Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The sw...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

• Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.

It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew.  Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.

Everything about this is wrong on an existential level.  AI, frankly, is wrong.  

And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest. 

• There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift

I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing.  She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.

I suppose that's the root of it.

Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift.  This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.

Swift is dating some football player.  I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me.  Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting.  Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe.  Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers).  Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy.  There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.

And so now we have this total weirdness:

Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: 

People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly:

They’re elevating her to an idol.

Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!

Far right activist Laura Loomer:

The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.

Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …

And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing  OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion. 

This is insane.

Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics.  What more evidence of this is required than this?

• Celebrity endorsements.

Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden.  I read something that claimed she had in 2020.

I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.

There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump.  Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it.  So why the concern.

Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of.  I.e, she's young and an independent female.  

Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?

I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow.  I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything.  Freaking out about it is just silly.

• Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.

This is a tragedy.

It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight.  We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news.  Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.

But this serves as a warning.  Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps.  And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not.  Most families find this out.

But what about when they're running for office?

• The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park.  Heart attack.

This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?

• A concluding thought.  We're getting scary stupid.

Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.

Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this.  It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.

That's not happening in the country now at all.  Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness.  This is out of hand.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Lex Anteinternet: A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who...

Lex Anteinternet: A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who...: 

A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who could be helped.

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say that I must not discuss it.

G. K. Chesterton.

The Gibson Girl, the iconic female figure of the early 1900s created by Charles Dana Gibson. The thing is, you see, she isn't, and wasn't, real.

There's been a story much in the news here, and indeed elsewhere, about a figure who is a guy but who claims he identifies as a girl, or more accurately, a figure who is a man who claims he identified as a woman.

What impresses me about this story isn't that aspect of it, so much as nobody, up until very recently, and after I started this post, has really bothered to dive very deep into the story, particularly from a psychological level.

It seems that they should.

Not that we should be too surprised about this. People rarely do.  During World War Two, for example, in one rural area of Germany a figure held forth as a local open anti-Nazi member of the German nobility. . . except he wasn't a member of the nobility at all.  He was lucky to get away with it, and his anti-Nazi stance was genuine.  But a Junker he was not.  Why did he do that?

Backstories to the public positions people take are very rarely looked at, but really should be.  Some backers of causes that are strongly for them in a virulent way have a personal connection that undermines their position in one fashion or another.  Others just make you wonder.  Why, for instance, would a well-to-do young man with no employment history relocate to a Western state and run for office as a political firebrand on the populist libertarian front?  You'd think voters would ask, but they largely don't.  Why would an ostensible billionaire who has gone down in defeat in an election and who faces a pile of criminal charges be running so aggressively for office again?

We tend to take things at face value.

So too here.

There's some new data out that shows that for the majority of people who claim transgenderism, if left to develop that claim on their own, the claim itself is transitory and youthful.  Most girls, for example, who in their very early teens feel they want to be boys, don't a decade latter.  That's a good reason in and of itself not to allow "transitions" that can't be reversed, and any substantial one can't be reversed.  Indeed, it's criminal to allow it in an existential sense, and ought to be in a legal sense.  But what causes it?

Indeed, as a commentor on the story in Wyo File, which finally did look at some of the backstory, noted:

The strong correlation between trans identity and autism spectrum disorder has been recognized over the last three years by such professional organizations as the National Autism Society, The Institutes of Health, Autism Research Institute, and studies published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Noted was the observation that autistic youths were up to 6 times more likely to identify as trans than a similar non-autistic demographic. The medical field recognizes and treats autism as a disorder, not a normal expression of the spectrum of the human condition. Since it appears that trans gender identity is resultant from ASD, it should also be treated as a disorder rather than celebrated.

That's an interesting observation, to say the least.

Well, we've looked at it before, but in regard to the individual who has been so much in the news, why hasn't anyone looked up until now?

The data is there, or at least was, when this story first developed.  It doesn't appear to be a happy story.

When this news first broke, there was a blog up, and maybe there still is, by the father.  It wasn't on his sons, but his son appeared in the photos.  He already looked different from the rest, having gained a lot of weight even as a child.  But what the blog made clear is that the father was bitterly disillusioned.

Not with the son, but with his former wife.

His wife, he claimed, had left and divorced him, and her Mormon faith was the reason why.

Now, that was never explained.  Mormon's can and do marry outside of their faiths, so there are a lot of roads that could be gone down there. Whatever the story was, from his prospective, the wife had left him and their children for her Mormonism.

Now, that doesn't really make sense.  One of the things most noted about Mormon's is their deep devotion to the children.  It's hard to imagine what the conflict was, but it was at least perceived that way by the former father.

Maybe the topic of the young man had already come up, and now based on the Wyo File story, it seems it definitely had.  Perhaps that was the division.  Or not.  Maybe that had nothing to do with the split.  Again, we don't really know.

