Truth and Consequences
How can one write about the underlying truth of the economy in a nation where the majority of people do not care about truth? Disregard of truth has become so extreme in the US that we've exceeded the queerness of calling a man a woman if he wants to change his body parts. In some instances, it's a punishable offense continue to call him a man even if he hasn't changed his parts yet and even though the DNA in every cell of his body will continue to scream "male" every moment of his remaining existence after his mostly external transformation. The US now imprisons people for expressing thousands of years of accepted thought about that confused person.
It's "woke" or broke
With a court ruling this past week, the US, which once enshrined free speech to a religious degree, has become a nation that imprisons people for sixteen years if they dare to say that bodies are hard facts and to express this by burning an LGBTQ flag. To a lesser degree that happened with a similar expression of thought this past week in the UK.
According to the Des Moines Register, an Iowa man was imprisoned for sixteen years for burning an LGBTQ flag, while in the UK people are going nuts over JK Rowling saying that men cannot become women just by changing their appearance. Imagine that, liberals in the UK are outraged because a female child fantasy author thinks being a woman goes deeper than just looks!
I'm not here to advocate hatred of anyone, but sixteen years of prison because you're a hateful man who burned a flag? If you were a hateful man who burned the US flag, you wouldn't get one day in jail! Yet, if your hatred runs against the desire of the people to believe in alternate realities, you may spend a major part of your life in prison for saying the emperor's new clothes (or body parts) do not make him a woman just because he thinks they do.
The minister of the church that flew the flag, who is gay, said she was glad to see the man go to prison for sixteen years for expressing his hatred because such hatred does not "feel good." She believed the sentencing might help the people of Ames, Iowa, adjust their opinions to become more welcoming of gays. Said the minister of love, tolerance and acceptance:
I often experienced Ames as not being as progressive as many people believe it is, and there still is a very large closeted queer community here.
So, jail the bastards who think being queer enough to change your body to match your mind is, well, queer.
Lovingly, she forgave Martinez, the flag-burning hater, and hoped that sixteen years in prison would change his opinion about gays to a view that is more accepting. The perp, however, stood by his actions with pride (albeit not with much love):
It was an honor to do that. It was a blessing from the Lord.... It is a judgment, and it is written to execute vengeance on the heathen and punishments upon the people.... I burned down their pride. Plain and simple.
In the UK, JK Rowling became the subject of twitter-rage because she voiced her support for a woman who was fired just for expressing her opinion that “men cannot change into women.†Never mind, that for thousands of years, her opinion was the accepted opinion with which probably no human being would likely disagree. Now it is grounds for termination from your career, and if you support the terminated woman who said it, that is grounds for a Twitter flogging and maybe termination your career, too -- all by the tolerant left.
The fired feminist, who worked (somewhat ironically, I think) at a think tank that supports women by campaigning against inequality originally wrote the following heresy:
What I am so surprised at is that smart people I admire, who are absolutely pro-science in other areas, and champion human rights & womens rights are tying themselves in knots to avoid saying the truth that men cannot change into women (because that might hurt mens feelings).
She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary†language in tweets opposing government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to self-identify as the opposite sex.
(You can't make this stuff up.)
You better not be so much of a feminist that you think men cannot actually become women by changing their objective external appearance or their dress on the basis that being a woman is more than developing two hills hormonally and carving out a valley. May society forbid you think that is the ultimate infringement on womanhood by men. This proved doubly true when Rowlings offered this woman the following support:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019
How dare she support a feminist woman who thinks men are men and women are women! How dare anyone continue to treat sexuality as it if were objective fact. Rowlings statement devil-spawned a new hashtag: #TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). You don't want to be one of those. That Rowling is a wrecker:
Over the past couple of years JK Rowling has used her massive platform and influence almost exclusively to destroy the UK left and ruin the lives of trans people. Almost like billionaires and vulnerable people can't be friends.
— Big Thatcherals (@banalplay) December 19, 2019
Seems to me the left is destroying itself in this case.
“There is literally no excuse at this point for not knowing that jk rowling is a transphobe who hates trans people, especially trans women,†added another.
Indeed. Rowling would be imprisoned for sixteen years if she lived in Iowa and posted a comment like that! (For more, see Mediaite, or get the backstory at The Guardian.) Say something that would have been regarded as a needless-to-say, self-evident fact throughout thousands of years of human history, and the "woke" will now put you in prison for it or fire you from your job!
