Coming Back Down to Earth

You might want to pace yourselves on this one. It’s a bit of a long haul. And keep in mind that I’M saying that.

I hope you all realize you’ve ruined me. Sure, you thought you might have done me a favor by bailing me out of a bad spot and flooding my poor ego with well-wishes, but all you’ve done is completely destroy me.

Because see, you’ve shown with your compassion and your aid that the world is filled with wonderful and compassionate people, and well… that’s just it. I’m so happy right now that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write anything ever again for the site. All that carefully honed cynicism, bitter resignment, and of course the fires of my rage that stoke the whole half-cracked boiler might as well be a million miles away.

How can I possibly continue delivering the epic smackdowns when all I’m feeling is gratitude and love? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recreate it, but I’ll take a float down the backwaters of Outer Wingnutistan just for old time’s sake, just to see.

Jeff (Will You Capitalism Take Me to Be Your Lawfully Wedded Husband), Gay Quisling:
Bradley/Chelsea Manning: Should We Care?

Hee hee, that’s just cute. I mean, is there a single pro-gay-rights decision or dramatic coming out that the “proud gay conservatives” at Gay Patriot haven’t straight-up minimized or argued were meaningless or worthless or secretly bad for “true gay people”?

I mean, do you see how you’ve destroyed me?!? I can’t even manage half a shit to give about the dismissive treatment of her name. Fuck… Let’s try the next bend.

Jospeh Farah, It Will Always Be Wing Nut Daily to Me:
Bradley Manning and the Death of America

Oh Joseph Farah, you and your gay porn moustache are so silly… So what’s this one about?

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

  • The fact that a prominent subject of a national conversation and the highlight of major news story is trans* is literally destroying this nation. We will not be able to continue with this knowledge added to us. Also, this is what happens when you let queers join the military, even though he joined when we were still banning queers and… fuck you logic!

Meh. I mean, I understand it is deeply fucked up, but it just doesn’t unlock the portal to the Dimension of Venom where I get my post ideas like it used to…

I’m just going to have to accept that I’m washed up and finished. Hanging up my hat while still in my prime. I’m sorry, all, but your generosity has put an end to my…

Unless… on the horizon.

Kevin D. Williamson, National Transphobia:
Bradley Manning is Not a Woman

Could it be?

Subtitle: Pronouns and delusions do not trump biology.

That familiar taste of bile rising in my throat. That way my eye twitches. And the subject matter is so promising, with the ignorance not just being ignorant, but intentionally ignorant. Straight up celebrating in its triumphalist denialism. All from a guy who tried to argue that having manly sperm will give you more male sons.

But the fear remains, will the post be stupid enough to match the impressively awful title?

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

  • Trans* People are a literally mythic invention by feminists and hippies.

That’s… but… I… I… I’m actually pissed off again! Oh happy day!

Bring on the slaughtered calf and a hearty mug of grog, we are celebrating with a triple post. That’s right. A full frothy mango blend of ALL THREE POSTS.

Because what better way to thank you all for nearly destroying me with your kindness, than paying it back in kind and trying to destroy you as well (little bit of a vindictive streak)?

All right, so let’s separate these babies out and start with the squirt in the kiddie pool before we get to the five alarm bowel movement in the adult swim area.

Please Capitalism, Return my Calls, Gay Capo:
Bradley/Chelsea Manning:Should We Care?

Oh Jeffy, my boy, you truly have proven to be the only intern fit to continue B. Daniel Blatt’s unique blend of desperate selling out of his identity to those who hate him and want to die and lazy half-useless mutterings.

I’d say you should be proud of that, but I have the suspicion that if either of you approaches anything with the term “Pride” in it, you break out into hives and start spinning your head 360 degrees.

All week, I’ve had a nagging feeling that the GP blog should say something on this…

I absolutely love this opening. It so perfectly distills the fundamental problem at the core of the Shamed to be Gay Chorus.

They have a nagging feeling that maybe the blog about being a gay worshiper of all things chintzy and Made in China “patriotic” should actually comment about major queer issues directly tied to our military and one of THE central news stories of the last year?

Well, gosh, I wonder why that might be? The accumulated shame of everyone who shares a sexuality with them rolling their eyes right out of their socket over how hesitant the twin douches are to ever remind their core base of rabid homophobes that they happen to be gay?

but what? And why?

Blogging is HARD! Why should we have to do it?!?

Um… both of you? You do realize that upkeeping a blog is a choice, right? If it’s not making you happy and you can’t manage to write anything other than “ugh, I can’t believe I have to write another one”, you can move on and better spend your time doing what you love (like gazing bitterly at gay men actually enjoying their lives rather than living in semi-closeted self-loathing). No one’s actually forcing you to write for a blog you hate to a bunch of malcontents who hate you for existing.

After all, it’s just celebrity nonsense.

Shaw. I know right. I mean, all this blah blah blather about the inner lives of Chelsea Manning, like why would I care about her outside of her music…? Er… movie career? Something to do with being a wealthy heiress to some rich fucker? Or maybe she was on a reality TV show?

Uh, help me out, what did she do again? Uh huh, leaked evidence revealing that the US had committed war crimes in our names in what used to be seen as a proud journalistic tradition (Pentagon Papers, anyone?), before our national news media in this country became owned agents of our security theatre state.

Like, who cares? Let me know when Miley Cyrus does something that every other Disney-created teen “heatthrob” has done when entering the awkward years of trying to guess what being a grown-up with a full sexual identity looks like! Or something else real.

But I will make this easy observation:

They have tried being lazier, but Jonah Goldberg started threatening to sue for them stealing his shtick.

If Manning likes men, and always felt herself to be a woman, then she was never actually a gay man whose struggle with homosexuality drove her actions. She was/is just a straight woman who broke her oath.

Hey, accurate pronouns. Never expected to see that in a wingnut post (hey, I feel I should recognize the good when it so RARELY occurs).

But yeah… um… being trans* is still something that gets you thrown out of the military with a dishonorable discharge (DADT style). It was actually a pretty big subject at the time, seeing as how trans* servicemembers were in the same boat no matter how the DADT repeal went. Indeed, that was a major justification by the lawyers of Pvt. Manning on why they were burying as much information about her gender identity as they could before her trial.

Unless you’re arguing that Bradley Manning was handing over the information as some sort of form of gay sex foreplay that would have been half as hot if it was just straight-person sex, then that whole “justification” (not that there ever really was much of one or more importantly needed to be one) doesn’t really change much with the information that she is a straight transwoman rather than a gay cisman. In fact, it makes it rather more “justifiable” on that particular criteria as she is going from something with few rights to no rights at all in our broken military.

Also I get military protocol and “RULES ARE RULES” bitchfests, but fuck the oath crap. She was witness to war crimes and did what would usually be shrugged off as journalism 50 years ago. And she was definitely singled out and punished for “embarrassing the country” more than anything else. And we can see it with the stacked trial and the fact that it ended in the same bullshit guilty ruling as some of the Gitmo cases.

I mean, for all the blather about “THE LAW”, Stallone style, the “LAAAAAAW” is rather clear on what torturing a suspect is supposed to do to the case. I.e. drop it entirely, because mishandling and abusing a suspect taints the entire case and means you have to let the fucker walk because of your own terrible behavior as law enforcement personnel. Doesn’t matter what they do or what you got, that action makes the whole case tainted and means you got nothing.

And by that criteria, Chelsea Manning should have been let go at about the first mark where they had to fight to get psychologists to her because they were openly kicking the “freak” who “made us look bad”.

But hey, who cares about oaths and the law when it’s the little person suffering rather than the little person being made an example of by an abusive state apparatus that has successfully normalized and in practice legalized torture.

And on that happy note, next post!

The Moustache of I Swear I’m Not Gay, Wing Nut Daily:
Bradley Manning and the Death of America

I actually almost get a charge out of posts like this.

Why, you may ask? Well, it’s because they make me feel like a mother fucking bad ass warrior woman. What’s that? Just by existing, women like me topple empires and reduce mankind to gibbering insane wrecks unable to process reality, like some cross between Goth hordes and Cthulhu?

Fuck. Yes.

By now everyone’s heard the news.

Stop now. What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

Pfc. Bradley Manning,

Oh phew. I was concerned for a moment that not aggressively dismissing the names and pronouns of trans* people was starting to catch on. Luckily, the right-wing are still as terrible as ever on trans* issues. Joy, indeed.

a former Army intelligence analyst convicted of espionage for posting classified information with Wikileaks, has announced he’s a woman trapped in the body of a man.

And that, right there, is why that particular turn of phrase is all but abandoned by the trans* community and why even terms like “in an X body” are being phased out for more accurate labels like “assigned X at birth” and whatnot.

Apologies, nonetheless for those poor men and women who are literally imprisoned within the inner biology of giant oppressive demons of opposite gender identity to them, who are woefully abandoned by this shift.

Going forward, as he serves his 35-year sentence, he demands to be called “Chelsea”

I think it’s the anger they feel at this that’s the most baffling. It’s like they really feel like this is a personal imposition on them when someone has a different name that they have to remember.

Are they like this when a friend marries and changes their last name? Fuck, you used to be Suzie Jones and now you’re Suzie Smith. FUCK! How could you do this to me? Or when someone prefers a nickname or a shortened version of their name. Oh hello, Phillip, we just- (Oh, it’s just Phil. Ha ha.) … Get the fuck out of my house, you vile piece of shit. Fucking demanding ingrates trying to impose their names on me, I’ll show them all.

But hey, I guess if I was so privileged and divorced from anything even remotely resembling discrimination, I would also consider having to remember a different name a serious imposition on my time and dignity.

and insists that taxpayers provide him with sex-reassignment treatment and surgery.

Um… yes. It’s a medical request and we generally don’t deny those to prisoners because we are not actually Siberian Russia and we still at least pretend to give a fuck about treating our imprisoned population like human beings rather than disposable cattle (not that it actually works out like that).

That being said, despite the fact that medical intervention on issues of gender dysphoria can often be literally life-saving, our prison system is… what’s the kind word for so unbelievably abusive to trans* people that it makes the way we treat black men look absolutely laudable?

Many times, trans* prisoners are not only often denied any form of treatment, whether hormone-related, SRS-related, or even straight-up medicine. They are an especially maltreated population in prison, receiving extra abuse, being more at target for rape and abuse both from guards and other prisoners, often placed in the wrongly gendered spaces and then poorly protected when there or worse, actively punished with penny-ante authoritarian tricks like leaving someone in heavily psychologically torturous solitary “for their protection”. And believe me, when you combine a trans* person in prison with the overall culture stereotypes of them being inherently dangerous and “infiltrating” the wrong sex’s spaces, you get a whole ‘nother level of fucked up.

Though of course that doesn’t stop the demagogues from selling the spectre of “scary trans* prisoners getting something you can’t on your dime” in order to demonize the procedure and the people in general. Even among those who should know better.

Which, on that note, it’s rather worth pointing out the model the right-wing has used for decades to make everything suck. Strip away every single aspect of the safety net until there is nothing left. And then point and whine to those who still have it, whether by virtue of greater class cohesion or by the requirements of the law from working for our actual government to demonize “those people” for getting “something extra”.

Yeah, some very tiny sliver of the prison population have access to medicine and health care on “your dime”, by which I mean, all of our dimes, besides the rich assholes who’ve been avoiding paying anything at all.

The correct response to that, however isn’t anger at the prisoners, but rather anger at the system. We should all have our basic survival covered by our state, as the minimum requirement of a safety net. I mean, for fuck’s sake, even our abusive prison system with all its rape and torture still recognizes there are just certain things you don’t deprive the humans under your care of and medical attention is one of them. And yet, we are content to let our own government mistreat us in this way in service to an over-bloated industry that profits when we suffer and die.

Yes, Joseph Farah, thank you. We should all be focusing on that particular injustice, rather than getting distracted by yet another cheap elbow at a threatened population and a yell of “they have something you don’t, even though you work hard. Hate them!”

Not surprisingly, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign and other anti-American agitators have weighed in on his behalf.

The way right-wingers have established tribal hierarchies by how many dog-whistles they have replaced normal operating words with is going to be a fascinating research subject for future linguists.

Excuse me, if I don’t share their enthusiasm for the cause.

I can see it’s eating you up inside, so very well, you’re excused.

I’m very sorry this young man is so confused when it comes to his gender. Yes, he could subject himself to mutilation-surgery to make him appear to be a woman.

Or she could just take hormones and maybe do some SRS steps if she wants to. Or heck, just go without if she isn’t too dysphoric with her body when its addressed correctly.

Seems safer and more likely to do good than engaging in cutting.

He can continue to wear lipstick and a wig.

How DARE trans* people use makeup! Like some some cisgendered person. It’s just wrong, I tell you.

Also, additional point. I suspect this is why I blow up my share of transphobic heads. I’m a transwoman but I really fucking hate makeup and never wear any. Can’t really dismiss us all as “trying too hard” to fit the stereotype when some of us are the same barely spending any time in front of the mirror dopes we were when we were younger (and not mentioning that a lot of trans* people have to navigate mirrors carefully in general because it’s such a ripe source for self-body-shaming and massive gender dysphoria triggers).

He can pretend to be a woman.

And it’ll be really easy because she already is one.

But he never will be. He will still have the same chromosomes and genes that define him as a member of the male gender.

If chromosomes and genes were really the immutable destiny that transphobes like to pretend they are, we wouldn’t spend so much money trying to treat sickle cell anemia, TTR amyloidosis, diabetes, or many forms of cancer or ischemic heart disease.

