TQ White II

I'm frustrated by the reporting on Huckabee Sanders' State of the Union rebuttal. It is characterized according to her generation, her political orientation and it's strategic value. To me, those are 'deck chairs on the Titanic' ideas. We are in deep trouble culturally and politicall when responsible observers fail to start with unhinged, demented and dishonest.

It is sheer lunacy to start with inflation, which is declining, being out of control and violent crime, mass shootings that the right refuses to consider, and calling the border "dangerous" and implying that Biden is the one who won't work on it. But it is just insane to suggest that "Democrats want to rule us".

"I'm for freedom. He's for government control." That's simply wrong. It's a lie. There is not a single element of truth in it yet, she said it with a straight face and the press evaluated it as part of her political strategy, not a bare-faced, crazy lie. That she followed by saying that she's implementing a thought-police regime on the teachers of Arkansas pushes it in a vile category of lunatic idea reversal.

Then to go onto fabricate a great economy, "most secure border in history", etc, and tell us that the "Democrats destroyed it" leaves me boggled. None of the antecedant is true and the Democrats haven't destroyed anything. No destruction. None. It's otherworldly.

But the worst, most dishonest segment is "A left-wing culture warr we didn't start and never wanted to fight." This from a person whose party met in the 1970's and explicitly said, "We need to start a culture war beginning with abortion." She knows it. Everyone knows it but there she is saying the opposite.

Yeh yeh yeh. Troops. Cheers. Blah blah blah. It's embarrassing for our troops to be used in this way. To suggest that somehow patriotic war fighters stand behind this venial dishonesty is horrible anti-patriotic.

The one thing she got right, "The choice is between normal or crazy".

I throw myself on the mercy of the court.

I had an interaction on the Mastodon instance Newsie.social. I joined it early when it said it was a place for people interested in journalism to congregate. It was interesting and fun. One day, I had a series of interactions (my end repeated below) with a couple of trans people. I had recently communicated with some people I like and respect about the topic and I conveyed thinking based on that interaction. Out of the blue, I receive this:

"While this post does not quite rise to violate our threatening or harassing anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease, you should take note that we have received numerous complaints regarding it."

And then I was banned.

I think this is something to worry about. The things I wrote were very carefully written to avoid being offensive in any way. After pushing back on someone who called me names, the interaction was not even heated. We disagreed. We discussed. And, in the end, I was convinced that the idea I was defending was wrong.

I think a challenge of Mastodon is to find a way to detect petty tyrants. This site, https://newsie.social, purported to be a place for open dialog, etc. I invested time and good will and was screwed in the end by petty people and an unfair moderator.

I hope some people will discuss this. I do not think that I was anywhere near "threatening or harassing" in any possible way but, I will read the comments and learn.

Also, I will stay away from small instances like Newsie.social now.


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I do not have access to the other parts of the conversation, only what I wrote. Make of it what you will.

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Personally, I go for Starship Troopers, coed everything and who the hell cares.
But, in every conversation I have with people about this issue, the one thing that comes up again and again is women worrying about being unsafe because people with penises are usually the ones doing the raping.
It's unfair to those of us who don't rape but, I think it is a correct compromise to make it easier to accept gender self-determination.

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First, stop being so contentious. I spoke politely, you can, too.
Second, this is not transphobic garbage any more than it is anti-male to say that men should not walk into a women's locker room. We all have our behavior regulated for others' comfort.
Further, there is nothing anti about the observation that people with penises do the raping. Ask anyone who doesn't have one.

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Until transformation became a public issue, we did not have a lot of women in changing rooms complaining about not being women. That's simply not a thing.
I understand that this is a rough deal for penis holders who present as female. Right now, they are passing laws to make it so that birth is the discriminant.
This compromise improves on that. I make no claim that it's ideal. That's why I use the word compromise. Better than being banned.

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I’m would be surprised if trans people  rape but I know many women whose only objection to the trans movement is penises in places where they are vulnerable. I’d like them to stop being in opposition.

