It’s not that our ruling class is actually LGBT. Most of them don’t actually have same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and will live straight lives after college. It’s just that IDing as LGBT is a tribal marker now.
RIght, but no one ever claimed that being made a eunuch was good for the eunuch. Now we are trying to help a young boy's inner eunuch grow to its full flowering.
The ruling class still don't identify themselves that way. Even when they are, they still keep to the closet, even when it's blindingly obvious they're not straight.
We'll see how much that changes, but closeting is a lot bigger in '24 than you'd think. You wouldn't believe how many contemporary celebrities, in their 20s and 30s, are rumored to be closeted. Fuck, Andrew Gillum was closeted, and he was on course to be the Dem's golden boy before his chemsex-orgy ways got exposed to the public. The Gillum/DeSantis race was closer than the Abrams/Kemp race, and the Dems were -- as they are today -- badly in need of both youth and masculinity.
Gillum's case is complicated by the fact of his blackness - gay men, particularly effeminate ones, are still very strongly stigmatized in major parts of the black community. Black men and teenagers can still be heard using "gay" as a pejorative, long after that usage was exiled from white society. Being out and effeminate would likely have been significant drawbacks for Gillum's political aspirations among his co-ethnics.
There's a difference between "queer" and "LGBT." Queer is performative for the most part, dominated by white, progressive women who think the make out session they had with their bestie during their sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence qualifies them as a sexual minority. Also known as the "slay queen brigade" for their eager adoption of the ballroom language used on Rupaul's Drag Race. The gay men profiled in this report are pretty feminine, whereas most gay men like myself and people I know who are older actively worked to try to de-emphasize the feminine, performative aspects of homosexuality. I can guarantee you one thing though - if you could see these queen's Grindr profiles they'd all be looking for the same thing - strong masculine, top men - not for F2M transsexuals or fellow queens.
Non lesbians (defined in has sex with or is in sexual relationships with other women) who go around calling themselves queer/non-binary are of two types in my experience:
1. Extremely neurotic about social acceptance and status. The way you get status for most cohorts below the age of about 45-50 is that you *perform* uniqueness. You are supposed to be authentic, non-conformist, and self-defining. But since you *super, super* care about acceptance, you can't be nonconformist. Therefore, you perform some "unique, authentic" category. The only one a white woman can plausibly play is bisexual or queer so huge numbers opt for that.
2. a grab bag of masculine presenting women who don't know what this means. It usually means 1) you are just a tomboy, 2) You have autism, 3) you are a confused lesbian, 4. some combination of these. (I'm 1 & 2). In the past, nobody was shoving some specific answer to why you were a masculinish woman in your face so these women usually had time to figure it out and became normal heterosexual tomboys or normal lesbians. Now queer and trans are extremely advertised and you'd have to be living under a rock not to see it. I had no idea what "queer" or "trans" was when I was figuring out any of this stuff. I'm not queer. I'm an unfemine heterosexual female, but I can see where if I was 15 today I'd likely think I was "queer."
Well, okay, there is another group that is especially true for younger teens.
3) Genuinely does have intense body dysphoria but not because they want to be male. They just don't want to be in *this* body because they associate *this* body with weakness, disgust, being trapped, etc. A lot of these have severe mental health problems in general. Some have been abused or severely bullied. Probably 95% who commit enough to get surgery are in this category.
You do kind of get into the old geek/jock dichotomy (is that still a thing?) with 'tomboy' being for athletes, though I suspect heterosexual nerd women have so many (nerdy) suitors they're just calling themselves that now.
Less true than you would think because many of these are just as socially awkward and/or introverted as their male counterparts. Just as the male nerd is not hitting on girls if he is at home in his parents basement, the female nerd is not getting hit on *by* guys if she's at home in her parents basement. Nobody asked me out until I was 19 because I just wasn't social *at all* and even then the first one who did was a dude my parents hired to replace our carpet. I've only been asked out 5 times in my life and I was excited every time it happened. 1 was carpet guy (accepted but didn't work out). 1 was a dude at church (accepted but didn't work out). 1 was online (accepted). 2 were at work (turned down because I was and still am with online guy)
Male nerds should totally ask female nerds out.. Many of them are more starved for attention than you think.
(Also, I meant "tomboy" in the sense of female who is interested in something that is overwhelming male coded - hunting, fixing cars, building computers, playing RTS games, various sports, etc.)
Scrolled down to the comments just to say this. Huge gap between people in same-sex relationships and self identified queer/nonbinary/bisexual people that wouldn't touch the same sex with a ten foot pole. The former are relatively normal in my experience, the latter always highly neurotic.
If only being queer in the new "queer theory" sense was even as interesting or committal as a makeout session with their bestie. It is precisely nothing.
I was arguing with Google's woke AI system about this yesterday. I don't remember in what context I came out to him/her but when I said I was gay, I got immediate pushback. Gay was too restrictive and old fashioned, while queer is empowering and all inclusive. When I told it I hate being called queer because I don't want the "you go, girl" and weird politics vibes that come with the term. I got a few more lectures about why I should use queer instead of what I want to be called, then gave up.
They gave in and started using 'Latine', which actually has local antecedents in Latin America--Argentine feminists were using 'e' as a gender-neutral ending.
The idea of X I think was that you could hear instantly someone pronouncing the X to show he was signaling virtue as demanded. Some said "Latinks" Others said "Latin-ex." Either way it's the kind of nonsense that you say because someone else says you have to.
Latin-eh is something you could almost say under your breath.
I mean, the right hates you. (Unlike with Jews, they'll admit it.) But if you at all care about beauty, meritocracy, culture, or any of the things gay men have always produced in disproportionate numbers (come on, Michelangelo was definitely lavender), the left is awful. It's gotta suck.
I heard about this in The Man Who Would Be Queen, and it bears in my experience the same holds true for lesbians. Though it's seldom brought up in polite company, homosexuals of both sexes are generally more inclined towards opposite-sex behavior and personality traits to amuch higher degree than heterosexuals, yet their attraction significantly skews towards the most masculine men and the most feminine women, like Dwayne Johnson and Taylor Swift.
