Wondering about the Trans Stampede

There is no reason to be rude or impolite to people who dress as and pretend to be members of the opposite sex, but there also is no more reason to accept their pretense as valid than for accepting someone’s statement that he is Napoleon. Yet at present there is a lot of social and sometimes governmental pressure from leftists to make people do it. It is interesting to think about why this is so.

There is not a question of injustice.  People have a right  to say, pretend, or believe anything they like about themselves, but no right to require anyone else to agree with them. If I claim to be a better basketball player than LeBron James, others do me no harm and commit no injustice in deciding I am wrong.  Neither on the surface does it appear to be about political opportunism. The number of transsexuals is vanishingly small as a percentage of the population. They are not likely to be significant either as donors or decisive swing voters.  

Still it is often useful in wondering about reasons for something to consider again who benefits from it and how.  Doing so with this  leads to  possible answers from George Orwell. If one is seeking  to maintain and increase one’s power in the name of false and indefensible beliefs, it is useful   to have a category of thought crimes, and it can be good  to make people say and even better to make them believe that two and two are five.  If one  can get people to accept a denial of  the obvious fact that throughout most of the animal kingdom and among all species of primates there are exactly two genetically determined sexes, it could become easier to gain similar acceptance for notions of a more pragmatic interest.  

Food Bank Drive

Helping out a hungry person is a good thing. Honesty  and analyzing the nature of a problem before trying to solve  it are also good things.  There is a lack of the latter two in much of the news, discussion, and propaganda about “hunger” in America.  The SNAP or food stamp welfare program provides poor people with per capita payments sufficient to pay for an adequately  nutritional (though far from fancy or even desirable) diet. The WIC program provides additional money for young children and women.  During the school year poor children receive free lunches and breakfasts at public schools.  According to reports the biggest nutritional problem among poor adults and children in this country is obesity.

One would learn none of this listening to the reports in the traditional media or the maudlin appeals for donations to local food banks during their drives in  the Thanksgiving to Christmas season. Instead one would get the impression that something akin to the Irish potato famine was going on just down the street. (Some of the propaganda is a more subtle as with reporting on alleged large percentages of people with “food insecurity” instead of those actually malnourished.  That term is quite different from malnourishment, intended to be  equated with it by propagandists and unthinking  journalists and talking heads,  and vague enough to cover a good deal of irrelevant  situations.  Anyone living paycheck to paycheck whose grocery budget gets tight before the next payday or any college student who spent too much money partying and is going to be a little short until  Daddy’s next check arrives might be labeled as suffering from food insecurity. This calls to mind the saying  that amateurs lie with statistics by fudging the data while professionals do it by monkeying with the definitions.)

There are some  malnourished people in this country. The evidence indicates this is mainly a matter of abuse and neglect by parents or other caretakers of children and by  caretakers of disabled people, ignorance about  how and why  to select and prepare food in ways that provide adequate  nutrition and are affordable by  one’s income, or poor choices by people with mental problems  including addictions. Though there is nothing wrong with the food bank drives apart from the way they are sold, the banks they support are band aids at best and may sometimes enable counterproductive behavior.  It likely  would be more useful  to spend the time and effort on trying to prevent or  stop abuse and neglect, providing instruction to reduce the ignorance,  and offering therapeutic help to the mentally disturbed.

However that would take harder work, give less opportunity for televised preening,  and lack the political benefits for the left of inducing guilt among the self-supporting and a resentful sense of entitlement among the non-self-supporting.  It probably is not going to happen.  

We’ll still be donating to the food bank drive starting soon on one of our local TV stations. However we'll likely make larger donations to outfits such as Meals on Wheels or the Salvation Army.

