I can’t say that I find this shocking. “Heterosexual” is obviously – and necessarily – the default for any mammalian species. Without it, the species does not reproduce, and thus dies out, making way for other species that *do* reproduce. But in recent years, there has been substantial social pressure, seeming aimed more at women, to abandon the default in favor of homosexuality. And peer pressure can be quite effective at convincing young people to do things that they don’t really want to do… and once they’ve done it, they often regret it.
Women whose sexual identity changed in a more same-sex-oriented direction tended to report greater psychological distress compared to women whose sexual identity remained stable. In contrast, women whose sexual identity changed in a less same-sex-oriented direction tended to report less psychological distress compared to women whose sexual identity remained stable.
Color me stunned.
This quote from one of the study authors kinda leads off the article. It says a few things that seem like they really aught to be followed up, but are, at least in the article, glossed over or outright ignored:
“This is true for many people, and we know that efforts to try and force people to change their sexual orientations are extremely harmful and do not work. However, there are a proportion of women who do experience changes to their sexual attractions and sexual identities across their lives. The sexualities of young women today in particular are less binary and more fluid than ever before.”
A) Yes, it’s harmful to try to force someone to change their sexuality. This includes, does it not, efforts to make straight girls lesbians? It includes, does it not, efforts to convince girls that they are actually boys, boys that they are actually girls?
B) Yes, young women today seem less binary than in millenia past. Ummm… WHY???
Part of the back story to my Zaneverse stories set 500 years in the future is that the 21st century turned out to be the most nightmarish century in human history. The Pan Asian Wars wipe out about half the planetary population and trash the rest of the worlds biosphere via pollution and radiation and plagues. Subsequent to that is the European Diaspora as tens of millions of indigenous Europeans flee the continent as it transforms into a third world hellhole, dominated by the Caliphate, feeding into the resurgence of Iceland and the rise of the Texas Semi Autonomous Region. All this is far in the past of the main characters, but it helped establish the world they live in just as the colonization of the New World starting five hundred years ago established *our* world.
This was all supposed to be *decades* in the future, time enough for civilized society to get set up on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, habitats, leading to *some* portion of humanity surviving The Fall at the end of the world at the beginning of the 22nd century. I fear I was too optimistic.
“‘The Three Little Pigs’ story was read round-robin style in a grade 11 classroom, which demonstrated limited student access in this class to grade-level text,” according to the department’s Office of Accountability. … At Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, more than one-third of all classes were being disrupted by students’ chatter …
Sure, society needs people who are no more skilled than required to dig a ditch. But the problem is, these kids are doubtless also being taught that they are special snowflakes and that anything less than a lavish lifestyle of hookers and blow is a sign that The Other People are oppressing them. So these “students” will not only leave school utterly incapable of performing any but the most basic tasks… they’ll be unwilling to do them. One might wonder why this sort of thing would be promoted. Well… one might wonder that if one had not been paying attention. Why would this sort of thing be promoted?
1) These kids will be useless, sure. But they’ll still be allowed to vote. And who will they probably vote for? The people promising to make their lives easier without effort on their part.
2) They will consume resources without contributing. Thus they will be a net drain, requiring someone to fill in for them. And who better to fill in for them but similarly low-skill, but less offended foreign workers of dubious legality? And who will they and their offspring and their enablers probably vote for? Why, most likely those politicians who promise to not deport them.
Maybe Congress should spare a moment from the January 6 show trials to look into the matter of politicians whoa re *really* working to damage the United States. It might be worth seeing who’s getting paid or influenced by, say, the ChiComs. The Rosenbergs sizzled for doing less damage to the US.
No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:
An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.
“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.
Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?
Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.
Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).
They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.
They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.
It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.
They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.
Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.
Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.
The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.
Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.
Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.
Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.
Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.
And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.
HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…
Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.
This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.
Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.
Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?
Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:
The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be on hand to receive 132 pallets of formula produced by Switzerland’s Nestle S.A. set to arrive in Indianapolis, the White House said Saturday.
132 pallets, huh? Wow. That might cover one good sized city for… what? A month?
I guess it’s a good thing that Americans have stopped having babies, because apparently we can’t feed them ourselves anymore. But *of* *course,* we can provide for illegal invaders. Yes, we should feed those in detention. But… they should leave detention as quickly as possible. Preferably on aircraft flying directly to Tierra del Fuego or points south. In a time of crisis in the US – and even in good times – illegal aliens should be deported ASAP.
I’ve visited a number of WalMarts and grocery stores lately, and the “baby formula” aisles look about like the “toilet paper” aisles during early 2020.
It seems that the root cause of the baby formula shortage was *one* Abbott factory in Michigan shutting down due to contamination concerns back in February, and not yet back up and running. Why are things so concentrated that one single factory can control the fates of so many Americans? Shouldn’t this sort of thing have more localized and widely distributed production? That one factory could fail for any of a number of reasons, including but not limited to accidental fires, Mostly Peaceful Protests, the spiking price of gas shutting down transport to and/or from.
And as always, you can count on the far left extremists to take this situation and go absolutely whackaloon. Take, for example, this article from Vox:
It is basically a propaganda piece extolling the evils of breastfeeding, compared to the good and proper approach of formula-feeding. While some of the points are valid, it’s worth noting that the world “mother” never once appears in the article. Nor do “woman” or “women,” odd omissions given the subject of the article. The closest they come is “birthing parent.” Even then, that only appears in a single panel of a cartoon explaining that if a “birth parent” doesn’t want to breastfeed its infant, it shouldn’t have to, full stop. Because the needs of a dependent human are less important the the shallow desires of someone else. Which logic I’d be interested in seeing deployed against, say, dependent humans such as prisoners and welfare recipients. How about men who simply “don’t want to” pay child support or alimony? I just got hit with a massive property tax bill. I don’t want to pay it. Would Vox be equally as sanguine about my desire to not take care of the responsibilities that I willingly signed up for?
Storytime: an EMP weapon goes off a few hundred kilometers over the central US, shutting down virtually *all* production lines in a thousand-mile radius for a span of a year or so. Fill in the rest.
This particular form of video meme has been around for a while, but it is sometimes interesting. The song “Little Dark Age” by MGMT, often slowed down somewhat, is played against a series of images all to a particular theme, such as “America” or “Space Exploration.” Often the videos start with images or video clips from the present that show some of the bad aspects of the topic, depressing stuff such as Antifa and Joe Biden and “Hamilton” for the “America” theme, then follow it with uplifting historical images. The point, it seems, to be to contrast the current-day insistence of many to view things only in the worst possible light with a much better view of the topic. A lot of these videos are lame, but the better ones have an evocative mix of despair and hope.
Some vary the style up by ditching the Black Pill content at the beginning and just use a vast number of historical images to tell a story. This one, for instance, tells the story of Western Civilization and somehow got itself “age restricted,” even though there’s nothing in there that seems to merit it… looks more like some algorithm decided that “western civilization = bad.”
After the unprecedented (and I’m led to understand illegal) leak of the Supreme Court preliminary opinion on overturning Roe vs Wade, the violent insurrectionists, yearning for the glory days of 2020, are back to doing what they do: violence.
Well, here is where we are. While the Florida state senate voted on whether or not to strip Disney of their special tax district status, a number of people in attendance – I *assume* visitors, not actual state senators, but these days who knows – shrieked like maniacs. That as much as anything shows the importance of standing up to these bullying groomers. With luck those who threw this little tantrum were caught on video somewhere clear enough for facial recognition to figure out who they were so that they can be put under psychiatric evaluation, and to keep them away from children. I won’t be at all shocked to find that at least some of them are teachers of small children. And if so, hopefully soon to be *former* teachers of small children.
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