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? 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!

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!

A 1970 grand fête at Leonard Bernstein's reveals the self-victimizing seeds planted for today's antiracist Uncle Toms The Black Panthers doing that Scary Negro thing. They were good at feeding poor ghetto kids, better at scaring white people. Photo courtesy of the State Governors’ Negative Collection, 1949-1975, Washington State Archives. CC0 2.0 image from Wikimedia Commons New York Magazine writer Tom Wolfe coined the term ‘Radical Chic’ in his hilarious, derisive dissection of an oh-so-fashionable- daaaaaahling party for chi-chi white liberals in 1970. Those who attended called it a ‘meeting’, (sounds so much more serious than ' party’ , you know) at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s posh Park Avenue apartment. Guests included Barbara Walters, movie directors Otto Preminger and Sidney Lumet, Julie Belafonte (Harry’s kid), and the rest mostly celebrity names from their time we’ve forgotten, or the insular New York high society socialites whose names we hoi polloi never knew. The purpose of the party/meeting (‘happening’?) was to raise criminal defense funds for the Panther 21, those flamboyant ‘revolutionaries’ of the early Black Power movement who were done with the well-dressed early civil rights ‘chumps’, those ‘Toms’ in suits ‘three sizes’ too large—Martin Luther King, Philip Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins. The time for talk was over and the time for action was now. The Panthers, who whipped out their big guns and looked badass and mean and preached that the Black Man should use violence if necessary to defend himself from Whitey’s racist power structure, had been accused of plotting to blow up five New York department stores, some Connecticut railroad facilities, a police station and, for some weird reason (a hate-on for the White Man’s horticulture?) the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Wolfe was not invited but managed to slip in anyway like Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal chat. He sat in a chair observing all that went on while taking notes in shorthand. Five months later, his essay Radical Chic appeared in New York Magazine, reviving the hubbub that had ensued days after the party when a fellow slick reporter, from the New York Times, reported it and drew hellacious wrath from social critics. Wolfe’s article lampooned the Beautiful People who seemed more interested in what we today would call ‘virtue signalling’, whose First World challenges included the very serious problem of trying to find white servants because it just wouldn’t do, darrrrrrling, to have Negroes serving at an affair like this! Wolfe’s scene-setting illustrates them with his frighteningly detailed knowledge of haute couture , ridiculously expensive imported furniture and architecture, and ingredients in fancy hors d’oeuvres that’s rivalled only by cheesy New York Boring Rich People novelist Domenick Dunne. He lampooned, further, Panther ‘mau-mauing’; a slang term with a murky etiology , meaning intimidation tactics designed to scare white folks. Mau-mauing consisted of violent rhetoric, divisive language and gun-waving, although Lenny’s guests left theirs at home. Scare honkeys, don’t actually hurt them. Wolfe went into greater depth of such tactics in a similar essay entitled Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers about bullying well-meaning bureaucrats—‘flak catchers’—trying to help poor blacks in San Francisco, hobbled by obstructive bureaucracy and corruption. The radicals chose a more moderately aggressive style to solicit the defense fund donations on this fine afternoon at Lenny’s, as Wolfe repeatedly referred to his clueless host. Just being the Panthers mau-maued the hoity-toity crowd plenty, nevertheless impressed with Real Panthers. Wolfe compared it to a century-old French idea— nostalgie de la boue , ‘nostalgia for the mud’, or an attraction to lowlife culture and degradation. It’s slumming for the rich, cultural appropriation for the privileged. Think of Marie Antoinette’s fake on-premise ‘village’ at Versailles. Think of middle-class white kids adopting ghetto lingo and rap talk and pretending to be ‘bangers. Think Rachel Dolezal. In all fairness, the Panthers had gotten a ridiculously bad rap for crimes whose alleged plots were found to have been instigated by undercover infiltrators. Their bails were insanely high—$100,000 in some cases, which is over $800,000 today. And they hadn’t even tipped over a cow or an old white lady. The Panthers had too-successfully mau-maued the entire U.S. Justice Department. They didn’t have to engage in violence; and they mostly didn’t, except against the police; they just had to convince white people they might, or they would, or that they had already, because there was no Google or Snopes back then to call them out on their radical affectations. All they had to do to pry moolah out of these bored rich shits was to talk like South American banana republic revolutionaries. These were the early seeds of black self-disempowerment and self-victimization exploiting white guilt to unravel the ‘Tom’s’ sense of maturity, cooperation with others and above all personal responsibility to seize the day and make the most of loosening racial discrimination bonds. Today’s ‘antiracism’ has since raised self-victimization to an art form. ‘Antiracists’ pretend to be violent and revolutionary, but are mostly a threat to statues; they otherwise threaten to ‘tear it all down’ and claim it’s the only way to fix a ‘hopelessly racist society’. Just like the Panthers did, yet didn’t. In 1970, testosterone-fueled youth rioted in cities around America without recognizing that tearing and burning down their own communities hurt only themselves, rather than a Bloomingdale or Bonwit Teller, which would have brought home black frustration to cloistered whites in their own ‘hoods. One young radical from that time, although not a Panther himself, was a fellow named Shelby Steele, whose own greatest act of defiance against the White Man was impudently sprinkling cigarette ashes on the rug of a college president as he and his young stud friends issued demands. Steele grew up to become a leading author and documentary maker who criticized his callow youth’s militants for relying on affectatious black rage to cajole handouts given to assuage white guilt rather than develop black communities and themselves. He condemned the militants’ intellectual laziness and self-crippling beliefs that he sees today in his weakened college students. He wrote a whole book about it: White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Black Power’s grandchildren now mouth the same tired lines from their middle- and upper-class homes, attending elitist schools that cost more per semester than their sharecropper granddaddy made in a lifetime. ‘Toms’, as black militants derided the earliest civil rights activists, dressed up for marches and protests, to demonstrate to the white system that black people were worthy of dignity and respect. Black Power thought that was for ‘chumps’ and, with the help of well-meaning white liberals, rich or not, worked together to disempower American blacks as they held out their hands once again like ‘Toms’ from decades past, asking white people for more favors. Steele preferred white help rather than white intervention to right the wrongs. Blacks were not, as the ‘Toms’ taught, helpless in the face of monolithic white power doled out in small, nonthreatening packages by liberal politicians and swanky celebrities and socialites. White help is holding out one’s hand to help someone up from the ground; she still has to engage her muscles to impel herself up and stand on her own. Although Black Power encouraged black pride and self-determination, it seemed to believe it couldn’t be accomplished without a lot of white intervention. Saturday Night Live satirizes ‘radical chic’ in a 1982 sketch about a whitey-hating black poet Anger, injustice and opportunity ‘Tom’-my guilt-tripping for money, like reparations, suggests an aggrieved group is childlike, incapable, simply, of handling their affairs themselves. Steele admired the MLK ‘Toms’ rejection of violence as a sign of their power of ‘moral witness’. These well-dressed Negroes embodying white respectability were cruelly beaten on camera; a little black girl in a pretty dress walked to school surrounded by towering white men protecting her from a lengthy, blocks-long gauntlet of screaming white faces. The middle-class optics didn’t look good on the six o’clock news. These ‘Negroes’ seized the day. These were adults, children, just trying to be normal Americans, prevented by suburban crazies deeply wounded at kids just trying to get an education like their own. What angered the Black Power militants was its passivity; lettin g redneck sheriffs attack you in your respectable clothes without fighting back. The anger they felt, Steele argues, “is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice.” He further noted that anger escalated not with more injustice but with less injustice. Let that sink in for a moment. The less oppressed the Angry Black Person becomes, the angrier s/he gets, because “weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice.” [Last italics Steele’s] Sound familiar? Have you seen this white guilt-driven mini-movie several times before? Maybe even in one day? Lenny’s liberals’ hearts wanted to understand, others already did. Plenty of Lenny’s guests were Jews who already supported black civil rights because they identified with their struggles. They’d been shut out from polite society too; they had been pogromed and murdered too and excluded from all the good jobs. Ironically, the Panthers offered in return gratuitous antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which didn’t amuse their host and several of his Jewish guests. There was a place for militancy in 1970 America where many white people were still just wrapping their heads around the fact that maybe it was a little unfair that all the American Dream required was European genetics. But the militancy mindfucked white liberals to surrender their moral authority while they did the same to black communities to reject their power by re-assuming the victim role. The Tom. Black anti-white racism grew, as Steele noted, in direct proportion to each legal and policy reduction of genuine black grievance. Today’s ‘antiracists’ are so little oppressed they’ve had to invent ‘microaggressions’ to feed the cultural need for rage rather than recognize a helping hand is all most black people need anymore. Adults can stand on their own. As Steele noted, “We also have never allowed our performance in sports, music, literature, or entertainment to be contingent on whether or not others helped us.” The real story As I wrote this, Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Substack featured an article on recent research on American social mobility and fairness. Here’s a shocker: It’s better to be born into a rich family than a poor one. Regardless of race , kids from better-off families face more lucrative futures than kids in poor communities. The presence of black fathers is important, but, the research found that growing up in a neighborhood with many active black fathers mattered more than a two-parent household. In ‘hoods with a high percentage of fatherless single parents, kids do much more poorly and are less inclined to earn highly, regardless of color. The worst birth lottery disadvantage is poverty and disappearing dads. Not color. Pretending it’s all about racism lets whites off the hook so they don’t have to address the real root cause: Economic privilege . Asking the white power structure to do something real— change laws and policies that would result in reducing tax breaks for the middle class and wealthy, and raising property taxes to fund better schools, and elimination of elite private school legacy admissions (‘DEI’ for rich white C- kids ), would accomplish real economic equality. Social justice too often stops at the wallet. For everyone. Had the later black civil rights movement stuck with the messaging of the older black nerds in dorky suits, it could have lifted all the boats rather than leaving the rich to conclude the more money you have, the less tax you should pay, and dole out handouts as required, sometimes. Economic empowerment has to lift all boats. Not all America’s ‘oppressors’ are white, and not all the oppressed aren’t. Woke up and smell the opportunity! 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!

