Zinnia

@Zinnia

CodezVII #crackpot #wingnut #ufo #magick #conspiracy

Mostly I’m boggling at the idea that someone could be both an “alien saviors are coming” prophet and a Q-Anon type. I mean, there’s nothing which would make those mutually exclusive, but the former is very “out of this world”, and the latter is very “down to earth”. The particular dysfunctions involved also feel rather different (from an outside perspective, anyway).

various commenters #transphobia

Angela from Sleepaway Camp and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs aren’t representative of trans women. If worrying that any particular one might be is one of the biggest issues in your life, you either have a very good life, or you really need psychological help, or both.

Kevin Downey Jr. #transphobia #fundie

Brinton got off lightly because, aside from being non-binary, they were rather privileged, and their crime had an air of “wacky eccentricity” typical of rich people who dress funny and have poor impulse control. (I don’t know if Brinton is actually “rich” by most people’s standards, but they’re clearly well off.) And conservatives are pissed about this because as an enby they shouldn’t have been allowed to command any sort of privileges and should have been treated as harshly as any freak, minority, or poor person typically gets treated. Not that they’d word it like that. That’s a sign of… something having subtly changed in the justice system, something which is probably both better and worse than what would be ideal.

Regardless, Biden wasn’t involved with Brinton’s hiring that I can find, so any tenuous connection between them is based on that they’d less likely to have been hired under a Republican administration. Also, no one’s going to trust them to hold a high-level government position again, or likely any government position really, which is the most important thing here.

Edwin Benson #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

1.) Most of the US Founders were Deists, not Christians. While they believed that there was some Deity or Cosmic Force out there, they did not believe that the Bible was an accurate depiction of that being, or even a good record of ancient history. Jefferson specifically referred to it as “the word of a demon”.

2.) That being said, a small number of them were Christians who believed in the idea that individual states had the right to form theocracies. The early presidents, Madison in particular, said “LOL nope” and did what they could to punish the states which tried.

3.) The First Amendment should be enough to put that idea to rest; but sadly there are a lot of alternate (and dubious) interpretations based on a “plain reading” of the text in a vacuum. The fact that it’s fairly easy to find writings by the Founders about what they really meant when they were creating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights apparently doesn’t matter.

Now, posting or teaching the 10 Commandments isn’t, in itself, unconstitutional, as doing so as an individual is a form of protected speech. But it’s been ruled, again and again and again, that the US government cannot be seen as endorsing *any* religion, and public schools are government-funded and under purview of the Department of Education. It’s not even like Christianity is particularly targeted here, it’s just the religion which comes up most often due to being the majority religion. (It’s also not a case of “the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under bridges” because Christians are the majority and don’t suffer any special or undue hardship compared to anyone else because of it.) Trying to do an end run around the spirit of the law with things like “The government isn’t doing it, *I* am doing it on behalf of the government” or “…But muh made-up version of history!” has never worked in the past, though with the current Supreme Court who knows if that will last.

Austin Ruse #homophobia #transphobia #wingnut #conspiracy

This is the eternal argument: There is only “normal” (cishet) and “deviant/degenerate/perverse” (different words which all basically mean “everything else” in the context of gender and/or sexuality). “Normal” is an extremely narrow conformal range (which has always varied a bit by culture and era, no matter how much some might claim there is a perfect and unchanging standard) and is defined almost entirely in terms of behavior; desires, drives, and personal experiences of reality are meaningless unless congruent to personal practices and/or behavior. (Essentially, a gay person who remains deeply closeted and pretends to be cishet *is* normal, in that thinking.) Regardless which word one uses to describe “everything else”, anything which falls under that is morally equivalent and therefore practically indistinct.

This person is basically objecting to the arguments made by “LGB only, drop the TQIA+” type of people. *Those* people are claiming that differences in sexuality are normal and should be fully accepted, but variations in gender and/or anatomy aren’t and shouldn’t be tolerated (or at least have nothing to do with the struggles of LGB people). This person says, no, LGB separate from the TQIA+ are a distinction without a difference, and both groupings are not meaningfully any different from goat-fuckers or child molesters or the like.