Substantially true. Lots of gay men (like me) are much more attracted to very masculine, toned, athletic men. But that's just the form that beauty takes in men. I don't like men who have girly mannerisms. I do like men who have some signal though that they are "sensitive." There used to be jean ads that featured a shirtless hunk holding a (presumably his) baby. I found that arresting.
You may enjoy a Billion Wicked Thoughts, it's a bit older (2011) but it talks about this and is probably from the last time a mainstream publisher would discuss this sort of thing.
I'm straying a bit off topic, but your post suggests an idea I've had since the late 1980s: Male homosexuality is one of the most masculine things there is.
(Specifically, the idea was inspired by listening to the San Francisco rock band Until December. In tonality and lyrics, they struck me as very masculine.)
Yeah, 'queer' has a political valence. Back when I was still trying, I was on OKCupid for a while, and think I dated something like four 'bi' women but never anyone who identified as 'queer'.
The increase in LGTBQ is entirely the Q - the stolen valor of gender identity. People go into hysterics on the Right about "oh my God the kids are all turning gay" which is the flipside of progressives who are all "look at how we have made people free to be themselves" when all this is the normative equivalent of being a Goth has become an identity others are supposed to take seriously. There is literally no objective way to know if a person who says "I am queer" or "I am nonbinary" is lying. It doesn't entail any actions or any identifying essence whatsoever except a few opinions and blue hair. It is quite literally nothing to panic about - when you panic about it you are taking these navel gazers way too seriously.
As annoying as these wimpy, safetyist protesters are, I'd say they are an improvement over what came before. I've read about the violence of the Sixties and Seventies when there were daily bombings by far left terror groups in the USA and violent riots. That sounds terrible. I am happy that I can go to the movie theater without worrying about bomb threats.
I am also not sure about the connection Richard is drawing between the increased amount of LGBT representation among protesters and their increased pacifism. I don't think LGBT protest movements in the Sixties and Seventies were noticeably more peaceful or safety focused than other liberal or leftist protest movements. I don't know how represented LGBT people were in protest groups not specifically focused on LGBT issues, but I know that the Weather Underground had some gay members. If LGBT activists are more peaceful and safetyist now it probably represents a more general trend among left-wing activists, rather than among LGBT ones specifically.
I definitely agree they're unlikely to assault you physically.
But when they're a third of Harvard, they're likely to be able to kick you out of employment when they take the commanding heights in 20 years. If you're already FIREd it's less of an issue, of course, but a lot of white men (and eventually women) are going to have problems coming up.
Even Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue of the Nazi Party, probably never physically harmed a Jew himself. The same goes for Julius Streicher, the architect of Nazi propaganda.
Yet, they facilitated the type of deadly violence executed by more brutal individuals. There are enough immigrants from the Muslim third world who would be eager to play the role of the executioner, if motivated by the intellectual elite. In the U.S., a jury's unanimous agreement is required for conviction, meaning that in scenarios of widespread antisemitism, Jewish lives could be especially vulnerable under certain conditions. Like being a wife of OJ Simpson.
I had similar thoughts when reading this essay. We shouldn't be too complacent about people who present as physically harmless not doing violence. In particular:
1. They may become violent when gathered in a mob.
2. They may slit your throat when your back is turned.
3. They may send others to do violence for them.
4. They may do property damage.
Also, as suggested another post I saw around here, they can do substantial financial and social harm in ways that have become known as "cancellation".
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That said, I agree that this current wave of Palestinian protesters does not seem all that worrisome.
"Foxes are unsuited to, and uncomfortable with, the employment of physical force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, seeking to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or manipulation of people and narratives. By contrast, Lions possess an instinct for the preservation of existing forms and virtues, along with communal unity and “group persistence.” Valuing security and stability, they prefer caution and conservatism, “hoping little and fearing much from any change, for they know from bitter experience that they will be called upon to foot the bill for it.” Society’s natural warrior class, they prefer the honesty of open conflict to scheming and, while typically slow to anger, tend to favor the direct application of force to solve problems.
Our contemporary elite class is quite transparently dominated by Foxes—the same personality type that tends to become Virtuals. Pareto would have predicted this, having noted a historical cycle in which safe and stable civilizations (usually founded by the firm hand of Lions) come to avoid—and, indeed, abhor—virtues and methods other than the indirect and diplomatic. This soon favors the byzantine organizing, scheming, manipulating, and propagandizing of Foxes. With the inarticulate Lions eventually fully marginalized and excluded from governance by the Foxes, the instability of such societies then increases relentlessly, generating direct challenges that the Foxes, inept at using force, may lash out at but are unable to resolve.
If Americans today suffer under a sort of escalating “anarcho-tyranny”—in which uncontrolled immigration, crime, substance abuse, and other social pathologies proliferate alongside a state that seems to grow constantly larger and more determined to exert its dominance through control over, and manipulation of, information, ideas, and narratives—the undiluted rule of Foxes may be partly to blame."
So it may not be that conservatives will have low human capital (at least not for long), conservative human capital will just skew towards lions as leftist human capital skews towards foxes.
Small nitpick: Machiavelli doesn't list them as personality types (that's more of a modern invention-Jung wrote Psychological Type in 1921)--he says a prince has to learn from the fox and the lion (which have the traits you said), i.e. he should be both.
But absolutely, strong men->good times->weak men->hard times->strong men, and the cycle repeats.
There's probably a reason the scholar-athlete was such a Western ideal going back to ancient Greece--completely separating the two masculine archetypes leads to trouble.
Interestingly, though, the nerds seem to have completely gotten the upper hand in China a couple of times over its long history. I wonder if someone knowledgeable in Chinese history can comment?
Problem I have is if one side said the same things in public that is being said today, a far different outcome would occur. Normalizing cries of “kill x” is the problem. At what point do we stop listening and be desensitized to what will sadly become a carried out promise. People lost their jobs for saying “Buildings Matter” and yet now we can allow chants of Death To America. We are sliding down the slope.
