It's The Culture War, Stupid

Because it's the Culture War that matters. Stolen victimhood and synthesized outrage are the stock in trade at DumFux News. So they go out of their way in search of something to bitch about. That's what sells the dick pills and panty liners.

And speaking of rebranding, "woke" is nothing more than "political correctness' by another name.

BTW, for the veterans out there: "Woke" = "Situational Awareness". Don't get stoopid.

Calm The Fuck Down, MAGA

Bless their hearts

We Who Say Merry Christmas

To Cis Or Not To Cis

Why are Republicans obsessed with people's junk?

I don't remember ever having seen the ad - if I did, the gender reference didn't register - but there is a message here that says, "Different is OK, but not too different - not like sex-different. Sex-different makes me feel kinda ooky, so it must be bad."

And then, if there's negative push-back, you go with, "C'mon - it's a joke. It's funny. We were ... uhm ... lemme see ... oh, I've got it - we were actually making fun of a buncha stupid Cis-Males doing that homophobia thing. You get it, dontcha - where's your sense of humor?"

Opinion

To understand biological sex, look at the brain, not the body

There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!”

The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side.

This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me whether it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said. “Then it kind of wrote itself.”

It’s a fun tune, and I admit I kind of loved seeing that commercial. But at its heart is an issue central to our current political moment.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology. Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, wants to restrict gender-affirming health care for all transgender people, including adults. A new dress code at the Texas Agriculture Department commands that employees wear clothing “in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on women’s sports teams in public schools.

This term, “biological males,” is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary. They’re uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer. At Wellesley College in March, for instance, a nonbinding student referendum called for the admission of trans men to a school that traditionally has been a women’s college. The president of the college, Paula Johnson, pushed back.

So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?

Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY and so on. There’s even something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female and might not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.

How can this be, if sex is only about a gene?

Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).

What do we do, then, with the millions of women who have had hysterectomies? Have they become men? What about women who’ve had mastectomies? Or men with gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts?

Are these people not who they think they are?

It might be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

In the past decade, there has been some fascinating research on the brains of transgender people. What is most remarkable about this work is not that trans women’s brains have been found to resemble those of cisgender women, or that trans men’s brains resemble those of cis men. What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.

But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one? It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics rather than a binary classification of either/or. There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book, “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.

And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology. A study described by author Francine Russo in Scientific American examined the brains of 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria. The experiment examined how these children responded to androstadienone, a pungent substance similar to pheromones, that is known to cause a different response in the brains of men and women. The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender. (The results were less clear with prepubescent children.)

This kind of testing is important, said one of the researchers Russo quoted, “because sex differences in responding to odors cannot be influenced by training or environment.” A similar study was done in measuring the responses of trans boys and girls to echo-like sounds produced in the inner ear. “Boys with gender dysphoria responded more like typical females, who have a stronger response to these sounds.”

What does it mean, to respond to the world in this way? For me, it has meant having a sense of myself as a woman, a sense that no matter how comfortable I was with the fact of being feminine, I was never at ease with not being female. When I was young, I tried to talk myself out of it, telling myself, in short, to “get over it.”

But I never got over it.

I compare it to a sense of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The moment you stepped onto those supposedly unfamiliar shores, though, you’d have a sense of overwhelming gratitude, and solace, and joy. Home, you might think. I’m finally home.

The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

But trans people are not broken. And, in fact, trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans: to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can be considered successful only if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it. Given the tremendous courage it takes to come out, given the fact that even now trans people can still lose everything — family, friends, jobs, even our lives — what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred but love.

When the person in that Chevy ad sings, Oh, I want to be free … to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman! the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire to be free to feel the way I feel.

Surely this is not a desire unique to trans people. Tell me: Is there anyone who has never struggled to live up to the hard truths of their own heart?

Man! I feel like a human.

Today's Eternal Petulance

45* is a fucking child - with a live hand grenade.

KDKA - Pittsburgh:

Digging deeper into a culture war that he’s repeatedly stoked, President Donald Trump on Monday called off a visit by the Philadelphia Eagles to the White House Tuesday, citing the dispute over whether NFL players must stand during the playing of the national anthem.

Trump said in a statement that some members of the Super Bowl championship team “disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.”

None of the Eagles took a knee during the anthem in 2017.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney replied with his own statement, saying that he is “equally proud of the Eagles’ activism off the field” and that the players “represent the diversity of our nation — a nation in which we are free to express our opinions.”

“Disinviting them from the White House only proves that our President is not a true patriot, but a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size and afraid of the embarrassment of throwing a party to which no one wants to attend,” the statement continued.

Jim Kenney's got guts.

