The other day, I was reading that same discussion again.

“I can’t wait till the tide finally turns and all these loudmouths on the Trans Train will get their just desserts!”

“Yeah, I think about that, too. But I’m afraid the world will just pretend it never happened.”

This goes against the gut feeling of Justice, but the pessimists have a point. How many times have we had something completely off-the-charts insane splashed across our screens, only to have the News Cycle churn onward and nothing really happen?

Tribalism has really gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? Everything must be on one side or the other in the Culture War, no front line is too remote.

But tossing everything in two huge piles throws together things that have no business anywhere near each other.

The simple dichotomy of Conservative = Republican / Progressive = Democrat has shown itself inadequate for a while now. For one thing, a ‘conservative’ is someone who wants to conserve things as they are. But this makes the Biden administration’s Back-To-Normal schtick a little weird, doesn’t it?

Ever wonder why so many of the people arguing with you seem brainwashed? Wonder no more!

Gabriel Rockhill lays it all out, but his article isn’t getting the attention it deserves. That’s probably because it’s a slog to read, but it’s as important as it is wordy.

He tells us about a declassified CIA report that describes exactly how the Agency helped to mastermind the current mess:

“In recognizing it was unlikely that it could abolish [the left] entirely, the world's most powerful spy organization has sought to move leftist culture away from resolute anti-capitalist and transformative politics toward center-left reformist positions that are less overtly critical of US foreign and domestic policies.”

Hey guyns, get this – Abortion is trending again! Zipidee-do-dah!

Ovarit’s comments on my post this week took a discouraging turn. Alongside a lively discussion of Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance Plan, an unexpected consensus emerged that abortion protections at the Federal level are basically gone.

The Sad State of Women’s Rights, US Edition

“It’s just a matter of time. It’ll be off the table soon, and it makes moderate Republicans a lot more appealing to me.“

This sounds reasonable until you remember that all Romney needs to look like a hero is a little integrity. 

This world just keeps on getting weirder! Today, I found myself sobbing with relief over a bill introduced by the man I voted against in 2012.

Saagar Enjeti over at The Hill explains how Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance Plan “Would almost single-handedly cut child poverty to the lowest level in decades.” 

He also reminds us that the United States is facing a real fertility crisis  – My generation is not having enough kids to replace ourselves. It seems many Americans don’t understand why this is important.

“When I praised this publicly, I was hit with unsurprisingly skeptical takes around, ‘Why do we even need more kids…? Doesn’t this discriminate against people who don’t have kids?”

“America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what it is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation – all is being refounded upon a religion.“

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But Professor John McWhorter was writing this week about race theory in America, not gender.

He is talking about the same thing we are, without knowing it.

Last week, I pointed out that Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk had stumbled upon the same issue we in the feminist community have been wrestling with for years – That lots of so-called Liberals really aren’t very. 

The story of the Reddit attack on Wall Street is being twisted in some strangely familiar ways.

Today on Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski shows us how tech companies and publications are working together to paint the Redditors as right-wing extremists.

He pulls headlines from Business Insider describing Discord banning r/Wallstreetbets for “hate speech”, and Newsweek claiming it’s all a cover for recruitment.

Kyle points out Discord’s convenient timing, “It’s not a coincidence that the day they took them down is the day that they were bankrupting hedge funds and taking down wealthy and powerful people.”

Democrats in the House of Representatives are going stir-crazy, held captive by Republicans who plainly state they have no intention of working with them on anything, ever. 

Apparently, their self-awarded consolation prize for failing to do much for the American people all through one of the worst years on record, was to make their paperwork More Inclusive.

The changes themselves aren’t all that crazy actually, quite a few ‘men’ are being removed – ‘Chairman’ becomes ‘Chair,’ ‘Seamen’ becomes ‘Seafarers.’ ‘Submit his or her resignation’ becomes ‘resign.’ Pretty straightforward stuff, it seems.

Pornhub recently changed its rules in a big way.

No more downloads! I guess the wanking public will have to make do with bookmarks. Only verified accounts are allowed to upload anything. This will probably make the biggest difference to the women and girls commodified without their permission.

And more moderators, of course. What credentials do you suppose they look for?

Saagar Enjeti at The Hill continued drifting leftward last week, disappointed that these changes didn’t come from years of conservative agitation. 

Sitting with mixed feelings tonight, after learning how a feminist icon threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg was a hard-hitting civil rights lawyer in the 1970s. Her mission was to take on sexual discrimination, one example at a time.

She argued before the Supreme Court for the American Civil Liberties Union. She won Social Security survivor benefits, she won women a place on juries. Appearing in six cases, she won five.

One day, her secretary remarked, “I’m typing these briefs for you, and there’s the word sex, sex, sex on every page! Don’t you know those nine men to whom you’re arguing, when they hear that word, their first association is not what you want them to be thinking about!“

Hey everyone, 

A harried BrazenShe checking in real quick, because I think I’ve solved a little mystery. 

There’s this idea floating around that radical feminists are conservative. More than that, I have seen us called white supremacists with all the authority a Tumblrite can muster. 

At first blush, this confused me immensely. I’m from Cleveland Heights. Racism does not compute for me. 

Ok, some of us have made appearances next to conservatives recently. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a frustrated liberal abandoned by her friends. 

Born to a wealthy Russian military family at the height of the Victorian era, Alexandra Kollontai rejected the upper-class life.

Opinionated and intelligent, she dove into politics young. Driven by the conviction that “bourgeois feminists” could never really understand the plight of The People, at 21 she ran away from her army officer husband and married a poor cousin. But it was the dangerous conditions in a local factory that caused her to snap. Devoting herself to Marxism, Alexandra left her second husband and made the acquaintance of the important men in the revolutionary Bolshevik party.

What do words like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberal’ actually mean?

Hong Kong has been in the news for a while now. Many of us will have at least a passing familiarity with the fact that the Chinese government is experimenting with various methods of running them into the ground.

But a more long-standing problem – in the country deemed 2020’s Freest Economy by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal – is the spiraling price of real estate.

Vox recently published a video addressing the issue. Land scarcity, the obvious suspect in an island nation of millions, is not the problem. Only about 3% of Hong Kong is zoned for urban housing.

It’s been a very long year so far. Between disease, financial crunch and political upheaval, it seems like the world is just plain confusing, if not actively out to get us.

In times like these, it’s important to occasionally take time out for something majorly positive.

Today’s installment of Something Positive features climate change. I know that sounds weird, but bear with me.

Women in underdeveloped countries often suffer the most from the personal and economic effects of climate change. So it was with no small relish that I learned how successful (and cheap!) the Great Green Wall of Africa has been so far.

Just popping in to bring attention to something I noticed in the news this morning.

This weekend was Father's Day in the United States. Usually, this holiday passes with little more fanfare than some cards at the drugstore and persistent Home Depot commercials.

This year, as we will all have noticed by now, is unique. This year, Father's Day was marked by random outbursts of violence across the country.

I'm not even talking about the protests. Or the riots. Or the looting. Or the brutal acts of political pageantry.

Chicago had it worst, with 60 people shot across the city. Nine of them have died, in unrelated situations where someone decided to start pulling a trigger. New York City has seen 18 shootings this weekend.

We have all developed our little quirks in dealing with daily life during lockdown. Your faithful writer has been vacillating between following the pandemic and its politics like a sexy murder trial, and avoiding anything remotely topical to cover the smell of my brain sizzling. Last night I was pulled from panicked reverie by the compulsion to respond to an article on Medium. 

We’re Watching An Economy Die is one of those rare treats that is both inescapably enjoyable and deeply disturbing. Umair Haque goes to great lengths to convince us that we are seeing the death throes of democracy in the United States. That the inevitable, eternal outcome of widespread poverty is a hard turn Right. We will blame minorities, elect fascists and become “the world’s first poor rich country.“

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal has done us the service this week of openly arguing that their bottom line is more important than our lives.

