transgender triumphs over feminism

With all the press surrounding Ronda Rousey, it’s a good time to bring up a persistent would-be challenger whom Jezebel says Rousey is dodging. 

Say hi to Fallon Fox, the transgender MMA starlet:

Fallon responds to Ronda’s claim that such a fight would be unfair:

Fallon Fox is a women’s featherweight MMA fighter with a 5-1 record. The first openly transgender athlete in MMA history, she has been the target of vitriol from many prominent MMA figures, including the UFC’s president Dana White and women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. Both White and Rousey have publicly insisted that Fox will never fight in the UFC women’s division. White has said, “I’ll leave it up to the athletic commissions, and the doctors and scientists,” to decide which gender divisions transgender athletes should compete in, but also declared, “I don’t think that somebody who used to be a man and became a woman should be able to fight another woman.” Rousey has said of Fox, “She can try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it’s still the same bone structure a man has. It’s an advantage. I don’t think it’s fair.”

Dana White and Rousey seem to have a problem with someone who had the first thirty years of his life to build up a man’s body, including a stint in special ops in the Navy, before spending that One Night in Bangkok under the scalpel, and identifying himself as a woman.  

What’s really going on here is hardly a fight for “equality”, but a kind of culture ranger spirit (rather than culture warrior) that has as much to do with cyberpunk and transhumanist ideas as anything else.  As Steve Sailer has pointed out, there’s definitely something sci-fi in all this, as  millionaires with previously macho backgrounds colonize femininity.   

Though a lot of people are signing off on the “T” part of the LBGT acronym without really thinking of its implications, there’s plenty who have thought this through, and in the interests of intellectual honesty, they need to own it. 

As many are starting to notice, a lot of “feminism” of the last few years is really about the triumph of masculinity in the feminine world.  Thirty years ago, a lot of feminists would have called this an  “invasion of womyns’ space”.

Voting Rights and Responsibilities

The question as to why our society should take the sale of a six pack more seriously than the franchise is one of those questions I can't get anyone to answer.  Show your ID to the beer barn, but in the name of some nebulous "disparate impact", one doesn't.  It's quite telling that a plastic display of maturity to get loaded is demanded, but the cool sobriety that democracy supposedly demands its "citizens" is some kind of tyranny.

Remember this inspiring image?

Billions of US tax dollars went to ensuring the integrity of elections in Iraq three years ago.  Such integrity is under attack here.
You need an ID to get beer, to qualify for EBT, for welfare, for WIC, to drive, for a plethora of cradle to grave social functions.  Why is voting supposed to be an exception to this?

When you vote, you do so because you are presumend to have skin in the game with your polity.  Your polity, in case the voting chaos advocates havent gotten the memo, is a series of concentric circles, not just a presidential election-the largest circle.  Your state and its many offices, your congressional district, you county, your town, and your city or county  districts.

Have these voting chaos advocates ever considered how many of the offices one casts a ballot for hinge on a few hundred, or even few dozen votes?  Do people really want to turn an election into a series of competing rent-a-blocs in corrupt districts?

Yeah, there's that word, corruption.  Does anyone think that an abandonment of standards will not invite the kinds of voting abuse that happens in countries that we police to ensure "fair and peaceful elections"?

Laugh at Them

Laugh.  Laugh at their absurd rhetorical conundrums.  Laugh at their navel gazing.  Laugh at their inability to enjoy themselves in the moment. Laugh at how the have made themselves ridiculous by doing anything  possible to preserve their sense of smug sanctimoniousness.

Laugh at the bedwetter Salonistas who tie themselves in knots explaining the logical conclusions of their beliefs. Laugh as these two-dollar pundits discover what happens when everything is a "social construct", and try to explain away the silliness of Rachel Dolezal.

Laugh at the Harvard law professor so divorced from the experience of regular people that he writes think pieces about how bowling leagues can lead to fascism.
 
Laugh at how they spill endless ink yougogirling a multimillionaire LA endocrine experiment.

Laugh at how the most privileged people in human history status jockey by calibrating the privilege of others and searching for microagressions that mess with their bubble. Laugh at how they hold hashtag signs to appear persecuted while they will never do anything more than express virtual "solidarity" with the truly persecuted who live thousands of miles away.

Laugh at how they turn college campuses into intellectual gulags.

You have no other outlet than laughing, since they won't debate, but turn into the very prim, humorless Church Lady caricature that they imagine they've overcome.

The Atlantic asks why there are no comedians beyond their circle, and that is because the absurd parade that is the news is its own comedy show. You're just not supposed to provide the laugh track.

 

If you want to laugh, but are afraid to do so because  you consider yourself part of their place on the "ideological spectrum" (one of the foundational rubrics of the Spectacle), console yourself by knowing that you are providing them much needed critique, as they won't critique themselves.  You will surely make them more honest, and their ideas better.  Perhaps they will begin to drift a bit away from identity politics, bedroom issues, congratulating their favorite hip millionaires, and start noticing the Davos world that has replaced the Daddy Warbucks capitalists of old.  Perhaps they'll reclaim the good sense of their forebearers, and notice a hollowed out economy, a continued warfare/welfare state, the same military bases in the usual countries, and the continued destruction of the earth.