While it's a relief that the fascist-hearted tyrants of today's insane lefties are so feminized and safetyist that they crumple under the slightest force, that only portends to a larger problem of what comes next in the Khaldunian cycle. Our good times being so overwhelmingly good have created Men who are overwhelmingly weak. And for all their inadeptness, they're nonetheless quite skilled at bringing about hard times. And if the weakness of Men is commesurate with the hardness of the times they bring, we're staring Hell in the face, and its pronouns are he, she, and they.
I've heard so much about the skyrocketing rates of LGBTQ identification among Gen Z. I'd really love to sense-check it by asking follow-up questions like "(if male) have you ever had anal sex with a person of the same sex?", "(if male) have you ever performed oral sex on a person of the same sex", "(if male) have you ever received oral sex from a person of the same sex?" Not only would I imagine the proportion of Gen Z males who answer "yes" to one or more of these questions is no higher than among Millennials - I suspect it's actually lower, as part of the general trend towards sexlessness. This would demonstrate that large chunks of LGBTQ identification in Gen Z are dishonest (e.g. males who call themselves queer despite never having had sex with a man nor even having the inclination to do so) or hypothetical (gay males who are sincerely attracted to other males, but have never actually rubbed naughty bits).
Just because a "queer" male answers no to all of these questions doesn't mean he's a faker, of course: a straight incel is still straight. But if a man calls himself bisexual or queer and has had multiple sexual partners, all of whom were female, it seems reasonable to conclude that he's full of shit.
A friend of mine has had oral sex both ways with a man or two during foursomes. He considers himself straight but not narrow. He says he has no actual interest in seeking male sex partners, being happily married to a woman (not me.) If he was answering your survey he would say No Yes and Yes but would not consider himself even bi-sexual, much less male-attracted. Women in foursomes often rub (or lick) naughty bits too, but that doesn't make them female-attracted in the same way that women are who go looking for women to date one-on-one.
I think the plumbing questions would substantially over-estimate the number of people at any age who are truly LGB etc. I don't know any trans people but from what I hear they spend more time demanding their "right" to screw anyone they want than actually being loved by anyone.
I dunno. If we break out the old Kinsey scale of 1 to 6, I think these heterosexual men licking dicks and heterosexual women licking pussies are all somewhere in the 2-5 range, unless they gag and run for a bottle of Listerine immediately afterwords.
You'd have to control for the fact that Gen Z'ers have less in-person sex generally, regardless of orientation. Goes along with the switch to online socialization and the trend away from alcohol and other social drugs which lower inhibitions.
You know what? I would say they are more gay than two guys or two girls who engage in some incidental same-sex contact during a threesome or a foursome. In the on-line encounter, the two people sought each other out to get together sexually, albeit virtually. That makes them same-sex attracted to a degree that the "straight-but-not-narrow" or "bi-curious" aren't.
This is horrible. What comes next? Are these ‘people’ who are too gay to rebel unwilling to type and send the order ‘liquidate’ to an ai commanding 100,000 drones? Is the capability I’m describing somehow technically implausible within a 20yr timespan?
We are about to restrain the most inhuman group of people our civilization has created while keeping them in power till they exercise a power unrivaled in all of human history. And then it’ll be game over.
I think the premise that the protests are too gay to be effective is incomplete as no protest in support of the Palestinians will ever be effective. In the vast history of humanity, many cultures have come and gone. The Jews are still here. And a lot Jews consider Israel their home. They are not going to fold up their tent and go away. It’s not in their genes.
There are a lot of great arguments to be had on the protests, who’s’ right, who’s wrong, what rights are being trampled and so on. But 2 years from now nothing on the ground in Gaza will change except probably more destroyed buildings. None of the Arab countries want the Palestinians. The Palestinians don’t have a democratic system for those weary of losing to choose plan B, where plan A seems to keep getting stepped on and killed by the Israelis.
The Israelis live in a tough corner of the world, they have a strong survival culture, are on the cutting edge of technology with a dynamic economy, have made alliances with many other countries in the region, and are not bashful at all about their place in the Middle East. They are fighters and no bunch of rich, pampered,
elite white (mostly) kids are going to have the slightest influence on their behavior.
So yes, maybe these protestors are too gay to be successful. But even the most ruthless could not be successful in bringing pressure to bear on Israel. Disputes that are anchored in religion and thousands of years of history will not be solved by banging a drum.
Much as I admire the Israelis (and have a few distant relatives there), you absolutely can exterminate Jews from a given area--Hitler did it. Cost him the Bomb and maybe the war, but he did it.
If the USA turns on Israel, its Arab not-quite-allies like Saudi Arabia will calculate there's no advantage in pretending to like them anymore and attack or get someone else to, which most Muslims (who strongly sympathize with the Palestinians) will favor.
The Israelis are smart, tough, and relatively rich. But there's only 7 million Jews in there. Probably they'll figure the jig is up and flee. I could see the Germans taking them in out of guilt (and the desire to improve their tech industry), or the Chinese out of calculation. With over a billion people they will be easily able to assimilate them and might get a tech bump.
Saudi’s aren’t ‘pretending’ to like Israel. It’s a political and economic calculation to align themselves. Don’t kid yourself how much the Gulf States hate the Palestinians and also Iran.
Agree. These numbskull and lame-ass protesters aren’t really a threat to safety as much as they are a threat to going to class without a moron beating a drum outside….or the threat of being tarred as an abject idiot for being in the same student body as these losers.
But still, whatever safetyism excuse is required, the combined solution of water cannons, dismissal, expulsion, and arrest seems apropos, and long overdue.
There is still the question, should the police lift a finger to be the bouncers for a very exclusive private club that has some guests who are have decided they want to sleep on the polo field and won't leave so the steward can lock up and go home to his family? At Columbia, where the police came once but the university let the squatters re-establish themselves, I think it's a civil matter now, like a landlord-tenant-squatter dispute, which the police say, Don't bother us. Go to civil court. If the only law the protestors are breaking is criminal trespass, which is a very minor offence in the U.S., the police won't call out the riot squad twice just because the university "commands" them to. If you have to call the police every night because your houseguests are overstaying their welcome, how many times do you think they will come, if nobody is being violent?