Tell me we are not now solidly inside of George Orwell's world of 1984. (WARNING: That's a link that pays me if you decide to buy the book, BUT you can also use it to find out more information about this classic book if you're a snowflake that hasn't read anything old-world and backward, as in dated before you were born when the world awoke due to your generation's advent of collective wisdom, love and tolerance.) Thoughtcrimes are now a social reality -- a legally punishable offense of the first degree under law. Soon they may be punishable even if you don't express them to anyone or carry out a violent act but simply wrote your hateful views in a diary intended for your own eyes only. What are facts anymore in a world where hearsay evidence is enough to impeach a president of the United States?
Believe what the snowflakes and the extreme left want you to believe, or be "canceled" by them (or imprisoned) because they are the loving ones. They are the tolerant. Anyone who believes elsewise is intolerant and should be put out of the public conscience so the tolerant ones can live their lives of peaceful coexistence and acceptance of alternate realities without hostile interruption by old-school dissonant (and now dissident) voices.
If being male or female is not black or white, neither is being Black or White
Let's see if we can have a logical conversation in a now illogical world. The US is no longer a nation that cares about hardwired truth or that enshrines freedom of speech. It cares about hearing what it wants to hear and not anything that doesn't "feel good." It cares about being protected from speech. You can burn the US flag with total impunity as a form of free speech to express your hatred of the entire nation, but you will go to prison for much of your life if you burn the rainbow flag because you hate people who claim, counter to the hardwired fact of their bodies, that they are gender-fluid.
I'm saddened that some states have created gender-neutral birth certificates as a way to confuse little children to the point of lifelong misery by convincing all of them that they cannot really tell what sex they are by simply looking at their bodies. For thousands of years children lived free of that burden. Indeed, most adults never knew it as a burden throughout their lives. It was considered a given of nature, so most of society never had to think about it, much less worry over it.
The states that have created the first gender-neutral birth certificates (and created twisted school systems that teach gender-neutrality) have suddenly burdened all children with now having to try to figure out what gender they are when 99% of children had it automatically figured out for them in the past and never worried about it for one second during the entirety of their lives. That new burden at an early age is considered a gift to all children!
Now, because of the 1% or less that did worry about it, all children are told in schools they may need to figure it out, which is telling them they need to worry about the most existential question of their lives from an early age -- WHAT are they? It's an even bigger question than "who do I like to have sex with?" It's what sex am I? What half of the human race do I belong to? It's something that for thousands of years was a simple given. It was the one thing in life you didn't have to worry about unless you were among the fewer than 1% who felt confused about that.
Try to even imagine the burden adults are placing on children for years to come. If an adult tells you as a child or even implies that you cannot tell what sex you are by looking at your body or even by your DNA, and you see from the evidence on your birth certificate that even a doctor apparently could not tell what sex you are, then how on earth are you supposed to figure it out? Children will decide they don't know how to know. Am I female because I played with a doll or wore pink? How do I tell if my body cannot be trusted and if adults cannot tell me? As generations come and go, more and more people will be confused about something that was once accepted as simple given fact. Who are you to think you know what you are when all the adults around you pretend not to know?
It's abusive. It's abusive to children to put all of them in the position of struggling with such a core identity question for the sake of a small fragment of humankind who feels hurt because of how people respond to their own gender confusion. Therefore, foist the confusion on everyone.
We have recently become a society where men must be allowed into women's bathrooms, but that is not perverted so long as they tell the courts they feel like a woman on the inside. It's a crime to kick them out. They may in actuality be going in to watch or lure little girls, but who will know? It is more important to this society to make the rare people who feel they are in the wrong body more comfortable than to make every little girl more secure ... as they were when society didn't let men go into women's restrooms and considering them a perv if they did.
Since bathrooms are entirely about bodies, what's wrong with just saying, "You go into the bathroom that matches your body type, regardless of how you identify in your mind." They are rooms for nothing other than to carrying out bodily functions, not for minds. How is it damaging to someone who feels they are a different gender than what their body states to have them go into the restroom that matches their body type? That is not saying anything to them that their body does not scream out every day when they look in the mirror. So, until you change your body, stay with the room that fits your body. Restrooms are not intellectual places that need offend your being.