I don't really know the definitive Mormon position on transgenderism.  I do know the Catholic one which is that disorders are not sinful, but acting upon them if it's outside of the moral framework, is.  This has typically come up in regard to homosexuality. Being a homosexual isn't sinful, but sex outside of marriage is, and marriage is just between a man and a woman.  I believe the Mormon position is similar, but I can't say that definitively.  If the boy's declared sexual dysmorphia became an issue in the household, with one parent taking the boy's side, and one not (and I don't know if that was the case), I can see where it may ultimately have been fatal to the marriage.

What we do know, and from long, long experience, is that its difficult in the extreme to raise a child in a one parent household and that this is so much the case that when one parent is present but really absent, such as one works all the time, or one is a drug or alcohol addict, it statistically impacts the outlook of the children and often for life.

Daughters, it's been shown, of a checked out woman are much more likely to turn out to be lesbians than daughters where the mother is present. That doesn't mean their relationship is necessarily rosy. But the daughters of what now is so charmingly called "the day drinking moms" who sit there in front of the television at 1:30 in the afternoon getting blotto tend to have no real female role model.*  In contrast, a mother may be a Tiger Mom, or whatever, but if she's there, it makes a huge difference.

In contrast, the son's of men who are not there tend to be more likely to have same sex attraction as well.  The two impulses, one in male and one in females, are not otherwise similar and other aspects go into it. Women who perceive, while young, that men are a threat are more likely to take refuge with other women.  What about men?

Well, I don't know, but one thing that has been pretty clearly demonstrated is that young men who are exclusively around other young men, to the exclusion of females, are more likely to become homosexuals.  English Boy Schools provide a well known example.  

What about transgenderism?

One thing we do know, in spite of recent left wing attempts to scientifically legitimize it, much like was formerly done with eugenics, it has no biological origin.  No set of hormones or the like is going to send you off into a different gender. That means it's purely psychological in origin.

But what's going on with it?

We don't know for sure, but we do know that with females it mostly hits in the very early teens and is gone by the early 20s.  And we also know that young women are getting exposed to piles of gross pornography right now, and that those who are ADHD are more likely to take this direction.  Often it occurs in groups.

Which may mean that its origin is much like lesbianism, except its much more destructive, but also much more transitory.  Girls are seeking refuge outside of their sex as they fear the roles that their sex seems to have.  Once it starts to clear up that the life of adult women isn't something featured on Pornhub, it wanes.

And men?

Well, it would appear autism is an element of it, as the subject is apparently on the spectrum.  That's telling.

It would also appear that early on, he received "support" from elements after he started to reveal his claimed orientation.  For one thing, his school had a "SPEAK" club, standing for Genders and Sexualities Alliance, of which he was a member.**

That's telling not because he was a member, but because it's well known that recruitment of people to anything, particularly anything destructive, tends to take root if done very young. There's a reason that the Nazi Party in Germany eliminated youth organizations and replaced them with the Hitler Youth, or why the Soviet Communist Party had the Young Pioneers.  There's also a reason, although people now turn a blind eye to it, that homosexual men used to fairly notably recruit teenage men.  If you start to dive into debasement, it's really hard to get back out.

Young pioneers... for the struggle in the name of Lenin and Stalin... be prepared! (1951)

So what else is over all going on here?

I don't know, but I suspect that a certain element of refuge, or indeed a large role of refuge, from the male role is at work here as well, in the overall story of transgenderism.  In spite of a protracted effort to undermine it, male roles basically remain unchanged.

We tend, mentally, to still think of the Four things greater than all things are.

When spring-time flushes the desert grass,

Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.

Lean are the camels but fat the frails,

Light are the purses but heavy the bales,

As the snowbound trade of the North comes down

To the market-square of Peshawur town.

 

In a turquoise twilight, crisp and chill,

A kafila camped at the foot of the hill.

Then blue smoke-haze of the cooking rose,

And tent-peg answered to  hammer-nose;

And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,

Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled;

And the bubbling camels beside the load

Sprawled for a furlong adown the road;

And the Persian pussy-cats, brought for sale,

Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale;

And the tribesmen bellowed to hasten the food;

And the camp-fires twinkled by Fort Jumrood;

And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk

A savour of camels and carpets and musk,

A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke,

To tell us the trade of the Khyber woke.

 

The lid of the flesh-pot chattered high,

The knives were whetted and -- then came I

To Mahbub Ali, the muleteer,

Patching his bridles and counting his gear,

Crammed with the gossip of half a year.

But Mahbub Ali the kindly said,

"Better is speech when the belly is fed."

So we plunged the hand to the mid-wrist deep

In a cinnamon stew of the fat-tailed sheep,

And he who never hath tasted the food,

By Allah! he knoweth not bad from good.

 

We cleansed our beards of the mutton-grease,

We lay on the mats and were filled with peace,

And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south,

With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth.

Four things greater than all things are, --

Women and Horses and Power and War.

We spake of them all, but the last the most,

For I sought a word of a Russian post,

Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword

And a grey-coat guard on the Helmund ford.

Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes

In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.

Quoth he:  "Of the Russians who can say?

When the night is gathering all is grey.

But we look that the gloom of the night shall die

In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.

Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,

But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

That unsought counsel is cursed of God

Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.

 

"His sire was leaky of tongue and pen,

His dam was a clucking Khattack hen;

And the colt bred close to the vice of each,

For he carried the curse of an unstaunched speech.

Therewith madness -- so that he sought

The favour of kings at the Kabul court;

And travelled, in hope of honour, far

To the line where the grey-coat squadrons are.

There have I journeyed too -- but I

Saw naught, said naught, and -- did not die!

He hearked to rumour, and snatched at a breath

Of `this one knoweth', and 'that one saith', --

Legends that ran from mouth to mouth

Of a grey-coat coming, and sack of the South.

These have I also heard -- they pass

With each new spring and the winter grass.

 

"Hot-foot southward, forgotten of God,

Back to the city ran Wali Dad,

Even to Kabul -- in full durbar

The King held talk with his Chief in War.

Into the press of the crowd he broke,

And what he had heard of the coming spoke.

 

"Then Gholam Hyder, the Red Chief, smiled,

As a mother might on a babbling child;

But those who would laugh restrained their breath,

When the face of the King showed dark as death.

Evil it is in full durbar

To cry to a ruler of gathering war!

Slowly he led to a peach-tree small,

That grew by a cleft of the city wall.

And he said to the boy:  `They shall praise thy zeal

So long as the red spurt follows the steel.

And the Russ is upon us even now?

Great is thy prudence -- await them, thou.

Watch from the tree.  Thou art young and strong.

Surely the vigil is not for long.

The Russ is upon us, thy clamour ran?

Surely an hour shall bring their van.

Wait and watch.  When the host is near,

Shout aloud that my men may hear.'

 

"Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

A guard was set that he might not flee --

A score of bayonets ringed the tree.

The peach-bloom fell in showers of snow,

When he shook at his death as he looked below.

By the power of God, Who alone is great,

Till the seventh day he fought with his fate.

Then madness took him, and men declare

He mowed in the branches as ape and bear,

And last as a sloth, ere his body failed,

And he hung like a bat in the forks, and wailed,

And sleep the cord of his hands untied,

And he fell, and was caught on the points and died.

 

"Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,

But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

Of the grey-coat coming who can say?

When the night is gathering all is grey.

Two things greater than all things are,

The first is Love, and the second War.

And since we know not how War may prove,

Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love!"

Kipling, The Ballad of the King's Jest. 

But those four things are tough things too, resulting in physical and psychological injury and sometimes death, but also, in a proper view that Theophilus might hold, to quite another direction as well.

There's always been men who feared not measuring up to the male ideal or the male role.  This has expressed itself differently in different eras. World War Two saw a surprising number of suicides undertaken by men who were rejected by draft boards.  They couldn't stand the thought of what that meant, in their own minds, and took their own lives.  I've already noted, in other threads, that the Apostolic clergy provided refuge for a certain number of men in former ears for same sex attraction.  

It's been well documented that in prisons certain men who have never demonstrated a transgender inclination before, but who are physical weak and in need of protection, will take on female attributes and become the "female" object of a same-sex relationship.  

In the extremely rough and violent world of Plaints Indians, there were, as is sometimes famously pointed out, men who would declare, at an early age, that they were really drawn to femininity and then would drop out of the male role for the female role.  While moderns like to pretend there's no division of labor by nature in human beings, there very clearly is, and that tellingly reduced those men to cooking, cleaning hides, and the like.  It meant they were exempt from killing other human beings and fighting, a normal part of cultures which exalted warriors.

Lakota warriors.  No doubt, every one of these men had killed other men.

Put another way, Crow Heart Butte in Wyoming, and near where this boy is from, is named that because Washakie killed a Crow chieftain and ate his heart.  Not because they met for tea.

And this raises an interesting point.

The waif like Audrey Hepburn in 1956, who was pretty clearly the model of female beauty for a man who recently promoted Bud Light as a woman.  She's a model, however, of safe female beauty that wouldn't really attract unwanted male attention. By 1956, the other type of female beauty, one more admired by males, was very much in circulation, as Playboy was expanding and the screens were full of Marilyn Monroe.

Men who try to affect a female appearance tend to take on an exaggerated one.  In modern society, if you go out on a city sidewalk on any particular day, you'll find at least a few young women wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and who are healthy muscular, in a female sense.  In offices and in office culture, you'll find most women wearing suitable office attire. You'll never find, however, a woman walking around with a feather boa, or trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, or wearing something like a polka dress.

But in the transgender community, you'll find all of that fairly commonly, although in this particular case that's not being demonstrated.

Indeed, here, in spite of what we're supposed to say, what we really see is a guy who looks like a very large, soft looking guy. 

Actor Robert Conrad, right, in The Killers. Conrad was always a big guy, but definately a guy.