I am a huge critic of identity politics and also a critic of Zionism and that seems the coherent position to me. Anti-woke Zionism does not seem coherent. I can't comprehend how a bunch of Jewish radicals from places like Ukraine saying "Yeah, I know tons of people live in Palestine with ancestors from there as plentiful and deep as mine, but they have to leave to make room for us because we are special victims" and engaging in serious and concerted activism and a program to make that happen isn't an identity victimhood movement. Anti-Zionism doesn't not mean "All Israelis should self-suicide or self-deport to give shit back to Palestinians". I think that is an absurd demand. But I also think it is absurd to think Palestinians in 1920 didn't have every reason to see the writing on the wall and think the demands being made should be resisted. Shit played out exactly the way they feared and it wasn't by accident. Y'all should listen to Darryl Cooper's MartyrMade podcast "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" - I am amazed how many people who are super pro-Israel have a plain cartoonish view of what Zionism was so maybe they would accept it from a known identity left hater like Cooper.
The Zionist movement did not talk about expelling Arabs. It always spoke of equal rights. Even when accepting the partition plan, the Jews danced and celebrated, despite committing to accept 600,000 Arab citizens and to grant them equal rights.
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923 when Jews were a tiny minority in Palestine...how do you.think they could get a majority Jewish state without expelling Arabs. They were expelling Arabs for 30 years before 1948 via the Jewish National Trust. If you are an Arab and you read this and it squares with what you are seeing what do you do? Jabotinsky was the most honest Zionists. Note how many times he calls what they are doing colonization. And I'll repeat, what annoys me about Zionism is the moralizing bullshit that Palestinians were unhinged to see any threat in this. This annoyance doesn't mean it think people 3 generations on can be expected to move or self suicide. Go listen to Darryl Cooper's epic Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem podcast and clear up these mythical slogans from a anti-left conservative who learned what he'd been told about Zionism wasn't what actually happened.
I don't understand. You try to prove your point or mine? In the link you sent Jabotinsky says:
I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.
How about this for anti-woke Zionism: the Israelis have guns, and they are going to keep their land as long as they are able. And I got no problem with that.
If you respect strength (which is very anti-woke), the Israelis have demonstrated that.
Woke anti-zionism is progressives--the Jews are white and therefore evil and should be expelled.
Anti-woke anti-zionism is White Nationalism--the Jews are nonwhite and therefore evil, and we oppose them. Or what you said elsewhere.
Woke Zionism--the Jews are an oppressed people, and deserve a homeland.
I can respect the strength argument and I'd council Palestinians together that the statute of limitations in violent resistance has passed. I'm not White Nationalist. I actively like Jews. I'd love more in the US and in my community. Zionism is just a glaring and contradictory blind spot for many, but by no means all. Calling anti-woke anti-Zionism White Nationalism is exactly like calling criticism of BLM White Nationalism. I don't think victimhood in one context gives you special rights over other people in others.
You can be antiwoke antiZionist without being a white nationalist--I said, "Or what you said elsewhere." I was making the analogy to progressivism, because I think they sound like white nationalists with a few minus signs flipped. Maybe it was unnecessarily inflammatory an example.
Not necessarily inferior. It works.. Sometimes you want it left unspecified as to plural or singular. “You can’t always get what you want”, doesn’t need to be parsed as to whether Mick Jagger is referring to one person or many. It’s true either way. If it matters, we can say, “I want to sleep with you alone. All the rest of you, get lost.”
And we have “you”, singular or plural, same as French. “Tu” is used only for singular children, pets, and close intimate friends, never for ordinary public discourse.
In oral speech, sure, Southerners say y’all, just like some rural people around here say ya’z even for singular you. It’s just the way they talk. I don’t think they spell it out in writing that way, as if they thought it was standard grammar. No, I think y’all is here an affected progressive woke shibboleth, like Latinx, which is why I turn off when someone uses it. Notice on TwitterX. They do it a lot. If an authentic Southerner says y’all in my hearing, he gets a high five. He’s being true to his roots.
It’s not that our ruling class is actually LGBT. Most of them don’t actually have same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and will live straight lives after college. It’s just that IDing as LGBT is a tribal marker now.
Except for all the kids mutilating their bodies. If you have no penis, ovaries, testicles, breasts, or clitoris, are you really anything?
You may have preferences, but they will no longer be demonstrated preferences.
Eunuchs have been a thing for a while. In many cultures.
Just ask a Chinese history buff about the Ten Regular Attendants. ;)
RIght, but no one ever claimed that being made a eunuch was good for the eunuch. Now we are trying to help a young boy's inner eunuch grow to its full flowering.
The ruling class still don't identify themselves that way. Even when they are, they still keep to the closet, even when it's blindingly obvious they're not straight.
We'll see how much that changes, but closeting is a lot bigger in '24 than you'd think. You wouldn't believe how many contemporary celebrities, in their 20s and 30s, are rumored to be closeted. Fuck, Andrew Gillum was closeted, and he was on course to be the Dem's golden boy before his chemsex-orgy ways got exposed to the public. The Gillum/DeSantis race was closer than the Abrams/Kemp race, and the Dems were -- as they are today -- badly in need of both youth and masculinity.
Gillum's case is complicated by the fact of his blackness - gay men, particularly effeminate ones, are still very strongly stigmatized in major parts of the black community. Black men and teenagers can still be heard using "gay" as a pejorative, long after that usage was exiled from white society. Being out and effeminate would likely have been significant drawbacks for Gillum's political aspirations among his co-ethnics.
Play a Sylvester track to out all those black gays...
He may have just been gay/bi and not also effeminate. Heavy overlap but all effeminate men not gay, all gay men not effeminate.