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I’m an old, extreme lefty. My friends are very sympathetic to trans issues. One is a woman who is very far on the left with me. She and I have protested for every issue you hold dear.
She is 200% supportive of trans rights but she, like lot of women, has had bad experiences with people with penises. She would fight for every right you could want if she was convinced that her young women would have spaces that were safe from penis people.
You want support?

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I will add this. I have argued your view. I know the stats as well as you.
She is intelligent and knowledgeable. She thinks it’s a threat and cites situations, perhaps imaginary but maybe not, where there have been problems.
As I said before, I agree with you. I just think compromise is necessary if progress is going to happen. I think intransigence will result in them more of the same.

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Last response from me: I know people who worry. About this who are not bigoted, not opposed to trans rights and are very sympathetic people. The insistence on characterizing them as such is counterproductive. It is creating enemies of people who want to be your friend.

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1) I do not want any restrictions whatsoever. I think gender should be unregulated. I want all bathrooms to be all-gender.
2) Presently, we do not require proof of genitals in bathrooms and I support that emphatically.
3) We do have a norm of not assigning people with penises to participate in non-penis spaces. I would prefer to eliminate this norm but, I think that many sincere people feel it is necessary and think compromise would help.

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If you ask cis women, pretty sure they'll say they expect their locker rooms to be free of penises.
I'd far rather share space with trans people in general. Less likely to be Trumpsters.
I don't want anyone to prove. I'd not support that ever. But, I'm ok with non-penis people having the option to eject penises in situations where they are vulnerable or naked.
Look, we aren't going to agree on this. I promise, I'd never support anything more than this.

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Also, in a comment you might not have been able to see, I said, and believe, that if I were king, I would make all bathrooms all-gender spaces with lots of cubicles. I'd make the norm include dealing with coed urinals.
Me? I have one and could not care less.
I am in favor of all trans rights. I have enough conversations with people who are otherwise supporters to believe that trans rights are going nowhere without the ability to have non-penis spaces.

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(Thanks for the pleasant tone.)
Changing rooms don’t seem a problem. I’ve never seen one without individual doors.
I don’t want enforcement. I want to allow non-penis people to be allowed to complain if they feel threatened (understanding that it’s generally unwarranted). I would add that I would like to have a ton of unisex bathrooms.

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Also, a thing that comes up is prisons and locker rooms. I’m told that trans women with penises have been housed with people that don’t have them.
I don’t know what to do about locker rooms but understand that many women have fear.
I repeat. I would prefer to just say, Deal with it haters. It’s just that I know people who are not haters who are not good with having penises around.

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I don't disagree with most of what you say but here's the problem: Trans people are not the ones with power. Shouldn't matter but they are looking for concessions that many do not want to grant.
I'm not a political scientist so I don't really know but I guess that black people supported laws against lynching and then letting them into schools even though it was still legal to discriminate in the workplace.
I guess I'm thinking about incremental gains.

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Overnight, I have concluded that I agree with you. My view is not tenable. There is no sane way to deal with the penis in non-penis space problem felt by some non-penis people.
I do not know what is going to happen and cannot think of an ideal situation that is conceivable considering the emotional intensity of otherwise trans friendly people.
I can only say that I will always vote against any restrictions and for all rights for trans. I hope for the best

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Until the 1800's, all western ethics started with the Ten Commandments accepted as fact. Schopenhauer came along and said, 1) atheism, and 2) there are no preexisting rules except "will", which he defined as the common motivation for all things. He had another phrase for the intentional motivation that we usually think of as 'will'. His usage would cover, I think, vomiting, ie, something that is a consequence of our being but not intentional. Also, the motivation of a rock rolling down a hill.

He says that ethics are a consequence of the higher level intentionality of humans, ie, reason. Consequently, it is, I think, essentially an artistic fabrication with an esthetic based on emotion. He observes that some people have compassion, a "felt knowledge" that comes down to viewing harm to others as harm to oneself. (I would prefer to call it empathy.)

