Moon of Alabama's venture into psychology: the transgendered and Ukraine
Now, I'm usually interested in psychological explanations of political stuff. Often, explanations of political stuff can draw upon history, and so for instance the Biden administration's foreign policy is descended from that of the first Reagan administration, and the Democratic Party is a product of the coalition between old money, wealthy suburbs, and weapons manufacturers coming out of the Northeast in the late Eighties. (Meanwhile the Reagan administration's coalition of fundies, former KKK, and "libertarians" survives to this day.) But history only goes so far and eventually we'll want psychological explanations. Why the insanity? And so here we have Moon of Alabama dabbling:
Transgender - The Inability To Distinguish Facts From Wishes
I do not think the transgender stuff is the big political issue here. Transgenderism is a political distraction, as RBN pointed out today. These days Joe Rogan tries to blame China for transgenderism. I'll update the link when I can get a link that isn't for a two- or three-hour RBN broadcast.
If there's anything awkward about transgendered people, it's that you have men who are anxious to become women and women who are anxious to become men when the technology to fully satisfy them doesn't exist just yet. It is, then, a matter of technology. When we get really effective gender reassignment surgery, we'll be able to choose our biological gender, biological age, skin color, eye color, hair color, and so on, and we'll be immortal. It will all be cool.
Full disclosure: I am currently just fine with my gender identity and sexual orientation. I could see becoming someone of the opposite gender, and I might even enjoy it, but it would really be too much of a bother with the way things are. Instead, I would like to be a trans-social-class person. After flying to some far-off country to undergo wealth affirmation surgery, I would like to inhabit the body of a billionaire. I could tell from an early age that I was born into the wrong social class, and I would like to rectify my social class dysphoria as soon as possible.
At any rate, after discussing transgenderism, Moon of Alabama pivots to a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's book "The Defeat of the West." I am going through a Google translation of it right now. It's a fun book. However, Todd makes too much of the persistence of formal religion in modern society. The God of the West is money, and it's been that way in the US since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Or maybe the death of formal religion and the ascendancy of the Dollar God happened later when it was decided that the Constitution also had to apply to the states. Maybe it took a little longer elsewhere. The key fact about religion was and is that you have to have one if you want to be "in" with the "right" people. How important is it that you believe in your religion? Oh, sure, you might stamp your feet and proclaim in a loud voice that you are a believer and that God is real or something. But that's just foot-stamping.
At any rate, in his book, Todd goes through the whole idiocy of the Russia-Ukraine war and how it has poisoned the West. The West would like to pretend that it is toppling Putin. It would also like to pretend that it is "defending Ukraine," and many other delusions besides. But the West's fumbling militarism about Ukraine is supposedly an example of the inability to distinguish facts from wishes.
The Moon of Alabama piece then proceeds to discuss Todd's opinion on transgenderism (he's against it) before mentioning the famous Ron Suskind piece in the NYT which discussed the solipsism of the Bush Junior administration. Our elites, then, like the transgendered, are essentially incapable of distinguishing facts from wishes. I'm not going to discuss the rest of Moon of Alabama's piece. My attitude toward it is set.
What Moon of Alabama calls "the inability to distinguish facts from wishes" is really mere psychological projection. Projection is a normal human behavior. When you have some big thing you want to do, you project it onto reality before you act. You tell yourself, gee I hope everyone goes along with my ideas for a successful business and that I won't declare bankruptcy in five years. And so you spend some time pretending that that will be the case. Religion is also about projection: there is nothing particularly convincing about the Bible or about any holy book for that matter, and there is nothing particularly convincing about the notion that the world is in any way informed by "God," whatever that is, yet people persist in claiming they have religion.
What distinguishes the projections of the West about Ukraine from, I don't know, maybe Russia's projections about Ukraine, is: the West has no back-up plan. The West does not ask itself: what do I do if my ideas about reality are the wrong ones? Instead, its so-called leaders double down on their proliferation of ridiculous garbage.
We might also say, what if the transgendered also have no back-up plans? What if the trans women decide, after having altered their bodies, that they don't like being women, and what if the trans men decide, after having altered their bodies, that they don't like being men? Well, that's somewhat up to them to decide. As for the rest of us, having had to cope with the disasters of Biden administration foreign policy, well, we might want to have political elite reassignment surgery, and have a full leadership-ectomy. I can think of at least of a few political elites who should be surgically removed.
Comments
projection and a lack of plan B
-
seem like reasonable arguments
if you study human nature and expand
certain traits into political spheres it seems to
indicate some of the worse tendencies become
amplified, making the figure heads appear more evil
nuances like acceptance and tolerance of others
can erase large swaths of prejudice and bigotry
similar to a sharing attitude offsets greed and hoarding
interesting thought exercise Cass
thx
question everything
So is it arrogance or fraud?
The liberals thought they had "saved democracy" by electing Biden (when it was clear that the people who really provided the victory margin for Biden in 2020 were not the Lisa Simpson faithful). Then they ostensibly saved the world from climate change by supporting a President whose energy policy included more approvals for oil exploitation than any of the previous ones. (Oh but they're building solar panels!) At this point they're "supporting democracy" by propping up a regime in Ukraine that banned all of its left-wing parties and is busy destroying itself through disastrous war strategies, and providing no-holds-barred military support to "the only democracy in the region" (Israel) as its troops commit genocide.
So is it arrogance or fraud?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
hard to say either or
ignorance, arrogance, fraud, stealth, entitlement, robbery and denial
all get into the mix when power is at play
question everything
Hey, as a comics-reading child, I identified as Scrooge McDuck
Still awaiting my government-supplied money-bin transplant.
Related to the topic of transgender
.
Here’s a deep dive into one of the drugs that doctors put very young people on.
Some good news!
It causes severe problems decades after people stopped taking it and doctors and others have been warning about it for decades and yet it’s still on the market.
My view on this issue is that no kid should be allowed to take drugs or have their body surgically altered until they are adults. No kid can possibly understand the consequences of changing themselves because their brains are just not mature enough to. I’ve read too many stories from people who greatly regret what was done to them.
As I suggested above --
-- this is a technology issue. Another benefit of quitting the whole for-profit warfare scam (and its currently-empowered perpetrators) is that we'd be able to focus on how to solve said technology issue. Instead they're babbling panicky garbage about "boots on the ground in Ukraine."
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Thank you, YES!!! Jeezu$!
Transsexuality is fundamentally a technology issue.
I am constantly baffled by why people don't bring this up more often - or indeed, EVER.
True transsexuals should be satisfied with this assessment, as well; the fact it's become a Cultural-Revolutionary cult makes clear that something else is driving it ("motte-and-bailey reasoning", I've heard such things called), and it has been taken over by "transtrenders" whose REAL problems are entirely different.
THIS. This SHOULD be a thing.
Take this notion public, publish a few articles about it, form an advocacy group (I guarantee you there are many, many transgentry individuals out there who'll forever revere your courage in being the first to speak out, and will flock to your banner in no time!) and watch the trichotillomania commence!
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
To answer your question --
Because you have empowered individuals in our societies who throw hissy fits when other people, especially young ones, decide they want to change genders. (And then there's the quieter part, in which the trangendered kill themselves. That happens a lot.)
The social aspect of a better technology would be if the otherwise transgendered individuals could simply alter their bodies, and the individuals who would otherwise throw the hissy fits would not have to know anything about it.
But what's really important to our society, you see, is that the Federal Reserve be directed to encode trillions of dollars every year so that military corporations can offer fat benefits to shareholders while the US pumps out gold-plated hardware that doesn't win wars, like it's not winning them now in Ukraine and in Gaza.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.