Now, in the male world, you can be overweight, but being soft is pretty difficult.  It no doubt goes back to our earliest origins.  Most likely, our Cro Magnon ancestors didn't get fat, they were too resource poor to pull that off, but softness probably simply couldn't be tolerated.  There wasn't any room for "I don't want to fight that new tribe that just showed up" allowed.  And to a large degree, there still really isn't.

Going back to when I was really young, I can think of some instances of pretty soft teenage boys, but the way that they and everyone else handled it was different.  They were soft, but not so soft that they were unreliable in a pinch. Basically, like a lot of people with different personality traits, they'd learned how to rise to the occasion, and in their cases often frequently, to overcome them.

We don't do that anymore.  We face our failings by "accepting" them, which is not to face them at all.

Now, there's more to this than that, but perhaps not as much as we might think, for no sane man would ever want to be a woman.

Women like to be women, as their DNA provides for it.***  But very few men, if any, would be comfortable with bleeding a great deal on a routine and scheduled basis, being subjected to hormonal storms, or being subject to the numerous medical and physical problems just being a woman entails.  Women's worlds change at least monthly, and in reality more frequently than that.  Over the course of a lifetime, women's reality changed massively, once at puberty, later at childbirth, if they have children, and then again at menopause.  Women live longer, to be sure, but the existential nature of their existence practically means they undergo a deep physical and psychological chrysalis at least twice if not three or more times.  Women mature more quickly than men, but some of them endure such hard physical changes that the impacts are nearly shattering when they occur, and that doesn't even take into account the monthly cyclonic storms they endure.

To be male means having a predictable physical reality that only changes over decades and to some extent never does.  And indeed, transgendered men in fact avoid that.  They aren't going to endure the agony of menstruation for one thing, and they likely don't want to.  Most just keep their dicks and balls and call it good.

Old Man : Hey are all farmers. Farmers talk of nothing but fertiliser and women. I've never shared their enthusiasm for fertiliser. As for women, I became indifferent when I was 83. I am staying here.

Line from The Magnificent Seven.

Two imagines, once expected, and one exaggerated, of 20th Century manhood.  In the top image, a British Tommy holds the line. . . alone.  He's probably going to die.  In the second, the super macho and brooding Sgt. Rock, entertainer of thousands of juvenile males in the second half of the century, leads Easy Company into a charge.

To be a transgender male, in some ways, means dropping out of the expectations without picking up the pain and agony of being a woman.  Male strength remains, and repeated naturally programmed female physical distress does not arrive.  No matter what they may say, for the most part, transgendered men are dropping out of male society.  Men don't want them as lovers, and most of them have physical attributes, even with their pants buttoned up, that make them unattractive even if an unsuspecting male eye was cast on them.

Beyond that, however, they're omitted from the male warband when young.  Nobody is going to ever ask them what they'd do if they're drafted.  And nobody is going to conscript them into a bar fight, which almost every living Western male has had happened or nearly happen.  You aren't going to be asked to defend some woman's  honor.  You aren't going to intervene if somebody threatens your sister, girlfriend or wife.  You aren't, moreover, ever going to hear "go over and ask her to dance", and all that means and what follows.

U.S. teenage pregnancy rates from the mid 1970s to mid 2010s.  Contrary to what might be expected, if this chart went back to the 1950s, the rate would have started off even higher, as the 50s really saw the peak in recent U.S. teen pregnancy rates.  Exactly 0% of these pregnancies were to the transgendered expressing as female.  Some probably originated from the same group acting contrary to their declared expression.

You also, however, are going to usually be safe to women, except as alleged here where the allegations, which are denied, is that you are leering at boobs and getting erections.  This isn't true at all of other men, no matter how friendly they may be.  Some males, including some highly intellectual ones, hold that no real platonic friendship can ever exist between a man and a woman, as the man (not the woman) will always regard a female contemporary as at least a suppressed potential object of affection.****  While it may be misperceived, transgenendered men and homosexual men are usually received well by women, as that threat is generally absent, or at least conceived of being absent.

Highly romanticized illustration of a teenage mother from Street Arabs and Gutter Snipes, The Pathetic and Humorous Side of Young Vagabond Life in the Great Cities, With Records of Work for Their Reclamation 1884.

But none of that is natural, and all of it, in some fashion, is a cry for help.  Even the cry for acceptance is just that.

Over the years, sometimes personally, and sometimes professionally, I've known people who ended up needing help, some well after they'd received it.  I know one lawyer who is a convicted felon, but overcame that for a successful career.  I've met people who were addicted to drugs or alcohol, and overcame that.  Usually if you got down to it, you could see that they didn't take up their afflictions as they really enjoyed them, but because they were attempting to bury something else.  One lawyer I somewhat knew disappeared for about a month before his family found him, in another state, in a hotel room, having crawled into a bottle.  He wasn't there as he enjoyed drinking himself stupid in hotel rooms.

