For awhile now, I've been predicting that the structure of the dominant contemporary mindset means that with the triumph of gay marriage, a need will be felt for a new front in the elite culture war on average people, with "transgenderism" (a catch-all phrase for a variety of complaints) the most likely salient.
I must thank the New York Times for tirelessly generating new evidence that my prediction of World War T was on the money.
Thus, in today's NYT, six Experts in Such Matters discuss:
Room for Debate: Is ‘Gay Rights’ a Trans Ally?
The gay-rights movement has racked up some big wins in the past few years. First it was: “Obama Ends ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy.” And then: “Supreme Court Bolsters Gay Marriage With Two Major Rulings.” But time and again, federal measures to protect transgender Americans have faltered.
Does it still make sense to think of trans rights as part of the gay-rights movement? Or at this point, is it a different campaign with different goals?
This is not to say I made my World War T prediction purely in the abstract from my understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the zeitgeist. Instead, it's a combination of how pattern recognition and abstracting reasoning should work together in a virtuous circle, making you better able to notice what's going on.
In contrast, elite culture at present encourages Americans to not think critically about current trends. Don't ask cui bono about whatever is the current media fixation. Instead, you should over certain the sins of an increasingly distant past.
This week, for example, continuing a trend of the Obama Years, the hottest topic is ... slavery.
Posts
42 comments:
Here's another idea for the next "War" - making it as easy as possible for gay couples to raise and even conceive children. Up to and including taxpayer-funded "immaculate conception" via genetic engineering, once the technology allows it. Maybe even implantation of wombs in men's bodies so they can be pregnant too.
Who is prosecuting World War T? It seems counterintuitive that emotionally unstable people are coordinating a rights movement, especially when there are so damn few of them -- for now. Is the template for creating a constitutionally protected class now so complete that a crazy person could do it, or is there a liberal vanguard doing it for them and ignoring all the moral hazards gender fickleness entails?
Whether "Trans" rights and "gay" rights are the same or different causes is an irrelevant question. What matters to all involved is that the "tent" of alternate orientation is big enough and covers enough people such that the political constituency of "alternate orientation" is so big that it becomes politically impossible to oppose it, thereby benefiting everyone under the tent, in spite of the differences they have with each other. This explains the ever expanding acronym, which is now up to LGBTQMIAPD.
It's the same reason why there are more and more minority groups invented with time, to widen the tent of affirmative action beneficiaries to make sure affirmative action stays in effect. Even though the various AA beneficiary constituencies don't like each other, they do all want to keep AA.
Rather than fighting them, come up with a way to get every soul on the planet in the tent with them. e.g. prove I'm not African-American, prove I'm not gay.
This week, for example, continuing a trend of the Obama Years, the hottest topic is ... slavery.
Well they got that movie coming out about that dude that was a slave and stuff, letting us relieve the Roots phenomenon all over again. And so soon after "The Butler" too! It's like a Renaissance of "ain't black people swell and ain't whitey hell" movies.
And just when it seems the blacks were getting over their Zimmerman revenge attacks, now we get this slave movie coming along to stir them all up again.
Though good news is that when Chiwetel Ejiofor wins the best actor Oscar (why even bother to have the vote?), how GOOD we will all feel about our lowly white selves then!
Ok, that World War T thing was a really good call.
By the way, Armond White's review of "12 Years a Slave" is one of the best things I've read on the Obama Years obsession with slavery: http://www.nyfcc.com/2013/10/3450/
Steve, you might be correct about World War T, but there is a battle going on now that is designed to give sports reporters some cred with their hard-news reporting friends.
The cause they are championing is to educate Americans that the Washington Redskins have a racist name. Although 90% of Native Americans like the name, Bob Costas, Peter King and others are hell bent on educating them that they should be upset by that name.
Peter Swinson
People who own the tent and pitch the tent won't want everyone under the tent, because they need outside enemies to rally those inside the tent around and to keep everyone inside the tent from devouring each other.
@Anonymous 3:24
That's exactly what i was thinking. But dont forget, this is just the NFL medias latest pet cause to prove how enlightened and morally just they are.
Concussions has been the big one the past few years, but this past offseason the lack of black GMs and coaches hired, as well as the possibility of not just one, but several gay players coming out became their obsession. The NFL even sent memos to teams on how to handle a gay player coming out.
armond white is an equal opportunity hater. he just hates everything.
