Private parts

 Like Paul Campos, I don't "get" transgender.

It's literally impossible for me to imagine. I'm physically male, and while I can imagine finding other men attractive and desiring men sexually I literally can't conceive how I would think and feel as a hetrosexual (or homosexual, or asexual, or any other sort of...) woman. 

While I don't feel that desire I can see a man and think "Wow, he's (fill in the attractive adjective)." without feeling physical attraction, meaning I "get" homosexuality.

(And bisexuality, and asexuality, and a lot of other "sexualities") 

But I can't feel what it would be like to be female, to think of myself as a woman. I don't "get" that.

And that's just fine. 

I don't have to, to understand that some people do feel that way. I "get" that it's an actual thing, just like I get that there are a whole spectrum of emotional and physical feelings and identities and...well, people, who aren't like me. 

Because people are complicated.

And y'know what?

That's just fine, too. Provided those complications neither pick my pocket nor break my leg, have at it my brothers and sisters and everyone in between.

Y'know what I don't get?

People who seem inordinately obsessed with policing other people's complications enough to do stuff like this:

Who does this serve?

Seriously. What earthly "good" does this do? How does this make anyone's life better or easier or simpler?

The world is full of horrors.

Someone with male junk who doesn't think of themselves as male?

Is not remotely close to one of them.

But apparently the sort of people who now call themselves "conservative" believe that isn't so. To the point of changing the rules to MAKE those people "a problem".

Why?

How does this even make their fucking lives any better?

Empire of Fools

Day 2 of Trump 2: Revenge Boogaloo! and Tubby the Stable Genetic Engineering Genius has determined that there are two and only two human genders...

...so by executive order the incredibly weird, complicated diversity of the human genome can…ummm...just stop being weird, diverse, and complicated and start being...ummm...what a bunch of ignorant bigoted MAGAts want it to be. 

 
Day Fucking 2. 

TWO. 

We’ve got something like another thousand days of stupid shit like just this.

At LEAST this stupid. 

Let's not even start on tariffs.

This, perhaps more than anything, more that the racism, more than the bigotry, more than the oligarchy, more than the hatred, more than all the other vile, shitty things that Republicans want and are, is what's so infuriating about my second go-around of MAGAt rule.

It's the stupid, stupid.

These people want - and what my own crowd didn't loathe and fear enough to show up to stop - incredibly simpleminded "solutions" to complex, difficult problems. 

They want, let's be blunt, stupid things.

No, tossing out immigrants of all varieties isn't going to "solve" anything. Not low wages. Not high prices. Not the increasing enshittification of American life.

Immigration, transgender people, "DEI", "wokeness" aren't the reasons America isn't Great for you and the other non-plutocrat Americans. 

Income inequality and poorly written tax codes and other laws, corporate greed and monopoly power, and regulatory capture are.

Immigrants aren't the reason your health care sucks; greedy insurance companies and greedy medical providers and wealthy people and corporations and poorly written laws and tax codes are.

Immigrants aren't the reasons your rent is so expensive; greedy landlords and NIMBY neighbors and poorly written zoning and development codes are.

Transgender people aren't the reason your kids are struggling; greedy college administrators and poorly written financial aid codes and corporate degree-gatekeeping are.

All these and more problems are extremely complex and difficult because We, the People, have allowed these problems to burrow deep within our already-flawed governmental systems. 

We've sat on our asses, most of us, fiddling with silly nonsense about Drag Queen Storytime and Bud Light ads whilst the wealthy and powerful whose primacy was written into the foundational documents regained all the power they'd lost (and more!) since the last time they shit the national bed in 1929.

The bottom line, as any Roman of the late Republic could warn you, is that you can have great disparity of wealth or a republic.

But not both.

And the simpleminded, in their search for a "simple" solution to this complex problem, have chosen the worst possible "simple" solution:

Just fucking elect the greedy fucking plutocrat and by inference all his greedy billionaire buddies.

Jesus wept.

I honestly don't have any idea how you fix this. There's even a saying: "You can't fix stupid." 

