July 10, 2022
8 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Questionable Motives
-
-
tildeb
- Where are we now?
- What is this ‘Woke’ movement and what does it have to do with me?
- Is censoring reality to support a BLM narrative causing real harm to real people in real life?
- Social construct? Too perceptive not to post
- What is today’s social justice movement and where does it come from?
- Is the Woke movement racist?
- Is the Trump Administration the First Postmodern American Regime?
- Why is Critical Social Justice theory the Covid-19 of liberal democracies?
- Female Erasure: the sustained attack against women’s sex-based rights and freedoms
- Look how ‘fringe’ Valerie Terico has become!
-
Recent Comments
tildeb on What is this ‘Woke… Forestwood on What is this ‘Woke… ParentingIsFunny on Where are we now? tildeb on Where are we now? ParentingIsFunny on Where are we now? Site Meter
-
-
-
Questionable Motives 
Here’s where we are:
You can avoid becoming a monster by working backwards from the right conclusion. For example, here’s what Eliza Mondegreen suggests:
“Take that working-backwards approach with gender identity, and problems magically melt away. If ‘transwomen’ are women, it doesn’t matter if they have an advantage in sports or if they pose a risk in women’s prisons.
If we want male people to be treated as female people for any or all purposes, then we can’t acknowledge there are any possibly relevant differences between male and female people—even if we sound totally bonkers.
If we want to remove gatekeeping around medical transition, then detransitioners are a problem. Therefore, the finding must be that nobody or almost nobody detransitions and that nothing could have or should have prevented people from going on these enlightening ‘gender journeys.’
When people raise concerns, they find themselves demonized because they worked forward from the evidence rather than backward from the desired conclusion. You’re not supposed to do that. You know not to listen to someone (who thinks this way) because they came to the wrong conclusion.”
So why does this matter? Eliza, concerned with how non profits are working against their own objectives following the ‘right’ way to think about this ‘progressive’ stuff, says:
“Besides, when it comes to gender identity (edit: or any other progressive narrative), you never know what you can say without landing yourself in hot water. (like this monstrous Mom) So, rather than speaking thoughtfully out of the desire to be understood, you speak cautiously out of fear of the consequences. Over time, anyone with an instinct for self-preservation will find herself speaking less and less.”
And therein lies the inevitable cost by millions of tiny cuts: the death of liberal democracy. Gilead – or the progressive version of it – is no longer ridiculous. It’s already coming. (Has your recent book been approved by ill educated ‘sensitivity’ readers?) The loss of freedom of expression by self censoring first undermines, then attacks, then overpowers Every. Other. Liberal. Value.
And that’s happening right now on our watch. (Check out the latest PEW numbers and article here)
Want to do you your part to stop it? Be honest. Don’t lie. Don’t go along with lies. Stop accepting the lying language of progressives and take it back. Yes, Virginia, there really are males and females. Call them that. Anti-racism is racist. Call the supporters of race essentialism racist. Call those who wish to ban and shut down honest dialogue and expressing differences of opinion what they: intolerant bullies. And so on.
But mostly, start to laugh at these people. Their ideology is not just absurd but insanely funny. And those who believe in it have been duped and need the spell broken preferably by having their beliefs laughed at.
Comment by tildeb — July 10, 2022 @ 3:16 pm |
Also on where we are:
There are now two classes of ‘appropriate’ humans: men and people.
Comment by tildeb — July 10, 2022 @ 4:51 pm |
I feel the Internet has become such a disgusting and pointless, flagrantly anti-woman cesspit of (literal) naked rape culture….I DON’T even (now: most of the time) want to be on it anymore. I am sooo glad I grew-up during (what, lol!, would seem like the “glory days” of the ’80s into the ’90s; before the ugly hooks of the social media contagion); however, the Web twenty years’-ago was something ten-times better: it, truly, was (when it started) a revolution in social networking (ESPECIALLY for women) where you (then) could dream of building a career by (at least) *trying* to avoid the usual/closed-door fraternal bureaucracy to get into a profession you wanted….AND: it was organized like an A thru Z encyclopedia, so you could get almost the equivalent to a self-taught education about the world at your fingertips (to try to cultivate your sophistication level). Not anymore.
