Monday, December 18, 2023

A Culture of Unreality

 Our social milieu is delusional in so many ways, largely by design. Yet the toxic seepage from Bizarro World Academia into social media, schools, government, non-profit orgs, and overall culture cannot be overstated. People under 20 are probably the most influenced, but so are those in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and up.

If social media is any indication, what these cohorts have in common is an apparent total disconnect from nature, and from reality overall. They can’t tell the difference between fact and opinion. They’ve never learned to watch or question their own thoughts, thereby learning that much of what they think is fleeting and unreal. They never learned critical thinking or to challenge themselves.

They don’t have problem-solving skills because most of these coddled children never had to solve any. Someone always rushed in to do that for them. They didn’t get free play, especially outside, with kids of their own choosing. Unlike the baby boomer cohort, they never got to decide what to do with other kids, like make up games and the rules for those games, and together solve the problems that arose, or learn how to deal with the problematic kids. In person, face to face.

They didn’t build forts together with found materials, or play in the woods, pretending to be explorers or pioneers or Native Americans (all of which would now be considered very BAD, a violation of critical social justice theories and therefore akin to VIOLENCE). Besides, what woods in towns are even left now?

These kids played in adult-organized sports league teams, and in some cases there was no winning team or losing team, so the kids didn’t learn how to deal with disappointment and loss, or develop the qualities of good sportsmanship and behaving with dignity when things didn’t go your way.

So their earliest years, a critical time for free play and exploration, was given over to parent-arranged activities, with frequent adult input, and adult-selected playmates, adult-imposed solutions.

 These people as parents seem to have little if any grasp of developmental psychology or biology. They don’t seem to get how the imagination is a huge feature of early childhood, or the fact that the child’s brain is still actively forming and developing, and it will be years before they are capable of adult-level thinking. Years before the frontal cortex is finished at age 23-25.

There’s a reason children are not allowed to make their own legal and medical decisions. Why they’re not allowed to vote, operate complex machinery, even if they could do so without being able to reach the pedals.

When a young child says “I’m a horse”! Or "I'm Superman"! It doesn’t mean they’re expressing a wish to be implemented permanently for the rest of their lives, and for which they have no ability to even begin to comprehend what that means.

It’s NORMAL for young children to pretend they are someone they are not – it’s a key feature of the young child’s development. A little boy announcing he’s a girl, or Wonder Woman, or some other female, a little girl pretending she’s a boy because she likes to play with the cool “boy” stuff, is a normal developmental event. It does NOT mean the child is “trans”, or was “born in the wrong body.”

And what is the agenda of those asserting such nonsense, and hiding behind their professional titles to do so? Attention? Funding? Peer approval? Or something more insidious?

The acolytes of this cult of gender woo have wormed their way into every level of public life, especially public schools. The NGOs promoting this unproven theory have an open door to present this ludicrous storyline from the preschool level on up. They are misleading children, and confusing children with concepts that are beyond their ability to evaluate and question.

Young children generally believe adults without question, or try to, to the best of their abilities. Hence the push from these acolytes to access the youngest children possible.

Gender ideology, while claiming to support people “being who they are”, is in fact based on the oldest and most tired sex-based stereotypes of human behavior: Blue is for boys, pink is for girls. Toy trucks and tractors are for boys. Dolls and easy-bake ovens are for girls. Boys like building things. Girls like pretending to be mothers. Boys are strong and aggressive. Girls like to look pretty and cheer them on. And some of that can be seen in children’s play, but what seems to be ignored are all the kids who also like to play and pretend things outside these limited stereotypes.

But according to gender ideologists, any child not conforming to these limited, rigid sex-based stereotypes is possibly someone who should be evaluated for social “transition” as soon as possible. And of course what follows THAT? Medical transition, with puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones for life (and the attendant serious side effects, sterility, and inability to ever orgasm), and/or surgery. 

This. Is. Nuts.