Some people, with more conventional afflictions, are like crashing trains right as you watch them.  And interestingly, if is a more conventional and traditional affliction, like addition to alcohol and sex, or the two combined, its commented about backdoor, but nobody ever says that being in that condition is just a life choice.  Everyone knows its not, and that is a disaster.

And so is this.

As the comment above notes, we help people on the autism spectrum, and we know that they may need help.  It's not regarded as a life choice.  But in 2023, everything sexual, except for pedophilism, is just an expression of individualism.  The ban on sex with children only remains as its so disgusting, as otherwise all the logic that applies to "accepting" every other sexual behavior applies equally to it, save for that its destructive to children.  But it's also destructive to adults, and its been shown that it tends to come on with people who have had multiple sex partners.

Transgenderism is like that.  There's no reason to believe that it is not a mental illness, one associated with other conditions, that can be arrested and addressed.

But in our political purity of the age, we're not doing that.  And that's destructive for the people making the declaration, who could have been helped.

We might, before concluding, stop to ask two questions. Does it really matter, would be the first.

After all, if somebody wants to drink themselves into oblivion, does it matter, if that's their choice?  Or more particularly, if somebody wants to present as a woman, who is a man, what does it really matter to me or anyone else?

Well, it does matter if your view of humanity is that we are our brother's keeper.  Oddly enough, in our contemporary world, it's the political left that claims that we are, while the political right, as exhibited by Jeanette Ward in a common in the last legislative session, feels we are not.  But most decent societies, and all Christian societies, feel that we are.

So there's a duty to the individual to help them live an ordered life. We know that living a disordered one leads to unhappiness.

There's a wider duty, however, to society.  Assaults on individual natures are assaults on nature in general, are destructive to us all.

And, additionally, telling a lie to yourself is one thing. But demanding, even with the force of law, that everyone else adopt the lie is quite another. That's completely destructive to the social structure, as enshrining lies as part of them inevitably leads to decay.

And finally, and more particularly, it's damaging to women in the extreme. Real women, that is.  Women know that they aren't men.  We all know that the biological life of a woman is radically different from a man's in nearly every sense.  Psychologically, it isn't the same either.  Reducing womanhood to appearing to have boobs is the most Hefnereque position of all, and an insult to women in every fashion.

Footnotes:

*I don't know how or why "day drinking", which is very often attributed to women, became cute. But it isn't.

**The existence of such non-academic clubs in schools is ample evidence of the intrusion of really left wing "progressive" values into schools. By and large I"m skeptical when such claims are made, but the recent library controversies over homosexual pornography in public schools shows there's definitely something to it, as do the existence of clubs that exist to effectively demand that inclinations that are poorly understood and fairly recently regarded as mental illnesses be accepted as normal.

***Having said that, there's plenty of evidence that well into the mid 20th Century, at least, plenty of women regretted having been born women, which isn't quite the same thing.

****Whatever hte truth of htat may be, it's pretty clear that it's not true of close relatives.  The "taboo" on incest is clearly ingrained enough into us to translate over to close relationship, such as cousins.

Lex Anteinternet: On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compellin...

Lex Anteinternet: On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compellin...: 

On Pride Month, the nature of Pride, and compelling opinions.

The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind.

G. K. Chesterton, in ‘On Certain Modern Writers’. 

Von Max Liebermann - Eigenes Werk, Yelkrokoyade, aufgenommen 16. Juli 2015, 10:52:45, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46254188

This is "Pride Month".

I wasn't going to comment it at all, for a variety of reasons, part of which are cowardly.  But because that is in fact cowardly, I'm commenting on it now.

Indeed, the fact that I was disinclined to post on it shows something.  Over the span of fifteen or so years, roughly dating to the Obergefell decision to the present date, the nation went from agreeing to tolerate a small minority of people who exhibit was largely regarded as a deeply peculiar unnatural trait, to one in which that particular trait is now so mild in comparison to what is now forced upon the population that it doesn't even make the charts.  That is, no matter what you may think of it, same sex attraction, which has in no means ever reached the point where actual science has determined that its origins are not environmental and psychological, rather than organic, is now fully accepted, both culturally and by force, as dictated by nature, and we're now being forced to accept that surgically and chemically mutilating minors is health care.

If you don't agree with any aspect of that for any reason, you will be subject to open hostility and repression.  You will, moreover, be tagged something like "homophobic", a word which in strict translation means "afraid of man", but is supposed to imply fear of anything other than the biological norm in regard to sex even if, in reality, your actual view is that the science doesn't back something that only a tiny, but growing, number of mostly European culture people exhibit.  Indeed, only social science, and really only social science in North America and Europe, and nations heavily influenced by European culture, are of the view that any of this is normal.  The fact that European cultured people are of the view that this is now a culturally and scientifically settled question shows, therefore, an interesting retention of cultural colonialism that is no supposedly passé.  

