All entries by this author

Guest post: A stupid and evil bug of the human brain

Dec 26th, 2023 5:07 am | By

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective.

And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all?

Once you rule out the trivial meanings of “identity” (i.e. x=x, people are whatever they happen to be etc.), what’s left is practically synonymous with “ingroup vs. outgroup” or “us vs. them” thinking, the very things the old “Left” was trying to get away from. I’m under no illusion that “who I am” has not to a significant degree been shaped by growing up Norwegian, white, male (in the biological sex sense, not the “gender identity” sense) etc. But that’s a stupid and evil bug … Read the rest



The world’s largest human displacement crisis

Dec 26th, 2023 4:49 am | By

We hear a lot about Gaza, not so much about Khartoum.

The conflict between the [Rapid Support Forces] and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has now raged for eight months with no end in sight, killing thousands of people and creating what the United Nations says is the world’s largest human displacement crisis.

Beyond trapping civilians and destroying infrastructure in a country that already struggles with high rates of poverty, international observers have accused both sides of committing war crimes.

That is, international observers have accused both sides of committing war crimes along with trapping civilians and destroying infrastructure.

Evidence is also emerging that the RSF and their allies have massacred members of an African ethnic group in

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Guest post: The whole message was about choosing reality over fiction

Dec 25th, 2023 4:19 pm | By

Originally a comment by VanitysFiend on Brave New World had the “feelies.”

@Bjarte Foshaug

Of course the creators of The Matrix both identify as women and supposedly meant the whole movie as a parable for transition in the first place (in case you wonder: the people who think Eddie Izzard is a woman are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened, and see the world as it really is. It’s the rest of us who are living a lie).

The character of Switch was originally intended to be one sex in the matrix and a different sex out of the matrix, the result of a coding error by the machines. That’s as good an explanation … Read the rest



THERE WILL BE A BIG AND GLORIOUS

Dec 25th, 2023 1:22 pm | By

Trump being all festive n shit.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

2024 WILL GO DOWN AS THE YEAR OF GREAT AND FULLY COORDINATED ILLEGAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE BY CROOKED JOE BIDEN, THE WORST AND MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, THE DOJ, FBI, A.G.’s, & D.A.’s THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY, BUT DESPITE IT ALL, IN THE END, THERE WILL BE A BIG AND GLORIOUS VICTORY FOR THOSE BRAVE AND VALIANT PATRIOTS WHO WANT TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!!

Also, less than an hour later:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

It’s hard to have a truly great Christmas when you have a Crooked and Incompetent President who wants to put his Political Opponent in jail, and who … Read the rest



Duck is risen

Dec 25th, 2023 10:53 am | By
Duck is risen

And now a feel-good story in honor of the solstice.

If you were strolling by a lake in the dead of winter and saw a duck trapped under the ice, you might search for a stick to poke a hole, or maybe throw a heavy rock, to create a break in the surface.

That is one very trapped duck!

But a fella named Langøien Karl didn’t mess around with rocks, he threw himself in.

The 36-year-old Norwegian native was already dressed for swimming, as he takes part in a (somewhat insane) hobby of “ice bathing,” which involves going for winter dips. When he spotted the duck, he dropped his towel and wasted no time jumping to the rescue.

Karl went

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The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective

Dec 25th, 2023 10:31 am | By

Here is Chief Sealth School’s guide to social studies courses including the one that teaches women can have penises.

Ethnic Studies World History 3
Credits: 0.5 credit
Grade(s): 10
Length of Course: One Semester
Prerequisite: World History I, II
Graduation Requirement Satisfied: World History 3

This course provides the opportunity for students to examine current world problems and their historical and systemic causes.  The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective and includes the structure of the 5 themes including Identity, Power and Oppression, Resistance and Liberation, reflection and Acton and Indigeneity. Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power and develop a sense of themselves as potential changemakers. The specific content varies from year to

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International School for Exploring Authentic Selves

Dec 25th, 2023 10:18 am | By

The source is conservative talk radio, but if the facts are true as reported then that’s what they are.

An activist history teacher failed a Seattle student on a quiz for saying only women can get pregnant and that only men have penises.

A 10th grade Ethnic Studies World History teacher at Chief Sealth International High School in Seattle gave students a quiz titled, “Understanding Gender vs. Sex.” The quiz provided a series of statements to label true or false, or questions with multiple choices.

