It’s Turtles All the Way Down

The trans crisis is the vax crisis, all the other crises, too. 

You can’t talk about one piece but not another piece.

by Chris Bray for American Greatness

Edward Dowd, a shrewd and persistent critic of mRNA injections (among other things) makes this argument:

Meaning that discussion of transgender everything is a distraction and a waste of time, and stop talking about Dylan Mulvaney and the beer cans.

But the problem is, every crisis is the same crisis, and the trans crisis is the COVID-19 crisis: the same arguments from authority, the same gaslighting, the same strawmanning, the same bad faith, the same coercion, the same attack on family structure. Remember this, the argument from California legislators that it’s OK for children to go get the mRNA vaccines without parental knowledge or consent because they can already do the same with abortions and birth control?

Well, the California legislature just stealth-killed Assembly Bill 1314, a bill that would have required schools to promptly inform parents if their children identify at school as transgender:

At the very same time, AB 665 is advancing in the state legislature. When it’s signed into law, which is looking like a good bet, it would allow school counselors and other mental health professionals to send children to residential mental health facilities without parental consent. Critics of the bill have pointed out its usefulness in taking children who declare transgender identity from disapproving parents.

So the California legislature, which passed laws allowing children to get birth control and abortions and medical treatment for rape without parental knowledge or consent, also tried to pass a law allowing children to get mRNA vaccines without parental knowledge or consent, and is now making sure children can identify as transgender without parental knowledge—and receive “gender-affirming” care, including treatment at a residential facility, without parental consent. Maybe you can spot a consistent theme in all of that.

Meanwhile, the gaslighting and strawmanning are also the same:

And then:

That last piece, published just a few days ago, has to be read to be believed. “Authoritarianism is gospel to modern conservatives. Nowhere is that clearer than in their assaults on children,” it explains.

Why are parents demanding parents’ rights bills to protect their involvement in the lives of their children? Because the right-wingers want to preserve the basic Christian right to murder their kids, obviously:

The language of parental rights can become a license to torture, as it did in the case of 13-year-old Hana Grace-Rose Williams. In 2011, officials found her “face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard,” the New York Times reported. An investigation later reported malnutrition and hypothermia as her causes of death. Her adoptive parents, Larry and Carri Williams, were reportedly followers of Michael and Debi Pearl and their book, To Train Up a Child. The book, named for that verse in Proverbs, urges corporal punishment with a switch and says that “a little fasting is good training.” By the time of the Times report, three children, including Williams, had died in homes with the Pearls’ book on the shelves.

See, Christian parents don’t want their children to go trans behind their backs because it threatens their commitment to torturing their children to death. The agenda becomes so clear in the glare of that devastating new fact, right? Journalism explains the world to us.

The whole essay is loaded up with gems like this:

State laws passed by conservative Republicans have made LGBTQ children in particular more vulnerable to abuse at home by practically requiring schools to out them to their parents. The denial of gender-affirming care is another act of violence. Far-right activists invent tales of wanton surgeries on minors and irreversible hormonal treatments.

Yeah, about that. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

So you have to get the vaccine for your child, or you’re a murderer, because the experts say, and you have to get top surgery and hormones for your child, or you’re a murderer, because the experts say, and all objections are inescapably monstrous. The vaccines are safe and effective, and gender-affirming care is lifesaving medical treatment. Trust the science and comply. We can take bets on how many years it takes to see the first “we should have an amnesty for the proponents of transgender surgery for children” article.

The assault on the body is the assault on the body. The assault on the family is the assault on the family. The medicalization of social reality is stretching out to touch bigger and bigger pieces of your life. Take the pill, bigot, and we’ll shove the other one down your child’s throat for you. You know, for your health.

You can’t talk about one piece but not another piece. The crisis is the crisis. It’s a crisis of “reality debt,” of the increasingly absurd rule by experts, and of the endless recourse to narrative-making maneuvers that reconstruct reality on unsustainable ideological models. Above all, it’s a manufactured crisis that has instrumental force, suggesting over and over again that family is atavistic and an impediment to a healthy society. Consider the possibility that people who keep telling you how much they hate the family mean what they say.

X22, And we Know, and more- April 14

 

After what has felt like 1 of the most insanely quiet weeks for info, I finally have 1 bit of info that I actually want to hear about:

This is the title of the last episode before NCIS LA's 2 part finale begins. The 1 that will be the full circle on Callen's past and hopefully involve bringing Hetty home when it is over.