Some of the comments by lesbians and gays at the NY Times are pretty amusing.
It seems they have the same problems with transgenders that ordinary people do. Difference is, they don't feel uncomfortable coming right out with it, protected species as they are themselves. A number of standard issue white liberals are scolding them over their "bigotry", to no apparent effect.
"Who is prosecuting World War T?"
the same people who did 90% of the heavy lifting in world war G.
when i was in college in the 90s, there were a lot of homosexuals, probably double their number in the general population, and i was even friends with some homos and bis. on campus there were small pockets of politically active counterculture and anti-mainstream culture, just like there are at most campuses. activists on crusades for all the usual subjects discussed in the alternative right ad nauseum. except for one.
homosexual marriage was not one of their causes. in fact, not only was there no homosexual marriage movement in the 90s, not one of my homosexual friends ever mentioned or talked about homosexual marriage. ONCE. not one time, EVER, did a homosexual talk about how it was the biggest, most grave injustice in the world that they could not marry somebody else who was the same sex.
not the 'normal' homos and bis who really only wanted to have same sex sex, and were in almost all other ways just like heteros. not the flaming homos. and none of the activist homos. (homosexual activists, by the way, claim that all homos fall into the first group, the "we're just like you" group, but anybody who knows a couple homos and bis knows this is wildly wrong, and that perhaps only 50% of homos and bis fall into this 'normal' group of people who mainly just want to have same sex sex but are otherwise pretty much the same as heteros).
pretty much to a person, they either had no concept of the idea, no interest in the idea, or regarded it as a goofy proposition which they themselves even chuckled at. that's when the topic even came up - which it almost NEVER did.
in most of the US, there was 0% interest in this topic 20 years ago. at best, maybe you could say 1% or 2% of the attention and agenda of the anti-american, countercultural left was focused on this issue. even on the campuses of the most stridently left universities such as cal and harvard, homosexual marriage occupied a negligible amount of the time or effort of the politically active counterculturalists.
so then, one must ask, who drove it from where it was then, 0% interest in most places and perhaps 2% of the liberals attention and agenda in the hottest of hotbeds of liberalism, to where it is now?
the answer is, mostly heterosexuals. heterosexual cultural marxists, that is. people who hate the historic american nation and everything about it. the interest in homosexual marriage as a national topic coincided with their rise to political hegemony.
today, they drive the topics, they set the agendas. they can turn an obscure topic into a mainstream topic in less than a decade, and even steadily condition the population and turn them from laughing at mere discussion of a topic, to getting a majority of them agreeing with it two decades later.
imagine barack obama running for president 20 years ago. it's a non-starter. he gets laughed out of the building. today? it's considered offensive in many circles if you don't think he should have been re-elected.
scalia will not like the new america, where new minorities and new oppressed groups will be created out of thin air by the dominant cultural marxists. i bet it will crush him psychologically when he finally has to retire, realizing his own very advanced age and inability to continue. for he knows, whenever he does retire, the president will be a cultural marxist, and will appoint a cultural marxist to replace him on the supreme court. one wonders if he views his own presence on the court as some kind of bitter, hopeless battle to his last breath. "You'll turn the United States of America into the Divided States of Brazil only over my cold, dead body."
which they will.
I've been marginally fascinated for years by the inclusion of Transgenderism in the gay tent. One of these things is not like the others, as Sesame Street taught me to think a long time ago, in its and my early years. Funny that the Times has maybe deigned to imagine that.
As commenter countenance says:
"What matters to all involved is that the "tent" of alternate orientation is big enough and covers enough people such that the political constituency of "alternate orientation" is so big that it becomes politically impossible to oppose it..."
By the way, that reminds me of a conversation I had with a New Mexico State Representative or whatever he was in a bar in Cambridge, MA in probably 1986. He was doing stuff at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government that summer as a Visiting Something-or-other.
In his Hispanic capacity, he spent a lot of our conversation bitching about Hispanic prospects for milking stuff from the government. It had all gone south, he claimed, when women got included as a protected class. He didn't put it this way, but I now see it in retrospect as dilution of his stock.
I remember doing a lot of insincere nodding that night.
For about four decades, the lesbian-feminist Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has banned male-born transsexuals.
There's something Orwellian about the NYT running a feature called "Room for Debate" where all of the respondents basically have the same opinion.
Mr Sailer,
It's off-topic, but you got another respectable journal to cite you on the "baby gap":
http://www.as.miami.edu/personal/cklofstad/15_mate_choice_PB.pdf
They should have read some of your other work to find out why more conservative men than conservative women were willing to marry outside their race.
Great Believer piece on the Michigan Womyn's problem with trans-chyx here:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea
It used to be just about homosexual rights. Then sometime in the last decade bisexuals and transgenders started being included, for the reasons countenance stated.
So, there's really only one final frontier left: pedophilia. The deviancy that dares not speak it's name. I wonder how long it will take before the Jerry Sanduskys out there get to have their turn. I mean, we're already very close to forcing the Boy Scouts to allow openly gay scoutmasters (curious how militant the gay movement is over that issue...)
Its bad enough that the common person is supposed to recognize homosexual as 'normal' when clearly it's not, but transgenderism as normal? Or even worse, morally superior to traditional white America? If it is an escalating war against middle America, next we'll hear beastiality or NAMBLA are the new 'gay'.
...making it as easy as possible for gay couples to raise and even conceive children.
By Jove that's it! It will be about "access" to one's reproductive rights--why should gay men be denied the fundamental, universal human right of biological parenthood, or, rather, why should they have to pay through the nose while breeders grow their own for nothing? That's discriminatory. The basic template is already in use--quotas to hire the underrepresented, Title IX, mandatory maternity leave, all of these movements are nothing less than demands that society right Nature's intolerable inequities.
So we'll eventually be funding various methods of artificial conception.
My first thought when considering whether World War T has legs is no--this is a group where maybe half or more are deeply troubled and the rest are flakes.
Gays produce their own talent; transgenders, probably not so much. And where are the poster children for WWT? Right? Where are the well-spoken, attractive and effective transgendered spokesmodels? Good luck with that, MSNBC.
But then I consider how successful Progressivism's genocidaires have been using black Americans as a bludgeon and I think yet again. Over time they've conditioned us to ignore the moral and intellectual mediocrity of our brown brothers, to collectively condescend. But of course blacks have created much of the cultural landscape. The transgendered are not going to do that.
My bet is the fervor will cool some but the movement will press on. This article suggests the gays are already looking over at their newly acquired subset with reservations. I mean, have you ever encountered a cross-dressing man in public? I was standing in line behind a guy at the store one day and I swear I was more offended by his lack of taste than anything else. I mean, if you're going to do it do it right.
For about four decades, the lesbian-feminist Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has banned male-born transsexuals.
See...fate isn't always cruel!
At the linked review, critic Armond White writes, "Some of the most racist people I know are bowled over by this movie."
That's a strange line. He actually knows self-identified racists, or does he just mean people he's decided are racist, like, for example, his wife's parents?
All these crazies want the same thing.
Liberation without separation.
Steve, you're always wondering about Mexican immigrant success:
"How 'Flamin' Hot Cheetos' transformed immigrant janitor without a high school degree into a corporate executive"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2463533/How-Flamin-Hot-Cheetos-transformed-immigrant-janitor-high-school-degree-corporate-executive.html
-Richard Montañez came up with the idea after the Cheeto machine broke in the factory where he worked
-The 55-year-old decided to add chilli powder to some unflavored Cheetos
-His colleagues and family loved it so he decided to pitch the idea to the president of the company
-He was named one of the most influential Hispanics in corporate America
-Has been featured in News Week and Fortune 500 magazine
"Richard Montañez is a walking, talking American Dream.
Working as a janitor at a California factory with no qualifications and barely able to speak English, the Mexican native's simple idea for a snack took him from mopping floors to meeting U.S. presidents and flying in corporate jets.
It all started in 1976 at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, when a machine broke in the Cheetos assembly line.
'Some of them were missing the cheese because the machine had broken, so I took some home. I put some chili powder on it, and it tasted good, Montañez said."
This week, for example, continuing a trend of the Obama Years, the hottest topic is ... slavery.
Funny how those most nostalgic about black oppression are those who are most ostentatiously outraged by it.
More seriously, between the re-election of Obama, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and the 50th anniversary of various civil rights milestones, the media and the public are probably going to hit a saturation point with respect to this stuff. Soledad O'Brien will probably be busy for the next few years doing specials, and those who own royalties to recordings of black choirs will do just fine licensing them to Ken Burns.
