than it was during Trump’s first term—56% vs 46%. Democrats, unsurprisingly, support anti-illegal immigration efforts much less than Republicans, who adore the brown-shirted gross human rights abuses and complete disregard for the law and Constitution that define the very core of Donald Trump’s administration, MAGA Republicans and his own degenerate personality. No one with a shred of human decency could support this. Even some Republican voters are muttering what has become many’s repetitive mantra, “This isn’t what I voted for.” Meanwhile, the left selectively condemns the violence they dislike while ignoring or applauding that which they approve of. Bad: Right-wing response to the ICE protests. Good:  Protest violence pretending to be protected speech. It’s a pattern we’ve seen over and over again in previous protests and especially within the ‘Free Palestine’ movement which exemplifies the moral rot of the woke progressive carcass. Liberals were supposed to be the good guys, remember? Only the lone voice of Senate Democrat John Fetterman rang out in the Democratic wilderness, the only member of his party with the balls to hands-down condemn the violent protesters who invited the tough government response. “I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos.” He also noted how much Democrats “lose the high ground” when they “refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.” Fetterman may be the only ‘normie’ left in the Party. The moral morass of Trump vs the Islamofascists No one can claim the moral high ground in the campus Thunderdome when one side (s)creams for the genocide of another country while the President tries to deport anyone who expresses an opinion he doesn’t like. Protected speech: Criticizing Israel and the IDF’s actions. Unprotected speech: Attacking, harassing, discriminating against and vilifying Jews, and subjecting them to clear hate speech. Funny how quickly the left came to embrace it when it was their own. Funny how Trump came to embrace cancel culture when expressed by Islamofascists rather than MAGA fascists. No one defended Jews during Biden’s Reign of Error. The Democrats turned a blind eye, except for the Volksgemeinschaft  the Squad who gleefully encouraged the blatant violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. It’s open season on Jews in a way the world hasn’t seen since the 1930s. Remember when our  side was against Nazism? It’s dead certain President Kamala Harris would have turned a blind eye to her own Jewish citizens. Before she replaced Biden, President Wannabe WishyWashy praised campus protesters , saying, “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.” She worried more about whether women in Gaza had enough sanitary pads rather than whether Jews in her own country could go to class without being vilified as baby murderers. She never blamed the Gazans for their filthy Islamofascist dictatorship that invited retribution, nor asked why Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. She fell forever squarely on the Blame Israel side. She never asked how kids obsessed with LGBTQ rights supported the most violently homophobic people in the world. Nor how their obsession with right-wing ‘fascism’ blinded them to the Islamofascism driving the ‘Free Palestine’ movement. If she’s so appalled by IDF violence against the Gazans, where’s her outrage for Hamas’s violence against them? They’re a brutal dictatorship. She and her morally rotten compatriots didn’t see what so many of us do: Harris is as much of an authoritarian cheerleader as the Trumpitarians. Trump decided to do the right thing about campus moral rot: FIX IT. And of course, he screwed it up royally. Trump’s actions are every bit as anti-free speech as anything they’re doing or teaching at Harvard. Political diversity? Do we have any reason to believe he’ll do anything other than turn elite institutions from woke ideological shitholes to MAGA ones? Watching him work to put an end to the blatantly illegal and unconstitutional actions of student protesters violating others’ civil rights isn’t exactly Justice League. Holding my nose I grow ever-more estranged from my fellow liberals as I observe the abandonment of traditional liberal values. Remember when we  weren’t the violent ones? Now we justify violence for ‘a good cause’ the way the right has always done. Luigi Mangione is a far-left folk hero, and the same people who condemn Vance Boelter for assassinating Minnesota Democrat politicians were sad that Thomas Crooks missed Trump  last year in Pennsylvania. Los Angeles rioters threaten, “Delete that photo or we’ll fuck you up.” Condoning your own bad actions gives permission to the other side. The political football in America, like the eternal Israel vs ‘Palestine’ clusterfuck, stretches back for centuries. Axios found that in 2022, all U.S. extremist mass violence was linked to the far right , which has historically been more violent, with occasional eruptions from the left, as we saw in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and once again galvanized by the Hamas October 7 attack. The far right has no moral credibility, either, when it condemns L.A. protest violence. They gave permission. So many partisans can’t differentiate between just causes  and bad actions. Facebook friends I know to be good people post weirdly uncomfortable responses when I say things like, “You can want to criticize or end the violence against the Gazans without being antisemitic or calling for the end of Israel,” or that there is absolutely no moral justification for the October 7 attack. Many on the left don’t understand the complex history of hostilities between the collective descendants of Abraham, and worse, they conveniently ignore the vast body of historical violence and terrorism endemic to Islam. Today’s Islamofascism began with a 7th-century military commander. These Facebook friends aren’t antisemitic, but they’re soft on it, and willfully blind to who’s actually responsible for turning Gaza into a shithole, long before October 7. Squirmy leftists drag out of mothballs, instead, the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Um, eight years ago, folks? They don’t like when pointing out the same sins they excoriate on the right, clearly present on the left. Even more exemplifying of the complete moral bankruptcy of many leftists are the so-called liberal ‘feminists’ of the Antisemite Set who denied  the horrific rapes that took place on October 7. False 'False Rape Allegations': The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape Grow Some Labia 31 January 2024 Read full story We libs are supposed to wax hysterical about Project 2025 when our own embrace genocidal calls, mass rape and Islamofascism ? Of course, the left lost immediate credibility when it weighed in on the side of the October 7 attackers the very same day . Why is racism bad, but antisemitism good? Why is it so hard to say, “Protests good, rioting bad”? Is the law for all of us, or just Donald Trump? Alien vs Predator The MAGA Klan cheered when Trump pardoned his January 6th insurrectionists   rioters  exuberant tourists. When the ICE violence started, the right-wing media shrieked in horror and exaggerated the violence, while the left-wing media practically pretended it wasn’t even there. But how can conservatives claim to stand for law and order, when Trump failed to bring in the Guard for January 6th, or when he hypocritically refused to call the Capitol Hill rioters what he now calls the ICE protesters: Insurrectionists. The morally rotten right gave permission for violent ICE protests. FFS, they chose a demonstrably lawless man to uphold the law. A second time. It’s hard to envision this bipartisan moral decay as ending in anything other than pain, blood, and at least some deaths. I still sometimes wonder whether Donald Trump is America’s ugliest enema , the man who will purge the shit out of both sides of the polar-ized ICE caps. Well, someone had to do it. The haters, criminals and rioters on the left weren’t going to clean themselves or anyone else up. It’s just a shame that the right won’t either. They’ll simply replace their own lawless, authoritarian vision for America to replace the Democrats’. And for now, it’s Alien vs Predator and—guess who’s losing. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Why do people cling to outdated ideas more than their unfortunate past hairstyles? Fossilized dinosaur Image by Peter Griffin at Public Domain Pictures Bill Maher’s recent New Rule explains in the most sarcastic manner possible why the ossified #MeToo movement needs to add a new amendment for 2025: “If you’re being abused, you’ve gotta leave right away.” This updates a relentless drive that #MeToo did nothing to dispel, consistently ignoring the central statement of fact in Maher’s Rule: Women have choice and agency. Maher quite rightly notes, as I’ve been screaming into the feminist wind, that #MeToo needs to recognize sex crime reporting has shot up, as have the number of women willing to speak out—often under their own names rather than social media pseudonyms. States have passed more victim-friendly laws making it easier to report. Sez Maher, “We’re no longer in the ‘No one listens to women or takes them seriously’ era anymore.” Including the police. His comments were inspired by the Diddy trial, in which Cassie Ventura’s texts come across as less non-consensual than she testified. It points to the strangely controversial feminist notion that women have the agency to leave abusive relationships, and the time to report and leave is as soon as it starts, not ten years into the abuse, or worse, ten years after it ends. The LA Times doesn’t agree; a modern chickie-boo journalist stuck in 1982 argues, essentially, that Diddy’s victims had no personal agency ; that ‘trauma connections’, the feminist catchphrase to explain away inconvenient female responsibility, kept them psychologically bound to him. Although they weren’t the only thing, as Cassie Ventura admitted. She stays (present tense) for the money: Diddy is still paying her rent. The LA writer’s ‘feminist’s’ perspective is so ossified I’m surprised she could move her fingers to type. She rails against those who ask ‘why don’t they leave,’ rather than asking when that will become a viable question. How much longer, and much more power, must women accumulate before we recognize that it’s easier to avoid developing those infamous trauma connections in the first place? This ain’t the Ike and Tina Turner era. It ain’t The Battered Wife, The Burning Bed, or a 1980s marital rape trial in which the defendant’s lawyer asked, “A woman who’s still in a marriage is presumably consenting to sex…Maybe this is the risk of being married, you know?” Never does the LA writer ask the question so many other ossified feminists don’t either: Yes, we agree trauma connections are real along with many complex reasons why women get involved with men like P. Diddy and stay, so why aren’t we encouraging women and particularly young girls to observe their personal psychology to identify their weak points so would-be Cassie Venturas can avoid Diddies? P. Diddy’s Misogyny and Misogynoir Are The Red Flags His Victims Ignore I suspect others like Ms. I’m-So Ossified-I-Still-Sport-A-Toni-Home-Perm fear the embarrassing answers, like that putting up with abusive men often involves a mental cost/benefit analysis: How worth it is it to stay? Enough to not have to pay one’s own rent, apparently. And, you got to meet a lot of stars and celebrities, so maybe the drug-laced compulsory group sex was worth it. The L.A. writer and others whose ideals should have gone extinct by now continue to infantilize women, when they can easily ruin a man’s life by naming him in a #MeToo tweet. Women no longer lack power they once did in the face of patriarchy. I’d expect my contemporaries to get with the program, look around, and observe how downright feminized , for example, the Democratic Party has become. They’re still going on as if women are constantly dragged under by a perpetual riptide of misogyny. Oh please. We have all failed the Millennials and Zoomers by teaching or at least not challenging outdated victim mentalities that don’t, as Bill Maher points out, hold up to scrutiny anymore. ‘22 scariest lines’? Speaking of ossified feminists, Ms. magazine recently extracted what they consider to be the scariest parts of the Republican Project 2025. If you’ve read the document (has anyone?) or even skimmed it, you know there are a shit-ton of bad ideas, but Ms. managed to pull out , instead, good ideas that make the project look a lot less sinister to people whose Permian-era values aren’t summed up as, “If the other side supports something common sense, I’m against it.” Most of Ms. ’s fear factors are those which are now supported by a fair chunk of normie human mammals, including protecting children from trans ideology; adopting “marriage, family, work, church, school, volunteering,” as ‘building blocks’ of a healthy society; promoting patriotism, colorblindness, and workplace competence in place of woke/social justice ideology; marriage promotion; calls for a more fact-based approach to the next pandemic; and defining a woman as what we actually are: Adult human females. Evolution: It doesn’t just terrify bass-ackwards Christians! Other selected ‘scary lines’ were genuinely scary, demonstrating conservative hostility to abortion rights and the environment, and a serious hard-on for authoritarianism we’re already watching unfold; but one ‘scary line’ for Ms. was downright hypocritical: Damning the Project for proposing to eliminate promoting abortion information and services abroad. Totally cool, though, with screwing up perfectly normal kids overseas with social-justice ideological genderwoo. Most of Ms. ’s hand-wringing is rooted in unexamined values. These lefty lollies haven’t investigated modern research in the areas of brain science , evolutionary psychology , history , and other schools of thought that have greatly changed how we think about men and women, sex roles, and power. Their views are as ossified as their knees. As are those of so many in both parties in Washington. The dinosaurs of D.C. Washington is a town full of lumbering walnut brains. The comet finally struck, on January 20th. Now all we mammals have to do is ride out the bipartisan authoritarian winter. The exemplar of ossification in America is our own Trumposaurus Wrecks and his creaky MAGAdon John Hammonds resurrecting bad, unworkable, no-longer-viable ideas like an ideological Jurassic Park. Like tariffs as stuck in the early ‘80s as much as the L.A writer. Like eliminating healthcare. Like hoovering up anyone not-white rather than checking to see if they’re