But we don’t. So maybe we should stop pretending that what your doctor guessed you were based on a five-second perusal of your junk while passing you over is somehow an immutable destiny that takes into account the whole of the biological situation.

Also, gender identity is at least partially determined by genetic information or some other in-born trait. That’s why it’s so intrinsic and denial tactics do nothing to change it. Or is it only biology which is destiny when the biology isn’t supporting the queers?

I’m sorry, but I get so confused on the rules sometimes.

But that is not my primary concern.

Naturally. It’d be kind of weird if a bunch of inaccurate ideas about how trans* people be were your primary concern. I mean, talk about needing a hobby.

My primary concern is for the moral sanity of a nation on the brink of moral madness.

What now?

My primary concern is for the moral sanity of a nation on the brink of moral madness.

One second.

(Take seat, make sure water glass is nowhere within reach)

Continue.

Am I alone in recognizing this is why the U.S. military and intelligence agencies guarded against recruiting and enlisting those with aberrant sexual identities in an effort to perform their objectives – namely the protection of the citizens of the United States?

Queers in the military make me think about homos when I should be masturbating to sexy disposable young people going to kill brown people. AND THAT’S BAD!

We tried “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies – thanks to Bill Clinton and a weak Congress. Bradley Manning was the result.

Wait… You’re against DADT now? Weren’t you just five seconds ago blathering about how we needed to protect our brave nation from having queers in the military because somehow that leads to prominent public figures coming out as trans* and that’s bad for our moral morals of moralness?

In fact, he blames that policy for his situation. It will form the basis for his plea for a shortened sentence. But we went from bad to worse with a military that now welcomes homosexuals and other gender-confused people like Manning with open arms!

So DADT is bad because Pvt Manning used it as an example where the military viewed people like her as inherently immoral scum so why should she feel loyalty to the military over the people she swore an oath to protect and keep its dirty laundry and thus become complicit in war crimes? Cause if they viewed her as even more of a non-person, that would have totally made her super happy to protect them from reality and aid in the covering-up of these crimes to protect her commanders from the “embarrassment” of having to explain their chosen actions to the “little people” who count on them to uphold the military code in their name rather than run around like tin-pot dictators training everyone to hate us and then lie about it.

But, it being repealed, is even worse, even though trans* people like Chelsea Manning are still not allowed to serve openly and thus are still in the same boat as when they were openly abused and forced into deep closets…

I guess this logic makes sense if you assume that gay people are fucking wizards and magicked themselves into the Armed Forces around the time of Clinton’s DADT for the sole purpose of dismantling the proud boner-generating edifice of the modern military in favor of feel-good disco beats.

But to that delusion, I say, sadly, no!

In fact, as WND reported last week, the U.S. military now gives those folks preferential treatment and perks. That’s how crazy things have gotten.

The link goes to an article reacting to the news that the military was creating a new category of benefit to cover the fact that DOMA blocks all federal recognitions of marriage and basically extend all the rights of “straight” (it’s worth noting that the conflicting levels of legal support for gender identity makes a merry mockery of any form of marriage being 100% straight or gay, ditto with regards to the existence of bi people) marriage. Which is kinda important to do, because there’s a good amount of law on military spouses that would be fucked over in a bad way by that roadblock if they didn’t do this.

But apparently this painful bereaved widow lawsuit-avoidance no shit action is the equivalent of Bambi’s mom getting shot to the desperate no-nothings at Wing Nut Daily. And an example of “same-sex” couples getting “something extra” that’s “denied” to “straight” couples. And the amount of air-quotes I just had to exhaust to even describe that sentence shows just how much hot air is filling up that turd-burger.

Hey, you know who doesn’t have to lie about how they’re being denied equal rights in order to talk about their life experiences, wingnuts?

Queer people.

Maybe that should tell you something.

Doesn’t anyone get why we put the country first by handing out security clearances and the privilege and honor (not right) of serving in the U.S. military second by screening out people like Bradly Manning?

No respect for our perfectly innocent masturbation sessions to those lithed up little warriors, being so fit and manly and… is that one a girl? Nah, totes biology and… IT IS A GIRL?!? STONE HER!!! … But he’s not gay.

They are walking time bombs for the nation’s security.

And now, I just have Chumbawamba’s Timebomb stuck in my head again. ~I’m a timebomb, a ticky ticky timebomb!~

I don’t expect Barack Obama, who only 20 months ago officially opposed same-sex marriage, to hear this plea.

I don’t expect Democrats who wrote the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law and signed it into law to hear this plea.

I don’t expect the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign and other America-haters to hear this plea.

Oh right, Dogwhistle McGee is opening his noise hole again. Blah blah, hate my enemies, random digs where he can about how they are not progressive enough and thus should always support bigots with enough passing self-awareness to realize that his particular brand of bigotry is too far gone even for imperfect allies presumably because IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION means that they’d have the same tribal loyalties as his merry band of Not Gay Anymore Fuckwits.

But I do expect millions and millions of Americans, especially those currently serving in the military as well as veterans, to hear it.

And they’ll do what, exactly? Pose seductively for your next “photo session” for “research materials” (Yanno, Farah, just because you have a hard-on for somebody doesn’t mean they’re actually obligated to like you back or serve as a perfect caricature for your libido)?

I mean, short of just ramping up the harassment and abuse against queer military personnel in the hopes of forming a sort of informally discriminatory network much like the abusive rape factory that makes it difficult to be a woman in the military, there’s very little you can…

Oh. That’s exactly what you mean.

Well, bless your little heart.

I would expect practicing Christians and Jews to hear it.

I would expect anyone who has any common sense and moral values to hear it.

When are we going to find the courage to stand up and be counted?

Just because you don’t like the count doesn’t mean it was wrong Joe, my boy. This is what you’ve tortured yourself back into the closet for. This is what remains of your “team” as it were.

And every day another one of them dies and is never replaced.

Welp, on that happy note, I’m gonna leave you and go have hot lesbian sex with my girlfriends. Mmm, transgressive.

This country is very quickly becoming the laughingstock of the world – and at a time when we face grave threats to our national security internally and externally.

Which clearly has everything to do with letting gay people serve openly in the military like most other first world nations and nothing to do with us being ruled for a time by a tiny monkey man who tried to pretend that some angry dudes in the desert unrelated to the dudes who blew up one of our buildings constituted an existential threat for a country with a military budget bigger than all the other countries on the planet combined… who then went on to lose the wars and alienate all our allies.

I mean, if we didn’t have all those gay Arabic translators we didn’t have because we kept kicking out because they were gay, then we totally could have won the War on Abstract Concept!

Is this what brave Americans today are fighting for? Is this what brave Americans from the past sacrificed and died for?

This is like a sick joke.

I would no sooner encourage any of my children or grandchildren to work for the federal government in any capacity or to serve in our armed forces under these conditions than I would encourage them to have a hole drilled in their heads.

Cause we have to worry so very much about you having children. Mmmhmm.

Where are Americans who have moral bearings supposed to go? Our forebears came here to escape the madness of the Old World. There are no new worlds to start afresh. Are we going to sit back and watch America go down the drain because of moral decay and the death of common sense?

C’mon guuuuuys! It’s not cool to ditch someone! Hey, come back. It’s scary out in these woods… alone.

Please, tell me what I’m missing here.

Uh…. That’s sort of a loooooong conversation and I’ve got things (and people) to do, sooooo… how about you just start here and here and I’ll come back on the far side of never.

But wait, we’re still not done yet. I’ve saved the most hilariously pompous one for last.

How Could This Happen to Me Williamson, National Whitey:
Bradley Manning is Not a Woman

I mean, you know you are in for some prime cut wingnuttery when the very title, itself is an angry cry to the Heavens about how reality just refuses to take your stamping feet and whining protestations of “no” in consideration.

And it’s even more promising, when you keep in mind that this is “I Despise Every Ounce of my Black Heritage” Kevin D. Williamson, who was the author of the possibly greatest bit of biological ignorance on the site with his “manly sperm produces male children, while girly sperm produces girls” bit of fuckwittery during the election season (and no, I’m never going to let you live that one down).

So, seeing as how he’s about to (spoiler warning) appeal to the supposed iron chains of biology (but only the kind that helps doctors rush out an assigned at birth categorization, not any of that studied icky stuff that makes up the reality of trans* experiences) for his angry bit of denialism, you can tell we’re in for a treat.

Dennis Avner was not a tiger,

And this bit of what the fuck kicking of a dead man who tragically killed himself is apparently Kevin’s entry bid into the asshole game he and his fellow National Review writers play every weekend to keep their game up.

And it’d probably have been on-topic and relevant if Dennis Avner thought he was a cat, rather than just being a body-modification enthusiast with enough disposable income to drop to make a reality a tribal tradition he liked about modifying your body to better align with your spirit animal.

Which hey, seeing as how I’ve seen the usual rich neighborhoods filled with 99% plastic people all trying to look like the same alien frog people that have been deemed “conventionally attractive”, more power to someone who used it to look more like a bad ass rather than just more desperate. And I say this even though I have my handful of reservations and issues with cosmetic surgery in general.

But I feel we are getting deliberately off-topic.

and Bradley Manning is not a woman.

There is often a strong wafting stench of desperate toxic masculinity to all of Kevin D. Williamson. As if he himself realizes that his masculinity is a glass flower barely coping with the demands he places on it to “measure” up with how he thinks he has to be.

I’d sympathize if I wasn’t mocking the ever living fuck about it.

I mean, seriously, he’s stamping his foot like a toddler about the reality that somebody is a transwoman. And I don’t even have to take the bet that it’s most likely prompted by his absolute terror at the concept that someone could “throw away their masculinity” (even though that’s not at all what transwomen are doing).

Mr. Manning, who upon his sentencing for his role in the WikiLeaks case announced that he desires to live out his days as a woman called Chelsea, is what he is, and no amount of pronoun play, psychotherapeutic doublespeak, or wishful thinking can make it otherwise.

That is even true in California.

Not really.

I mean, I have my share of objections about how the promised protections and laws supporting transgender people in this state may as well be tissue paper for all the good they do. And I may have my share of scars over how the ENDA of this state isn’t really enforceable or respected by the employers here.

But it’s definitely a state that’s trying and if I can muster up the scratch (long term, for Bob’s sake, don’t start shoveling money my direction so “I can get this shit done faster” or anything. I mean, I was nearly homeless. Gender dysphoria crap can wait… though anyone who wants to take away my estrogen and spirotone can do so over my cold dead body), I can get some pretty impressive stuff done. Including like getting major records corrected to display correct gender information (including birth certificates) and so on.

Also, is it just my PTSD talking or does his “I don’t trust scientists, they be lying to me” ICP impression sound like my dad’s bullshit about how being transgender and studies say blah blah blah were bullshit, because?

On July 24, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had reached an agreement with the public-school district of Arcadia, Calif., for the resolution of certain “sex discrimination” claims. The case involves a girl who desires to use boys’ facilities, such as restrooms and locker rooms, to be housed with the boys in “sex-specific overnight accommodations at a school-sponsored trip,” etc. In doing so, the DOJ cites Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, in the department’s words, “prohibit discrimination against students based on sex.” But the girl is not being discriminated against because of her sex. Even the DOJ implicitly concedes as much. Rather, the problem is her “gender identity,” which is, the DOJ reports, male.

Ugh. This is one of the major reasons why I have my own private objections to the generally accepted academic terminologies regarding “sex”, “gender”, and “gender identity” preferring things like “mental sex” or “the sex one is assigned at birth” or “gender performance”.

Because the use of “sex” to refer to the best-guess one’s doctor made while being born based on outward criteria such as overall genital appearance often unnecessarily props up the misconception that this is some how more solid, real, and “biological” than something a person can’t see like one’s “gender identity” (mental sex).

Which, leaving aside the fact that intersex people exist and this emphasis on “correctly determining” the “sex” of the child often leads to rather invasive and abusive surgeries on newborns to “fix” what’s wrong with them… We still have the way this utterly ignores how something as airy sounding as “gender identity” is still something biological. Hard-coded in all our brains, even those lucky to have been born cisgendered and which cannot be changed even with extensive therapy.

Cause, despite the terminology, one’s “sex” is rather unimpressive as a means of understanding someone. Unable to even correctly divine whether one will be male, female, or something outside of or in-between the binary. It overprivileges things like genitals and chromosomes and thus encourages others to retreat to them like cowards and claim that those replaceable and mutable organs, organs often separated more by accidents of hormones and timed-gene-expressions than anything meaningful, somehow matter more than what someone is. And more importantly, that they will somehow endure over something as tiny and yet monumental as getting on the correct hormone bath or seeking corrective surgery.

And we see it here, with Kevin’s weaselly attempt to eel around what is rock-solid to pretend that since the “sex” (i.e. what the doctor said on your birth certificate) didn’t change, we can ignore everything else real and pretend that laws haven’t been updated with the realities of transgender individuals.

But then, I’m probably getting way over analytical over here (and that’s saying something, all things considered).

Which yeah, the much easier way to dismantle this little bit of nothing is to note that when a school discriminates against someone and denies them access to appropriate facilities with regards to their gender identity, they are essentially making a discriminatory ruling that their sex (i.e. that bullshit genital and doctor determination business) is incompatible in being the correct space. So it is also correct to say he was discriminated against because of his sex and the belief by the school that this somehow renders the young boy incapable of changing his shirt in the correct locker room like everybody else.