Saturday, November 4, 2023

When Both Left and Right Sound Loony: Lots of Unanswered Questions

Yes, right wing extremists have a very well-funded platform and a disturbing agenda. The disturbing agenda part feels strangely familiar.

I think it would be refreshing if a major left-leaning site finally acknowledged the left's social/political agenda; specifically,  its ambitious attempts to insert gender ideology, queer theory, and critical race theories into schools, government agencies, non-profits, and just about everywhere else. They've already taken over social media, universities, and completely captured the democratic party - yet not a word about that is ever uttered by the mouthpieces of what passes for the left these days. Perhaps they're terrified of their own readers: Some are likely the same vitriolic, misogynist, and sanctimonious arbiters of cultural correctness we're inundated with on social media.

This may come as a surprise to some, because those of us who do not embrace these unsupported post-modern social theories have largely been de-platformed and demonized as "bigots" by the politically righteous on social media platforms. Which is a tad ironic coming from the compulsive virtue signalers who now vilify an entire race of people, but irony sails over many heads these days, on either side of the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, the "critical" part of critical social justice apparently does not include "critical thinking", which is now a foreign concept to Americans in general, whether left or right. While I never was part of the latter, I no longer fit into the former. And I'm far from the only one.

The hate and intolerance of the left, aimed at anyone who doesn't embrace their unsupported theories or "affirm" biological impossibilities, is just as big of a threat to our country/culture as the hate and intolerance of the right. 
 
And the promotion of  divisive social theories  - who is benefiting from the mindset of dividing people, of keeping conflict front and center? From insisting that literally everything has to do with race, and that an entire race - white people - are born bigots? From conflating the teaching of an accurate history with critical race theory, which are separate issues? From viewing absolutely everyone and everything through the binary lens of "oppressor and victim"? From the assertion that heterosexuality and "normalcy" is somehow bad, or at the very least, not appealing? Who benefits from insisting everyone pretend that humans can actually change their biological sex by wishing it so, along with lifelong cross-sex hormones plus surgery?  Or for that matter, the ludicrous notion that a person's biological sex is "assigned at birth"?
 
 Who is benefiting from telling children - little kids, ffs - that "they may have been born into the wrong bodies" if their interests and play choices don't conform to rigid, regressive sex-based stereotypes?  It's almost like there's an entire industry seeking to create a generation of lifelong medical patients. Oh wait...

 What happened to the sex-based rights and protection of actual women? Why are women called names and even physically attacked BY THOSE ON THE LEFT, for fighting for their own domains like locker rooms, changing rooms, sports teams, shelters, bathrooms, and even jail cells?  Why is the comfort and safety of women not an issue, and how is it that leftist women themselves center the wishes/delusions of a tiny minority of males over women's needs and wants? These self-described progressive women seem so pathetically desperate to position themselves as kind and inclusive, yet can't be bothered to include actual women in their consideration. This is apparently what passes for "feminism" these days on the left.

And why are the LGBTQ alphabet groups ignoring the homophobia promoted by gender ideology? Could it be because LGBTQ etc is now in reality TTTQ? (All trans all the time, with a dash of "queer" thrown in for that extra edginess). Lesbians are now not allowed to have women-only gatherings, dating sites, or clubs, because that would be "transphobic" to not include the men who pretend they are women. Seriously? Hel-looooo....what part of "same sex attraction" do the gender acolytes not get?!
 
Why aren't these kinds of questions ever addressed, or even asked, in the media? Why is no one on the so-called left allowed to discuss any of this without being utterly vilified? What does it tell you when even the most insightful, articulate writers with media platforms avoid these questions and issues like the plague?  Shouldn't that be seen as at least problematic?

Individuals like me, who have never had an affinity for the right, who also aren't centrists, and now can't relate to much of the left, are politically and socially homeless.
 
It feels strange and alienating. When listening to many progressives now, I find myself thinking the same thoughts I'd have when listening to MAGA folks: "How can you actually believe stuff like this?!"