There's a difference between "queer" and "LGBT." Queer is performative for the most part, dominated by white, progressive women who think the make out session they had with their bestie during their sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence qualifies them as a sexual minority. Also known as the "slay queen brigade" for their eager adoption of the ballroom language used on Rupaul's Drag Race. The gay men profiled in this report are pretty feminine, whereas most gay men like myself and people I know who are older actively worked to try to de-emphasize the feminine, performative aspects of homosexuality. I can guarantee you one thing though - if you could see these queen's Grindr profiles they'd all be looking for the same thing - strong masculine, top men - not for F2M transsexuals or fellow queens.
Non lesbians (defined in has sex with or is in sexual relationships with other women) who go around calling themselves queer/non-binary are of two types in my experience:
1. Extremely neurotic about social acceptance and status. The way you get status for most cohorts below the age of about 45-50 is that you *perform* uniqueness. You are supposed to be authentic, non-conformist, and self-defining. But since you *super, super* care about acceptance, you can't be nonconformist. Therefore, you perform some "unique, authentic" category. The only one a white woman can plausibly play is bisexual or queer so huge numbers opt for that.
2. a grab bag of masculine presenting women who don't know what this means. It usually means 1) you are just a tomboy, 2) You have autism, 3) you are a confused lesbian, 4. some combination of these. (I'm 1 & 2). In the past, nobody was shoving some specific answer to why you were a masculinish woman in your face so these women usually had time to figure it out and became normal heterosexual tomboys or normal lesbians. Now queer and trans are extremely advertised and you'd have to be living under a rock not to see it. I had no idea what "queer" or "trans" was when I was figuring out any of this stuff. I'm not queer. I'm an unfemine heterosexual female, but I can see where if I was 15 today I'd likely think I was "queer."
Well, okay, there is another group that is especially true for younger teens.
3) Genuinely does have intense body dysphoria but not because they want to be male. They just don't want to be in *this* body because they associate *this* body with weakness, disgust, being trapped, etc. A lot of these have severe mental health problems in general. Some have been abused or severely bullied. Probably 95% who commit enough to get surgery are in this category.
+1 for using “tomboy” instead of inventing new words to describe a masculine girl or woman
You do kind of get into the old geek/jock dichotomy (is that still a thing?) with 'tomboy' being for athletes, though I suspect heterosexual nerd women have so many (nerdy) suitors they're just calling themselves that now.
Less true than you would think because many of these are just as socially awkward and/or introverted as their male counterparts. Just as the male nerd is not hitting on girls if he is at home in his parents basement, the female nerd is not getting hit on *by* guys if she's at home in her parents basement. Nobody asked me out until I was 19 because I just wasn't social *at all* and even then the first one who did was a dude my parents hired to replace our carpet. I've only been asked out 5 times in my life and I was excited every time it happened. 1 was carpet guy (accepted but didn't work out). 1 was a dude at church (accepted but didn't work out). 1 was online (accepted). 2 were at work (turned down because I was and still am with online guy)
Male nerds should totally ask female nerds out.. Many of them are more starved for attention than you think.
(Also, I meant "tomboy" in the sense of female who is interested in something that is overwhelming male coded - hunting, fixing cars, building computers, playing RTS games, various sports, etc.)
Scrolled down to the comments just to say this. Huge gap between people in same-sex relationships and self identified queer/nonbinary/bisexual people that wouldn't touch the same sex with a ten foot pole. The former are relatively normal in my experience, the latter always highly neurotic.
If only being queer in the new "queer theory" sense was even as interesting or committal as a makeout session with their bestie. It is precisely nothing.
I was arguing with Google's woke AI system about this yesterday. I don't remember in what context I came out to him/her but when I said I was gay, I got immediate pushback. Gay was too restrictive and old fashioned, while queer is empowering and all inclusive. When I told it I hate being called queer because I don't want the "you go, girl" and weird politics vibes that come with the term. I got a few more lectures about why I should use queer instead of what I want to be called, then gave up.
Google's AI is an atrocity. Never use it, like much of Google's output these days, it sucks. Try Perplexity instead :-)
I never heard of it (I'm a bit out of the tech loop). But I just signed up and will give it a spin. thanks
I wonder if they will start giving us tattoos with the label they want us to use. Maybe when they chip us.
Well, at least I'm not a Latino gay or I'd be forced to call myself Latinx Queer.
They gave in and started using 'Latine', which actually has local antecedents in Latin America--Argentine feminists were using 'e' as a gender-neutral ending.
X was probably the worst, most unpronounceable change they could have come up with.
The idea of X I think was that you could hear instantly someone pronouncing the X to show he was signaling virtue as demanded. Some said "Latinks" Others said "Latin-ex." Either way it's the kind of nonsense that you say because someone else says you have to.
Latin-eh is something you could almost say under your breath.
I kind of wonder if that was the point--someone made it to stand out on a college campus and didn't intend it to get as far as it did.
If you go on a gay dating app, at least in DC, they seem to outnumber the non-Latin ones. Maybe they are a disproportionate share of immigrants?
More likely to leave, no? Latin American society's much more macho.
Ages ago I was talking to an older gay guy who actually remembered when it was a slur and was very wary of it.
Yeah, that's me. I just didn't want to come across as a snowflake with this crowd. I'm ok without a trigger warning though.
I always wonder about conservative gay men.
I mean, the right hates you. (Unlike with Jews, they'll admit it.) But if you at all care about beauty, meritocracy, culture, or any of the things gay men have always produced in disproportionate numbers (come on, Michelangelo was definitely lavender), the left is awful. It's gotta suck.
I heard about this in The Man Who Would Be Queen, and it bears in my experience the same holds true for lesbians. Though it's seldom brought up in polite company, homosexuals of both sexes are generally more inclined towards opposite-sex behavior and personality traits to amuch higher degree than heterosexuals, yet their attraction significantly skews towards the most masculine men and the most feminine women, like Dwayne Johnson and Taylor Swift.
Huh. Sexual attractiveness transcends gender identified boundaries. Who'd a thunk it?
Substantially true. Lots of gay men (like me) are much more attracted to very masculine, toned, athletic men. But that's just the form that beauty takes in men. I don't like men who have girly mannerisms. I do like men who have some signal though that they are "sensitive." There used to be jean ads that featured a shirtless hunk holding a (presumably his) baby. I found that arresting.