Do I even have to count the ways? Okay, fine, I will. I've compiled a list. Just think about it, America. What have you got to lose? This may be your last shot at living in a civilized country! Canadians: We’re hot, you’re not. But you could be. Go Canadian!!! Free image from Pexels Look, America, let me speak bluntly. This is coming from a native daughter. Look, we’re friends, right? Still? Even though, frankly, you’ve turned into a real bitch. I’m just being honest. Countries are talking. They’re saying you’re not as cool as you used to be. That you’re a real snot. That Canada is ‘the good one’. That you need to get over yourself. Don’t get mad!!! I’m just being honest. Nobody admires you anymore. No one likes you. Or wants to be like you. Some of the meaner countries are saying, frankly, that you suck. And come on, you know what I’m talking about. You need to change your attitude. A real makeover. To turn over a new leaf. A maple one. I’ve got the perfect solution. You need to become part of Canada! Our eleventh province. Now wait, before you object, just hear me out. Please? Because we’re friends and I’m only trying to help you. I’ve compiled a list of Top Ten Reasons Why America Should Join Canada, rather than the other way around. Just listen, just listen, I think you’re going to like this! #10 - We’re prettier than you, but you could be just as pretty! All your best-looking actors and celebrities? They’re Canadians. Justin Bieber. Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Gosling. Anna Paquin. Rachel MacAdams. Drake. Elisha Cuthbert. Michael Bubl é . Keanu Reeves!!! Nina Dobrev. Shay Mitchell. Hayden Christensen. And, OMG, Justin Trudeau!!! Still a babe after ten years of running this country, often, we’ll admit, into the ground. But I mean, we’re just gorgeous! I know, I know, you want to know our beauty secrets. I’ll share them. We bathe every day in MAGA’s envious tears and we liberally (tee hee) apply maple-flavoured national pride every morning with a beaver pelt. And, TBH, and please don’t get mad at this, we also express gratitude every night that we’re not American. Being Not American does wonders for your skin and makes you glow like a 12-year-old!!! You should try it! Because America, as so many countries who are not America know, is Ugly. And that brings me to my next reason for you to improve your How Hot Am I? attractiveness score by becoming Canadian. #9 Healthcare isn’t a business here, so we don’t shoot anyone over it Become part of Canada, and, seriously speaking, you’ll gain a lot more sleep not worrying about what will happen if you get an expensive disease. Anxiety destroys beauty. Being bankrupted by a broken bone creates ugly wrinkles. When we visit the doctor we show them a card and they show us a patient’s room. Sometimes we have to pay extra, and not everything’s covered. But we don’t spend a lot of time fighting with healthcare providers because everyone knows what’s covered and what’s not. Healthcare is run by the Canadian government, not by large corporations who deny defend depose. Oh, and flu shots are free. For everyone. With a health card. But you have to be a Canadian first. #8 We have a social safety net and leaders who’ve got our backs (if they’re Liberal) Canada watches out for you when the chips are down. The government has got our backs. Okay, the Liberal government. The Conservatives since I’ve been here? Not so much . During the COVID crisis, Justin Trudeau implemented the CERB program to support Canadians suddenly thrown out of work and unable to find employment. It saved a lot of people’s bacon. It wasn’t perfectly implemented—it was an emergency rush job—and many fell through the cracks and others took advantage to defraud the program . Up front, they admitted they might expect you to pay it back if it was found later you didn’t qualify after all, and they did. But it went a helluva longer way than the occasional scraps of money Trump and Biden tossed out. Today, our new Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a $2B relief plan to support autoworkers thrown out of jobs thanks to You-Know-Who’s unprovoked trade war. Canadians support Canadians. #8 We got weed!!! Legal!!! And we’ll share if you don’t try and bogart the land or water! We’ve had legal weed since 2018 and we haven’t turned into a nation of Reefer Madness murder zombies or a Timbits-scarfing nation of Jabba the Huffs. We’ve got gummies! We’ve got brownies! We’ve got candies! You can just buy them on any street corner! Okay, not like from some smelly dude with a backpack, we’ve got more weed shops than Tim Horton’s. We’ve got weed farms! In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret—actually, it’s a VERY BIG MILITARY SECRET, so don’t tell anyone, but—weed is our Secret Weapon in case the U.S. invades. We plan to ply your soldiers with the best weed (offered by all our drop-dead gorgeous women and men) so they’ll forget why they’re here. Then when they ask us we’ll say, “More weed, better beer, and lots of great sex!” Your soldiers will never want to leave. If we can’t beat you in a traditional war, we’ll acquire you one stoned, sexually satisfied, madly in love American soldier at a time! We took your people during the Vietnam War, and we’ll do it again. Be careful when the border asks you to 'Show me your papers' :) #7 Canadians get along with each other We’re multicultural, like you, but we treat each other better because we’re not obnoxious. Like our Christians, who aren’t always nagging you to adopt their pre-owned god. In fact, you usually don’t even know they’re Christian because they don’t run around making a big virtue-signalling deal about it. Black Canadians get along with white Canadians just fine, and Black Lives Matter made idiots of themselves years ago when they formed a Toronto chapter and then had nothing to do because our police weren’t, you know, lining black people up for miles or routing them out of bed at four in the morning to shoot them, which is, I guess, the sort of thing that happens in your country. BLM got so bored they were reduced to holding up a Pride Parade to protest the fact that police weren’t killing enough black people to justify their existence. Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic but you get my point. Canadians like each other more, especially after the Big Orange Fat Fuck (B.O.F.F.) declared economic war on us. United we stand, divided you fall. #6 We have abortion rights Women decide. You want an abortion? You got it. No need to travel to some far-flung state (State? What’s that? Ha ha!) because all the voter crazies in your state and the states surrounding yours abolished it. No more walking past a gauntlet of self-righteous fetus warriors who would just as easily kick that kid off welfare and let ‘im starve, or who believe Jesus hates women who take The Pill. Nor do you need to get consent from your partner (he doesn’t need yours either when he gets pregnant). And you can get the morning-after pill over the counter. #5 We’re safer: Fewer mass shootings Canada is proof positive that you don’t need a bunch of guns to be safe. In fact, it’s directly counterproductive. Canada has far fewer guns than America, and, consequently, far fewer mass shootings. We’d have even fewer if Trudeau (praise be unto his blue eyes nevertheless) had smacked back on Donald Trump about the fentanyl by saying, “Okay, fine, we’ll do something about the small cosmetic case of drugs that crosses your border every year but you must do the same with guns.” When you don’t let any old idiot yahoo have shooty things, the murder rate stays lower. Our children walk to school every day like you did thirty or forty years ago without worrying they’ll come home with their head missing from some ugly Merk with a grievance against, God only knows what, goldfish or something. You can stand on your balcony here without being shot. You can buy eggs (at $3.43/carton as I did this past Saturday) at the grocery store without falling into a bloody puddle. You can do your fast food job without getting shot for having run out of a side dish. You can eat a cheeseburger without becoming dead meat yourself. I mean, come on America, you’re just crazy. No one wants to talk to you because you might blow a hole in their butt for feeding squirrels . It's a lot easier than it looks ;) #4 We’re nicer than you (when you’re not attacking us) Foreigners pretend to love you when you visit (“Ohhhhhh, Amedican! Beddy big tippahs! Bring big Amedican wallet!”) but in fact they’re just after you for your money. Go Canadian, and you can sew honest flag patches on your backpacks and big American Canadian wallet which everyone will just assume is stuffed with weed and vapes. We’ll teach you how to talk Canuckian and not overuse the ‘eh?’ at the end which is a totally rookie move. Walk like an Egyptian, talk like a Canadian, you hoser! The Big Orange Fat Fuck and the Barbie Bimbo disrespecting Canada and our former Prime Minister is not winning you any friends, New Canada. Now we know a lot of you love us already, and don’t approve of the trash-talkin’ manbaby and his trained parrot. You know no country on earth wants to become one of your states for many very obvious reasons. (This list should give you a good idea.) Here’s the deal: Become Canadian and then everyone will love you! We’ll call your province New Canada! Alaska will join the mainland, and Hawaii will be Canada South. You can keep your eagle, but it’ll be your provincial animal. Your national animal will be the beaver, which is great because everybody loves beavers!!! #3 You won’t starve to death We have shit the manbaby wants—our rare earth minerals, our oil and our water. We’ve got potash, which was made millions of years ago from the Sea of Saskatchewan. And you don’t got much of it yourselves. The Sea of Saskatchewan today. We take what’s left and turn it into fertilizer which we sell rather a lot of to you and you will starve to death if we don’t. Image by Jimmy Emerson on Flickr . CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Become New Canada, and you don’t starve to death when we tariff the shit out of potash since America actually depends on us for it. Tell the Big Orange Fat Fuck the U.S. needs us far more than he knows. Become our eleventh province, and you will never starve to death. #2 - We’re more liberal than you are Even our conservatives. We don’t argue about abortion. Or gay marriage. They resisted legal weed, but our conservatives are dealing with it. We still believe in democracy, and honestly, you don’t. No, not even the Democrats . Especially the Democrats . They’re as infested and indoctrinated with anti-democratic crazies as the MAGAts. Who supports the Islamofascist Hamas more, I ask you? Now tell us again how Donald Trump is the most fascist threat to America. Get real: It’s a toss-up. #1 - Our nation is run by grownups We are getting our shit together because of you. This is the big one, kids. New Canada, right now you’re a nation of children run by spoiled toddlers. And we don’t just mean Donnie Demento and the MAGAt gang. We mean all of you. Yeah, you too, Democrats, we’re looking at you too! Nadda wunnuya can be counted on to put up and elect a real, competent, educated, experienced presidential candidate. We have four major parties in Canada and although they often don’t agree with each other they’re all grownups. And when the shit comes down, like with COVID and now Donnie Delusional ranting and raving about annexing, like, the entire solar system, our leaders come together like a perfectly-synchronized marching band in lockstep to slam you back with higher consumer prices because President Schitzenpants wakes up one morning and thinks, “Four dollars a pound for beef is way too low. It needs to be six dollars a pound! I’ll raise the tariffs on beef so Canada will raise it back!” Et voilà - we make it happen for you. A Hamburger Helper meal that costs more than your engagement ring. And we’ll keep it comin’ for ya as long as ya want, America. Our new prime minister promises to “keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect.” As in, suck it, you B.F.O.B. (Big Fat Orange Bitch)! Two words that should strike the fear of God into Americans: Oil embargo. We’ve already kicked your annexing ass twice, here and here , and we’ll do it again if you make us. We ain’t no rice paddy farmers or desert-dwelling goat herders, cupcakes. And you couldn’t even beat them. Remember, the ‘artificially drawn line’ works both ways, to your benefit. End the misery now! Become our next province, New Canada! You can’t afford to live in the U.S. anymore anyway! Because you can’t beat us and the offer to join us is limited. Remember: Become Canadian, enjoy our riches, and avoid Trumpflation. How To Become A Canadian - Real advice based on my experience When I'm not going all Julius Caesar on Canada, I sober up and suggest, only semi-jokingly: Which states want to join Canada? I've heard most of New England and California does but--what if you put it up to a vote? Don't Republicans revere 'states' rights'? If no one was forced or 'annexed' as the U.S. calls it, wouldn't it benefit both sovereign nations? The U.S. would be rid of those pesky liberal pro-democracy types and MAGA could turn what's left into Jesusland or whatever. And Canada would go bluer and smoke more weed and have really mind-blowing sex with AWOL soldiers. Think about, state politicians.......................................... 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!

