Thanks, Lisa, for calling our attention to this. I sent a thank you to her and I sent versions of this to my reps:
Thank you for representing me. I am a long-time Democrat, a [county] resident, and a parent.
I am writing to share the brave, thoughtful statement by Shawn Thierry in the Texas House of Representatives, regarding SB 14. I am linking her written statement and the accompanying her video statement. Please read, and watch, and consider the arguments she offers for her position. Her statement highlights the lack of evidence behind gender-affirming care, her concerns about children's abilities to make life-long decisions, and the ways in which European countries have changed course, moving away from allowing such treatments for minors. I would be happy to share with you what I have learned in trying to understand this topic - and what concerns me.
We, in [state], should follow the lead of this brave Democrat, in order to protect the well-being of our vulnerable gender non-conforming minors from treatments that lack evidence and efficacy and that have already harmed many. I would like to see a similar bill in the [State] Senate and similar statements in defense of children's well-being on the Senate floor. I encourage you to build bridges across the aisle on behalf of our kids.
1 in 10 kids are ID’d as trans in the US. The incoming freshman class of U Wisconsin is over 20% trans ID-ing. No parent of school age kids has been able to escape the effects of this juggernaut.
If you don’t have school aged kids, you literally cannot understand the absurdity of what is happening.
These trender kids walk around threatening suicide if their peers and family don’t play along.
Affirmation-only for kids was driven, top-down by pharma and Jennifer Pritzker. It’s not based on data and it’s unbelievably radical, given the European research.
No reasonable politician could have expected trans to be the next fashionable teen aesthetic. 10 years ago, trans kids were so vanishingly rare, their medicalization was a fringe issue. The contagiousness is so bizarre and unexpected, it has painted the dems into a corner.
I am absolutely a single issue voter around this, as are other dem parents surprised to learn non-compliance = losing custody and state-mandated sterilization.
I wake up everyday in disbelief that my own party perpetuates the dystopia we are in. You have no idea how toxic this is for the children involved. It romanticizes suicide.
2/ Unfortunately, as a parent I am personally affected by this trend.
3/ Two criticisms:
a/ I wonder if you understand that posting, "I am absolutely a single issue voter around this" issue "absolutely" fails to engage with my question to Renate Bob.
b/ Re "Affirmation-only for kids was driven, top-down by pharma and Jennifer Pritzker. It’s not based on data":
Correct on the "data" point. But obtuse about the "drivers" - which I've analyzed at length elsewhere on this website. Basically, I've argued Democrats promote identity politics to avoid economic/class that would challenge economic power and inequality.
The Democratic strategy is exemplified here, in this 2016 statement by Clinton, employed to debunk Sanders' class/economic power criticisms of US injustice: "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?"
And the US right? Republicans are also fine attacking "liberal" identity politics to distract citizens from its destructive and unjust economic policies. And of course liberals and right wing reps scramble to outdo each other when they jack up wasteful and dangerous military spending each year.
Coastal Elite, you're reminding me that I used to send every new critical/questioning article to my kid's pediatrician, but I gave up because he seemed to be ignoring me. He seemed to be "captured". You're reminding me to keep going. Thank you.
Suggestions for what to do with kids on the "train already" are:
1. Give them the information in the Swedish film, Trans Train, regarding the dangers to the skeleton, literally meaning a child can get scoliosis from a weakened spine and this is documented there. Link to the English translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow-XwdauYr0
2. Get the child in touch with the detransitioner groups, and focus on those who "were so sure" but changed their minds after 7 years. Teach teens the roller coaster of their natural hormone levels and the fact that brain maturity does not occur until age 25.
3. Find a movement system which intrinsically reconnects mind/body, such as Alexander work or Feldenkrais physical therapy. I recommend Feldenkrais, which helped me recover from a terrible shoulder injury, and has given me a movement philosophy. Try out the Ute Heggen Wellness moves, based on strategies from both of these:
4. Make a schedule involving outside work either gardening, birdwatching, trail maintenance or other public service, cleaning up playgrounds, etc. There are so many damaging non-native plant species needing removal in almost every park and field these days. I have a successful wildflower management project ongoing, very absorbing and rewarding.
5. Discuss what narcissism is, what cults are, what social contagion is and how addiction to social media promotes them, while undermining mental health.
6. Be an adult who is in good shape, and does most of the above to have a strong mind/body connection. Adults with their noses in screens 24/7 are not good role models.
Good luck. I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey.