But then, this is the National Review we’re talking about. They’re not exactly on par with Einstein if you grok what I’m saying.

Having invoked those magic words,

… Now I feel really bad for having blathered on for so long about all that.

Fuck, gender identity is magic? Damn. Little did I know I was a little spell-casting sorceress hussy? That sounds fucking badass!

Do I get a wand, cause all the cool magic users had wands… ooh, or a staff. Staves are bad ass!

the DOJ is empowered to commit violence upon language and reason both,

Oh please, language and reason are both insatiable subs who very deliberately consented to the flogging and have full cognizance of their safeword. Stop being such a vanilla scrub.

describing its investigation into “allegations of discrimination against a transgender student based on the student’s sex,” that being the sex of a student “whose gender identity is male and who has consistently and uniformly presented as a boy at school and in all other aspects of his life for several years,” and who henceforth “will be treated like other male students.”

Just because you don’t respect the concepts being referred to here doesn’t make them absence. You can rail against reality and call it “bizarre” or “insane”, but that doesn’t make it any less real or you any less in complete delusion…

Just saying.

And in case, you think that’s harsh, his next paragraph is about how trans* people are mythical inventions.

No, really.

The DOJ has placed its imprimatur upon a fantasy involving a legendary creature:

OH FUCK YES! Not only are we bad as wizards and mistresses of magick Zatanna style, but we’re bad ass legendary creatures as well?!? Ooh, but which one should I be? Hmm, unicorn, hippogriff, ooh, maybe a kappa, three-headed dog (nah, too strange)…

Aagh, too hard to decide.

the person of one sex trapped in the body of a person of another sex.

And the tail of a manticore and the stomach of a djinn and the left buttcheek of a tupilak and…

What? You specifically said legendary.

And if you thought that was a turn of phrase, heh. MUAHAHAHA!

It is not an entirely new legend, nor one without some basis in reality. The Roman emperor Elagabalus is (according to the seriously dubious historical resources available to us) said to have offered half the empire to any physician who could effect a sex change upon his person (“by means of an anterior incision,” in the wincingly clinical phrase of Cassius Dio), but, having failed that, had to content himself with cross-dressing and referring to himself in the feminine. Times being what they were, the Romans could put up with a great deal of depravity from their emperors, but were said to have been particularly piqued by Elagabalus’s insistence that he was the empress of Rome intending to make his husband (a favorite slave) the emperor. The emperor Nero had ordered the sex change of a male slave who resembled a woman he favored, according to an almost certainly fictitious account. The myth of Tiresias we all know, as well as the many classical characters, such as Attis, and Jupiter, who assumed female form when seducing Callisto. (The offspring of that union produced Arcas, namesake of Arcadia, both the one in Greece and the one in California.) There are tales of sex change in the Mahabharata. And we have the real-world experiences of those such as François Timoléon, abbé de Choisy, the notorious French cross-dresser, who wrote in his memoirs: “I thought myself really and truly a woman. I have tried to find out how such a strange pleasure came to me, and I take it to be in this way. It is an attribute of God to be loved and adored, and man — so far as his weak nature will permit — has the same ambition, and it is beauty which creates love, and beauty is generally woman’s portion. . . . I have heard someone near me whisper, ‘There is a pretty woman,’ I have felt a pleasure so great that it is beyond all comparison. Ambition, riches, even love cannot equal it.”

Yup. You read that right. Ancient mythologies about Gods shifting genders. Historical evidence of the recurring existence of transgender people.

Same. Thing.

Oh, Kevin D. Williamson, you are a gift to homeschooled underachievers everywhere.

The abbé de Choisy is the sort of man that Dr. Paul R. McHugh had in mind when he wrote:

Meet Dr. Paul R. McHaugh. He’s an old dude with impressive credentials and a good reputation on some academic disciplines who nonetheless has inherited a bass-awkwards bigoted viewpoint with regards to a specific group of people due to his religious background and the fact that smart people can be idiots on issues, it happens. He’s semi-well-known among queer people at least as the fucker who signed on an amicus brief to the Perry case basically promoting some ignorant blather about how there’s no proof that queerness be genetic and who can even say that fags exist.

Wingnuts LOVE to trot out fuckers like him, because they are base authoritarians at heart and worship names, especially ones with a list of impressive sounding credentials.

It helps them believe that their ignorant views have the credibility they so desperately crave, but are so unwilling to work for. And it helps them argue that they shouldn’t have to do any actual work to like prove their views exist because Smart Person X or Person Y who did Z believes it, so it might as well be canon.

Spoiler Warning: it doesn’t actually make the bullshit smell any more fresh.

“When you discuss what the patient means by ‘feeling like a woman,’ you often get a sex stereotype in return — something that woman physicians note immediately is a male caricature of women’s attitudes and interests. One of our patients, for example, said that, as a woman, he would be more ‘invested with being than with doing.’

Yes. Because the bullshit hoops trans* people are forced to jump through especially with regards to disbelieving or conservative psychiatrists force us to say that shit. If we don’t ape a caricature of what being a woman is like then we can be denied (legal) access to the medications and surgeries we feel necessary to make peace with our gender dysphorias or have access to the legal ability to change our legal sex.

If we are say a transwoman and we don’t wear our girliest summer dress, show our best makeup skills and talk about how hard it was growing up wanting to cook while all the boys were playing ball then some dick with a stick up his ass along the way might decide that we’re lying about our gender identity and need X more years of bullshit circling before continuing.

It’s some nasty ass gatekeeping bullshit, often requiring the loss of weight in order to be more conventionally attractive (or the gain if you are male) because only those who most successfully “pass” drugs untouched can be considered “real” enough. And especially back in the day, the requirements were even stricter.

Luckily, the restrictions have been loosening. Trans* aware therapists have built up references to more aware people along the way to help streamline the process for those lucky enough to afford the steps.

And the internet has let the trans* community get in touch with itself and provide tips and tricks for bypassing or bullshitting the gatekeepers in order to get the care we need.

And this in turn, in combination with the restriction of oppressive gender roles in general and the growing awareness of transgender issues has allowed people to choose gender performances that aren’t stereotypes. Want to be a transwoman with a flannel shirt and a pair of boy jeans? There’s more room for that now. Want to be a transman with some short shorts? Again, there’s room for that. It’s still sometimes rocky on the “passing” front (at least pre-hormones) if you choose a gender-performance that is masculine or feminine when you are female or male respectively, but it’s improving more everyday and a number of queer-aware spaces are getting really good about respecting shit and not making assumptions.

So yeah, don’t like trans* people performing a parody of social gender norms in order to be accepted as real? Maybe stop forcing them to perform a parody of gender norms to be accepted as real.

Hell, this exact issue is why I’ve more and more preferred the terms: “gender performance” and “ideal gender performance”. I.e. the masculine and feminine behaviors we perform in our daily lives and then what we would perform if society would get off our tits and actually let us without freaking the fuck out or denying us access to things we need to survive.

And the only way we get to the ideal being the reality for the majority of trans* people is to stop forcing them to assuage your fear over how they demonstrate that the difference between men and women isn’t as vast as the bullshit gender norms would prefer to believe.

It is not obvious how this patient’s feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia nervosa that she is obese despite her emaciated, cachectic state. We don’t do liposuction on anorexics. Why amputate the genitals of these poor men? Surely, the fault is in the mind, not the member.”

Bob spare me from worry-wort fuckheads crying crocodile tears over my genitals.

Hey, dipshits, genitals aren’t actually people. They’re just inanimate lumps of flesh. They don’t fucking care what I do or do not do to or with them. Because they aren’t actually sentient. That whole joke about X thinking with their junk? It’s just that.

So how about you stop whining for the “poor genitals” that are “going to be abused” by the evil trannies as if they were beat dogs whimpering in the corner from their bottle-throwing owners?

If I wanted to turn my genitals into a pretty flowerpot complete with copper accents, there ain’t no one real to be affected except me and possibly my sexual partners. So, stop fucking caring and obsessing about it, you goddamned closeted voyeurs.

Also, we’ve tried for centuries your way. Forcing trans* people to live lies and deny away the reality slamming the inside of their brains every five seconds. And you know what we had to show for it?

Piles upon piles of dead trans* people going to their too early graves still aware and weeping over the truth they had known deep inside from an early age.

Maybe we should do it the way consistent with reality for a change.

Dr. McHugh became a controversial figure in the 1970s when he was the chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University and set about dismantling its “Gender Identity Clinic,” which was established in 1965 and performed what we all have agreed to call “sex-reassignment surgery,” a term that begs the question.

As noted, he’s the pet bigot that Kevin is clinging to to make his “NO! NO TRANS! TRANS NO EXIST!” desperation sound like the super-thinky stuff proper academics do.

Also, yes, sex-reassignment surgery. We are assigned, best guess style a “sex” no more biological than the lottery numbers based on a loose assortment of genital shape information. Sometimes it’s wrong as fuck, so it needs reassignment.

It only sounds weird because you are a bigoted denialist fuck who can’t even be arsed to learn the intro terminology and somehow think that genitals = destiny.

But given your night terrors about how much of a “man” you are, I understand why you might be loathe to abandon the notion that your penis saves you from ever officially being a “girl” even when that assumption is laughably, painfully wrong.

Sex is a biological feature that is present at the level of DNA.

Not… really. It’s more something the doctors best guess at. I mean, there is a chromosomal and genital reality that exists, but your “sex” only may or may not align with that before it even gets into questions of your actual gender identity (Let’s just say it’s way more a spectrum than our society likes to admit).

But even giving “sex” way more credit than it deserves, it doesn’t change that gender identity is no less biological and thus no less present at the level of DNA. Our gender identity is hard-coded, as any person who suffers gender dysphoria or tried to rationalize it away, can tell you.

If there was a biology is destiny argument then it’s right there.

Cause, fuckwits of the universe, just because something isn’t externally visible makes it no less biological. And that includes that squishy ball of grey matter that is our brains.

Just because we’ve been trained with centuries of body-phobic religious bullshit trying to argue that our minds are wholly separate from our biological reality makes it no less true. Our brains are ruled, quite literally, by our biology and there are things that simply are and no manner of effort is going to change that without medication or proper care.

And it’s about time we acknowledged that instead of endlessly tiptoeing around the feefees of those who want to pretend their “minds” are wholly separate from the hot kinky sex their bodies want to have.

That fact is known even to Barack Obama’s Justice Department, which in April disclosed through an anonymous leak (of course) that it had discovered “female DNA” at the site of the Boston-marathon bombing. The ladies and gentlemen at Eric Holder’s disposal did not ask the DNA whether it identified as male or female, but instead took a look at the chromosomes, which answered the question for them. A sample taken from any man or woman could be used in precisely the same way, regardless of how that person self-identifies.

Yes… it could. And it would have the same 1% chance of being completely inaccurate. That “female DNA” had a 1% chance of belonging to someone who was male or someone who was genderqueer.

The chromosomes didn’t “conclusively answer” fuck all. But hey, what did we expect from the guy who’s biological knowledge is so absent that he thinks that meiotic cells can be willed X or Y through sheer masculine gender performance.

Feminists have long argued that biological sex and social gender should be considered disconnected, but as a matter of law (and more than law) we are expected to treat them as a unified phenomenon:

No. They really aren’t at all unified.

Someone female-assigned-at-birth may be masculine or feminine, will most likely be a mix of both, will be into some stuff that will be read socially as “mannish” or into other stuff that will be read socially as “girly” and what is read what way may very well transform radically as they get older. They may gravitate to one or the other and despite the gender-norm socialization, may take pride in being a girl who’s super butch or being a boy who’s super femme, depending on who they are.

And the law realizes this and acts in accordance. Which is why many ENDAs in various states list gender, sex, gender identity, and gender expression as separate categories protected by the law even though those all will overlap in various ways.

Eric Holder’s DOJ argues that the case in Arcadia is one of sex discrimination, even though there is no serious question as to the sex of the girl in question. By this standard, not only is it sex discrimination to treat a girl as a girl when she desires to be treated as a boy, it is sex discrimination to maintain such categories to begin with.

Sigh. A little knowledge is sometimes the worst. He has realized that there is an academic concept of the “sex” and decides to conflate that with all the various baggage we dump on that “sex” as if they were intrinsically linked and the only real biological thing.

No, dipshit, one’s “sex” matters very little in this world. For all of us.

It’s just cisgender people don’t have to think much about the gender identity that deeply affects their lives because it neatly assigns with the checkmark their doctor put into their forms at birth.

We have created a rhetoric of “gender identity” that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought to be considered mutilation rather than therapy.

Oh my word, look what I found here.

It’s a letter from my genitals:

Dear Dipshits of the World,

Stop speaking on my behalf. I’m not actually a real fucking person.

Love,
A Penis

P.S. Stop jumping to thinking about me as your go-to way to understand trans* people. If I was a real person I would understand that that’s fucking rude, so why can’t you?

P.P.S. This same advice also goes for my cousin, A Fetus.

Huh, wonder where that came from. Also, the only reason that it’s a lot more transwomen getting the surgery when transmen and transwomen are about equally occurring in society is because the current option for bottom surgery for transmen makes those looking into it for themselves make this face. Top surgery occurs at about the same rate if not more so that part of your comment is accurate if you weren’t being a transphobic fuck.

This is not to discount the feelings of people who suffer from gender-identity disorders

Really, cause that seems to be what we’re doing. Are we not doing that anymore, because I already ordered the trans-excluding cake and everything.