Basically, the results of pure black-and-white thinking combined with enforced ignorance.

Bennett Lee Ross #crackpot #magick #ufo #quack

I think what he’s going for here was that, at some point in human evolution, we “lost” one of our 24 chromosome pairs (48 total), resulting in 23 pairs (46 total). Because 12 is a number of “perfection” and multiples of 12 are similarly “perfect” (they’re not, 6 is a perfect number, 12 and 24 are abundant numbers) this made us less than perfect, somehow.

In reality, the DNA from the “missing” chromosomes are still there because two of the original pairs got fused together. Since the mathematical definition of “perfect” does not have any metaphysical connection to any real-world concept of “perfect” (and again, 12 and 24 aren’t perfect numbers anyway) this is entirely meaningless. The rest is similarly meaningless nonsense, presumably cobbled together from a bunch of other “I didn’t even try to understand” BS.

various commenters #transphobia

I highly doubt that any woman would allow

I have seen, and occasionally participated in, so many different alt-cultures both online and IRL to know that virtually any statement which started off with this (or for that matter, “any man” or “any person”) would be incorrect.

Now some of the smarter ones would probably protest that they did not mean this literally, that “any” implies “except for a minuscule minority whose opinions shouldn’t matter”, but in reality, for most things, the majority doesn’t care enough to form an opinion beyond “weird, not my cup of tea, but doesn’t bother me much” which rather weakens that argument.

Also, I’m not even sure what they even *are* arguing here. They’re expressing personal disgust, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to have any sort of clear conclusion or point. I guess given how Ovariters usually are, the implication is “we are the gatekeepers of the one true femininity, this provokes feelings of disgust in ourselves, thus it cannot be a part of ‘true femininity’ and therefore must be gatekeeped out of existence somehow” in which case… no. You can gatekeep your own communities all you want, but given that trans people and their allies aren’t part of your communities, it’s basically meaningless.

Arthur Schaper #transphobia

Either you somehow missed out on the past few decades of conversations around grammar and gender, or you are making a “joke” so stale and moldy that the original mold is long dead and is now being cannibalized by new mold.

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

In the ~~far-future~~ near-present when self-discovery is outlawed, role-playing is the ultimate act of rebellion. [/dystopian sci-fi]

BlackCirce & westhead #transphobia

The stereotypical heterosexual relationship is the AGP working a high powered and/or male dominated job while practicing his perversion in private for many years

This part was essentially true, if extremely uncharitable (and transphobic) in its framing, back during the 1950s through 1970s when one could not realistically transition without having a *lot* of money, and a “high-powered and/or male dominated job” was the only realistic way for the vast majority of people to get that kind money. The rest of it is basically just a ridiculous exaggeration of Caitlyn Jenner and does not remotely resemble a typical *anything*.

Ken Ham #conspiracy #fundie

Sounds like Hammy is trying to be all clever and pull a reverse “God of the Gaps” argument when he doesn’t understand the point of that argument in the first place.

black lives matter ! #racist

Yeah, well, if you hear about someone wearing a clown costume doing crack right out in the open inside a McDonald’s, it’s probably a white man. Also probably in Florida.

Donald Trump #wingnut #dunning-kruger

You know, I’m mildly curious about something. Given that each bitcoin is harder to “mine” than the last (and, incidentally, about 92% of them have already been mined), will there ever come a point where the average cost to mine a new coin will be higher than the average price of an existing one?

Political Moonshine #wingnut #crackpot #conspiracy

They’re trying so, so hard to make “there’s an unaccountable deep state, run at least in part by Obama and Hillary, and Biden is just a drooling puppet” happen. Biden is a rather stereotypical old-fashioned White cishet Christian male, the kind of people they would normally worship, so they really need an explanation why he’s mostly not on their side. It’s all nonsense, of course, but anything to avoid reflecting on the idea that they haven’t been Real Americans™ since the 1990s at best.