It's a freaking perfect title! All of the titles this Season have either been really corny sounding or just bad altogether. 

Now just have to hope that the episode info about this episode fits the title. Because this episode will set the tone for how the finale begins. Happy endings may depend on how this episode goes.

3 Tips For Exposing The Left’s Lack Of Logic In Political Debates

It’s imperative that conservatives understand and deploy the very best kinds of argumentation in order to refute bad arguments.

posted by Casey Chalk at The Federalist

You’ve heard them a thousand times. Banning interventions such as puberty blockers and hormones for transgender-identifying minors will be a “direct cause” of suicide. Restrictions on abortion are a direct attack on human rights. And rejecting the curriculum of the Advanced Placement African American Studies course is “racist” and “white supremacist.”

All of these arguments are constantly asserted on the left. But they are also bad arguments, containing all manner of illogic and specious reasoning. And as much as conservatives can casually wave them off as such, it’s also imperative that conservatives understand and deploy the very best kinds of argumentation in order to refute bad arguments and also effectively (and graciously) communicate truth in our increasingly confused culture.

To that end, I propose the following three principles for conservatives to follow and employ when they encounter — and seek to refute — the kinds of poor reasoning so common in our society today. Much of this relies on ethicist Matthew Petrusek’s excellent upcoming book “Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture.”

1. Know Their Arguments Better Than They Do

In order to effectively argue, we need what Petrusek calls a disposition for constructive debate rather than simply point-scoring (as fun as it may be to “own” the other side). That includes trying to sympathetically understand our opponent’s position. A great way to do that is to try to repeat the person’s argument back to them in your own words. It can be as simple as saying, “Tell me if I understand you accurately: What you are saying is [fill in the blank]?”

The purpose of this is not simply to be charitable to the other side (though that’s certainly important). It’s also a way to force your opponent to actually make an argument, rather than simply an emotive, often aggressive assertion. Petrusek explains: “Central to playing the game of truth-seeking is knowing the opponent’s position at least as well, if not better, than he or she does.” And by helping the person package an argument, their errors usually become manifest.

So, for example, the claim that trying to curb transgender interventions for children will result in kids killing themselves needs to be unpacked. Presumably, the person is referencing some talking point he heard about how “trans” teens are X amount of times more likely to commit suicide, and thus if we don’t affirm children in how they want to express their so-called gender identity, we risk them killing themselves. 

The problem is that there is currently no scientific evidence to substantiate that claim. Moreover, it elides the fact that 87 percent of gender-dysphoric children and adolescents have “comorbid psychiatric diagnoses,” such as anxiety or depression. Stated simply, correlation is not causation.

2. Demand People Define Their Terms

Arguments can only go so far when two or more people aren’t using the same terms in the same way because the two camps define their words differently. Thus before jumping right into the point-counterpoint debate, we should ask our interlocutors to define their terms. Sometimes the result of that will be that people realize they don’t know what those terms even mean. Alternatively, it could become clear there is a deeper origin point for the disagreement.

“Without pinpointing where the conflict originates, there can be no authentic debate; the disagreeing parties will simply be talking (or more likely, shouting) past each other,” writes Petrusek.

Take the claim that abortion restrictions undermine human rights because they limit a woman’s ability to abort the living organism in the womb. But what are human rights, and how do we go about identifying them? What about the living organism in the womb — is it human, and thus should enjoy those same rights? If the life in the womb doesn’t enjoy such rights, why not?

Moreover, the idea of human rights is predicated on the equality of humanity. Yet, as Petrusek notes, that “all human beings are equal” is far from clear at a purely secular level, given that humans differ in regard to intellect, physical appearance, emotional intelligence, or degree of personal ambition. So on what grounds does a person claim there are such things as “human rights” or that everyone is equal? It’s not that there aren’t such things as human rights or that everyone is equal, but you should push your interlocutor to defend these ambiguous terms.

3. Find the Underlying Philosophical Principles

This points to another important element of real, productive debate: identifying the underlying philosophical principle often doing the unmentioned work in an argument. Petrusek explains that isolating arguments and breaking them down into parts enables us to more clearly recognize their faulty premises because “sound arguments have valid propositions and unambiguous terms.” See if you can spot the philosophy underlying each below claim, and the error.

“Only scientific knowledge is meaningful knowledge.”