But after all of that, The Gap will persist, the police blotters will continue to look like they currently do. And no one will have learned a damn thing.
There are some interesting points of friction and fracture between transgenders and homosexuals. My favorite recent example: the "cotton ceiling." Male-to-Female transsexuals (some of them "pre-operative" or "non-operative," meaning they have a penis), who consider themselves "lesbians" complain of a "cotton ceiling." (Like the "glass ceiling," get it?) Apparently, their lesbian "sisters" are all on board with talking about transgender rights and inclusion and all the rest. But when it comes to being willing to have sex with the transsexuals or including them in women- (womyn-?) only sex parties, the lesbians who were born with the right bits aren't putting out. (Hence the "cotton" being the undies that aren't come off the way they're supposed to.) And this is evidence of lesbian "transphobia" and "cissexism."
Needless to say, adherents to the theory that a significant fraction of male-to-female transsexuals are merely acting out a peculiar sexual fetish can have a field day with these "women" acting suspiciously similarly to horny men trying to get in on girl-on-girl action.
http://factcheckme.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/the-cotton-ceiling-really/
OT, NJ senate results by county:
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/10/booker_vs_lonegan_county-by-county_voting_results_in_us_senate_election.html
The counties with the big discrepancies usually have a big ghetto city:
Camden county: Camden, tons of blacks
Essex: Newark and Irvington, more blacks
Hudson: Jersey city, more blacks and latinos
Mercer: trenton, state capital, complete ghetto
Passaic: tons of hispanics
Union: elizabeth, blacks and hispanics
2 outliers:
Bergen county and Mercer county, guess what? these tend to be better off economically and have higher percentage of asians, you would think they would vote the responsible white guy, nope, these two counties also voted strongly for booker.
It seems to me that for every white vote there are 2 non white votes for the non whites/non responsible candidate.
They beat us on quantity and not quality.
When the biological cause/etiology of homosexuality is pinpointed, gays will demand that researchers find a wsy to turn fetus' (or perhaps toddlers) gay. They will demand it and demand it and demand it....
"Si se puede! said...
'Some of them were missing the cheese because the machine had broken, so I took some home. I put some chili powder on it, and it tasted good, Montañez said.""
You're kidding me! Cheetos actually contain cheese? I thought that the name of thier distinctive flavor was "Bright Orange".
Cheetos have got to be the most perfect synthetic food-product - completely severed from any connection to the actual food-chain.
"But time and again, federal measures to protect transgender Americans have faltered."
Oh, for Pete's sake, protect them from what? From having to live in a world where not everyone likes and admires them for how wonderful and special they are?
It's not enough for the Cultural Marxists to win, they have to crush everything and everyone in their path. This is not a free country; it's a theocracy with a set of gods and totems and a high priesthood looking for heretics.
The funny thing is, I mind homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. a lot less than I mind advocacy for these causes. The wheedling about "Human Rights", the political Mau-Mauing, the sanctimonious victimhood pageantry...as I told my friends when I voted for Prop 8 back in college in 2008, I did it less to stop gay marriage than to make all the earnest, trendy Millennials cry in their soy lattes.
"It seems to me that for every white vote there are 2 non white votes for the non whites/non responsible candidate.
They beat us on quantity and not quality."
Clearly, the problem is that the NJ GOP hasn't sufficiently explained to the minorities that they're Natural Republicans deep down.
More cowbell, dammit!
So, there's really only one final frontier left: pedophilia.
Don't worry, they're busy at it:
In the recent flick We're The Millers, the hero is caught by a policeman while trying to smuggle drugs out of Mexico and asked for a 1,000 bribe.
Well, the Mexican cop will settle for a sexual favor . . from a male party.
Guess what, the father demands his 13-year-old looking son to give him a blow job.
The boy reluctantly accepts, his father lecturing him that a refusal would be homophobic.
The message has been sent loud and clear to a few people.
Oh, for Pete's sake, protect them from what? From having to live in a world where not everyone likes and admires them for how wonderful and special they are?
It's not enough for the Cultural Marxists to win, they have to crush everything and everyone in their path. This is not a free country; it's a theocracy with a set of gods and totems and a high priesthood looking for heretics.
