The countless ways
As promised or threatened, continuing with Mister Friendly and his hostility to people who don’t fervently endorse every claim of every branch of trans ideology.
He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics) etc etc…
Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.
Notice that trans people are called a “community” while people who interrogate broad claims about what being trans means are not. Mehta might as well talk about the white hat people and the black hat people, or the good people and the bad people, or the angels and the vermin. Or even the healthy people and the sick ones. Oh right, he did that last one.
But the problem wasn’t just that he wrote the piece. It was that the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group that I believe does excellent work defending church/state separation, published it on their own blog.
Note the absent-minded egotism there – the problem was that the FFRF, a group that all-important I endorse…
It takes real self-admiration, that.
But here’s some welcome news: All three of those men have now resigned from that board. The trash is taking itself out.
Friendly. Friendly friendly friendly.
He quotes Jerry Coyne
I will add one more thing. The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (“a woman is whoever she says she is”), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.
and all but bursts into flames of indignation:
That last part is Coyne showing his whole ass to everyone. Apparently acknowledging the humanity of trans people, and defending their civil rights, and not falling for right-wing lies about who they are is a religion unto itself.
No, not apparently at all. That’s not what Coyne said, and there’s no reason to think it’s what he meant. The gender ideology does have a lot in common with religion, absolutely including dogma, blasphemy, belief in nonsensical bullshit, apostasy, and an allergy to science. Mehta is displaying much of that list in this very post of his.
I’m actually surprised, though True Believers are unlikely to see themselves in the mirror Coyne is hold up in front of them, Mehta included apparently.
Letting people see how your characterization of someone’s words compares with what they actually said doesn’t work so well when they’re so far apart. Not everyone is going to fill in all those blanks you see, read everything you say is between the lines, and hear all of the supposed dog whistles you insist are there, especially when a plain reading is so clear. But this clarity is pure naïveté. Apparently. In Mehta’s parsing, pretty much every word in the original must mean something completely different than what Coyne is allegedly saying on the surface (but not actually meaning). I’d be curious to see Mehta’s work, and how he’s managed to do this impressive bit of crytpanalysis. With Coyne using all the rotors on his Enigma machine, that’s a lot of secret message bandwidth for Mehta’s captured secret TERF decoder rings to work out. All of that purported subtext is supposedly as pervasive as dark matter. It’s about as obvious as dark matter as well. But given all of the lies he’s already told, why would he stop now?
It does take a lot to get what he got out of “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. ;-)
That’s how I was “peaked”.
Everybody knows that “welcome news” is a dog whistle for “flush live kittens down the toilet”. Disgusting, but far from surprising given Mr. Mehta’s long history of anti-kitten rhetoric.
The Ovaltine’s always cyanide flavoured with these guys!
This, right here, is a good example of why Democrats lose elections. Too many on the left just can’t conceive of a good-faith disagreement with others who have a different opinion but are still decent people Thus, Coyne, Dawkins and Pinker, all left-leaning and left-voting intellectuals of stature, are dismissed as “trash”.
This is what too many on the left sound like on the topic of gender ideology, and, while gender ideology is by far the worst of it, this is what too many on the left sound like to moderate centrists on many other topics. And after a while, enough of them think “well I’m not going to vote for you …”.
Well, here is Coel again, showing us his brilliant understanding by indicating that Republicans win elections because Democrats sound mean. Wow. Somehow I wouldn’t have thought of that!
Trans has just made its way into the mainstream, having been mostly restricted to college campuses and obscure sections of the internet until trans players in women’s sports made them a top issue. Yes, it almost certainly lost the left some votes. I suspect it wasn’t the biggest vote loser, but Coel, of course, knows better.
Meanwhile, the GOP has been calling their opponents trash…and worse…for decades. They have called us everything from morons to rodents, including Nazis, Communists, un-American, anti-American, and whatever else comes to their mind.
Somehow I think the Democrats sounding mean might be the least of their problems. The voting public has indicated it likes mean…after all, Donald Trump is set to be the next president…again.
Coel,
You’re right, but not in the way that you think. The problem with the Democrats is that they’re starting to act like Republicans. The attribute you’re criticizing, that they’re dismissing those with whom they disagree as “trash,” has been a central feature of conservatives for decades and decades. From AM radio to Fox News, the entire right wing media has done nothing but spout vicious hatred at liberals and progressives for decades and decades. I’m a gay man, and I’ve been called FAR FAR worse than “trash” by the pigs on the right. I’ve endured more than just hateful words from them, too.