The absolutely corrupt (and: I’d add outright EVIL) system responsible for the rest of the madness going on now MADE CERTAIN TO DESTROY THAT AS MUCH AS THEY COULD. All of this whackjob, nihilistic, dehumanizing filth the Internet has devolved into makes one think(?): what. the. ‘eff. kind. of. parallel. universe. ARE. THESE. MONSTERS. FROM??? Who is fomenting the endless stream of this worthless c*ap being pumped out daily? Whom stands to profit (economically AND, just in-terms-of as well, seeing a total collapse of civil society) from letting everything sink this way into a bottomless pit? I mean, a woman today can’t access the Web to even expect a discussion about (biologically-specific) medical issues from a normal person on the other end of it professing to be an “expert” or a doctor….or have a virtual workout-meeting social group….or even have a friggin’ Pinterest account(!)….WITHOUT this constant barrage of either the political woke idiocy, pornified EVERYTHING, or (in the case-of, before I terminated the Pinterest account I’d had) the absolutely insulting notion of somebody (probably?: some 23 y.o. tech zombie, undoubtedly male and self-i.d.’ing as “queer”) believing “inspirational quotes” should use the B-word multiple times and sermonize me about “kindness”!
I can’t tolerate any of it. It’s something the Democrat Party of my parents’ generation (the 1960s) was a world apart from. The only thing which is going to change it, is a revolution (but an UNtelevised one of grass-roots, SANE people from across the ENTIRE planet).
Comment by cara ryan — July 20, 2022 @ 1:04 pm |
I think this helps explain where we are and so we can figure out a bit of direction on how to handle it. It’s real. It’s all around us. It needs to be challenged if not to be corrected than to allow us to fell we’re at least doing our part as small as that may be. Death from a thousand cuts is still as effective as sudden death from one. Each small act of criticism and challenge to any kind of illiberal authoritarianism is one more cut. And it adds up.
It’s easy to get ploughed under considering just how tremendous are the social changes we’ve been through in the past decade. The hard fought battles for equality are not an event or a ruling but an ongoing process, a struggle, to keep the gains from the past 100 years intact while trying to not allow them to be undone. So we ARE the front line defenders of our inheritance, namely, liberal democracy. and equality rights that come with this. And so we have to represent liberal democracy and the principles that inform it in this struggle. That’s hard when frustration and hopelessness are never too far away. That’s where courage comes into it. And we can all be courageous.
It’s not surprising everything liberal (and I mean that term in its enlightenment sense of individual rights and freedoms recognized in law as the base unit in our society) is under attack and from many, many directions. The goal for all kinds of other ideologies and framing needs to tear this down before the preferred ideology can replace it. This is why we see it all around us. And it is neither an accident nor surprising. But trying to defend these principles called ‘liberalism’ can seem overwhelming or even impossible as they crumble here and there. So all each of us can do individually is stay true to a few simple principles and set the example: respect ourselves as real people with strengths and weakness and successes and failures and abilities and deficits and problems and so on, respect other people as equivalent real people, respect reality, respect knowledge, and – perhaps the most difficult – don’t lie. Not lying means not going along with any reasoning or actions that are in conflict with these. Be real. Don’t take on the offered ‘identity’ that associates you with this group or that (you’re not a group: you’re a real person and it’s reasonable to be treated that way). Don’t pretend fuzzy replacement words ideologically stuffed with different meanings are legitimate descriptors of reality. They’re not. They are the primary weapons for the replacement ideology so don’t agree to play that game. Don’t go along with the framing of any knowledge as if partisan. The whole point of the word game is to replace reality with words and then pretend the new words define reality. To mix my metaphors, it’s turtles all the way down this linguistic rabbit hole.
You have the power to engage much of the world on your own terms. Use this power to shape your life as best you can knowing it is also constrained by the public domain and the interactions you must have with it. Be specific about what use you choose to have with the internet and stay away from going down rabbit holes where you feel powerless! Use your very real power for your own mental wellbeing in your life. That is what being respectful of yourself means. Then treat others as you would like to be treated. That’s what your power looks like in action and you might be surprised at how well this approach ends up charging your batteries rather than draining them.