I've changed my mind from a few years ago. It's a bridge too far. Why are so many of these people middle-aged and morbidly obese? Image by Marcel van Engelenburg from Pixabay I haven’t written much about trans issues recently. It seems less pressing now that Donald Trump has set the TransTrain on fire with several executive orders rolling back several key pieces of Democratic ‘progressive’ anti-scientific whackjobbery. America. Most of his EOs have met resistance in the courts, and from medical professionals who continue to insist that this gravy trai n these medical treatments are abso-freakin’-lutely necessary and ‘life-saving’. Early evidence indicates that in the short term, Trump is going to lose most of these battles. Judge orders Trump administration to return two transgender inmates to women’s prisons - This just makes me loathe Democrats and ‘progressives’ even more But the key word is ‘battles’. ‘Progressives’ will lose this war. They’re up against 80% of American common-sense normies who don’t support fake female athletes, but do support established science. Trans issues, though, motivate me less than they did two months ago. Ultimately, common sense is prevailing, on this issue if not in much else for the next four years. The horse of different rainbow colors is out of the barn. The world is moving on from ‘trans’, and Trump/Musk have introduced far bigger problems for America than those facing this highly niche elitist, largely sexual fetishist minority . It got me to thinking about my old kiddie drag piece from a few years ago— Are Drag Shows Really All That Bad For Kids? I’d felt weird supporting it in 2023, but belly dancing got in the way. I used to be the flashy, heavily-costumed, bejeweled, loud and outrageous chick embarrassing entertaining forty-year-old men on their birthdays. Kids loved me. They were my favorite audience. But I felt, and still feel, that nagging pedo-ey sensation, not because drag queens or Team Rainbow are particularly disposed to pedophilia, but because the overly-inclusive progressive movement can’t say no to anybody. We need to remember that any activity that draws children is bound to interest the kiddie-far-too-friendly. As the Boy Scouts can tell you. Democrats and progressive activists are still fighting this trans crap with Trump, despite illiberal ‘woke’ ideology being one of the many reasons they lost the election so soundly. Today, they’re polling at 27% approval with only 7% thinking they’re doing ‘a great job’. Trump, after all he’s done, is polling at 48%. Democrats and progressives WILL throw open the doors for the pedos. You can’t trust them with anyone’s safety. The whole drag performance movement is tainted by its association with transactivism and the latter’s success in infiltrating the schools and the therapy profession with gender-bending and indoctrinating children. Drag’s connection to transactivism is why I’m cutting off my tenuous support. You’re known by the company you keep. Transactivists prey on children, to mold them into something they’re not, tone-deaf to the pleas that gay kids have the right to grow up gay and that children aren’t old enough to make rational, informed decisions about sex transition. Detransition lawsuits even have begun to state the lack of real prep talk, specificall y. The trans movement is an extension of transhumanism to remake and reimagine what it means to be human, which is fine for adults, but simply inappropriate for children who need to focus on growing up and learning how to navigate the world in the wonderfully healthy bodies most of them have been granted. There’s a growing sense among the LGB that they made a huge mistake letting the trans and queer in. The Pride movement is losing supporters as normies, including liberals with a sense of decency and the need for boundaries (especially in regard to male sexual desire), quietly withdraw support. Last year in Canada, the Liberal Party and several government groups and corporate sponsors withdrew from various Pride events, mostly over the movement’s anti-Israel stance, which is a weird position for Pride to take considering how much Muslims and Islamic terrorists and the Gazans hate anything LGBTQ. Israel is the ONLY Middle Eastern country that supports gay and transfolk. You’re welcome very fucking much, you garish, overprivileged hate-mongering ingrates! I haven’t been to a Pride parade in a few years. Trans has overwhelmed it. It’s just—icky. How far is too far? What’s the deal with middle-aged and older overweight trans or drag dudes? What’s up with the dude with the beard and hairy chest down below? Women don’t have excessive hirsuteness without a hormonal imbalance. I’d bet my bottom dollar these dudes aren’t ‘gender dysphoric’. My money’s on autogynephilia. And yet, I’ll be frank, I still feel a bit judge-y as a former belly dancer, who has seen many kiddie dancers and never had a problem with it. I understand why little girls want to wear pretty costumes and dance (and, I’m sure, some boys too although I never encountered any). I adored belly dancers when I was their age, and I’ve never found anything icky about it for kids, maybe because I know how empowering belly dancing actually is. Kiddie beauty pageants they ain’t, drawing slavering pedophiles at the sight of grown-up looking toddlers. Drag has changed the game. It comes from a highly sexualized culture and I can’t ignore it anymore. Belly dancers don’t do show ‘n’ tells in school, asking kids, “Are you sure you’re not a belly dancer?” No doubt some of them are! I was, apparently. Drag and belly dancing appeal to boys too, as there is both male-style belly dancing and female-style. Because of trans extremism, genderqueer recruitment , and ‘gender-affirming care’, we’ve stopped supporting and protecting gay children. I don’t want to support trans homophobia. Some kids do need help. I wrote about Aaron Kimberly here on Substack, who unfortunately seems to have taken down all his Bearded Lesbian podcasts and materials. He was taking a lot of flak from others for his views and multiple sex transition back-and-forths. It’s a shame because he struck me as a genuinely, biologically gender dysphoric person, set apart from the old, overweight, suspiciously fetishy autogynephiles. We need to make a place for people like Aaron, and even for those who aren’t particularly dysphoric, but want to experiment with gender fluidity. There’s a place for that , too, and the young’uns today are hardly the first to cross gender lines. Our grandmothers or great-grandmothers strapped down their breasts with binders a hundred years ago. They made their bodies more like boys’. Later, Boomer and Gen-X rock musicians like David Bowie, Boy George, Mick Jagger, Prince, and Annie Lennox caused others to whisper, “Is he or she gay?” “Who cares?” others responded. Indeed. So what? Support for gay marriage and rights has slipped a little with the American public and I wonder if it’s because progressives refused to stop the slippery slope. The all-too-inclusive Pride movement has clearly gone several bridges too far after many great successes. Conservatives who initially resisted gay rights came around once they realized gay people aren’t anymore a threat than straight people. In Canada, it’s not an issue for the Conservative Party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre, who’s made it clear eliminating gay marriage isn’t in the policy platform. He fully accepts his gay father-in-law. Not all conservatives embrace these rights we consider a given, but neither do all ‘progressives’ . Homosexuality is real. Except for a very small percentage of cases, ‘gender dysphoria’ is not. Instead of teaching children it’s okay to be gay and it’s not okay to hate others, Pride breached the respectability dam and opened the floodgates to what looked an awful lot like heteroseuxal male fetishism. I support gay kids, but there’s no such thing as ‘trans’ kids. There just isn’t. Progressives manufactured them. There’s nothing wrong with sexual fetishism. Just keep it away from kids. Children can be happy in their own bodies. If you let them. My problems with drag It would be incorrect to believe that children aren’t sexual at all. They are. Romantic stirrings start young. I remember a very strong inclination for boys when I was a child. I chased little boys around on the playground trying to kiss them. Yeah, I was That Annoying Girl. Ewwwww! Children explore their own bodies at around ages 4-6. Some experiment with masturbation. Kids play doctor. Boys and girls sometimes dare each other to expose ‘wee-wees’. Human sexuality is ever-present. Fetuses have been observed playing with themselves . We explore that wonderful thing between our legs even before birth. But dudes who express comments like the one below are why so many normies distrust drag queens. From Twitter Little girls are NOT ‘kinky’. That’s a male sexual fetishist projection. The queen is right that kids might not be as ‘straight and narrow’ as we think, but it doesn’t give him permission to expose them to inappropriate conduct. It’s pretty creepy on multiple levels. Not only does he suggest little girls are ‘kinky’ but addresses the fear some adults have that pedo men in the ladies’ room might harm children. Instead of refuting it, he subtly suggests they might like what this theoretical pervert does to them. Pedophiles justify themselves that way, too. I do, actually, understand why kids like drag, for the same reason they like belly dancers. I can imagine some kids just eat it up, but others, I wonder, might be quietly creeped out. Old fat guys dancing around like clowns appropriating womanhood; what’s all that about? Funny how few drag shows ever feature crossing the other way. I’m leaving up my original drag article but I’m adding a proviso about how I’ve changed my mind. Somewhere, two years ago, deep down in my liberal soul, I knew it. What it comes down to is this: Recruitment and indoctrination. ‘Drag story hour’ and shows reek of both; belly dancing doesn’t. Probably because it’s a mostly female activity and profession. The trans movement supports a mostly manufactured pseudo-marginalized group of men. It’s about rolling back women’s rights and, I’m sorry, I have to say it, sexualizing children. It is, as always, biological males at the bottom of this. When men push for something as violently and aggressively as transactivists have for access to women’s private spaces, sports teams, and children, the real motivation is pretty certainly to be found between their legs. Even if they’re not pedos themselves. Even if they have no desire to expose children to them. But will they stop the pedos who are quietly awaiting their moment with the Ado Annie left? I believe they won’t. I’m calling BS on drag queens for children. Call me a conservative, a MAGA, a Christian nationalist, a Trumper, or as my progressive Koolaid-drinking college friend accuses me of, a Fox News Koolaid-drinker. I’m none of the above. I’m just a liberal normie trying to be as true and level-headed as I can be about the values and beliefs I’ve held all my adult life. I was wrong to make the half-assed defense of kiddie drag shows that I did. Sincere, but wrong. I have ‘flip-flopped’ as George W. Bush would have put it. Or maybe I just evolved. The Hideous Authenticityphobia Of The Left’s Body-Modders What Would A ‘Christian’ Pride Month Look Like, After June’s? ‘Saving Normal’ Describes How Transmania Evolved, Before It Started What If The Trans Movement Evolved More Honestly? 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!