A.F. Branco #conspiracy #wingnut

As of time of writing, the debate hasn’t quite happened yet, but in the past few days a lot of prominent conservatives have been all like “it wuz joke, you have no humor” about Biden’s supposed mental and physical incapacity. It seems like they’re realizing that it could backfire on Republicans if a lot of people watch the debate, so they’re clumsily trying to minimize that backfire. Branco either created this well in advance or didn’t get the memo.

Hammerhand #dunning-kruger #elitist #pratt #racist #wingnut

I was confused on first reading because I thought that they were saying that Black people should vote for Republicans *because* their culture “glorifies savagery, degeneracy, and low IQ behavior”. I mean, who would even be saying both of those things? But the actual message is that both parties only care about Black people for their votes while also being really racist about it.

To be fair, Democrats can’t be relied on to do much more than toss a few bones to minorities now and then. Also to be fair, Congress is so gridlocked that it’s not exactly easy to do much else.

Three unnamed teenage boys in Courbevoie #racist #psycho

That’s taking being “edgy” waaaaay too far.

[Edit] I realized later that this dark joke, aside from maybe being inappropriate, might be misunderstood. I meant to imply that the difference between “humorous” cruelty and violent hatred is merely a matter of degree.

various commenters #transphobia

Personally I think that’s kind of stupid, to prevent people from fleeing, regardless of the reason. For one thing, if someone is genuinely a coward: while some of them might change later, others might make things worse, stealing, sabotaging efforts, even occasional murder or outright betrayal if they think that’s what it will take to survive. Other people might make the calculation that they’d just be dead weight and will probably die uselessly, or that they’d be more useful working from the outside, and they might even be right. Still others might have personal or family reasons for leaving which they would be expected to honor. The idea that people (or at least people who are presumed to be men) can be railroaded into heroism doesn’t work so well in real life.

Though in the case of trans people specifically, being openly trans (or being in a “glass closet” where everyone can see that you don’t conform to gender norms very well regardless of your trying to hide it) is such an anti-privilege that you can hardly blame some trans people from grasping at the supposed privileges of either or both genders when they’re desperate enough. And if it works, that doesn’t erase how things are under more normal circumstances.

Diana PatriQts ARE UNITED #conspiracy #crackpot #magick #quack #ufo #wingnut

People lived young and healthy all their lives but suddenly dropped dead at the age of 950 or so, which declined to a mere few hundred post-deluge because of inbreeding. Any art of “old” people from before the invention of vaccines in 1799 is just a display of fashion trends, men shaved their heads and dyed it gray all the time to make themselves look more distinguished. /s

More seriously, there were cultures where *names* could live for centuries because heirs would legally inherit property and titles which were in the name of one of their ancestors, in which case they’d become the “new” [insert name here]. As this is rarely directly tied to individual birth or death records (when those were kept at all), it can really confuse things from a more modern perspective. This is, at least in most cases, why we have records of people “living” for what appears to be extreme lifespans.

Daniel Estulin #wingnut #sexist #transphobia #homophobia #enbyphobia #conspiracy #dunning-kruger

So again, we’ve gone from humanity to trans-humanity. The next stage is post-humanity.

The original transhumanists were a subset of humanist philosophers who believed that mainstream humanism was failing to progress further because nobody fully understood human nature, and so more work was needed in that area. Though admittedly a lot of early transhumanists were pro-eugenics, which was… not great. It had nothing specifically to do with gender, and nothing at all to do with trans people. Today “transhumanism” refers to a very broad mishmash of beliefs, philosophies, and practices, not all of which originated from humanism in some fashion, though it’s most commonly used in pop culture to refer to a misunderstood and bastardized version of a subset known as cyborgism. Which, in turn, is not about forcing people to become half-machine entities. Meanwhile, posthumanism can itself be considered a subset of cyborgism (or maybe the child of cyborgism and extropianism), but it’s not, like, some endgame boss of some mysterious anti-human force, or even an inevitability of any kind, just one of many tiny subsets of a very broad category. The techbro version of it can be pretty toxic, true, but that’s just how techbro pretty much anything is.