And deconstruct, since humor is the oldest deconstruction.  They imagine that they own the techniques of deconstruction, but they got most of theirs from Nietzsche anyway- it is a device that belongs to no one.  They have spent decades tearing down idols, and merely replaced them with their own.

Neocons Set Bait for the Right-Thinking

It’s mind-boggling how in 2014, these people are not only still around, but suckering people into their agenda with the coarsest of bait.   It’s well known that neocons have had it in for Russia since they emerged in the 1970s.

The bait was LGBT, the one cause celebre  that would neutralize prog/NYT opposition to our Project for a New American Century, the one thing that could get them to do a TwoMinutesHate on Vladimir Putin.  Thus, the Olympics turned into a ceaseless finger wag against Russia.   Dissidents of all sorts were interviewed, lionized, and name checked, since Russia had obviously regressed to a gulag beyond Saddam’s torture chambers.

It was no less manufactured than the color-code revolutions of a few years ago.   Pussy Riot, like their cheerleader/promoter Masha Gessen  , have been on the State Department payroll for some time.  

Just wondering, would it be OK if Pussy Riot were to burst into a synagogue or mosque and do the same thing?  No, it wouldn’t because we’re out of the gates of prog social dichotomies.  Russians are “white” or “Western” or semi-western, thus all institutions and mores are up for deconstruction.   Prog cultural anthropology can be confusing at times, but neo-cons understand it quite well and scaffold their ideology accordingly.  What is striking is how progressives and neo-cons are in such agreement on which societies are up for deconstruction, and which aren’t.  I don't foresee this kind of choreographed culture critique being done in Burkina Faso, Malaysia, or Oman- all countries with much worse of treatment of gays- any time soon.  Thus, the sort of gatekeeping of who gets critiqued and who doesn't makes it OK for truly anti woman, antigay societies like Saudi Arabia to be left unmolested by policymakers.  Then there’s the fact that if Pussy Riot tried acting up over in Yemen, they would be dead before the authorities could get there to arrest them.  

Progressive Mind Contortions

In case anyone doubts that there are Progressives who are as batshit delusional as some Teapartiers, check out this exchange:

Love his "No True Scotsman" fallacy at the end. It's like leftists saying that the 100 million dead in the 20th century from Marxism had nothing to do with Marxism.   I guess the families of the victims of ISIS crucifixions could use some  reassurance.

Gun grabbing in Chicago: Should I care?

The mayor of Chicago now wants all gun purchases in Chicago to be videotaped, calling gun violence the city's "most urgent problem". It certainly is, and has been at least since the late 1960's when the hundreds of thousands of dollars in block grants were given to the Vice Lords gang in some Great Society experiment to turn thugs respectable (the VL's used the veneer of respectability and the funds to arm themselves and grow).  Sure, it's another creeping check on the second amendment, just like the supposed micromanaging of peoples soft drink choices in New York offends the liberty of many.

But what is to be done in Chicago, and should I care?  You can hardly blame the sentiment behind it.  Shootings are what one thinks about when one considers Chicago.  The problem is that there is currently a cultural/cognitive dissonance going on with regard to guns.  You can't go a week in the NYT/Salon/Slate/WaPo media complex without some kind of identity politicking about macho redneck gun culture. Unfortunately, the cities don't have too many Bubba's shooting up the place, but rather race-based gangs, and the suburbs and progressive towns don't either: they get nerdy, passive-aggressive dweebs from liberal backgrounds who've lost the thread between video games and real life and decide to go postal.

I live in a somewhat liberal outpost in a red state.  It's pretty doubtful that such levels of statism is coming to my town soon. Libertarians and gun rights advocate are vigilant against slippery slopes, and in the past, I shared the slippery slope outlook. For example I counted myself as being pretty close to a free speech absolutist.   I had that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty view, and that meant that folks like the ACLU were there to make sure that Pfoofer's Corners, Wyoming had the same rights as the Lower East Side. But lately I've begun to accept more of the idea of  states and towns as democracy laboratories.  Local initiatives on topics like fracking and weed seem to be stronger than ever. Granted, Chicago my not be my idea of democracy, but let's face it:  Chicago and New York attract fairly statist people, and in Chicago, there's a lot of people calling for the state to be their patriarch.  If they feel like they need more adult supervision, well, let them have it.

Not Watching the Super Bowl

Thinking about how many people tonight are riding money a football game.

In my sleepy cotton town, the bookie joint was like an Elk's Lodge. Situated in the alley behind the row of cotton factors and brokers, you could walk in and hang out all day long, have a coke, crack open some whiskey, make a bet, read the paper, watch sports, talk shit.

My father enjoyed taking me there just to see the characters drawl on. They were an assortment of cotton factors, farmers, cops, lawyers, and two-bit county politicians. There was a stove, a counter, four tables, and a coke machine. The whole room was no more than 30' x 30'. The mayor of the village nearby would drop by and make deer sausage with cheese grits.

Stacey, the bookie, would be updating the point spread as the day went on, and joke around with the characters. You could bet on anything ten dollars and up, straight bets, teasers, round robins. I watched a card game once when I was in there with my father- I was maybe twelve- where a fellow lost a hundred acres of prime land on a single hand. I've never been tempted to gamble.