Today's Tweet

Trump cancels Chicago rally amid security concerns https://t.co/LVEGWkrAQ7 #Chicago #DonaldTrump photo by @ejwamb pic.twitter.com/tF1NTu8qui

— Chicago Trib Photo (@ChiTribPhoto) March 12, 2016

Slag her all ya want, guys.  She's earned it.  And she knows she's earned it.  And she's proud of having earned it.

For 25 years, she's been taking the training to do exactly that, at exactly that moment. 

Limbaugh, Coulter, Boortz, Savage, Cavuto - they've been teaching her that what really matters is to make "The Libruls" mad.  That's the only test.  If "The Libruls" get pissed off, then you're on the right track.  Do anything, say anything - it doesn't even have to make sense cuz making sense is what "The Libruls" try to do. So just come out with whatever you find when you unpack all that weird shit way down deep in the lizard part of your brain (which, of course, you're absolutely sure isn't even there); now say it.  And watch "The Libruls" gag.  And you'll know you're right.

Try it.  It's easy.  

Somebody needs to start a betting pool on when the lid comes off this motherfucker, and we get our first real donnybrook / fracas / melee / gunfight whatever.

I'm taking sometime before midnight on March 31.

And with apologies to Gil Scott Heron, this little dance party is gonna be on everything that even remotely resembles a TV screen. 

Cuz It's Hard To See

An awful lot of people came to love Archie Bunker because the perverse twist in American TV Culture is that sometimes the characters meant to be the Negative Exemplars morph into "the guys telling the real truth" - the ones who're just speaking from their hearts, ignoring the imposition of Political Correctness blah blah blah.  They're supposed to show the deep dark id of the lower brain, but somehow way too many of us mistake it for what I think is a pretty fucked up version of child-like innocence.



If I'm a racist asshole, then I'm a racist asshole.  And if I don't know I'm a racist asshole, then it just means I have some work to do; particularly on my Self Awareness.  It doesn't mean it's OK to say whatever stoopid thing that pops into my skull just because I don't know it's a stoopid thing to say.  AND, it doesn't mean I get to go on choosing to remain stoopid.

The Un-War On Christmas

Do you see it?  There on the side of the wagon and again on the banner under the picture of the wagon?  It says "White House Christmas Tree".

I'm serious - if you bring any of the usual shit about "anti-Christian this" or "holiday that", I can't guarantee I won't get all medieval on your dumb ass.

Here's the video:


Yeah - it's just that boring.  It's always just that boring.   Why is it ALWAYS the Little Stoopid that DumFux News and the wingnuts choose to make into a Big Stoopid?

Here's a tho't - what if DumFux News is actually helping Obama and all those Big Gubmint rascals by distracting our attention away from Torture and Murder-by-Drone and Domestic Spying and a hundred other bigger things by getting us to concentrate on a bunch of fanciful junk that isn't true and wouldn't fucking matter even if it was true?

It Just Gets Funner

Rhetorical violence and revenge fantasies are "just talk", so there's "no way we can tie the things that are said and the images that are seen (coming from the Right Wing of the spectrum) to the violent behavior of individuals who're obviously acting of their own accord."

If I buy the arguments of Conservative Apologists, then every time there's a shooting spree, I can only shake my head and wonder where the shooter could possibly have gotten the crazy idea to start shooting people.

Heard alla dat before.

A few things.  First, violent imagery cuts a lot of ways that aren't predictable and can't be controlled.  It might be a good idea to remind the TheoCons about that "reap what you sow" thing.

Second, I suspect we're gonna hear a lot about "See?  Liberals shoot people too", so we'll get bogged down by the usual bullshit of "both sides do it".

Third - As bad as it is for the victims and their families, for the broader society it's not really a huge problem until "the other side" starts shootin' back.

We've been in a slow-motion Civil War Redux for a good 50 years, and I'm hoping we haven't just seen an important escalation.

From Addicting Info:

The incident is being treated as domestic terrorism. What Corkins intended to do if he had succeeded in infiltrating the building is unknown and what his motivations were outside of disagreeing with the FRC’s policies is unclear.

Rebutting the inevitable False Equivalence (Media Matters):

SPLC Intelligence Project director Mark Potok attributes this dramatic increase in right-wing extremist activity to three factors: "Resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government's handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities."

Rollin' 'Em

Along the same lines as the recent  "issue" of contraception, Obama follows it up with Eric Holder saying DoJ intends not to defend a provision in the Veterans' Bennies law that denies benefits to same-sex spouses.

It's not clear to me that they're saying the VA will stop denying those bennies, it's just that if you're denied and you challenge, then DoJ isn't gonna put up a fight.  Not quite as good as I think it oughta be, but they have to make it look like they're at least trying to follow the law.  There're still problems with the whole Torture and Illegal Imprisonment things out there, but hey - I'll take smallish improvements where I can get 'em.