You may enjoy a Billion Wicked Thoughts, it's a bit older (2011) but it talks about this and is probably from the last time a mainstream publisher would discuss this sort of thing.
https://www.billionwickedthoughts.com/index.html
Thanks! To you and Anon Dude. I'll have to check this out sometime. It looks intriguing.
I checked and it seems to be in public libraries.
Amen Brother!
I'm straying a bit off topic, but your post suggests an idea I've had since the late 1980s: Male homosexuality is one of the most masculine things there is.
(Specifically, the idea was inspired by listening to the San Francisco rock band Until December. In tonality and lyrics, they struck me as very masculine.)
No, you're correct - it truly is.
Yeah, 'queer' has a political valence. Back when I was still trying, I was on OKCupid for a while, and think I dated something like four 'bi' women but never anyone who identified as 'queer'.
Very true. "Queer" just means "I'm more progressive than you in an edgy way that I mean to make you uncomfortable."
Must be a leftist, argues ad hominem instead of attacking the argument.
Oh, wait.
Genius comment of the evening
Wow. I wonder what it was. Did he fart in church?
He said "You're still a fa##ot."
Ah. Well. That was uncalled for, wasn't it.
The increase in LGTBQ is entirely the Q - the stolen valor of gender identity. People go into hysterics on the Right about "oh my God the kids are all turning gay" which is the flipside of progressives who are all "look at how we have made people free to be themselves" when all this is the normative equivalent of being a Goth has become an identity others are supposed to take seriously. There is literally no objective way to know if a person who says "I am queer" or "I am nonbinary" is lying. It doesn't entail any actions or any identifying essence whatsoever except a few opinions and blue hair. It is quite literally nothing to panic about - when you panic about it you are taking these navel gazers way too seriously.
As annoying as these wimpy, safetyist protesters are, I'd say they are an improvement over what came before. I've read about the violence of the Sixties and Seventies when there were daily bombings by far left terror groups in the USA and violent riots. That sounds terrible. I am happy that I can go to the movie theater without worrying about bomb threats.
I am also not sure about the connection Richard is drawing between the increased amount of LGBT representation among protesters and their increased pacifism. I don't think LGBT protest movements in the Sixties and Seventies were noticeably more peaceful or safety focused than other liberal or leftist protest movements. I don't know how represented LGBT people were in protest groups not specifically focused on LGBT issues, but I know that the Weather Underground had some gay members. If LGBT activists are more peaceful and safetyist now it probably represents a more general trend among left-wing activists, rather than among LGBT ones specifically.
I definitely agree they're unlikely to assault you physically.
But when they're a third of Harvard, they're likely to be able to kick you out of employment when they take the commanding heights in 20 years. If you're already FIREd it's less of an issue, of course, but a lot of white men (and eventually women) are going to have problems coming up.
Very wise observation. This is frickin' Harvard!
Even Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue of the Nazi Party, probably never physically harmed a Jew himself. The same goes for Julius Streicher, the architect of Nazi propaganda.
Yet, they facilitated the type of deadly violence executed by more brutal individuals. There are enough immigrants from the Muslim third world who would be eager to play the role of the executioner, if motivated by the intellectual elite. In the U.S., a jury's unanimous agreement is required for conviction, meaning that in scenarios of widespread antisemitism, Jewish lives could be especially vulnerable under certain conditions. Like being a wife of OJ Simpson.
There's no need to speculate too much; it has all already unfolded in France. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Sarah_Halimi
I had similar thoughts when reading this essay. We shouldn't be too complacent about people who present as physically harmless not doing violence. In particular:
1. They may become violent when gathered in a mob.
2. They may slit your throat when your back is turned.
3. They may send others to do violence for them.
4. They may do property damage.
Also, as suggested another post I saw around here, they can do substantial financial and social harm in ways that have become known as "cancellation".
---
That said, I agree that this current wave of Palestinian protesters does not seem all that worrisome.
If, as the progressive left claims, words are violence, then there most certainly is violence among these children.
NS Lyons cited Machiavelli when he wrote up a similar analysis of leaders as Lions vs Foxes:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-change-merchants
"Foxes are unsuited to, and uncomfortable with, the employment of physical force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, seeking to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or manipulation of people and narratives. By contrast, Lions possess an instinct for the preservation of existing forms and virtues, along with communal unity and “group persistence.” Valuing security and stability, they prefer caution and conservatism, “hoping little and fearing much from any change, for they know from bitter experience that they will be called upon to foot the bill for it.” Society’s natural warrior class, they prefer the honesty of open conflict to scheming and, while typically slow to anger, tend to favor the direct application of force to solve problems.
Our contemporary elite class is quite transparently dominated by Foxes—the same personality type that tends to become Virtuals. Pareto would have predicted this, having noted a historical cycle in which safe and stable civilizations (usually founded by the firm hand of Lions) come to avoid—and, indeed, abhor—virtues and methods other than the indirect and diplomatic. This soon favors the byzantine organizing, scheming, manipulating, and propagandizing of Foxes. With the inarticulate Lions eventually fully marginalized and excluded from governance by the Foxes, the instability of such societies then increases relentlessly, generating direct challenges that the Foxes, inept at using force, may lash out at but are unable to resolve.
If Americans today suffer under a sort of escalating “anarcho-tyranny”—in which uncontrolled immigration, crime, substance abuse, and other social pathologies proliferate alongside a state that seems to grow constantly larger and more determined to exert its dominance through control over, and manipulation of, information, ideas, and narratives—the undiluted rule of Foxes may be partly to blame."
So it may not be that conservatives will have low human capital (at least not for long), conservative human capital will just skew towards lions as leftist human capital skews towards foxes.
Very good point.
Small nitpick: Machiavelli doesn't list them as personality types (that's more of a modern invention-Jung wrote Psychological Type in 1921)--he says a prince has to learn from the fox and the lion (which have the traits you said), i.e. he should be both.
But absolutely, strong men->good times->weak men->hard times->strong men, and the cycle repeats.