It’s behind a paywall, but Fox Business was kind enough to provide a free version for our perusal. The headline, ‘Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown‘ vaguely presages its thesis subheading: “No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.“

Yes, yes they can. Many countries around the world are running a skeleton crew of essential services to stave off, ya know, a pandemic.

Around the world, the spread of the pandemic has illustrated the existing social patterns in real time.

Here in Tennessee, we are almost last in line. West Virginia was recently declared the 50th state to see an official case.

Watching it take over Reddit, Twitter, and finally YouTube, was like studying a bowling ball from the POV of a pin.

I got to learn which of my friends pay attention to the outside world. Which of my friends, whether on purpose or not, had been absorbing right-wing talking points.

My state was also one of the last places to roll out closure rules, closely following President Trump’s timing. The US’ lack of readiness appears poised to puncture our arrogance. We’re about a week away from getting to see just how bad it might get.

Last Fall, I was planning to throw all my little weight behind Elizabeth Warren.

She speaks my language, about families and ground-level economics. I was excited to have a woman candidate whose policies I could actually support. Her background with disabled children and low-income families seemed to indicate a person who understood some issues that have been ignored by mainstream politics for way too long.

But recently, readers may know, she has pushed herself as a vocal supporter of Trans Rights.

I was disappointed by this because I had not gotten around to doing any real digging. I was hoping adding pronouns to her website was lip service, but she has been pro-Trans for a while.

….OK, Boomer.

Two words have crystalized our generational friction as we slip into the second decade of the 21st century. The “entitled” Millennials and our

Zoomer cousins are beginning to see we are in for a struggle to inherit the world.

Stephanie Hofeller has it worse than most. Her Dad, Thomas Hofeller, was the architect of today’s political landscape. Called “The master of the modern gerrymander” by The New Yorker, Tom died in 2018 and left a lot of interesting things behind.

Stephanie has been using her father’s files to chip away at his work. She was instrumental in the Supreme Court ruling against including a citizenship question in the 2020 census, after Tom’s cache revealed a study showing the question to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” Which, obviously, is a faux pas.

The Washington Post spilled a lot of digital ink recently to pose a simple question:

What does it mean when left-wing feminists and conservatives work together?

“Tensions between the TERFs and transgender activists erupted at the Seattle Public Library as hundreds of women -“

Stop right there. Please enjoy this photo of those hundreds of “women.”

Hot stuff, no?

It’s fun when formerly-trustworthy pillars of Journalism leave out inconvenient facts, isn’t it? It’s like a Journalism scavenger hunt!

Political lesbianism has always been controversial.

First coined in the 1960s, women are encouraged to “get men out of their heads and out of their beds.”

Which may very well be good advice. But the group promoting this plan, the Revolutionary Feminists, were very much literal and total in their meaning.

Choose to Be A Lesbian?

Their most famous outing was a booklet published in 1981. It established, among other things, that lesbianism is a choice any woman can make.

Wait a minute. Sexual orientation is a choice? That’s exactly the opposite of the foundation of the Gay Rights Movement. Gay people can’t just choose to be straight. And vice-versa.

Yesterday evening in Toronto, the irrepressible Meghan Murphy spoke for about 30 minutes at the public library.

Her program, Gender Identity – Society, the Law and Women, follows in a string of appearances in Canada and Britain. These events are increasingly controversial, and the Toronto library was the scene of vehement protest.

Meghan is a Feminist freelance writer. She has become more and more high-profile since Gender ID became law in Canada.

(Seriously, they even record crime statistics according to the offender’s “expressed gender” rather than sex. Get ready for a spike in “female” crime in Canada….)

More specifically, a hedonist. And a total maniac. It’s spit-take-worthy irony that she would pray for the abortion of “satanic pregnancies.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Even the most casual of Christians will be familiar with Jesus’ messages of charity and peace. Heal the sick, the meek shall inherit the earth, all that. These things are central to the popular idea of his character.

It’s not one of my favorite stories, but I can see how some people find good things in it.

Then, there’s Prosperity Doctrine.