Check out my new blog: My AI Obsession, and my latest post there “People are having sex with ChatGPT”
I have to give The Federalist credit for one thing: It was an eye-catching headline. Yesterday, you see, the billionaire-backed right-wing website ran a semi-coherent rant from staff editor Samuel Mangold-Lenett under the headline: “Pride Month Is A Cynical Exercise In State-Enforced Homosexuality.”
Naturally, I clicked the link to find out just how the Federal government was going to be making people gay this June. Would straight men be herded up and put in dick-sucking camps? Would straight women be forced to wear flannel and trade their cars in for Subaru Outbacks?
What I found under the headline was an angry and unfocused rant about how “government and corporate America alike use their respective spheres of influence to form a public-private regime dedicated to immanentizing a disordered eschaton.”
I then looked up the phrase “immanentize the eschaton” and discovered that it was “a generally pejorative term referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world.” In other words, Mr. Mangold-Lenett is mad at the attempts by allegedly leftist corporations and the government to make the world a better place.
He offered assorted bits of “evidence” that allegedly prove that “the public and private sectors [are] work[ing] hand in glove to advance both an ideological and political agenda.” It’s basically just a laundry list of right-wing culture war complaints. He’s mad about
things like ESG scores, the Corporate Equality Index, the LGBT indoctrination of children by public schools and entertainment conglomerates like Disney, and pronoun struggle sessions at the State Department … .
He’s also not happy about
the annual rainbow lighting of the White House, heaping of praise upon people like the Nashville shooter, and the continued denigration of religious institutions by American corporations.
Even Hunter Biden’s laptop makes an appearance in his list of terrible wrongs inflicted upon right-thinking Americans.
You’ll notice that many of these things have absolutely no connection to LGBTQ+ issues and that the ones that do aren’t always, you know, real. No one was heaping praise on the Nashville shooter. Corporations aren’t denigrating religious institutions. Disney isn’t making kids gay. In fact, no one is making anyone gay. That’s not how sexuality works.
But don’t tell that to Mr. Mangold-Lenett.
There simply is no longer a distinction between the private and public sectors; they carry out each other’s goals and enforce them as though they are part of the same body — because they are different only in name. And only by spreading their message can you reap the benefits; opposing it drastically increases the odds you get your teeth kicked in.
No one is getting their teeth kicked in for being straight. People do get their teeth kicked in for being gay and/or trans.
You may be wondering just where the whole “state-enforced homosexuality” thing comes in. And the answer is: it doesn’t, really–unless you believe that seeing a photograph of the White House illuminated with rainbow colors is enough to make you gay.
Indeed, the only time that the phrase “state-enforced homosexuality” makes it into the essay itself is in reference to a fake TED Talk given by alt-right-adjacent comedian Sam Hyde in which he used the phrase as part of a bit.
Sorry dude, but seeing a few rainbow flags isn’t “state-enforced homosexuality” any more than seeing a bumper sticker saying “I’d rather be bow hunting” is going to turn people into bow hunters. You’re not a victim because Target puts up a pride display. The world is not your “safe space.” Get a grip.
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Sad and funny:
Several weeks ago, I mentioned in a comment that Finland had just begun to “enforce” the recently approved gender recognition reform. The word choice felt weird in my mind, but I couldn’t figure out a better expression. In afterthought, I think “enact” would’ve been correct.
In any case, I’ll let you know if my legal gender automatically changes during this Pride month.
This guy is free, absolutely, to be a bitter, selfish, sad. obviously impotent, raging asshole.
That acknowledged – though deeply pitied – I of course add that he’ll only be able to make his bitterness and self-loathing government policy and civil and social law by (and this is just for any initial “Success”) murdering a very great number of people (including myself):
people who clearly will not ourselves to be murdered at all easily.
May he find a way back to the humanity he obviously loathes and despises in himself, since he’ll die, like all of us, soon enough the same homo sapiens he was born.