There's probably a reason the scholar-athlete was such a Western ideal going back to ancient Greece--completely separating the two masculine archetypes leads to trouble.
Interestingly, though, the nerds seem to have completely gotten the upper hand in China a couple of times over its long history. I wonder if someone knowledgeable in Chinese history can comment?
Brilliant and correct
I was working on a different piece that drew on this same citation, so I of course had to throw in a hat tip to Richard before I hit publish:
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-eroding-accountability
Problem I have is if one side said the same things in public that is being said today, a far different outcome would occur. Normalizing cries of “kill x” is the problem. At what point do we stop listening and be desensitized to what will sadly become a carried out promise. People lost their jobs for saying “Buildings Matter” and yet now we can allow chants of Death To America. We are sliding down the slope.
While it's a relief that the fascist-hearted tyrants of today's insane lefties are so feminized and safetyist that they crumple under the slightest force, that only portends to a larger problem of what comes next in the Khaldunian cycle. Our good times being so overwhelmingly good have created Men who are overwhelmingly weak. And for all their inadeptness, they're nonetheless quite skilled at bringing about hard times. And if the weakness of Men is commesurate with the hardness of the times they bring, we're staring Hell in the face, and its pronouns are he, she, and they.
I've heard so much about the skyrocketing rates of LGBTQ identification among Gen Z. I'd really love to sense-check it by asking follow-up questions like "(if male) have you ever had anal sex with a person of the same sex?", "(if male) have you ever performed oral sex on a person of the same sex", "(if male) have you ever received oral sex from a person of the same sex?" Not only would I imagine the proportion of Gen Z males who answer "yes" to one or more of these questions is no higher than among Millennials - I suspect it's actually lower, as part of the general trend towards sexlessness. This would demonstrate that large chunks of LGBTQ identification in Gen Z are dishonest (e.g. males who call themselves queer despite never having had sex with a man nor even having the inclination to do so) or hypothetical (gay males who are sincerely attracted to other males, but have never actually rubbed naughty bits).
Just because a "queer" male answers no to all of these questions doesn't mean he's a faker, of course: a straight incel is still straight. But if a man calls himself bisexual or queer and has had multiple sexual partners, all of whom were female, it seems reasonable to conclude that he's full of shit.
A friend of mine has had oral sex both ways with a man or two during foursomes. He considers himself straight but not narrow. He says he has no actual interest in seeking male sex partners, being happily married to a woman (not me.) If he was answering your survey he would say No Yes and Yes but would not consider himself even bi-sexual, much less male-attracted. Women in foursomes often rub (or lick) naughty bits too, but that doesn't make them female-attracted in the same way that women are who go looking for women to date one-on-one.
I think the plumbing questions would substantially over-estimate the number of people at any age who are truly LGB etc. I don't know any trans people but from what I hear they spend more time demanding their "right" to screw anyone they want than actually being loved by anyone.
I dunno. If we break out the old Kinsey scale of 1 to 6, I think these heterosexual men licking dicks and heterosexual women licking pussies are all somewhere in the 2-5 range, unless they gag and run for a bottle of Listerine immediately afterwords.
If they gag and run for a bottle of Listerine, they're a 0, not a 1.
You'd have to control for the fact that Gen Z'ers have less in-person sex generally, regardless of orientation. Goes along with the switch to online socialization and the trend away from alcohol and other social drugs which lower inhibitions.
True. What if two "heterosexuals" of the same sex facetime each other and engage in mutual masturbation. Are they still 100% straight?
You know what? I would say they are more gay than two guys or two girls who engage in some incidental same-sex contact during a threesome or a foursome. In the on-line encounter, the two people sought each other out to get together sexually, albeit virtually. That makes them same-sex attracted to a degree that the "straight-but-not-narrow" or "bi-curious" aren't.
The big increase is among natal females rather than males.
Even fudge packed, you might say.
This is horrible. What comes next? Are these ‘people’ who are too gay to rebel unwilling to type and send the order ‘liquidate’ to an ai commanding 100,000 drones? Is the capability I’m describing somehow technically implausible within a 20yr timespan?
We are about to restrain the most inhuman group of people our civilization has created while keeping them in power till they exercise a power unrivaled in all of human history. And then it’ll be game over.
Probably implausible? I don't think voice AI is good enough to parse the gay lisp yet
It is.
That was my thought, yeah. The thing about Foxes and Lions is that machines are much, much better at physical force than they used to be.
I think the premise that the protests are too gay to be effective is incomplete as no protest in support of the Palestinians will ever be effective. In the vast history of humanity, many cultures have come and gone. The Jews are still here. And a lot Jews consider Israel their home. They are not going to fold up their tent and go away. It’s not in their genes.
There are a lot of great arguments to be had on the protests, who’s’ right, who’s wrong, what rights are being trampled and so on. But 2 years from now nothing on the ground in Gaza will change except probably more destroyed buildings. None of the Arab countries want the Palestinians. The Palestinians don’t have a democratic system for those weary of losing to choose plan B, where plan A seems to keep getting stepped on and killed by the Israelis.
The Israelis live in a tough corner of the world, they have a strong survival culture, are on the cutting edge of technology with a dynamic economy, have made alliances with many other countries in the region, and are not bashful at all about their place in the Middle East. They are fighters and no bunch of rich, pampered,
elite white (mostly) kids are going to have the slightest influence on their behavior.
So yes, maybe these protestors are too gay to be successful. But even the most ruthless could not be successful in bringing pressure to bear on Israel. Disputes that are anchored in religion and thousands of years of history will not be solved by banging a drum.
Much as I admire the Israelis (and have a few distant relatives there), you absolutely can exterminate Jews from a given area--Hitler did it. Cost him the Bomb and maybe the war, but he did it.
If the USA turns on Israel, its Arab not-quite-allies like Saudi Arabia will calculate there's no advantage in pretending to like them anymore and attack or get someone else to, which most Muslims (who strongly sympathize with the Palestinians) will favor.
