Every once in a while I forget that this lunacy is going on amid all the hum drum banality of every day modern life. Then I remember, just riding the bus or something and it's like, "wow all bets really are off for liberal society". Why is everyone acting so normal? I guess it's a tiny-enough segment affected that we can just pretend the water's not boiling. It's like we're just waiting for things to reach some logical conclusion, or an absurd one as the case may be.
Wesley's patented, tortuous parentheticals outlining the absurd claims made in the name of social justice are true works of art. (It's not the same on your twitter, man!) When you systematically unpack the contents of a statement like "JK rowling is denying my right to exist" it's uncanny to see the byzantine mental leaps actually required for someone to get there!
...Another reason most normies will just live and let live til it's almost too late.
"If the courts finds that my feeling that I am something I believe myself to be because I have redefined what it means to be that thing as “having a feeling that I am that thing” imposes a duty of obligation onto others to affirm that I am the thing that I feel that I am, it will have expanded the meaning of what it means to have a right onto a whole frontier — an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
"— an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
Gramsci's "Repressive Tolerance" - which is the definition of tolerance that is used in "our" "Discourse." The word "tolerance" is thereby redefined - that is, falsified. It is via such means that reality itself becomes comprehensively falsified. Citizens use the word innocently - and many other words - and are manipulated by activists and intellectuals, and their accomplices (media, etc.). The citizens are uneasy, but can't "put their finger on" the lie. Their good will is exploited.
I was myself an ideologue for about 9 months - literally in my Sophomore year at university (!). I recall the sense of inner compulsion - the absurd, two-headed messianism (one head in reality, and the other outside of it). It was like a fever or perhaps like a mouse infected with toxoplasma gondii who does looking for a cat to eat it. - and dreams of watching itself get eaten. It is a weird mania which must be classified as a form of immaturity. Mine broke upon reality and the world's indifference - thank God nobody paid me any mind (I had no "activist" inclinations) or encouraged me. My family occasionally addressed my excesses (occasional commentary) with ironic indulgence. This is proper - the place of the immature is the private world of the family, and not the public world of the citizen.
I have experienced nothing remotely like it, since. It astonishes me that adults can entertain such enthusiasms. Social media plainly acts as a bearer of cultic indoctrination and false-affirmation, where reality can be suspended and the fantastic indulged.
I'm sure this isn't cutting edge thinking but I almost never see my observation about pronouns discussed anywhere. I don't understand why trans etc people make such a big deal about it, and all progressive folks introduce themselves with their pronouns. They're the wrong pronouns! Why are you introducing yourself with third person pronouns instead of second? After you introduce yourself as a they/them for example, the listener is never going to say "nice to meet them". We have the ability in English to ignore the whole thing, since the whole "issue" is about third person pronouns and we only use first and second in front of one another. This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
Thank you for this. Something a great pro-reality advocate brought up lately regarding teen culture is that, unfortunately, trans is the only counterculture left. No more punks/goths/etc. is that something that rings true to you and your research? More here:
The problem is that the system is being imbued with this madness: teachers and educators are now they/them, so why shouldn't children be? It's so easy, it's trendy, it makes an insider out of an outsider (being trans or non-binary gives you instant points on the popularity/special scale), it gives a pseudo-explanation for all the body issues teens naturally go through in puberty. I'm terrified of how many children will be sacrificed to this ideology (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/why-are-so-many-children-declaring) before we can finally turn this around.
At its core, this legal fight around self-ID issues (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/i-identify-therefore-i-am-the-illusion) is in fact a fight for reality: If we base laws on how people FEEL and we cannot agree on factual reality anymore, then every single right is basically nullified.
Very interesting read, looking forward to part II!
Great post. The practical problem with each person creating their own reality, and then society making acknowledgement of that inner reality legally enforceable, is obvious. There are several billion people on the planet, each with their own conflicting realities. How can I, a single individual with my own perception of reality, possibly be expected to validate them all? What it really comes down to is whose internal realities are sacred and whose are collateral. And women's realities seem very much to be collateral.
I have been influenced by a comment made by British author Zadie Smith when she was interviewed by Radio New Zealand a few years ago.