His fundamental understanding of the operation of will (his usage) in humans is egotistic and the equivalence implied by compassion forms the basis of his basic ethical idea, "Harm no one and help others as much as you can," ie, do what you can to avoid feeling the internal harm (sadness) that results from compassionate perception of other people's injury.

So, I think about your sequence of values, kill the guy on the spot, kill the guy in the alley, give him to the police and have them kill him, ... police try him and kill him, police try him and don't kill him, etc. 

Interest to me is the fact that that Schopenhauer doesn't provide any guidance on whether he should be killed. He has no 'thou shalt not kill'. If the person is a monster that in no way excites compassion, then his life or death is ethically neutral. Kill him in front of the kids, harm arises, compassion engages, QED: don't kill him. 

Sneak him out to the wilderness where nobody will ever know (avoiding whatever abstract societal harms) and he can do no harm. I guess that would count as you doing less harm (as long as you don't feel badly about for some perverse reason).

I'm a fan of Schopenhauer in a lot of ways. I absolutely agree with him that there is no god, that all ethical/moral principles are human fabrications that fundamentally come down to our emotional perspective and, even more, our esthetic evaluation of how we want our world to be. 

I have some different thoughts about where compassion comes from but, in the end, I am a huge fan of the premise that the basis of ethics comes down to (I paraphrase) a determination of one's idea of how pretty the social fabric should be.

Some years ago, I had a friend who was a fashion photographer. He, with his wife, a stylist, had a contract with a local modeling college to do portfolio shoots for the students. I helped them sometimes. It was fascinating to see some completely ordinary looking girl (mostly) or boy come into the room and walk out with pictures that made them look wonderful and lovely. 

The appearance of people you see our side of a camera lens is completely false. Our society would lose absolutely nothing if every single one of these pictures never, ever existed. They are pernicious. They are a lie that make people feel badly about themselves and present a fake reality for us to live in.

Nobody my age really gets TikTok. Really, none of us really get 'social media'. Young people do and it leads them to eat Tide pods. It causes suicide. Depression is occurring at record rates and it is clear that social media is an important reason for it.

Also, riots on Jan 6. Death threats for election workers. Skyrocketing incidents of antisemitic behavior and harassment. Mass shootings. Our side of the social media lens is dangerous and awful.

It turns out that young people leaving isolation are 'romanticising' their work lives. I don't know if it's harmful but I do know that it's false. I don't get TikTok but I have seen it and it's always, inevitably, intrinsically false. It's entire point is to edit, ie, change, video so that it is quick and fun, ie, not like anything real.

Elon Musk and the Republicans are calling for Apple to be prevented from curating its App Store. He fears that, when Twitter achieves its goal of attracting Donald Trump and the Proud Boys back to Twitter, they will not let him distribute the Twitter app.

I no longer have any friends, even distant ones, who doubt the necessity of gun control. Most think that both the American fetish with guns and the modern absolutist interpretation of the second amendment are dangerous and wrong.

I'm here to tell you that our absolutist interpretation of the first amendment is equally dangerous. Just as the founders had no idea of armor penetrating bullets and machine guns, they had no idea of TikTok and Twitter. 

Their freedom of the press was a laboriously created page or two of text in print. Freedom of speech was someone preaching to fifty people, occasionally a hundred, who mostly had to walk a couple of miles to the meeting.

In 1984, Orwell envisioned a world where the the people in power suppressed individual communication and supplanted it with official lies. We have come to that world. He thought it would be the government. Turns out it's corporations. 

It's not muzzling the truth, it's drowning it out. We leftists tend to laugh at the right over the meme that Fox News listeners believe a ton of laughably, demonstrably false things, stolen elections, anti-vax, etc. The NY Times publishes the truth, the rubes just can't see it behind the gish gallop of awfulness.