A Hundred Years Later

The history of governments in most of the world for most of the time has been one of  various levels of barbarism.  In Europe  Greece during its greatest days condoned slavery and subjugation by conquest. The Roman empire was largely based on those things. The Christian middle ages were a model for later totalitarianism.  The politics of the Renaissance were brutal and bloody, and the religious wars following the Reformation were awful. English authorities were still torturing and murdering English men and women for their religious opinions in the Sixteenth Century, and the Scottish government hanged a man for blasphemy in 1697.  The rulers of France were breaking men on the wheel in the mid-1700s.  Governments in Spain, Russia, and much of the rest of the continent were worse as were those in Africa and Asia.  The reason we have the term “oriental despot” is the throughout history most of the populated areas of North Africa and in  Asia from Anatolia to the Pacific have  been governed despotically.  The Inca and Aztec empires  were rigid autocracies  (with the Aztecs adding in gruesome mass human sacrifice of prisoners), and the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors who replaced them ruled as brutal tyrants.  In North America the English colony of Massachusetts put women on trial as witches as late as 1692, and the trade in slaves continued for over a century after that.

From the 1600s on thinkers in western Europe devised new theories of the proper nature of government and argued for the liberal values of individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, liberty, and limitations on the powers of  the state. By the end of the 19^th Century these ideas had led to the abolition of slavery and serfdom, a general toleration of dissenting religious opinions, and limitations (varying in degree from place to place) on the powers of authorities throughout the parts of the world governed by Europeans or descendants of Europeans.   There was a fairly generally held belief in a progressive evolution toward better societies, not out of naivete but because people had been  observing it happen.

Things changed with the tragedy of the First World War.  The war made a reversion toward barbarism possible,  and in its aftermath in  Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, and some of the  states created from parts of the old Austrian empire barbarism arrived.  The Second World War following from the First got rid of the Nazis but otherwise made the spread of barbarism more likely. Communist tyrannies took control in China and Soviet-dominated areas of eastern and central Europe. The postwar demise of the British and French  empires led to the creation of  locally controlled governments in Asia and Africa which were almost uniformly worse than the colonial administrations they replaced and often horribly  worse. 

The defeat of the Soviet Union in the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet empire caused  many people to believe at the time of the millennium that the regressions of the 20th Century were  an aberration, and that evolution toward a more liberal world would resume. For many that hope has faded. Now pessimists in this country fear a coming  end of the United States as a liberal republic will make a general triumph of barbarism inevitable.

I see  their point  but don’t accept their conclusion. There are both time and opportunity for America and the world to produce a better outcome.  Still a person being realistic has  to admit that in many ways  the great war that ended a hundred years ago today put civilization behind a good sized eight ball. The tragedy did not end on 11/11/1918.

2018 Election

As of this morning the Democrats have gained control of the house, and the Republicans have gained three seats in the senate, assuming the lead by the Republican in  Arizona holds up.  While this may not be a “blue wave”, it surely is not good news for Republicans who should have done better in a time of peace and notable prosperity.

 People have suggested various explanations for the size of the defeat in the house.  Republicans‘ voters were less fired up than  Democrats’ voters.   Something like this usually happens  in the first midterm after a new president is elected. Conservatives were displeased by the congress’s failure to pass bills on some things they cared about.  Democrats conned voters with candidates  in swing districts who disguised themselves as  “moderates” rather than leftists. Biased leftists in the traditional media gave the Democrats an even larger than usual boost with their slanted reporting.  Too many Republicans retired or left the house to run for other offices, and so on.

While there is something to all of these, I think an important  reason was the personality and behavior of Donald Trump.  The man acts like a  jackass much of the time.  Some people like that. Many others tolerate it because of  the  generally good things he has done with deregulation, foreign policy, taxation,  appointing judges, and national defense – focusing on his “substance” rather than his style.  However many who favor the things he is doing and like the way the economy is going and usually would vote accordingly cannot get past the style.  My guess is that that there were enough of them to switch a number of seats in the house to the Democrats.  (According to polls, he is not very popular and was not when he won in 2016. In that election he had the advantage of running against an unusually unlikable  and detested opponent.  Some analysts have attributed his victory to his doing better than Mrs. Clinton among voters who disliked both candidates.) 

Perhaps Trump will think about this and start behaving like a sensible, respectable, serious person. That would be a good thing.  For whatever one may think of the Democrats’ style, their substance is pretty rough.