So I do this from time to time. Some people would think that I do it constantly, but sometimes, I have to just look at some of the content online, often from a far-left perspective, and wonder exactly what they were thinking.
Then, I remember they weren’t. They were just reacting emotionally.
So let’s look at one such example.So today, we’re going to be looking at a TMM video that is taking on something that Ben Shapiro said. Now I vehemently disagree with a lot of the things that Shapiro says, especially when it comes to religion, but I’ve got a different take on it and that’s what I want to go into today.
I am convinced that so many discussions that I see online these days, they are just people talking entirely past the other party because nobody stops to clarify their terms up front. Most people, I think, just don’t care. Where have we heard me say that one before?
Also, I want to be very clear that I’m just using the video as a jumping off point for my own discussion, so while you can certainly go look at it, especially for the Shapiro parts, I’m not really doing a direct response here.
So, Ben Shapiro, after being asked a question from the audience, he goes off into the differences between sex and gender and points out that there is a direct biological reason for gender that TMM, eventually, disagrees with. Well, sorry, Ben is right here. The simple fact is, those with XX chromosomes are genetically female and those with XY are genetically male. Your feelings don’t remotely enter into it. Yes, there are a few very rare exceptions, XXY and the like, there are intersex individuals, but you don’t make rules based on the exceptions, you make them based on the majority of cases.
Because here’s the part where people are going to freak out. I don’t give a damn about your feelings. Yes, I acknowledge that people can, and sometimes do, feel that their genetic biological reality doesn’t match what they feel in their heads. I’m fine with that. Yet it doesn’t actually change the genetic biological reality. I don’t care if you think that you are male or female or a furry, or an attack helicopter for that matter, the simple fact remains, you are what your biology makes you. At present, at least, you have no way to change it. Time to deal with reality.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t care if you want to refer to yourself as whatever you want to refer to yourself as. Knock yourself out. Anyone that you can convince to go along with it, that’s fine too. Where I get bothered is when people try to force the general public to go along with your fee-fees and that’s not something that I’m going to condone.
Because again, I don’t give a damn about your feelings. So here’s kind of a story. I grew up being really good friends with this guy. He was part of my main roleplaying group for a very, very long time. Throughout thought, he was very strongly anti-gay. I don’t think he was a bigot or anything, he was dealing with some things internally, but if there was anything that ever looked a little “queer,” for lack of a better word, he’d probably say something snide about it. That said though, in almost every game that we played, he’d play a female character. Nobody cared, nobody ever said anything about it and, years later, absolutely none of us were surprised at all when he came out as trans. Now Bill (not his real name) wanted to be called Willamina (also not the real name) and I, because I had an active relationship with, and respect for, Bill, I complied.
But guess what? That was my choice. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t the government’s. It certainly isn’t the business of the busybodies on the political left. I made a choice to go along with a personal decision of someone that I respected and thus, Bill became Willamina in my mind.
Now genetically, Bill is still Bill. Changing the label that’s associated with the person, that doesn’t change the underlying reality. I simply care about the individual, I want them to be happy and therefore, I’m going to call them whatever they choose to be called. And Willamina has been living as a woman for a very long time now, happily and I want nothing but the best for her.
So reality aside, let’s pretend that it wasn’t someone that I’ve known for my entire life, someone that I don’t have a great deal of respect for. Some stranger comes up to me and demands to be referred to as an attack helicopter. What am I going to say to this individual?
“Fuck you.”
Because I have absolutely no requirement to refer to them as such. It’s not the functional reality, no matter what they might feel in their heads. That goes for, say, furries. I’ve had them demand that I refer to them as anthropomorphic foxes or whatever. Not a chance. You haven’t earned that from me because, ultimately, this all comes down to my choice. I get to decide how I am going to react and if you haven’t earned that modicum of respect from me, I am not going to go along with your non-realistic fantasy. But here’s the thing, I don’t have to and you can’t make me.
Which is why so many on the far left have tried to appeal to the law to coddle their fee-fees. Now don’t get me wrong, this has nothing at all to do with rights. I think all people deserve equal rights period. I don’t think we should pay the slightest bit of attention to any immutable characteristic, be it race, gender, sexual orientation or anything else. Everyone is the same. Everyone has the same rights and everyone has the same responsibilities. Keep your social special pleading to yourself.