Apparently it wasn't clear that my comments are in response to this:
Ute Heggen [said]
6 hr ago
"I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey."
[END EDIT]
excerpt:
... the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.
In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.
Apparently it wasn't clear that my comments are in response to this:
Ute Heggen [said]
6 hr ago
"I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey."
"Progressives" have always been 1800s Victorians in that they require constant moral panics to justify their "missionary" projects, including the spread of "progressive" ideology via war mongering.
[In contrast, ] there was always a strong "isolationist" tendency in american culture, going back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", which linked taxes, imperialism, slavery, big govt and the military-industrial-complex.
The first major "progressive" politicians in the USA, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were insane xenophobes, racists and war mongers.
Wilson was famous for his vicious, xenophobic attacks on war resisters, especially German immigrants.
"Progressive" FDR continued the vicious attacks on war resisters, which he saw as a major impediment to getting public support for US entry into WW2.
Ultimately, the greatest, last real challenge to the expansion of the USA into an imperial power were "traditionalists" in the 1800s model of rejecting "foreign entanglements"
Description in 1899 of how the USA was mutating into an imperial power:
Politics are a function of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution.
The existing left-vs-right narrative is obsolete and dysfunctional, and an anchor around the neck of any project to move culture [past] the postmodern "crisis of meaning'.
I have no idea how the OHSU gender clinic is relevant.
This explains how (much of) the trans movement has been corrupted:
re: postmodern relativism (nebulosity of meaning) / epistemological indeterminacy and sophisticated awareness
(brain science and the nebulosity-pattern conundrum)
Again, the trans issue exposes a problem in the evolution of human psychology, in the context of postmodern social conditions and relativism/nihilism, also known as "the meaning crisis" (John Vervaeke).
Here is one of the best summaries of the core issue of that stuff and how meaning and language is subject to "deconstruction" by relativists:
My guess is that my crossdressing ex-husband would love this and would find a way, no matter what, to have an interpretation that makes excuses for committing fraud in court to get out of paying child support and lying to our sons constantly so that I had to explain why Daddy had to get electrolysis and has a swollen face when they come back from that weekend. Which happened.
What he "loves" is irrelevant. Wokeism is a quasi-religious, dogmatic cult. It represents the "pathological" version of postmodernism and ILLIBERAL, totalitarian neo-marxism.
The point is that we are in an era of postmodern values, like it or not, so developing an anti-fragile framework for responding to it is more effective than being reactionary.
answer: conventional categories of meaning, including mythic religion and scientific rationalism, are inadequate to FULLY capture emergent phenomena (see "Ghost in the Machine" Koestler) in the context of postmodern social conditions (which tend toward relativist, pluralistic, anti-absolutist thinking).
The rejection of such "absolutisms" by postmodernists is itself bizarre in that it is usually absolutist in its demands for the rejection of absolutism.
Thus, the "conundrum" in the nebulosity-pattern conundrum.
background: evolutionary psychology holds that the human mind evolved to take mental "short cuts", via the use of learned patterns, to reduce the amount of energy the human brain needs, and thus require less food and improve survival under primitive conditions.
the philosophical problem which is exposed by postmodernists is that the "scientific absolute" that pattern (objectivity, more or less) is more reliable than nebulosity (subjectivity more or less) is not always true.
the next stage in human evolution will presumably require a major upgrade to modern, rationalist, scientific thinking to (re)integrate nebulosity and subjectivity.
at that point the "one or the other" arguments , that either the pro-trans position (relativism, nebulosity, epistemological indeterminacy) is moral, good and true OR that the anti-trans position (scientific rationalism, objectivity) is true, ceases to be relevant because sometimes "truth" is indeed objective, rational, factual, physical and other times "truth" is a matter of subjective-relativistic narratives, emotions and cultural construction that vary from person to person and culture to culture.
short version: "wokeism" is a quasi-religious cult and an establishment propaganda scheme that exploits the "meaning crisis" (which co-emerged with 60s/70s counterculture).
A classical (economic) socialist, Dr. Christian Parenti, PhD science historian, explains how CIA funded Neomarxists like Herbert Marcuse sought to create "controlled opposition" on the cultural-left (see the "Useful Idiots" podcast/substack archive).
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
The new problem: During the twentieth century, it became apparent that attempts to build unshakable foundations had failed, and suspicion grew that it was actually impossible. That raised the threat of nihilism: perhaps everything is actually meaningless?