Have we still not learned how to get along with the boys? I don’t think I could find anything more ridiculously archaic than this. Public domain photo “Hey, you want to join this?” my boss emailed me a few weeks ago. It was a women’s online networking group for IT services professionals. I checked my calendar. No, it was not 1972. “Is there a professional networking opportunity?” I asked. “We want to sell more managed services. Do you think I could find leads?” No, he just thought I might be interested. I wasn’t. Sex-segregated spaces put my brain to sleep. What’s the point? What are these gals afraid of? Mansplaining? Inappropriate comments? Andrew Tate aggressively flexing his tattooed muscles? Some dude Zooming off on-camera? I believe in only a limited need for sex-segregated groups, for trauma or emotional support. Trauma victims sometimes need a man-free safe space. Others need to just bitch. So do men (more on that shortly). Otherwise, I prefer my gatherings and groups sex-integrated. It’s 2025, girls! In a progressive world mad for ‘inclusivity’, there’s grand irony in excluding half the human race. Public domain photo from Pxhere Woman up, ladies! Radical Radha and I have written before about how diversifying the workplace is one thing, but then everyone has to get along. Especially women and men, who constitute the world’s first division of Us vs Them. Better DEI Will Teach Women How To Handle Conflict With Male Colleagues I don’t see how we can do that when we refuse to network with each other. Our polarized world has taught us to stick to our own and not even bother trying to understand someone else’s perspective. Judging males via one’s own experiences as a female, or vice versa, is ignorantly sexist. We are different, with psychological sex differences. A quick look at the headlines on gender difference articles at Science Daily indicate the many differences between men and women: How they respond to stress , that women talk more than men ( but only during certain life phases ), that the ability to better negotiate for more resources starts early with boys , and that women deal with significantly more body issues and feeling judged at the gym ( did we really need a study for this? ). Is it real or is it all in her head? Zen koan: If you’re trying to lose weight or get in shape, why aren’t you focusing on your workout rather than Barbie McPerfect and Ramboner? Several years ago I joined a women’s-only group for aspiring entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. We met at various restaurants, and the camaraderie was friendly, warm, and female. It wasn’t especially business-oriented. Frankly, few of us knew what we were doing. It was the blind leading the blind. Radha had a similar experience. Her group tended to turn into emotional support sessions. These aren’t business-related. What many self-starters need to talk about is understanding the best practices and processes for starting a business, whether they’re selling coffee online, as twin sisters in my group were doing, or starting up her own employment agency, as the leader was attempting to do. Self-starters often tend to bumble along, learning as they go, which is easier if you have a business or financial administration degree. You already know you need to develop a business idea; study the market to make sure you’re fulfilling a genuine need; create a business plan and choose a business structure; research the product or service you want to provide, and develop a business strategy. Everyone else doesn’t know this. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we didn’t talk about those things. If we had I would have stayed. It would have been relevant. I stopped going. I wondered how much more productive we’d be if men were part of the group. In the corporate world, women who want to succeed, whether to start their own business, become self-employed, or just move ahead, simply must engage with still-powerful men. They possess much of the knowledge. Many are willing to share it. Men have created the world we live in, for better as well as for worse. We often forget the first part. Radha pointed out that men in men-only groups may exclude women not because they’re trying to cling to power but because they’re afraid female joiners might be ‘woke nazis’, a not-unreasonable concern. As a result, men consolidate their power, intentionally or not, with unintentional collaboration with women. No one wants the Language or Microaggressions Police present any more than women want private Zoom messages informing them how pretty they are while they’re trying to focus on new business best practices with the IRS. Confronting conflict A couple of years ago someone asked on Reddit: The querent notes that she ‘feels more comfortable’ in a group of all women, ‘freer in her expression, more emotionally open’, and with an ability to connect better. Other responders complained about couples tending to socialize with each other in mixed groups, or having to deal with “harassment, belittlement, and mansplaning [sic]’. Or misinterpretations of friendly behavior as an invitation for a come-on. Or men not understanding that women’s experiences with work and family obligations are just different. Third-wave feminism (it should be called third-rate feminism) has taught women not to take responsibility for themselves, their feelings, or how they handle others. Men are the way they are; communicate as they do; don’t take feelings as seriously as we; don’t understand the subtle signs that a woman isn’t interested just because she smiled vaguely at him. Handling it rather than running off to your ‘safe space’ hidey-hole with your girlfriends teaches both sexes how to modify their behavior or their responses to take into account how others understand communication and respond. It opens the door for men to do the same: To politely handle misunderstandings with women, including those not caused by themselves. Women must be open to learning and modifying their behavior, too, to interact with men more effectively. It’s not all about our comfort, either. The women-only hiking group could encourage everyone to engage with everyone else on the hike, not just the folks who are like them (single, married, gay, etc.). In their community guidelines, they and business professionals could state how to comport oneself with the opposite sex to reduce the likelihood of romantic misunderstandings. To remember that this was a business group, not a dating service, so tread very, very carefully. And women need to speak up. I speak as a mouthy old broad. I’ve written about how even I, an old lady over sixty, who’s supposed to be invisible because I’m not the wank fantasy I once was, who should STFU because no one cares what an old lady thinks, is still heard whether people want to hear me or not. I make people hear me, and others can too. They can talk over and shut down mansplaining. They can learn to hold their own debating a man. They can be firm and clear about their lack of romantic interest without dragging #MeToo and the U.S. Supreme Court into it. No means no. Every single Canadian man knows what that means when he hears it. We can pass the stick or stitch ‘n’ bitch in our own groups, and after we’ve spoken with our own frankly about our fraught relationship with our father, or whether our spouse is supportive enough or not, then we can perhaps one day integrate and listen to each other with open hearts, without all the sex-based defensiveness. Richard Reeves argues in in his article The case for male spaces that feminist fear of the ‘Old Boys Club’ harms males. Women are afraid of men-only groups, he says, fearing they’re inherently sexist, when males do in fact need them for reasons other than as mini-Davos summits for Da Patriarchy. He says men-only groups function to help men develop better friendships, to support each other, and to combat loneliness. He notes that can benefit women by relieving them of relational emotional support which is still primarily female-borne. Although benefiting women is not the point, he says. This isn’t about women’s needs. For a change. Sex segregation does make sense for emotional support groups. But I still ask both parties: What about later? How about non-segregated groups so the enlightened can now hear much different stories and experiences from the other side? Just a thought for the future. Tear down the social and professional binary Radha has written extensively about the workplace problems she’s encountered that came from other women, not men. On Radically Pragmatic she’s written about accusations of being a ‘pick-me’ girl; of women undercutting her ; of how DEI ignores the many ways work colleagues can harm, discriminate against, abuse, and malign their co-workers even when they’re not white, male, or both. Pandemic isolation degraded everyone’s social skills and many of us were isolating long before COVID made it cool; the rise of sophisticated pocket phones and algo-addicting social media apps had already turned us into a nation of cell zombies. The pandemic made it much, much worse. The recent federal election illustrates just how far we’ve grown apart: Young white women continue to vote Democrat while young men of all colors moved toward the GOP, many of them citing how fed up they were with male-demonizing feminism. Random Stuff Men Say That Make Me Go, ‘WTF, Feminists?’ It doesn’t matter anymore that women were never given a fair shake to contribute, develop, produce, or co-create for thousands of years. History, oh that’s interesting. But that was then, this is now. We can’t change the past but we can change the present and future. Success coaches tell you to hobnob with the already successful. (This was what was wrong with the lady entrepreneurs group). Seek out all the accomplished , not just the ones who look like you. The professional world is highly competitive, but as Radha has written, women are no less competitive–mostly with each other–and nothing would change if men disappeared tomorrow. Let’s tear down the social and professional binary. Several years ago I was in a women-only Pagan Facebook group where I had stopped engaging because it had gone so uber-lefty. I wanted to stay, but not at the expense of shutting up to keep the peace. I tested them with an article I’d written questioning the value of women’s-only groups and whether this one should desegregate. I knew it wouldn’t go over well but I was surprised that no one liked it. Not even my privately heretical long-time Pagan friend. “I need my safe space to fight the Patriarchy,” a Pagan lady snarled. I envisioned an older woman hiding in the gutter under the sidewalk, slapping at men’s ankles as they walked by. When I finally returned to leave the Facebook group, they were planning a witchy weekend and a transwoman was complaining she didn’t feel ‘included’ in a planned ritual honoring female fertility and menstruation, since she was incapable of neither. How so like a narcissistic man to make it all about him, I thought, considering that there would be prepubertal girls and post-menopausal women taking part. But still, there he was! A man! Apparently not violating any ‘safe spaces’ or regarded as a member of Da Patriarchy! Well done, Monsieur, well done. These ladies need some male energy, and this might be a good, gently challenging start. Undercover disruption of the binary paradigm. I like it! 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!