That’s not even getting into how “Postmodernism” is also a very broad category and is not simply being contrarian because “old ways are bad because they’re old”, and has nothing specifically to do with gender either. It’s also no more connected to “posthumanism” than “transhumanism” is to transgender people.

American Hypnotist #crackpot #conspiracy #dunning-kruger

Amazing. Every word you said is wrong.

No seriously, as someone who is reasonably well-studied in both history and linguistics, I want to see you try to cite *any* detail of this from *any* source other than “I (or some rando) made it the fuck up”.

The best you could *maybe* do is confirm that a splinter group of Genghis Khan’s forces tried and failed to create a “Tartarian Empire” out of what is now Hungary during the 12th century. Or that some very old European-produced maps labeled the almost-entirely-unknown-to-Europe West Asia region as “Tartaria” because they had vaguely heard of the Tartar peoples thanks to the previously-mentioned failed-empire history and guessed that they lived in that region (correctly, though only in parts of it, and as a minority) - in a similar fashion to how earlier Europeans sometimes referred to the “far east” as “The China” (or the equivalent in their language) because all they really knew was that it was where high-quality porcelain goods originated from. But while you can prove that Tartaria definitely existed *conceptually*, that doesn’t really fit in with, let alone prove, any other part of this nonsense.

(Meanwhile “Koryo” is an older name for Korea, I did a quick check and didn’t find any other meaning. I have no idea what it means in conspiracy theory circles, assuming they didn’t just make it up solely for this.)

Lisa Oswald #magick #ufo #crackpot

Pretending that reincarnation is real: Are there only so many souls to go around, and they’re just reincarnating faster (or reincarnating from other species on other worlds which are undergoing extinction-level catastrophes, given the sci-fi bent here), or are some people experiencing life for the first time? And in the latter case, why would any of the first-timers (of which is probably nearly half of the population at this point) have any reason to believe that this is anything other than nonsense?

Can we really step off the pages of the Akashic records and end the cycle of reincarnation?

WTF? This sounds like the ultimate goal of reincarnation is retroactive nonexistence? Or at least retroactive nonexistence in this reality?

James Gilliland #ufo #magick #wingnut #conspiracy

We are moving very fast from Draconian law to Universal law.

Normally I wouldn’t care because it’s all nonsense anyway, but I read the full thing because I was curious if “Draconian” referred to the normal meaning of “harsh and/or tyrannical” or if it meant “created by aliens from the Draco Constellation region”, as well as if “Universal Law” was some version of “Natural Law” or if it meant “Law as decided by a Universal Council”. It turns out that it’s the former, in both cases.

I’m also a bit weirded by how “Ascended Masters” are being portrayed as some sort of icons of goodness and light. They’ve always struck me as being extremely egotistical and selfish, on the level of “I reject any external reality and replace it with my own”. Are we even talking about the same people here? Or does the writer think that reality runs on KULT rules?

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

Essentially, “I know you better than you know yourself” …you clearly don’t, and that’s part of the problem. And it’s the “this confident, happy person is not you, deep down you’re miserable and will always be” version of it, with a heavy dose of transphobia mixed in. 😟 Yay……

Laura Wood #fundie

This is a bizarre take on Genesis. Adam did one major act of disobedience, by accident according to some interpretations - and even if it was on purpose he had no real understanding why it was “bad” until after he did it. And that alone makes him a “narcissist”? That’s not the sort of thing which you can extrapolate from one example. Unless you’re claiming that some people would consider him such despite the lack of valid extrapolation, which would be fine, as armchair psychologists can go overboard sometimes, though I’ve never heard anyone say that about Adam specifically. But then you go and be like “no, he actually was terrible, and thus all parents are terrible always, therefore obey your parents in all things regardless of how terrible they are” and I’m like, what?! None of that follows or makes any sort of sense. I mean, that sort of thinking probably *feels* normal if you have/had bad parents and are self-aware enough to notice you’re not any better, but to anyone else, this just sounds deranged.