By the 1960s, mainstream systematic society and culture had become obviously dysfunctional. They failed to provide adequate meaningfulness, and there was general revulsion at the mainstream’s nihilistic moral breakdown.
...
The problems we have now: Throughout the twentieth century, from the beginning of the breakdown of the mainstream systems until the breakdown of subcultures, the underlying worry was “not enough meaning.” The atomized mode delivers, for the first time, way too much meaning. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose.
Because the shards of meaning do not relate with each other, it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial. The collapse of subcultural community has atomized society, and we find it impossible to construct satisfactory selves from the jagged fragments of meaning we’re bombarded with.
<<What did Democrats think was good about denying healthcare to detransitioners? Why care only about providing healthcare to young people while they’re still identifying as trans?>>
Simple. Detransitioners contradict the Borg's party line. Their existence must be concealed or denied or minimized or dismissed and ridiculed as MAGA propaganda. "Gender identity" including "gender fluid" is immutable, right?
This morning's NYTimes article is typical. Legislative efforts are uniformly described as in "Republican-controlled". There's no mention of the European countries, usually the gold standard for the Left in public healthcare policy, which are backing off from their aggressive approach. See https://nyti.ms/3OdXndx.
I also thanked her for her courage! We need more Democrats to stand up to this dangerous ideology that is hurting our children. I for one will not vote for any Democrat, who supports the gender theology ( it’s a religion in a way).
I disagree with your problem with bans. This is a runaway train. This is a decision that should only be made for adults by adults. Good for the the lady from Texas.
Hmm - the plot thickens. Shawn Thierry has also joined her Republican colleagues for a "book ban" on sexually explicit books, and in response to that vote, and the vote restricting "gender affirming care", her fellow Democrats have "censured" her.
"Why care only about providing healthcare to young people while they’re still identifying as trans?" Because the strict church succeeds by making it difficult to leave.
Lisa, wonderful and thoughtful, as always. You raise a good point: What do you do about the kids already on the medical path? Well, as far as young _boys_ are concerned (or AMAB, to be seen as using the "correct" terminology), we know estrogen is lethal (https://bit.ly/estro_on_men). So, stopping it as soon as possible is the correct way to go - at least we will stop them from harming themselves further. With the young girls unfortunate enough to start on testosterone, the evidence base of harm does not yet exist. As Dr Michael S Irwig, from the Center for Andrology and Division of Endocrinology at George Washington University, said in his review in The Lancet in 2017 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221385871600036X), “[a] major limitation in the study of testosterone therapy for transgender men is a paucity of high-quality data due to a shortage of randomised controlled trials…few prospective and long-term studies, the use of suboptimum control groups, loss to follow-up, and difficulties in recruitment of representative samples of transgender populations.” However, as more data is gathered about this new cohort, those harms will become much better quantified (as of now, we have to do with detransitioner stories like this one https://youtu.be/RmTx5GaV2zM; that does not make their experience any less real, just that they will be seen as anecdotes rather than proper analysis of data), and at that time, better guidelines can come out for these unfortunate young women. With young men, however, the guidelines are clear - estrogen, in pharmacological doses, is lethal for their bodies and brains, and should be stopped immediately.
Coastal, this is a terrific call to action, and I am saving it for ongoing reference. I know what you mean about the politicians. I have certainly had that experience in my attempts to get through to them (all Ds, where I live now). For contacting public officials, I think what is missing and sorely needed is a greater critical mass of activated voters pressing on them in a concerted, focused way. Your efforts to educate health care professionals are an absolutely fabulous example of how to develop that critical mass.
Thanks, Lisa, for calling our attention to this. I sent a thank you to her and I sent versions of this to my reps:
Thank you for representing me. I am a long-time Democrat, a [county] resident, and a parent.
I am writing to share the brave, thoughtful statement by Shawn Thierry in the Texas House of Representatives, regarding SB 14. I am linking her written statement and the accompanying her video statement. Please read, and watch, and consider the arguments she offers for her position. Her statement highlights the lack of evidence behind gender-affirming care, her concerns about children's abilities to make life-long decisions, and the ways in which European countries have changed course, moving away from allowing such treatments for minors. I would be happy to share with you what I have learned in trying to understand this topic - and what concerns me.
We, in [state], should follow the lead of this brave Democrat, in order to protect the well-being of our vulnerable gender non-conforming minors from treatments that lack evidence and efficacy and that have already harmed many. I would like to see a similar bill in the [State] Senate and similar statements in defense of children's well-being on the Senate floor. I encourage you to build bridges across the aisle on behalf of our kids.