Towards the end of a longish interview about her fiction Smith said “Identity is always a negotiation. I know am a black woman. I cannot control what every stranger in the street sees when they look at me. That is not something I can control. It's between who you know yourself to be true and what the other sees and it can't be other than a negotiation. It can be ridiculous, tragic, etc” https://t.co/Uqv5ymwCzU?amp=1 She says this at about 34.00 minutes and her comments followed on from a discussion of how she was perceived when she was on a visit to West Africa.
It made me realise what a huge and unusual expectation there is in respect of endorsing the gender identities of people who feel they have them. To say nothing of the fact that the demands often seem to stem from a need to be believed. Is there any other group that seeks to demand such endorsement? Generally we are allowed to be sceptical especially of far fetched claims or to seek explanation. Not 'believe me when I tell you who I am"
People who need constant "affirmation" of their identities by everyone around them don't know who they are, or even if they are, without all that "mirroring." They are in fact the only ones capable of sorting out who they are, but they prefer to hand that responsibility to others. All of this looks like narcissism, and little more than that.
Imposing speech and thought restrictions while threatening non-compliance with potential suspension, job loss and career destruction is violence. It is accuse the victim, gaslighting, passive-aggressive infliction of emotional and psychic violence. (Toxic feminism developed the technique while installing the D.E.I. commissariat.) The DNC/Biden conflation of criminal violence and citizen assault with revolution during the riot's and the administration's open declaration of war on half the American population is violence. It is long game avarice and tyranny masked as social concern. International criminal finance views the empowered educated American citizen and our Constitutional Republic as a threat. Their control of the EU flooded Europe with massive illegal immigration and displacement. Mass arrest's, prosecution's and re-education classes for bogus thought and speech crime's are underway now. Canada euthanized over 10,000 of its citizen's last year. You're next. When the Constitution goes down (and that's the goal) so are you.
The DNC/ surveillance state serves criminal finance. It represents an avaricious LIE of immense proportion. Like the '08 market crash, the Ukraine is yet another looting and "upward" transference, without consequence, of American treasure. American industry is gutted, DNC cities are war zone's, fentanyl flow's like water, the border is wide open, there's sh't in the streets and America's park's and underpasses are filled with the homeless. Do you actually think the DNC gives a damn about "trans"?
It is simply another instance of manufactured and weaponized chaos being used to bludgeon the Republic and American's into unconscious submission. The butchery of children is just "blowback"(and another chance for "big pharma" to stuff its pocket's).
Hopium: Without subscription journalism the "Twitter" revelation's would not have happened. We are slowly recapturing the American national dialogue but the DNC surveillance state psyop remains alive and dangerous. Criminal finance has totally compromised elected American political leadership. There is (at least at present) a malleable aspect to the Republican Party that might allow a way forward.
I am very curious what will come of all this when it hits the courts.
I just took a new job and I read through the employee handbook. They are trading sex for gender identity in nearly every instance. I am curious if I was to be outed as the TERF that I am if I could be legally fired because of breaking the handbook rules or if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook.
Traditionally, struggling for civil rights was to prevent discrimination against people for their ascriptive identities--that is, what can't be changed, such as who your parents are, your sex, your phenotype, unlike what you can change, such as your political or religious affiliation.
But trans is an identity--the very name means "change"--that is not ascriptive, it is something one can declare. Fighting for civil rights for an identity that anyone can move in (or out of) undermines the entire purpose of traditional civil rights--it's being dismantled in front of us.
beautifully constructed argument. it seems to me that most people are actually NOT transphobic or anti-Trans or any of the other linguistic games or mechanisms used to gaslight, manipulate and control people and assert power. they are simply protecting, as is their MF right, what THEY believe: that, for example, nature and biology are objective realities, whether or not we choose to accept them; and that free speech and expression is as sacrosanct as compelled speech is unethical if not malevolent.
Great reporting, Wesley. Although I confess whenever I read the insanity I still find myself wondering how people can believe this stuff, despite having a front-row seat.