— to the contrary, those feelings must be taken into account in determining courses of treatment for people who have severe personality disorders.

Ah good, I don’t have to cancel the order.

But those subjective experiences do not render inconsequential the biological facts: A man who believes he is a woman trapped in a man’s body, no matter the intensity of his feeling, is no such thing. The duty of the medical profession is not to encourage and enable delusions, but to help those who suffer from them to cope with them. It is worth noting here that as a matter of law and a matter of social expectation, the fiction of sex change is treated as the paramount good: We are not expected to treat those who have undergone the procedure as men who have taken surgical and hormonal steps to impersonate women (or vice versa) but as people who have literally changed sex, which they have not

If I close my eyes and wish real hard, maybe the trans* people will all go away and admit that they are just deluding themselves and will nicely return back to the closet to end their lives early in brutal suicide and save me from ever having to question the stress-fueled way I fret over my masculinity like an anxious mother hen fearful that a fox will steal it if I ever look away.

Oh, Kevin, sadly, no!

— no more than Dennis Avner, the famous “Stalking Cat” who attempted to physically transform himself into a tiger, changed species.

Again, he wasn’t actually trying to do that. He was just trying to ape some of the physical characteristics of the spirit animal he identified with in fulfillment of his particular religious beliefs (which I’ll point out, unlike the religious traditions of other faiths didn’t actually mandate surgical modifications on non-consenting infants).

Which also, I will note, was something he a) consented to, and b) didn’t actually hurt anyone else or even affect them in any way. Dude got cheek implants and brow modifications to make himself look more feline. Whatevs. I’m more concerned that our system has so many issues and so little resources for anything related to mental illness that the poor guy didn’t feel safe getting care he could afford for his unrelated depression before it claimed his life.

And again, I’m wondering what the fuck he ever did to you to deserve being dragged into this conversation as your “see trans* people, you’re totally a freak like this guy” example. I mean, I know you fuckers are ghouls, but you can try and have a little respect for the dead.

Unhappily, we are poised to move in the opposite direction. Medicare currently does not cover sex-reassignment surgery, but it is considering changing that policy. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services solicited public comment on the possibility of reversing the government’s policy of not paying for sex-reassignment surgery. It quickly withdrew that proposal after media reports, but is reviewing an administrative challenge to its characterization of sex-reassignment surgery as “experimental” and therefore ineligible for Medicare coverage.

Even if we were to believe that a course of medical mutilation could make someone happier, this therapy seems often not to be therapeutic. A large number of those who undergo sex reassignment, as many as one in four by some estimates, pronounce themselves unhappy with the procedure.

Again, given that the options available for transmen are sad face inducing in the extreme for a bottom surgery and the surgery for transwomen could use a bit of work as well, there could be some truth inside that made-up unreferenced statistic, but seeing as how what studies there have been show a hugely high happiness rate with surgery and an even higher rate with hormones and there is a marked decrease in rates of suicide. Well, I think we can be safe in vouching for its overall make-people-happy powers.

But one thing that would make it even more happy making might be less assholes claiming that trans* people are fictional inhuman creatures who are mutilating themselves and just need to accept that they are delusional sacks of shit who society will never accept as their actual real gender.

You know, if we wanted to try getting radical in here.

Dr. McHugh in a 1992 essay wrote about its long-term consequences: “Age accentuates the sad caricature of the sexually reassigned and saps their bravado.

Yeah, age makes bitches of us all, robbing us of the flowers of our youths and all that jazz. So?

It’s not like we claim that some old guy never played piano because age has stolen his hands and made them shaky messes unable to even hold a spoon.

Some, pathetically, ask about re-reassignment.” Dr. James Bellringer, a British physician who has performed hundreds of sex-reassignment surgeries at the Charing Cross Hospital gender-identity clinic, points out in defense of the practice that about one-fifth of those who are denied the procedure attempt suicide; but a study conducted by the British National Health Service found practically identical — 18 percent — suicide-attempt rates for those who had undergone the procedure. (Mr. Avner, whose feline transformation also took a toll on his personal life — “Being a tiger is more important to me than humanity, which is difficult for many women to cope with” — was found dead of an apparent suicide.) The Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility, which advises the NHS on the effectiveness of treatments, conducted a broad review of the research literature and “found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective,” according to the Guardian, the liberal newspaper that commissioned the review. A study by the scholarly journal BJUI (formerly the British Journal of Urology) found that some 24 percent of those who undergo reassignment reported that they were unhappy with the cosmetic results, and 20 percent reported that they were in general dissatisfied with the procedure. Those numbers would be high for nose jobs or breast implants; they are sobering for a course of therapy that involves elective amputations.

It would be if we weren’t aware that the suicide rate for trans* people in general is up into the 30s and general dissatisfaction with the state of their genitals pre-surgery bumps up against 100%.

But hey, that’s the beauty of dragging studies and made up statistics out of the ether and having them dance context free.

Oh hey, one other thing studies show? That social acceptance and the end of brutal discrimination and hatreds would go a huge way in lowering the suicide rate and the rate of suicidal ideation.

Also, love how the suicidal depressions caused by the pressures of gender dysphoria and societal bigotry are then used as the excuse for why we’re too “crazy” to have the treatments that would help.

Cause apparently, being mentally ill in any regards means you are completely incapable of managing consent in your life or awareness of any type of reality. Because crazy people are just crazy people, amirite?

It’d be merely eye-roll worthy if it wasn’t coming from the denialist fucks who literally make near-constant psychotic breaks with reality in order to maintain tribal loyalty. I mean, talk about the mother of IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTIONs.

On that subject, elective amputations of healthy arms and legs are quietly offered as “treatment” for something we are expected to call Body Identity Integrity Disorder, which is “characterized by a burning and incessant desire to amputate an otherwise perfectly healthy limb,” in the words of Mo Costandi, a neurobiologist who writes a science column for the Guardian and advocates the procedure. The stories of these amputees trapped in amputationless bodies will sound familiar. “To date, there have been approximately 300 documented cases of BIID,” Mr. Costandi writes. “Most of these are male, almost all of whom desire amputation of a limb on the left side of the body. More often, it is the arm that is affected rather than the leg. All of these so-called ‘wannabe amputees’ know exactly where they want the limb to be cut off, to the millimetre, and almost all of them remember seeing an amputee at a very young age and thinking that they should have been born like that themselves. ‘When I was 3 years old, I met a young man who was completely missing all four of his fingers on his right hand,’ said one 21-year-old female BIID sufferer, ‘and ever since that time I have been fascinated by all amputees, especially women amputees who were missing parts of their arms and wore hook prostheses.’” Another patient says, “My left foot is not part of me.” (But it is.) There is a sexual component in many (but not all) of these voluntary amputations, a fetish documented as far back as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1906).

Brains, man.

And people, for that manner too. Somebody has a reality and its uncommon. A way their brain has decided to fuck with them about how it interprets what it inhabits and how that’s socially seen.

And bigots come out the woodwork with the same old shit. It’s freaky! It’s an insane delusion! The poor limbs need us! It’s probably just a sexual fetish!

As with the invention of “personhood” in the abortion debate,

Wait, are you trying to argue that the group denying biological reality to associate a non-existant state on a clump of cells isn’t the group arguing that a mass of sperm cells sitting in the fallopian tubes waiting for an egg is morally and physically equivalent to a born child?

Cause… um… no. Just, nooooo.

we have created a metaphysical category — “identity” — in order to avoid talking about physical reality.

Again, I know you religious zealots and your histories of revulsion at the fleshy nature of the human condition hate this, but our brains are part of our physical realities.

The stuff that’s hard-coded in there is no less biological than the color of our skin or whether DAF2 is a functional protein or not.

We are our minds. Our minds are part of us, made of so many nerve cells wrapped together like snakes fucking. It is our body. It is inseparable. Without this fleshy meatsack, we could not function, could not continue. And when our bodies age and decay, our minds rot right along with them, dropping functionality with every synapse choked by amyloid plaques.

And that may suck. But it’s no less true for sucking.

In the case of sex-reassignment surgery, it is gender identity; in the case of those who want their left legs removed, it is body-integrity identity. The latter may seem shocking and exotic, but the former is no more defensible. But the question of sex reassignment is linked rhetorically and politically to the question of gay rights, though homosexuality is an entirely distinct and separate phenomenon under the emotional shadow of civil rights. It is a measure of the intellectual degradation of our times that the physical reality of these cases is considered, if it is considered at all, a distant second to the subjective impressions of people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, mentally ill and in need of treatment.

Okay, fine, faggots, I guess you’re winning what with the growing social support for your causes, but can you please cut those filthy trannies loose so we can have a happy fun ball to bat around and feel superior for not being born as? That would be ever so kind.

We cannot think because we cannot speak. Having lost the words for things, we lose the things themselves. The word “gender” as a replacement for the word “sex” is a new development in the English language, dating from the early 1960s, not coincidentally the period during which the normalization of sex reassignment began to gain real momentum. “Gender” is a linguistic twin of the word “genre,” the two descending in parallel from the Latin “genus” via the Old French “gendre.” This was partly the natural evolution of the language — as the word “sex” began to denote erotic acts themselves, there was an opening for a word to describe the categorical differences between the male and the female. But it is not an accident that a literary term received the promotion over a scientific one: “Gender” overtook “sex” linguistically at the same time that “gender,” which denotes male-female differences that are, in the debased language of the time, “socially constructed,” overtook “sex,” which denotes male-female differences that are biological, as a guiding consideration. Every battle in the war on reality begins with the opening of a new linguistic front.

You do realize the whole “I’m not a bigot, I just worry about how the poor words are being abused” gambit is no less silly when you divorce it from your bullshit over marriage, right?

That leaves us in the unhappy position described by Dr. McHugh: “The zeal for this sex-change surgery — perhaps, with the exception of frontal lobotomy, the most radical therapy ever encouraged by twentieth-century psychiatrists — did not derive from critical reasoning or thoughtful assessments . . . [but from] the ‘illusion of technique,’ which assumes that the body is like a suit of clothes to be hemmed and stitched to style.” And not just the body: The family and society are as much the products of evolution as the body is, and attempting to reconstruct them in the image of the Venus de Milo — arms optional — with contempt for the underlying reality will yield ghastly results.

The thing about SRS is the thing about abortion is the same thing as all surgeries. Biology, especially the messy invasive business of opening somebody up and fixing what went wrong, is something that can be easily sensationalized. We are not used to seeing the inside of a person’s body or viewing our insides. So we view it as shocking. And so when someone describes all the steps of any surgery it can sound frightening, disturbing and like something no person in their right mind would want to go through with.

But that doesn’t make those sensationalized accounts accurate. Surgeries aren’t mutilations, rather the opposite and frankly if we are a society that can normalize botox, I have a hard time stomaching the balking some people have to SRS surgeries, which actually serve some form of actual purpose other than the fulfillment of bizarre beauty standards.

In many ways the comparisons to abortions are apt, because the right-wing freakout is remarkably similar right down to the crocodile tears of concern over what is not and can never be the anthropomorphized full human being that they want to treat as somehow more important than the only real human involved in the procedure.

And the fact that it’s working no less well in dominating our discourse on the subject and people’s initial reactions is a perfect example of how we’re so willing to treat literally anything like real people in lieu of real people who happen to be a member of an oppressed class.

Actions like Chelsea Manning being brave and being publicly true to themselves are crucial to this society stopping sucking. Every Chelsea Manning and Chas Bono and Lana Wachowski provide something young trans* people can point to. To say, that person, that’s me. That’s an entry point to my life experiences. And as they go, others will follow because the world will be letting others follow them in taking that risk.

With every smashed open skull, the brick wall of bigotry shakes more and gets closer to toppling over. It’s painful, but things are getting there. And to that end, I applaud Chelsea Manning for taking one of those first leaps.

Even if we already knew and were giving your supporters shit for using your legal name and incorrect gender pronouns while still acknowledging your trans* nature to march as a contingent in our Marches.


‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Seriously, though, thank you one and all who helped me out. I know exactly where I would have been otherwise and am so so grateful I was able to avoid it. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


*P.S. Jeffy boy from Gay Patriot is starting to really make the Pigs for Bacon analogy disturbingly apt of late.

Two of his more recent posts have been a post whining about how ex-gays are being oppressed by mean old gays who are denying them the right to abuse and fuck up queer youth. And another weeping tears for poor suffering Scott Lively who’s being ripped apart by those nasty queers just because he happened to nearly single-handedly create a law encouraging the genocide of queer folks in Uganda.

So yeah, major news figures coming out and major victories for queer rights in America? Post yawning about being forced to write posts. Some homophobes get criticized by gay people for the horrible damage their works do to real living queer people? CRANK UP THE WAHMBULANCE! It’s the worst thing EVAR!

And they wonder why we mock them so mercilessly.

**P.P.S. My cobloggers said they’ll hurt me if I don’t include this sort of thing at the bottom of my posts for the next little while for those who want to make my lifeline into something robust and meaty.

If you want to email me directly or want to send me snail-mail aid, I can send that to you through my email at cerberussadlyno AT gmail DOT com so that’s also a way for those who want to help further (please do not feel obligated to help further).

And my donation page continues to be:

Here’s the link to throw in an extra few bucks if you want (again, no obligation):
Donate Button with Credit Cards

Again, do not feel obligated to pitch in. The worst is definitely over and next month’s rent check is in the mail entirely thanks to all of you. You all really came through for me. And this more epic than usual sized post is my way of giving some tiny little thing back.

