Angus retweeted
My position is that gender dysphoria is a real, painful condition and that for some adults, the only way they may feel able to resolve that inner conflict is transition. If that’s the road they choose I wish them long life and happiness and I would vigorously oppose any discrimination against them when it comes to employment, housing or voting rights.
I do not believe children have the capacity to consent to treatments that may leave them infertile and, in some cases, anorgasmic. Multiple studies have shown that gender dysphoria in childhood and adolescence is not uncommon, for gay kids particularly, but it also occurs in, for example, straight girls who hate the idea of becoming women and sometimes, tragically, in children who’ve been abused. The available evidence shows that in the majority of cases, gender dysphoria resolves after the person has gone through adolescence. I am strongly opposed to the experimental treatment of blocking puberty in dysphoric children. I believe trans activists have behaved hugely unethically and irresponsibly in pretending that there is good evidence that these treatments are beneficial (there isn’t), that puberty blockers are completely reversible (there is a mounting body of evidence to suggest they aren’t) or that children are likely to kill themselves if denied blockers (there is no evidence to support this and suicide prevention charities warn against making such statements, due to the very real danger of suicide contagion.)
Of course, not all trans-identified people are dysphoric. Erotic transvestism, also known as autogynephilia, (getting a sexual thrill out of dressing as/pretending to be a woman) has been around for a very long time. I believe lesbians are entitled to exclude straight, cross-dressing men from their dating pools without being accused of bigotry and worse (same goes for gay men with trans-identified women). It’s profoundly homophobic to attack gay people for being same-sex attracted.
I don’t believe anyone, adult or child, is ‘born in the wrong body.’ That is an unfalsifiable, quasi-religious belief. A person may *feel* as if they’re in the wrong body, but humans cannot literally change sex. However they identify, men don’t belong in the single-sex spaces for which women fought so hard.
Angus retweeted
When I was in school, the grandfather of one of classmates came on Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell us about his experience during the war.
He lived in a small Polish town and was captured by the Germans after being betrayed by a Polish collaborator. After the war, he returned home. He was the only survivor from his family.
Soon after, a Red Army officer approached him and said in Yiddish, "I am Jewish. My entire family was murdered in Ukraine. I want to kill collaborators. Tell me who they are in this town and we will hang them on the spot."
In an amazing coincidence, the Pole who betrayed the man's family happened to be walking down the street. The Jewish survivor saw the terror in the Pole's eyes and felt pity for him. So he told the Red Army officer, "I don't know anyone."
As a boy, I was upset by this story. What revenge could be more justified? But now I understand. I don't approve, this is not how I would have acted, but I understand.
This is who we are. Both the officer and the survivor. It's not good, it's not bad. It's just who we are.
Angus retweeted
If the drug scene got shut down, most of the "homeless" problem would disappear.
And if the homeless problem disappeared, so would $billions of spending on SF homeless.
Some of that money backflows to politicians, who aren't interested in giving it up.
So they don't want the drug scene shut down.
Angus retweeted
As sexual deviance goes, this wasn't on the dark side.
He wanted sex with a trailer park whore. That's what he wanted. Not a young girl, or a young boy. He didn't want to hold her underwater until she almost died. He didn't want to do her any harm at all, near as we know.
He just wanted sex with a trailer park whore. That was his thing.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but then, what each of us wants isn't likely what most people want.
Angus retweeted
If you walked up to Mike Tyson in a bar and punched him in the face, I doubt ‘you can’t hit back because I’m so puny!’ would save you from consequences.
Same on X. If you want to punch me in public but don’t want to risk a brain injury in return, stick to your own weight class.
Angus retweeted
Start from a novel place. That these people are both honest and neither sick nor insane. They're intelligent, rational people who just have different goals in life as compared to civilized people.
They have the goal to advance submission to Islam, worldwide, and they're very happy to die to advance that goal. Not civilized, but that's Islam.
Work back from that and see where you end up.
And then contemplate what civilized people need to do, should we not wish to submit.
Angus retweeted
The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down.
Angus retweeted
I always laughed at "defunding the police", because I know how that would go. The people who advocate it are incapable of thinking beyond first-order consequences.
So, let's suppose major American city X fully defunds its police. How will this play out?
For a short time, criminals will have a field day. They will shoplift, rob, mug, and invade homes to their hearts' content. Because who's going to arrest them?
But then their victims are going to arm up. Homeowners, shopkeepers, and ordinary citizens will start open-carrying and shooting criminals. Because he's going to arrest them?
So far, so good.
Now, here's the part that isn't obvious. 60% of index crimes are committed by Black people. Once the shooting phase starts, Black criminals are going to form gangs (if they haven't already) so they can overwhelm individual targets.
Once Black gang predation becomes routine, the rational strategy for whites and Hispanics and Asians becomes to simply start gunning down groups of multiple Blacks on sight. Because he's going to arrest them?
The same dynamic applies to any minority with a higher criminal propensity than white people. Which is basically all of them except for Northeast Asians.
Innocents will not be spared. If there are any left - it's a statistical fact, for, example, that Black women have a higher rate of criminal violence than white men.
The eventual result would be a white nationalist's wet dream. Minorities dead or keeping very, very quiet in order not to get shot. They might be able to hold mono-ethnic enclaves in the short term, but venturing outside them would be asking for death.
I'm pretty sure this is not what advocates of defunding the police want to happen. But these are the same people who were all gung-ho for police bodycams, and we all know how that turned out.