The problem here is that this claim, premised on the philosophical error of scientism, cannot be verified or falsified using the scientific method and is thus a form of question-begging, or presuming exactly what is in question. No science experiment can prove the claim.

“All that matters are the practical things.”

This claim, premised on the error of pragmatism, also cannot be empirically tested. Many things we cherish today — literature, sports, music — are anything but “practical.” And many scientific advances — penicillin, X-rays, insulin — happened by accidental discovery.

“We shouldn’t legislate morality.”

This claim is premised on the empirical belief that certain laws are based on hard, empirical truths, while other laws are based on flimsy, subjective definitions of morality. But the problem is that all laws are moral in the sense that they obviously communicate that some behaviors are good, and others are bad. Not legislating morality is, in a word, impossible.

Recovering Our Rhetorical Skills

A lot of what gets labeled an “argument” today is less true argumentation and more just fighting and name-calling (claims about alleged racism, white supremacy, or “the patriarchy” fall into this category). The above examples only scratch the surface of Petrusek’s guidance for developing more precise, effective arguments.

It is not hard for conservatives to identify opportunities to employ these tactics. Think about how you could respond to those who claim people need to be protected from “harmful” or “dangerous” speech. Typically, these arguments amount to little more than emotivism and voluntarism: the assertion that a person’s emotions and individual will trump everything else, even, ironically, things they otherwise claim to believe in, such as logic, science, or democracy.

“Pointing out to others that their political views have the same rational consistency as a two-year-old ‘arguing’ his case by thrashing on a grocery store floor exposes intellectual fraud,” writes Petrusek. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should tell our opponents they are acting like 2-year-olds. Simply implementing the kinds of tactics described above will often do that for us, enabling us to take the high road, and hopefully persuading the open-minded that our views on transgenderism, abortion, and anti-racism are based not on bad premises or emotion, but truth.

Social -vs- Economic Priorities

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Prior to the 2012 election and the rise of the Sandra Fluke free birth control narrative, we used to call them social issues; however, the usefulness of cultural wars has morphed into the larger war of wokeism.

In the big picture, keeping the base GOPe voter distracted from the economic expansion of multinational globalism, the corporate ‘masters of the universe’ (ie. the Big Club), need to keep pushing anti-wokeism as a political strategy.

The cultural issues are useful tools to keep control of an alignment of voters.  It has always been thus, and even more important now that people are starting to realize the expansion of the rust belt.

The rust belt, the diminishment of the U.S. economic manufacturing base, was an outcome of corporate control over politics.  Corporations and banks seek profit, those profits are inflated by a U.S. service driven economic model.  Skilled jobs require higher wages.

If the skilled jobs can be outsourced to lower cost labor nations, the subsequent lowered labor costs drive bigger margins.  Again, it has always been thus.

At the core of the U.S. political issue, you discover that both wings of the DC UniParty agree with this basic economic model.  Republicans and Democrats now use the catchphrase ‘service driven economy‘ with bipartisan frequency.

Many voters no longer have any reference to an economic system that is anything except a ‘service driven economy’, yet nothing about that system provides long-term value for U.S. voters or workers.

Within this very specific dynamic, you find the root of the support for Donald J. Trump.  A larger, formerly considered silent majority who comprise the baseline middle class workforce, find common understanding with President Trump because he sees the flaws in the economic model.

Not coincidentally, it is only Donald Trump who has ever discussed these economic issues. Factually, no national politician in the modern era prior to Donald Trump ever dared broach the subject of economic nationalism, economic globalism and the negative consequences therein.  Republican candidates who would disagree on economic policy would find themselves in the target field of the corporations who fund the political system.

A general platform more akin to a code of omerta covered the entire subject of republican economic policy.

As the pandemic years have shown, economic security is deeply tied to national security.  As an outcome, economic policy ultimately drives foreign policy.  When combined, the economic and foreign policy outlooks form the structural alignment of the UniParty platform.

Following the downstream effect of multinational corporate influence, modern Democrats support expansionist and interventionist foreign policy.  Meanwhile, modern Republicans, previously called “neocons” have always supported expansionist and interventionist foreign policy.

Leadership of both parties now align in a singular foreign policy outlook; thus, we see support for the Ukraine spending and intervention by both Democrats and Republicans. However, outside the DC bubble of multinational corporate influence, the support for the interventionist foreign policy doesn’t exist in the same scale and scope.

