I have loaded the vibe trebuchet and launched into the world a large number of bublasuars, Ivysaurs, and Venusaurs. The reason for this is not clear to me. Although I do have reasons for having done so...

The reality of biology in a single clip:

Transwomen are women

I'm not being a jerk, I'm making my point with a sledgehammer.

Pretending differences between men and women don't exist is utterly absurd, and people keep saying it. This ACLU lawyer quite literally says "Women and girls who are trans are biological women and girls."

In 2017 Craid Telfor ranked 390th in the mens 400m hurdles.

In 2018 Craig Telfor transitioned and became CeCe Telfor.

In 2019 CeCe Telfor won the women's 400m hurdles at the Womens Division II National Championship.

In what moral universe is this fair to women?

Renee Richards was a male to female transgender person who at age *45* became the 20th ranked women's player in the world.

Richards now says if the transition had at happened age 22 rather then at 40 no biological women would have had a chance:

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One of the most common tricks used by woke Social Justice activists to defend their view is to de-legitimize criticism by attacking the motives of the person who is opposing them. The goal is to undercut the moral authority and social standing of anyone who disagrees with them

2/
If you criticize the views of woke Social justice Activists they'll attack your motivations and imply that you're not being honest about your true motives. The goal is to make the audience suspicious of your intentions so they won't trust you or believe anything you say.

3/
By attacking your motives the woke activists can both discredit you while getting the audience to raise their level of skepticism toward you. This tactic is sometime referred to as "poisoning the well."

It is a dirty tactic, but it is effective.

4/
Here @BrandonLBradfor attempts to smear Conservative Black thinkers by claiming the reason the Right listens to conservative blacks is to assuage their own insecurity. The implication is people don't really care about the ideas of conservative blacks, they just use them...

5/
This implies that the ideas of conservative blacks are not worth listening too, and that even if conservative blacks had good ideas, nobody would care any way. This is the sort of pure cynicism that typifies Wokeness.

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A huge mistake people make is to think of postmodernism, post-structuralism, intersectionality, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, 4th wave feminism, and Critical Theory as being separate and distinct, having nothing to do with each other

This is a massive mistake.

2/
These disciplines are connected. They are not like individual academic factories producing different theories. The fact is that the ideas that are produced in various disciplines cross-pollinate and influence each other. The theorists make use of and share each others ideas.

3/
These fields are akin to ingredients used by activists to make the stew of Critical Social Justice.

Mix some postmodernism here with some intersectionality there, add Critical Race Theory and 4th wave feminist post-structuralism and *taste test* YUMMY...Social Justice!👨‍🍳

4/
Take a look through the activist literature and you'll see that they pull from all these theorists as they see fit and as they find it useful.

An excellent example of this is the book/website: "Beautiful Trouble." You can see how this dynamic works in that book.

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You all know the old trick about how "postmoderns" and Marxists are totally different? Well that was true at one time, but woke activists will gladly take ideas from both the Postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1st pic) and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci (2nd pic)

1/

Mini Thread:

Every time I think there is no more postmodernism in Christianity, I find more postmodernism in Christianity.

This time @KaitlynSchiess

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We start out with acknowledging a shift in how "truth" is thought about.

Which, I mean, yeah just read some Stanley Grenz and you can see it coming. It is called *taps mic*
🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭

POSTMODERNISM

🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭🥐🦭

3/
Pic 1: We are sinful and as such we are epistemicly flawed

Pic 2: Because we are flawed and imperfect we must adopt the philosophy of Richard Rorty: "The truth is out there but we can't get it."

Although she hedges slightly with "every time."

4/
Next "There is no universal basis for evaluating our environment."

This is her argument for that:

1. our perspectives are limited,
2. our communities suffer from generational and structural biases,
Therefore:
3. there is no universal basis for evaluating our
environments.

5/
This whole argument (much like the whole essay) is totally confused.