That alone is an interesting example of the evolution, and decay, of Western Society.  We are now at the point where most of the real fundamentals of Western Society, including an appreciation of its intellectual history and the profound influence of Christianity upon it are abhorred in the benighted, enlightened, and well off classes, as a rule, but in regard to left wing theory, we are arrogant enough to demand it be accepted by the whole globe.

A lot of that decay set in eons ago, and indeed, as we noted the other day, the rot really started to set in on October 31, 1517, when a psychologically troubled misplaced Augustinian German monk determined that he knew better than anyone else on certain topics and struck a blow for radical individuality.  LGBTQIAP2S+? comes directly from that day, and from that individual, in part, although he'd no doubt be horrified, maybe, by the development.

Native Ameican students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. 1900.

Pride Month is also an example of cultural colonialism.  It's highly akin to the late 18th, early 19th Century Reservation System pushed on Native Americans, which had the idea that Native Americans would become Protestant farmers.*  It didn't matter if they didn't want to become either, they were going to no matter what, and no matter what it took to get that result, right down to separating children from parents, was okay.

It's interesting to note that the widespread result instead was cultural destruction, crime and chemical dependency. . . all of which are on the rise in the wider culture now.

Quite a few Natives long attempted to keep on some aspect of the old life, and of course it was never fully given up, even to the present day.  But the element of force was attempted for a very long time.

Prime Month has that aspect.  No matter what your view on the scientific authenticity of the concept that young women on the spectrum can decide in their mid-teens that they want their boobs removed and to receive chemical injections, something that has Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom all now ban and which Norway is getting set to on the basis that it is not evidence based, you are going to have to socially choke it down.** It's better, society asserts, that you shut up and agree with what is contrary to nature and science and allow the mutilations to continue than to voice any opinion in opposition to it on any basis whatsoever.  

Custer, after all, was a hero, right?  He was putting those Indians back on the Reservation for their own good.

But what about the concept of "pride" itself?

Designating something a "month", if it receives some sort of official recognition, is a way of officially blessing what the declaration stands for.  It's not clear when it really got started, but in some ways it's both less than and more than declaring something to be a day.  I haven't researched what the first "month" in honor of something was, but it might be Black History Month, which had its origin in 1926 with an African American History Week.  Kent State proposed Black History Month in 1970, and it's grown since then.

Black History Month has to be regarded as fairly successful, although frankly its more of a way for educators to focus on the contributions of African Americans to American history than anything else, although official organs of the government recognize it.  Its success lead to Women's History Month, which is March.  Black History Month is February.  November became Native American History Month under President George Bush, which is also Aviation History Month.

The interesting thing of the focus of all of those months is their focus on history.  The thought was that the history of the group may have been forgotten or inaccurate, and this was a chance to redress it, although as Aviation History Month shows, this can devolve into a focus on what is a specialized topic or interest.  Over time, the latter has really taken hold.

For example, take January for the United States:

• National Codependency Awareness Month
• National Mentoring Month
• National Healthy Weight Awareness Month 
• Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month
• Stalking Awareness Month
• Veganuary

Hmmmm.

"Pride Month" fits into the latter category, but its an attempt to recall the former.  In both instances, conceptually, its problematic.

Pride does not go before a fall. Pride is a fall, in the instant understanding of all the intelligent who see it.

G. K. Chesterton.

Pride itself is problematic.

The online Oxford Dictionary defines pride as follows:

1. a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired.

   "the team was bursting with pride after recording a sensational victory"

   Similar:

   pleasure

   joy

   delight

   gratification

   fulfillment

   satisfaction

   sense of achievement

   comfort

   content

   contentment
2. 2.

   consciousness of one's own dignity.

   "he swallowed his pride and asked for help"

   Similar:

   self-esteem

   dignity

   honor

   self-respect

   ego

   self-worth

   self-image

   self-identity

   self-regard

   pride in oneself

   pride in one's abilities

   belief in one's worth

   faith in oneself

   amour propre

   Opposite:

   shame

verb

1. be especially proud of (a particular quality or skill).

   "she'd always prided herself on her ability to deal with a crisis"

Clearly the first definition doesn't make sense here, although it's probably the one that was in mind, maybe, when June was declared Pride Month.  LGBTQ+ don't claim to have achieved that status.  Perhaps they're celebrating the things that people who fit into that category, which isn't a real category as it's far too broad, have achieved.  Maybe the second category makes more sense, actually.

Indeed, what I really think Pride Month is supposed to refer to is absence of shame, which isn't the same thing.   People have certainly been shamed for things in the past that they should not have been, and a same-sex attraction (which is now only a limited part of this broad category) is one such thing.  Pride Month was probably really intended to be an absence of shame month, so to speak.

The problem there is It's gone from "don't shame", which is related to "tolerate", to accept.  

It's one thing not to be ashamed.  A person can have attributes and conditions of all types that others regard with some element of disdain, which they are not ashamed of, or should not be ashamed of.  I'd wager that almost everyone has felt this at some point in time.  When I was a kid, I was ashamed that I had asthma, and I still somewhat am.  Most people probably wouldn't be, but I was.  I still keep it pretty much to myself, although it rarely afflicts me know.