Voters inside both the Democrat and Republican base do not support U.S. foreign policy intervention at the same level as the political leadership of both parties.  There is a structural break between the priorities of voters and the priorities of the elected officials.  None of this is new discussion, we all accept this basic reality and we see it every day amid the headlines.

With political leadership of both parties supporting the same economic outlook, and both parties supporting the same foreign policy outlook, we find the source of opposition against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Economic policy and foreign policy form the uniting bond that drives both parties to oppose Trump’s America First ideological outlook.

As long as Donald J Trump singularly represents the only counterforce against this UniParty globalist construct, he will continue to be targeted by the system of financial controllers who fund the political system.  For the sake of brevity this alignment of multinational corporate and financial economic interests is called “the big club.”

As part of the strategic political effort, the Republican wing of the Big Club needs to carve up the supporters of Donald Trump into smaller, easier to target, pieces.  This is where the value of the culture war, what is now considered as ‘wokeism‘, plays into the strategy of those who seek to control political outcomes and remove the threat that Trump represents to their financial interests.

In many ways, this is why we are seeing prominent Republican officeholders pushing the culture war as a tool for their own political advancement.  The same Big Club members who are directly fighting against the America-First economic agenda, are the same Big Club members who are funding the Republican politicians to push the culture war.

The corporations, billionaires and multinationals who are funding the Republican candidates do not have any vested interest in the culture war. For them the social issues are a tool, technique or insurance policy to guarantee security of the interest that does matter, their financial status.

There are trillions at stake, literally trillions.  Additionally, decades of their prior investment interests are contingent upon the ‘service driven economy’ being maintained.

Dollars drive the U.S. global trade and financial exchanges.  The multinationals, both corporations and banks, have pre-deployed investments all around the globe.  However, many of those investments are entirely contingent upon the retention of the U.S. economic system they pre-established before the investment was made.  President Donald J. Trump represents the threat to that entire financial system.

Once you understand this, then a great deal of the more nuanced and granular U.S. political moves, almost all of which are funded by the corporations and billionaires who are attached to the global investment process, begin to make sense.

Every non-Trump candidate, funded to create the opposition to America First, is part of this process to use anti-wokeism as a strategy.

With this level of money at stake, do not be surprised when you look at how much is being spent to construct the system that guarantees the continuation of globalism. The money spent in funding the Republican candidates to advance the distracting cultural war pales in comparison to the amount of money at risk in the 2024 election outcome.

That’s the baseline for this:

…“GOP leaders and candidates should take from this poll one important lesson: voters expect them to fight wokeness,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling said. “Support for policies protecting families from gender ideology is off the charts, with the majority of the base showing a strong preference for tackling these issues. Meanwhile, approval of Republican establishment priorities was much more muted, with most of those surveyed even agreeing that GOP elected officials have given up too much ground in the culture war.”  

…“Any candidate who expects to win a Republican primary next year for any office needs to lead on cultural issues in order to win over voters,” Schilling said. “Perhaps the two most prominent leaders on these issues so far have been Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, so it should be no surprise they are far and away the favorites in the presidential field. It’s time for the rest of the party to pay heed and set their priorities accordingly.” (more)

Candidate Donald Trump understands the real priorities of the Big Club extend beyond this useful cultural war, deep into the world of economics and foreign policy.

As each of the corporate funded Republican candidates hits the cultural war (wokeism) effort as part of the distracting political strategy, watch President Trump generally agree with the ‘social issues’, but then counter the distraction with arguments specifically targeting economic and foreign policy.

The entire field of Republican candidates will hold the same economic and foreign policy outlook (Ukraine example), with only Donald Trump representing an alternative.

 

China: Dior accused of racism over 'pulled eye' advertisement

 

Luxury brand Dior has been accused of racism on Chinese social media over an advertisement showing an Asian model pulling up the corner of her eye.

The French label posted the picture on its Instagram account earlier this week, before swiftly taking it down.

Dior has not made any public comment. The BBC has asked them for a response.

Chinese netizens have become increasingly sensitive to the depiction of Chinese people amid rising nationalist sentiment online.

The controversial picture was posted six days ago to promote Dior's new makeup collection. It shows the model pulling up her eye with the caption "Channel your feline fierceness".

It was later reposted by netizens on Chinese social media platforms, where it received criticism and sparked the viral hashtag "Dior makeup advertisement accused of discriminating against Asians" on Weibo.   

Angry comments have also flooded the label's Instagram account. "It's racial discrimination," a top-liked comment reads.