I love you all so so much.

 

Comments: 258

 
 
 

xkcd be damned… FIRST!
.

 
 

Am I alone in recognizing this is why the U.S. military and intelligence agencies guarded against recruiting and enlisting those with aberrant sexual identities in an effort to perform their objectives – namely the protection of the citizens of the United States?

Ah yes. Another Real American Patriot who couldn’t tell you the difference between (for example) the FBI and (by way of another example) the USMC if you tied a string around his balls and used it to dangle him over a pit full of broken glass.

Neither can he speak articulately about what it means to receive a security clearance and how that is not identical to a) Conducting intelligence work or b) Being in the military or c) Why attitudes such as his increase the risk of spying and intelligence breaches, if you shoved a large funnel up his ass and threatened to load him up with red hot bbs.

Not that this would be the moral thing to do.

 
 

One of my best friends from high school became a trans person. The last I saw of him was probably sometime when I was home from college in the summer. He was a very intelligent but rather nerdy guy.

I lost touch after I went into the Air Force. Some years later I was told through a mutual friend that he now identified as a female and was living in Seattle.

I managed to get back in touch a few times via email. She seemed much happier identifying as a female and actually took care of her appearance, whereas the boy I knew in high school was rather a slob and never did.

While identifying as a female, she was still attracted to women – sexuality is a very complicated thing.

Sadly she was suffering from MS and pretty much living homeless in Seattle. That’s the last I ever heard from her.

Sometimes it troubles me.

 
Smarter Than Your Average Bear
 

@shakezula

” if you shoved a large funnel up his ass and threatened to load him up with red hot bbs”

Now why would you want to give him so much pleasure – I know, I know you’re a generous soul at heart – but he doesn’t deserve it.

 
 

The fact is, Manning is not a woman, he is a gay and should have ben excuted.

 
 

he is a gay and should have ben excuted

This probably sounded better in the original Arabic.

 
 

and insists that taxpayers provide him with sex-reassignment treatment and surgery.

Manning’s lawyer has specifically stated she doesn’t want surgery in prison AND expects to pay for her own hormone therapy, which makes Farah the worst sort of lying pig-ignorant motherfucker.

 
 

He will still have the same chromosomes and genes that define him as a member of the male gender.

And he knows fuck-all about sex. If he doesn’t think there are XY women in the world maybe he should ask somebody who’s NOT a pig-ignorant motherfucker. Androgen insensitivity syndrome, look it the fuck up, asshole. And it’s not the only non-binary sex variation.

 
 

A lot of people seem to be leaping aboard the “OUR TAXES are paying for this surgery!” train, and my observation suggests that outright telling the people “no, here is a thing where the military prison said “lol no” and here is a thing where it says Private Manning and her own family/friends/support group are ponying up the cash money for the hormones” makes 0% difference, because there is nothing right-wing people these days enjoy more than the fantasies about what the dread SOCIALISTS are spending OUR TAXES on. In fact, this is rather a basic fantasy compared to the bogus asylum seekers that live in mansions and drive Rolls Royces, all paid for by OUR TAXES.

 
 

there is nothing right-wing people these days enjoy more than the fantasies about what the dread SOCIALISTS are spending OUR TAXES on

They live for that sort of thing. It comes from being a bunch of professional outrage junkies. If the liberals aren’t doing something to piss them off they’ll make up something. It’s the only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning.

 
 

The Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility, which advises the NHS on the effectiveness of treatments, conducted a broad review of the research literature and “found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective,” according to the Guardian

That was back in 2004. Perhaps there has been more and better research in the course of the subsequent decade.

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

It’s the only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning.

Though if they didn’t, suddenly it would become the responsibility of OUR TAXES to take care of the accumulated bed sores.

 
 

So when are you signing up? I’ve still got some contacts in the National Guard if you need an in.

 
 

And yes I do think bombing Syria would be a bad idea. I don’t see it accomplishing much.

To get rid of Assad would require a much greater amount of force than we’re willing to use (or can afford) at this time. And then we’d be right back to trying to pick the “good guys” out of the various rebel groups.

I see little good coming out of this.

 
 

because there is nothing right-wing people these days enjoy more than the fantasies about what the dread SOCIALISTS are spending OUR TAXES on

This is an oldie but a goodie. For example, I understand the “The person buying “luxury food items” with food stamps,” is making the rounds again.

What’s interesting is that once upon a time it was very easy to tell who was buying with food stamps because they were actual bits of paper, colorful and smaller than real money. The clerk had to handle them differently than real cash and the transactions took longer.

It was in fact pretty humiliating. With the EBT card, the observer would have to stick his or her face right into the transaction to see it was an EBT card vs. one of the zillions of other bits of plastic people use to make purchases. So the story remains, even though it has become less plausible.

But it isn’t surprising that totalitarian fuckknobs want to control other people. Neither is it surprising that remain intentionally ignorant of how money works. Neither is it surprising that some of the same people who scream about moochers and their tax dollars don’t pay taxes and would starve to death without welfare.

 
 

Only a thousand words in, but had to jump ahead to do this.

FIRST!

 
Séraphin Lampion
 

How many words in will you take care of a mom?

 
 

Sweet IPU. That’s some pretty intense weapons grade wingnut right there. I mean they get so much worse from one post to the next – that Gay Patriot post almost looks okay by comparison.

 
 

“Major Kong said,

September 1, 2013 at 4:13

he is a gay and should have ben excuted

This probably sounded better in the original Arabic.”

That’s a pretty lazy assumption that you’ve automatically jumped to there – not to mention the fact that it shows up your own ignorance and racism. I seem to recall that you have more than your fair share of homophobes in the USA yet curiously no-one seems to regard the bigotry spoken with their mother tongue as the necessary evidence for a wholesale damning indictment of the English language. Fact is, you owe your numbering system to Arabic too – so why not condemn that to the dustbin of backwardness as well?

And please don’t believe everything that the US military may tell you about Arabs – especially if the myths they peddle are solely aimed at making your post-service psychological fall-out easier to deal with by trying to brainwash you through de-humanising the 6-year-old kids that you incinerate from several thousand feet above, cocooned in the nice, comfortable safety of your high-tech bigman airplane cockpit.

 
 

@Fariba

I’ve been to Saudi Arabia. “Gay friendly” would not be the first thing I would describe it as.

I just like to point out when our own homophobic fundamentalists sound exactly like the “Sharia law!” they fear so much.

 
 

Teh Ho sometimes says I’m a straight man trapped in a gay man’s body. Does he need to say it differently?

 
 

To be clear, he sez that about me.

 
 

Madison’s Grill. I am eschewing the Benny for some reason, just don’t feel it today. Wild blueberry pancakes (I do hope they tame the berries) plus eggs and good local bacon ‘n stuff. The have “almost bottomless mimosas.” Up to three for $7. What a deal, we said. Turns out they’re pints. This gonna be a snoggerful brunch.

 
 

he is a gay and should have ben excuted.

You leave Ben out of this!

And I fail to see how Chelsea Manning is supposed to have the power to have Ben executed anyway. She’s got her own problems to deal with.

 
 

Yay, muchos mangos para el día de trabajo – or something.

Is it me or are transphobes more obsessed with cutting off penises than with any other aspect of being trans? Just like homophobes seem obsessed with gay male sex… Looks like penis obsession all around. Maybe ’cause they’re a bunch of pricks?

 
 

Meh. Chelsea Manning can have all the time she wants inside the bars of leavenworth prison. It’s a shame that it basically took the trauma of a treason trial to get her the support she needed, though.

 
 

Maybe ’cause they’re a bunch of pricks?

WYDT,ISI.

 
 

Hey Pup, I got a flat iron steak from my butcher. What should I do with it? I’ve never worked with this cut of meat before.

 
 

Pup says “I see it” about “a bunch of pricks”. The jokes are getting so meta you need to XML markup your notes.

Too complicated. I’m just going to go back to mooning over Anna Kendrick. zomg, there’s a movie with her and Olivia Wilde and it’s all about getting loaded. I suspect a conspiracy to rehabilitate Paul Reubens by mainstreaming movie house masturbation.

 
 

MK – I’d just grill it. The flatiron is a very flavorful piece of meat and its not overly tough though not as tender as a loin cut steak. Make chimichurri! That’d be an excellent way to have flatiron.

 
 

The concern troll is right. This site never talks about home-grown bigots like all of the ones quoted in the article.

I think wingnuts who claim to witness people using food stamps to buy “luxury items” are actual just seeing black people use coupons and assuming the worst.

 
 

I think wingnuts who claim to witness people using food stamps to buy “luxury items” are actual just seeing black people use coupons and assuming the worst.

IOW… idiots.
.

 
 

Pup — Glad to hear you didn’t die! Don’t be doin’ that, okay?

Caturday repeat, since we got two Saturdays this weekend.
.

 
 

The kid only got 35 years. True, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, got 20 years; but he wasn’t a sissy.

 
 

I think wingnuts who claim to witness people using food stamps to buy “luxury items” are actual just seeing black people use coupons and assuming the worst.

You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

 
 

I think wingnuts who claim to witness people using food stamps to buy “luxury items” are actual just seeing black people use coupons and assuming the worst.

Oh. I assumed they were lying. Again. Because they’re liars.

 
 

Imagine that someone was using those to buy a luxury item.

So fucking what? A poor person NEVER gets a treat, or are they due constant beatings in perpetuity?

 
 

Oh. I assumed they were lying. Again. Because they’re liars.

Hard to argue with a stone-cold indisputable fact.
.

 
 

Motherfucker, you think we sent you that money ’cause we felt sorry for your ass? Damn, bitch, keep whaling on those wingnuts because *that’s* what we pay you for.

Oh, nice post.

 
 

We are our minds. Our minds are part of us, made of so many nerve cells wrapped together like snakes fucking. It is our body. It is inseparable. Without this fleshy meatsack, we could not function, could not continue. And when our bodies age and decay, our minds rot right along with them, dropping functionality with every synapse choked by amyloid plaques.

This is fucking beautifully written. I mean, sure, I come here for the mangoes and the ranting and the snark and the wingnut-dismantling, but little gems like that paragraph are the reasons I hang around a while! I almost want to get that made into a poster or something. Frame it and put it on my desk, I dunno.

Also… glad you found something to break you out of your orbital daze — it’s good to have your usual selectively misanthropic self back down to earth and posting great articles like this one!

 
 

Thanks muchly, Cerb. I learned a lot from this post. In addition to being a razor-sharp polemicist, you are one helluva educator.

The best friend of my life came out as trans* about a year ago. We had been the closest of friends well over three decades. So perfectly had she concealed her identity from those closest to her–family, spouse, children (and at tremendous personal cost as I now realize)–that I was absolutely stunned. “Wow!” was the first thing I said. “I had no idea.”

I was so ignorant that I had only the vaguest idea of what being trans* even meant. But in a synaptic flash, I knew that her declaration didn’t alter my love for my friend one whit; she is the most brilliant and deeply moral person I’ve ever known.

From long habit, we’ve always sprinkled direct address into our conversations. I still slip every now and then, using the wrong name (or wrong pronoun when talking about her). No matter how diligently I patrol myself, 34 years of using different labels for my friend are deeply ingrained; they sometimes slip out reflexively. When my tongue slips, she is understanding and patient.

I am so glad that her family and closest friends support her, and that she has the financial means to effect her transformation. I worry, however, about the visciousness and violence to which trans* people (in particular) are subjected. I also worry about her depression.

 
 

So fucking what? A poor person NEVER gets a treat, or are they due constant beatings in perpetuity?

There are three levels of asininity at work here.

One is the idea that there’s a legal definition of “luxury food items” in regards to food stamps. (Like our favorite, the t-bone steak.) There isn’t. There never has been. There are certain things you can’t buy with food stamps, but then the unnamed witness would see the cashier telling the person they can’t fucking buy those items, right?

From this refusal to acknowledge there are already rules (because acknowledging rules would require knowing the rules and reduce the power to the Perpetual Aggrievement Machine by a few percent), you get two – which is the inability to realize that if someone on food stamps spends all of his or her monthly allowance on a big fat steak, its the same as if I spend all of my food budget on a big fat steak. I will be without food for the rest of the month. I suspect they believe the person just goes back to the First Bank of Poor People Take What They Want and demand more money because that would be just like Them.

Three is the one you point out. The belief that poor people should suffer. (This is also where you get their demand that we return to charity. But not, the Biblical charity. They want some sort of fucked up Dickensian charity with panels and judgements and people begging to be found worthy of a crust of bread on a daily basis and most of them being denied for failing to come up to standard.)

Or at least, they believe other poor people should suffer. If I had a dollar for every welfare recipient who screams about the evils of welfare I’d be so rich the wingfuckers would be screaming about me instead of George Soros.

 
 

So fucking what? A poor person NEVER gets a treat, or are they due constant beatings in perpetuity?

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

 
 

And yet they never begrudge people not working and just living on what other people earned* if it’s their family. If a welfare family buying potato chips is bad what about the trust fund kids buying $100 salts? Aren’t they sponges too?

 
 

* and by earned I mean figured a way to bilk someone else of what they earned

 
 

Morale will decline unless beatings improve!

 
 

Shakezula said,

September 2, 2013 at 19:30 (kill)

Well said. I’ve said it before: conservatism is primarily defined by the deep concern that some poor person somewhere is getting something they don’t deserve.