How is that doing people violence? No one else in the men's restroom cares or is looking at you if you have a man's body. Well, maybe some gay fellow is, but so what? Think what you want, but you are only in there to relieve your body's needs in a room designed to most efficiently take care of that body's functions. It's a body room, not a personality exploration room.
Our society is inventing new reasons to feel legally offended every day. I read recently that urinals are now considered offensive if they are in non-gendered restrooms. I guess men will have to do without that convenience since it is now offensive to the trans-women in the room, never mind that having them for men would speed things up for all women in the family restroom line, too.
You can change your sexual organs, but you still have the same male or female DNA you were born with; so you cannot truly change your gender. You can pretend like you did because you made it look like you did and are taking pills to make it feel like you have. I have to ask what was most likely corrupted -- the software, which is highly programmable or the hardware, which is hard wired at the core processing level?
I'm thinking it's clearly more likely that people who think they are male in a female body or vice versa have a software bug -- a sexual identity disorder that messed up their programming -- but that is considered a HORRID thing to say; whereas, for some completely irrational reason, saying that they have a hardware issue and were messed up by being uploaded into the wrong body is perfectly sane and entirely kind. What a truly messed up society we have become.
How peculiar that people find it more offensive for me to think their software is messed up than to think their hardware is messed up! For some odd reason they think people exist only as their minds, and not also as their bodies. Even though their bodies matter so much they feel compelled to change them, they do not believe their bodies define them, not even their sexuality. They think their existence is defined only by their minds and not by their genetics that laid out a script for their bodies to follow that their minds disagree with. It could not be that the body is right and the mind is wrong! You're hateful if you think so.
Let's follow the logic out: What if they think they are a different species and want physical changes to match what they think they are? There are people who think they are something other than human. Should society protect that as normal and make it a hate crime to say they should just accept being human because they have human DNA? Should plastic surgeons help them align their bodies with their chosen species identification? Will it be a crime to recommend psychological treatment.? Should their birth certificates be species-neutral so all children can decide what species they want to be?
What if they only think they were born the wrong race and want to declare themselves Native American on their birth certificate, though they were born Caucasian? (I'm sure Elizabeth Warren would have found it helpful to allow that modification to birth certificates. At least, she might have until the political-correctness police attacked her.)
After all, if you cannot tell by looking at someone whether they are male or female, then you certainly cannot tell by looking at them what race they are! How do you know what race they identify as? So, race should not be on birth certificates either. Perhaps it will soon become illegal to even mention if someone is male or female based on appearance and then illegal to mention their race. (In some situations, it now is. Maybe it should be in all situations.)
Being a man or a woman is certainly as core-level as race. If having male DNA does not define you as male, then having White or Black DNA doesn't define you either. In that case, having homo-sapiens DNA doesn't define you as human either. What if you think you are a plant? Maybe birth certificates should become kingdom-neutral, too. Obviously some people are vegetables since some think you can switch from being a man to a woman (or vice versa) by changing your plumbing and taking hormones, even though your DNA keeps screaming throughout your body and throughout your life that you are still what you were born as, and you will still hand that down genetically! Until you can strip every last Y chromosome out of a man, you cannot make him truly a woman, and until you can add a Y chromosome to every cell in a woman, you cannot make her a man, no matter how many other modifications you crudely attempt because at the core of their hardwired genetic code, they remain what they were born as.
People seem to have forgotten that we are incarnate. By that I mean we are as much a product of our flesh as of our brains. Some of us have forgotten apparently that our brains are just flesh, too; so, there is no more reason to say our brains should dictate who we are meant to be than our bodies. As for our MINDS, well mind is a product of our conscious experience of our own flesh internally interacting with the external natural world around us, so who is to say the mental development of our own gender awareness could not become so malfunctioning based on experience to where it becomes incongruent with our flesh? But that's an unkind thought!
We know that people have all kinds of identity disorders, so what makes more sense (albeit is totally incorrect on the basis that people hurt when they hear it) -- that some people's programming got out of alignment or that the hard fact of their bodies is entirely wrong? And why is it more insensitive to think they have the wrong programming than to think they have the wrong body? If it is a mental delusion, do I help them by participating in it and reinforcing it?