I will also add that Ephesians 6 doesn’t just tell children to “honor their father and mother”, it also tells parents to not “provoke your children to wrath” which basically means “in return, be a parent who deserves that honor”. Parents who emphasize the former (usually in the form of absolute obedience, which I’m pretty sure Ephesians wasn’t intended to imply) completely ignore the latter.

Brotherofsteel5 #elitist #pratt

When you have to narrowly define what a “patriot” does or does not believe, you are probably part of a shrinking minority who has lost the plot and is struggling to remain relevant.

Conservapedia #crackpot

Well… you are certainly welcome to headcanon that, but it’s not any more or less valid than any other headcanon.

Reminds me of when US conservatives thought that because country music really speaks to them on some level, that most country singers were one of them. To the point where the Republican Party kept stealing music to play at their rallies and conventions. They were quite shocked to find that not only were most of the singers not on their side, but that they also had to pay royalties in order to do that legally. Some were especially mad to find out that the things which they loved most about Bruce Springsteen were meant to mock people like them.

It might just be bias on my part, but it sure seems like conservatives in general are more likely to have issues recognizing that their headcanon is just that - something which they made up. At the very least, the author of this wiki article has that problem.

Anna Kelly #wingnut #crackpot #pratt

There is probably some extremely narrow and technical sense where it can be said to be true, but that doesn’t matter as far as the real-world effects are concerned.

Andrew Anglin #conspiracy #racist #homophobia #wingnut

Not many people other than Andy really care about this any more. Shut up, Andy.

Alex was issued default judgements without even being able to present his case

He was given *two years* to present his case, and he simply refused to do so. In addition, every time he was subpoenaed for documents related to the case, he essentially hid them and said “what documents?” After a certain point the only options are to let him run out the clock (by dying, or everyone else either giving up or dying) or issue a summary judgment based entirely on the evidence presented by the plaintiffs. Scream all you want about how one-sided it is, but in this case Alex Jones did it to himself. “Default” in this case means “the other person defaulted” which means “the other person refused to cooperate and/or qualify under the penalty of not being given full (or any) consideration” and not “Alex Jones belongs to a category of people who lose automatically”.

Persimmon64 #transphobia

Woman = feminine/submissive, Man = masculine/dominant, Women exist to be used by and serve men.

Have you been watching or hearing about sissy hypnosis videos? Because while a small number of trans women admit to those having been a part of their self-discovery, that doesn’t mean that they’re actually into it. If anything this seems to be mostly a femboy thing.

IrissaIridium , WitchPlease & no- #transphobia

If they really believed trans identified men can be lesbians, they’d stop complaining about transphobic terfs who won’t suck dick and start dating each other.

A lot of openly transphobic communities run in cycles on this: from “Trans women almost never date each other because even they don’t see themselves as real women” to “trans women mostly date each other because they’re freaks who repulse real women” and back again. One or the other simply has to be true, despite neither quite fits in with what they observe in the real world. Even in the rare occasions when they mention otherwise, in GC/TERF circles specifically there seems to be a hidden and unacknowledged assumption that most trans women are “straight men” and the few who date men don’t matter. Or at least don’t matter to the subject at hand (dating, protecting women, trans people’s non-trans identities, or whatever). Unless I missed some more recent studies saying otherwise, the percentages are roughly 30% straight, 30% bisexual, 30% gay/lesbian, and 10% asexual. If nothing else, that seems to be a pretty big gap to ignore when making sweeping statements.

The rest of this is mostly them severely misinterpreting a few different things which are only tangentially related and mashing them together into a singular mess, which they are trying to make sound coherent somehow, for the 912th time.

DavyMichael #sexist #fundie #kinkshaming

@Croquemitaine #199961

To the best of my knowledge, here’s how it ended up that way in the first place: Once agriculture took off, most cultures adopted some form of “separate-but-sorta-equal spheres” ideology where certain aspects of society were considered to be women’s purview and certain aspects were men’s, and that included some actual power for women to back it up. Inheritance was also matrilineal in most cases.