There's progress in the chaos. You can see it, if you don't drink ideological/party Kool-Aid. Trump Deux is all part of The Purge. There’s much danger in the next four years, but also a lot of potential too. Photo by Mike Ribeiro at Pexels The emergence of TrumpinSloMo began days after the election. Since I didn’t vote for either party, I was disappointed in accordance with the plan. My inbox immediately filled with Substack newsletters commenting, observing, and speculating on the national mindshift. It was Morning in America again, which usually only dawned on new Democratic administrations. Even us ex-pats felt it. Though we knew the Republicans had taken both houses, that Project 2025 was devised by Christian crazies, that the malignant psychopath with no concern about re-election would be a thousand times more dangerous… January 20th seemed a very long time away. Once you move past the OMFG in the unconstitutional maelstrom Trump has wrought, you find a glimmer of hope—for down the road. Way down. TrumpinSloMo Woke had finally broke, like a high fever. The sharks circled, sensing weakness. Even before Trump began conveyor-belting executive dis/orders to restore ‘free speech’, women’s rights, plastic straws, English, et al, we normies reclaimed our power from the woke. People spoke out and praised Trump and the Republicans, even those who hadn’t voted for them. “I’ll restore women’s rights to all-female sports teams,” he promised, and we cheered. That was the 70%’s hope for Trump II: That he would at least dial back the horrific excesses of ‘progressive’ authoritarianism. Fascist, indeed. It takes several million to know one. He vomited Executive Orders. He unleashed a rabid Muskrat on the federal government chasing waste in the blindest, most unstrategic manner possible. The Medicaid system failed , briefly. Thousands of federal employees hurriedly updated their resumes. Trump started speaking first sort of jokingly, then more seriously, about taking over other countries. Image by Rebekah Wilce at Sourcewatch . Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike It’s been mass chaos, and abjectly terrifying for those already suffering from hardcore TDS, especially the low-information kind . For the nuanced who look for multiple views, who want to know if Trump is really that bad, if he’s really serious about this or that, or if he can really do what he says he’s going to do, we look for the good that comes from any of this. Often, the discoveries are slow-moving. Trump expresses or does something batshit crazy, and we’re horrified. OMG he can’t be serious about that, can he??? Then later you find the shitbar that makes you smile. That’s the TrumpinSloMo. “Wait for it!” The TrumpinSloMo of Gaza One night I checked CNN just before going to bed—always a bad idea. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “He’s gonna do WHAT with Gaza? Is he trying to start World War III???” The next morning I woke up, knew that dumbass Mar-A-Gaza plan was never going to happen, and then thought, “Hmmmm. Trump’s right about the real estate. It’s beautiful, or it would be if Hamas wasn’t there to schedule regular death and destruction with or without IDF help. Why don’t the Gazans do that themselves? Maybe not turn it into the French Riviera but as part of the Holy Land they could build a huge tourism industry. With yeah, great hotels and swimming pools. They get to make the rules, decide whether to allow bikinis or serve alcohol. If only—” —If only they weren’t batshit crazy themselves, with too many unwilling to share the land with Israel and handle their own state and affairs, but if they did it right they could become self-sustaining. The Gazan shitbar was Trump’s perfect point that the Gazans are sitting on a gold mine. He doesn’t want them to run it, of course. He wants the riches for himself. But point taken. He revealed the question we all needed to voice: Why don’t the Gazans do this? Apparently, Trump got the Egyptians a-thinkin’ the same thing . They’ve proposed their own very rough draft for Gazan self-sustainability that doesn’t include Hamas or Trump. The Arab League likes it. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. But it’s a good start, and it started with Trump. The Trumpenfreude When Trump realized who he was dealing with— the Gazans, ffs!— he spoke vaguely of moving them somewhere, location unspecified, where they’d build a beautiful new place for them, it was gonna be the best, like no place anyone had ever seen before, and they’d be very very happy there. This was his Plan B since Egypt and Jordan were like, when he suggested they take them in, Are you out of your fucking mind? Those people are big-T Trouble wherever they go!!! The Gazans, he planned, would be rounded up like cattle in cars (yes, deliberate Holocaust imagery) and taken off to—someplace else. “Ethnic cleansing,” his vehement critics called it. “Not genocide,” he insisted. The smile returned to my face. How does it feel to be on the other end of the ethnic cleansing wank dream, habibis? “From the river to the sea…Ahhhhh—” Trumpenfreude. There are two kinds. One is when ‘progressives’ find themselves—or their highly questionable friends—treated the way they’ve treated others. Like when their free speech is suppressed. Like when they get cancelled for saying something fascist. Mar-A-Gaza Trumpenfreude is when antisemitic progressives and their single-mindedly violent Islamofascist friends are made to feel the fear they’ve caused so many others. The other kind is when Trump supporters get what they voted for. Breaking down the DOGE shitbar Trump designated Deputy DOGE to run his Muskdozer through the federal government. It’s been horrifying, except for the part where they eliminated DEI. That was no shitbar, that was a nice yummy go-fuck-yourselves-you-blacksplaining-racist-grifters chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream dessert that said, “You’ve already got lots of equality and diversity. Now go update your LinkedIn profile, Sparky!” My fellow ex-Dem rebels and I smiled to think of DEI ‘experts’ on the unemployment line, finding there are no longer any positions available for professional bigots. After the shock wore off, I saw the glimmer of the objective underneath: Increasing government efficiency. Bear with me here, because I don’t justify how they’re doing it. I asked myself, What would the Democrats have done if they’d won? You know the answer. Fuck all. Cleaning up government waste has never been a priority for them, and had the voters named it as their top priority for the next President, the Dems would have done a one-twentieth-assed job at best. They’d have politely approached, trimmed the rainbow-frosted doughnuts budget for privilege acknowledgement diversity sessions with their manicure scissors, and called it a day. “Nothing more to see here! Behold our sleek and svelte operationally-efficient federal government!” The Democratic bloat reduction project before and after. "Fixed it for ya!" Public domain imag e from Pxhere In many of Trump’s craziest acts, and his looniest suggestions, and his most deranged plans dreamed up in that suspiciously overcooked brain, there is almost always something that makes us normies smile, even as we feel horror and anxiety at the way he’s destroying what’s left of America and democracy. So what has Trump’s Fearless Weeder found so far? We don’t know much. Musk doesn’t document well, and many of his fraud claims have already been debunked , or put into context, by fact-checking organizations. We don’t know. The ‘savings’ we allegedly have come directly from the White House and DOGE, and without documentation, they could be fiction. They found waste and fraud, for sure. But they’re breaking everything in the process. Chainsaws aren’t any better than manicure scissors. Elon Musk Archives - Factcheck.org Elon Musk Articles - Snopes.com We’ll only find out later, probably much later, exactly what they got right and wrong when and if adult supervision ever returns to the U.S. government. DOGE doesn’t even know when to stay put and handle a big fat enchilada when it sees it. The Muskrat’s Bratzkrieg mucked around in the U.S. Treasury Department for about fifteen minutes and got expelled from the databases, quite rightly. They moved on to less combative quesadillas. But Treasury is the hugest enchilada, whose fraud and waste the GAO (Government Accountability Office) estimated costs taxpayers an eye-watering $233B to $521B in taxpayer money every single year. Instead of doing some real good, Musk prefers to Trump-et the nonsensical Pride and DEI expenditures he found. Many good agencies and departments in the government exist for very good reasons but have become bloated and definitely need some Jenny Craig. Musk doesn’t know how to conduct proper cost-cutting efforts; look at the mess he made of Twitter. He and Trump are men of action; not rational strategy. Trump needs results now, to show his base he’s not some stinking Democrat who can’t get anything done—a not-unrealistic perception based on a lot of historical Democratic inaction, incompetence