 
 

jim, still exothermal after all these years

Give it time.

 
 

If a welfare family buying potato chips is bad what about the trust fund kids buying $100 salts?

No, because somebody somewhere earned the salt money honestly, once upon a time. Honestly earned money always stays honest no matter who’s spending it now or on what. Just like gummit money always has gummint stink on it and nothing can shake it off. It’s an uncomplicated worldview, which is why it attracts so many idiots.

 
 

“Failure Artist said,

September 2, 2013 at 2:56

The concern troll is right. This site never talks about home-grown bigots like all of the ones quoted in the article.”

I didn’t say that – I merely pointed out that you people are quick to demonise Arabs and Arabic…erm…as evidenced by your own post. Ps. Saudi Arabia is only a small part of the Arab world and there are Arabs all over the world. Prejudice and discrimination towards Arabs is also called anti-Semitism. Just sayin’.

 
 

Oops, someone get the plunger.

 
 

Saudi Arabia is only a small part of the Arab world and there are Arabs all over the world.

I obviously have insulted you for which I apologize. That was not my intent.

Please try to understand – I almost got my behind shot off in 1991 trying to protect the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam Hussein.

I never felt that they were grateful in the least. The impression I got is that I was little more than “hired help”. They seemed almost resentful that I was there, yet I was expected to die for them if need be.

 
 

I obviously have insulted you for which I apologize. That was not my intent.

Kong, the rest of us (I assume) got it that you were riffing on the “…in the original German” meme and the fact that Wahabi fundamentalists would in fact say such a thing.

Something that “Fariba” (anybody check its IP yet? I wouLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLd if I could) appears much too…concerned…to recognize.

 
 

Fariba said,
I didn’t say that – I merely pointed out that you people are quick to demonise Arabs and Arabic…erm…as evidenced by your own post. Ps. Saudi Arabia is only a small part of the Arab world and there are Arabs all over the world. Prejudice and discrimination towards Arabs is also called anti-Semitism. Just sayin’.

Hi Fariba. I’m guessing that you’re not a frequent visitor to Sadly, No!, so I’ll explain what was going on. Major Kong was pointing out to one of our resident homophobes that he sounded very much like one of the fundamentalist Islamic homophobes. Given that said resident homophobes tend to also be Islamophobes, that’s doubly ironic. I imagine that the mis-typing of ‘been’ as ‘ben’ probably was just the icing on the irony cake.

Most of the people here are pretty familiar with the accomplishments of the Arabic culture: not just Arabic numerals (which originated in India), but algebra, algorithms (that al Khwarizmi was a bit of a hero of mine, me being a maths geek), medicine, interest in clean drinking water at a time when the west was happily pissing in theirs and wondering where the cholera came from, etc., etc., and so it goes. So you don’t need to worry on that account.

Oddly enough, we even know about the derivation of the term ‘anti-Semitism’. So you can set your mind at rest on that as well.

As for children being incinerated by bombs, I don’t think you’ll find one single person on this site (apart from a resident nutter or two who drops in to spew bigotry) who supports anyone bombing anything, at least without a helluva good reason.

So we’re all good, yes? Good.

 
Red Dingo with a hat on top
 

Good on yer, Just Allison

 
 

Something that “Fariba” (anybody check its IP yet? I wouLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLd if I could) appears much too…concerned…to recognize.

And no fair mentioning the shocking levels of misogyny enshrined in many Arab nations’ laws.

In other news, does anyone here visit Balloon Juice. Is anyone getting a Suspended Account message?

 
 

So fucking what? A poor person NEVER gets a treat, or are they due constant beatings in perpetuity?

If we’re not throwing epic BFs over that, WHAT’S LEFT TO BITCH ABOUT?

 
 

I merely pointed out that you people are quick to demonise Arabs and Arabic…erm…as evidenced by your own post. Ps. Saudi Arabia is only a small part of the Arab world and there are Arabs all over the world. Prejudice and discrimination towards Arabs is also called anti-Semitism. Just sayin’.

We’re quick to demonize anyone that uses their sillyass superstitions to oppress others. Which silly superstition that is, Hindu, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, conservatism, nationalism, race supremacy, class supremacy Team Jacob, Team Edward, tastes great/less filling…means nothing to us. You’re so missing the point.

We all understand that 99% of the people in this world are just trying to get by and eek out a decent living and leave something behind for their children. These discussions focus on aberrations–those who seek power and control over others, or try to reform the world in their own image of how things “ought to be”, as they like to say.

 
 

So fucking what?

Also, if about 1/100th of 1% of my tax bill ends up buying a few kids the occasional candy bar or a birthday cake, then I’m what one might call happy as fuck about it. If the family saves up and has a steak night, I’m down with that too.

 
 

Something that “Fariba” (anybody check its IP yet? I wouLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLd if I could) appears much too…concerned…to recognize.

Checks out as just a standard, oh so very concerned, concern troll.

In other news, does anyone here visit Balloon Juice. Is anyone getting a Suspended Account message?

I’m not a big reader, but yeah, seems dead. Could be a hosting glitch, or Cole finally losing his shit for the last time. There have been some pretty big piss-fests between Cole, the commenters, and other front pagers over there recently.

 
 

Also, if about 1/100th of 1% of my tax bill ends up buying a few kids the occasional candy bar or a birthday cake, then I’m what one might call happy as fuck about it. If the family saves up and has a steak night, I’m down with that too.

Similarly, if some of my tax money goes to getting Chelsea Manning to where she needs to be or getting clean water to some villager in remotest Africa or fixing a bridge that’s about to collapse, I’m OK with that too.

Maybe we could trade an F-35 or two for it. Prolly would be a whole lot more bang for the buck, eh?

 
 

Kong, the rest of us (I assume) got it that you were riffing on the “…in the original German” meme and the fact that Wahabi fundamentalists would in fact say such a thing.

That is correct. Not to mention that being Lebanese (half anyway) technically makes me an Arab.

 
 

The Arab country that is nicest to be gay in is…

 
 

Total SNAP funding per year is less than the per year interest payments for past wars.

 
 

The Arab country that is nicest to be gay in is…

Fabuloustan!

 
 

The “stan” is a Persian suffix and Major Kong will have his belly eaten with fire. His will be a painful doom.

 
 

I couldn’t make the joke work in Arabic.

 
 

Major Kong will have his belly eaten with fire.

That already happened the last time I had lunch at Taco Bell.

 
 

Fabulorabia?

 
 

The gays in Saudi Arabia and other horrible places are, according to credible reports, having lots of gay sex. Everybody knows it but they never ever speak of it. From what I’ve heard getting laid is easy. Having a boyfriend however is impossible.

This might be a good place to mention that Iran, of all places, provides gender reassignment services through the state run health system.

 
 

The Arab country that is nicest to be gay in is…

Yaymen.

 
 

And for the laydeez… Lesbanon.

 
 

The gays in Saudi Arabia and other horrible places are, according to credible reports, having lots of gay sex. Everybody knows it but they never ever speak of it.

Lots of wrestling/body-building magazines for sale in Cairo…not to mention opportunities. Okay, having a cat watch you go to town is tolerable I guess, but doing it with your camel RIGHT THERE is just wrong.

 
 

Yaymen.

Innuendonesia.

 
 

Innuendonesia.

Since Indonesia is not an Arab country OBS will have his face blackened on the last day. He will face an awful doom.

 
 

Duh, Gaygypt.

Stealing Lesbanon though.

 
 

Oh!Man

 
 

Since Indonesia is not an Arab country OBS will have his face blackened on the last day. He will face an awful doom.

I’m so askeert!

And yeah, yeah, Muslim, not Arab. Sosumi. Doesn’t the homophobia come from the religion?

Also, too: Bangladesh.

 
 

Not sure we can congratulate Iran for supporting SRS. I’ve read they bully non-trans homosexuals into it to make them “heterosexual”.

 
 

Doesn’t the homophobia come from the religion?

I think it’s complicated. Some of it’s religious and some of it’s probably tribal.

 
 

Jisbooty. I think the capitol city is Santorum.

 
 

I think it’s complicated. Some of it’s religious and some of it’s probably tribal.

So exactly like the United States of Gaymerica then.

 
 

Not sure we can congratulate Iran for supporting SRS. I’ve read they bully non-trans homosexuals into it to make them “heterosexual”.

Also too kill them. The support of trans surgery is slavishness to their religion as much as anything else is; happier result in that case than in others, but it’s not about kindness.

 
 

Maybe we could trade an F-35 or two for it. Prolly would be a whole lot more bang for the buck, eh?

Oh wow. Yes. Or straighten out the tax code so that being rich doesn’t absolve you of your tax bill, stop subsidizing oil companies, end the war in Afghanistan, stop giving Isreal all of it’s weapon stamps…

Butter tastes so much better than guns.

 
 

I can’t believe it’s not .50 caliber.

 
 

It’s not nice to fool Father Mars.

 
 

Yousbuttfuckistan.

 
 

Lay-us.

 
Fun the Mentalist
 

Maybe we could trade an F-35 or two for it. Prolly would be a whole lot more bang for the buck, eh?

Oh wow. Yes. Or straighten out the tax code so that being rich doesn’t absolve you of your tax bill, stop subsidizing oil companies, end the war in Afghanistan, stop giving Isreal all of it’s weapon stamps…

Butter tastes so much better than guns.

Just wait a minute, now. Before we do anything crazy we should stop and ask ourselves, what would Jesus do?

Oh, he’d do just what you’re suggesting. Ok, carry on.

 
 

FudgePakistan.

 
 

Cooswait.

 
 

Mauricetania.

 
 

Hello?!?! MOrocco?’?!?!

 
 

SoMaleYeah

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Da-homo

 
 

JoeOrDan.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Shit, Dahomey doesn’t exist any more? Ignore previous “joke”.

 
 

PalIsFiiiine.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

“Been-IN?” Maybe it could be salvaged….

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Although “Been-in-ya” from Stand on Zanzibar would be better.

 
 

Just blogwhoring it up re: a happy bedtime story about another bit of the old digital ultraviolence, this time online.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

“The bite o’ been-in, the bite o’ been-in
One came out where a hundred went in.

The bite o’ been-in, the bite o’ been-in
God ha’ mercy on a child of sin”

I’ll stop now.

 
 

Just blogwhoring it up re: a happy bedtime story about another bit of the old digital ultraviolence, this time online.

I had Google recently attach my name to an account I did not want my name attached to. Oh joy.

 
 

It’s a shame that Assyria both no longer exists and was in the wrong-ish location.

 
 

It’s a shame that Assyria both no longer exists and was in the wrong-ish location.

One guess why the ASSyrians died out.

 
 

Phallustine.

Too much of a reach?

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Too much of a reach?

Not as much as Pole-land.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

We’re all forgetting the most obviously gay country: Chad!

 
 

what would Jesus do?

Put on his motorcycle boots and STOMP A HIPPY. Or feed the poor. Depends on who you ask, I suppose.

 
 

Fuck Cerb, that was epic!*

*In a good way

/genuflects in your general direction…also, too, next week I will devote some time to figuring out how to bolt the tip jar to the side bar, as well as looking into some other back side tech issues…

xoxox,

 
 

Doesn’t the homophobia come from the religion?

Burroughs and Orton give the impression that gay sex tourism was Tunisia’s main industry in the 50s and 60s. North Africa was very much the S.E-Asia of its day. So lots of variation across place and era.
If the theocracy in Saudi Arabia invented the Scourge of Homosex to distract their subjects from other outlets for their anger, this would totally be the first time this has happened.

 
 

also, too, next week I will devote some time to figuring out how to bolt the tip jar to the side bar, as well as looking into some other back side tech issues…

Let me know if you need any help. My non-beer real life is spent dealing with servers and writing lots and lots (and lots) of code. Most of it web-related one way or another.

Actually, sometimes there’s beer involved in that stuff too.

 
 

How many words in will you take care of a mom?

I almost larfed out loud (in a public space, so the governor is engaged.)

Nice work.

As was the reply…

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Doesn’t the homophobia come from the religion?

Every new religion that comes along in the middle-eastern space we still live in (unfortunately)—Abrahamism, Christianity, Islam—is first embraced and promoted by previously oppressed groups…women, first and foremost of course.

So far, there’s always eventually been a recrudescence of the tribal mores that the Semitic-speaking tribes brought out of the desert with them. I think the biggest disaster in history is when they infiltrated, undermined, and clumsily adopted Sumerian civilization, replacing it with Assyria and Babe-baloney-a.

 
 

United Arab Sodomites.

For a minute, UNE stood for UnitedNegroEmirites™…I was working on getting a piece of the ports deal at the time…

 
 

Burroughs and Orton give the impression that gay sex tourism was Tunisia’s main industry in the 50s and 60s. North Africa was very much the S.E-Asia of its day. So lots of variation across place and era.

And maybe in the treatment of tourists vs. locals, urbanites vs. yokels.

 
 

“Been-IN?” Maybe it could be salvaged….

I actually have that country in the logbook (Amateur Radio)…There was a pileup of assholes…good story if not boring to 99% of the population…And yes, gag can be salvaged, there is always an angle.

OBS, I will consult if necessary, and thanks for offering assistance, as well as assisting. We appreciate it. 🙂

I believe I am now caught up.

 
 

The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge said,

September 3, 2013 at 20:44 (kill)

Although “Been-in-ya” from Stand on Zanzibar would be better.