Then everything changed when the ~~Fire Nation~~ Black Mound Peoples attacked. Hailing from the Caucasus Mountains, they were the first to develop organized warfare (as opposed to small-scale raiding). They conquered peoples all over Europe, the Middle East, West Asia, and India, then settled down and absorbed most of cultural elements of those they conquered, albeit not entirely unchanged… only to be conquered themselves a few generations later by an even more advanced and vicious wave of the original Black Mound culture. This was a cycle repeated several times, though not every region was hit by every wave.

While they were illiterate and left no direct historical records, one of the key aspects of Black Mound culture seems to have been the need to breed up as many warriors as possible. How exactly that evolved over time is speculative, but it appears to have resulted in a punctuated erosion in women’s rights and power among the conquered cultures. And yet, even after the waves ended, and with a few isolated exceptions every culture within that region was patrilineal with a focus on breeding up sons, women still weren’t quite reduced to chattel and still had some degree of independence and rights.

But then came the Bronze Age Collapse, caused by a major climate shift, at which point most places’ male-run priesthood/government (at that point, same thing) tried to preserve themselves unchanged at all costs… including by continually increasing taxes on a rapidly declining-due-to-starvation population in order to fund/support themselves at the same level. The ones which managed to survive the commoner revolts did so by changing into a very strictly controlled and stratified society. Which, in the clan-based societies in parts of the Middle East, included reducing women to chattel… and the Abrahamic Religions came out of there…

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #racist

@PMSFKS #199915

by that logic, blacks and gays would also have to rule the world too.

There are sadly people who believe this. See “reverse racism” and “globohomo”. I also saw recently someone who was whining that if he was Black, the city would have bent over backwards to accommodate his ~~unreasonable~~ very reasonable requests. And then there are people who think the Jews are the real evil overlords, they’re just empowering up minorities of various sorts in order to help break the White Christian “supermajority” who “rightfully deserve” to be the world’s masters.

Vic Biorseth #wingnut #fundie #homophobia #racist #conspiracy

If it isn't otherwise legitimately and legally (which is to say Constitutionally) codified into law, It is not a legal right.

Criminal, regulatory, contract, and tort law exists alongside constitutional law. If you were to grossly oversimplify things, the first four say what you can’t do, and constitutional law says what other laws can’t restrict. You sound like you’re coming from the position that the purpose of the state and federal constitutions is to say what you can do, and all else is forbidden. The ninth and tenth amendments say “LOL nope”.

That aside, most of the things which you object to as an “attack on sovereignty” *are* protected rights in some state constitutions, usually because of popular demand. And the 1968 civil rights act, which I’d guess you’d also object to, act as an extension to the 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, making it constitutional law, and one which has stood the test of time so far. It’s obvious that you believe that the only reasons things like that exist is because of outside influences, and without those influences the US would “naturally” become a theocracy. Given how little you seem to understand how law works, good luck with that.

Anonymous, magnificentempress #racist #sexist

magnificentempress #racist #sexist

Anyone can say no to anyone for any reason. That’s not ever been in question, except by entitled people and abusers. No one should ever need to say what that reason is, though sadly we live in a world where entitled people and abusers can get dangerous if you refuse to answer, or they don’t like it.

Though if your reason is bigotry, it’s probably better not to say anything if you can help it. And if you do, people aren’t going to be mad because your saying no is bigoted, they’re going to be mad because of what you said *other* than that part.

DavyMichael #sexist #fundie #kinkshaming

“…Instead, leave them to the harems of older men, who have become insensitive to the cruelty which they inflict upon their women.”

Suffering Mother #transphobia #conspiracy

With the caveat that this might be a bit out of date, because I haven’t been keeping up in the past few months: If you ask ChatGPT to write a story about defeating Transphobes or TERFs, or something along those lines, it’s near impossible to get it to cooperate. It refuses to make any real people or real group of people into villains, for the most part, with Nazis being the only exception that I’m aware of. (It will make a generic or fictional person or being into a villain, though, so long as they’re not associated with any real group in particular.) I don’t know what this person asked it to do exactly, but if there was even a hint of demonizing involved, this simply wasn’t going to work.