actually illegal immigrants, or criminals. Like eliminating pollution standards. And his love affair with a ‘Gilded Age’-era economic agenda . Donald Trump is such a relic I’m surprised he didn’t drag his supermodel future wife off the runway by her hair. ‘Pussy-grabbing’ is positively Paleolithic. The Jurassic Park of museum-worthy long-past-their-sell-by ideas aren’t just limited to the GOPosauruses and their red-capped semi-fossilized Congresscritters. The equally-ossified Democratatops are now less popular than a Bible at a Diddy freak-off because of their own ideas that, like Trump, they Just. Won’t. Let. Go. Here’s a screaming example of everything far left-ossified that drives the Democratatops consistently into the extinction ditch: The 5,000-year-old hate-on for all things Jewish, particularly Israel, and the ludicrous notion that the ‘Palestinians’ are sinless and blameless. The left was goose-stepping antisemitism when I was in college, although mostly behind closed doors. But an attack on a music festival empowered them to crawl out from under their death camp rubble to fly their keffiyeh freak flags. New York mayor wannabe Zohran Mamdani wants to ‘globalize the intifadah’'; Democratic ‘Squad’ Congress members Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar were the only Democrats who couldn’t muster the moral courage to vote for a House resolution late last year to condemn a ‘global rise of antisemitism’. Then there’s the Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan at your local elitist university. These people who haven’t cracked open a book about Israel or Judaism since the original Exodus would feel quite at home in fifteenth-century Europe. Traditional Democratic ideals once sensibly rooted in tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion have fossilized. No one’s questioned whether they’ve taken laudable values too far for too many years. Is there such a thing as too much tolerance, too much human value, too much diversity, too much inclusion? Can we consider those questions, please, while Democrats and the far-left lament the University of Pennsylvania revoking Will Thomas’s swimming awards and naming the actual (real female) winners years after they ‘lost’ to a man with an obvious dick in his swim trunks? Who’s running the Democrats, anyway? Dr. Renee Richards ? Today, they console themselves after an election trouncing with self-congratulating, holier-than-thou virtue signalling, mouthing pieties to tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion while they turn away their conservative, Trump-voting family members from Thanksgiving dinner. And they think Trump voters are the intolerant ones. Evolve already! CC0 1.0 Universal image from Open Clip Art I know so many people whose beliefs and values remain mired in amber. Cognitive scientist Dr. David Levitin at Montreal’s McGill University claims humans are not wired to change their minds because until very, very recently, information changed so little that facts tended to get stuck in proto-craniums. Except, how would humans have survived if they weren’t forced to learn new ideas and skills, like how to survive the approaching Ice Age? It strikes many that we often refuse to re-examine old values and beliefs periodically, or simply to naturally evolve, because it might suggest we were wrong, about which we have a veritable phobia, even though it might not always have been a wrong belief, but something changed, or we now have better knowledge. More contemporarily, changing one’s mind carries particular peril for those whose community is particularly intolerance-based: Failing to kowtow to established ossified narratives runs one the risk of being ostracized from their community with ‘cancellation’ and defriendings. Liberals won’t cross party lines as much as the right. Many Democratic young women won’t date a Trump supporter ; who are less likely to feel the reverse, although, as more women drift toward the Republicans, maybe dating is getting easier, especially since many white women traditionally vote that way. Never do they wonder whether perhaps Trump won partly because he promised to roll back the excesses of Democratic ossified policies and values, however ossified his own might be. Some people believe they don’t need to change their views when they already ‘know’ they’re right, howevermuch facts fail to support their ossification. Easier, it becomes, to embrace safer ‘crony beliefs’ that reduce the risk of social ostracism rather than adopt ‘merit beliefs’ based in evidence and best available knowledge. Like they say in Communist countries: Shut up and keep your head down. Thinking too critically leads to cognitive dissonance from holding conflicting beliefs. De-ossification isn’t popular with one’s peer group, whether they’re lefty liberals or hardcore conservatives. Remember the Dixie Chicks fiasco during Bush II when they offended conservative fragile flowers and got banned from radio? It really doesn’t pay to think for yourself. Critical thinking is for losers and people who never want to receive a social invitation ever again. But the dinosaurs did eventually die out, and sometimes it feels like maybe we’re experiencing a global T-Rex vs Velociraptor duke-out to the death. Maybe all we ‘normies’ have to do is stay underground until the last of the progressive and MAGA dinosaurs fall. After all, we inherited the earth from them once before, and we can do it again. No one knows if this is a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, anarchist or autocrat. All we know is that it didn’t move fast enough. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Nick Normal on Flickr Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Thoughts of a 'From away' during my Freedom Week: Today is Canada Day, and Friday is the Fourth of July. Yay, and uh....yay? Photo by the author I’m a ‘from away’ who’s lived in Canada for twenty years and I’ve never lost that sense that I’m still a bit of an outsider. ‘From away’ is an Atlantic provinces expression meaning someone who’s not from here or has moved from way the hell somewhere else in Canada. This is ‘Freedom Week’ for this ex-pat From Away, when I feel most conflicted about where I come from and where I am. I feel most at home with my fellow ‘from aways’. My neighborhood is nothing but foreign—us. Lately, we’re deluged with Ukrainians. We were up to our butts in them before as home to a fairly large diaspora; but since the war began, we’ve been up to our earlobes in them. I’m considering learning Ukrainian after French. While today’s Canada Day is more intense and aggressively patriotic than previous ones, I expect the Fourth of July in the Ignited States of American’t will light the skies more easily than their own muted souls, with questions of how much longer it will remain the Land of the Free, along with soul-searching about how the American Project all went so unimaginably tits-up. Canada is now under threat from the United States, which is now a national mental health casualty driven collectively mad by insane split politics that re-elected a demented criminal madman to replace the senile but sweet old man before him. The current geezer seems hell-bent on destroying his own country, and everyone else’s, although I imagine it will eventually be mostly America pulling itself out of the wreckage. Canada has gone uber-patriotic in a way that would shame a MAGA after Donnie Demento forced us to realize neither Americans, and by extension their political parties, can be depended on to nominate and choose their leaders wisely. Fifty-first state , indeed. It’s a MAGA mentally masturbatory delusion to think any other country wants to become part of the Ignited States for the same reason Ukraine and other European countries resist the Putinocracy. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a week or so ago that Trump can, in fact, deport migrants to shithole dumping grounds like El Salvador and South Sudan to which they have no ties. No doubt ‘traitorous’ ex-pats like me, especially us dual citizens, and other ‘enemies’ of the state are next if we dare cross the border again. The U.S., to be perfectly blunt, is skipping down the failing-state path. How American wars against Canada always turn out. As The Eagle falls, the Mighty Beaver rises I remember telling my mother when I was maybe ten or so, “I’m really lucky to have been born when and where I was.” I was old enough to recognize my life was pretty damn good in the United States, not like the ‘ starving children in China ’ Mom would invoke to shame me into eating my vegetables. I knew my mother and my uncle got crappier Christmas presents than my brother and I because they grew up during the Depression, when Grandma would say, “Jim, only cut the pot roast this far, I need the rest for the weekend.” Whereas in our house it was no big deal whether there were leftovers or not. I recognized, also, that I was better off in 1973 than people were when kids died regularly and girls didn’t have much freedom to do anything except boring household chores, and teenage boys went off to die in foreign wars fought on someone else’s soil. My adolescence and college years were an era of free speech and thought in which I could say anything I wanted, except to call my mother a bitch, as I found out the hard way. But the American sense of can-do degraded over the years, along with freedom of thought, more reasonable politics, and social movements with actual problems to solve. The country seemed no longer to stand for what it used to. Little by little, Americans’ collective identity as all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips declined, and by the time I moved to Canada in 2005, a moron running the country approved of prisoner torture, and manufactured new America-hating Islamofascist terrorists in a Cuban prison. Moving north made me feel safe again. Shortly after, I met an American lesbian who told me she and her girlfriend also felt safer here, too—the very reason they emigrated. I concurred, thinking of how faintly ominous was the flapping American flag while crossing the Blue Water Bridge to visit my mother country. I knew I would return, but still. Mass shootings. Conservative crazies who recognized, on some level, that Canada was more like Golden Age America than the U.S. was now. Rising crime. Racism from all sides and a growing hatred for women. Then, Obama. “Hello again!” I’d cheerfully greet Old Glory at the bridge. Today, America be crazier. My flag looks more like a skull-and-crossbones. I’m so afraid of my mother country I won’t cross the border at all. My fellow Americans, in a fit of madness, re-elected a demonstrated incompetent again, who has now gone mega-MAGA-toxic full-blown megalomaniac. Canadians and other foreigners literally fear crossing the border for hassles, pushy questions, and demands to access our phone data. Or worse, detention. The very worst: Jail on Trumped-up charges. And maybe not in America. So here we stay, and vacation anywhere that isn’t the U.S., a trend that’s spreading around the world as the U.S. tourism industry quickly collapses. Absent Canadians lead the world in the American exodus, as it was we who until now provided by far the most U.S. tourism and vacation trips annually. America’s loss is Canada’s gain. Hell, we’re even visiting our own country more . America may actually Make Canada Great Again While America commits seppa-kook, Canada turns hopefully to a new endearingly crooked-smiled Prime Minister who embodies what American politicians used to before fuzzy but affable Ronald Reagan. Mark Carney is the adult in the room, a kind and sober father bringing a steady voice, a strong hand, and a willingness to stand up to an intellectual peon of a President the way our former deer-in-the-headlights prettyboy couldn’t. The ‘governor’ crap stopped with Mark Carney. “I hear what Donald Trump says, but I don’t take direction from him.” Trump, he says, isn’t bringing up annexation anymore in private conversations. Complacent Canadians are forced to grow up as the empire next door melts down. No longer can we casually rely on U.S. support for defense or allyship. Trump declared war on our economy, hoping we’d knuckle under and become a state, but he severely ‘misunderestimated’ how proud and patriotic Canadians actually are, and how fiercely we are willing to fight to retain our sovereignty. Trump knows little of American history and may not know America’s two previous attempts to annex Canadian territory failed. And America collectively forgets, over and over, how it’s inevitably forced into guerrilla wars by Canadians, Vietnamese rice paddy farmers and Middle Eastern goat herders, only to return with no mission accomplished. America is still exceptional. Sort of. No country is perfect, including Canada. My adopted people, like Americans, have become too ‘woke’, with the concomitant reductions in free speech and an ugly antisemitism every bit as virulent as the U.S.’s. Although left-wing ‘progressives’ assure me Nazis and fascists are only on the right, the only Nazis I see here scream Free Palestine rather than Heil Hitler. Our economy is in the crapper, housing is unaffordable, and we’re sitting ducks not just for our deranged neighbor to the south, but just as critically by China and Russia, who are eyeing our melting polar caps for the buried treasure beneath. Mr. Carney is strategizing heavily for our defensive future, creating priorities, forging new alliances with Europe, and warning Canadians sacrifices will be required. He didn’t elaborate and I wish he would. I want to know what to expect, as I’m sure my countryfolk would too. But as a Canadian, I feel more hopeful than I have in a long time. I feel less stress, despite our immediate threat from the south. The TrumpInSloMo for Canada is that he’s forcing us to become a better country and closer Canadians. Donald Trump may actually Make Canada Great Again. Prime Minister Carney said that if America no longer wanted to lead the world, Canada would. TrumpInSloMo is forcing our attention away from culture war issues to the very real threats we face, rather than Trudeau’s First World problems like masking wars and ‘trans rights’. (I haven’t seen much Pride pride on my end of Toronto this year. Fewer rainbow flags and letter-jumble virtue signalling from local businesses. #PrideFatigue ) Canada: We’re getting serious. And proud. We’re waking up and, ironically, many of us see a brighter future as the demented old coot drives allies, goodwill, and corporate megaliths to the True North strong and free. Long before I even considered leaving the States, I thought we Americans needed to get over ourselves. We were not put anywhere by God. We’re not as exceptional as we think, although we’re more exceptional than the rest of the world thinks. We Americans brought democracy back after a 1,700-year hiatus and with the help of our French, Spanish, Prussian, and even a few Indigenous allies, we won our right to sovereignty and self-determination with a victory we couldn’t have accomplished without them. We dragged our asses behind the rest of you on abolishing slavery, but then pioneered new heights in human rights recognition and declaration. We’ve fallen short of it in the decades hence, and so has everyone else. We have failed ourselves, and each other. But many Americans admit now—our shit does, in fact, also stink. I can still identify, talk, think, and be American. You can take the American out of America, but you can never take America out of the American. I still love my country. I still love my peeps. I believe moral right will eventually prevail. It has for 249 years. Today, I prefer the red-and-white to the red-white-and-blue, but I harbour hopes that my mother country will one day allow me to straddle the border proudly flying both flags. With the American one right-side-up. That one day I can cross the border fearlessly, regardless of which party is in power. But for now, this ‘from away’ will stay away. America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year and that’s saying something. The Bicentennial was a truly joyful year for us; next year’s—sesquibicentennial? Bicentennial-and-a-half? One quarter-millennium? Semiquincentennial! — I hope will be more joyous than today would suggest. Happy Freedom Week to all my North American peeps, and especially all my fellow ex-pats. We get twice the fireworks! Actor Darren McGavin, the ‘Night Stalker’, offers a 1976 Bicentennial minute. These breaks offered Americans a brief thumbnail sketch of Revolution-era stories and events. Canadian equivalent: Heritage Minutes, except we haven’t stopped producing them since 1991. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