Yet the left doesn’t like that. They want everyone to be asking for pronouns and be put in jail for the imaginary crime of “misgendering someone”. And no, that’s not going to work, especially in a country built on the fundamental right to free speech. Because I don’t have to care about your feelings and, the more you piss me off, the less likely I’m going to be to do what you want me to do. Go and live your life. Get your friends to call you whatever you want to be called. Don’t expect random strangers on the street to comply with your wishes, no matter what they might be. If you seem to be black by visual inspection, I’m going to call you black. Or white. Or anything else that you seem to be. If you want to earn my respect, I might comply with your wishes, but the respect comes first, not the demand that I go along with you.
Everyone on the planet needs to figure out that their feelings are not first and foremost on everyone’s mind. Nobody cares, at least not anyone who isn’t emotionally frail and ideologically programmed. If you want me to call you a woman or a redwood tree, convince me that you deserve it. Don’t try to force me under threat of imprisonment or fine. That’s only going to get me to tell you to fuck off and walk happily into a cell. I am not concerned about you as a human being. I am concerned if you are rational, responsible and realistic. Try being any of those. It really isn’t that hard.
re: Everyone is the same.✔ Everyone has the same rights✔ and everyone has the same responsibilities.✔ Keep your social special pleading to yourself. –YES.✔✔✔
Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say. Now, where have we seen this before: religion. ―When you lack the demonstrable, independently verifiable, credible evidence to convince, use the law, fines and jail time.
From our companies training I had to attend: “. . . . Misgendering is an important topic to trans people as it intersects with so many other issues. Innocent misgendering can still be painful. It shows no concern for the effort others may have put in as they are leaving their old persona behind. Someone could easily ruin a trans person’s day by addressing them as the wrong gender and openly using the wrong pronoun.”
―You see that? You claw and climb your way out of one box [religion] and you can be in a [SJW] box even crazier. Demonstrable facts should move society not feels.
That’s why I say, Parents: Consider teaching your children How to think —NOT— What to think. For example: This is primary source evidence; this is secondary source evidence; this is hearsay; this is gossip and this is rumor. This is special pleading. This is a circular argument. This is an argument from authority. This is an argument from ignorance. This is false equivalence. This argument assumes medical facts NOT in evidence. If you want real, demonstrable independently verifiable facts it is important not to bypass the head and go straight to the heart [religion].
In the course, being bi-gendered was also explained and we were told that people can move across the gender spectrum, somewhere in between, fluid, both, or neither. Thirteen states now offer a nonbinary gender option for driver’s licenses. Of course, there are all kinds of situations where gender fluid non-binary make it impossible to know what mode people are in. The driver’s license needs a microchip in it that senses the fluid and changes the gender designation on the driver’s license. Because sometimes you just can’t say “attack helicopter,” sometimes like the Z-10M you have autocannons, sometimes like the Ka-52 Alligator or the Mi-28NM Havoc, you carry anti-tank rockets. At other times you’re a Ka-50 Black Shark with nuclear tipped land attack missiles and sometimes like an AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter, straight forward sidewinder or hellfire missiles, you can’t just say “attack helicopter.”
A gender-malcontent. Not a boy or a girl, not any binary, rigid definition of a person. Just everything, all at once, and completely fluid. Just like religion where the goalposts move with the feels and it is user defined. Bart Ehrman says people tell him: I don’t care what your misinterpretation of the Bible is [even if you are using the oldest Greek manuscripts] my God wouldn’t do. . . . My Jesus tells me I can. . . . . My user-defined God and Jesus, the one on the dashboard of my mind. It’s like debating moving Jello.
It is unlawful (and it should be) to advertise that a product can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent, demonstrable, reliable evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made.
How then do religious leaders get a free pass (sorry for going back to this)? Making false and unsupported claims in the absence of competent, reliable demonstrable evidence is exactly what they do to earn a living. It’s their whole business model. And what they do is worse than merely promoting bogus cures because they tout their products as cure-alls for all sorts of physical and mental health problems year after year. Religious leaders and institutions just bilk money out of vulnerable people who yearn for a little more goodness and health in their lives, leaving them alive but lighter in the pockets.
Assumes vast amounts of facts NOT in evidence.✓
For entertainment purposes only DOES NOT work as advertised.✓
They’re using kindness as a cudgel, whacking people over the head with it as a means of getting their way. It’s kind, if and only if they agree with it. Anything else, they’ll try to shut you down. That’s why cancel culture is such a disaster.