The Israelis are smart, tough, and relatively rich. But there's only 7 million Jews in there. Probably they'll figure the jig is up and flee. I could see the Germans taking them in out of guilt (and the desire to improve their tech industry), or the Chinese out of calculation. With over a billion people they will be easily able to assimilate them and might get a tech bump.
Saudi’s aren’t ‘pretending’ to like Israel. It’s a political and economic calculation to align themselves. Don’t kid yourself how much the Gulf States hate the Palestinians and also Iran.
How much goodwill can the Ivy leagues burn before they lose their elite status? My guess is quite a lot but they are burning it quite quickly.
Reminds me of the quotation "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation".
Imagine being naive enough to think that weaponizing fake fear, trauma, and violence hasn't been a left-wing staple for longer than you've been alive.
It didn't get as much mileage as it does now, though. You actually had evidence of violence in most cases.
Agree. These numbskull and lame-ass protesters aren’t really a threat to safety as much as they are a threat to going to class without a moron beating a drum outside….or the threat of being tarred as an abject idiot for being in the same student body as these losers.
But still, whatever safetyism excuse is required, the combined solution of water cannons, dismissal, expulsion, and arrest seems apropos, and long overdue.
There is still the question, should the police lift a finger to be the bouncers for a very exclusive private club that has some guests who are have decided they want to sleep on the polo field and won't leave so the steward can lock up and go home to his family? At Columbia, where the police came once but the university let the squatters re-establish themselves, I think it's a civil matter now, like a landlord-tenant-squatter dispute, which the police say, Don't bother us. Go to civil court. If the only law the protestors are breaking is criminal trespass, which is a very minor offence in the U.S., the police won't call out the riot squad twice just because the university "commands" them to. If you have to call the police every night because your houseguests are overstaying their welcome, how many times do you think they will come, if nobody is being violent?
I am a huge critic of identity politics and also a critic of Zionism and that seems the coherent position to me. Anti-woke Zionism does not seem coherent. I can't comprehend how a bunch of Jewish radicals from places like Ukraine saying "Yeah, I know tons of people live in Palestine with ancestors from there as plentiful and deep as mine, but they have to leave to make room for us because we are special victims" and engaging in serious and concerted activism and a program to make that happen isn't an identity victimhood movement. Anti-Zionism doesn't not mean "All Israelis should self-suicide or self-deport to give shit back to Palestinians". I think that is an absurd demand. But I also think it is absurd to think Palestinians in 1920 didn't have every reason to see the writing on the wall and think the demands being made should be resisted. Shit played out exactly the way they feared and it wasn't by accident. Y'all should listen to Darryl Cooper's MartyrMade podcast "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" - I am amazed how many people who are super pro-Israel have a plain cartoonish view of what Zionism was so maybe they would accept it from a known identity left hater like Cooper.
The Zionist movement did not talk about expelling Arabs. It always spoke of equal rights. Even when accepting the partition plan, the Jews danced and celebrated, despite committing to accept 600,000 Arab citizens and to grant them equal rights.
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923 when Jews were a tiny minority in Palestine...how do you.think they could get a majority Jewish state without expelling Arabs. They were expelling Arabs for 30 years before 1948 via the Jewish National Trust. If you are an Arab and you read this and it squares with what you are seeing what do you do? Jabotinsky was the most honest Zionists. Note how many times he calls what they are doing colonization. And I'll repeat, what annoys me about Zionism is the moralizing bullshit that Palestinians were unhinged to see any threat in this. This annoyance doesn't mean it think people 3 generations on can be expected to move or self suicide. Go listen to Darryl Cooper's epic Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem podcast and clear up these mythical slogans from a anti-left conservative who learned what he'd been told about Zionism wasn't what actually happened.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot
I don't understand. You try to prove your point or mine? In the link you sent Jabotinsky says:
I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.
There are lots of coherent positions.
How about this for anti-woke Zionism: the Israelis have guns, and they are going to keep their land as long as they are able. And I got no problem with that.
If you respect strength (which is very anti-woke), the Israelis have demonstrated that.
Woke anti-zionism is progressives--the Jews are white and therefore evil and should be expelled.
Anti-woke anti-zionism is White Nationalism--the Jews are nonwhite and therefore evil, and we oppose them. Or what you said elsewhere.
Woke Zionism--the Jews are an oppressed people, and deserve a homeland.
I can respect the strength argument and I'd council Palestinians together that the statute of limitations in violent resistance has passed. I'm not White Nationalist. I actively like Jews. I'd love more in the US and in my community. Zionism is just a glaring and contradictory blind spot for many, but by no means all. Calling anti-woke anti-Zionism White Nationalism is exactly like calling criticism of BLM White Nationalism. I don't think victimhood in one context gives you special rights over other people in others.
You can be antiwoke antiZionist without being a white nationalist--I said, "Or what you said elsewhere." I was making the analogy to progressivism, because I think they sound like white nationalists with a few minus signs flipped. Maybe it was unnecessarily inflammatory an example.
I cancel people who say "Y'all".
Accept that English is inferior in its lack of a second person plural and thus must adapt.
Not necessarily inferior. It works.. Sometimes you want it left unspecified as to plural or singular. “You can’t always get what you want”, doesn’t need to be parsed as to whether Mick Jagger is referring to one person or many. It’s true either way. If it matters, we can say, “I want to sleep with you alone. All the rest of you, get lost.”
It's a useful pronoun, the Spanish have 'vosotros', the French 'vous', the Germans 'ihr'...
And we have “you”, singular or plural, same as French. “Tu” is used only for singular children, pets, and close intimate friends, never for ordinary public discourse.
They might could be from the South, where that's how you conjugate.
In oral speech, sure, Southerners say y’all, just like some rural people around here say ya’z even for singular you. It’s just the way they talk. I don’t think they spell it out in writing that way, as if they thought it was standard grammar. No, I think y’all is here an affected progressive woke shibboleth, like Latinx, which is why I turn off when someone uses it. Notice on TwitterX. They do it a lot. If an authentic Southerner says y’all in my hearing, he gets a high five. He’s being true to his roots.