Unless democrats wake up they will lose a lot of votes.
"Unless democrats wake up they will lose a lot of votes."
How do you know?
1 in 10 kids are ID’d as trans in the US. The incoming freshman class of U Wisconsin is over 20% trans ID-ing. No parent of school age kids has been able to escape the effects of this juggernaut.
If you don’t have school aged kids, you literally cannot understand the absurdity of what is happening.
These trender kids walk around threatening suicide if their peers and family don’t play along.
Affirmation-only for kids was driven, top-down by pharma and Jennifer Pritzker. It’s not based on data and it’s unbelievably radical, given the European research.
No reasonable politician could have expected trans to be the next fashionable teen aesthetic. 10 years ago, trans kids were so vanishingly rare, their medicalization was a fringe issue. The contagiousness is so bizarre and unexpected, it has painted the dems into a corner.
I am absolutely a single issue voter around this, as are other dem parents surprised to learn non-compliance = losing custody and state-mandated sterilization.
I wake up everyday in disbelief that my own party perpetuates the dystopia we are in. You have no idea how toxic this is for the children involved. It romanticizes suicide.
1/ I am sympathetic to much of yr post.
2/ Unfortunately, as a parent I am personally affected by this trend.
3/ Two criticisms:
a/ I wonder if you understand that posting, "I am absolutely a single issue voter around this" issue "absolutely" fails to engage with my question to Renate Bob.
b/ Re "Affirmation-only for kids was driven, top-down by pharma and Jennifer Pritzker. It’s not based on data":
Correct on the "data" point. But obtuse about the "drivers" - which I've analyzed at length elsewhere on this website. Basically, I've argued Democrats promote identity politics to avoid economic/class that would challenge economic power and inequality.
The Democratic strategy is exemplified here, in this 2016 statement by Clinton, employed to debunk Sanders' class/economic power criticisms of US injustice: "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?"
And the US right? Republicans are also fine attacking "liberal" identity politics to distract citizens from its destructive and unjust economic policies. And of course liberals and right wing reps scramble to outdo each other when they jack up wasteful and dangerous military spending each year.
Coastal Elite, you're reminding me that I used to send every new critical/questioning article to my kid's pediatrician, but I gave up because he seemed to be ignoring me. He seemed to be "captured". You're reminding me to keep going. Thank you.
Suggestions for what to do with kids on the "train already" are:
1. Give them the information in the Swedish film, Trans Train, regarding the dangers to the skeleton, literally meaning a child can get scoliosis from a weakened spine and this is documented there. Link to the English translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow-XwdauYr0
2. Get the child in touch with the detransitioner groups, and focus on those who "were so sure" but changed their minds after 7 years. Teach teens the roller coaster of their natural hormone levels and the fact that brain maturity does not occur until age 25.
3. Find a movement system which intrinsically reconnects mind/body, such as Alexander work or Feldenkrais physical therapy. I recommend Feldenkrais, which helped me recover from a terrible shoulder injury, and has given me a movement philosophy. Try out the Ute Heggen Wellness moves, based on strategies from both of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1SvNi3O1Sc&list=PLOFlPPQm71Ii-l-xoAlBZc5Iy9xZyfbUY
4. Make a schedule involving outside work either gardening, birdwatching, trail maintenance or other public service, cleaning up playgrounds, etc. There are so many damaging non-native plant species needing removal in almost every park and field these days. I have a successful wildflower management project ongoing, very absorbing and rewarding.
5. Discuss what narcissism is, what cults are, what social contagion is and how addiction to social media promotes them, while undermining mental health.
6. Be an adult who is in good shape, and does most of the above to have a strong mind/body connection. Adults with their noses in screens 24/7 are not good role models.
Good luck. I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey.
re: disruption of the social system (hierarchies of curated expertise) by techno-economic change
(jargon warning)
https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e4781b2bd9b5
[EDIT]
re: what went wrong with the "left"
Apparently it wasn't clear that my comments are in response to this:
Ute Heggen [said]
6 hr ago
"I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey."
[END EDIT]
excerpt:
... the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.
In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.
...
thanks for finally explaining what you are talking about!
"wokeism" is depraved and evil (most of the time).
re: what went wrong with the "left"
Apparently it wasn't clear that my comments are in response to this:
Ute Heggen [said]
6 hr ago
"I'm already old and am losing faith in the next generation. I do not understand how the emphasis on the natural of my 1960-70s youth turned into heavy drag make-up & 50 shades of grey."