I wouldn't ever, however, consent to being "proud" of having asthma.

As an adult, I've been curious subject to an element of shame about having chosen to be a lawyer, which is a really strange personality quirk for somebody who has been successful at it. The fact that it bothers me, bothers me.  My mother was quite proud of it, but I hated it whenever she told somebody that.  For that matter, I hate it when somebody asks me "what do you do?", which is a routine question for men to receive.  I recall being at a small local bar once with a coworker, who is immensely proud of being a lawyer, when he answered that immediate upon being questioned with an enthusiastic "We're lawyers!".  

Oh, great.

More on that, at some other time.

There are some things I'm genuinely proud of, and there are others I'm genuinely ashamed of.  I'm not going to publish either of those here, however.

To be ashamed, of course, means to have a sense of shame.  Part of the experiment of modern life has been to banish shame, and that's one of the tragedies of the modern world. There are things that people should be ashamed of, including sexual things, which Pride Month is on, in a fashion.  People who cheat on their spouses, have "sexual addiction", delve in pornography and prostitution, those being two sides of the same coin, and the like should in fact be ashamed.  Some of those people have fallen so deeply into those things that they have a very hard time getting out of them, but hat doesn't mean that they shouldn't be ashamed. Their shame should be, and if properly ordered is, their motivator, in part.

Which brings us back to the LGBTQ+ topic.

A major problem here, from the onset, is that this entire area when from homosexuality, which doesn't even appear to really be the same in men and women, to being all sexual abnormalities. From there, it's become an outright assault on normality, and that's the problem with the month.  It's gone from "accept that there are people who have same sex attraction" to "nobody is really heterosexual so you must join us".

And that's both scientifically invalid and wrong.

Starting off with the broad nature of the definition, it should be obvious that this is a problem in and of itself.  If every sexually deviation from the mean fits into a category, and the category must be not only tolerated but celebrated, then there is no bar whatsoever to any sexual deviation.  

Put more bluntly, if you have to accept transgenderism as real and worthy of celebration, you have to accept child molestation the same way, and there's no bar to that which is anything more than sophistry.

Of course, we all know that's wrong, except for a tiny number of pedophiles who argue just what I noted.  That brings you to the flip side.  If pedophiles are mentally ill, then you can have a departure from the mean, which is a mental illness.

That is in fact the reality of it. The question then becomes what is a mental illness and what isn't. . . assuming that any of these departures from the mean aren't.

Well, the ones that pretty clearly aren't always are the old male/female ones where somebody is a bad actor.  That is, men who screw every woman that will let them, and women who behave the same way. That's bad behavior, and wrong.  It's also now being "polyamorous".  

Having said that, according to modern psychology, which is often wrong, this may be sexual addiction, which is a mental illness.

Some of the categories in the LBGTQ+ group are, quite obviously, mental illnesses.  Transgenderism definitely is.  Others may simply be strong compulsions, or even weak ones. For those, Pride Month serves to pigeonhole people where they wouldn't otherwise go, and may not wish to.

Everyone has known some people with some sexual deviation compulsions.  Some of them hold them strongly, and others not very much.  The interesting thing, however, is that until the Obergefell era, many simply had that as an aspect of their personality, with many of them emphasizing it hardly at all.  Only the most aggressive, who are often those who demonstrated a pronounced deviation, were really aggressive about it.  Those people are now, however, driving the bus and the entire culture.

Part of that bus driving is mowing down anyone who won't get on, and that in part is serving to drive the nation apart.  Pride Month has been co-opted, or perhaps always served, to force accepting every sexual deviation down the throats of everyone else.  If you don't believe that it's all natural, you are liable to intellectual assault.

It's the racist eugenics of our era.

From Government websites from every branch of the government all the way to corporations are forcing the agenda.  As you can't force the unnatural on everyone indefinitely, it will fail, but it might fail in destructive ways.

It's also in advertising, which is interesting in that this is the second time in fifty years that advertising has gone down this road. The first time was in the 1970s, when it became heavily sexualized for a decade or so, and it delved into pedophilia.  Reaction to the worst of that pulled it back out, but it serves as a model.  Conventional advertising in the 70s used juvenile female models as sex objects until the consuming public said "enough", and then they stopped, but not before entertainment became briefly pedophilia as well.  Pretty Baby, The Blue Lagoon, etc., donned the movie screens.  "Does Your Mother Know" and "What's Your Name" the airwaves.

Right now you can't swing a moribund felis domesitcus without hitting some advertising effort to get you to adopt the concept that maybe you ought to crawl into bed with your own gender, and perhaps frequently, or at least that's A-OK.