You don't have to be an expert in everything. Just Google it when people make claims you're not sure about. And, sometimes ask for evidence. Me, when someone asks me a dumb question they could have easily Googled. Public domain image from Pikist. We humans live in abject fear that we might be publicly busted for looking stupid; that if we don’t know something we’ll be laughed at and shamed for our lack of omniscience. And sometimes we are, whether we deserve it or not. We fake it hoping they’ll take it. We make it up if we have to. Intellectual bullies, meanwhile, roam the planet looking for exactly you—someone they can shame and diminish. They may not even be experts in the topic of discussion; they just have to know a little bit more. I’m here to tell you you don’t have to know everything about everything, and you don’t lose an argument just because you admit you don’t know much about it. This spring, my Montreal filmmaker cousin stayed with me for Toronto’s annual HotDocs festival. We had a grand time hanging out, catching up, drinking ‘cuz-tinis’ and watching movies - including a few my filmmaker cousin had made. We both lean left (like me, he doesn’t let his brains fall out either) although our realms of knowledge differed. My cuz knew a lot about space travel, about which he’d made a documentary, as well as foreign defense politics, which he keeps up on more than I. “Can you name the four biggest nuclear powers in the right order?” he challenged me. No, I couldn’t, although I figured Russia, the U.S., and China all had to be on the list. They were, in that order, with France as the distant fourth. (I would have guessed Germany.) I felt a little intellectually diminished not knowing that, but then realized, hey, I’m not as knowledgeable as Alan about this. It’s okay . Image from Pexels Later, I told him about the alleged 6,000 burials of Indigenous Canadian children, which Indigenous bands claimed have died in our country’s residential schools, although they haven’t provided one single case of excavated remains. My cuz found it hard to believe. “It’s true,” I said. “Everyone’s always surprised. Look it up.” The next morning when I emerged from my bedroom he said, “Hey, you were right! I Googled this morning on the Indigenous graves and holy cow, they haven’t unearthed a single kid!” You have to Google it because it just sounds too crazy. Later, we talked about trans issues. “I find that hard to believe,” he said several times as I told him about the lack of science behind sex transitions for kids, and the driver of the sexual fetish autogynephilia in the movement, and the trans-identified men who had used access to women’s private spaces to assault or intimidate them or just to satisfy their need to ogle women and girls undressing. “I’d need to know where that came from. I’d like to see those sources,” he said. He wasn’t skeptic-bullying, it was an honest response. I really didn’t want to dig up links again like I have for so many others. “Google it,” I told him, knowing he’d find his answers in the first page of search results. He said later, “I thought about a lot of the things you said about transgender issues and came to realize that it’s okay to say, ‘I just don’t know enough about that.’” Ironically, he’d come to the same conclusion about his lack of knowledge on trans issues that I’d come to about nuclear politics. It’s liberating once you realize it’s okay to admit you simply don’t have enough knowledge about an issue. She never minded admitting she didn't know something. So what, she thought; I could always learn.― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy Not everyone has gotten into the weeds on culture war issues as I have, and many are genuinely mystified as to why I even find them important. I can be impatient with people who don’t seem to get it, but some don’t even know what’s going on; an apolitical news-avoiding friend was surprised to find we’re now giving sex-change treatments to children. My knowledge of global politics will probably never approach my cousin’s level. It’s his bag, not mine. Nevertheless, Alan doesn’t pay much attention to the eternal Israeli-Gazan conflict and didn’t know that the Middle East took advantage of the then-new state of Israel by pushing their own Mizrahi Arab Jews out of their homelands because now they had a ‘dumping ground’ for them. How many people don’t know that Israel was only first populated by European Jews, but that a second influx came shortly later from the antisemitic Arab world? Betcha 95% of the college campus Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan don’t know that, including the ones from the Arab world. I don’t know if Alan felt momentarily stupid by my greater knowledge of trans issues or Arab Jews, but we both came to realize we’re not stupid if we don’t know as much about an issue as someone else. You learn important things talking to others, like that Indigenous bands here are making some highly spurious claims and excoriating Canadians who ask too many questions like, “Where are the bodies?” Or, that France is more nuclear-badass than you thought. Now, let’s examine when should you provide evidence, and when you should point folks to Google. Demands to ‘Prove it!’ We often end arguments by demanding, “Prove it! Send me your source!” Such requests can be valid, or wielded to mire the statement-maker in endless Googling trying to find that article they read last month by that guy, in the article in the Conversation? Or was it Quillette? Or maybe Newsweek? The challengers might not even look at it, either through lack of interest (the purpose might be to shut you up) or worse, for fear that you proved them wrong. One intellectual bully in a pro-science skeptic chat group I once belonged to put down those he deemed his inferiors by challenging them over anything. If one failed to provide evidence, he declared them ‘debunked’. If you challenged him on some claim, he’d tell you he didn’t need to provide sources, it was ‘common knowledge’. While ‘common knowledge’ is sometimes a fair response, a bully can use it to abrogate responsibility, holding others to a higher standard than himself. Another type of bully simply seeks to destroy, roaming social media looking for targets. When I was working for a technology company a few years ago I made an online joke about “Which pronouns are we using this week?” and two users tried to start a cancel campaign to perhaps get me fired, since I was posting under our professional account. I didn’t think what I said was bad, even professionally, but I checked out the two accounts and one described himself as a ‘professional Millennial,’ which I took to mean professionally unemployed, especially since he was tweeting in the middle of the day. The other person also looked suspiciously jobless. I blocked them and no other Twitterati picked up their calls for action. I wiped my forehead in relief, since my boss was absolutely phobic about ‘controversy’. Ideological bullies are near-religious about their political beliefs, whether it’s trans rights, antiracism, supporting the ICE raids or devotion to a political figure like Donald Trump. Women have finally achieved some unpleasant equity—in political and social media bullying. Some discussions are beginning to center around how feminized ‘cancel culture’ is , how much it resembles the feminine power games any female older than two years old has experienced, and that women may be behind the popularity of wokeness politics. Campus protests are dominated by women . Educator and narcissism expert Dr. Nathalie Martinek , in her article Dark neurodivergence or Cluster B traits? , analyzes what she observes as “a social pattern I’ve observed in adults who frame antisocial behaviour as trauma-based neurodivergence. These individuals often display vulnerable narcissism , covert manipulation , and antisocial tendencies that never come with real accountability. They rarely apologise unless there is something to gain. They are skilled at DARVO [deny, attack, reverse victim and offender] and consistently position themselves as the victim, the empath, and the misunderstood one.” These people, she says, reframe as ‘neurodivergence’ what is actually “indicators of arrested emotional and moral development,” rather than subject their ‘fragile identity’ to self-awareness and confrontation. Sound familiar, ladies? Nathalie notes the ‘flood’ of social media warnings about ‘narcissistic’ and ‘toxic’ people. She doesn’t mention sexes here but I’ve noticed they appear to be predominantly women, and when they’re not, they’re often men claiming to be or pretending to be women. Back when I was on Medium, it was hands-down biological women diagnosing everyone they’d ever dated or had a disagreement with as a narcissist or a toxic personality. Sound kinda like the Mean Girls you dreaded in school? Back in my early-Internet skeptic group days, on the other hand, intellectual bullies were almost all men. My ex-partner was in an email free speech/anti-censorship discussion group, where many seemed more interested in argumentative victory than actually changing minds over various media stories and court cases they were debating. There were no women on this list. He asked me if I wanted to join and I said I had no interest in an intellectual dick-slinging contest. Go figger. When do you need to provide evidence? I’m circumspect when people ask me to ‘send me your sources. I have to see them.’ It’s not bullying, it’s a fair request, but if it’s fairly common information, I tell them to Google it if I think they’ll find it on the first page of results. (My ‘common knowledge’ defense). On the other hand, if it’s not something they can easily find themselves, like a particular research paper they won’t find by general Googling—I dig it up and send it to them. That’s a valid request. I archive many articles on a thumb drive so I can find them easily. People aren’t stupid for not knowing something someone else does. (I’m assuming you don’t hang out with sub-literate NEETs who spend their entire day downloading porn, gaming, and debating whether that guy with Karolyn Leavitt is her husband or her dad.) What we shouldn’t do is allow anyone to make us feel stupid for not knowing something. We also shouldn’t bully ourselves for not knowing something. Hector from #holysmoke, the aforementioned skeptics’ group, loved laughing at others but, predictably, had no sense of humor about himself. One evening I showed up with mischief on my mind. “How do I know you’re really Hector?” I challenged him. “How do I know you’re the real deal? Have you got a DNA test to prove yourself? A notarized testimonial? Any witnesses here to whether it’s really you or not?” “Fuck you, Frenchy!” he replied. “Yep, that’s the real Hector,” everyone else laughed. He was the only one not amused. Always remember: Bullies are ridiculously insecure. Write that down! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Childfree-by-choice is still and always an option. Don't listen to the most unfit, irresponsible Genghis Khan wannabes. Eight billion is enough. Tragedy stalked this family like P Diddy at a high school. Photo by the author. Public domain. The above photo is from a small cemetery around the corner from where I live. Six Bryans children, and only two made it to adulthood. I remember reading elsewhere of a nineteenth-century family in America who had twenty children, only one of which made it that far. Back then, relentless breeding was necessary to perpetuate the family line. Today, losing a child is a tragedy beyond imagining in an era where parents can reasonably expect their children to outlive them. My French grandmother lost her firstborn to a tragic accident back in France, but it’s a wonder she didn’t lose more of her six children. Although her last three were born in the late teens and ‘20s, and in America, where kids drank milk instead of wine at meals, and had vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria and tetanus, and wars were fought elsewhere. My mother knew a child who died of a childhood illness. Fifteen years earlier, she would have known several. Six billion humans later… The eight-billion-strong human race is in no danger of under-replacing the dead, no matter what you’ve heard from billionaires racing each other to see who can be the most Genghis Khan, at least with consent since mass rape is now largely frowned upon. Baby production is the renewed conservative obsession, propagandized by Elon Musk and Greg Lindberg, whose baby-factory network landed him in prison. Other criminal billionaires the enterprising womb can engage with is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, who claims to have fathered over 100 babies around the world and is currently also in legal trouble in France. Rich men seek out young beautiful women to bear their children, in true 21st-century form—sexlessly. In fact, only one of Elon Musk’s children was conceived while he was there. Right-wing baby-making is liberally (ar ar) led by the very worst stereotypes of irresponsible non-fathers spreading their sperm as if that’s all that matters, who believe fathers really aren’t all that important in raising a child. (Um, how is this right-wing again?) Some conservatives ignore it, seeming to believe fathers are only tsk-tsk necessary when a woman gets pregnant by someone who isn’t an entitled rich guy. Rather, she’s a deplorable welfare ho whose kid will grow up to be a CVS smash ‘n’ grabber because he didn’t have a steady paternal hand. But when a father decides to seed a child from afar, and nothing else, many conservatives are silent, except for the ‘family values’ religious right, with whom I haven’t agreed on anything for forty years until now . Nearby are ‘tradwives’ who prefer housewifery to the rat race, and work to convince others via TikTok and Instagram that really, doing everything for your man and your children is all the fulfillment you need. While I won’t deny that avenue, it’s the very reason why Betty Friedan freed women from the family trap in the first place, since women weren’t finding the Betty Crocker life as fulfilling as they might. It was a trap for fathers, too. They didn’t get to see the kids grow up. They didn’t get to see the ‘firsts’. First smile, first wobbly step clinging to the divan, first time discovering grass. (The lawn! The lawn!) 1960s dads after a big holiday dinner. Photo by the author’s mom Gen X introduced—with some success—the notion that men should spend more time with their families, in a world in which both parents now worked, but with only limited success. Digital media made the sex divide even worse—mobile-addicted young people can’t even connect with each other like normal humans, many remain virgins , and young males (virginity Ground Zero) ruin themselves through porn or toxic influencers like Andrew Tate. While young women ruin themselves with toxic feminism and ‘progressive’ politics: Is there a real argument behind the concern about declining fertility? The reduced fertility hand-wringing isn’t for naught. Fewer or no children means no one to take care of the elderly in their dotage. Fewer taxpayers mean reduced services all around, not to mention reduced federal funding for states. Lower fertility worsens labor shortages, although wages failing to keep up with the cost of living for decades also contributes. The anti-immigration sentiment will fade quickly when populations realize they need to get shit done. The Trump administration is pondering $5,000 ‘baby bonuses’ to encourage people to go forth and be fertile—already a demonstrably failed policy, as the South Korean government has ponied up $200B trying to get South Koreans to propagate which failed to inhibit their ‘4B’ movement - No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. Why? Because Korean women are sick of misogynist men with prehistoric attitudes who resist women’s advancement, feel entitled to sexually harass, and are often overtly hostile. Maybe the money would have been better spent addressing the four U’s of South Korean masculinity: Undateable, unshaggable, unreliable and unmarriageable. Meanwhile, back in the States…. A more level-headed strategy for boosting birth rates won’t please liberals: Graduate from high school, get a full-time job, marry first, then have babies. Fifty years ago, everyone was doing it. Now, not so much. But as Rob Henderson pointed out in his newsletter recently, it works . The only proviso is this ain’t the 1950s and you can’t make much money on a high school education unless you learn a trade, which pays a lot less than it did before union-busting. Unions, love ‘em or hate ‘em, built the U.S. after the war, and as they declined, so to did the middle class. The drive to thrive is highly complex and will take more than one or two solutions to resolve. For certain young women, rich-entitled impregnation makes sense if she wants a child but is surrounded by man-children, and knows she can’t afford single motherhood. But. Strike a deal with a faraway sperm donor who provides the child support, and voilà ! You have a right-wing Murphy Brown . Billionaire genetics must factor in as well. Maybe she, too, could produce a genius kid who might make billions and set her for life. Except for the research she may not be aware of that consistently links negative outcomes to fatherlessness by about 76%—mental illness, suicide attempts, incarceration, dropping out of school. Environment and culture matter as much as genetics. If she doesn’t find a loving stepfather to provide the real example and effort billionaire donors don’t, she may raise the most deviously genius CVS looter in the ‘hood. Conservatives need to remember their most cherished value is that it takes two to make a baby, and, if they remain true to their ideological values, two to properly raise it. They must make up their minds: Are fathers important or not? If not, admit the libs were right and stop shaming single mothers. If not, prove it by doing it. Get married, make babies with one woman, and help raise and take care of them. But condemn those of your own who aren’t doing it right. What’s good for the libs is good for the cons. What would happen if a few billion humans quickly died off? Experts think we’ll hit peak humans at somewhere between 9-10B in a few more decades and then live with regular human decline permanently. There’s a controversial ‘ Toba catastrophe theory ’ which begs an interesting question: What if a chunk of humanity suddenly died off? The theory considers whether the human population experienced a serious reproduction bottleneck 70,000 years ago after a supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia. It’s theorized to have brought down a ‘volcanic winter’ on the world population after ejecting ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, resulting in vegetation die-offs and significant cooling in some areas—and maybe to a huge decline in human reproduction. Scientists cite the fairly low genetic variation in humans at this time, without the same in other primates. After recovering from the catastrophic event, humans eventually moved out of Africa and populated other parts of the world. Archaeologists argue that some regions may have been more affected than others, while other experts argue there might have been other causes for the mass migration. So how bad would it be if something similar happened and we lost, say, a quarter of the world’s population—about two billion? That would take us back to the world of 1999. Depending on how and where the population declines were worst—most likely the poorest and unstable parts of the world—post-shock humans would eventually come together and do what needs to be done to pick themselves up and move on, like our ancestors had to do throughout human history. To misquote another great philosophical thinker—Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, humans, like life, find a way. Which is why I don’t lose sleep over declining fertility rates. There are genuine consequences to a globally declining birth rate we need to consider and adapt to; there are, I would remind population hysterics, other solutions besides baby-making. Maybe we’ll need to spread our resources differently. Maybe we’ll need to take care of our own elderly family members more. (Maybe give that $5,000 to people caring for relatives instead.) We didn’t know how to handle a pandemic lockdown until we were forced. Rather than fretting about a baby dearth, we can accept the drop until humanity somehow collectively decides the time is right to go forth and be fruitful again. Maybe declining fertility is all just part of the natural evolutionary process. Childfree by choice is still an option There’s a lot to be said for not raising humans you don’t want. I chose the professional life, and never regretted it. My life definitely does not suck. Many others’ don’t either. In fact, it would probably be greatly to our benefit to stop fucking for ten or fifteen years. Darwin knows it would be a boon to the environment, and we keep forgetting we still have to live here since Elon can’t build a rocket yet that doesn’t explode like Mentos in Coke. It would probably suck even if he could get us there. Seriously, after about three weeks of a tedious landscape you can’t easily visit, or send the kids out to play in, you’re going to long for a walk on a beach, or a mountains horizon (with trees), or Jesus, even the flat unending plains of Saskatchewan. Geez, if this is what you want to look at for the rest of your life just build a house in Death Valley. Image generated by Poe AI The hell with baby-making. Americans especially can’t afford it now with a mentally unstable old man ruining the economy and ensuring low prices will never terrorize consumers again. If Trump’s MAGAs really want to make America fruitful again, maybe they should raise wages and stop destroying jobs. In fact, raise taxes on the rich rather than everyone else which is what tariffs do-. After all, if billionaires can afford to pay 100 women to have their babies, they can sure as hell afford higher taxes. Just sayin’. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

COVID-19 spotlighted political polarization and how you can't trust 'reliable sources' or even 'the science' when even the scientists were biased and censorship-crazed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 photo by Joe Zachs on Flickr A few years ago a subscriber challenged me to learn more about the COVID pandemic and response when I asked for 'convincing evidence' re conservative skepticism. She sent me a 1,600-word missive covering The Great Barrington Declaration, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, censorship, and crappy media coverage. I pinned her response (thanks, N.S. Austin ! No, I never forgot you!) to my desktop knowing I'd get to it 'wunna deze daze' since I wanted to investigate, but not right at that moment. Then, last Christmas, I got something from my wish list: The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind by Free Press columnist Joe Nocera and journalist Bethany McLean. Gotta warn ya: This is a lengthy article. Skim over what you already know and focus on what you don’t. The Big Fail covers a broad range of pandemic issues, but my primary curiosity was about what we got right, what we got wrong, and when we simply didn't have enough information, versus when we were acting like Neolithic tribalist dumbasses. And we were. Often. How did scientists screw up the science so badly? How do you not trust a guy like Anthony Fauci? He was a physician, an immunologist, and had worked for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His work was relentlessly cited by scientists around the globe. He’d worked with the then near-impeccable National Institutes of Health. He received the highest civilian award available in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, given by George W. Bush for his work on an AIDS relief program. The man knew his infectious diseases. So when he was attacked and criticized by Republicans, the left defended him, well-versed in Fauci’s adversaries’ historical allergy to science . There was growing evidence the left wasn’t always so keen on science either—but in 2020, we were only just beginning to take note of, for example, woke progressives’ hostility to well-established biology-based immutable sex differences. Had we been more cognizant of a ‘progressive’ political position with about as much scientific evidence as Creationism, we might have responded more knowledgeably and critically when this killer virus began spreading around the world and doctors warned it could kill millions. (The firm scientific consensus that, for example, ‘gender-affirming’ care for children had little scientific basis, wasn’t yet available). Ignorantly, but understandably, liberals panicked, because not only was there a Republican president, but he was pretty demonstrably the most intellectually-challenged man Republican voters could find. We had good reason to fear conservative ideologues. Especially when Trump pushed, to no one’s surprise, junk fixes like hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. The man asked his coronavirus task force whether people could inject bleach , FFS! Trump did get a few things right, including a successful, fast-tracked vaccine, but he otherwise made the facts-challenged George W. Bush look like Jonas Salk. Fauci was this old, calming, and immeasurably more knowledgeable scientist . And yet, the man who exemplified ‘Follow the science’, confessed to Congress in 2024 that there was none behind multiple COVID rules, which arguably killed many more Americans and resulted in an incredible learning loss for children who couldn’t attend school. Even though kids were the least likely to suffer adverse effects or die from COVID infection. Americans masked, shut down, social distanced, enforced vaccinations—and led the world in COVID infections and deaths. How did Fauci get it so wrong? Science and politics are a bad mix, one based on evidence, the other on ideology (although that can be based in evidence as well). Fauci admitted to fudging the facts sometimes to manipulate Americans, like to get vaccinated. First he said masks weren’t effective in preventing transmission, then he said they were, and then claimed he never said that. He made honest mistakes—he said, with the best available information at the time, that it would take a year and a half to develop a vaccine, then the Trump administration put it into production by the end of 2020—successfully. He pish-poshed the Wuhan lab leak theory, despite knowing early on that experts suspected the virus hadn’t developed naturally. As of today, science points now to a natural origin although that still hasn’t been established, but it looked very bad when it was revealed that the lab may or may not have been involved in virus-altering research (also still unclear). Fauci played the media like a harp, seducing progressives and liberals to ‘follow the science’ and we thought we were. We clutched the man with undeniable credentials to our bosoms while checking in with Reddit’s Herman Cain Death List , named in honor of the failed Republican mask-shunning presidential candidate who died of COVID-19 in July 2020. The list stood as a testament to those who, as one nurse put it, ‘ refused to believe COVID was real ’ until it killed them. How did the left screw it up so badly? The left smartly embraced