How do you show someone who doesn't believe that pouring literally billions of tons of things like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can raise global climatic warmth? How do you convince someone who thinks that China pays tariffs on Chinese exports that something like "health insurance" is nothing but a greedy middleman that helps increase medical costs while adding nothing of value? How do you prove to someone who thinks the President dictates the price of eggs that supply problems related to avian flu are the reason for the high price of eggs?

"Solving" all these things would require incredible knowledge, hard work, and patience to understand, and incredible levels of effort to deal with, especially given that the people and organizations that profit from stuff like corporate and personal profits will fight like ten thousand devils against you.

Instead, well, how about going for the con man who tells you that trade wars are fun and easy to win? That your relationship problems are because uppity bitches? That your egg prices are because you have to press "one" for English?

Is that fucking stupid?

Of COURSE it is!

But it's simpler and easier that putting in the hard work of self-governance.

So here we are.

I have no idea where this will end up. And given my neurological problem, whether I'll even be alive to know.

But from here?

It doesn't look promising.

To be ruled by competent evil is appalling.

But to be ruled by stupid fools..?

Sunday check-in and a question

 Got a busy week, but wanted to stop by here and download a couple of thoughts. It's been that kind of day.

The good news is that the Bride's job is reduced only 0.1FTE. We can live with that. I'll have to pick up some more contract work here and there, but we keep ALL the medical coverage, and that's what would hurt the most.

The bad news is that the goddamn IRS refuses to believe that I don't have a quarter million stashed in the Maldives.

Long story, but the bottom line is that my mother's IRA didn't get correctly divided into two inherited IRAs - one each for my sister and me - and instead went 1) into her's and then 2) into mine. There it is; it didn;t get turned into hookers and blow, or whatever the fucking IRA thinks it did. 

But the paper trail is complicated, and I'm not sure how to get the sonsofbitches to see how it worked and that I'm not hiding the money. I've got a FTF appointment this coming Friday and I hope to try and lay out what I have and see if I can convince the guy to see reason.

And fucking Trump has never been dinged so much as a nickel for all his tax chiseling? What a fucking fuckstory.

One thing I've been following with increasing incredulity has been the whole "transpanic" thing.

Fortunately Oregon is fairly insulated from this sort of wingnut freakout. It's not that our wingnuts are less freaky - they are, believe me; nobody who's stupid and twitchy enough to think that it's a great notion to move the less-paved parts of the state into Idaho is anything less than a gibbering loon - but that they're much fewer and much less in-our-faces, living as they do out in the hinterlands far from the decadence of civilization.

But as I understand it the whole idea is that these nuts are utterly unhinged on the subject of transgender people who, as I understand it, are people who are born with one set of genital plumbing but don't think and feel in harmony with that.

I joke about "Sharing the bathroom with a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock" but apparently this is a thing and a thing that utterly drives some people out of their tree; someone who goes to the ladies room and pisses standing up in the stall.

Now WHY this freaks these folks out I have no idea.

I dunno know about them, but I go to the can to do my business and I could care less about what the other people there are doing or how they do it. More than that - I don't want to know. Those excretory and urinary functions?

NOT my kink.

But apparently the whole thing - and I can't believe that it's all purely electoral cynicism; some people HAVE to be genuinely freaky about this for it to gain traction - really DOES freak people out, to which my response is complete and utter bafflement.

Seriously?

WTF, folks?

Why?

Why do you give a shit?

If someone with a cock wants to be called Shirley? If someone with a uterus wants to grow a beard and hang out at the bar with the bros? If they want to be called "them" or whatever?

Why on Earth is it your business to even care, much less "do something"?

No, really.

I totally don't get it.

There's so many things to worry about. So many fucked up problems; global warming, MILF Manor, nonalcoholic beer, exploding freight trains, Dick Cheney, the collected works of Sonny Bono. It's almost impossible to list them all, much less worry and "do something" about.

And you want to fuck around with this?

Like I said; I don't get it.

Anyone help a brother out? No kidding; what's the deal? Not with the cynical GQP scum using it for "culture war" ammo, but the CHUDs out there they're driving with it. What's THEIR problem? Why are these gomers so arsed about this?