I am delighted and completely unsurprised to find a John Brunner citation here.

 
 

You know what they say: nobody ever went broke betting on “a recrudescence of the tribal mores the Semetic-speaking tribes brought out of the desert with them.”

 
 

Scott Lively: Russia A ‘Beacon Of Freedom’ While US Is A ‘Gay Version Of The Soviet Union’

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lively-russia-beacon-freedom-while-us-gay-version-soviet-union

Still trying to figure out that last part…

 
 

Who can tell teh Ghey Arab nations apart? I mean Lesbya is a BearBear state. That makes no sense.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Scott Lively: Russia A ‘Beacon Of Freedom’ While US Is A ‘Gay Version Of The Soviet Union’

Translation: “Bring back the Skoptsiy!”

 
 

From Pup’s most recent link, the fist sentence:

Scott Lively believes Vladimir Putin’s attempt to stop Russia’s “homosexualization” is comparable to the fight against Nazis and the pastor has promised Putin the first copy of a Russian-translation of his book The Pink Swastika, which blames gays for the Holocaust.

Why I feel compelled to download the page and other referential materials, I do not know…Oh right the new gig…there have to be lulzorz to be had from the distillation of mangoes, though no promises…

Lively….hmmm the gag could almost write itself…Plus I forgot about that asshole…There are so many it is like attempting to see through the chaff and catch a proper bead on the plane.

(Gotta be a better reversal of the forest and trees metaphor…)

 
 

Scott Lively, in a video posted by Box Turtle Bulletin youtu.be

Submitted without comment.

/hanging curve ball

 
 

Scott Lively: Russia A “Beacon Of Freedom” While U.S. Is A “Gay Version Of The Soviet Union”

A gay version of the U.S.S.R.? See: East Side Story. Or just Google “Stalinist musicals.”

 
 

Scott Lively: Russia A ‘Beacon Of Freedom’

Which serves to illustrate Fariba’s point. Putin cranks up his Homophobia Crusade, consolidating his power in a number of ways*… and shitweasels like Lively are in love, because Lively has never seen a boot he didn’t want to lick… but people do not ascribe it to some deep-rooted homophobia integral to the Slavic character.

* It’s one more label to stick on opponents before imprisoning them; part-&-parcel of promoting authoritarian culture in general; and so on.

 
 

Phallustine.

Too much of a reach-around?

Fuxt.

 
 

but people do not ascribe it to some deep-rooted homophobia integral to the Slavic character.

So Gary’s statement wouldn’t have sounded better in the original Russian?

 
 

So Gary’s statement wouldn’t have sounded better in the original Russian?

Some things *do* sound better in Russian. I rate for any language where “I love” is pronounced “Ya lyublyu”. But that is not really in Gary’s vocabulary.

 
 

Too much of a reach-around?

The reach-around I can handle, but what’s the reacher doing back there in the meantime?

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

The reach-around I can handle, but what’s the reacher doing back there in the meantime?

I don’t suppose “?????? ????????” (rzhaviye trombonye) will pass preview….

 
 

Some things *do* sound better in Russian. I rate for any language where “I love” is pronounced “Ya lyublyu”. But that is not really in Gary’s vocabulary.

“You speak Russian?”
“Oh, a bit. But only one sentence.”
“Well go on, mate, let me have it.”
“Ya lyublyu.”
“Ya…?”
“Lyublyu.”
“Ya lyubliu? Ya lyiubliu. Ya lyiubliu. What’s it mean?”
“I love you.”
“I love you? What bloody good is that?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t planning to use it myself.”

And if you know what movie that’s from, you rock.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

You don’t really need the “ya”—the “yu” ending carries person and tense. But you do need a direct object. Lyublyu just means “I love”. Lyublyu t’ebya means “I love you“.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Gah! Person and number, I mean.

 
 

I would love to learn Russian just so I could read The Master and Margarita in the original.

That’s how much I love the book.

 
 

Lyublyu t’ebya
I don’t know where you’re getting the palatalised ‘t’ from.

Or “Vas lyublyu” if you’re addressing more than one partner.

 
 

the palatalised ‘t’ from.
OK, the vowel is е, not э. I knew that.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

So Smut, how did you get “e oborodnoye” through WordPress?

 
 

Copy-pasted the Unicode sequence ampersand-hash-1101-semicolon. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Let’s see if Character Palette does the same thing: ?

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Nope.

 
 

Sorry.

This one is local, and too weird NOT to share.
.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Well, I found a table, but говно! that would be a laborious process!

 
 

We’re all forgetting the most obviously gay country: Chad!

OMFG. I have never laughed so had IN MY LIFE.
.

 
 

that would be a laborious process!
Substance McGravitas probably has a utility to simplify it.

Currently reading this IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY.
Spoiler alert: It is not as enthralling as “The Master & Margarita”.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

I just got a Firefox extension called UnicodetoHTML. Let’s see:

ржавые тромбоне

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Fantastic! But speaking of Firefox extensions, why doesn’t Cooliris work on any of the links on this page?

 
 

Let’s see:
?????? ????????

Y U USE PREPOSITIONAL CASE

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

Y U USE PREPOSITIONAL CASE

Ask Sergei Brin.

 
 

Y U USE PREPOSITIONAL CASE

In Soviet Russia case prepositions you.

 
 

CNN has been on at one of my wifi spots lately and seems to have taken the set designs from HLN. Also, Gloria Borger is using her very expressive eyebrows in a very serious way to express her very serious thoughts on what Obama is about to get up to in Stockholm.

Oh and it occurs that I am sitting next to the one Democrat in the county from whom I withheld my vote (asshole, and he will hear about it sometime.)

 
 

I have a cousin whose mother was Russian, she always said that the Paschal Greeting (??????? ???????!)(Christos voskres!) sounded like Christ is crazy in English.

 
 

I’ve read a few news stories in the past few days that suggest the real problem in Syria is the biggest drought in recent history. They say the protest that Assad brutally suppressed were agitating for government assistance for farmers. Millions of the refugees are farmers whose land can no longer grow anything because of drought.
this article explains things pretty well:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/03/437051/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/
So, whoever winds up in charge of Syria after the dust settles, is going to have big problems right from the start. And sending in a few cruise missiles probably won’t bring the rains back either.

Climate change is here. Resource wars are here. Welcome to the 21st century.

 
 

And sending in a few cruise missiles probably won’t bring the rains back either.

But I was told bombs solve everything!

 
 

But I was told bombs solve everything!

Bombed people often never have to worry about anything ever again.

 
 

I’m torn on this. After WW1, all these countries that hated each others’ guts got together and decided that shit was off limits. That’s almost 100 years of convention that most countries have respected. We’ve destroyed most of our stocks of the shit…

So what now?

Personally, I think the argument that bullets and bombs are just as bad is total bullshit. They aren’t. Not much better, but most certainly not the same.

 
 

I started to try to learn Russian from tape but I was disturbed that they negate with a tiny barely hearable ‘n attached to the noun (IIRC)

 
 

And sending in a few cruise missiles probably won’t bring the rains back either.

Texas has been having serious droughts. Perhaps a test of your theory is in order.

 
 

Personally, I think the argument that bullets and bombs are just as bad is total bullshit. They aren’t. Not much better, but most certainly not the same.

I agree. We’ve signed treaties against chemical/biological etc. for a reason. I’m pissed that we’ve allowed their uses in the past from our “ally” at the time.

What gets me is that for some reason we’re stuck (or have chosen) to deal with this on our own. At this point, why the fuck does the UN even exist? It’s not like anything can ever make it through the Security Council vetoes — we veto any action against Israel for its various issues, Russia vetoes anything against Syria/Iran/whoever, China vetoes… on and on.

Maybe we could all agree on some kind of action against Chad for wearing that hideous sweater. And those pants! Oh. Em. Gee.

 
 

What gets me is that for some reason we’re stuck (or have chosen) to deal with this on our own.

I think that’s a direct result of Bush Doctrine…

But then we got quite a bit of help with Libya, so go figure.

If I had to guess, I’d say that world support comes with a “what’s in it for me” clause every time. The UN does do a ton of good things around the world, but when it comes to gathering nations to enforce international law, treaties and standards, they fall flat every time. But then the Security Council has been hijacked by the superpowers. Small countries were supposed to have a voice in these things, but as far as I can tell, they have none.

 
 

I’m pissed that we’ve allowed their uses in the past from our “ally” at the time.

Well, yeah. It’s hyper-hypocritical to talk about how bad WMDs are after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we still have to let the world know that the use of these things is not acceptable.

If it were me, I would have pounded a few of those cruise missiles RIGHT AT Assad. Not at military hardware, not at electricity or water production facilities, but right at his face and as many senior military officials as could be located and targeted.

 
 

In the interest of demonstrating that the entire world is not composed of complete and utter asshats when it comes to trans* people, I thought I’d share a tidbit from my old home town on the frozen tundra.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/09/02/transgender_boy_returns_to_school_in_edmonton_proudly_sharing_his_story.html

 
 

⌶ ⋒∫∈ ♱ℌأṨ.

Also ABCTajpu. But for Russian and Arabic and Farsi, if you know the sounds the letters make Google Translate will change characters as you type.

 
 

Personally, I think the argument that bullets and bombs are just as bad is total bullshit. They aren’t. Not much better, but most certainly not the same.

Chemical weapons are clearly bad news, here’s why I think they are particularly evil. They are indiscriminate, although no more so than aerial bombardment, they are impersonal and dehumanizing, we gas vermin, but recoil at the thought of doing that to people, there is also the genocidal aspect- they are used to rid the users of troubling populations without the expense and risk of conventional warfare, there is the poison aspect- some chemical weapons can make a place deadly for a long time, denying people the home and crops upon which they are dependent.

Other weapons share some of these traits, few share them all. They are all of the brutality of war without any legitimate use. Even land mines can be ‘legitimately’ used if deployed in clearly marked minefields to protect obvious military assets (army bases, etc), not so with poison gas, their every use is a war crime and serves as a potent reminder of how vicious and callous anyone who would use them is.

 
 

Oh joy, look who’s here.

 
 

OBS (I presume) is ON THE JOB!

I keep hearing “what if it doesn’t work” and such. The people who say that don’t explain what they mean by “work” though I get the impression they mean to topple Assad or make a decisive turn in the war and the like. Which is not the aim. I blame Bush and Cheney for making a mockery of our military and national principles.

 
 

Syria never decided chemical weapons were off limits. So there’s a problem in enforcing a treaty someone didn’t sign on for.

 
 

Substance McGravitas said,
September 4, 2013 at 20:15

Stop waving your PENIS in our faces!

 
 

Syria never decided chemical weapons were off limits. So there’s a problem in enforcing a treaty someone didn’t sign on for.

That’s true, but everyone else did….It’s hard to decide where to draw the line, but if the asshole had used them against one of his neighbors, the bombs would have been dropped the next day. I think those citizens deserve some level of retaliation and a clear message that further use of those fucking things will result in his death.

 
 

Why do all these homosexuals keep letting me wave my penis in their faces?

 
 

Why do all these homosexuals keep letting me wave my penis in their faces?

You’re doing it wrong. If you want to be appreciated for the penis waving, do it to family values conservatives. They’re so not gay, but could watch that shit all day.

 
 

if the asshole had used them against one of his neighbors, the bombs would have been dropped the next day

We never stated it officially, but through back-channels we let it be known that any use of chemicals by the Iraqis in 1991 would cause a nuclear response.

 
 

It’s hard to decide where to draw the line, but if the asshole had used them against one of his neighbors, the bombs would have been dropped the next day.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on Iran and on Kurds within his own borders.

If Syria had done that to Iran somehow I reckon it’d be the fortunes of war.

 
 

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on Iran and on Kurds within his own borders.

And we only happened to notice that after he stopped being Rumsfeld’s BFF.

 
 

I’m not sure what to think about the whole thing. Hard to weep when Assad dies. I haven’t really followed the fate of Libya; maybe good was done there.

 
 

If Syria had done that to Iran somehow I reckon it’d be the fortunes of war.

Yeah, I’m sure you’re right about that…but then other countries like Russia and China would have a huge issue with that…

If it were ever possible to put aside our allegiances in interest of protecting civilian populations, we would have a lot more friends around the world. As it is, we seem to be OK with dividing the world into two factions like they were around 1914.

 
 

Also, it looks like there’s a chance Johnny Warmonger might not like the current Senate bill because it doesn’t go far enough (’cause what we really, really need is full-on war, not this pansy limited term missile shit).

So if he doesn’t like it, that can only be construed as a good thing.

I still wish there were some sort of international consensus on this. We are talking about “international law” and “international norms” after all, not “US law” and “US norms.”

Edited to add: (yes, I can edit — neener neener!) the link to WaMo found via this at LGM.

 
 

I’m really torn about it too. So far, Assad is winning. But that could change. We are already on the wrong side of Assad, but we do not want to be on the wrong side of a fledgling government with a ton of military hardware, including chem weapons at their disposal. Seems like doing something is a slightly less shitty option than doing nothing. The trick will be deciding where that something ends. We don’t have a very good track record with that sort of thing in the last 50 years.

 
 

I still wish there were some sort of international consensus on this.

Well yeah. I think consensus is “whoa, that’s fucked up, bro”, but nothing further than that. Having better than half the world just send warships to the region and demonstrate a buildup of forces would probably get the job done without having to fire a single missile.

Maybe. Maybe not. Might cause it to go global, too, which doesn’t seem like a farfetched possibility at this point.

 
 

Off Topic, but the title and graphic are appropriate. RIP Frederik Pohl.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/09/03/science-fiction-writer-frederik-pohl-dead-at-93/2760681/

 
 

No mention of Fred getting vastened so I guess he’s really gone.

 
 

I really liked Fred Pohl’s work, and he helped out a lot of other authors.

 
 

We never stated it officially, but through back-channels we let it be known that any use of chemicals by the Iraqis in 1991 would cause a nuclear response.

Do you think that was an earnest threat or bluff?

 
 

Do you think that was an earnest threat or bluff?

I think it was earnest, and if we didn’t the Brits probably would have.

 
 

Jeezlebub, that would have been fucking atrocious.

 
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
 

First Vance, then Pohl. Coincidence? I wonder….

</Les_Nessman>

 
 

All these nonagenarian authors suddenly dying! There’s definitely a pattern taking shape.

 
 

The Curse of Science Fiction.

 
 

Jeezlebub, that would have been fucking atrocious.

Things almost went pear-shaped in a hurry.

When the Iraqi SCUDs started hitting Tel Aviv the Israelis were getting ready to retaliate in a big way.

We figured if they did the Arab countries would have turned against us. We had plans to evacuate Jeddah and burn the buildings behind us so that the secrets wouldn’t fall into anyone’s hands.

The Gulf War wasn’t nearly as “precise” as you were led to believe.

 
 

Who do I complain to around here? ‘Cause I feel all nitpicky………………….I’ve been looking at this quote up top for years, see, and it oughta be “Too many people GOT their mail!”! It makes me…….SO ANGRY……………….I
just…………………I just wanna………………..SMASH something…………..or, or, or someBODY…………..I CAN’T
STOP THE, THE, THE COOPERSTOWN CAPRA PHILIP ROTH GREAT RADIO HEROES LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

 
 

The Gulf War wasn’t nearly as “precise” as you were led to Bush I & Wolf Blitzer wanted me to believe.

Please sir, have some respect for my deeply ingrained cynicism.

We figured if they did the Arab countries would have turned against us.

It isn’t unlikely that any non-Middle Easterners in the region would have had difficulty getting served at the local McD’s, but I don’t see the connection between the possibility of an Israeli strike and the decision to use nukes. (But then, I wasn’t aware there was a nuke that could be used without annoying folks downwind.)

Or are you just illustrating the general clustery fuckedness of it all?

 
 

o, what will the strikes target? I imagine, that because the US Air Force and Naval aviators are good at this sort of thing, that Syria’s air force will become so many scorch marks on the flight lines of Syria’s air bases. The air bases themselves will soon become listed as ‘fixer uppers’ and ‘a great value for the motivated do-it-yourselfer’ by the local real estate agents. If our military gets more ambitious, any tanks or APCs parked outside will be need of some serious work at a body shop. Destroying high contrast targets like jet fighters and tanks are what our military is best at. Will that be enough punishment to make Assad respect the Geneva conventions for the rest of the civil war? I am not an intelligence analyst for the military. I don’t know what mix of forces the Assad regime has been using to fight this war. Does he have, and has he been using the kind of obvious military hardware the US is so good at blowing up? Will losing tanks and planes and APCs hinder the Assad forces much?

 
 

Having better than half the world just send warships to the region and demonstrate a buildup of forces would probably get the job done without having to fire a single missile.

perhaps not skeery enough…i heard a dude on mpr this morning say that we’ve got to bomb the crap outta syria to show assad we mean bidness…we have to make him uncomfortable…topple a few buildings, etc…and then he said something about ‘dust on his wife’s wardrobe’ and i was like wtf?

 
 

I don’t see the connection between the possibility of an Israeli strike and the decision to use nukes.

Two separate issues. Remember that during Gulf War I we had a loosely held together coalition including the Gulf States and, wait for it, Syria.

If the Israelis had hit Iraq in retaliation for the SCUD attacks, our allies might very well have decided that they’re rather side with Iraq against Israel than with us against Iraq.

The Bush I administration did some very fast talking to keep the Israelis from retaliating. By some accounts they either had a strike package in the air, or on the ground waiting to go.

That’s when we quickly shifted our air campaign to SCUD hunting, mostly to appease the Israelis.

B-52 SCUD hunting and why it was a very bad idea

 
 

o, what will the strikes target?

At the very least I would expect known chemical weapons facilities and any assets that can launch chemical weapons (SCUD missiles, attack aircraft).

I would also expect air defense and command-control facilities to be hit.

If they wanted to expand the target list I would expect broader attacks against the Syrian military plus government buildings.

 
 

and then he said something about ‘dust on his wife’s wardrobe’ and i was like wtf?

If his wife is shacking up with Assad it would explain this guy’s desire for vengeance.

 
 

If his wife is shacking up with Assad it would explain this guy’s desire for vengeance.

So it’s like Helen of Troy all over again?

 
 

I still think making it clear that the cruise missiles are aimed at Assad himself, and the uppermost military cadre is the only way to get the message across.

The message is: If you live through this one and do that shit again, we WILL kill you.

 
 

So it’s like Helen of Troy all over again?

so…what causes most pitched battles…women or penis?

 
 

I still think making it clear that the cruise missiles are aimed at Assad himself, and the uppermost military cadre is the only way to get the message across.

The message is: If you live through this one and do that shit again, we WILL kill you.

oddly enough, i’m with tsam on this one…the pictures of dead kids just kill me

 
 

Thanks Maj. K.

I guess we should be glad Bush II wasn’t in office.

 
 

so…what causes most pitched battles…women or penis?

I blame Eris and and her golden apple inscribed ‘for the fairest’.

 
 

oddly enough, i’m with tsam on this one

Is it really that odd?

 
 

That’s when we quickly shifted our air campaign to SCUD hunting, mostly to appease the Israelis.

does anyone remember the ‘scud stud’ whom i believe was on cnn at the time? any time i’ve mentioned him, i get weird looks…or was he just a figment of my imagination i devised to get me through hours of watching the hours of missle strike footage that fed hubbkf’s massive war boner?

 
 

Is it really that odd?

sadly, no…i find about the only thing we disagree on his hot women and beer…

 
 

You sound ashamed about it. I don’t know how to take this.

I’m going to put on a Cure album now.

 
 

You sound ashamed about it. I don’t know how to take this.

I’m going to put on a Cure album now.

hahaha…no…i just like to say ‘sadly, no’ which oddly enough, is how i got drawn into this site…

dang, i wish i had a cure cd here…i might have to opt for the church or depeche mode…

 
 

does anyone remember the ‘scud stud’ whom i believe was on cnn at the time? any time i’ve mentioned him, i get weird looks…

Yes, I do. He was Arthur Kent, who narrated some History Channel programs before completely dropping out of sight as far as Americans are concerned.

 
 

Syria .. Dust on the wardrobe…

Never thought I’d encounter anything worse than Kansas.

 
 

bbkf should look for the new OMD album. Really, its like the intervening years never happened.

 
 

bbkf should look for the new OMD album. Really, its like the intervening years never happened.

just watched teh videeo for night cafe on the youtube…lol, you are right…i am especially fond of michael stipe’s cameo appearance…

 
 

I really wish moron would quit changing his name so the filter would work.

 
 

Keeping the hot tub clean is a thankless task.

 
 

Hey, I think I may have found a reasonable conservative. As a highly endangered species, perhaps he should be placed in some sore of preserve or museum.

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/02/counterculture-conservatism-the-right-needs-less-ayn-rand-more-flannery-oconnor.html

 
 

so…what causes most pitched battles…women or penis?

Yes.

 
 

Bacevich:

The conservative tradition I have in mind may not satisfy purists. It doesn’t rise to the level of qualifying as anything so grandiose as a coherent philosophy. It’s more of a stew produced by combining sundry ingredients. The result, to use a word that ought warm the cockles of any conservative’s heart, is a sort of an intellectual slumgullion.

A slumgullion in every pot!

 
 

“Imaginative conservative.”

DOES NOT COMPUTE
DOES NOT COMPUTE

Bacevich (NOT “have icy” fyautocorrect ) has been in the conservative wilderness for a long time. He’s about the only self-identifying conservative for whom I can muster up any respect. If you’re not familiar with his back story you should check it out.

 
 

Bacevich (NOT “have icy” fyautocorrect ) has been in the conservative wilderness for a long time. He’s about the only self-identifying conservative for whom I can muster up any respect. If you’re not familiar with his back story you should check it out.

i’ve never heard of the dude, but he was a good read…good points…

 
 

“Imaginative conservative.”

DOES NOT COMPUTE
DOES NOT COMPUTE

Oh, they’re imaginative all right, they can imagine death panels, long form birth certificates, libertarian gulches, good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns and calves the size of cantaloupes.

 
 

so…what causes most pitched battles…women or penis?

Penis, because even when it’s women it’s really PENIS.

 
 

Penis, because even when it’s women it’s really PENIS.

DING! DING! DING! tigris wins the prize…which is a lifetime supply of penis, or calves the size of cantaloupes…

 
 

The Penic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Men and Other Men over some Woman from 264 BC to 146 BC. At the time, they were probably the largest wars that had ever taken place (Size matters). The term Penic comes from the Latin word Penicus (or Poenicus), meaning “Well Hung”, with reference to the Carthaginians’ Phoenician ancestry. The main cause of the Penic Wars was the conflict of love interests between the existing Carthaginian Empire and the expanding Roman Republic.

 
 

I heard the rumors about the Carthaginians were completely unfounded. Confirmed by a confirmed size queen.

 
 

Spartans, however, not so much. Apparently military training in the womb does a PENIS good.

 
 

The Romans were, however, expanding.

 
 

After the fall of Carthage the Romans assaulted the earth.

 
 

After the fall of Carthage the Romans assaulted the earth.

They then battered the earth. And deep fried it.

 
 

From the author of Dia(betes)netics. Batterfried Earth.

 
 

Slightly OT, the National Guards in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are all refusing to follow the order to process benefits for married gay and lesbian spouses.

 
 

They then battered the earth. And deep fried it.

And served it with delicious garum.

 
 

Orders are only for following mindlessly, not for THAT.

 
 

the National Guards in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are all refusing to follow the order to process benefits for married gay and lesbian spouses.

OK, now can we let them secede?

 
 

Slightly OT, the National Guards in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are all refusing to follow the order to process benefits for married gay and lesbian spouses.

so the people who are charged with taking care of us when the shit hits the fan are being total obsfucating dicks about this? nice to know…

 
 

Also the people who rely on the federal government to keep the lights on.

I have never been in the military but I know people who have and still are. Somehow, and I could be wrong, but somehow I’ve gotten the impression that openly saying “I’ve received your orders and I’m going to disobey them,” isn’t the most brilliant of career moves.

 
 

Red alert! Pitched tent followed by blue balls results in pitched battle! Tie a yellow ribbon.

 
 

Tie a yellow ribbon.

…around your red tent-pole?

 
 

CRA said,

September 5, 2013 at 23:22 (kill)

Red alert! Pitched tent followed by blue balls results in pitched battle! Tie a yellow ribbon.

Whale Chowder said,

September 5, 2013 at 23:43 (kill)

Tie a yellow ribbon.

…around your red tent-pole?

That reminds me – I haven’t looked at one of my favorite sites in a while. Youse guys know about Awkward Boners?

 
 

Somehow, and I could be wrong, but somehow I’ve gotten the impression that openly saying “I’ve received your orders and I’m going to disobey them,” isn’t the most brilliant of career moves.

I can verify that this is undeniably true.

Besides–didn’t you watch the Rambo movies? Dude went to JAIL.

 
 

Youse guys know about Awkward Boners?

Well that sounds safe for work.

 
 

Youse guys know about Awkward Boners?

I hate it when you need a quickie and you pop the blue pill and get the job done and then you’ve got the four-hour boner and you just HAVE to show up for your synchronized swimming practice.

 
 

…and then he said something about ‘dust on his wife’s wardrobe’ and i was like wtf?

This bit has rendered me speechless…suffering from mental vapor lock a little bit as in I don’t even know where to start. Imma gonna see if the workmates liked the pizza, finish the cigarette and cypher on how many angles of wrongness are displayed by the idea that ‘dust’ on the dress of Assad’s wife will somehow make any difference whatsoever…

 
 

the National Guards in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are all refusing to follow the order to process benefits for married gay and lesbian spouses.

The Mississippi Air National Guard unit at Meridian had some big corruptions issues a few years back. I think most of the top brass lost their jobs.

I’m not sure if it was a Guard or Reserve unit at Kelly AFB in Texas had some racism complaints (Texas, go figure) a few years back as well.

I’m not surprised based on the “corporate culture” of those units.

 
 

This notion of unlimited devotion
Isn’t a potion to be swallowed
unless you’re sure it’s hallowed.

 
 

Well that sounds safe for work.

That used to be the case.

Once while browsing a store on Catalina Island the wife and I came across a fun old book and bought it — The Omnibus Boners,” illustrated by Dr. Seuss.

There are other books of boners, like Boners: Seriously Misguided Facts According to Schoolkids.

Most or all of those boners could be awkward.

 
 

New post. Another triple post. Hopefully this won’t become a “thing”.

 
 

From you, Cerberus, we *expect* triple-headed posts.

 
 

[…] I feel like we’ve been here before. Have we been here before? Yeah, we’ve been here before. […]

 
 

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