Anyway, add this one to Contraception (and let's not forget DOMA), and we've got something that's starting to look like a pattern.

Obama is aware that the attitudes have shifted.  People who went along with the Right Radicals on the Culture War crap, thinking they'd get something good in return, are seeing now that there wasn't any real payoff at all - it was a gyp.  The Culture War is the agenda, and what you get for your trouble is fucked with your pants on.

So Obama rolls merrily along.  Once in a while he tosses a big hunk of juicy red meat out the window, and we all get to watch as a smaller and smaller pack of increasingly vicious feral dogs tear into each other trying to get at it.

One other little thing occurs to me.  I think this is looking like Obama is finding his footing, and learning how to use his expertise in Constitutional Law to drive the politics necessary to move his policy agenda forward.  Remember the big stupid show the House Repubs made of reading the Constitution, and requiring that every proposed bill include Constitutional compliance / justification?  I think Obama has taken that in hand like a blackjack and is in the process of wailin' the shit out of 'em with it.  I dunno of course, but it's more fun to watch now than it was just 6 or 8 months ago.

A Short Battle

The War on Christmas is sometimes just a little hard to follow.  What if some Israeli settlers attacked a busload of Palestinian Christians (eg)?

Do ya think that's gonna find its way onto DumFux News? Yer right - prob'ly not. Ma'an News Agency

If You're Stupid And You Know It

I always have a hard time thinking there are people who actually believe this shit. I really do try to think more highly of my neighbors and countrymen, but I have to admit (to myself anyway) that DumFux News wouldn't put it on the air if it wasn't working.

hat tip = Media Matters for America



And the kicker is that the Boca Raton city government was being threatened with lawsuits - not by the evil forces of atheism (which is always the inference invited by the middle school melodrama that is DumFux News), but by "Religious Groups" who were always loudly demanding ever more sectarian displays.  And Jesus wept.

Read all about it.

Dear Governor Perry

hat tip = Balloon Juice

Post Racial Debunked

As if anybody paying any attention at all needs to be convinced or reminded, all mutterings about how "we elected a black guy president and that means we've all gotten over that whole racism thing now" can be officially stamped HORSESHIT.

Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president's ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data.

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.
"I'm just astounded by those numbers," said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department's pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office's practices that would have skewed the recommendations. "I can recall several African Americans getting pardons."

The full story at Pro Publica.

And a great rundown at Balloon Juice (includes video from The Rachel Maddow Show).

Blind Zealotry

Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is a wealthy, and oh so 'conservative' DC suburb - and the sense of Entitled Victimhood is sometimes just a little overwhelming.  Especially when that feeling makes you miss the fucking point entirely.

From Leesburg Today (hat tip to Wonkette):

"I am very upset with what has happened here with this holiday as have been since several holidays ago. This is Christmas," Bill Rusciolelli said. Rusciolelli said he "respects the decision for people to petition and be allowed to represent their beliefs," but said it went too far when displays are allowed that mock religion and religious beliefs of many residents.

Leesburg attorney and father of three, Jack Hanssen said he believed if the board knew what would result, the language governing the displays would have been written differently, and added that the crucified Santa is a "direct attack" on religion.

It is certainly about as close as you come to a burning cross as I have ever seen," he said.

Read the story and be amazed.

Fools' Play

Terry Jones is a straight up asshole.  He makes a show of his "faith" so you have to know he's a fuckin' phony right off.  Anyway, he sets up his little Burn-a-Quran day and then sits back and collects the accolades and (most important) the dollars that start flowing in as soon as certain other straight up assholes react in a totally and predictably asshole-ish way to his being an asshole.

Here's a question: why is this news to anybody?

Make no mistake; there are no good guys in this.  The Muslimist assholes who react violently are no better than the Christianist assholes who deliberately foment Muslim rage; and anybody who sits around worrying about the politics instead of standing up and shouting a full-on gut-level condemnation of the whole sorry mess is an asshole too.

The Mosque At Ground Zero

There's a meltdown occurring because the community board in lower Manhattan has approved plans to build a good-sized Mosque/Muslim Community Ctr a couple of blocks away from the WTC site.

The Brain Free Zone (aka Fox News and other Wingnut Media) is going ape shit, yelling about "those insensitive bastards...; it's a slap in the face...; blah blah blah.

I only know two things about any of this:
Fear is the opposite of love, and forgiveness is the opposite of hate.

BTW: the proposed mosque is to replace one that's already within spittin' distance anyway.  If you're opposed to any mosque "on hallowed ground", then you need to have been a little more aware of what's been goin' on all along.

This non-troversy is typical reactionary bullshit and I'm callin' it for what it is.

Dodge Charger Commercial & Response

If the Opposition Party in Congress could make their SOTU responses like this, we might have a chance to get somewhere.
First the ad that ran during Super Bowl, then the response: