Listen to da yoof
Cutting edge political analysis.
So…it’s the young who get everything right, and the middle-aged and older who are the smug comfortable clueless Wrong people who stifle all the youthful rightness and ruin everything.
I wonder if OJ can see a downside to that way of looking at it. What downside? The fact that if that’s true then we might as well all give up, because nothing can ever improve. Why? Because young people become middle-aged people (OJ himself is middle-aged). Those young people who are so shiningly Right about everything now will be older and Wrong about everything tomorrow. It’s just a constant churn that never gets anywhere.
That could be true, of course, and we know of some ways in which it is true. The most glaring way is the failure to stop killing the planet, which can be seen as a shockingly callous indifference to younger people. But it doesn’t actually follow that young people can See the Truth of everything while everyone else is blind to it. OJ’s take is glib and hackneyed, which is pretty typical for him. (It’s probably because he’s so old.)
So I went to the original thread by Sirena Bergman.
In her list of ‘errors’ in the original article, she notes a study that ‘only’ 7 out of 97 reported rapes against inmates were by transwomen inmates.
Sirena fails to grok that if 7% of rapes are committed by transwomen, then either:
1: Transwomen make up 7% of the prison population, vastly more than their 1-ish% of the general pop, or;
2: Placing TWs into the prison pop increases the odds of rape by about one-in-twenty.
“Only.” Jesus.
I went in search of stats on this a while back and found that apparently less than half of rapes of inmates in women’s prisons were committed by other inmates. So, if that’s 7% of the total number of rapes, that means something less than 43% of the total number of rapes are committed by female inmates, and trans-identified male inmates commit more than 14% of the inmate-on-inmate rapes.
Am I a middle-aged centrist now? Or is it just because I’m 37 and to be “progressive” is to be drowning in the idpol bottomless pit instead of actually helping people?
I will admit to being middle aged. I will not admit to being a centrist. I wasn’t a centrist back when the left was actually left, and I certainly am not now that Richard Nixon qualifies as a centrist. Moving the Overton window did not move me…I remain proudly progressive and also proudly a radical feminist. Shoving women under the bus is not now and never was a truly progressive position, though many progressives throughout history have been all too glad to do just that.
I’m with you, iknklast. The left seems to have left us behind as politics shifts steadily to the right. I’ll be 69 at Xmas, and am wishing the communists would come back, not because I long for a communist government, but because their presence kept lefties to the left.
The older I get, the longer I live, the more I see that Marx got so much right about the direction of capitalism as a political system. It has taken so much from us that there is so little individuality remaining I am not surprised that narcism is on the rise.
OJ is one of those people who pretends to be younger (in spirit, at least) than he is in order to suck up to younger people and gain popularity among them; popularity is power. I suspect he will go along with any ideas, however ridiculous, among the young people whom he conceives as being his source of popularity and power. I do not think it is cynical on his part – he is not sufficiently self-aware.
I thought “transphobes” were all right-wingers? I must be wrong. We’ve always been at war with
Eastasmiddle-aged quote-unquote centrists.Translation: Their argument is good; here are the talking points we can use to distract people from it.
“Nailing its mast to anti-trans rights”? Utterly failing on the basic comprehension of the expression about masts, and nailing things, for a start. Also, “anti-trans rights” looks to me like the rights of the anti-trans where I suspect he means against the rights of the trans. But of course I’m practically German and completely comfortable with the puttingtogetherness of multiple words to create the right noun.