LGBTQ org: Pronouns Are "Required."
Plus Aspartame and the Unabomber for #ThreeThoughtThursday
I am still working on the next installment of The Distributed Nation (and recovering from our New Year’s Eve party, frankly) so let’s do a quick #ThreeThoughtThursday. It’s been a while!
#1 Are regulatory agencies actually protecting us?
Opponents of anarchocapitalism/defenders of statism sometimes offer the argument that without government, we will not have regulatory agencies—consumer protection agencies, food and drug administrations, and other entities at every level of government—to protects us. But might we actually be better off without them?
There are plenty of ways in which consumer protection can be accomplished more effectively without government regulatory agencies (or any government whatsoever, for that matter), but that is a separate issue. For now, let’s just ask another important question: are these agencies actually protecting us?
For one quick case study, let’s look at aspartame. Check out this tweet and meme from @AE_Holman1958:
Artificial Sweetener called Aspartame is actually a brain drug that stimulates your brain, so you think that the food you're eating tastes sweet. Aspartame breaks down to its poison constituents at 86 degrees (aspartic acid 40%, phenylalanine 50%, and methanol 10%).
I know this is just a meme, and I certainly have not vetted all these claims. But in general, we have known for years how bad aspartame is, and yet our regulatory agencies still give it their stamp of approval.
When they do that, the assumption among most people is that “it must be safe, because the government says so.” Just like happened with margarine and Thalidomide.
The point here is not only to question the assumption that we need government agencies to protect us, but also to question the assumption that the ones we have are actually protecting us. Or do they do at least as much harm as good?
#2 Lambda Legal tell us what we must say
This tweet is about 18 months old, but it represents a zeitgeist that is still very much in play:
Pronouns aren’t preferred. They’re required.
Using someone’s correct pronouns is a simple act of kindness that can make a huge difference. Pronouns are a crucial part of someone’s identity, and no one should have to explain why their pronouns matter & should be respected!
I agree, in general, with the “simple act of kindness” aspect of this argument.
I have a friend who is old-school trans. She transitioned many years before the leftist social contagion increased the number of trans people from the genuine 0.003 percent of the population who suffer from true dysphoria to the crazy-high numbers of people claiming to be “trans” today. I call her “she” because that is what she wants.
She is not asking to be called by any one of the scores of other weird pronouns that have recently been invented as tools of grievance, control, and power. Her dysphoria told her that she was a she from the time she was little, so that is what we call her now that she has transitioned.
But then Lambda legal goes too far, and tells us that such pronouns are “required.”
“Required” is a serious word. Things that are required must be enforced. How do they plan to do that? Precisely what act of violence do they intend to deploy against us should we fail to use the words they are telling us to use? (They are already doing this in Canada and elsewhere, so this question is not overwrought.)
As an act of kindness, I am there. As an act of force, my pronouns are l/will not comply.
One person memed the following appropriate response:
#3 Use your words!
I am not going to call Ted Kaczynski “Uncle Ted,” or even obliquely justify what he did. (Or what he is purported to have done—with U.S. alphabet agencies’ history of patsies and set-ups, who knows?) However, I have been seeing excerpts of Kaczynski’s writing over the last few years, shared in various venues, and they are pretty interesting.
For one thing, if he hadn’t chosen the path he did, he might have been an effective public intellectual. His critiques of the left, for example, are pretty spot on:
He is using a lot of personal language (focusing on “leftists” as opposed to referencing the ideology of the left). But his thesis about the left’s intolerance of merit-based distinctions is solid. Indeed, this is the same overall idea that Evan Sayet lays out in his book The Kindergarden of Eden.
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you end your career with the sword, few people will remember you for anything else. As we say to our kids…
Use your words!
I decided to read Kaczynski’s writings a couple years ago after another writer referenced them and my curiosity was sufficiently piqued. It was because he first became known to me as the "Unabomber" that I had dismissed his "manifesto" when it was first disclosed years ago as the rantings and ravings of a madman. After all of the lies and deceit of the bioterror attack on our nation and the world that was launched in 2020 as a coordinated global government war against their people my mind was finally pried open enough to take in the rantings and ravings of the madman I first knew as the Unabomber.
I found passages like the one you highlighted, many others that might as well have been speaking to our times. That showed he was trying to alert the world around him about the evil he saw masquerading as "science" and "progress." And was largely spot-on. He was highly intelligent, perceptive, his mind able to string together patterns and complex analysis, along with a level of discernment about the trappings of the modern world that had more people been exposed to his "manifesto" with open minds and curiosity perhaps some of the evil that we see our world devolving into could've been averted, rejected.
But very few had reached a point of disillusionment with the world we exist in, being constructed around us that we were open or curious enough to indulge the ideas he shared. And pre-internet they certainly weren't very accessible.
Lacking an audience or platform he turned to a very dark path trying to get his message out that he thought was important enough to share with the world. Unfortunately for him, and us, his potential audience, by choosing the path of darkness his ideas were relegated to the status of rantings and ravings of a madman's manifesto for decades after his primal, murderous screams to be heard. It took a frontal assault on mankind that awakened a great many about the things he first tried to warn us about nearly a half century ago.
Attempts to violently shake people awake to the monstrous agenda of those in power today actually served the purposes of the monsters. Which should reinforce to us the understanding of human psychology as one that respects the wisdom that people will awaken when they are ready to receive information that disrupts preconceived ideas of how they are being led and governed. As long as they/we are comfortable we have little incentive to look beyond our comfort zone. We might see something that upsets our tranquility and ease. Better to keep our heads down and enjoy our simple lives, "in the Matrix," where eating a juicy steak and drinking fine wine gives us enjoyment than to eat the gruel and suffer immense hardship always fighting off the relentless machines that exist destroy all who have escaped the Matrix, as Cypher eventually succumbed. Better the comfortable illusion to the uncomfortable reality.
As much as I tried to shake people awake in 2020, sometimes with a very nasty disposition in public encounters, or as a fire hydrant of information that blasted potential listeners who may have been curious but couldn't handle the deluge I unleashed on them, those techniques were unsuccessful. Because depressingly few people wanted to be shaken from their comfort zones. And had I been more disciplined in my communications with those who were curious I'd have chosen to plant seeds of doubt with the goal of piquing curiosity for potential listeners instead of being an open fire hydrant.
That's our challenge. How to pique curiosity for those who's minds have seen enough to be curious about reality but not scare them back into the illusion. Dragging them out of it will usually make them kick and scream and fight to get back into the illusion of the Matrix. And make us appear to be the madmen who author manifestos. Triggering fear of more Unabomber primal screams. Instead of piquing curiosities for those who may choose to pick up the incredibly brilliant "manifesto" he wrote with an open mind and learn what he was trying to share before he gave up on peaceful persuasion and enlightenment.
Our greatest challenge is to offer an alternative vision of the world that isn't so frightening that potential allies run back into the arms of their tormentors, preferring the false comfort and ease to the hardships we seem to offer. Is one of the reasons I enjoy reading your Stack, Christopher, as you offer ideas about an alternative vision that attempts to manage the frightening nature of a radically different world of human organization and coexistence. Thank you, I'm glad I found your work.
My words: resistance to all of this is required. No more status quo and no more laying down in front of the wokie train. The nuns taught me pronouns in grade school and their teachings are sacrosanct. Cross or defy a nun and it's lights out...yours. At least it was 65 years ago.