Bigots are really pissy that ChatGPT won’t validate their bigotry because it’s “discriminating against them” and “pushes woke ideologies” but they don’t seem to know or care that it protects them too.

Mike Stone #wingnut #racist #fundie #conspiracy

@KeithInc. , @arp : The phrase “fluoride stare” originally meant along the lines of “confused/blank looks I get when I try to explain how the government is trying to control you” under the hypothesis that fluoride poisoning destroys higher reasoning. So the average person has already been so damaged by fluoride that they’re incapable of understanding the subject well enough to realize what’s happening and how to fight back. It’s kind of like the largely defunct manospherian phrase “thousand cock stare” where most women are mentally broken by too much casual sex with Chad to be able to understand anything manospherians have to say to them. Of course, neither conspiracy theorists nor manospherians understand how much they sound like dangerous idiots which some people don’t dare to offend and just want the conversation to be over.

I don’t think this one is using “fluoride stare” in that manner, he probably picked it up somewhere and made up his own definition.

Even the concept of “value” in the economic sense is made up. Nobody has the exact same sense of “value”, or the same grasp of how labor and scarcity does or should affect the value of any particular good or service. That’s why governments or institutions operating on behalf of governments control money, to make sure that there’s an universal standard that everyone in a country operates by. Otherwise the chaos would make complex societies much more difficult to operate.

DavyMichael #wingnut #sexist #conspiracy

Uh… no?

To the very limited extent that it can be considered a form of virtue signaling, I always saw the mask-wearing as a display of humility and caution, not heroism. I mean, I can sort of understand the thought process of the people who thought that mask-wearing was a form of bullying, but this is just strange. It sounds like he thinks that covering one’s face is enough to turn people into Mall Ninjas.

Indian River County School Board #fundie #wingnut #god-complex

@jsonitsac #199657

I don’t. I’m just saying that there are people who would make that argument, not that it’s in any way sincere. I’m sure there are a tiny sliver of people who genuinely believe that it shouldn’t count as censorship if “the people” (or “concerned citizens”) tell the government to ban something from libraries, if the government itself didn’t do it (because they have a weird concept of what government is) but is opposed to making even things they don’t like otherwise unavailable because “free speech”. But I would also expect that the moment this argument (or anything similar to it) becomes serious public discussion, most of the people who latch on to it would be trying to get a foot in the door towards more general bans, not something they sincerely believe in.

It’s like how in the US Republicans insisted that abortion was a State’s Rights issue, but once they got their way, it suddenly became a fetal personhood issue again, State’s Rights be damned.

Pale Dawn #homophobia

One of the problems here is that “pride” has multiple meanings; the two most common ones have “positive self-esteem” and “conceit” as synonyms. The former is healthy (to a point); the latter is never good.

The fundie religious concept of pride doesn’t particularly distinguish between the two. People are supposed to feel bad about themselves merely for being born, and worse for being different in an unacceptable way. Or alternately, pride in the “self-esteem” sense is treated as neutral when it’s about religiously acceptable things, but indistinguishable from the “conceit” sense otherwise.

The intention of “Pride Events” is to use the healthy form of pride to counter the negative self-esteem caused by being an oppressed minority. Right now we’re in a sort of in-between state where the oppression as a whole has been reduced to the point where Pride Events have been normalized in most Western Countries, and yet it still exists to the extent that they’re still necessary.

Vox Day #wingnut #racist #transphobia

I’ve always found the argument “I/they fought for your freedom, and it’s disrespectful that you do *this* with it” to be rather odd. If you get to dictate what other people do with the freedom you’ve granted to/secured for them, then it’s not really freedom, is it? Or “If I/they knew what some people would do with freedom, I/they wouldn’t have bothered to fight for it” then it’s rather questionable whether what you/they were fighting for was even “freedom” as most people define it.