"Are you trying to make money and play racism at the same time?" a Chinese user posted.

State-owned newspaper Global Times published an editorial calling on the brand to apologise.

"'Pulling your eyes back'... makes fun of the appearance of Asians, especially East Asians," it said. "We hope that Dior can face up to its mistakes, make a sincere apology and response to Asian society, and make clear statements on how to prevent similar problems from happening in the future."

Some netizens have also called on Chinese celebrities who model for Dior to end their association with the brand.

But there are also some who think the discussion is over the top.

"An extreme unconfident person won't be able to take any level of humour," one Weibo user wrote.

"Those who buy Dior never think it insults China, it's always those who don't buy that are concerned by it," another one said.

This is not the first time Dior has been caught up in controversy in China, one of its biggest markets. 

A Chinese fashion photographer's picture for the brand sparked outrage in 2021 after some netizens said it perpetuated Western stereotypes of Asian faces. The photographer later apologised and Dior said it "respects the sentiments of the Chinese people".

In 2022, Dior was accused of "culturally appropriating" a Chinese traditional design for one of its skirts.

A Chinese snack brand was also previously accused of racism for using a model with narrow eyes in its advertisements.     

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65229901?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_ptr_name=twitter&at_link_origin=BBCWorld&at_campaign_type=owned&at_link_type=web_link&at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_medium=social&at_format=link&at_link_id=56DD9CBE-DAD3-11ED-AAAC-0694FF7C7F44    

There's Only One Way the Gun Control Push Ends

posted by Brandon Morse at RedStateVIP 

The undeniable fact about Americans is that rebellion runs deep within their blood. Our nation was founded on a revolutionary act that involved a violent revolt against tyranny.

You might be asking yourself how that opinion tracks given the presence of leftists ready and willing to bend the knee and become good little socialists and communists. That’s easy to answer. Look at how the left couches these concepts. It’s always thought about in terms of rebellion against an unfair system that oppresses the oppressed. It’s rebellion against the rebellion.

The thing about American rebelliousness is that the OG rebels weren’t wholly blinded by their revolution. They were calculating and logical. They were true believers, but they weren’t stupid. As such, they recognized the God-given right of the citizens to rebel when necessary and in effective ways.

The most effective way is to resort to necessary violence. It’s a last resort, but it’s something that should be resorted to if things get pushed too far.

Today’s Democrats love to sell people the idea that guns are to blame for a lot of the violence we see in America. The media breathlessly covers every shooting that happens, but only those outside of a blue city where triggers are pulled constantly and narratives become complicated.

The ultimate goal of the United States of America is freedom and the keeping of that freedom. If I’m being wholly honest, we haven’t been especially good at stopping the inevitable slide toward dictatorship, as hard as many do try.

It was, perhaps, a logical end for the United States to slide into tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson said; “The natural progress of things is for the government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.” The wisdom of the founders gave them foresight, born from history lessons of their own.

With every shooting that the left overpublicizes and parades in front of the people, the tyrannical build their case for the seizure or, at the very least, the limitation of firearms for the people. Don’t be fooled by talk of a rule here and a ban there. The end goal is the elimination of firearms from the populace, with the ultimate goal being the conquering of the American people.

Conquering might not look like it does in the movies, with men being slaughtered and women and children being carted off in chains. Modern conquering looks a lot like overt government control of businesses and healthcare through regulations and rationing. It looks like the police showing up at your door and carting you off for a tweet someone in a government building didn’t like. It’s social credit systems and mandatory state indoctrination of your children.

But first, the guns have to go because they know so long as the people have them, then conquering is going to be incredibly difficult. It will be incredibly difficult because Americans will not submit quietly to this kind of overt control.

Democrats will likely attempt to find sneaky ways to ban guns or limit who can purchase them and how they can be purchased. They will work through banks and credit card companies. They will send government agents to intimidate. They will weaponize government agencies like the IRS against gun owners.

Eventually, authorities will show up at someone’s front door demanding they hand over their firearms for one reason or another. Maybe they won’t have trouble with the first house. Maybe they won’t with the second. At some point, though, the wrong house is going to be approached and a bloodbath will ensue.

As Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins said last year, Democrats are setting Americans up for death, and the battle for America’s future will be moved out of the courts and to the front porches of the people.

The blood will be on the hands of the Democrats who wanted authority over the people so badly that they would risk open war with the people. Because war is the only way this ends.

I recommend you watch this speech in its entirety.