For one, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. She goes from different perspectives and people have bias directly to there is no foundation for the discovery of truth.

now....

As America celebrates its defeat of an authoritarian in the middle of consolidating power, it is critical to stay vigilant.

In my @BylineTimes interview with historian @ruthbenghiat she cautions these so-called “strongmen” often remain in the party’s

1/ Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, details the precise moment in time when fascism was born.

2/ “World War One was this cataclysmic change,” she told Byline Times. “Multiple empires fell, including the Russian Empire, Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire. It created death on a scale no one had seen before. It created wounds no one had seen before because of new weapons.”

3/ In addition, the Great War led to a profound crisis in maleness.

4/ “It created this entire class of men who were damaged, many were killed, and it created this huge crisis of masculinity,” she said. “So fascist rulers came up during this crisis period of unrest and instability in their individual countries and Italy was first.”

“Thread: History of Valentines Day”

Ancient historical sources have claimed the existence of several saints by the name of St.Valentines who died on Feb 14. Among them, two were executed during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius Gothicus in 269-270 A.D.
#valentinesday2021

[1]

It was the time when the Christian persecution was common. Another legendary account states that under the rule of Claudius II, Rome was involved in the bloody campaigns, therefore, to maintain a strong army, Claudius II banned all marriages and engagements in Rome.

[2]

The reason of forbidding marriages was forced by the reluctance of people to join military because of their strong attachment to their wives. But St. Valentine defied the orders of the Emperor Claudius II Gothicus and married couples secretly to spare the husbands from war.

[3]

A few claims have reported that St.Valentine endorsed illegal relationships which could end up into a marriage. When it was discovered by the emperor, St. Valentine was arrested and condemned to have his head cut off.

[4]

An order of Belgian monks spent almost three centuries to explore the lives of saints by the name of St.Valentines from archives around the world. Bollandists suggested, that there weren’t actually two decapitated Valentines, but the two different versions of one saint’s...

[5]

This week, 33 years ago, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was assassinated in a French-backed coup. He aspired to an egalitarian, feminist society, and an economy built on self-sufficiency, ecological regeneration, and independence from Western powers.

As debt crises mount across Africa, his ideas are more vital now than ever. I wrote about Sankara's legacy in these two pages from The Divide:

Today, Sankara's legacy is inspiring a new generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists across the continent and beyond. As Sankara himself put it, with uncanny prescience, “You can assassinate revolutionaries, but you cannot kill ideas”.

Sankara knew his assassination was coming. Speaking to African leaders at the OAU, he said "I would like this conference to clearly declare that we will not repay the debt; we must do it together, to avoid being assassinated individually..."

"...If Burkina Faso is the only one to refuse, I will not be here at the next conference."

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

3/

Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

THREAD: Meditations on marriage metaphors in Ruth

The book of Ruth is, of course, a story about a beautiful marriage. But even before the courtship and the wedding and the important genealogy at the end, we find interesting language that is strikingly reminiscent of Genesis 2:24

That important verse reads:

'Therefore a man shall leave [יַֽעֲזָב] his father and his mother and hold fast [וְדָבַ֣ק] to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.'

The verb עזב can be quite strong in force. For example, Joseph leaves behind [וַיַּעֲזֹ֤ב] his garment as he flees from Pharaoh's wife's sexual advances. Countless times, Israel is depicted abandoning the LORD, for example in Judg 2:12 [וַיַּעַזְב֞וּ], and going after other gods.

Likewise, the verb דבק is rather striking. Lot is mortified of disaster overtaking him [תִּדְבָּקַ֥נִי] as he flees from Sodom. Israel is commanded in Deut 10:20 to cling fast [תִדְבָּ֔ק] to the LORD and serve him and swear by his name.

Together they illustrate how radical God designed marriage to be. Marriage is a real severing of family relations in order to form a new, permanent bond with another human being.

Something very similar to this takes places in Ruth's life.