Here's a ready example: there are people who think they should be an amputee, even though both arms are perfectly whole and functional. Is it helpful to chop off a perfectly good limb they could make ample use of to help them match their body image, or might there be something that could be done psychologically to correct a glitch in the programming that falsely makes them feel they should have one less arm? I don't think chopping off limbs is the compassionate answer even if it is the one they insist on.
How is sexual identity any less likely to get screwed up than our thoughts about how many arms we should have when one of the most screwed up parts of the human psyche is the act of sex, itself. Humans have numerous identity disorders. What is more normal than admitting human sexuality is frequently screwed up and that our sexual identity may be screwed up, too? When we get messed up, it can be pretty core level. So, is it kind to help people mutilate their bodies to match their body image, rather than seek to understand what might have happened in the human psyche to set their programming out of alignment with their actual body?
Regardless of the sense or senstivity of such questions, are you going to put me in prison for asking them and suggesting that society's thinking has divorced itself entirely from objectivity (a problem I face in writing about economics and markets all the time). Go ahead. I'll wear it like an honor and constantly use my incarceration to make my point in writing about how screwed up society is. I'm not going to give up on freedom of speech because some people can't handle the truth. Suck it up, Buttercup.
Everything is offensive
US society has taught itself to be offended by things that were regarded normal by everyone in the world for thousands of years. If someone appropriates your cultural dress, it's no longer a compliment to your style as it used to be; it's an insult and it's cultural thievery. If people use something about your identity, such as the fact that you are an Indian by calling themselves the Braves, it's no longer a statement of honor to you now that we've been taught it is a dishonor. We are taught we are treating certain people groups like animals because teams are commonly named after bears and tigers. Therefore, people should feel degraded by that! But, in fact, teams are named after things we find powerful or admire.
I say the only reason it is a dishonor to name some sports teams after people groups is that some people have said it is, and they have convinced the weak majority to see themselves as victims. By their illogic, cowboys should feel downtrodden by Dallas, and people working in the oil industry should feel burned by Houston, and meat packers should feel tenderized in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Gold miners with a claim made in 1849 should stake out the grounds for a harassment suit in San Francisco. We should all feel insulted and all sue each other!
On the other hand, if it is an honor to one group of people to name your team after them, it is an honor to any group of people because who names their team after something they despise? Yet, it has become politically incorrect, and people have been taught to feel insulted by it when they could feel honored!
However, there is no logic in US political correctness because the ruling majority has no interest in truth, and logic is built from truth values, not feelings. It is all about feelings. What matters in the new millennium is that people feel insulted, even if they only feel that way because someone taught them they should. Someone said that team monikers are degrading to people groups, so those people should feel insulted. It couldn't possibly be that we name our team the Braves or the Cowboys because Indian braves and western cowboys are regarded as being strong and we want to associate our team with the native or cultural strengths of our region. Just think: we could be teaching people it is a great honor, and then all frayed feelings would be automatically heeled. They would never be hurt in the first place because of how we choose to look at that.
I happen to think that hatred, by itself, is not a crime or even a sin; but it certainly isn't good and certainly can cause people to commit crimes and can damage your own being. However, I think we'd do better by teaching the world to love than by punishing hatred if no crime has been committed or raising the cost of a crime for destruction of property to sixteen years in prison just because the crime was motivated by hatred or perhaps by misconstrued biblical beliefs. You are not going to end hatred by trying to eradicate it directly. You'll probably only make it worse. Even Jesus said we should let the weeds grow with the wheat because, in pulling out the weeds, we'll only disturb the good wheat.
So, lock me up and throw away the key because, so long as I keep writing, I'm going to keep writing what I think is the objective truth, whether most people love it or hate it. And I happen to believe free speech is more important than freedom from speech (that I don't like). I happen to think that a crime is worthy of the same punishment, whether it came about due to hatred or greed or anger. Will I feel worse because I am being stabbed by someone out of hatred than I feel if I am stabbed because someone thinks I am worth less than the twenty dollars in my wallet? Either way, the perp regarded my humanity as so worthless that he left me bleeding out and dying on the street.
I'm not going to switch to pronouns like "zhe" when "he" and "she" have sufficed for millennia. I'm not going to switch to calling an individual "they" as if that person is more than one, confusing everyone, just because they've decided they are gender neutral. (Such as "I saw Shawn, and they gave me a hug," instead of "he" or "she gave me a hug."