I have found engaging more with the real world than the virtual keeps me sane when so many people are really just like I am and trying to do the best they can. We share far more similarities and concerns in reality than the differences we may have in opinions and beliefs. (That’s because they’re real people, too. If I want to be respected for mine, I have to respect the same right for others.) I find this daily contact with real people in real life grounds me from believing much of the insanity and meanness and petulance one can find so easily online represents the wider world. It doesn’t. It is within the hearts and minds of real people in real life where liberalism lives – whether they know it or not – and it’s nice to be reminded that the vast majority of us live it on a daily basis even if we also encounter the authoritarian demands of the ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum at some point during the same day.
You got this.
Comment by tildeb — July 20, 2022 @ 2:41 pm |
Thank you so much for sharing those words of wisdom (something I’m always reading about whenever I happen to see your replies at the Arbourist’s page: which made me want to check out what’s “over here”!). Enjoy the rest of your day!
Comment by cara ryan — July 20, 2022 @ 4:30 pm |
Hi, tildeb. This is Betsy from over at Keith’s blog. I’m staying out of that mess with Keith. I think you might like this interview with a former CIA analyst about why and how wokeness is taking over. I hope I’ll be allowed to post a link in a comment (and that you’ll see this). Here goes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbLkSib_yDw&t
Comment by ParentingIsFunny — February 14, 2023 @ 11:52 am |
Funny you should select this interview, Betsy, because when I was but a wee one I spent time in apartheid South Africa and then a few months later standing at Auschwitz. Weeks later, I was outside the Kremlin in Red Square. I realized the cause of each of these political expressions that had killed so many in reality made real in law resulted in totalitarianism and relied on exactly the same belief: that people could be – indeed, should be – turned into things in the eyes of the The Legitimate Person (the Elect, so to speak). I grappled with how people could be turned into things in the eyes of so many and realized that can only happen when some other GROUP identity replaces the value of the actual individual. I later learned individual rights and freedoms were the absolute core of liberalism, which made the West not only different from so much of the world, but fragile. It can be taken away.
Liberalism as a core value was always the object under attack by those who had some agenda other than respecting real people in real life. So from a young age I have always been particularly sensitive to ideas that attacked liberalism no matter from whom, no matter for what reason, no matter what the end result might be used to justify it because the alternative is submission to the path towards totalitarianism. And I have always refused to be simply a bystander because I believe each of us has a wider responsibility to defending liberalism if we want to enjoy individual rights and freedoms. One cannot have it both ways and so I criticize anti-liberal ideas whenever, wherever, and with whomever if the idea is being promoted or even tolerated. (Of course there must be checks and balances and some level of compromise in order for the greatest number of people to share the greatest extent of these values). So I think it is telling that the most powerful counter argument against my position is almost always ad hominem.
The threat is very real given today’s regressive and highly anti-liberal social movement busy creating Us and Them. I’ve encountered it in education and seen it play out in every single institution, public and private. It is leaving a trail of real victims who, unlike the ideologues, are unable to weaponize empathy like the foes of liberalism. And this is why I try to give more exposure to those critical of what’s going on who have lived under totalitarian regimes – secular and religious – and see the glaring similarities that those raised in the luxurious waters of liberalism are blind to… often wilfully so.
So I enjoyed hearing someone educated in Russian history and experienced in dealing with the methods used by totalitarian states to maintain social control in this link. Her observations are in alignment with those I’ve previously highlighted. Groupthink is very real and it rests on believing in these artificially meaningful identities (some group-based identities ARE meaningful because they do describe very real differences – authentic differences – shared by all members. ie. male/female).
Thanks for you suggestion, Betsy.
Comment by tildeb — February 14, 2023 @ 12:52 pm |
Wowsa. And I’m glad you enjoyed the vid. Lots of good interviews on that Dr. J Show Youtube page.
Comment by ParentingIsFunny — February 14, 2023 @ 6:01 pm