I feel therefore I am and you must agree with me is, as you point out, an extremely dangerous philosophy
Every once in a while I forget that this lunacy is going on amid all the hum drum banality of every day modern life. Then I remember, just riding the bus or something and it's like, "wow all bets really are off for liberal society". Why is everyone acting so normal? I guess it's a tiny-enough segment affected that we can just pretend the water's not boiling. It's like we're just waiting for things to reach some logical conclusion, or an absurd one as the case may be.
Wesley's patented, tortuous parentheticals outlining the absurd claims made in the name of social justice are true works of art. (It's not the same on your twitter, man!) When you systematically unpack the contents of a statement like "JK rowling is denying my right to exist" it's uncanny to see the byzantine mental leaps actually required for someone to get there!
...Another reason most normies will just live and let live til it's almost too late.
"If the courts finds that my feeling that I am something I believe myself to be because I have redefined what it means to be that thing as “having a feeling that I am that thing” imposes a duty of obligation onto others to affirm that I am the thing that I feel that I am, it will have expanded the meaning of what it means to have a right onto a whole frontier — an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
"— an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
Gramsci's "Repressive Tolerance" - which is the definition of tolerance that is used in "our" "Discourse." The word "tolerance" is thereby redefined - that is, falsified. It is via such means that reality itself becomes comprehensively falsified. Citizens use the word innocently - and many other words - and are manipulated by activists and intellectuals, and their accomplices (media, etc.). The citizens are uneasy, but can't "put their finger on" the lie. Their good will is exploited.
I was myself an ideologue for about 9 months - literally in my Sophomore year at university (!). I recall the sense of inner compulsion - the absurd, two-headed messianism (one head in reality, and the other outside of it). It was like a fever or perhaps like a mouse infected with toxoplasma gondii who does looking for a cat to eat it. - and dreams of watching itself get eaten. It is a weird mania which must be classified as a form of immaturity. Mine broke upon reality and the world's indifference - thank God nobody paid me any mind (I had no "activist" inclinations) or encouraged me. My family occasionally addressed my excesses (occasional commentary) with ironic indulgence. This is proper - the place of the immature is the private world of the family, and not the public world of the citizen.
I have experienced nothing remotely like it, since. It astonishes me that adults can entertain such enthusiasms. Social media plainly acts as a bearer of cultic indoctrination and false-affirmation, where reality can be suspended and the fantastic indulged.
I'm sure this isn't cutting edge thinking but I almost never see my observation about pronouns discussed anywhere. I don't understand why trans etc people make such a big deal about it, and all progressive folks introduce themselves with their pronouns. They're the wrong pronouns! Why are you introducing yourself with third person pronouns instead of second? After you introduce yourself as a they/them for example, the listener is never going to say "nice to meet them". We have the ability in English to ignore the whole thing, since the whole "issue" is about third person pronouns and we only use first and second in front of one another. This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
Thank you for this. Something a great pro-reality advocate brought up lately regarding teen culture is that, unfortunately, trans is the only counterculture left. No more punks/goths/etc. is that something that rings true to you and your research? More here:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/would-you-rather-have-a-living-son
You couldn't make this craziness up.
The problem is that the system is being imbued with this madness: teachers and educators are now they/them, so why shouldn't children be? It's so easy, it's trendy, it makes an insider out of an outsider (being trans or non-binary gives you instant points on the popularity/special scale), it gives a pseudo-explanation for all the body issues teens naturally go through in puberty. I'm terrified of how many children will be sacrificed to this ideology (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/why-are-so-many-children-declaring) before we can finally turn this around.
At its core, this legal fight around self-ID issues (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/i-identify-therefore-i-am-the-illusion) is in fact a fight for reality: If we base laws on how people FEEL and we cannot agree on factual reality anymore, then every single right is basically nullified.
Very interesting read, looking forward to part II!
Great post. The practical problem with each person creating their own reality, and then society making acknowledgement of that inner reality legally enforceable, is obvious. There are several billion people on the planet, each with their own conflicting realities. How can I, a single individual with my own perception of reality, possibly be expected to validate them all? What it really comes down to is whose internal realities are sacred and whose are collateral. And women's realities seem very much to be collateral.
I used to laugh at historical events like the Salem Witch Trials -- not anymore!
I have been influenced by a comment made by British author Zadie Smith when she was interviewed by Radio New Zealand a few years ago.