All of this fuels part of the counter reaction which is raging in our time.  People wonder how a late septuagenarian serial polygamist with weird bad hair can openly demand to be crowned Emperor and stand a good chance of having it happen, or how a thirty-something single Californian who has never held a real job but who spouts conspiracy theories and cloaks himself in the mantle of true conservatism can win office and be prayed over by college Republicans, or how individuals can be voted onto school boards with the intent to remove books.  Well, an administration that demands you accept the unnatural, a political party that requires you accept the new eugenics, and the stocking of books in school libraries that are openly sexually perverse are a big part of the reason why.

In other words, going from the widely accepted "look, we don't tell you what to do in your bedrooms, so just leave the same sex attracted alone, and they won't bother you", to "you must accept children being taught sodomy" and "you must let gender mutilation of minors occur" is a big part of that.  People on the left might claim that's the manifestation of Christian Nationalism (which it really isn't), but a lot of the reaction is just a species knowing what is biologically correct and reacting to being attacked. 

In other words, toleration is one thing.  Brutally forced acceptance of what you were formally asked to tolerate, quite another.

Pride itself is a curious thing, and in our Lutherarian society, worshiping individualism as it is, and declaring self-worth and worthiness in everything, grossly overdone.  You can be legitimately proud of an accomplishment that has some merit, particularly difficult ones.  Having pride for overcoming something, such as a difficult task, including overcoming a personal problem or vice, is fully legitimate.  Being proud of a greater group of which you are part is as well, when that group has done more than simply exist, is as well, but much, much less so.  "Taking pride" is different, but can have merit as well.  A person can legitimately take pride, for example, in their appearance, or in their occupational or social status, assuming the latter has some merit.

Merely being proud, however, with no investment in something, tends to be arrogance.  Often statements like "proud to be an American", while that can indeed have worth, are just that.  Extreme cultural pride can cross over into something really vile.  Members of the SS were, after all, proud to be German.

Being proud of something biological, in any sense, is totally misplaced.  A person can't be proud to be tall or short. They can, however, lack shame for the same thing, which is totally different.  In the category that we're dealing with, sort of, a person with a high sex drive can't really legitimately claim pride in it.  Depending upon how they react to it, they may claim to be proud, in handling it in a dignified and moral fashion, or they may be in the category of those who should bear shame for how they handle it, that latter concept having gone out of fashion, seemingly, in the libertine era in which we live.

Having pride for being a member of a group that has a minority sexual inclination, which is now unfairly and bizarrely all lumped together in "LGBTQIAP2S+?" makes no more sense than being heterosexual does.  Those who fit into one of those categories claim not to have achieved it, but to have had it imposed upon them, in some fashion. That's not much different than being short or tall.  It comes dangerously close to endorsing a sort of racism in the same fashion that "White Pride" does.

It's also distinctly different than not being ashamed.  There are plenty of reasons that those with deep-seated sexual minoritarian inclinations should not be ashamed.  There's no reason, for instance, that homosexuals should be ashamed of that inclination.  They didn't chose it.  Not being ashamed is not price, it's not being ashamed.

That's also separate, of course, from how we react to a deep-seated inclination of that type.  For eons those with such drives struggled to contain them, which we will confess was in part because of cultural norms and beliefs, and in part because of repression.  Be that as it may, it wasn't all that long ago that most with such drives may have been aware of them, but they didn't dominate their existence and didn't define who they were.  Now the cultural gatekeepers demand the opposite.

That doesn't touch, of course, where we are compelled by nature or morality to act towards restraint or reform.  It wasn't very long ago that the Hefnerian view of the world so dominated that we openly winked at people forcing sex upon women, and those with money and power were granted the right to do so. We can all pretend that we were shocked, shocked, to learn that Bill Cosby drugged women and then had his way with them, but we knew for decades that he was hanging out at the Playboy mansion which was dedicated to no other purpose than female sexual chattel slavery.  We can pretend that we didn't know that juvenile female actresses were often expected to trade in sex, and that young women in the workplace were subject to constant abuse, but it was so widely known that it was hinted at repeatedly in the movies themselves.***This leaves us with there being things we should not be ashamed of at all, things we should not be ashamed of but not yield to, and things which shame should compel us to act upon.

We should not take pride in simply having a sex drive, no matter how it is oriented.  And those who question things that only yesterday were regarded by nearly everyone, including those with minoritarian inclinations, as deeply disordered, on a scientific basis should not be shouted down and be forced to shut up for not going with the flow of the day.

Indeed, we've done that before.  We did it on race based slavery.  We did it with destruction of indigenous cultures.  More recently, we did it with eugenics, part of what became the foundation of at first Planned Parenthood, and then later, the Holocaust.

Footnotes

*Not "Christian" farmers, Protestant farmers.  Indeed, Catholicism had made inroads into Native populations everywhere already, with it being the case in what became the Louisiana Purchase and Canada that their conversion was simply religious, but not cultural.

**As with abortion, it's worth noting that its the United States that really has the extreme liberal allowances in this area.

***This is portrayed, somewhat veiled, in The Godfather.  It the book its not only portrayed, but not veiled, leaving the reader with the oddity that to a degree the Mafia is portrayed as more moral than the movie industry.