"Progressives" have always been 1800s Victorians in that they require constant moral panics to justify their "missionary" projects, including the spread of "progressive" ideology via war mongering.
[In contrast, ] there was always a strong "isolationist" tendency in american culture, going back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", which linked taxes, imperialism, slavery, big govt and the military-industrial-complex.
The first major "progressive" politicians in the USA, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were insane xenophobes, racists and war mongers.
Wilson was famous for his vicious, xenophobic attacks on war resisters, especially German immigrants.
"Progressive" FDR continued the vicious attacks on war resisters, which he saw as a major impediment to getting public support for US entry into WW2.
Ultimately, the greatest, last real challenge to the expansion of the USA into an imperial power were "traditionalists" in the 1800s model of rejecting "foreign entanglements"
Description in 1899 of how the USA was mutating into an imperial power:
https://mises.org/library/conquest-united-states-spain
(trying again)
Politics are a function of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution.
The existing left-vs-right narrative is obsolete and dysfunctional, and an anchor around the neck of any project to move culture [past] the postmodern "crisis of meaning'.
I have no idea how the OHSU gender clinic is relevant.
This explains how (much of) the trans movement has been corrupted:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
re: postmodern relativism (nebulosity of meaning) / epistemological indeterminacy and sophisticated awareness
(brain science and the nebulosity-pattern conundrum)
Again, the trans issue exposes a problem in the evolution of human psychology, in the context of postmodern social conditions and relativism/nihilism, also known as "the meaning crisis" (John Vervaeke).
Here is one of the best summaries of the core issue of that stuff and how meaning and language is subject to "deconstruction" by relativists:
https://meaningness.com/nebulosity
and
https://meaningness.com/pattern
My guess is that my crossdressing ex-husband would love this and would find a way, no matter what, to have an interpretation that makes excuses for committing fraud in court to get out of paying child support and lying to our sons constantly so that I had to explain why Daddy had to get electrolysis and has a swollen face when they come back from that weekend. Which happened.
What he "loves" is irrelevant. Wokeism is a quasi-religious, dogmatic cult. It represents the "pathological" version of postmodernism and ILLIBERAL, totalitarian neo-marxism.
The point is that we are in an era of postmodern values, like it or not, so developing an anti-fragile framework for responding to it is more effective than being reactionary.
wtf does that mean?
answer: conventional categories of meaning, including mythic religion and scientific rationalism, are inadequate to FULLY capture emergent phenomena (see "Ghost in the Machine" Koestler) in the context of postmodern social conditions (which tend toward relativist, pluralistic, anti-absolutist thinking).
The rejection of such "absolutisms" by postmodernists is itself bizarre in that it is usually absolutist in its demands for the rejection of absolutism.
Thus, the "conundrum" in the nebulosity-pattern conundrum.
background: evolutionary psychology holds that the human mind evolved to take mental "short cuts", via the use of learned patterns, to reduce the amount of energy the human brain needs, and thus require less food and improve survival under primitive conditions.
the philosophical problem which is exposed by postmodernists is that the "scientific absolute" that pattern (objectivity, more or less) is more reliable than nebulosity (subjectivity more or less) is not always true.
the next stage in human evolution will presumably require a major upgrade to modern, rationalist, scientific thinking to (re)integrate nebulosity and subjectivity.
at that point the "one or the other" arguments , that either the pro-trans position (relativism, nebulosity, epistemological indeterminacy) is moral, good and true OR that the anti-trans position (scientific rationalism, objectivity) is true, ceases to be relevant because sometimes "truth" is indeed objective, rational, factual, physical and other times "truth" is a matter of subjective-relativistic narratives, emotions and cultural construction that vary from person to person and culture to culture.
hope that helps, if not, let me know.
short version: "wokeism" is a quasi-religious cult and an establishment propaganda scheme that exploits the "meaning crisis" (which co-emerged with 60s/70s counterculture).
A classical (economic) socialist, Dr. Christian Parenti, PhD science historian, explains how CIA funded Neomarxists like Herbert Marcuse sought to create "controlled opposition" on the cultural-left (see the "Useful Idiots" podcast/substack archive).