and inability to make hard decisions because someone, somewhere, raises a fuss . But there’s the TrumpinSloMo. As poorly implemented as it is, the TrumpRat is exposing a lot of fault lines in the federal government. It may take years to fix but it’ll probably work much better. The Trumpenfreude will arrive shortly when Americans begin to see and feel the pain of the ridiculously irresponsible way these two are destroying highly complex service systems that many Americans don’t realize how much they critically depend on. If the MuskRat MAGAs succeed in cutting Medicaid, millions of Americans, already budget-strapped and suffering from tariff-induced Trumpflation will have to scramble to keep their parents and other aging relatives off the street. Many of them will have voted for this. The plan could be to privatize everything, the ultimate historical Republican wank dream. Democrats have been warning for years that government-provided services are much cheaper. Republicans have denied that, saying privatization is cheaper. Who’s telling the truth, the bureaucrat-pushing Democrats or the pro-capitalist Republicans salivating at raising service prices on a whim? Hope you can afford fire department and police services. The Trumpenfreuders won’t let the chumps who voted for it claim they didn’t know he’d lie to them during a campaign which will be his last. They all knew exactly who they were voting for. They boasted about ‘voting for the convicted felon’. They rubbed it in libs’ faces. MAGA voters are Trump’s bitches. Trumpenfreude. If you’re a Dem who’s sitting there with your arms crossed with an unpleasant smirk on your face experiencing Harrisfreude, just remember: You campaigned hard for this, too, with the worst candidate and campaign platform in several epochs. To sum up We’re in a Crisis, and it’s actually—natural. The TrumpTrain and similarly wider anti-immigrant election victories in Europe and elsewhere signal a global change—a purging, if you will, of the old guards. It’s beginning to make sense, as I work my way through Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. This is the most recent edition of the book, in which Howe describes a time period called a saeculum, which is roughly a human lifetime, 80-100 years. It’s divided into four orderly eras or ‘seasons’. Each season takes 20-25 years, the length of a human generation. Howe traces this evolution through the last 500 years of history. He claims we’ve completed High, Awakening, and Unraveling, and have already entered the Fourth ‘Crisis’ Turning, a highly dangerous time of civic upheaval, traumatic and transformative. I’m about two-thirds through. According to the inside blurb, the book states that the “polarization, the growing threats of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even ushering in America’s next golden age.” The last great Crisis was the world war in 1945. Then we entered a period of growth and stability (High). Then Awakening and unrest (the Sixties and Seventies). Then the Unraveling, when individualism triumphs over institutions (!), and now—the purging of the old ways. Do the math. I suspect it’s a mass purge of the failures of both liberalism and conservatism, capitalism and socialism, a bitch-slap to everyone who thought the problems were brought by others, not themselves. Some or none may re-emerge in ten years. Whatever does won’t look the same. What we’re seeing now is the worsening, and it will get much worse before it gets better. And it may be global. I’d like to think if we just sit tight for 7-10 more years this will all pass away like the world’s worst collective food poisoning, which would be comforting except that few lived comfortably through the horrors of World War II, when they hadn’t even processed the collective mass trauma from World War I, and now we have the potential for nuclear war. Maybe Trump is the purge we need. Or the poorly chosen road. It helps to understand it’s all kind of cyclically reincarnative—‘This shit has happened before and it will happen again’. Trump, Putin, and JinPing may be our historical Ex-Lax, or they may be writing humanity’s concluding chapter. We’ll have to wait and see. Keep watching for the TrumpinSloMo, which may be the harbingers of better times. Here’s a final TrumpinSloMo. Trump just offered us normies a new yummy dessert not unwrapped in shit: He’s threatening to cut off $5B in aid to the antisemitism factory Columbia University if they don’t knock it off with all the Jew hate. He’s fighting antisemitism, which the Democrats would NEVER have done. I can’t find a goddamn thing wrong with that. Hamaslove is why we hate the progressives. Purging. Trumpenfreude. TrumpinSloMo. It’s good for you, but it also may kill you. 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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What I learned with my top-performing Substack article is many expect me to loathe and detest all Muslims uncritically. I'd rather my loathing be justified . Am I supposed to hate these Muslims too? I know, there are no women in the picture. They may be off-camera. But it's ballsy of them to challenge their religion like this. It's a start. CC-BY SA 3.0 image by Alif Laam Meem on Wikipedia A month ago my article 2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims became my top-performing Substack, in which I noted that with the rapid decline of woke progressivism in the face of a wildly un/popular new President, we now have the freedom to publicly discuss what was once verboten in polite progressive company, if that’s not already an oxymoron. Which is that the religion of Islam, and its well over two billion followers, are seriously lagging behind the rest of the, frankly, more civilized world, and we need to start dissecting it publicly because Muslims are never going to change their reactionary, tribalist ways until we grab them by the short ‘n’ curlies. I wrote at length about the UK’s hardly-new ongoing Pakistani Muslim rape gang scandal, regularly flaring up like a bad case of genital herpes. I spoke of Islamic-supported global antisemitism, ongoing terrorist attacks in democratic countries, sometimes but not always perpetrated by immigrants. I addressed whether we need to be stricter in our immigration standards for people from a clearly highly volatile part of the world. One of my readers, YourUnclePedro , summed it up: ‘Someone once likened Islam to the dumbest kid in class who lags behind everyone and vents his frustrations through violence and simply causing problems wherever he goes.” The most interesting comments came from the blanket-haters. The subject of Islam generates extremely strong feelings including some obviously justified fear, and my critics were many. But as I repeatedly pointed out, there are over two and a half billion Muslims in the world and they’re not all sex trafficking little white girls, convening to discuss how to impose Shariah law on Wisconsin, running over partygoers with cars or blowing things up. Muslims, like all other groups of people and cultures, have their good folks and their bad and every shade in between. What was most notable about my negative commenters was how we mostly agreed that Islam has a serious violence problem and Muslims overall need to be held accountable for problems rooted and codified in their religion. My article was 80% critical of Islam and 20% praiseworthy or just a reminder that not all Muslims suck. What outraged the outraged the most was the 20%, not the 80%. What is Islamophobia, and why are people so fearful? Wikipedia describes Islamophobia as, “the irrational fear of, hostility towards, or hatred against the religion of Islam or Muslims in general.” It further remarks that it’s “primarily a form of religious or cultural bigotry; and people who harbour such sentiments often stereotype Muslims as a geopolitical threat or a source of terrorism.” I purposely chose Wikipedia’s definition because it’s famously ‘progressive’ left. I agree with calling Islamophobia ‘irrational’, ‘hostile’ and against the religion and its practitioners ‘in general’. This is what I found not only in the comments on my article, but in a separate non-related Notes thread in which I got challenged by many Islam critics. But, Wikipedia ignores how pervasive Islamic terrorism has been throughout the world, so one must question whether fear of it is a ‘stereotype’ considering how much Islam has earned it. However, it’s important to note (Trigger warning for woke righties: I’m about to say something nice) that many Islamic states have joined the effort to reduce or defeat Islamic terrorists. As CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) notes, it’s mostly a problem in places where the government is unable or unwilling to meet their population’s critical needs. Donald Trump’s brilliant idea to cut foreign aid means ISIS or China will be the good guys feeding poor families, not the United States. Oh, that’ll work out great for us geopolitically. It’s interesting, though, that religiously-motivated terrorist acts seem mostly motivated by the Islamic faith. Christianity stopped