Angus retweeted
According to sharia, if a Muslim walks into a room and a non-Muslim is seated, the non-Muslim must stand-out of “respect,” and give his seat to the Muslim.
A dhimmi (a non-Muslim living under Islam) is to lower his gaze, never raise his voice, never walk ahead of a Muslim.
He could not build higher than a Muslim’s house, ride a horse in public, or repair his place of worship without permission.
Islam does not teach that all men are created equal. It teaches that Muslims are superior and that everyone else, Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, are second-class citizens at best, enemies of God at worst.
If you believe it was evil for white men to demand that black women give up their seats, then you must admit that Islam is evil too.
Don't let the Abduls and the Omars deceive you, sharia is completely the opposite of what he is trying to do here.
Banning Sharia is equal to liberating slaves.
This is unbelievable. I thought it was AI.
Abdul El-Sayed advocates for sharia law in the U.S.
He argues that the U.S. banned sharia because of hate and discrimination, and the forces that banned it are the same forces that committed [insert every historic evil].
This is obscene political propaganda, putting sharia law in the same category of victimhood as historic American tragedies.
It’s a perfect example of how illiberal movements use liberal politics as a Trojan horse to smuggle in authoritarianism.
But you are right about one thing, Abdul. You don’t know what it means.
Iranians do, and their message is clear:
Fuck you, and fuck your sharia law.
Angus retweeted
RFK Jr. sat on CNN and said something that should not have been controversial. He said the government’s first duty in any future pandemic is to protect constitutional rights. Not balance them against expert opinion. Not temporarily suspend them. Protect them.
Dana Bash reacted as if he had just committed a category error. She told him she did not want to “allow” him to say things that were not entirely true. Allow. That is the word she chose. Not “challenge.” Not “disagree.” Allow.
Watch that moment carefully and the entire posture becomes clear. This is not a journalist testing a claim. This is a gatekeeper deciding which premises are permitted on air. The substance of Kennedy’s argument ... that the last response got almost everything wrong ... barely registered. What registered was the unacceptable suggestion that rights might rank above the public-health machinery.
That is the scandal that never ended. A large part of the media and the expert class still treats constitutional rights as optional equipment that can be powered down whenever the right people declare an emergency. They do not say it in those words. They simply act as if the Bill of Rights is a set of guidelines that apply only when the experts find them convenient.
Bash’s performance was not an outlier. It was a clean demonstration of the surviving mindset. The lockdowns are over. The mandates are gone. The emergency declarations have expired. But the assumption that experts outrank rights never left the building. It just learned to speak more politely until someone like Kennedy forced the issue back into the open.
The Constitution was not written as a suggestion for calm weather. It was written to restrain power precisely when fear is highest and the people in charge are most certain they know better.
(article below)
Angus retweeted
Vindication Is Sweet. Lost Opportunities Are Sour
Back in the 90s I taught high school social studies at a tough, low-achieving school in Hawaii. Roughly a third of incoming freshmen never graduated, and only about 5% of graduates went on to college.
Most of my classes were ninth graders reading, on average, at a fifth-grade level; about 20% were essentially illiterate. I used World History to teach reading as well as content, and spent my own money on a Gates-MacGinitie assessment so I could track pre- and post-test progress.
I saw gains in comprehension for many students. Those who struggled most, however, had clearly never learned phonics. I asked the principal to buy a phonics kit so I could tutor them on my own time. Even though hundreds of thousands of Title I dollars flowed into the school, she refused to spend a hundred dollars on the kit because “phonics aren’t a panacea.”
That was one of my first major red pills about education - and about how stubbornly wrong some educators can be. I improvised a phonics program myself, recruited a few students, and got solid results: roughly two grade levels of improvement in a single semester. I hoped this informal pilot would show the principal the value of identifying and fixing decoding problems. It didn’t. She didn’t care, and the chance to help a lot of kids simply vanished.
If I had run the school, I would have given every incoming student a full assessment battery and separated those ready for high-school work from those who weren’t. Students who performed adequately would enter as ninth graders. Those who scored very poorly would enter as “8½ graders” and receive a full year of Title I-funded remediation. Angry parents would get the assessment results along with the phone number of the middle school that had sent them unprepared.
Vindication came later, when I became an administrator and then principal of a K–6 elementary school. We made phonics a major priority, produced students who read at or above grade level, and earned two National Blue Ribbons. The vindication was sweet. It just didn’t help those high-school kids of mine.
It did, however, help the middle school that received our graduates.
You do what you can, when you can do it.
Angus retweeted
SF politicians came to understand that if homelessness was really bad, then huge amounts of money could be spread around.
Keeping the homeless problem front and center, was easy. Give the addicts a stipend to buy drugs, tolerate their crime, and watch them come from all over the world to die in SF.
And the money flowed like the Amazon.
Never mind that downtown was destroyed, the people in power had money like no one could have imagined.
Angus retweeted
I'm no fan of prison for non-violent addicts.
But I disagree with any cause/effect with regards to homelessness and addiction.
Addiction is not homelessness, in the sense that an employed person is living in their car, homeless. Nor will an employed person living in a car be driven to addiction by the difficulty of moving forward.
I did it that way myself, the employed living in car thing. I was homeless, but not an addict.
Addicts are addicts, not "homeless". The best we can do for them is a steady stream of misery. Cold. Wet. Hungry. Broke. And above all, dopesick.
Do that dopesick thing 100 times, and a few will recover.
Angus retweeted
"You need to understand that Islam is designed in such a way that you are bound to fail, so that your guilt can be weaponized against you."
==Dan Burmawny @DanBurmawy