It's not that I dislike them; it's that I think that is ridiculous and weak and far too complicated to have to figure out when I used to be allowed to just look at each person and call him or her by what I saw. I don't have a big enough memory to program in all the personal pronouns I might need to use to avoid offending each individual and apply them in my database to all the correct individuals. It's just too complicated with too many ways to unintentionally offend someone.
So, if you look like a woman but believe you are man, you can feel offended or not when I call you "she," but I'm not going to reprogram my whole world and rewrite thousands of years of history into gender-neutral literature to help you feel more complete or less offended. I don't hate you, and I'll be kind to you, and I'll even try to protect you from people who abuse you because the one thing I hate most is hatred.
However, I'm not reprogramming my objective world to realign with your highly subjective psyche, and I'm not abusing you when I simply call the world as I see it for what it plainly is, exactly as thousands of years of humanity would have called it. As a writer and an American, I will stand by the enshrinement of free speech and not for freedom from speech. Ours is the aberrant period in history, not all the rest of human history.
What does commitment to truth mean for the future of this blog?
As a writer on economics, I will tell you what you don't want to hear if the truth so mandates. The corollary to that is that I'll stop writing on this subject if I am increasingly inaccurate in laying out the objective truth about the economy and where it is going because I'd rather terminate my own writing than promote beliefs that are not true. It's not as though I make most of my income from this or derive any fame, so it is not worth doing if it is not, on the balance, helpful and true.
One of my underlying beliefs is that, if my understanding of economics and or our US economy and the global economy is reasonably accurate, it should help me see where the economy is headed. So, I'm going to review how I've done in that respect and see if this blog is worth continuing into the next year.
I'll be sharing that with you at the end of the year based on the economic trajectory I laid out in my first Patron Post last January when people started supporting the blog with patronage. I do not even remember all that I wrote in that post in order to know at this point how I did overall. I won't hang myself up for one or two errors, as no humans are above that; so, that would be an arrogant standard, but I will look objectively point by point to see how I did on balance -- to see if it was all more helpful than harmful -- and I will point out the errors in that article wherever events did not go as I thought they would.
As we move into that re-evaluation, I'd like to hear your suggestions of what you think should change in how I go about things or what other topics you think I might be more suited to or ... whatever guidance or criticism you want to give. It's just part of objective evaluation. Corporations are supposed to evaluate themselves objectively (though they don't), and I should, too. I'm not going to change just to be popular, but I will change if the reasoning makes sense and isn't asking me to say things I don't believe just because you believe them. (Of course, I know I'm leaving myself wide open to TruBlu22, but that doesn't matter. It's time to take stock on the continuance of this blog. Last year I continued because things came in very close to how I thought they would.)
Thank you to the many who stepped in with support last year; and, if my self-evaluation comes up too short and I decide to discontinue, I'll honor your pledges by continuing to write on the topic long enough beyond the start of the new year to give back something for your support until then. I've been writing on this subject for many years, so it may be time for a change of topic just for interest sake, but I'll certainly let you know at the start of the new year what I've decided, and mentioning it now gives a couple of weeks for us to discuss it in the comments below, particularly in order for me to honor your commitment if you've been a patron.
I think the start of a new year as we roar into the new twenties (whether we're roaring for good or bad) is the right time for serious self-reflection. Because I've been at this a long time, I get a little weary of the subject sometimes, and that could be coming through. Maybe I need to freshen up a bit.
So, lay it on me. I've not hesitated to write about when I am right, but that's always been with the belief that doing so is only non-arrogant if you are equally open to point out where you are wrong or to hearing it. (When people present themselves like mere trolls, however, I don't give their opinion much respect.) I can easily feel as good (maybe even better and freer) about moving on to entirely different kinds of writing that I enjoy -- such as comedic screenplays and unmarketable poetry -- as about staying with what one reader who hasn't posted his moniker here in months calls "the dismal science." (Because it's dismal, I try to throw in a little humor sometimes, though I was told by one reader my humor is sophomoric, such as when I call people names like Ben Burn-the-banky or Lunatic Larry, and that it discredited my writing. That kind of criticism is fair enough, but my name-calling is now presidential in tone, so I've been vindicated ; )