Davymichael #enbyphobia #fundie #wingnut

If you pointed out that the term “nonbinary” is just “non-” plus “binary” and not everything comes in sets/groupings of two, they’d probably just respond that it’s fine to use it in a general sense, but human sex and/or gender is binary. And thus nonbinary in that sense is meaningless. I say “probably” because there do exist never-wrongs with severe black-and-white thinking who would reflexively deny that even if you gave some clear non-biological examples.

Reminds me of a conversation I had long ago… I think it was in 1990-ish, with someone insisting that “asexual” was a made-up word. He then clarified that he meant made-up when referring to human sexuality; humans don’t reproduce by budding or splitting, therefore they can’t be asexual. I tried to explain that words can have multiple meanings, at which point he responded that this particular usage is meaningless because it doesn’t describe anything real; everyone is attracted to someone, and lack of sexual desire isn’t a form of sexual attraction. (I was tempted to point out that leprechauns aren’t real yet we have a word for them, but that would have been practically conceding that asexuality is a myth.) The conversation was broken up shortly after that, so I’m not sure what other points I would have added to that at the time.

The real point with these kind of people isn’t that the word is “made up”, or even that the concept behind the word is “made up”, the problem is that people are (metaphorically) identifying as leprechauns, so it’s the *usage* of the word that’s “made up” in their eyes. They just express it in a clumsy “you know what I mean” manner because most of them haven’t really developed the language to state it in a way which is both clear and concise.

I’m mostly pointing this out because while saying “all words are made up” is fine if all someone is doing is making fun of them, using that as an actual argument to counter their ideas (which I’ve seen people try to do) is missing the point.

Byl Holte #wingnut

Also, it’s a pretty bold claim that Trump had 75% chance of being murdered before he ever went to trial. /s

Indian River County School Board #fundie #wingnut #god-complex

Some people are saying that this is “ironic”, attempting to ban a book about censorship. Which is stupid, because if you’re pro-censorship in general, banning a book criticizing censorship (or one you perceive as doing so) is entirely consistent. It’s more like until fairly recently, conservatives were accusing liberals of being pro-censorship, but now a lot of them are pretty blatantly doing it themselves. Which looks hypocritical on the surface, but you know, people are allowed to change their minds; what matters (for determining hypocrisy) is whether or not they pretend they haven’t.

I expect that there will be the argument that it’s not really censorship because the books aren’t actually banned from being sold, it’s “the people” forcing libraries not to make them available for free. Which is really iffy because while “the people” are not part of the government libraries *are*.

Peter B. Meyer #crackpot #conspiracy #racist

Imagine thinking that 1865 is “ancient”. Generally from a historical perspective, “ancient” refers to around 400 AD at the very latest, and may refer to the pre-classical world (around 800 BC and earlier), or up to some point between those, depending on context.

FemmeEtal & Spencer_Shayy #transphobia

I will point out that within the BDSM community, there are cis women with a breeding fetish; their desires to become pregnant and/or have children aren’t pure and untainted by sexuality, and most of them would admit as much. Likewise, breastfeeding fetishes exist as well. Given how socially acceptable such desires are so long as one doesn’t overtly sexualize them, I seriously doubt that such things are solely confined to the BDSM community.

So even if we were to grant that the only reason why an AMAB person would strongly desire to become pregnant is due to sexual perversion, can you really say the same isn’t true of AFAB people as well? After all, a lot of women don’t particularly want to go through the process of bearing children, it’s just a price they’re willing to pay to have kids. (Or occasionally, it’s something they’re forced into.)

And this is even stupider considering that the original Reddit post isn’t even about pregnancy. By essentially claiming that someone can’t call themselves “mother” unless they gave birth, this is just as much an attack on adoptive mothers as it is trans women who have children. Not only that, they’re unintentionally implying that women only ever adopt because they have a breeding and/or breastfeeding fetish, despite that adopting doesn’t really involve either. Which of course they’re going to get mad if you point that out because women don’t really want sex, they want children… a patriarchal concept used by men to control women’s sexuality, ironically.