Block crypto-fascists and keep em in their echo lo

As some background, I have a masters in counseling with a specialization in addiction and I currently work at a methadone clinic where I operate intensive outpatient treatment for people coming down off of heroin.

I’ll start off by saying, yes, every drug should be decriminalized and tbh each drug should have a dosing program in order to dose safely, securely, free of charge, and without any strings attached. The current system (even the culture of some people in my dosing clinic!) tends to treat substance abuse far more punitively than any other type of mental health service and it’s a fucking shame we’re still dealing with stigma and the perception of “moral failure” attached to substance use and recovery.

I am also of the mind that there is no such thing as a “bad” drug. The drug is a chemical. It can be neither good nor bad. It just is. And they work in our brain the way they were meant to - whether made by nature or crafted by human hands. What makes the difference is a person’s relationship with that drug as well as the circumstances in which they are used.

When it comes to my stance on this post, it boils down to the safety of the public at large. And the reality of what unchecked and fully accessible drug use across the nation / globe would mean. Now it’s pretty vague in this post, but while I don’t believe drugs should be demonized nor criminalized as they currently are, I do not believe having highly addictive substances (especially ones with higher chances of overdose) available in, say, every gas station is the answer either. Because in reality addictive substances - when used in the wrong relationship and wrong circumstances - has the potential to cause drastic harm and / or death to the person using.

And before anyone says “but what about nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol??” Yeah, I’m not lost on the irony of this. Alcohol is one of the worst drugs on your body, one of the most addictive, and is one of the only drugs you can die from withdrawal of, yet a giant portion of the world’s culture is built on it’s usage. I’ve always found it fascinating and yet infuriating how we decide which drugs are “good” thus legal, and “bad” thus illegal, despite many having extremely similar chemical makeups (example: morphine vs heroin).

I guess my summary is that, yes, in many ways I agree with the sentiment. However, I think the solution is going to ultimately be more complicated than fully legalizing every drug and letting people do as they wish - which becomes an extremely grey area anyways as soon as someone takes an addictive substance, because is it truly consent if their brain demands more?

1 - It is around 40 AD, you are the greco-babylonian Occultist Hermes Trismegistus, you read some early vedic philosophy and write some fun mystic stuff about how oftentimes things are created when opposites combine. You use a lot of imagery related to male and female organs. You have just invented what will eventually be called Hermeticism.

2 - It's 2017, someone on 4chan reads that soy products have plant estrogen in them. People are not plants and it has no effect on people, but suddenly soy products are responsible for the feminization of the western male and therefore the downfall of civilization. This is the birthplace of the transphobic epithet soyboy.

3 - If soy products are feminine, what are some products with say, plant testosterone in them? 4chan fixates on onions. Queue months worth of posts of channers chugging onion juice to own the libs.

4 - You are Jordan Peterson, you're a self help writer down on his luck. You've got an audience of angry young men who feel emasculated by the failures of late capitalism, and you've read a lot of hermetic philosophy. It's time to cache in.

5 - You create what will become the foundation of neofascist metaphysics. You take the hermetic idea of male and female energies literally, positing that all things in their essence are either inherently male or inherently female, with no in-between. This allows said young men to blame bad things on their inherent spiritual feminity, rather than say, capitalism.

INGREDIENTS:

bratwurst

chicken batter mix (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS:

batter that bad boy

fry for eight minutes

I genuinely saw a person in the comments say “half of landlords in the us own only 1-10 properties, it’s not like these are rich people.” ?!????????

Most people don’t own their own cars let alone a single property. At any point if you have enough money to purchase multiple properties, you are in a different class than working people.

Beyond that, I see people saying things like “most landlords barely charge more than their mortgage” well first of all that’s just not true but even if it was can you really not see how unethical that is?

Racism, generational poverty, and classism keeps most people from being able to finance a house of their own forcing them to rent. You have the privilege to finance multiple properties and you take the vast majority of working class peoples hard earned income to pay your mortgages and line your pockets. In 10 years you have 10 properties that you now own off of nothing but the hard work and extorted wages of working class people and these people have....nothing.

Chickens coming home to roost, and all that…

There exist a large chunk of people who honestly, genuinely believe that there are no physical differences between biological men and women. I never ran in to any such people until grad school, when I got in a bit of trouble for explaining to a badly out of shape woman that fighting a man is almost always significantly more difficult than fighting a woman–that’s why it’s considered a much greater offense for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man, after all. Commonsense shit.  

This being the halcyon days of 2010, there was enough space for the non-moronic people around me to nod in agreement. Older school feminists, aware that a complete embrace of relativism could rob them of the privilege of victimhood, rallied in my defense.

In 2020, a young humanities grad student could easily see his career ended for making such a statement. No one would say a word in support, lest they risk ruin themselves. The more obviously incorrect a belief is, the more violent its believers are in defending it. If your argument is paper thin and can be easily rebutted by a small child, you cannot broker any dissent toward it. This is a human tendency that certainly does not stem solely from the vagaries of contemporary liberal identity politics, but oh my god they have weaponized it to a degree I did not honestly think was possible.