Also see:
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
excerpt:
The First Privilege Walk
BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI
NOVEMBER 18, 2021
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
...
re: 1960s/70s counterculture failure, explained by a Buddhist AI scientist
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
excerpts:
The new problem: During the twentieth century, it became apparent that attempts to build unshakable foundations had failed, and suspicion grew that it was actually impossible. That raised the threat of nihilism: perhaps everything is actually meaningless?
By the 1960s, mainstream systematic society and culture had become obviously dysfunctional. They failed to provide adequate meaningfulness, and there was general revulsion at the mainstream’s nihilistic moral breakdown.
...
The problems we have now: Throughout the twentieth century, from the beginning of the breakdown of the mainstream systems until the breakdown of subcultures, the underlying worry was “not enough meaning.” The atomized mode delivers, for the first time, way too much meaning. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose.
Because the shards of meaning do not relate with each other, it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial. The collapse of subcultural community has atomized society, and we find it impossible to construct satisfactory selves from the jagged fragments of meaning we’re bombarded with.
<<What did Democrats think was good about denying healthcare to detransitioners? Why care only about providing healthcare to young people while they’re still identifying as trans?>>
Simple. Detransitioners contradict the Borg's party line. Their existence must be concealed or denied or minimized or dismissed and ridiculed as MAGA propaganda. "Gender identity" including "gender fluid" is immutable, right?
This morning's NYTimes article is typical. Legislative efforts are uniformly described as in "Republican-controlled". There's no mention of the European countries, usually the gold standard for the Left in public healthcare policy, which are backing off from their aggressive approach. See https://nyti.ms/3OdXndx.
yep. "wokeism" is a quasi-religious, dogmatic cult. NYT is complicit in the "woke" cult's bizarro REGIME PROPAGANDA schemes.
Oh, amen on that Goldberg piece. Talk about misusing her platform, without doing ANY homework at all.
You are absolutely right!
I also thanked her for her courage! We need more Democrats to stand up to this dangerous ideology that is hurting our children. I for one will not vote for any Democrat, who supports the gender theology ( it’s a religion in a way).
Brava, Lisa. Well said!
I disagree with your problem with bans. This is a runaway train. This is a decision that should only be made for adults by adults. Good for the the lady from Texas.
Hmm - the plot thickens. Shawn Thierry has also joined her Republican colleagues for a "book ban" on sexually explicit books, and in response to that vote, and the vote restricting "gender affirming care", her fellow Democrats have "censured" her.
"Why care only about providing healthcare to young people while they’re still identifying as trans?" Because the strict church succeeds by making it difficult to leave.
Lisa, wonderful and thoughtful, as always. You raise a good point: What do you do about the kids already on the medical path? Well, as far as young _boys_ are concerned (or AMAB, to be seen as using the "correct" terminology), we know estrogen is lethal (https://bit.ly/estro_on_men). So, stopping it as soon as possible is the correct way to go - at least we will stop them from harming themselves further. With the young girls unfortunate enough to start on testosterone, the evidence base of harm does not yet exist. As Dr Michael S Irwig, from the Center for Andrology and Division of Endocrinology at George Washington University, said in his review in The Lancet in 2017 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221385871600036X), “[a] major limitation in the study of testosterone therapy for transgender men is a paucity of high-quality data due to a shortage of randomised controlled trials…few prospective and long-term studies, the use of suboptimum control groups, loss to follow-up, and difficulties in recruitment of representative samples of transgender populations.” However, as more data is gathered about this new cohort, those harms will become much better quantified (as of now, we have to do with detransitioner stories like this one https://youtu.be/RmTx5GaV2zM; that does not make their experience any less real, just that they will be seen as anecdotes rather than proper analysis of data), and at that time, better guidelines can come out for these unfortunate young women. With young men, however, the guidelines are clear - estrogen, in pharmacological doses, is lethal for their bodies and brains, and should be stopped immediately.
Another issue not being Discussed, HOW DID OUR CHILDREN GET HERE?
HMMMMM
THE PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM HAS BEEN POISONING OUR CHILDREN For THE PAST 10 YEARS!
I am speaking in regards to this attack. They have actually been after our children much longer.
I witnessed it firsthand Also.
I would love you opinion one the House's new members!
Coastal, this is a terrific call to action, and I am saving it for ongoing reference. I know what you mean about the politicians. I have certainly had that experience in my attempts to get through to them (all Ds, where I live now). For contacting public officials, I think what is missing and sorely needed is a greater critical mass of activated voters pressing on them in a concerted, focused way. Your efforts to educate health care professionals are an absolutely fabulous example of how to develop that critical mass.