The right have always taken the low road. Always. The reason the left is now losing votes is that, with the Dems beginning to stoop to the right’s level, their message of having the moral high ground has become flawed and perceived by some as hypocritical.
People, being not very rational, would rather vote for outright, explicit horrible dirtbags because at least they feel a sense of control: it makes them feel like they at least know who they’re voting for (even though they’re about to be fed a plateful of shit by them). Whereas asking people to vote for far-less horrible dirtbags (but nevertheless still dirtbags, because politicians are usually assholes) who present themselves as morally superior puts people off and makes them feel distrustful. Even though by voting for the lesser dirtbags, they’d probably end up having to swallow a lot less shit.
So go ahead, Coel, dig in to your plateful of genuine, pure, unconcealed, unhypocritical Trump/Musk horseshit, if it makes you feel smug and superior.
That Democrats underestimated “culture war” progressive issues like DEI and transgenderism — with their heavy-handed attempts at enforcement — is a point being made by pundits on the left, right, and center. So I don’t think this characterization compares well to what Coel actually said.
OK, a couple of clarifications:
First, it’s not just on trans issues (that’s just a notable example) it’s on a whole range of issues (including anything to do with race).
Second, sure, people in one political camp insult and deride those in the other political camp. The Republicans are indeed guilty of this.
What I was getting at (perhaps not clearly enough) is that many of today’s Democrats are deliberately alienating those in their own camp! They are happy to dismiss and deride center-left and center-ground moderates. In the recent election a lot of such people who had previously voted Democrat decided this time to vote for Trump or to simply not vote.
In the above example, Hemant Mehta is not calling three staunch MAGA Republicans “trash”, he is calling three center-left, Democrat voting notables as “trash”!
Elections are always won by who best appeals to the center ground, and too many Democrats sound as though they are deliberately trying to alienate that center ground! That is just dumb. Trump insults his opponents, yes indeed, but he doesn’t insult those in the center ground.
Lastly, if your main defense against a charge such as mine is “Well, the Republicans, blah, blah …” then that’s not much of a defense.
And I’ll clarify right back: I’m not quite defending against your charge — indeed, I said that I agree with it — but I’m clarifying that it’s not at all unique to the one side.
The left is caught in an awful purity spiral and it’s currently eating its own. Very, very true. And the right have done the same, countless times. See, for example: McCarthyism.
Coel dances around the reason why Trump has won twice, and lost once.
Twice Trump has won because his opponent was a woman, not because no woman is suited to the role of POTUS, but because having a female candidate allowed Trump to amplify his misogyny, and Dog knows, America is infested with misogyny. Biden denied him that line of attack.
OK, I admit that my reasoning here is about as poor as Coel’s original comment, but there is a nugget of truth in there. One need only look back at how Trump insulted and denigrated the other GOP aspirants, and reserved much of his worst invective for those of the female sex.
I’m sorry, really? All this throwing around “the reason”? If he’d gotten like 55 plus I might be willing to listen, but the most obvious answer is that things cost too much and what voters are willing to tolerate when gas is fifty cents less per gallon is different.
More to the point it was an election mostly determined by people who don’t actually know much about politics and were able to project all of their feelings on to someone who they didn’t actually know much about (because they weren’t watching/reading the news and they’re not terminally online). Everyone’s pet issue is always *the* reason for any movement in politics except it isn’t. The trannies were effectively weaponized on the margins but most people that aren’t activists don’t really know much about it.
If anything *the* issue is that the Democratic party didn’t take the threat of Trump and Elon Musk seriously and the lack of movement on electorally relevant issues thoroughly demonstrates this.
Meanwhile, Western civilization gets rolled over by rurals and Eastern barbarians (and Xi Jinping, who may be barbarous but is certainly not a barbarian).
Sastra said:
True.
And I’ll say I think I encounter more automatic attribution of bad faith or bad values from those on the nominal left than the right. I’m damn sure I have to watch what I say around family members who vote blue more than those who vote red, because even the suggestion of any divergence from the party line is treated like damnable heresy. If there’s any automatic attribution from my Right-leaning family, it’s of bad information or bad reasoning. That is, they might think me gullible or stupid. I can live with that. It’s a little bit harder to accept being thought mendacious or immoral.
This wasn’t always how things worked. It used to be that neither group was so eager to convict, at least within my family and friends. (I’ve been involved in pro–abortion-rights work since I was a kid. Half my immediate family extended family is Catholic. Disagreement has always been commonplace.) In a bit of memetic self-defense, you often can’t even call attention to this without being convicted of Rightwing-think or even bigotry.