What a stupid and sick nation the USA now is – and yet better than it has ever been in very many ways.
They can’t even get their outrage du jour straight before veering off. It must be exhausting being permanently angry about something, especially something increasingly vague and nebulous. They’re simply deeply unhappy people and they’re probably getting a lot of “can’t talk to you now, dude” from a lot of people and getting increasingly disinvited to events. Nobody wants to hear their rants. People just ant to enjoy their lives without some crank spoiling their good time. This is the ultimate cul de sac the culture warriors always end up. “Can’t talk to you now, grandpa”
”Immanentize the eschaton” is one of those phrases people use when they’re trying to sound Really Smart.
I guess the thought process is “I don’t like all these visual reminders that gay people are welcome and valued” -> “It feels nonconsensual” -> “Homosexuality is being forced on us by the state”. Something got lost in translation there.
@ Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Yet it seems like if people who make that leap can hear something like “The way women’s bodies are depicted in advertisements/comics/etc. makes me uncomfortable” and think it’s a non-issue, because you can always just not watch/read/etc. those things.
Their discomfort is a national crisis, other people’s discomfort is just a personal problem.
@Masse_Mysteria
Nail. Head. Hit.
It seems as though, to the authoritarian, if something is not forbidden, it is mandatory, and vice-versa.
Homosexuality is not forbidden? The government is forcing it on us.
They cannot force kids to pray sectarian prayers in school? The government has banned kids praying in school.
When I was a boy, I was told that if I immanentized my eschaton, I’d go blind and crazy and hair would grow on the palms of my hands.
*skims linked Wikipedia article*
Oops, my bad. I thought that phrase meant something else.
And we’re back to attacks on my food supply.
The main grocer in town (located centrally, rather than at one end or the other) has reduced the amount in its bakery’s cookies from 12 to 10, without any corresponding drop in the price. And they seem to have changed their policy regarding freshness of bread products, making that even worse. Before, they sometimes had some that were fresh for as much as 10 or even 12 days, though they occasionally had nothing with more than a few days left, and the average for “maximum freshness” was 8 or so days with it often being necessary to reach to the back of the shelf to find the fresher stuff, with the ones at the front often only good for another 3 or 4 days.
For the past few weeks, though, they never seem to have any of the common brands (including Dempsters and the in-store Brand X) fresher than five or six days left to expiration, and it’s all uniform. There are no fresher ones toward the back of the shelf any more, ever.
This ought to be a problem for everybody, not just me. It’s very common, bordering on cliche, for grocery trips to be a once-a-week thing for people, and they are now refusing to stock fresh enough product frequently enough that a shopper will always be able to get a week’s worth of groceries in a single trip. Case in point: yesterday, a Saturday, all the Dempster’s had six days left on their tiny little clocks, and the store brand all had just five. Saturday being the most common grocery day for a family with a weekly shopping pattern. So any such family would be stuck getting bread likely to go moldy around next Friday, leaving them with none to eat on that day or before the shopping trip on the Saturday.
There is a single brand whose product tends to often be fresher, but it’s also a more expensive one by around 30ish percent (so not a trivial amount more). One has the suspicion that the store is trying to push people to splurge on this more expensive brand.
I don’t know what the idiots running the place are thinking, but this is getting to be unsustainable for me in particular. I can’t be having to make extra trips, going twice a week instead of once, for reasons of stamina if I walk and expense if I don’t. Getting it at a different store is sometimes an option, sometimes not. The other grocers are somewhat farther (= more exertion, or a higher taxi fare) and not as convenient to either the pharmacy or a more specialist food shop I get one item from regularly (so if I need more Pepcid, Flonase, or this other food item, going to a different grocer for everything else would add further mileage to the trip still, at further cost to my stamina and/or pocketbook). Add in the straight-up price gouging and I just don’t see how I can sustainably keep myself fed, sheltered, and with winter heating on my present income.