N95 surgical masks , which were highly effective and provided the most protection. But it also failed to challenge certain policies or ask enough questions of what the experts claimed. Our biggest fail was on lockdowns and school closings, since it made perfect sense when you consider how contagious the common cold and influenza were. The support for lockdowns in a politically polarized world is one I still can’t completely damn the left for, at least initially and for those who weren’t epidemiologists. The right knee-jerked the opposite response of anything the left supported, and the far right’s famous lack of compassion for their fellow humans made it more believable that they were just being contrary, tantrumming children. What we libs didn’t question enough was the insanity of what stayed open and what was forced to close. Schools were the worst. The initial rationale was that children and teenagers were particularly susceptible to influenza, and who wanted to take a chance with a virus that was already killing thousands? The school closure plan had been strategized by the U.S.’s response plan originator, George W. Bush—whose well-thought-out pandemic prep strategy unfortunately proved useless in an actual pandemic. It became clear early that old people and those with existing co-morbidities like diabetes and obesity were most at risk. Fauci never considered many lockdown/closedown ancillary risks, like denying children an education, when hastily-assembled Zoom classrooms quickly degenerated into no-shows. It didn’t help that the media focused on the few hundred children who did die of COVID, failing to provide the perspective that they all had extenuating circumstances and that the total number of children who died from COVID—a very tiny fraction of 1%—were dwarfed by the way the virus ripped through senior homes like Elon Musk on a DEI tear. Fauci’s and others’ COVID-19 pandemic response unfortunately reversed traditional, established, outbreak strategy—it isolated the healthy rather than the sick. Blue city San Francisco, on the other hand, got it right—they were several leaps ahead of the rest of the country by applying their decades-old AIDS control strategy. In the ‘80s, when the city became ground zero for the mysterious new STD, San Francisco responded by targeting communities where the disease clustered—like Hispanic neighborhoods, where they moved quickly to isolate the ill, rather than the healthy. Fauci didn’t take note of adversarial successes, blue or red—another huge mistake. Rhode Island was the only blue state to respond like pros. Governor Gina Raimondo, who paid attention to the data and followed the actual science, was able to force schools open in Providence where the state controlled the school system. But other cities insisted on closing the schools, which drove her crazy. She told parents who were frustrated with closed schools that if they wanted to sue the district, the state would help them. Raimondo noted the serious risks of leaving children behind to force them to go virtual, that it would irreparably harm them academically, threaten the kids with food insecurity getting free meals at school, and suffer further mental health declines. She worried about those for whom school offered a daily respite from abuse and neglect. But most other blue states and cities refused to reopen. Today, kids who suffered school shutdowns lag in math and literacy worldwide, while child suicide attempts and depression rose sharply . How did the right screw it up so badly? The right wasn’t always killing it on the facts, either. Trump’s administration teamwork was hobbled by the enduring feuds and loyalties that characterized his first term. They, too, fell prey to ‘Whatever the left believes and does, we must do the opposite’. Some red state governors curried favor with Trump by refusing to instigate sensible mitigation measures. Others parroted his aforementioned junk fixes. Then there was Florida governor Ronald DeSantis, who provided a somewhat better example than his fellow red-state leaders. DeSantis actually did follow the correct science initially, but in the latter half of the pandemic appeared more driven by conservative politics. DeSantis annoyed many conservatives by supporting vaccines, correctly observing that “The data is showing us that you are much less likely to be hospitalized or die if you are vaccinated.” This is correct; one early misunderstanding is that the vaccines prevented infection. He didn’t support, however, vaccine mandates, and his reasons appeared much more political than scientific. Whether the mandates were justified or not is still a matter of debate, clouded further by stands taken by formerly highly scientific organizations like the National Institutes of Health whose reputation has since fallen somewhat in disrepute. To those of us on the left, right-wing opposition to vaccine mandates looked rather a lot like little resistant children who’d rather put their families’ and neighbors’ lives in danger than get the Fauci Ouchie. I won’t judge DeSantis yet on his mandates resistance because we may not understand their reality for some time to come. But he did abrogate attention later in the pandemic by focusing more on the politics—‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’—than he did on the public health benefits and consequences. Nor was he always respectful of municipal agency itself. Earlier on, he supported allowing Floridian municipalities to instigate their own mitigation rules if they deemed it necessary. Later, he docked salaries of school board members who defied his edict against instituting mask mandates. (It sure did look awfully cancel-culturish to us libs!) Where the right really got it wrong was on vaccines. The American resistance to them, which were almost universally regarded a generation ago as one of the modern world’s greatest successes, was a joint effort by celebrities on both political sides who unscientifically pushed notions like that they cause autism. Many religious conservative sects have also historically resisted vaccines. While many issues still remain unaddressed, like the health problems some claimed and which were sometimes valid, the overall consensus today among health professionals is that the COVID vaccines were effective at doing what they were supposed to do. The cost of vaccine refusal in red states was predictably high. According to The Big Fail, “an ABC news analysis of federal data found that the excess death rates in states that voted for Trump were more than 38 percent higher than in states that voted for Biden.” The highest vaccination states voted for Biden, and the lowest for Trump, except for Georgia. I remember checking the Microsoft Bing COVID infection map daily and nodding sagely as the red states reddened faster than the blue states—and how the U.S. remained at the global apex with the highest infection rates throughout the pandemic. Early on, I wondered if Trump was going to ruin his own chances at a second 2020 term by killing off his voters. I still wonder today if he did. One of the most famous Herman Cain Death List casualties was the Republican ex-rock musician Meat Loaf, a high-risk individual who was elderly (74 years old) and obese. He refused to vaccinate. We libs shook our heads and tsk-tsked at the sheer stupidity. No, vaccines didn’t prevent infection all that well, but the N95 masks that might have saved Meat Loaf’s life did, and vaccines kept you out of the hospital—and the morgue. These are the big fails of the right. When I finally got COVID, in January 2023, it lasted only a few days, with a nastier but not life-threatening cough than I got from colds. I was a virtuous, compassionate liberal and stayed inside for five days, with my neighbor helping with my laundry and grocery shopping. For five days after, I masked when I went outside, in accordance with Health Canada recommendations. No, I didn’t want to accidentally kill anybody, and even today I feel disgust at those political children—right or left—who may have. Still, under DeSantis the Florida economy did much better than those who obeyed the government and shut down. He took a lot of blowback from allowing the beaches to remain open. Florida closed far fewer businesses and as a result became an attractive state for startups. DeSantis focused, correctly, on the elderly who were the prime victims of COVID and most likely to die from it. Young people in bars and on beaches might contract it but almost no one died. As for Trump, he appointed a team led by a project-capable Jared Kushner, fast-tracked vaccine development with Operation WarpSpeed, and pushed out the first vaccines by Christmas 2020. The Big Fail offers a fascinating look into how they pulled it off. How did censorship hobble our response? Many raised their voices, challenging and questioning the draconian policies imposed by governments around the world, and those speaking truth to power were shut down and censored, much of it fuelled by political polarization. Too many politically knee-jerked, because if the other side was in favor, or not, of a particular policy, response, or vaccine, they themselves opposed it. Scientists censored, too. Those with dissident views watched their tweets, posts, and YouTube videos taken down. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician, wasn’t just censored on LinkedIn for an article criticizing national pandemic response, his profile was removed, too. He was fired from his job at Harvard Medical School for the crime of being right. Others described his and Jay Battarcharya’s similar theories as ‘pixie dust and pseudo science’. Scientists attacked one another for following science rather than official party diktat. Many kept quiet, knowing nothing good could come out of telling the truth. The Great Barrington Declaration In October 2020, a think tank convened in the lovely Massachusetts Berkshires to debate pandemic strategies. Luminaries included Kulldorf, Battarcharya, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University, who disliked the lockdowns. They spent a weekend discussing mitigation strategies, and all agreed that, big surprise, the elderly should be the prime focus until vaccines became available. In this way everyone could get back to their lives and the economy could start rolling again. They summarized their findings in a one-pager they named the Great Barrington Declaration and published it on social media. And of course, all hell broke loose. The GBDers criticized lockdown policies and noted their horrific impacts on mental health. They also named “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.” ( The Big Fail’ s theme is who, how and why some Americans got left behind.) Their goal, they stated, was to “minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity,” along with recommendations for nursing homes, where the virus decimated so many seniors. It also called for opening the schools again. Long story short, it went viral, a few hundred thousand people signed it, and—the critics drowned it out who claimed relying on herd immunity was unethical and questioned whether it was possible to protect seniors and the immunocompromised since together they comprised 30% of the US population. The British medical publication The Lancet, the medical sparkies who ironically linked childhood vaccines to autism, arrogantly called the GBD’s strategy “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” And once again, the Fauci gang criticized the Declaration as well. This is only one of many reasons why today, in 2025, it’s become much more difficult to ‘follow the science’, especially with how far scientific journal reputations have fallen. Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Seymour Hersh of the healthcare world. Both men with sterling careers that ended in nuttiness. Are we set to screw it up again next time? I don’t usually write articles this long and if I gave the amount of detail I’d like to in this one it would probably be two or three times longer. The Big Fail is an engaging read that both criticizes and praises the left, right, and scientists for their reactions to the pandemic and the government/healthcare response. There’s a whole chapter on how American healthcare began to privatize in 1968 and how it’s led to better healthcare for the rich and less for the poor, who were disproportionately disabled and killed by COVID. (It doubled poverty.) We could take a closer look at the problems surrounding WHO and the CDC, and the pandemic scams that multiplied faster than COVID, it seemed, skimming billions off the response as America scrambled to source enough N95 masks for healthcare workers, let alone the public. Their prime supplier was China, from whom there were far fewer available now as they took care of, understandably, their own population as well as supply all other China-dependent countries with them. There’s plenty more about the politics, the polarization, and how countries fail when they don’t trust their government (Sweden was an uncommon success story; guess what, because they trusted their trustworthy government). If you don’t trust yours, or the last one, ask yourself why, and whether America is producing leadership candidates of appropriate calibre. In the end, for me anyway, I find the uneven COVID response to be a case study in how politics and polarization don’t mix with science. Have we learned our lessons? Probably some, but not others. And now we have a government only 39% of Americans trust, and scientists who must now fight for open science , rather than the social justice-infused pseudoscience that has led to so many ruined lives. It took me as long as I did to embrace N.S.’s challenge to delve deeper into COVID because I wanted a source that was unbiased and factual; in the olden days you knew to avoid opinion factories like podcasts and social media influencers, and stick with the respectable journals. Five years ago that was a viable option; today, six years after I began regularly consulting Media Bias Fact Check and Snopes to check bias and factualism, I find even the best sources like the AP and Reuters infected with social justice nonsense and bias. It’s something we should all be thinking about when the Next Big Pandemic hits. I’m not sure how I’m going to follow the science. Or who. But I will listen to conservatives more. And I hope they will listen to liberals more, too. Because no one got it all right, or all wrong. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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There's something deeply, desperately wrong everywhere and we may well be headed toward a highly unpleasant but highly necessary purge CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 photo by Mike Bitzenhofer  on Flickr. He knows changes aren't permanent But change is - Rush, ‘Tom Sawyer’ I just finished reading Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. Howe and his late co-author William Strauss first published it in 1997. It details what they identified as the cycles of history, based on the last five hundred years. Four periods, named after the four seasons, comprise the ‘turnings’ of a complete cycle of human history—a saeculum , or roughly one human life span of about 80-100 years. If you’re at all unclear on where we are today, we’re in Winter, the Crisis period—right on time, about eighty years after World War II, the last Crisis. Wars tend to factor heavily in previous Crises. Howe believes this Crisis (not necessarily war) will culminate in the early 2030s and is fraught with great danger but also holds great potential promise, if we manage not to fuck it up with, say, a turn toward totalitarianism. The book is long and complex and difficult to follow sometimes, but the last part, about the current Crisis, its potential resolutions, and what it may mean for humanity, and particularly North Americans, was the most engaging part. His predictions are self-admittedly speculative, and some seem downright insane, if hopeful, today: Such as that maturing Millennials may actually turn to embrace “rationalism, objectivity, and top down systemizing.” That would be a welcome change. He notes Millennials today probably wouldn’t believe in America’s ability to come together against adversity, and notes that “one lesson of history is that the real danger may be quite the opposite—that the nation pulls together,” with the caveat that the union can be brutal or reckless. There’s a new regime coming together in the world order one way or another and that could involve autocracy—right- or left-wing. I’ve watched my own country pull together for the last three months as scrappy, argumentative Canadians react to the direct threat from the land-, water-, and resource-hungry United States regime. So far I’m not seeing any Canadian brutality or recklessness. Maybe we’re saving that for the invading forces. Many of Howe’s more welcome predictions—all of which are carefully caveat-ed with words like ‘could’, ‘maybe’, or ‘possibly’—include a post-Crisis “epidemic of normalcy” which would repeat the conformity, conscious cooperation, and family focus that framed the last post-war era. Yes, Elon and J.D., Americans will start #$%^ing without rubbers again after what Howe calls the ‘Epkyrosis’ and what I call the ‘Enema’. This is the climax, the massive purge coming from a terrible event or series of them after which America, or the world, picks itself up and surveys the wreckage of whatever just happened. The very worst outcome would be war, especially if it goes nuclear. Another potential outcome is the possibility America could find itself “fatally undermined” by domestic division or a civil war that leads to outside intervention and conquest. Howe imagines a ‘worst case scenario’ in which America finds itself ‘torn into pieces’ or ‘occupied’. Not beyond the ken, as the MAGA/Trump administration works to weaken America, whether it intends to or not (or simply doesn’t care). A defeated, malfunctioning, and now, self-isolated  America, Howe notes, could bring down the rest of the world. (Watch it live right now on CNN!) There’s a good reason why Howe’s language is highly speculative, based on a reading of the past. So is trying to predict what will happen by this weekend. Our near future, and the new First Turning, could go so many ways. Howe notes how after the last post-war enema, polarization disappeared as Democrats learned to live with Big Business, and Republicans came around to the New Deal. He theorizes the same might happen to us, which makes sense when people have to pull together to do-or-die, and become tired of conflict. There’s the very real possibility, looming even right now with Trump’s threats to invade and conquer Greenland, that we might find ourselves in a major conflict before the year ends. One thing Howe got ridiculously wrong: Americans did, in fact, vote Donald Trump back into office. Public domain image  by mitsuecligsx on Pixabay The Enema works, Howe says, by, “sucking all surrounding matter into a single vortex of ferocious energy.” It occurs late in the Fourth Turning, and accumulates from “unmet needs, unpaid debts, and unresolved problems.” It’s a process in which the old order(s) which no longer function properly must be purged and changed. Humans don’t have much control over The Enema; the process has been set in motion and results in massive upheaval we can’t even imagine. It changes everyone radically; it’s traumatic and painful; it “shakes a society to its roots, transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its people (and its generations) for life.” Those who survive the current Enema will certainly never be the same: Permanently psychologically and emotionally branded. This even includes a nuclear war. We will never stop talking about The Enema, no matter what it turns out to have been. As much as we dread the forthcoming generational and societal apocalypse, what would be worse, Howe writes, is if we don’t go through it. The Epkyrosis is the enema that humanity periodically needs. For myself, it’s helpful to think of it that way since I’m caught in the forthcoming Crisis at a much more advanced age than my parents. I can certainly see we can’t keep going on as we have been. We can’t stop the mighty forces now. It’s almost like a human’s very worst physical nightmare—a massive purge from both ends to rid the body of its toxins before it kills you. If you survive, you’re going to feel so much better—and more at peace. Buddhism teaches that resistance always makes a bad situation worse. What we can’t stop, we must accept and work with and do our best to help ourselves, and others, to survive. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of his experiences as a young monk during the Vietnam War, building and rebuilding villages the Americans had bombed. It was a living embodiment of the lessons of impermanence—and regeneration. In America, we rebuilt the lives of the returning G.I.s. We rebuilt Europe. We even rebuilt Japan. The old enmities fell away and human beings came together to do what needed to be done. We are a hardy, persistent, and cooperative  species. Purge that shit I see the need. For all of us. What also arose out of the ashes of two very brutal world wars, along with hope, union and regeneration, was growing Communism and then the Cold War. Of the creation of Israel borne of the vicious antisemitism of the Third Reich and the Islamic world. It stoked further antisemitism which has spread like wildfire once again around the world, along with ferocious Islamic terrorist death cults. After the last Fourth Turning came the Spring, the First Turning of the new saeculum, which brought a golden age of growth and prosperity for many, and a new world order tired of war. The Awakening, the Second Turning arrived when the imperfections and failures of the Golden Age became impossible to ignore. The age of prosperity hadn’t been for everyone; black people and young women had been excluded while young people demanded the right to drop out of life, to the horror of their parents, who wanted them to finish college and start families like obedient Americans. American folk singer Malvina Reynolds tweaks conformist Americans in 'Little Boxes' The Third Turning is the Unraveling, the Fall, where institutions weaken, individualism strengthens, and the old civic order unravels. For those of us alive today, it began in the early 2000s, perhaps marked by 9/11. Others point to the 2008 financial crisis. Today, I look south to my mother country and I don’t recognize it. Nor do I recognize either the stodgy but sane Republicanism I grew up with in my family. I especially don’t recognize my former Democratic Party. It’s become the same, a coalition of identity-driven autocracy, authoritarianism and fundamentalism which those who still hew to it can’t see. They point their righteous fingers at the other side, the Republicans, the MAGAs, accusing them of their very same sins of which they themselves are guilty. They condemn Elon Musk for destroying the government, though they themselves have been tearing down America’s institutions for years. And the antisemites spread their moral disease like cockroaches in a cheap slum. I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness! - Jesus, Matthew 7 Donald Trump is, right now, America’s enema, purging more than just the government, even as progressives and MAGAs clench their butt cheeks, resisting The Deluge. I watch the forthcoming Enema/Epykrosis not with pleasure—it will be traumatic for everyone, and will purge us all  of our moral rot—and people will likely die. A lot. Maybe me and you. But I take the Buddhist, or perhaps a revamped AA credo—I must accept what I cannot change, change the minds I can, and be prepared to head north into the Canadian hinterlands if the nukes start flying. Or the drones attack. "You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" - Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes The ‘Strauss-Howe generational theory’ is not without its critics. Some claim it’s more science fiction than science, although it’s clearly based on a speculative reading of generational history. Others say it  generalizes too much. That it’s pseudo-history, which I acknowledge. Predicting the future is often a fool’s errand, and five hundred years isn’t far enough back to go. Their focus is European-American history. How does this stack up for other parts of the world? For China, for example, the world’s oldest civilization? For Africa? For Southeast Asia? Or even until recently, a really isolated group of islands called Japan? The critics are correct that the theory is still too new, even at nearly thirty years old, to determine how reality-based it is, or not. And maybe one simply can’t effectively predict the future, especially when it involves eight billion wild cards. But I do see, even before I began the book, a potential global setup for war. Maybe a war within. On January 19th, I never dreamed the U.S. harbored imperialist fantasies of fellow First World allies. Now it’s severed those ties, and reordered the world. But I do believe one thing: We are all about to get a massive Enema. I’m with Howe that it’s needed and none of us should look forward to it with smug grins thinking it’s only for Them. I’m considering that I may not survive it. I don’t know. And neither does anyone else. But I think if I live, I will feel much, much better. CC0 public domain image  by Tip Yinan on Public Domain Pictures Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? 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I've learned that the moment I hear the words 'Israeli genocide' come out of someone's mouth, I need to leave the conversation immediately. Image by Petr Kratochvil at Public Images (May 12th) What began as a lovely conversation with a fellow tourist on a Barbados beach ended in sheer ideological nutbaggery. It was early evening and I was trying to work off a poorly-chosen milkshake consumed earlier that afternoon that came to me larger than advertised. I strolled down to a public beach and passed the pool to which I had access with my Vrbo cottage. An older woman was standing near the rail so I called out, “Excuse me, do you know how late the pool is open?” “I’m not sure,” she said Britishly. “I was here the other night and the fellow was cleaning out the pool at 7pm, but I don’t know if you can swim afterwards.” So we started chatting the usual tourist banter, I asked where she was from in England and I said I was from Toronto, and later it came into the conversation that I was American by birth, and of course as soon as you say ‘American’ the talk turns to You-Know-Who and how he’s ruining everything. Lovely little fellow liberal conversation until, trusting me too much apparently, she proudly flashed a sticker on the back of her mobile that said STOP ISRAELI GENOCIDE. Gulp. I hadn’t said a thing about Israel or anything remotely related to it. She just thought I must be a fellow—antisemite. She started going on about Israeli genocide and I said, “Wait! What about Palestinian and Hamas genocide?” “What Palestinian genocide?” “Ever heard of the 1929 Hebron Massacre? ” “The what?” I could make a snarky comment about her ignorance but it’s not the best-known massacre even today. Still, someone who had just revealed herself as a freaking far-left lunatic invested in the current conflict should have at least heard about it. To her credit, she pulled out her mobile. “What was it again?” “1929 Hebron Massacre,” I said, spelling Hebron in case I’d mispronounced it. “The description reads very similar to the October 7th attack except without the hang gliders.” She’d started entering it into Google but then went off on a tear about Israeli genocide and what’s been visited on the Palestinians and what about the 1947 Israeli—" “Wait a minute,” I said, "let’s go back to 1929, before the creation of the Israeli state.” She still had her mobile in hand. I don’t know if she ever completed the search. I started telling her about it and she interrupted to rant. “And then there’s Hamas and the October 7th attack—” “That wasn’t genocide!” “It was a good start. Genocide is in their charter.” “No it’s not.” “They’ve watered down the language in their newer charter but it’s still there. It was quite explicit in the original charter.” “That’s not true,” she said. I guess she hadn’t read it. Or Googled it. Or even heard of it. And she started going on about Israeli settlers and colonization of Palestine and no right to the land and I said, “Wait! They both have a right to the land!” “The Jews are COLONIZERS!” “So are the Palestinians! Their ancestors invaded in the seventh century!” At some point shortly after, she put her mobile away and said, “That’s it! Stop! I can’t talk to you anymore! Genocidist! Murderer! Israeli killer!” She turned on her heel. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, loud enough for her to overhear. “Fucking fanatic.” I strolled down the boardwalk, a lot less triggered than she. It had been such a nice, lovely conversation, two tourists exchanging information and chatting about our respective countries and then she brought Israel into it and I knew at that very moment, as soon as she flashed her mobile sticker, that this wasn’t going to end well. I could have turned and walked away, but honestly, it didn’t occur to me. I could have tried to change the subject but it’s hard to do when someone does a 180 on you by dragging the world’s most toxic topic into the conversation. And me, always trying to educate, challenged her. I was polite, I injected facts where I could into her one-sided near-hysterical blindness. She turned from a sweet old British lady into a freaking antisemitic Tyrannosaurus Rex with a Keffiyeh Klan hate sticker. The people who think they know the most about this tediously perpetual conflict are almost always those who know the least . God, Goddess and Darwin knows I’m no expert on the Middle East nor the latest war in a region that will probably never stop fighting each other until the sun goes white dwarf. There’s plenty of blame on both sides and what the Israeli government, for all its faults and flaws, has done is appalling but I still find myself falling more on their side, because it’s the only democracy that has ever survived in the Middle East. Every other country in the region is a theocratic autocracy and human rights abrogation mess to one degree or another, and we all remember George Bush’s experimental failure in Iraq. I believe many Afghans wanted democracy but too many did not. At least too many in power. I’m sorry: Muslims just don’t do democracy. Today’s Gazans and their ancestors have a long ugly history of antisemitism dating back before Islam to Biblical times. Islam is rooted in it. The Koran is clear that Jews must all die. Along with conflicting verses as well, as many have pointed out, that expresses brotherhood to all people, and doesn’t add “…except for the Jews.” But today’s Islamic states clearly adhere far too dearly to the former interpretation of What To Do About The Jews. As though they had the right to determine the fate of others. Here’s an article I wish I’d read before I encountered ideologically constipated British woman. Update - The Ugly Truth About Palestinian Violence - by David Josef Volodzko at The Radicalist . What the ‘Stop Israeli Genocide’ set would rather not think about is that as of late 2024, 90% of Gazans believe no atrocities were committed by Hamas on October 7th. The article further notes that the father of Palestinianism was a Hitler-loving card-carrying Nazi and calls the Gazans out for being among the most hateful, intolerant people on the planet. They’re a weird bunch to support by a batshit-crazy left that thinks one should never say No to a transperson. It still doesn’t mean I approve of the way Israel is handling this war, and Netanyahu simply gives me the willies. Like his far-right cohort-in-crime, he manhandles the current conflict with a chainsaw. He’s a crazy-ass right-winger, not the normal centrist kind, which is why Donald Trump loves him so much. He tried to seize the Israeli court system in 2023 (sound weirdly familiar?). He’s led one of the most destructive defensive campaigns in history, and while it’s hard to determine even roughly how many Gazans have died, since the numbers tend to come from IDF- or Hamas-supporting sources, one of whom shrinks the figures, the other inflates them, Gaza has suffered many times over the deaths of October 7th. If some experts are to be believed (is there even any such thing here?), they’ve allegedly killed more than died in Ukraine’s Mariupol, or even the WWII Allied bombing of Nazi Germany. Gaza looks like what I find when I Google ‘post-apocalyptic future’. The starving Gaza kids are real. The wholesale destruction of hospitals is also real. The Gazan (or maybe they’re Israeli) kids held prisoner in chicken cages are not. Israel has a lot of answer for. There are some voices in Israel calling for the complete destruction of Gaza, which does sound pretty genocidal. It doesn’t account for all Israelis, though, especially the over 70% who want Netanyahu to resign, any more than MAGA insanity represents all Americans. Even a lot of Republican voters, and a growing number of their politicians, don’t feel represented by Trump’s America. Israel occupies some land it shouldn’t, it bulldozes Gazan houses, and it has been blockading food and other humanitarian assistance to whatever Gazans are left. It’s committed post-October 7th war crimes. Then again, so has Hamas , including plenty against the Gazans, which people like the British nutbag either ignore or remain blissfully ignorant about. That’s Hamas’s whole reason for being: Terrorism and power-mongering. How are they ‘resisting’ the ‘Israeli occupiers’ when they divert hunger relief and other humanitarian aid from the Gazans to themselves? Israel, right now, is certifiably insane. So is Hamas and so too are the Gazans, at least when they’re not being leveled back to the Stone Age. So, too, is all of the Middle East. When there’s clearly so much violence, justified and not, on both sides, and political extremism, and yes, voices on both sides encouraging genocide (although lopsidedly Muslim) I understand why the crazy British Gaza cultist is furious about what’s being done to Gaza, but I’m also furious that these people are so blindly one-sided. Palestinians are angels. Palestinians aren’t genocidal. Hamas are freedom fighters. Like hell. Like hell. Like bloody hell. Zero sympathy for the other side, which makes them no better than their adversaries. We all think we understand what’s going on there and we don’t. None of us do. Even people who’ve made it their life’s work to understand the conflict and perhaps offer solutions don’t completely understand it. Maybe they’re experts in their tiny little sliver of it, but there’s something so primal, so tribal, so indefinably neolithic about the conflict, that maybe none of us in the modern world can truly comprehend it. Many of us have moved beyond the traditional historical lifestyle in which everyone who isn’t part of your tribe is an enemy and must be eliminated. Genocide has been part of the human psyche at least since we climbed down from the trees. Modern humans didn’t even recognize it as a problem until the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The crazy Brit, and everyone like her—the Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan on the college campuses, the hatemongers in Canada and the United States who’ve targeted violence against Jews (670% rise in Canada, a world record in antisemitism), the vicious little merdes that have made Montreal the most antisemitic city in North America—when you only see half the problem, you are the problem. Gazans and Israelis are human beings, some honorable, all imperfect. Democracy germinated and developed the radical notion that all human beings are equals, a liberal idea that dispenses with the notion that whoever has the gold makes the rules, or that might makes right, that some are naturally inferior, or that some people are more equal than others. It’s why women, children, gays, transfolk and even animals have greater protections, and greater than in any Islamic country. Whose misogyny, homophobia and genuine transphobia is far higher . Someone I know who considers herself fair and egalitarian got testy with me a few months ago because I kept calling out campus protester antisemites and Nazis. “Why don’t you ever criticize the right-wing Nazis?” she asked, finger-pointing elsewhere in a fit of whataboutist pique. “Because they’re not abusing, harassing, attacking and vilifying Jews on college campuses,” I said. “It’s our antisemites and Nazis.” I emphasized the our. “Aren’t you anti-antisemitic?” “Of course I am!” she replied indignantly. “Then why aren’t you happy I’m condemning our s?” I asked. “You are against all antisemites, correct? Or only right-wing ones?” Of course she has no use for any of them, she assured me, but I knew it made her uncomfortable that I was pointing out the many, many equally morally flawed individuals on our own side. Some Nazis wave the keffiyeh rather than the swastika. She, like the British woman, would rather point fingers at the hate and violence on the other side while ignoring the same on her own. This acquaintance isn’t a Jew-hater. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever known, but she, like so many, is afraid to turn over her own shiny sun-dappled liberal rock to see what slimes around underneath. She didn’t turn into a monster, like the crazy Brit who I swear in a heartbeat was about to open a giant maw like a Dune sandworm and swallow me whole. But, for now, she simply can’t see the other side, with that one-sided moral blindness. On some level, both these people prefer a safer ignorance. The moment the words ‘Israeli genocide’ crawl out of someone’s mouth, the moment to leave is right fucking now. I have this: The crazy Brit has now heard the words 1929 Hebron massacre. Maybe she Googled it later, or will in the future. Maybe she won’t, out of fear of what might tarnish her rose-colored view of the Gazans. But I have planted a seed she will not easily dislodge. What has been heard cannot be unheard. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Women's resistance to biological males in their bathroom is rooted in sound evolutionary psychology. And guess what! The gents don't always like it either. Look dudes, there are only two. Just call them co-ed. Photo by DC Department of General Services. No, this was not okay, but I really had to go to the bathroom. My cousin and I had gone to the Hot Docs movie Shamed  in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, and I really had to tinkle, as my mother would have put it. My cousin directed to me to where he had gone before the movie. Gender Neutral, the sign said. I glanced around. I didn’t see anything else. There may have been another potty elsewhere, but it was late, I was tired, we had a subway ride ahead of us, I needed a shower, I had to go to work in the morning, and as people flowed up the stairs, I knew I’d better tee-tee before a line formed. I entered, finding it was a men’s room with a new sign slapped on the door. Uncomfortably, I walked past three men at urinals. I entered a stall and tried to do my thing, only to find I suddenly had bashful bladder. It was downright weird. I took stock. Did I feel in danger? No. Did I feel threatened? No. Did I feel deeply weird? Yes. I sat, thinking about the subway ride home—only about fifteen minutes but with a ten-minute walk after. I managed to accomplish a little, at least, and figured I could hold the rest until I got home. I’m glad I’m past menopause. I would have felt really uncomfortable unwrapping a tampon within earshot of everyone. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember seeing a separate dispenser for ‘lady discards’, although maybe it was behind me and I was too agitated to notice. I went to the sink, and the fellow who was just finishing exchanged nervous smiles with me as he departed. I washed up quickly and joined my cousin in the lobby. He said something to me, but I wasn’t listening. “I’m too pissed off to think right now,” I said. “I didn’t want a gender-neutral toilet.” I wasn’t angry at my cuz, but at the cinema. I don’t know if their ladies’ room was still solely for the biologically female or was also gendernutzi, but if I ever go to Bloor Cinema again I’ll definitely look for it as soon as I arrive. That was the most uncomfortable bathroom experience I’ve ever had. I wrote a polite but irritated email to the cinema later. I’ve been there once or twice before, but it was before narcissistic activists had convinced idiot progressives that it was okay to force women to share bathrooms with the larger, more dangerous sex. “I don’t like women in my bathroom either,” said my cuz. He didn’t feel threatened, but he wanted his privacy when he ‘saw a man about a dog’ as my mother also would have put it (she was great for vintage polite or humorous expressions for human waste elimination), and I can’t blame him. He’s not the first man to express that. I’ve had some other experiences with this gender-neutral bathroom crap, but this was the worst. My favorite bar in town has kinda sorta not really political ‘gender neutral’ bathrooms. All I share with the hairy-armed is sinks. The stalls are all enclosed rooms with locks. I do glance around for hidden cameras. Dudes can be dudes. But I’m not uncomfortable with it. A few years ago I attended a drag brunch in Toronto’s Liberty Village. Their in-your-face bathroom sign on the door belligerently proclaimed it was a gender identity free-for-all and if you don’t like it, you can go fuck yourself. I’m paraphrasing. I don’t remember the exact words. But it had, I think, a Pride flag and sounded like it was written by a misogynist man. It seems like a minor issue to some, but it’s a critical stress to many. I’m not a victim of sexual assault myself, but if I was a sexual assault survivor, I imagine I would feel far more threatened, forced to share a private space with strange men, a sex with a millennia-long history of not controlling their penis very well. We don’t know which ones to trust. Sometimes we trust the wrong ones. The sign made it glaringly clear how this is a political statement against women’s privacy rights and all but told women who didn’t like it to suck it. What does the public think? A 2018 article on the NBC News website  noted that there was ‘no link between trans-inclusive policies and bathroom safety’, according to one study. “Data come from public record requests of criminal incident reports related to assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in public restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms to measure safety and privacy violations in these spaces. This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces. Additionally, the study finds that reports of privacy and safety violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms are exceedingly rare.” One must log in from an educational institution to access the study so I can’t see the rest of it. Seven years ago, that may have been true, but today there are more transgender-identifying individuals than before. Seven years later, there are plenty of incidents to question whether it’s a good idea to mix biological males and females in certain places. I’ve documented several of them here , but it’s not exhaustive by any stretch. I add new incidents as I encounter them, but I don’t actively look for them, nor do I include any if I can’t find them from a reliable enough source. Many poll results since 2018 indicated a growing support for inclusive bathrooms, but I’m not sure how accurate that was, since media reliability, bias and factualism are all over the board today. However, in 2016, a Pew Research Center article  found, contrarily, that Americans were pretty divided on the issue. Support was highest among young people and lowest, not surprisingly, with the oldest. Support dropped as age increased. Nine years later, (that’s today!) Pew