Fight them or be destroyed. Because they will not spare you.

Thoughts knocking around in my head today:

What’s frustrating about my current job situation is that I have several deadlines bearing down on me but am wasting this morning doing monkey-brain grade dirt nanny work because we can’t seem to find and hire (and keep) field techs with more brains and energy than an actual monkey.

 

If the American Taliban thinks that the SCOTUS will “stop abortion” they’re as stupid as they are credulous. Humans have been DXing their spawn since before the hippies invented sex in the Sixties.

 

The difference is simply “will emptying my womb kill or injure me, or not?” be the question, and the wingnuts are happy to answer “Maybe. Take your chances, slut.” because the wealthy ones know their cash will ensure their mistresses and daughters will be safely surgically de-fetused and the others are some combination of stupid, delusional, high on their own supply, or just mean as goddamn weasels. 

Of course, it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about killing sluts with coathangers, and jailing them, and ruining their lives.

 

And the ultimate irony? The real Abortion Doctor is their precious Nature’s God, who ends some ridiculously huge number of pregnancies with miscarriage.

 

But. That’s not the real goal. The sleazy Alito screed spells it out in letters of fire. It’s marriage equity and contraceptives and every other ruling that keeps the Bible-bangers’ noses out of your bedroom, your workplace, your life.

Because it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about making everything that Republicans think is icky - men kissing men, women loving up women, people dressing "funny", people not listening to them talk about sex and how if those people aren't doing it their way they're doing it wrong. And that's evil. And evil must be destroyed.

 

So stop kidding yourself. You have a choice; fight them now and stop them. Or be crushed by them.

 

If you’re not prostrate before the Cross?

 

Those nice happy friendly Jesus people in the picture below? 

 

They're coming for your fucking heads.

 

Last thoughts on the whole idiotic "groomer" nonsense...

Good discussion over at Nancy Nall's joint. Which brought the following thoughts to mind (a lot of the conversation revolved around young people making choices about their sexuality or gender that they might regret...):

Are there people who are going to be troubled on the issues of sexuality and gender? Are there people who will be confused, or make mistakes, or do things that they might regret?

Yes.

(Or not. But that’s not really the point)

The point being; is any of that none of your business, or mine, or anyone’s business but theirs and the people who care about them?

Also yes.

People are complicated. All people – cis, trans, het, non-het, binary, non-binary. Some may be more complicated than others. But either way, it’s the height of arrogance to barge into their lives uninvited and start opining about them, their choices, their lives…

Like anything else that neither picks my or your pockets nor breaks our legs, our most appropriate posture is sitting quietly drinking a nice hot cup of STFU.

Let's think for a moment. This is about a tiny subset of the human race. Why are we even discussing this, other than a bunch of looney wingnuts are screeching about it in public?

Now.

Since the whole reason we’re even discussing this is because wingnuts are screeching about it, while we ponder the whole business it’s important to remember that:

1. Wingnuts in 2022 believe things about people, gender, and sex that would be embarrassingly vile and ignorant in a 15th Century Spanish Inquisitor, and
2. Wingnuts don’t want you to think that, so they’ll find something anodyne to cloak their vile ignorance in.

So the current hysteria about everything non-cis-het is all about finding ways to get their hatred and loathing of everyone they find icky into the conversation by linking “trans-people-gay-people-child-molesting”.

That’s as genuine as linking model trains with oenophilia, but they don’t care, anymore than they really care about their lies regarding the Affordable Care Act, Black people, the 2020 election, and the robust manliness of Donald Trump.

It’s performance art, pure bullshit, they’re good at it, and by spending time even discussing this (rather than telling them to STFU and leave other people alone…)

So. Bottom line?

I’m perfectly fine with everyone who’s not me living their lives the way they want (unless it involves stuff like driving drunk or experimenting with the public use of high explosives – y'know, picking pockets, breaking legs…) so I have absolutely nothing to add to the issues of human sexuality other than “Good luck. Call me when you figure it out.”

Wingnuts?

Same-same for you nimrods: sit down and STFU. 

If we ever need more tax cuts for billionaires we'll know where to find you.