Apple has power. It says it disagrees with the absolutist view of the first amendment. It says hate speech, pornography and calls to violence are unacceptable. Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say it is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/technology/elon-musk-apple-twitter.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/business/tiktok-office-influencers.html

5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazingly competent product, nicely square, makes for a tidy refrigerator
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Size: 2-PackStyle: Large (9.6 Cup)Pattern Name: Container Verified Purchase
For me, the main purpose, aside from containing food, is to stack nicely and not waste space. Other containers have big flapped lids and sloping sides that leave inches between containers.

These [(Rubbermaid Brilliance Plastic Food Containers)] do not. The walls of the container are very close to vertical and the flanges around the top and lid are minimal. The geometry lets differing sizes stack on each other in even multiples.

They are airtight and leakproof, amazingly so. I have never trusted containers full of soup before. With these I do.

I didn't think I would care about the crystal clear plastic but it's great. With my previous translucent ones, I could usually tell what was inside but this is much better. Also, the plastic is very hard and is more reliably clean.

The price is, of course, much higher than the Ziplock disposables they replace but, after mourning that company's decision to change and ruin their products (which I loved), I am now almost glad.

Because of my kitchen management practices, I bought a ton of these things, a couple of hundred dollars worth. My life is much better now. My refrigerator is organized. My food kept fresh. And, I can rely on the containers staying completely sealed. They are pleasant to look at and easy to use.

One extra bit of advice: The lids are substantial and, in storage, a bit cumbersome. Accidentally, I kept the boxes the containers came in and ended up using them as stacking organizers for the lids. Word to the wise.

4.0 out of 5 stars
100% Good. Thickens, emulsifies and has no problems at all
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Size: 8 Ounce (Pack of 1) Verified Purchase
The package is good. The product is good. There is absolutely no reason not to use this.

PS, Xanthin dissolves in oil, not water. Stir it into the fat first.

5.0 out of 5 stars
Big enough package of perfectly good cheesecloth
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Material Type: Grade 90Size: 5Yards Verified Purchase
When you buy cheesecloth in the grocery store, it's about a million dollars a square inch and the package has enough cloth to use like four times and two of those times your compromising how much you use because your at the end.

This stuff is reasonably priced but almost more importantly, you get enough at once that it's always enough on hand. If I want to strain something twice, no problem. I have plenty of cheesecloth.

The cloth itself is smooth, fine and strong. I like it a lot.

4.0 out of 5 stars
Pleasant versatile product adds umami flavor and not too much saltiness
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Flavor Name: NaturalSize: 16 Fl Oz (Pack of 1) Verified Purchase
I put Liquid Aminos into almost everything savory. It's especially good for creating fake meat gravy when there are no pan drippings. I am very enthusiastic about it.

4.0 out of 5 stars
I use this as a weight, not as an anvil
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Size: 4''x6''x3/4'' Verified Purchase
I have a couple of these [(steel jewelers anvils)]. One I use to stabilize my iPad stand. It's tall and wants to fall over. This compact, five pound beauty makes it sit nicely.

Also, I have found that many sandwiches are made better by setting them under pressure for several minutes to blend the flavors and cause the ingredients to adhere. I used a cast iron skillet for awhile. I bought one of these and use it, with a small cutting board, to compress sandwiches. Works a charm.

In both cases, I bought rubberized paint (of the sort used for coating plier handles) to coat them. The steel is not stainless and before I figured this out, the first one got rusty and pretty nasty looking. Now they both look great.


5.0 out of 5 stars
As a Cheese Lover, I put this tasty stuff in all kinds of foods
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
Style: 1 Pound (Pack of 1) Verified Purchase
On pasta, in meatloaf, mashed potatoes and a zillion other things, this [(Anthony's Cheese Powder)] provides additional richness to the flavor that makes me very happy. Also, I use it for both quick and elaborate cheese sauces. If I want some cheesy flavor on broccoli, I will quickly microwave it into some cream or milk. Thinned béchamel with a ton of cheese powder forms the base for a nice cheese soup.

RE: This...