Personally, I just don't find categorisation behaviour by the masculine~feminine spectrum of supposed traits to be particularly useful when living my life. — apokrisis
How men treat women, how people treat other people, is not a political question, no matter how much political ideologues try to make it one. — T Clark
What is a real man? — Moliere
Here's refined gay Cole Porter's take on the rough man from his 1929 musical, 50 Million Frenchmen:
Find me a primitive man,
Built on a primitive plan.
Someone with vigor and vim.
I don't mean a kind that belongs to a club,
But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
I could be the personal slave
Of someone just out of a cave.
The only man who'll ever win me
Has gotta wake up the gypsy in me,
Find me a primitive man.
I've known too many people who do or do not live up to the cliches across the sex line to think sex is very determinative of one's traits or abilities. — Moliere
It's ridiculous to frame this discussion as a fight between trans and disabled folk. — Banno
I wouldn't have the Emancipation Proclamation as a holiday because it only freed slaves in states that opposed the union. Many northern states continued having slaves until the 13th amendment. — TiredThinker
This is to say the Proclamation was a strategic manuever. — Hanover
That's not exactly a democratic success story. — frank
One of the criticisms we can make of the Cis understanding of the issue is that we often seem to think trans, or being gay for that matter, is a lifestyle choice and people can stop 'doing it' just like they should say 'no' to drugs, etc, etc — Tom Storm
It's interesting that no one ever raises the issue of female to trans-male. No one seems to care and perhaps this says something about attitudes to women more generally.
— @Tom Storm — Hanover
(1) those of sexual orientation "woman" and (2) those of gender orientation "woman." — Hanover
Greer was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. He claims he saw an unidentified flying object at close range when he was eight years old. He claims he saw another UFO when he was 35. Greer was trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher and served as director of a meditation organization. He received a B.S. degree in biology from Appalachian State University in 1982 and an M.D. degree from the James H. Quillen College of Medicine of East Tennessee State University in 1987. He received his Virginia medical license in 1989 and worked as an emergency room physician, and in 1998 retired as a physician in favor of his ufology activities.
if I'm being frank — Noble Dust
I guess, but the guys who attacked the capital on Jan-6 organized on-line. I think the internet helped Trump get elected. Maybe some of it seeps into real life? — frank
Frequency illusion is related to memory. Now that you know about something, it appears to pop up more often. In reality, your new favorite song may have always been around. But because it's on your mind, you might start to notice it everywhere and, in turn, think that it's somehow become more popular.
The point is that profit-making, as a European profession, did not pop into existence in the 1800s. — frank
I was playing with the idea that to the extent that there is any leftism in America, it's a pose, like a poster of Che Guevara makes your meaningless life more worthwhile. — frank
Without the power of labor unions, American leftists just strayed off into nowhere. — frank
Just trying to figure the world out. Why all the angst toward "wokeness" and elitists? — frank
As the forerunners of capitalists appeared, it was out of the serf class. — frank
Yeah, not many have had the chance to notice us. — ssu
They had one thing in common with the old aristocrats: they hated capitalists and capitalism — frank
ATTENTION, PEOPLE OF EARTH
We are on our way to your planet. We will be there shortly. But in this, our first contact with you, our “headline” is: We do not want your gravel.
We are coming to Earth, first of all, just to see if we can actually do it. Second, we hope to learn about you and your culture(s). Third—if we end up having some free time—we wouldn’t mind taking a firsthand look at your almost ridiculously bountiful stores of gravel. But all we want to do is look.
You’re probably wondering if we mean you harm. Good question! So you’re going to like the answer, which is: We mean you no harm. Truth be told, there is a faction of us who want to completely annihilate you. But they’re not in power right now. And a significant majority of us find their views abhorrent and almost even barbaric.
But, thanks to the fact that our government operates on a system very similar to your Earth democracy, we have to tolerate the views of this “loyal opposition,” even while we hope that they never regain power, which they probably won’t (if the current poll tracking numbers hold up).
By the way, if we do take any of your gravel, it’s going to be such a small percentage of your massive gravel supply that you probably won’t even notice it’s gone.
You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there’s a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don’t really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we’ll watch Earth TV sometimes—if it happens to be on already—but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.
Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.
Speaking of a vast wasteland, you might want to start picking out and clearing off a place for our spacecraft to land. Our spacecraft, as you will see shortly, is huge. Do not be alarmed; this does not mean that each one of us is that much bigger than each one of you. It’s just that there were so many of us who wanted to come that we had to build a really huge spacecraft.
So, again, no cause for alarm.
(Full disclosure: each of us actually is much bigger than each of you, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So please don’t use any of your Earth-style discrimination against us. This is just how we are, and it’s not our fault.)
Anyway, re our spacecraft: it’s kind of gigantic. The deceleration thrusters alone are sort of, like . . . well, imagine four of your Vesuvius volcanoes (but bigger), turned upside down. — THE NEW YORKER
Have you ever feel that the universe conspires against you? — Niki Wonoto
Bathrooms are for personal hygene and getting rid of waste bodily fluids. — Philosophim