being the scourge of Europe hundreds of years ago. Hindu violence is primarily regional, based on Hindu nationalism and mostly targets Muslims. The ongoing violence in Israel is also regional, although strong feelings about which side is ‘right’ are universal. Gazan complaints about ‘genocide’ and casualties come from primarily Muslim Gazans, pretty famously terrorists themselves , alliance with Hamas optional. At any rate, only Islam exports terrorism globally. Many of my critics, Islamophobic or not, pointed out how the faithful are commanded in the Koran to commit countless violent acts and other human rights violations. They’re correct; too many Muslims today subscribe to those ugly and barbaric human violations. So, if Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents, what would you call the rational fear of it? How about Islamojustifobia: The justified fear of Islamic extremism. The fuzzier terrorist-ish types The fuzzier terrorist threats come from Muslims who say nothing or financially support it, even if they never trigger a suicide bomb. Muslim lesbian feminist Irshan Manji details the Muslim ‘buts’ in her book Allah, Liberty & Love: The Courage To Reconcile Faith and Freedo m. The Muslim ‘but’ folk are the kind of people who say they don’t support some bad thing “but….” signalling they’re about to support that bad thing. “I don’t support terrorism BUT….” They can sort of, you know, sometimes see the point? The exceptions? Like for the Gazans? Or against Americans? Or, of course, need we even say this, Jews? They make excuses. The ‘buts’ are ‘fuzzy terrorists’. Islamojustifobics differ from Islamophobics in that they can distinguish between the ‘good Muslims’ and the ‘bad Muslims’. They recognize the bomb throwers; the rogue drivers; the global recruiters; the ‘good Muslims’ who emigrate to get away from their own crazies but who may still raise children who aspire to be terrorists—perhaps by teaching them to hate Jews from birth as is common in many of their cultures, or whose children are radicalized by friends; or ‘progressive’ anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-West education. The pre-requisites for the terrorist profession are low: All you have to do is hate Jews, the West and its freedoms. Bonus: Maybe you ideate suicide. You can no longer detect an Islamic terrorist by their skin color or telltale keffiyeh. They come in all colors and may not tote a gun, and may be much prettier. The radicalization of antisemitic college students by October 7th has been heavily organized and facilitated by female students. Oh, the irony for a famously misogynist religion. Or, what patsies for Islamofascist extremism those little ‘antifascist’ girly-boos are. The ‘progressive’ left has long had a hard-on for Islam, despite its infamous misogyny and homophobia. But, you never know what terrorism your other neighbors support. Whaddabout the non-Islamic fuzzies? Many Irish-Americans who don’t identify as terrorists or supporters nevertheless financially supported the IRA during its heyday. Black Lives Matter supports Hamas. Your ‘anti-fascist’ teenage headcase neighbor across the street might be building bombs in his basement or ordering weaponry to blast the local mosque or synagogue. Or, maybe your neighborhood terrorist is that creepy dude down the street who pays especial attention to small children. The difference between Islamophobes and Islamojustifobes Anti-Muslim incidents have risen around the world since 10/7, but nowhere close to the level of anti-semitism (Thanks, Islam! Not.) But the backlash has begun; several European and the United States have voted in anti-immigration leaders. There will be plenty of talk about what to do about Muslim immigrant wannabes. Or what to do about the ones already there. I wonder if Trump will try a Muslim ban again; he might succeed this time in a more broken, more lawless America. Islamojustifobics, though, always remember that people are individuals. Islamophobes, on the other hand, read the Koran, or read about the Koran, or believe what their friend told them on Twitter about it and think they know the religion when in fact what they know is what someone else says about it, factually or not. They ignore (or are ignorant of) progressive Muslims and their non-profits encouraging adoption of progressive Islam. To be fair, we don’t always see them. It’s not as safe to be a public Muslim as much as it once was, either. Progressive Muslims may be hiding in greater numbers than we know because now they don’t have only their own crazies to worry about, but the far right’s too. ‘Progressive’ lefties are useless, openly justifying and collaborating with Islamic terrorism. International students now face potential deportation from a Trump Executive Order. I have to admit: Cry me a Jordan river about how your free speech is being shut down, bitches. Trumpenfreude. Frankly, I want these holy terrors gone, too. These particular Muslims aren’t civilized enough to live in a free, and, at the moment, still democratic country. Enough is enough. Countries have the right to decide who to let in, and keep in, their countries. I said that even as I waited on my Canadian immigrant application. I would never have snuck across the border. Islamophobics want to eliminate all Muslim immigration. I want to eliminate or prevent only the obviously bad guys. I favor much stricter immigration requirements for Muslims because of their clear violence and radicalization problems. They need to be scrutinized much more closely and if we can’t be sure about a particular immigrant— REJECTED. This will send a very clear message to the Muslim world that the West is sick of their shit. That we’re tired of Muslim immigrants coming to our countries and radicalizing others. You MUST be willing to adopt and live with our democratic values or stay home. They demand exactly the same of us when we move to their countries. Trump has emboldened the UnWoke to step out of their hidey-holes and make their opinions known. The wokies no longer have the power to shut down Islam critics, even though it’s only a short-lived honeymoon as the MAGAs are blanket-hating Islamophobes and we may all have to return underground soon. It may be rooted in Islamojustifobia, but rank, non-discriminating fear is always simply—phobic. What to do Moderate and progressive Muslims can join their non-Muslim allies to fight Islamic extremism in their communities and the greater MAGA threat on the outside. We’ll also need to address our ‘progressive’ terrorist collaborators. While Muslims need to own their members’ misdeeds, the rest of us must hold the far left accountable for its willful blindness against crimes planned or perpetrated by Muslims. You can’t be a #MeToo feminist when you’re collaborating with some rapes. We need to directly confront progressives’ racist willingness to hold only white men accountable for sex crimes. We need to hold them especially accountable for their own terrorist crimes and acts against Jews. Progressives fancy themselves warriors against divisive societal evils while perpetrating those exact same evils themselves. We have to go after their teachers too, and the education system that indoctrinates children with Israel-erasing, anti-white, misogyny-apologetic nonsense. We must call out their performative outrage every time a Trumper shoots the Nazi salute, while waving their ‘I Stand With Hamas’ signs at the ‘pro-Palestinian’ rally. A quick way to identify an Islamophobe is by her support for her own side’s terrorism or potential for it. Many of those fearful of ‘Shariah’ law are those who tried to impose ‘Christian’ law on America during the Reagan-Bush years and who are behind Project 2025. Does the suspected Islamophobe fear all religious authoritarianism, or just someone else’s? Because true anti-authoritarians fear all of it, and the rest are blind to their own dictatorial impulses. I prefer to be Islamojustifobic. I live in a neighborhood full of Muslims and I walk around fearlessly. I probably couldn’t in their own countries, especially as a blonde white woman. But they accept they can’t act like that here. I won’t be able to expect that level of non-violence the next time I visit the Ignited States, if I even do in the next four years. Goddess knows I won’t be flying anywhere there. Islamic extremism is a genuine threat, but any ideology taken too far is, too. Like woke progressivism. And now, TrumpMAGAism. Let’s resolve to be Islami justif obic so we can fight the right Muslims and leave the rest alone to live their lives like the normal people they actually are. Yes really. Regardless of what you hear on your favorite Islam-hysterical podcast. The decent ones don’t make the news because they’re too busy being all normal and shit. Just like us. Be Islamojustifobic rather than Islamophobic. Fight all extremism. Because if your kid is blown up on a bus your kid’s going to be dead regardless of whether the terrorist hates Jews, Americans, ‘libtards’ or ‘fascists’. 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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