found  that Americans had grown ‘more supportive’ of restrictive policies for trans people overall. And furthermore, support for using whichever bathroom matches one’s ‘identification’ had dropped as well. Ten to twelve years ago, there was less attention paid to trans issues than now, and even today, I find people often have no idea any of this is going on. Or don’t understand what the big deal is when someone just wants to take a wiz. What many don’t understand—or are too young to have experienced themselves—is that not so long go, it wasn’t a big deal to expect people to use the bathroom in accordance with their biological sex. That there were strong taboos about violating the holy sanction of the ladies’ or the gents’. Many years ago I accidentally used the men’s room at a restaurant and didn’t realize it until a man entered and began using the urinal I had walked right past without noticing. Today I still feel a little embarrassed when I think about it, and it was over thirty years ago. The taboo is strong. It doesn’t have to be this way Transactivists have made a very simple process—going to the bathroom—a massive controversy, demonstrating traditional patriarchal male entitlement as they demand women cast aside millions of years of evolutionary survival wiring to be wary of males when they’re in the vulnerable position of going to the bathroom. Only very recently have women enjoyed protected facilities of their own with locked stall doors. But in other parts of the world, women have learned not to go to the bathroom outside when night falls  because of the higher risk of sexual assault. A  USA Today article  states, “The link between inadequate sanitation and sexual violence has been documented in cities from Kenya to India, as well as in other makeshift urban settlements (such as refugee and disaster-relief camps) in the developing world.” Going to the bathroom in developing countries with inadequate sanitation facilities increases a woman’s chances of being sexually assaulted. Just imagine what it was like for thousands of generations of our ancient grandmothers copping a squat in the forest. Women’s resistance to gender-neutral bathrooms is based in sound sexual assault prevention. While it’s reduced with modern sanitation facilities, it raises the risk by mixing the sexes. The plain fact is that women have very good reason to fear biological men in their bathrooms, or when forced into ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms. I don’t understand how progressive feminists can support telling women they don’t have the right to personal safety, and even tell fearful sexual assault victims they should ‘get over it’, but these women also appear to be the most easily gaslit by men. Hot Docs Cinema might return my email and tell me there was, in fact, a ladies’ loo there, upon which I’ll thank them for correcting me and noting maybe they should have a sign there directing women to it in case they don’t want to use the ‘inclusive bathroom’. If they respond I’ll update this. I’ll admit - I think this is really funny :) Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! 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A Conservative politician's campaign promise would protect women, but politicians can't fix what only women can. Don’t be the victim. Image by akiragiulia  from Pixabay Here we go again. Another politician addressing intimate partner violence, correctly, but as always, focused on males. I don’t know if Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party campaigning for this week’s federal election, actually cares about protecting women through stiffer jail ‘n’ bail penalties for accused batterers, or whether he’s simply courting women’s votes, but I sigh the way I would no matter which political leaning. Nothing that requests anything from women. Women don’t want abusers, of course, but many jones for them, out of a misplaced notion of what being a man is and failing to recognize that hyper-masculinity sometimes masks insecurity, signifying a guy prone to lashing out. These women are often ignorant of the warning signals . Others simply don’t know any better. Or don’t believe they deserve better. That no matter how hot or sexy he is, if he hits her, she should leave immediately without turning back. Other ways women harm and offer themselves for abuse is not learning or developing important job skills, ergo depending on a man. Having babies she couldn’t afford on her own shackles a woman to a man who poses a danger to her and their children, especially if they’re not his. Feminism fails women and girls again and again and again when it fails to teach them how to avoid abuse, rather than simply react to it. Don’t BE the victim. Poilevre’s plan His proposed new law would keep violent men off the streets for longer which is always a good thing. According to the Conservative Party’s website, he pledges to enact tougher conditions for those accused of abuse, and longer sentences for the convicted. Bail would require ankle bracelet monitoring and immediate imprisonment for breaking conditions. He would end the practice of downgrading a ‘crime of passion’ from domestic murder to manslaughter, a laudable change. ‘Crimes of passion’, like ‘gay panic’ and ‘trans panic’, remove the responsibility for emotional regulation. We shouldn’t be slaves to our emotional spikes, however justified. Poilievre says he wants to put victims first, rather than criminals. I can’t argue with any of that. The courts have long been lax on the accused and documented batterers, so Poilievre’s policies, if implemented, would definitely protect women and children more. But it doesn’t address the other  root cause. This isn’t a criticism of him or any other politicians attempting to protect the vulnerable from male rage. I admit my idea would be a a ridiculously risky policy push for a politician—to offer a program, something to address to women  what they can do  to avoid abusers—like become more emotionally and psychologically stronger and more resilient, so as not to take him back when he’s released, or find a new batterer to whack her around. " Did you ever notice   it’s the short guys who hit?” Michelle’s question came out of left field. My first thought was, What on earth makes you think I’d know? “No, I’ve never been hit by a man,” I replied in a steady voice, otherwise hornswoggled. “I’ve dated plenty of short men, but none of them had Short Guy Disease.” You know That Guy. The man who struts around overcompensating for his perceived lack of manhood because he’s not towering over you like a cactus in the Arizona desert. Who’s more hyper-masculine than thou and hits women because he thinks they’re secretly laughing at him. And because they’re weaker than he, and if he can’t get respect for his height, dammit, people and especially those bitches  will respect his superior strength. Not the kind of short man I ever went out with. Michelle believed this was normal , and part of every woman’s experience. She didn’t know I’d made conscious choices my entire life, thanks to my mother teaching me to never allow a man to control you, belittle you, insult you, make fun of you, or hit you. I doubt anyone ever told Michelle she shouldn’t allow men to treat her that way. I didn’t, that night. Domestic abuse wasn’t my interest back then. It didn’t affect me. I may have said something like, “I don’t allow men to mistreat me; if a man were to hit me, he’d be out the door in a heartbeat.” More likely I stuck up for short guys and the importance of avoiding those with Short Guy Disease. Feminists don’t talk about this. It’s verboten. A few years ago some do-gooder and always-clueless rights organization offered up another tired, pointless anti-domestic violence campaign  plodding on about Canadian ‘femicide’ (which amounted to 182 domestic homicides a year, hardly a concerted effort to destroy women in a nation of forty million). It did nothing to address male patriarchy, a major root cause of intimate partner violence, and, bien sûr,  failed to acknowledge that the much higher Indigenous IPV rate was the result of men also  responsible for their patriarchal personal behavior, and that genocidal history, residential schools, and other unjust treatment by white society is no excuse for smashing your fist into your wife’s face. This is one of the biggest problems with white feminism: They often   make excuses for non-white batterers. It’s always wrong, or it’s never wrong; dudes with a sad story don’t get a free pass. A real feminist and true social justice warrior would offer the slogan No Excuses, Dude! I wish some political party would step up and offer programs and resources to encourage women to take back their power with better partner choices. Fool you once, shame on him. Fool you three or four times, educate yourself until you can figure out why you jones for abusers , or what you’re doing to draw  men who seek willing victims, however unconsciously. It is consent, the first time you go back to him or fail to kick him out after the first offense. It’s giving him permission. The Two Women Marilyn Manson *Didn’t* Abuse - Why Not? The confounding question Researchers and anti-violence advocates continuously seek the answer to a question about which there are multiple theories but no definitive answers: Why does violent assault increase the likelihood of another assault? The heightened risk of ‘revictimization’ affects everyone, not just women. Your risk of being robbed again after an initial robbery increases nine times. Getting burglarized increases your risk four times. For a woman who’s been sexually assaulted, including in childhood, the risk for a second assault increases 35 times! No one can pinpoint exactly why violent attack victims are at heightened risk. With theft crimes, word may spread on the street that your house is an easy mark or that the homeowner doesn’t seem to have a gun. But what is it about rape and battery that increases a woman’s chance of a repeat, apart from living under the same roof as the perpetrator? The theories flounder. Maybe she learns silence, maybe the trauma causes her to revert to familiar patterns. Maybe she hasn’t learned to distinguish between consent and coercion. Maybe she doesn’t resist enough or say no early enough. No one knows. It’s as though she emits some sort of pheromone that advertises, “I’m a victim.” I’ve actually considered that as one possibility. I don’t really understand how pheromones work, even though I’ve read extensively about them. If you ask me why I fancy this man or that man, or why I chose some former partner in my past, I’ll give you a lot of logical reasons along with how compelling he turned out to be for reasons I don’t understand. Maybe I don’t respond well to some theoretical I’m heavily masculine and I’ll also beat you pheromone. Maybe there’s no such thing. It’s my  theory.  Maybe abuse victims don’t know how to set boundaries, or recognize misogyny, or signal low self-confidence with body posture and facial expressions. Research has shown that certain psychopaths are actually excellent judges  of victim potential simply by the way people walk; victims display unconscious body language that signify they’re easy marks. This is not to blame the victim; this is to empower her to make changes to repel abusers and attract better quality partners. If a woman was victimized early, as a young girl, she never had a chance to learn how to avoid abuse before the first incident. They, more than any other women, need education to teach them it wasn’t their fault but they still need to be extra-vigilant about how to identify early who is likely an abuser, who exhibits misogynist traits. What Can We Learn From This Woman’s Abusive Relationship?  - ‘Maria’ has no idea where she made mistakes and no one will tell her Now more than ever, women in North America and elsewhere need to be educated and made aware of the potential for abuse, even from men who never were before. Because domestic abuse rises with economic and household instability, which the current President has threatened to make a permanent state for everyone. Women must learn how to set boundaries and protect themselves and their children. With the decline of left-wing wokeness and the victimization culture it nurtured, common sense is making a comeback . Perhaps now is the time to address how women can lay down rules and boundaries early, and eliminate anyone who doesn’t respect them. Just say no - it really is that simple I applaud Pierre Poilievre’s proposed policy although I won’t be voting Conservative. PP, as we call him, doesn’t understand that Canadians are preoccupied with an increasingly hostile United States run by a cognitively deficient and aggressive old man; not chicks who like abusive dicks. In fact, Trump exhibits the personality traits  of a classic abuser, in his business and political dealings. A savvy politician would put forth a tit-for-tat proposal: My newest policy for reducing intimate partner violence includes tougher sentences for abusers and an education program for picking better partners. And oh, it’s not just for women, it’s for men too, since they also suffer IPV. As do homosexual and trans partnerships. The dynamics are frighteningly similar regardless of who’s doing the battering and who’s the receiver. Women, and others, possess untold power over abusers; they can just say no. An ounce of prevention. You have to recognize the warning signs and internalize  the values that rule over animal instincts because he’s just so damned dangerous and sexy!  A man who hits others may easily do the same to a partner; these men loathe weakness. Bullying has returned to the world with a vengeance; populist right-wing dictators gain power around the world. The weak, overly-feminized left is giving way to an equally unhealthy male dominant dynamic. That never works well for everyone, as I expect a lot of ‘anti-feminists’ are discovering now that they realize the price for a cardboard DEI-hating he-man President is the giant sucking sound of their mortgage and grocery bills depositing themselves into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. Now’s a great time to practice anti-bullying skills and assert one’s self against the Andrew Tates and Amber Heards in our lives. To practice more powerful body language and to walk like someone who isn’t going to take another’s shit. To learn how men’s and women’s minds work, to study the more narcissistic and publicly abusive dynamics of celebrities with fraught relationships as case studies. To consciously refuse  to be someone’s bitch, whether one is male or female, (or used to be one or the other), or gay or straight.  It’s a choice. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!