Many of the questions focused on personal pronoun use (When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) or assumptions one may make around gender identity (“True/false: Transgender people are

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Man underlines his hatred of women

Dec 25th, 2023 9:38 am | By

Dude get over it.

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Guest post: Brave New World had the “feelies”

Dec 25th, 2023 7:14 am | By

Originally a comment by Vanitys Fiend on The disembodied avatar worlds of the internet.

One thing that gets me about this is that Science Fiction, and probably a fair number of fairy tales and myths, have been exploring and warning about this kind of disembodiment from reality for decades now. The original pilot for Star Trek featured a race that became so detached from reality over time that they no longer knew how to maintain the advanced technology of their ancestors. Neuromancer has “The Matrix” before The Matrix did and even that film has time to explore the idea of whether it matters if you’re living in an illusion or reality, and it come down on the side of … Read the rest



Happy terfmas!

Dec 25th, 2023 7:09 am | By

Merry krissmiss!!

This is GLORIOUS.

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Becoz he woz prez at the time

Dec 25th, 2023 6:58 am | By

Well at least one lawyer agrees that it’s grotesque to claim that presidents can crime with impunity because they were in theWhiteHouse at the time of the criming.

A pre-Christmas filing by Donald Trump‘s lawyers asking a federal appeals court to throw out the election subversion case against him is “ridiculous,” according to a Florida state attorney.

State Attorney for Palm Beach County Dave Aronberg said the filing arguing that Trump is immune from prosecution for actions that fell within his official presidential duties was about “delay.”

The former president has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review [whether] he is immune from allegations [that] he tried to overturn the

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Locational immunity

Dec 24th, 2023 5:21 pm | By

Here again is that weird circularity.

He took the actions in the White House, therefore you can’t touch him, therefore he gets to try to return to the White House, despite having done his best to force his way in with violent sedition last time. Which you can’t touch him for doing, because he was in the White House at the time. It’s so very … Read the rest



Aka witches

Dec 24th, 2023 4:47 pm | By

This is so progressive.

“Hahaha you can’t get abortions any more and you’re miserable old hags.”

I just can’t figure out why feminist women say no to this glorious revolution.… Read the rest



Keep your stinkin’ benefits

Dec 24th, 2023 4:33 pm | By

How to help kids be healthy:

Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.

The state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children — or Summer EBT — program, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time

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Divine right of mob bosses

Dec 24th, 2023 11:18 am | By

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to set up a system in which the top boss can never be held to account because the top boss is the top boss. Why? Because even the top boss is just another human, and humans can do bad things. We need to be able to hold them to account, for our own protection. We can’t just assume they won’t exploit the top job to rob us blind and get away with it.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have asked a federal appeals court to throw out a case alleging interference in the 2020 election, arguing that he is immune from prosecution.

Like that. There shouldn’t be such a thing. People shouldn’t … Read the rest



Guest post: The disembodied avatar worlds of the internet

Dec 24th, 2023 8:53 am | By
Guest post: The disembodied avatar worlds of the internet

Originally a comment by Sastra on Let us be clear about the difference.

YNNB #7 wrote:

Too many of us are under the illusion that we’re a self-made species.

The deceptive comforts of modernity responsible for this would not be complete I think without what appears to have ratcheted the illusion up to 11: the disembodied avatar worlds of the internet. While the theories of postmodernism and post colonialism formed before the average person had at least one personal computer, the plausibility of a human nature detached from its evolved biological origins no doubt got a major boost from a large part of the population—especially the younger part of the population — getting comfortable with entire worlds where we … Read the rest



Distinctions

Dec 24th, 2023 8:04 am | By

Honestly legislators should not be this stupid. It’s an important job; they should not be this lost in the fog.

Thundering herds of bison that’s dumb. Of course people of any kind are not a theory or an ideology or a contested belief, and nobody says they are. The ideology/contested belief is that people can change sex, that people literally are the sex they are not, that people are … Read the rest



Guest post: Hungry lions ask no questions

Dec 23rd, 2023 3:45 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this … Read the rest



Let us be clear about the difference

Dec 23rd, 2023 3:28 pm | By

Onward!

Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”

The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.

But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to

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“Gender itself is a colonial introduction”

Dec 23rd, 2023 11:59 am | By

So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by

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