Anonymous @ 9:51: "The funny thing is, I mind homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. a lot less than I mind advocacy for these causes. The wheedling about "Human Rights", the political Mau-Mauing, the sanctimonious victimhood pageantry...as I told my friends when I voted for Prop 8 back in college in 2008, I did it less to stop gay marriage than to make all the earnest, trendy Millennials cry in their soy lattes."
An instructive contrast is cannabis smokers. They don't care too much about being judged by the "content of their character" and have been and will be quite happy when the society and law leave them alone. They're unlikely to try to change the attitudes of society at large to pot smoking, so long as they're reasonably sure that they won't be put in cages for it.
A good test for oppression is whether the oppressed people merely want to be left alone or to get away, like the East German dissidents, from people who either won't leave them alone or won't let them leave or whether they're interested in a seat at the oppressor's table or society's attitudes toward them.
by the way i've already noticed the opening shots of world war T in a few places.
gamespot, for instance, now deliberately has tranny men do the video reviews of some games. it was sporadic and rare in the past, but when grand theft auto 5 came out and they had a tranny review it, that had to be on purpose. no way would they randomly assign a tranny to review the most popular game of the year and the review which would be watched the most on their site.
i don't get to play many games anymore, just not enough time, however when i do want to check out some reviews of the occasional game i'm interested in, i don't want an ugly, totally obvious 'nerdy man who's doing a really bad imitation of a woman' type tranny to do it.
not that i want any tranny but the average tranny is never even going to pass for a woman. just as i don't want woman sideline reporters at my NFL games and woman anchors on the sports desk, i don't want wimpy little bradly wommanning type twerps to start doing lots of the video games reviews because the SWPL crowd, who control some of the video game media space, want to make a political point.
Girls Threatened With Hate Crime Charges For Complaining About Transgender Bathroom Harassment
We are screwed...
Nothing wrong in being concerned about slavery - this BBC report lists the latest rankings of countries for where it's currently most prevalent:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24560937
Countries inhabited by lots of Wicked White Men are absent from the top ten, so the issue may not hold as much attention as the past depradations of European slave-traders and owners.
"-Richard Montañez came up with the idea after the Cheeto machine broke in the factory where he worked
-The 55-year-old decided to add chilli powder to some unflavored Cheetos
-His colleagues and family loved it so he decided to pitch the idea to the president of the company
-He was named one of the most influential Hispanics in corporate America
-Has been featured in News Week and Fortune 500 magazine"
That's hilarious. I was roasting pumpkin seeds one time and decided to try dusting some with chili powder. It was good. When do I get my Newsweek interview?
I guess these people have never heard the phrase "damning with faint praise."
I still think that the elitist attempt to abolish all border controls, (in desirable nations, at least), is the next big 'liberation struggle' looming on the horizon.
You can already hear the tossers scream that "nationality is exclusionary" and therefore nationality has to go because it 'discriminates'. (As an aside, when I was at school, back in the year dot, the verb 'to discriminate' was taught as to represent the highest of virtues and faculties).
Tossers like the arch-tosser Brian Caplan are already distressingly and boringly passing tired old guff of lies about 'nationality'. There is no need for me to point out the myriad of Steve posts and Steve comments over the years that utterly demolish his cardboard falsehoods uttered through false teeth.
The elitists were all most up on their game, but fortunately the current depression threw a spanner in the works. Vide how the odious New Labour sneaked in immigrants by stealth, rather like silent flatulence. Vide how pre-2007 the papers bombarded us with crap about how 'great' immigration was for the economy. Yup, if pattern recognition's your thing, it's always the same old game. First the papers and elite opinion chattering endlessly - then when things have be 'softened-up' you get the sneak law changes, (though New Labour by-passed a few stages).
Alawys the same old story. Lies, screaming, shouting and then law changes.
WWT news:
http://www.truenewsusa.blogspot.com/2013/10/straight-girls-threatened-with-hate.html
FredR said...White has a fairly low bar for what constitutes being a racist (liking Michelle Pfeiffer, for one). In any event, I thought he was gay.
I have to confess I had no idea who White is when I wrote my comment, but further research indicates that he's (probably) gay, which obliterates my "wife" comment, and black, which explains why he thinks he knows lots of racists.
12 yrs a slave and Tom Hanks gets roughed up by Somalis.
Post a Comment