Towards the end of a longish interview about her fiction Smith said “Identity is always a negotiation. I know am a black woman. I cannot control what every stranger in the street sees when they look at me. That is not something I can control. It's between who you know yourself to be true and what the other sees and it can't be other than a negotiation. It can be ridiculous, tragic, etc” https://t.co/Uqv5ymwCzU?amp=1 She says this at about 34.00 minutes and her comments followed on from a discussion of how she was perceived when she was on a visit to West Africa.
It made me realise what a huge and unusual expectation there is in respect of endorsing the gender identities of people who feel they have them. To say nothing of the fact that the demands often seem to stem from a need to be believed. Is there any other group that seeks to demand such endorsement? Generally we are allowed to be sceptical especially of far fetched claims or to seek explanation. Not 'believe me when I tell you who I am"
People who need constant "affirmation" of their identities by everyone around them don't know who they are, or even if they are, without all that "mirroring." They are in fact the only ones capable of sorting out who they are, but they prefer to hand that responsibility to others. All of this looks like narcissism, and little more than that.
I just want to say thank you to Molly Myers. We need more principled, courageous people to stand up for themselves and their kids.
Imposing speech and thought restrictions while threatening non-compliance with potential suspension, job loss and career destruction is violence. It is accuse the victim, gaslighting, passive-aggressive infliction of emotional and psychic violence. (Toxic feminism developed the technique while installing the D.E.I. commissariat.) The DNC/Biden conflation of criminal violence and citizen assault with revolution during the riot's and the administration's open declaration of war on half the American population is violence. It is long game avarice and tyranny masked as social concern. International criminal finance views the empowered educated American citizen and our Constitutional Republic as a threat. Their control of the EU flooded Europe with massive illegal immigration and displacement. Mass arrest's, prosecution's and re-education classes for bogus thought and speech crime's are underway now. Canada euthanized over 10,000 of its citizen's last year. You're next. When the Constitution goes down (and that's the goal) so are you.
The DNC/ surveillance state serves criminal finance. It represents an avaricious LIE of immense proportion. Like the '08 market crash, the Ukraine is yet another looting and "upward" transference, without consequence, of American treasure. American industry is gutted, DNC cities are war zone's, fentanyl flow's like water, the border is wide open, there's sh't in the streets and America's park's and underpasses are filled with the homeless. Do you actually think the DNC gives a damn about "trans"?
It is simply another instance of manufactured and weaponized chaos being used to bludgeon the Republic and American's into unconscious submission. The butchery of children is just "blowback"(and another chance for "big pharma" to stuff its pocket's).
Hopium: Without subscription journalism the "Twitter" revelation's would not have happened. We are slowly recapturing the American national dialogue but the DNC surveillance state psyop remains alive and dangerous. Criminal finance has totally compromised elected American political leadership. There is (at least at present) a malleable aspect to the Republican Party that might allow a way forward.
Stay strong. Stay clear.
I am very curious what will come of all this when it hits the courts.
I just took a new job and I read through the employee handbook. They are trading sex for gender identity in nearly every instance. I am curious if I was to be outed as the TERF that I am if I could be legally fired because of breaking the handbook rules or if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook.
Traditionally, struggling for civil rights was to prevent discrimination against people for their ascriptive identities--that is, what can't be changed, such as who your parents are, your sex, your phenotype, unlike what you can change, such as your political or religious affiliation.
But trans is an identity--the very name means "change"--that is not ascriptive, it is something one can declare. Fighting for civil rights for an identity that anyone can move in (or out of) undermines the entire purpose of traditional civil rights--it's being dismantled in front of us.
beautifully constructed argument. it seems to me that most people are actually NOT transphobic or anti-Trans or any of the other linguistic games or mechanisms used to gaslight, manipulate and control people and assert power. they are simply protecting, as is their MF right, what THEY believe: that, for example, nature and biology are objective realities, whether or not we choose to accept them; and that free speech and expression is as sacrosanct as compelled speech is unethical if not malevolent.
Great reporting, Wesley. Although I confess whenever I read the insanity I still find myself wondering how people can believe this stuff, despite having a front-row seat.