How do I fix this? I don’t have the clout to force the store to revert to their policies and prices of, say, two years ago, not acting alone. I also demonstrably lack the social skills to amass any significant number of followers, let alone enough to change that calculus. I have a feeling the people in charge, to the extent they consider people in situations like mine at all, would like me to just lie down and die and quit pestering them, but for obvious reasons I consider that to be invalid and I will have to insist on some other outcome happening instead. But I don’t know how to ensure such an outcome.
And really, what kind of grocery store doesn’t stock product fresh enough for people to do their shopping once a week?!?!?!
That’s nothing new. The now demolished Jeff Davis memorial in Richmond had a quote about him “advancing freedom”. This from the guy whose new state had draconian free speech laws, and of course the entire purpose of the new state was to continue to take away the freedoms of slaves.
@Nequam, @Ivory Bill: You both got a small laugh out of me.
Scrolling down too quickly, the Pride Policeman reminded me of John Barrowman, which would be very appropriate.
I don’t want a Suburu, but I’m down with flannel. And I got a very short haircut, so I should fit right in.
Ya know what this place needs? More capybaras! I saw a picture of two of the guys floating around in a fancy Japanese exhibit and wondered why we hadn’t seen our beloved carpinchos lately.
I would also accept more bad AI art mammoths, with the tusks and trunk all mixed up.
@GSS ex-noob: That I can help with.
What I don’t understand is: Even if the Federal government and corporations WERE conspiring to push people of all ages to become queer/trans/gay, or at least welcoming of these people, what would be the endgame? Why would they be doing this? Am I missing something here?
I firmly believe there is no such thing as a ‘woke’ corporation. For them, it’s whatever brings in the most money. And, let’s face it, the US gov’t is behind them every step of the way.
After Bud Light’s recent fiasco, they just released an ad trumpeting ‘merica and all the related American summertime cliches. In other words, they gave their consumers what they like.
It all reminds me of a bizarre YouTube channel I came across once, whose creator claimed that numerous well-known Hollywood types, both men and women, were really transsexuals, and this was all part of the demonic elite pedo agenda. What?! Why!??
GSS ex-noob, Battering Lamb:
I saw a video from Brazil, where a group of 4 or 5 capybaras were crossing a street at a designated crosswalk, along with the humans. It was amusing.
I wish we had capybaras in North America, although my mother calls them ‘nasty rodents’.
@Alan Robertshaw: My mother hates all rodents. She’s a city girl, who didn’t know what chipmunks were – she called them rat-squirrels. She turned down a job after college, because she would have had to handle lab rats. Not that you asked…
@Dormousing_it: I recently learned that bunnies and hares aren’t rodents (different family, different set of teeth). Is your mother aware of this, and if not, does she hate bunnies and hares too? (Sorry, my brain just latched onto that, so it made me curious).
we won’t need to enforce homosexuality when the chemicals that made the frogs gay are adapted for mammals
Capybaras! Just what I needed today.
Someone with better search skills than mine needs to find that video of them crosssing the road one the crossing that Dormousing_H mentions . . . please?
@ jazzlet
I don’t have the tech skills to download the video; but here you go…
https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1502396580095479809?lang=en-GB
Come for the state-enforced sodomy, stay for the capybaras.
@Battering Lamb: My mother doesn’t seem to hate bunnies and hares, no. I used to have a couple of rabbits, and she was OK with them.
I remember once, many years ago, my parents rented a ranch for a few months, while we were waiting for our house to be built. My mother walked into the kitchen at night, and gave a blood curdling scream. There were a few mice on the counter, that was all. My father found a hole behind the oven, where they probably got into the house.
Funny, that she now lives semi-rural. I keep trying to get her to get a cat.
Not award winningly on topic. But I’m just impressed. Both by the headline and the actual achievement.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/29/woman-wins-coopers-hill-cheese-rolling-race-despite-being-knocked-out