Of course, they’re doing the same thing as the religious. “You must behave the way we tell you to behave, otherwise you’re wrong.” “You have to believe what we tell you to believe or you’re going to get punished!” That’s blatantly authoritarian, not liberal, sorry. I don’t care how anyone feels. There’s a big difference between purposely hurting people and doing so accidentally, but the socially religious insist that if you don’t behave exactly as they want, you’re automatically wrong. Trust me, I’ve done enough of those workplace courses, even taught my fair share, to know just how insidious they are, especially when you live in a very far-left state that thinks they get to control every move you make.
Because here’s the thing. A lot of these people treat George Orwell’s 1984 like a primer on how to run a society. They completely miss the point, which is why most of them tend to be communists or socialists. They actively hate freedom. They want everyone to be just like they are. Hmmm, where have I heard that one before? I’ve run into a lot of them who want mind crime to be real crime. You can’t have your own opinions, you have to go along with the whims of the state…. but only if they run the state, of course. Otherwise, you can just ignore it as evil.
I think it’s positively silly to hate gay people, but I’m never going to deny people to internally think whatever they want. I couldn’t stop them, even if I tried. The politically ideological, they want everyone, not only to treat everyone the same, but to all walk in mental lockstep with them. You can’t dare defy their ideological purity. It’s really why, if you watch them, they spend so much time eating their own. Nobody is ever pure enough and everyone is terrified of being found to be less than perfect.
The simple fact is, religion doesn’t act as advertised, nor do any of the emotionally-comforting political ideologies. They’re all a mess and ultimately, they are doomed to fail. It’s why none of them impress me one whit. You just have to be able to step back and evaluate them rationally and the second you do that, they all just implode.
re: cancel culture is such a disaster.✔✔✔
re: Of course, they’re doing the same thing as the religious. “You must behave the way we tell you to behave, otherwise you’re wrong.” “You have to believe what we tell you to believe or you’re going to get punished!”
Absolutely!!! —Lawsuits, an excellent response.
re: They actively hate freedom.✔✔✔
re: mind crime = real crime‼‼ —Just like religion.
An idea is something you have but an SJW ideology is something that has/consumes you to the point you can’t step back from it.
But, with time, they all do self-implode just like religions. For me, I learned that seriously studied, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism *ever* conceived.
A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a SJW philosophical system can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; she sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which she is possessed. Thus, a SJW of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “SJW struggle.”
This is really where you start to find these parallels between religion and politics. Where we see the religious making their faith the end-all-be-all of their entire existence, we see the political left doing the exact same thing. They can’t recognize their political ideology as just a part of the overall whole, it is the single-most important thing in their lives and everything else pales in comparison. It’s like the old Carlin bit where Christians can’t help but bring up Jesus 147 times in a 3 minute conversation, with the far-left, it’s “discrimination” or some other leftist buzz word. It’s in their movies, it’s in their music, it’s all that they can see.
Someone really needs to introduce these people to reality. It can only help.
The real problem with the new bathroom rules aren’t those with gender dysphoria, but perverts taking advantage. And if course this was predicted, and was ignored because “that would never happen”. And of course it is happening; a lot.
Then there’s gender pronouns; like I’m going to keep track of your made-up 78 genders and figure out which one you currently are. Even more crazy is that people do not use a gendered pronoun when addressing someone, or are even just in their presence. Try going up to someone and asking “how is she today?” So to be “offended” requires the assistance of a spy.
I think that’s been a bit overplayed. Honestly, it isn’t like you’re asking someone who has no clue what the male genitalia looks like to go into the men’s room to take a dump. They are well acquainted with what it all looks like. Are there perverts who might do that? Sure. By the same token, are there gay male perverts who can walk into any men’s room and do the same thing? Absolutely. We don’t complain about it on the gay side because honestly, what else are we going to do? Make a dozen different bathrooms for everyone? We have to understand that, so long as there are perverts willing to take advantage of others, a small number of them are going to do some stupid stuff and when they’re caught, we hold them legally accountable. There really isn’t any other way to rationally handle it.
I agree with you on the musical pronouns thing. The only reason they’re doing it over on Atheist Experience, etc. is because Matt and Arden are together. It was never a thing before that happened. I’m thinking that the reason Eric Murphy and Vi La Bianca left the network was because they wanted to push that leftist nonsense, which they did from the very first show they do, and that’s exactly where I decided to stop watching it, for that and other reasons. It’s one thing if someone makes an issue of a pronoun, but to force everyone to have to listen to it for ideological reasons, that’s just stupid. With one possible exception, I haven’t heard anyone on any of the AE videos who didn’t sound exactly like their stated pronouns. What’s the point in it all other than pushing your political agenda?