Because now, good god, now this belief–so manifestly and obviously wrong that it qualifies as a delusion–this is now orthodoxy. You are not allowed to push back against it in public. Trans women are women and since all women are the same trans women in sports have no advantages over regular women because they don’t, they just don’t, they’re exactly the same, every bit about them is the exact same. 

An oft-repeated line is that there exists “zero evidence” demonstrating male athletic advantage. This is untrue, but we could probably forgive scientists for this omission even if it were–kinda like how very few studies have been done demonstrating that the sky is blue or water is wet, researchers don’t tend to focus too much on matters that were so settled they were never even raised.

The existence of women’s only sports leagues, at the very least, suggests that there’s some profound differences in the athletic abilities of the sexes. Then there’s the fact that every single track and field world record is presently held by a biological male. Ditto weightlifting records. There’s also that one time that both the Williams sisters got the living shit beat out of them by a dude who was ranked 203rd in the world and took cigarette breaks during matches. 

But, oh, here is where the professional obfuscators from Gender Studies departments get to deploy their skills. First we’re told that gender doesn’t exist so this conversation is moot. Also gender is the most important part of a person’s identity and it should determine their access to different spaces and even whether or not they have a right to speak. Gender is also not a binary but a scale, and also if you evince too many traits stereotypically associated with a different gender that means you’re trans. 

It’s very easy to build delusional cases when no one is allowed to criticize anything you say. Or when you have been allowed to position all your statements and beliefs as existing beyond the bounds of verifiability, because truth is just, like, a matter of preference. 

And that’s how we end up with this absolute masterpiece of a tweet thread by a feminist writer with a plethora of bylines in top-tier publications. Why should sports be gendered, she wonders? Gender is such an arbitrary distinction… why not segregate on something more tangible, like height or weight or skill?

Skills-segregated sports leagues are herein presented as a novel concept. The assumption being that sports are somehow not already segregated by skill? And that weight and height and athletic ability don’t factor into a person’s skillset? And that these aren’t very, very obviously influenced by sex? 

That’s the level of delusion we’re at right now. This is what you’re not allowed to criticize without risking professional and personal ostracization.

I’ve long complained about how Americans’ unfamiliarity with violence leads us to develop unhinged worldviews. This is how, in 2003, identity politickers like Dan Savage argued in favor of the Iraq war, since liberating that nation’s people would save its homosexuals from state oppression. It’s how I once attended a talk about “decolonization” that started with a moment of silence for our Brave Troops overseas. It’s how anyone can support starting new wars and still call themself a feminist, oblivious to the fact that the massive destabilization caused by literal war leads to hundreds of thousands of women being murdered, raped, and enslaved.

We’re now past that point, though. People aren’t just unfamiliar with violence. They are now unable to grasp the basic realities of embodied experience. We’ve become so convinced that material reality is inconsequential that it’s now verboten to suggest that male bodies and female bodies have different planes of athletic potential.

Girl’s sports are a social good. They’ve saved far more lives than all trans suicide hotlines and bottom surgery gofundme’s combined. This is something that even the vampires within the GOP recognize, and so while cutting women’s sports might be an easy cost saving measure as we enter into a presidential administration that will bring about unprecedented austerity, few programs will get cut.

There’s literally zero reference to empirical facts in this entire piece, it consists solely of polemics and attempts at dazzling the reader with emotionally charged references to imperialist atrocities in some kind of extremely cheap attempt at shocking the reader into accepting the nonsensical, paranoid notion that allowing trans women to compete with cis women in sports can, somehow, be compared to the large scale dismantlement of the welfare state, as well as, even more tastelessly, the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq by the American imperialist war machine. If it wasn’t already morally repugnant it would be a loathsome piece solely on the basis of how transparently cheap the rhetorical techniques deployed here are, and that’s all it’s about right? Pure rhetoric with absolutely zero research or facts backing it.

The fact that OP alleges to be a professor of English or something just serves to me as a clear indication of how easily the highly-educated fall into the trap of speaking completely outside their discipline with complete and utter confidence. Next time leave the sociology to the sociologists and the biology to the biologists, and refrain from writing these detestable culture war opinion pieces if you’re going to refrain from citing a single fact.

And frankly, the utterly needless shock value in trying to degrade the importance of trans suicide hotlines and other such forms of community support, while trying to actually make the utterly idiotic, juvenile claim that there’s some critical mass of trans people eagerly awaiting to pass more austerity measures and call all saintly socialist women evil TERFs makes it exceedingly transparent that the writer of this piece is simply interested in producing shlock that appeals to a small gaggle of hyper-online misanthropes, and is utterly disconnected from the reality that the vast majority of anti-trans culture warriors are, throughout the entire anglosphere, proven to be highly connected with neoliberal cultural and political institutions such as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and the United States Republican Party.

The bank takes your house because you failed to keep up payments on it. Due to your own failures and financial issues you haven’t satisfied the contract you signed when you started occupying the house.

A good round-up post regarding the current state of female erasure.

This has to be the worst: