May 27, 1921. Horrors in Oklahoma and Futile Acts in Russia.

The body of Anna Brown, an Osage Indian woman, in Osage County, Oklahoma led to an investigation which which ultimately determined that a large number of Osage women were killed over a period of years, but the reasons and perpetrators, and even if they were related, were largely never determined, although there white men were convicted of murders.  It is thought that the killings may have been done to effectuate inheritance to non Indians, as at the time the Osage were the wealthiest people in the world due to oil production.  As a result of that suspicion, Congress ultimately passed a bill prohibiting the inheritance rights to pass to non tribal members.

Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Mensheviks seized control of Vladivostok from Bolsheviks.  

The Mensheviks were a  more numerous Socialist group than the Bolsheviks, and less radical, which doesn't mean they were not radical.  They failed in their contest with the Bolsheviks and, by this time, they'd actually been outlawed due to the Kronstadt Rebellion.

May 26, 1921. Rickenbacker crashes in Cheyenne.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 26: 1921   Eddie Rickenbacker crashed a mail plane near Cheyenne.

And this photograph was taken of Craig Street in Montreal, five  years before my mother was born in that city.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 16. Reality check. Je me souviens.

Perversion.

On May 24, I ran an item about the 1941 sinking of the HMS Hood.

On the same day, the same item, had an item about the sinking, on the same day, of the SS Conte Rosso.  Those two events both resulted in massive loss of life, with man of those lives being young. The Conte Rosso, a pre war Italian cruise liner, is forgotten, but the Hood certainly is not.

I don't note this to suggest moral equivalency or something in this, but rather to note something completely different.  

The Battle of the Denmark Straits is an epic event of World War Two, but like all epic events of the Second World War it resulted in massive loss of life.  It's not funny.

One of the things that has occurred since World War Two is the pornification of everything, and across cultural lines.  This is bad in the US, but frankly its worse in other countries.  Japan, which doesn't have a Western culture, and therefore doesn't have the remaining restraints of the Apostolic faiths and their protestant split offs, has a much different culture in this regard, and indeed in regard to the societal view of women in general.  Japan, quite frankly, tolerates a lot of things in this are area that are outright perverse.

One of the things that it tolerates is a pornographic cartoon industry.  Unfortunately, with the Internet, that's developed a huge American fan base, predictably.  And oddly enough, and it is really, really odd, a feature of Japanese weird cartoon art is the cartoon treatment of World War Two warships, personified as improbably shaped women in the Japanese cartoon style.

I note this as when I ran the item on the Hood I ran across quite accidentally, on a net search, a cartoon depicting the Hood, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in this fashion, in what I guess was intended to be a cartoon representation of the Battle of Denmark Strait.  And its deeply, deeply, weird and perverted.

We have the Internet in part to thank for this.  It's not good.

A existential shift?

One of the things about living in one place for a long time is that you both experience changes and aren't aware of them when they're happening.  The recent Anthony Bouchard matter brings this to mind.

I've followed Wyoming's politics since I was a teenager.  The first election I really recall closely watching was the 1972 Presidential election.  I was nine years old at the time.  I paid more attention to the 1976 Ford v. Carter election, where I definitely had an opinion (I was for Ford).  So I have a long political rear view mirror.

My entire life the Republican party has been the majority party, although we've also had three Democratic governors, one Democratic Senator and one Democratic Congressman in that time frame.  And for almost all of that time we've never fit the national mold.

Wyoming Republicans tended to be more like independents elsewhere.  Wyoming Democrats, it was often noted, would have been Republicans elsewhere.

Something happened when Clinton was President and its still hard to figure out looking back.  Clinton was not, in retrospect, a bad President and he wasn't actually detestable while he served in any real sense.  But the Democratic Party simply died here during that period and it reflects the fringe today.  The serious Democrats, including the ones in the legislature, pretty much picked up and moved to the Republican Party.

You'd think that would have cemented the party in the center, and for awhile it sort of looked that way.  Maybe it has, but we're about to see.

The Wyoming Republican Party of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, was highly centrist and independent.  When a Natrona County member attempted to introduce an anti phonography bill in the 80s he was pretty much howled down as messing in other people's business.  Efforts by out of staters to move into the Powell region of the state to set up a white enclave met with an open public demonstration.  Whether you thought they should or not, the party wouldn't touch social issues.  An effort by ranchers to take over hunting licenses met with a near public rebellion.

But something has happened since then.

I'm not sure what it is, but that party has been captured by real right wing populists and they actually openly hate the old party.  By accident and without my desire, I ended up being a silent recipient on an email list for at time made up of Republican figures in the state who are fairly well known.  I asked the list owner to drop me off as frankly I'm sure that they wouldn't have wanted me there and I don't know why I was included in the first place.

What that revealed, however, is an open contempt of the populist who control the state's GOP for the old party.  

The question is, where are the voters and is the old party still around?

Up until recently, I've thought it was.  And I still think and hope it is. But I have to acknowledge that something has really crept into the GOP here and taken it over.  

Whatever it is, it isn't conservatism.

To some extent, I wonder to what degree this is imported, and if that's the case, to what degree the importation is permanent.  Some of the figures I recognized are very much Wyomingites, but perhaps notably of demographics and regions that were outside the mainstream up until now.  But other figures in this change are out of staters.

That really matters as out of staters, or more accurately out of the region immigrants, bring their views and politics with them.  They often don't know it, however.  Be that as it may, people come here for various reasons and instantly set about trying to make this place like the place they left.

In the last Gubernatorial election the state had a candidate that hailed originally from Wisconsin but who had taken an adult trip, so to speak, through Texas and Arizona before ending up here, part, I suppose most, of the year in that county that's the domain of the wealthy, Teton County.  His campaign struck me like something out of the South in the 1970s, complete with lightly clad young women in a climate that's cold most of the time.  At one time I saw a car licensed in Colorado that had a bumper sticker for him that proclaimed "Christians for    ".

Now, I'm a Christian, but prior to the 2018 race you never would have seen that sticker here.  Wyomingites aren't anti Christian, but they tend to be "leave me alone" in their view of things.  People simply wouldn't have attempted to garner the support of somebody by citing their religious faith prior to that time.  Indeed, I know one of the prior Governors somewhat and know that he is very observant in his faith. At least one of the other prior ones had a profound personal conversion. And yet another candidate in the 2018 race was Greek Orthodox but that was largely unnoted.

That's because what's really meant by that claim is "I'm an evangelical Protestant", usually.  And that's interesting as Wyoming is the least observant state, religion wise, in the country.

That's not new to Wyoming, it's always been the case.  Over the state's century long history there's been an evolution in Protestantism however.  The Episcopal Church was once very prominent in the state, but it's now declined massively and continues to. The Presbyterian Church and the Lutheran Church had pretty strong bases in certain demographics.  The Latter Day Saints are very strong in certain regions and have been since before the state was a state.  And Catholics form a unique demographic as they're a minority in Wyoming by a long measure, but they're a fairly observant one which actually makes them sort of prominent in terms of groups actually going to church.

Fundamentalist Christian faiths have always been here as well, but the real growth of them is quite new.  In the 60s and 70s, your church attending Protestant school mates, probably went to a Lutheran, Episcopal or Presbyterian church.  I can recall having one friend who went to a Baptist church, but only one.  One of the girls I knew in junior high and high school was the daughter of the Methodist minister and I later knew some Methodists.  I knew one Mormon.  I knew one Jehovah's Witness.

Indeed, of my immediate grade school friends, one was a Baptist (mentioned above), two were Lutherans (although oddly one of the brothers of one of them became an Episcopal, and then Anglican, priest), one a Mormon, and one wasn't of any religion I can recall, which probably means his parents didn't attend church.  

Of my close junior high/high school friends, two were Lutheran, one Episcopalian, one Mormon, and one nominally Catholic.  In my wider circle, one was the aforementioned daughter of the Methodist minister and one the son of the Greek Orthodox priest.

Well so what, you may ask?

Well, on my work now there's two churches that are of very much different theology, one being a very large Assembly of God church and one purporting to be free of a denomination, which actually puts it into the evangelical protestant arena.  Across town there's a very large non denominational church in that category. A person may say, so what, but this is evidence of something.  Truth be known, up into the 1970s these latter types of Christian denominations were pretty rare here and had small congregations.  That's changed.

And that's evidence of something demographic, and that reflects back to what I've just noted above about politics.

In the 1970s we had an oil boom that died by the early 1980s.  When it died, the folks who had come in during it left.  This was the age old pattern here.  The mainline protestant churches and the Apostolic churches had congregations made up of people who had roots here, or who had sunk roots here. Some were oilmen and oilfield workers, but an awful lot of them had some other long standing base here.  

The recent oil booms, there being two, of post 2000 vintage also brought in the oil demographic, which tends to be from Texas and Oklahoma, and that's really when we saw the rise of the evangelical protestant churches.  It's also when our politics really began to change as well.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone who goes to one of the evangelical protestant churches is an outsider, nor am I saying everyone in the populist GOP is. As we'll note on the latter, however, some definitely are.  But there's a phenomenon in invasions, if you care to look at it, of the outnumbered invader changing the culture of the invaded territory.

Pre Saxon Britain was populated, not surprisingly, by the British, a Celtic people.  It was long wondered if the Saxons killed most of them, although there was little evidence of that, when they came in. We now know, thanks to DNA testing, that they didn't.  Indeed, the modern English, or the Anglesch, or the Angles, are pretty much Celts, genetically.  The Saxons simply took over and their culture became the dominant one.

I wonder if we something like that going on here.  The population of Wyoming at any one time contains more outsiders than Wyomingites.  A lot of the immigrants are from the region, who largely share the same culture, but not all of them are. Some are form outside and bring their culture with them.

Indeed, I'm personally familiar with just one such example of a transplanted Midwesterner who is pretty much incapable of leaving his big city, Midwestern view, behind him.  He can't, as that's who he is, and there's nothing wrong with that. But very few people realize that they have a regional culture, and that the culture is shaped by where they are from.

The traditional Wyoming culture is pretty Woody Guthrie-esque.  "This land is my land", in other words.  A lot of the imports don't view it that way at all.  And most of the old Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Mormons here pretty much figured that their religion informed their daily actions and politics, but none of them would have said "vote for me, I'm a . . . "

Maybe what I'm noting hasn't really happened.  I hope not.  But I wonder.  One of the current Congressional candidates came out of hte chute announcing he was  "pro-God, pro-family, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business, pro-oil and gas, pro-coal."  No Wyoming candidate of the 1970s and 80s, would have dared say that they were "pro God" as it would have been presumptuous in the extreme.  For that matter, none would have said they were "pro gun" as that would have been assumed, and statements on the extractive industries would have been more intelligent than that.

That candidate is from Wyoming, but he's backed by the Teton County former candidate mentioned above.  Of the remaining field we have one from Florida who has acknowledged, but not really show contrition, for what would amount to statutory rape in Wyoming, followed by what would have been pretty much regarded as a shocking marriage to a child by most Wyomingites prior to 2000, but which doesn't seem to now.  One who has made a comment about Liz Cheney not really living here, a fair enough criticism that I've made myself in prior years, isn't from here either, but is at least from a neighboring state.  Two have long military careers which by definition puts you out of contact with the state and I'm  not sure if one is from here. The other most recently lived in California, supposedly the antithesis of all things Wyoming.

Some have noted that Idaho's politics were basically taken over by the populist wing of the GOP and Idaho has definitely gone through something like this in the last decade.  Maybe we have too. ^[1]. 

I hope not.

Je ne regrette rein. . . mais peut-être que je devrais

Another thing, I suppose, we have the Internet to thank for is the recent decline of politics and the rise of anger as a virtue.

A lot of the current crop of GOP candidates here, which is all we really have so far, are just hoping pissed off mad.1. Now, being mad in politics can make sense, but it's really gotten out of hand.

It has to be kept in mind that people rarely make rational decisions when mad, and the essential element of a demagogue is keeping his followers mad.  Mussolini never went to the balcony, and said, "gee, Romans, its such a nice day. . . let's do what Italians do and just take the day off . . . ".  Nope was mad, and so his followers were mad.

While comparing anything contemporary to the Nazis is always fraught with danger, the same is true of Hitler.  You can view, and if you speak it listen, to lots of Hitler speeches. And he's hoping mad. He's really mad at the Jews.  Mad, mad, mad.  His followers were mad too. . . so mad they never stopped to think "what exactly has this tiny minority of people in our country actually done to us. . . oh yeah. . nothing".

As I noted in another post, Wyoming populists are busy accusing old line Republicans of being not Republicans.  Some mad person put up a RINO billboard here recently, apparently not realizing that may be the majority of the state.  Anthony Bouchard is mad at the "fake press" for reporting news that isn't fake.  

In earlier eras it took radio and posters to keep people whipped up to this state of perpetual frenzy.  Now its the Internet, and that doesn't take nearly as much effort.  In large part, that's why the Trumpites of the GOP are mad, and its' why the left winger of the Democratic party, who really love being mad, are made.

Everyone ought to listen to Gene Shepherd's "Fanatics". Truly.

As part of this, nobody seems to publicly repent of their sins.

Not that everyone has to, but let's be honest.  If you are public figure and you acted badly, you ought to acknowledge that.  Now, nobody is.  Up until recently, they did.

And there's some bridges that you just can't cross.  Rape, including statutory rape (which is usually consensual we'd note), is one.  If it comes out, you have to confess guilt or it says something about you that's icky.  Even if you do the right thing, you have to.  You can note that you did the right thing, but you can't blame "the fake news media."

And you can't praise the guilty either.  Mussolini did make the trains run on time, and Hitler did fix the rather odd German civil legal structure, supported a modernized highway system, and backed the Volkswagen, but that's not a reason to set his greater transgressions aside.

In other words, you can't really let Roman Polanski off  the hook.  You just don't want to go where that leads.  If you start to try to wipe off the shit, you'll smell like it.  No two ways about it.

Retrospect

I typed most of this out on a day that happened to be my birthday.

My birthday tends to be no big deal to me.  Indeed, I'm always caught off guard when people note it and to a certain degree, with people that I don't know, it can irritate me to have it noted.  I know this is unusual.

I note it here as the past year has been hopelessly odd, globally, and only now things are beginning to become less strained. Be all of that as it may, because of a variety of things, I'm irritated and disappointed, but not at anyone I know.  From deep thinkers, however, I do appreciate thoughtful wishes.

One of the things that routinely happens on birthdays where I work is a communal late day birthday celebration.  I absolutely dread it.  Indeed, I always note to people who aske me what I want, etc., for my birthday that I don't really want anything, or if they are going to get me something, they ought to get me a mule, which I really do want.  I'm perfectly serious about the mule, but nobody ever gets me one.  I think they think I'm joking.

People don't take seriously the request that a birthday not be observed either.

I suppose that's because most people really enjoy having their birthdays celebrated widely.  I don't really.  

I always try to keep in mind that this is a view that's personal to me.  And it isn't for the reason that you hear some people cite about being closer to death.  I'm now 58, and at 58, if you are honest, death can come at any time.  Oh well, that's the way that is.

Rather, I think it has to do with my early years, which of course people will always say is responsible for everything.  But here it actually is.

When I was growing up, we always observed birthdays, but after your very early years it was an immediate family type of deal. And this was the case for the entire extended family.  I get birthday wishes from my cousins, and they're sincere, but we don't have parties or exchange gifts.  After I was about 7 or so, there were no birthday parties with friends and I can recall my parents even discussing that.  It just wasn't done.  You'd always get some gifts, but big gifts were particularly associated with real milestones.  They didn't come every year.  As my birthday comes during the school year, when I was at university I was usually not home when it occurred, and a phone call was about it, which is about all I expected and frankly I appreciated that.  To compound things, after I was 13 my mother was so ill birthdays were really a thing that my father, whose birthday was one day after mine, was really the one observing it, and vice versa.

With that background, birthdays are deeply personal and private to me.  I don't expect nor desire light wishes and I really don't want gatherings, particularly at work.  One at home with my family is fine.  I almost always work my birthday and when I'm at work, I'm working.  I don't want to take a break late day to eat something.  I know that's weird, but that's the way I feel about it.

I don't mind celebrating other people's birthdays, as they aren't mine.  I get that.  I get the larger cultural tradition.  I'm just not participating in it and I never have.

An added part of that is that personal focus or attention is something that a really private person keeps really private.  I don't want to respond to a fully day of birthday wishes as people stop by my office as the day is private and frankly, given my history with it, wounded.  

I oddly feel the same thing about my first name.  My mother was the only one, when I was growing up, who called me by my entire first name.  Everyone else, absolutely everyone who knows me, uses a truncated form of it.  My mother and I shared that truncated name as our names are male and female variants of the same name.  I note that only her siblings called her by her full name.  The same name reoccurs in my extended family and nobody uses the full variant of it commonly.

But at work people do.  You can't break them of it, and you can't really tell them to knock it off.  Why would they know?

Finally, I suppose, birthdays are a reminder of the things I didn't get done over the past year, which are the same things I didn't get done the year before that, and the same things I made resolutions on at New Years.  At this age the things you need to work on are persistent, and even if they'd be easy for a younger person to address, at over half a century, they're not.  I suppose the reminder is a good thing, in a way, and the birthday serves as a speedbump in that sense, but being reminded of perennial failure is a bit irritating.

Footnotes

1. Ironically, if this upcoming election is like the last, the real Wyomingite who gets the Democratic nomination may be the real Wyomingite.

Is it just bad male behavior, or. . .

is it the predictable tide of the Sexual Revolution going back out to reveal what the flood wrecked?^[1] 

Public domain snipped of Gone With the Wind.  In the film Butler is portrayed as a womanizing cad, but a charming one, who become entangled with Scarlet O'Hara, who is a scheming, not very nice, person.  It's not often noted, but the two central characters of the film are extremely flawed, while the really admirable ones meet with bad ends. 

Not that evidence of wreckage was really needed.

Consider this.

Starting some years ago, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, dob 1952, was revealed to have engaged in an entire string of really icky behavior concerning women, ranging from rape, to pressuring them in sexual matters, to simply being gross.  He's now in prison.  Weinstein's behavior in regard to women was well known inside the industry and even the subject of at least one on stage joke at an awards ceremony before it all broke.

Following Weinstein, or more or less contemporaneously, Bill Cosby, dob 1937, legendary family friendly comedian was revealed to have engaged in serial rapes, basically drugging women and then, well. . .   Apparently rumors about Cosby, who was a pal of uber creep Hugh Hefner, had been circulating for years before they finally broke out into the full media and prosecution results.  They resurfaced when made the target of a routine by another black comedian.  Frankly, the frequent hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, something not consistent with being "America's Dad", should have clued somebody into something.

Andrew Cuomo, dob 1957, appears to be going down in flames, career wise, after a string of accusations have been made against him. They're not, so far, like the Cosby and Weinstein accusations, however.  He's mostly accused of inappropriate touching and behavior.

Matt Gaetz, dob 1982 who doesn't  have the appearance of being the mostly manly of men, is now accused of taking a 17 year old across state lines for immoral purposes.  Just in the past few days an associate of his plead guilty to procuring.

Al Franken, dob 1951, a few years back, saw his political career ruined overnight when it was revealed that he'd engaged in unwanted contact, but not sex, with a string of women.

Now, Tom Reed, dob 1971, a New York politician, has faced accusations that in 2017 he unhooked the bra of a female lobbyist and ran his hand up her thigh, accusations that he at first denied, and then admitted but attributed to alcoholism, which he says he's now defeated.

We'll see, I guess, how Bill Gates does, now that its shown that the super rich philanthropist didn't have just philanthropy on his mind.

Now, also consider this.

Weinstein's behavior, however, isn't all that different from that of Harry Cohn's (1891-1958) who was the long time head of Columbian Pictures.  Cohn pretty much demanded sex from actresses and caused Jean Arthur to retire from acting from a time due to his attacks on actresses.  Not every actress yielded to his advances, however, with the tough as nails Joan Crawford actually stopping by his office and telling him to "keep his pants on" as she was having lunch with his wife and sons the following day.

Natalie Wood, it was revealed after her death, was raped in a hotel room by "a big star" when she was 16 years old.  Her mother told her to keep it a secret, which she did, as revealing it would wreck her budding career.  It should be noted that while there is speculation on who the rapist was, there's no real evidence of that person's identity at all.

John F. Kennedy's conduct with women was so flagrant and abysmal that we have to hardly even go into it.  Frankly, it's not only gross, but if it broke today, he'd never survive politically. His worst conduct was with Mimi Alford, who was an intern, age 20, whom Kennedy made a mistress, but whose actions today would, at least in regard to their initial encounter, would be regarded as rape today. Oddly, he remains a national hero in spite of his behavior generally being well known.

Bill Clinton, dob 1946, survived a series of sex related scandals, one of which is so famous we need not go into it.  Having said that, Clinton's White House behavior was mild in comparison to Kennedy's.

And of course, as we all know, the Teflon Don, dob 1946, survived some accusations as well.

What's the point of all of this?

Well, I guess this depends a bit on how you interpret the evidence.  One simple thing that you can gain from it is that men have been taking advantage of women for a really long time.  After all, we've been looking at things a century past and we just passed the centennial of the inauguration of Warren G. Harding.  Harding was a popular President at the time with a wife that pushed his career (he'd never really wanted to be President).  He also had a long running affair for much of his married life that only  avoided being a scandal, his mistress had German sympathies and may have been a spy during World War One, as the Republican Party bought her off and sent her packing.  That didn't stop Harding from taking on besotted Nan Britton as his mistress. The mid 20s Britton was employed as his secretary and became pregnant, later writing a kiss and tell book with the sordid details of their affair, which included Harding posting Secret Service guards at the door and taking her into a closet for, um dictation.

So, once again, we can take this evidence and conclude that men have been acting badly in this department for a long time.

But something is different about this here maybe.

It's hard to define, but it's the sense of shame that goes with all of this, which is only now just returning.

Thomas Jefferson pretty surely kept Sally Hemmings as a bedmate after his wife died and until he died.  People gossiped about it, but in an era when private lives were truly private, it never really came out into the full light of day until many, many years later, and was only really confirmed, pretty much, after DNA testing became available (there's a string of thought that it could have been Jefferson's brother, but that's probably wrong).  Jefferson and Hemming's relationship was really close to that of a common law, but very weird, marriage and probably the interracial nature of it kept that from every actually occurring, together with the scandal that would have attached to it at the time.

It's interesting, by the way, to note that when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions on interracial marriages it did so in the case of Loving v. Virginia, giving Virginia bookends on this matter.  I.e., Hemmings may have been an enslaved mistress, or an enslaved wife, but the relationship was illegal and slavery massively immoral, with the Supreme Court ultimately striking down the illegality of interracial relationships many decades later through a case arising in Virginia.

Anyhow, I don't want to sweep under the rug the icky nature of this.  Hemmings may have been Jefferson's late wife's half sister, but she was also a slave, and there's a lot that can be said about the nature of a slave and her "owner" in this context, that I'm not going to as others have and it doesn't really have to be said anyhow.

The point is, Jefferson kept this a secret and it would have been a scandal at the time, and not simply because of their racial diversity, but because they weren't married in addition.

Hamilton's affair, which did break out into the open, was a major scandal that his reputation has never fully recovered from.  It was, we would note, weird, and it was the set up for blackmail.

Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child by Mary Halpin did cause a major scandal as he was running for office, but his opponents political scandals also did.  Cleveland managed to overcome what should have been a career destroying event and went on to be a well known and well liked President.  In the background of that were two different version of the event which were extremely different.  Cleveland ultimately admitted to the paternity of the child, but his supporters managed to portray the incident as resulting from "youthful" indiscretion, when in fact Cleveland was nearly 40 years old when the event occurred, which wasn't a lot younger than his age at becoming President.  Halpin alleged that the child was the result of a single encounter  which amounted to rape after Cleveland had pursued her relentlessly.  Her story after the birth of her child, who went on to live in obscurity and who seems to have become a physician, was extremely tragic, which in part probably helped to discount her veracity at the time, but which would not now.  The story here probably is that this even would normally have destroyed Cleveland's political career, but the nature of his opponent and his ultimate stepping up to the plate, combined with a societal presumption that Halpin was a bit nuts (which she probably wasn't), ended up  weighing in his favor.  Conventional morality was challenged, but certainly not discarded.

In contrast, a long running affair of Franklin Roosevelt's was simply kept quiet by everybody who knew about it, and John F. Kennedy's really creepy moral depravity was wholly buried by everybody who knew him while he lived even though the rumors regarding it could barely be contained due to his flagrant tomcat behavior.

In the Old Testament we're told of the story of the two lecherous elders who make an accusation against a young woman bathing in her garden, in an effort to pressure her into sex.  They're cross examined separately by a profit, who reveals their lies, and they accordingly go on to be stoned to death.

That's the age old ancient standard in the West, and that's pretty much the one we're returning to.  

It isn't the universal global standard.

The Old Testament also provides that men who saw a comely widow in a conquered land, whose hatband had died in battle, could be acquired by a victorious Jewish man, but only have he observed an entire series of concessions to her and her family that were so extensive, it has to be wondered if anyone ever pursued such a conquest.  They included her right to honor the fallen husband and to mourn for him, as well as concessions to her family.  In contrast, Muhammed simply advised his combatants that they could take conquered women as slaves.

That standard was pretty much the global one.  Romans feared conquering barbarian tribes in their late history for a wide variety of reason, but standardized rape was one of them.  Arab tribes raided as far as the Atlantic and hit Ireland for female slaves in raids that had no other purpose. The Vikings took female slaves for obvious purposes wherever they went.  Even into the 20th Century national armies for some non Western nations conducted themselves in this fashion.  And beyond that, armies that fought for nations whose leaders had severed the ties with Christianity also did, the Red Army being the most notorious in this area, and being guilty of the largest mass rape of all time and the largest rapes per capita since ancient times, something that the reputation of that army still has to contend with.

This is not to say that no soldier from a Western nation ever behaved this way through 1945, or later, but it was much rarer and in contrast to the Soviet example, soldiers who were caught were prosecuted, and perpetrators generally tried to keep their conduct as secret as they could, so much so that some of the odder historical examples remain uncertain matters. Did Custer take a Cheyenne girl as an effective sex slave or not? ^[2].  Russian officers, in contrast, actually stood by while mass rapes of Germen women occurred  and egged their soldiers on, with the deaths of the repeated female victims being common^[3]. 

And then came the Second World War.

And we're not simply talking about Russian sexual assault on entire cultures, including their own, or of Japanese sex slaves.^[4]. 

We've presented this thesis before, although we're certainly not welded to it.  Something about World War Two impacted global morality and culture everywhere.  Having said that, in this area, things were undoubtedly evolving prior to the war.

Indeed, so much so that I've had some doubts on my thesis here, although not so much that I've discarded it.  I think it's still valid.  But what is undoubtedly the case is that when photography became less cumbersome, which is right about World War One, an evolution in the objectification of women really started.  There was already at that point pornography, but it wasn't hugely widespread. The war had a role in spreading it, however, through in part cigarette cards and other photographic distributions.  Advertising didn't stray into it rapidly, however, nor did popular depictions.

Movies seem to have started the acceleration of the evolution.  When movies really started to break out following the war, there were no restrictions on what they depicted at all, and film makers, including some really famous ones, picked up on that quickly.  Even Cecille B. DeMille, famous for such films as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, issued an early movie ostensibly on the suffering of the saints which is regarded as outright pornographic in its depiction of torture of female subjects.

The Hays Production Code of course took that all on, but by then there was something going on. The World War One era had yielded to The Roaring Twenties, which was in large part a huge sigh of relief for the Great War being over and the accompanying post war recession having ended.  Coming when it did, when women were living away from home in increasing numbers, and the farm economy of the United States, and indeed the entire Western World, was increasingly yielding to a rootless urban culture, it created a certain libertine atmosphere that lead naturally to exploitation of women.  For the feel of it, the most recent The Great Gatsby really does it well.

It's easy to say that this all came to a screeching halt with the Great Depression, and people do say that, but just looking at the evidence shows it isn't so.  Magazine covers leading up to World War Two are shockingly revealing in comparison to those of teh 1910s and 1920s, even when done by the same artists.  Some of the female figures on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post from the 30s, and then into the 40s, are pretty revealing really.  When looked at that way, it isn't a long trip from Norman Rockwell in the late 30s and the 1940s, to Vargas in the 1940s, to Playboy in the 1950s.

Move poster from 1942's Casablanca. Regarded as one of the best movies of all time, there's not a single sex scene in it, and for a movie based on protagonists who are dispirited and dispossessed, their actions are classically moral.

What is I suppose different is that even though popular culture as okay with exploiting the female figure, or just outright exploiting women, in the 20s, 30s and 40s, it wasn't at the point where it was willing to regard women purely as objects and it wasn't willing to give outright license to men.  Things happened, of course, and Hollywood was an absolute moral sewer right from the onset, but there was no public celebration of it like there would be later.  Indeed, a lot of the female leads in movies from the 30s and 40s, are of the femme fatale variety, and are more than a little scary in some ways.  It wasn't until Marilyn Monroe that we're really offered a female lead who is both beautiful and portrayed as dimwitted.  Lauren Bacall may have been beautiful, but she certainly wasn't portrayed as dimwitted, and always seemed close to being ready to hurt you.  Ilsa Lund in Casablanca is definitely vulnerable and torn, but she almost shoots Rick and Rick never takes advantage of her.

Indeed, while it may be a cheesy way to do it, Casablanca provides us a really interesting example of how things started changing in the 1950s. The movie was made in 1942 and we know that Rick and Isla had been a couple in Paris, but we aren't provided any sordid details at all, and indeed the way the film portrays that, we'd be better off believing that there aren't any, other than Ilsa's mistaken belief that her husband, Victor Lazlo, is dead.  When presented with the opportunity to lead Ilsa astray, he doesn't, instead rising to morality fully in spite of his own checkered past.  The film is practically a morality play. A huge hit from the following year, The Song of Bernadette, is outright hagiography about a real life saint, something that is almost impossible to imagine Hollywood filming now.

By the 1950s, however, we were getting the Seven Year Itch and by the 1960 we were getting The Apartment, the latter being a criticism of a male dominated culture of economic seduction.  Indeed, The Apartment, for all practical purposes, illustrates most of the negative conduct complained of above, all the way 

Wilder, as this poster notes, had already directed Some Like It Hot by this time, a film which not only would be regarded as mild by contemporary standards, but which couldn't really be made now as the gender bending  comedy of the film would be regarded as offensive.  In this film, however, he took a distinct turn as both of the protagonists are trapped in situations they don't like and made miserable by the sexual misconduct of others.

A person could, and by this point probably is, asking what the point of all of this is. To try to get there, we'll note that maybe what the Church was concerned with which caused it to convene Vatican II was correct, although I don't know that their reaction to it really worked. There's some evidence that it didn't fully.  At any rate, what seems to have occurred is a combination of things actually following World War One, not World War Two as we've earlier suggested, got rolling, some caused by the war and some by the onset of new technologies, that disrupted human society for the worse.  We've been paying for it every since.

The Great War took millions of men away from home for a prolonged period of time and exposed them all to death, and most to vice, in varying degrees.  It's no wonder that the Communists came up violently starting in 1917, and its no wonder that there was massive social disruption in continental Europe following the war.  An established sense of order was grossly disrupted in nearly everything.  At the same time, photography in particularly developed to the point that it was comparatively cheap and easy to use, where as moving images became fairly easy to make.  What had before been a fairly difficult process to make use of, which by extension means it was a fairly difficult thing to misuse, suddenly became the opposite.  Once the technology was around the only think that could be done was to regulate its misuse, but that's always problematic.

At the same time social changes that had been in the works for some time began to accelerate.  Young women increasingly were away from home for the first time in appreciable numbers.  Young men were away from home in much greater numbers.  In both instances the "leaving home" was not accompanied by the shove into the adult world which is otherwise extremely distracting and time consuming.  The Roaring Twenties came around with a hedonistic emphasis that the Great Depression only partially abated.  By the 1930s the covers of magazines routinely featured young women in ways that would have been regarded as scandalous in the prior decade, and which are often cheesecake by contemporary standards.

That's the state of evolved society at the time the US entered World War Two.  Like all American wars, people look back on them and claim the time prior was "an age of innocence", but it really wasn't, and indeed it particularly wasn't, although it was nothing like the current era in that regard.  World War Two's amplified the uprootedness that the First World War and the Great Depression had already caused and made it worse.  A popular illustration and photography industry that crept up on cheesecake constantly made it easy for illustrations to cross right over into pornography during World War Two.  Hugh Hefner, post war, merely picked up on a development that had already occurred, but repackaged it in a slick and socially acceptable fashion, while at the same time radically attacking conventional morality.  By the 1960s his assault had become massive, and by the 70s it was copied and expanded.

It was in that last period of time that women went from being portrayed as objects of desire, but smart ones, to simply objects.  

Its from that status that women now are struggling to get back and away from. And its the current status which creates a situation in which a Republican Congressman can be accused of having sex with a very young minor and defend himself not on the basis that it didn't occur, but that what she received wasn't payment.^[5]

And that latter fact is really remarkable, and evidence of the transition.  Jefferson's transgressions were kept secret by Jefferson, but whispered about by those who knew him. Hamilton came clean about his, but he was openly mocked by his political opponents due to them.  Cleveland survived his scandal but only by ignoring what became an open political topic and subsequently marrying a (rather young) bride.  Roosevelt simply kept his long running affair secret, taking a page out of Harding's book, but without the human byproduct that the latter incident produced.  Everyone around Kennedy operated to keep his dalliances secret, which was a monumental chore, given their nature.

Even as recently as Al Franken, with the rise of the "Me Too" movement, politicians faced with allegations of sexual immorality resigned, and quickly.

Now we're seeing that they don't.  Gaetz and Cuomo are not going quietly.  Cuomo isn't saying anything at all, but following Trump's lead, he's just ignoring the accusations.  Gaetz sort of isn't, actually noting how generous he was to his illicit lovers.

And now, following this, we have the story of Anthony Bouchard and his first wife, although in fairness the events in that tale took place some 40 years ago.  The remarkable thing there, however, is that Bouchard, in breaking the story prior to it being broken on him, by the British press, isn't apologetic about what in Wyoming would amount to statutory rape (it occurred in Florida, where seemingly nobody can determine what the law was at the time) and rather praises himself for stepping up to the plate to deal with the situation.  While he does deserve some credit, and maybe even praise, for not resorting to abortion, under prior retained standards his political career would be over.  There were some bridges that you could not cross and come back from, and that was one.  Now, nothing seems to be a bridge too far.

Women, on the other hand, are now calling on virtue and have been since launching the Me Too movement, although I don't that this is what they realize they are doing.  Indeed, I don't think that the prime movers in the movement are aware that this is what they are doing.

And hence the problem of the era.  You can't correct this sort of abominable behavior without a resort to an ultimate standard.   And ultimate standards are unforgiving things.  You can't go halfway with them, you have to go all the way.

Until you do, you are left participating in an element of hypocrisy, sort of in the Godfather II type manner where Michael Corleone notes to the Senator Pat Geary that "you and I are engaged in the same hypocrisy". And without that ultimate standard, there's always a way for the counter reaction of boys just being boys to come in.

In other words, I suppose, its not only demanding favors in the garden, it's averting your eyes to start with, and trying to make sure that you have privacy in the garden bath.

Footnotes

1.  I started this thread after the news on that Gaetz figure got rolling and that's what inspired it.

After that, however, some news/gossip, or whatever it would be, circulated a little more locally which gave me pause on the same topic as I slightly knew one of, well more than one of, the characters involved.

It's pretty revolting and gross actually, but it sheds some light, I think on the situation we find ourselves in.

Following that, moreover, we had the entire Anthony Bouchard flap here locally, which ended up being a national, and even international, story.

2.  There's certainly reason to believe he may have.  

In contrast, the commanders of the Corps of Discovery's commanders, Lewis and Clark, studiously avoided all such contact with Indian women even though the offering of them was somewhat of an odd cultural courtesy with some of the tribes they encountered in their trip to the Pacific.  They did not restrain their men, however, and as a result treating them for venerial disease was a constant medical problem for the Corps.

3.  Sometimes missed in this is that Russian women were likewise the victims of Russian soldiers on a pretty wide scale.

Rapes by Soviet soldiers make up a well known story but are usually given in the context of rapes that started once the Red Army entered Hungary.  At that point they did reach a really massive scale that continued on into Germany.  Missed in this story, however, is that Red Army soldiers engaged in this conduct, but on a less massive scale, inside of Russia itself and Russian brutality towards the German population continued on some time after the war.

Setting aside the Germans, for which there's a cultural revenge angle to this, by and large the Red Army had real elements of simply being an armed mob.

4.  Japan, as is also well known at least in regard to Korea, kept sex slaves for their troops.  Less well known is that women from conquered Southeast Asian regions were also forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.

5.  "I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women I've dated. You know, I've paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I've been, you know, generous as a partner. I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not."  Matt Gaetz.

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

Graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.

You can be what you want. ..  you just can't want what you want. This determines what you want.

From Lawrence of Arabia.

In in the film Lawrence of Arabia, there's a point at which Sharif Ali confronts Lawrence with his having said, earlier in the film, that "you can be anything you want". Set out above is Lawrence's cinematic answer.

And its correct.

When I was young, I had to study genetics.

The reason for that was that I was a geology student, and while those who aren't familiar with the discipline may imagine that you study rocks all day, in actuality its an incredibly diverse field of study.  Biology was a big element of geology, but paleobiology.  That involved genetics in a major, major way.  As a geology student, you learned that genetics is destiny and a controlling, immutable, factor in reality.

In fact, quite frankly, I think you end up learning that more deeply, in some areas, than biologist do.  You become deeply aware of evolutionary biology, which is its own field really, and which is something that has an overarching impact on everything else, and I mean everything else, more than anything else in the physical world.

You are what you are, to a major degree, due to evolutionary biology.

You also became aware that this wasn't accepted by everyone in society. At that time, it wasn't accepted by Protestant fundamentalists, and it still isn't.  I recall being in a paleontology lab when a person came into it as he wanted to debate our professor, Don Boyd, about evolution.  Evolution is applied genetic paleobiology.  The person who came in, however, armed with a misconstruction of the Old Testament, had further armed himself with pseudo science to support his position that evolution wasn't.  It is.^[1]. 

That sort of experience left a person with not only a solid grounding in biology and paleobiology, and a really solid grounding in science itself, but also with an expectation that there were people out there who didn't accept scientific reality.

None the less, I'd never have guessed the extent to which this has become true in the 35 years that have passed since the event noted above.  And not just with "conservatives" or the right wing of politics, as is so often claimed, but with the left as well.  Indeed, it can be maintained pretty clearly that both sides of the political spectrum have their own major problems with different areas of the scientific fields, with the right really having one right now with medical science and certain of the physical sciences, and the left having one with the topic of human evolutionary biology.^[2].   Each side would prefer to just make things up in these areas, or certain portions of these areas.

The depiction set out above, as noted, is a graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.  This particular examples shows the organization of the genome into chromosomes, further showing both the female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the 23rd chromosome pair.

This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are.  It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine.  It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.  Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that it isn't even funny.  That's why, in fact, in terms of paleontology these "species" can only be regarded as a "species" if you are a "splitter".  If you are  a "lumper", and thereby a member of that scientific group that holds that the classic definition of a species is the prioper one, that being if a male and female individual can breed and produce a viable offspring (capable of breeding itself), they're one species.  Frankly, this is the correct view in my opinion, and the opposite view is only held, in my opinion, as developed species that we've genetically altered over times, such as canines, are viewed instinctively by us as more than one species because of what we've developed.  In other words, we think dogs and wolves are different species only because we can't imagine wolves and labradoodles being in the same species.  Genetically, however, the better argument is that they are.^[3]. 

Okay, so what is this about?

Well, to kick it off, Demi Lavato just a week ago or so announced that she's "non binary".  She even wants to be called "they", rather than she.

No, she's not non binary, she's a woman, and that makes her a she.

Let's note here that sexual inclination, or no inclination at all, doesn't define your biology.  Your biology defines your biology.  If you have a female biology, and she does, you are a women.  If you have male biology, you are a man.

That, we'd note again, has nothing to do with your individual desires, irrespective of what they are and regardless of their origin.  Almost every living human being alive has some desire to be something other than what they are, at some level.  Not all of that is biological by any means, but some of it is.  People struggle with desires to be thinner, stronger, taller, or free of physical impairments of all sorts all the time.  Wishing doesn't make it so, and you can't insist that other recognize these features as non existent.  Indeed, doing so is a lie, and if you are doing it regarding yourself, you are lying to yourself, which is a very bad think to do.

An organization that's in this end of the social spectrum, and this is a societal and cultural deal, not a biological or physical one, argues on its site that while most human beings are male or female, some are not, and they're non binary, and moreover that this has always been true.

It hasn't always been true, and in additional that confuses society and culture with science, which are not the same thing.

What's always true with 100% of mammals, absent extremely rare conditions which are generally regarded as a species of biological defect (which doesn't make a person so afflicted bad), is that humans are born with either male reproductive organs, or females ones.  Moreover, this difference in our species is not only significant, its massively significant.

We'll have another thread that will no doubt anger some that we were going to quote from, in advance, here, but instead we'll just take it on directly, and maybe quote there, what we'll type here.

We're primates, which is pretty obvious, and as primates we are members of the animal group that has the highest sexual dimorphism than another mammal. Great apes, of which we're a member, are very pronounced in that regard, and our genus, Homo, is through the roof on it.  Like it or not, and there's plenty of evidence that lots of people don't like it, and that it's a problem in various ways (more on that in other upcoming posts as well) that's a fact.  Evolutionary biology teaches us that early on in earlier Homo progenitors there came a time when our brains got big, the off spring needed long nurturing, and things really got rolling in all sorts of ways.  The males ended up stronger, much stronger, and aggressive for a reason.  The females were weaker and frankly much more maternal than the males.  Because of being tied for years to their children, they depended upon the foodstuff support from the males, and the result was that humans evolved disparate, but constant, sexual drives, that tying the males to the females on an individual basis.  Indeed, psychologist are now well aware of what St. Paul was early on, that sex fused a man to a woman in an irrevocable psychological way that made promiscuity particularly perverse.

This isn't really on that topic, but again it is.   There are men, women, and that's biologically it.  Generally that's psychologically it as well.  "Non binary" or "transgenderism" doesn't really exist but rather reflect present sociology, which is more cultural than physical.

What does exist, however, is a wide ranging human mind that's now set outside, very much outside, of its eco niche.  And as we've become richer and richer, over time, we've naturally, because of our original evolution, come to focus on our genitals, as odd as that may seem.

But another way, of you are Oot Gronk, Cro Magnon, and a man, your daily focus is probably on finding things to hunt and kill, or pick up and eat, and avoiding bears.   Sure, the babes have your attention and you're likely in a natural marriage with one.  And for her, the focus will be on the kiddos and also on finding something to eat and hoping that Oot doesn't get killed by a bear.

In that environmental regime, think resources are going to keep everyone focused on the thin resources and overcoming them.  Indeed, if you ever have the experience of being in thin resources, which most people in the Western world don't anymore, in this real existential sense, you'll find that the level of pondering of sex is pretty low.  Contrary to what people tend to imagine, for example, about old fashioned basic training, which was pretty much all male, is that this topic isn't on anyone's mind and if there's focus on anything inappropriate, it's probably on beer at the 1-2-3 Club.

Indeed, studies on men who are left in really isolated environments where they need to be focused shows that by and large, they don't think about women at all.  I haven't read anything on women, but logic would hold that they probably don't much either.  Those studies tend to show that men who are busy don't tend to start thinking about women until there's women around, and at that point they still don't think about them that much if they're really tied up in something on a continual basis.

You really have to have an element of leisure, or at least down time, until these things start to come up much.  And while that time comes up in our original aboriginal state, it does in a  pretty concentrated fashion and in one in which people are really still pretty focused.  As an example, its' been noted that Native American societies had really low birth rates, far below European Americans at the same period, and one of the early features of European/Native American contact was that women were attracted to European men (or European American men) as they were comparatively wealthy and much less restrained in regard to abstention (we're trying to be delicate here).

Leaping forward, we'd first note, as we have before, that the current set of definitions in regard to sexual orientation categories is really recently, dating back only a little over 100 years ago.  This doesn't mean that acts based on the non typical orientation didn't occur, but the identification categories now made are social categories, not scientific ones.  And its also not really until societies have enough wealth to have leisure does an expansion of culture, and cultural specialization, arise. That's also about when we really start to notice this phenomenon.

That suggests that the phenomenon itself is a cultural and psychological one, which I'd note doesn't mean right off the bat, as some will assume we're leaping to, that I'm asserting this is a mental illness. But it is worth noting that as a phenomenon its much more recognized among people of European extraction.  General Asian cultures regard its as solely a "white" matter and wholly cultural in origin, although certain the same things happen in every Asian culture.

Okay, what's all this suggest?

Well for starters it suggest that people are leaping to conclusions that these things are real in a scientific, i.e., biological, sense, which isn't very well supported at all.  Indeed, the opposite its true although it does seem that some people may be more genetically predisposed to them than others.  But its still the case that all humans are male, and female, that's flat out it.

It also suggest that the modern definitions perhaps should be reconsidered as the least.  Indeed, it tracks back to a really long, probably overlong, thread we did awhile back which brings up the point that maybe these definitions are actually completely in error and, ironically, those backing them may actually be backing a set of concepts that originated with definitions that served to categorize these things as mental illnesses.

If that's the case, and there's pretty good evidence that there is, those who are awash in the new definitions should both rejoice and recoil, as it gets back to the science, which doesn't endorse the new views, but doesn't endorse the old categories either.

Basically, what that leaves us with is humans, and as a species we have a wide range of traits, and one of our characteristics sit hat there are those among us who always depart from the median, and those departures are benign or harmful in very degrees, and oddly enough, in varying times in varying degrees.  A person has to accept that. But that doesn't change you from what you basically are, which means you're either a man, or a woman not both or neither, and you really can't choose to be the other.

And you really shouldn't, for that part.

Oh, why not, you may ask?  Isn't crafting your own reality nifty and guaranteed to have a better chance of making you happy?

Nope, it isn't, on lots of scores.

All of this is presenting an interesting set of unanticipated modern problems, again only of that type that a really rich society can have. And they're problems that could be avoided.

To start with, denying concrete scientific realities is simply dangerous in its own right, and we know that.  Indeed, we see that all the time with people who have ignored scientific realities in regard to diet and substances, with any number of tragic results occurring nearly daily.

Here, although we often fail to realize it, we constantly see it in regard to attempting to take on our psychological desires medically or pharmaceutically, which tends to produce widespread suffering.  Indeed, I'll note one that people often don't think about in this context, which is directly related, that being pharmaceutical birth control.

Pharmaceutical birth control was first introduced in the early 1960s.  For the most part, so far, designed to hormonally alter a woman's natural cycle, it should be pretty obvious that ingesting hormones to defeat a natural system is going to have some pretty risky results, and yet we've been happy to accept them, we think, for over 50 years now.

And yet in that time these substances have been shown to cause an increase in cancer and stroke, two risks that, I'm pretty sure, would cause them to be banned by the FDA as a class if they were just being introduced. They're also demonstrated to have an impact on female psychology in a way that isn't really understood, with it being shown that women taking them judge long term male mates significantly differently if they're on them, than if they are not.^[4]. 

Societally it can be argued that they've been a disaster as they've broken down the social order to an enormous degree.  This is a point often raised by social conservatives and particularly by religious conservatives from those branches of Christianity that oppose pharmaceutical birth control, which are principally the Apostolic faiths.  Irrespective of how a person identifies with these groups, however, the argument is solid as the change in overall behavior has decoupled the original link between men, women, sex and longevity or relationships by severing its natural procreative purpose from the picture, all while leaving the basic instinctive pattern, including the imprinting it causes, in place. 

Given that example, and numerous others, a good case can be made for the position that medical and pharmaceutical treatments that go to address natural biological makeup are a really bad idea.  Indeed, in some other areas we've already concluded that.  Nobody, for example, would now advocate the psychosurgery that Rosemary Kennedy was subjected to, for example.  And yet that was an accepted treatment at the time, much like gender reassignment procedures have suddenly become in the last few years.

Added to that, as that's occurred, there have been developments that have led to concern and pushback.  Indeed, just while in the US procedures are expanding down to the child level, in Europe they're being banned on the basis that childhood expressions of identity in this area tend to be subject to being false where as the procedures themselves can be devastating for the recipients.  

Indeed Reddit, where seemingly everything is located, has a subreddit simply made up of people trying to reverse their gender reversal. This is yet another thing I discovered by accident (like the completely disgusting subreddit that is made up of Hentai representations of World War Two naval ships) but it has a surprising level of participation, which given the generally low levels of the overall population who undertakes a reassignment in the first place, should at least give a person pause.^[5]. 

And all that points out that if a person is uncomfortable in their own skin, there's likely a greater reason for it than the one they perceive.  A person can medicate themselves out of a greater reality, and can have a surgeon cut out a greater reality either.  The risks of trying that are vast.

And in someway they're dishonest to oneself and to society at large.

An example of that is provided by cosmetic surgery, which is concentrated in the female portion of the population and which is more over fixated on breasts.  All kinds of women go through surgery they don't' need to have unnatural large breasts when there's no point to such a surgery, in a healthy woman, at all.  Inserting foreign bodies in a healthy body is a bad idea in and of itself.  Moreover, given yourself a visual reproductive advantage, which is what is the underlying goal, is destructive to society overall, given the really odd idea to everyone that everyone needs to look like one of Hugh Hefner's visual prostitutes, and further promoting an idea that visual attractiveness is so important over everything else that surgery is warranted to achieve it.

Indeed, on that last point, all of this gets back to the idea that we ought to be sex focused, and sex focused on a way that has nothing to do with reproduction.  This isn't healthy societal focus.  Indeed, it tends toward trivializing the entire topic.

People who advocate for those in this area commonly tend to point out historical figures, often with some wide liberties taken, who had these tendencies. Its often noted that they had really productive lives and that their tendencies were never acknowledged, even by those who had them.  This isn't always the case, of course, but there's something significant in that.  They may not have acknowledged them in part because our modern understandings of these things are wrong, i.e., people can't be put in a box like that, and also because these people were busy, i.e., a lot of the time they had something else that really was taking up their time.

Indeed, that was even the case in the entertainment industry more than it is now, where plenty of experimentation with all sorts of things seems to go on constantly.  Entertainers seem to have more time to engage in themselves than other people do in general, so it shouldn't be too surprising that these things surface more there, but as noted, plenty of people who were supposedly "closeted" may very well not have been, or if they were the same thing would apply; they were just really busy.  

Beyond that, however, a lot of the time on any social movement, we're just flat out wrong.  People with strong roots in the evolutionary biology sense of things, or with very strong roots in history or the history of philosophy, tend to be very aware of that, but regular people and even extraordinary people just living their lives often are not.  Cutting edge developments seem like they must be true as they're happening now.  Over time, this leads to a lot of things that seemed to be new and true turning out to have been new and false. As noted above, the entire current conceptualization of sexuality outside of biology and evolutionary biology basically goes back to Freud, who is now regarded as wrong on darned near everything.  Everything we're currently obsessed with in this area now, on a societal basis, may very well turn out to be as well.  

Indeed, the fact that it may very well turn out to be is in part demonstrated by the lengths that people have to go to ignore the problems this creates.

The other day I read an editorial by a top preforming female athlete noting that she couldn't compete against "transgender females". Why?  Well, if you grow up male most of your body remains male, no matter what you do with your reproductive organs later on.  In other words, they're stronger as that's the way nature made them.  This is accordingly creating an unfair problem for "born females" if you will, who shouldn't have to accommodate themselves to this.

Likewise, the back and forth in the military is surreal.  We'll have a future post coming up on the topic of women in combat, but for the time being we'd note that there are those in the service who have transitioned from male to female, in the current vernacular.  As the essence of military service is serving in war, how does the United States government plan on accommodating this ongoing medical treatment requiring status in time of war, and should it have to?  And if those who have done this are captured from our service, which doesn't recognize male/female divides (although as we'll show it should), what then.  Are the Chinese or North Koreans going to accommodate it?

Finally, ignoring nature is done at your absolute hazard, and we've gotten away with about as much of this as we can.  This lesson should be obvious, but we live in such surreal times that "progressives" can fixate on nature while arguing that humans can create their own reality.  We're part of nature, however, and we can't get away with that indefinitely.

At some point in the future, and probably more quickly than we care to even think of, all of this current experimentation is going to come back to haunt us.  It's already haunting some now.  But believing that sociology is ever accurate is a pretty foolish assumption in the first place, and ignoring nature is an even more foolish one.  We ought to step back, and maybe step out.

Footnotes:

1.  Okay, I want to note right here that I won't entertain an argument that discussing evolution is contrary to the Christian faith.  It isn't.

Right now, on the edge of town, there's a large billboard by some obviously conservative Protestant organization that states we're created, not evolved, with the classic crossed out traffic symbol in use.  

People who take this point of view also tend to take the view that the Bible establishes that the world is around 7,000 or so years old, which is wrong.  The Bible doesn't state that and the world is way, way older than that.  Additionally, people who take this view are highly literal in their reading of the Bible in some things, and tend to ignore it completely in others.  For instance, almost everyone who is going to take the strict reading of the word "created" is also going to hold a solo scriptura view of the New Testament, even though the New Testament never defines the canon of scripture anywhere whatsoever, and therefore if you are at an intellectual dead end immediately.

Anyhow, nowhere in the Bible does it say how God went about creating things, only that He did.  It borders on arrogance to assume God couldn't create the current biological world through evolution.  For those who would pose the question why would he do that, why wouldn't he.  Presuming to know the mind of God for such things assumes more than can be assumed.

As a member of one of the Apostolic faiths, I'd note I'm part of the majority wing of Christianity that doesn't have doctrine in this are and doesn't feel it has to, as it doesn't have to.  The view of the Catholic Church is that science illuminates the Divine Creation, so following science is not antithetical to the Faith, properly understood in both venues.  I'd argue that insisting that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution is made up, is a problem however as it makes Christians look ignorant and creates the dummy argument that Faith, Reason and Science can't be reconciled, when in fact they aren't at odds to start with.

Anyhow, I'll state my view.  Evolution is a fact.  

2.  For absolutely baffling reasons, its impossible to discuss vaccinations in certain right wing circles now as the science on this, which is now ancient, isn't accepted. It's not clear why it isn't accepted, but its concentrated just in that demographic.

Conservatives for some time have been hugely skeptical on climate science, which is a bit different as the climate is hard to figure.  I'm noting it here, however, as it goes from scholarly skepticism at higher levels to sort of a rational that if my livelihood depends on it, the science must be wrong, at another level, which may be how a lot of skepticism works on everything, I suppose.

As will be seen here, however, progressives are outright rejecting biology in favor of an extraordinarily recent social set of concepts.  Never mind that it just doesn't fit the science.

3. Indeed dogs make a really interesting examples as they must be the species that's more genetically engineered by human than any others, leading to examples that bear so little resemblance to the wolf, or even to other dogs, that its not funny.  At the end of the day, however, all dogs are "mutts".

A friend of mine who is a big Labrador Retriever fan tends to scoff at the dog I have, a North American Retriever (Double Doodle) as they're a "designer breed".  But in fact, all dogs are.  As I point out to him, the only "purebred" dog is the wolf.

4.  This has been shown to be real, and widespread, but why isn't understood.  For whatever reason, however, women who aren't on them tend to make different value judgments about different character traits than women who are.

It'd be tempting to regard this as selection bias, i.e., women who are on them are one group and women who are not a second. But that doesn't work as women who go off them change their mental calculations, so something else is at work here.  Moreover, it seems that women who are off them make much "safer" calculations.  I.e. the mates they choose are more likely to stick around, be stable, etc. etc.

Psychologically, it'd be tempting to believe that being on them just recalculates the mental dice as women are weighting sex more than long term stability, but that doesn't seem to be it.  The analysis still applies to women who marry while taking them. What's going on here simply isn't clear but something's going on.

5. Overall, all of this goes to show that the Internet is full of traps for the unwary.

I've already noted here the Tessa Fowler incident in which I went to look up wildlife photographer Tessa Fowler, about whom an article was published in the Tribune. Instead of finding her web page, however, I instead found that there's a second Tessa Fowler who is a naked boob model.  That's not who I was looking for.  My guess is that wildlife photography Fowler receives a lot less viewing than boob model Fowler, and that a fair percentage of people who find the wildlife photographer were looking for somebody else, which is the opposite experience I had.

Since that time, much more recently, I ran an item here about the May 24, 1941 sinking of the HMS Hood.  A search on that revealed that some really odd characters draw Hentai drawings of WWII ships as large chested women, and that they'd done a cartoon rendition of the Battle of the Demark Straits as the Bismarck, and Prinz Eugen, as two badly drawn women feeling up a topless HMS Hood, also so depicted.  That is truly perverse.  Lots of men lost their lives on the Hood, and for that matter the Bismarck.

The aforementioned subreddit was discovered following a history tweet by an individual who turns out to be one of the people reversing a reassignment. Usually reddit commenters stay more or less in one area of comment, but obviously not everyone does.

All of this may seem irrelevant/amusing, etc. but I think it's actually directly related to the phenomenon being discussed.  Prior to the Internet people with all sorts of latent sexual desires that don't reflect hte majority of such things probably often went through their lives with those desires never really surfacing.  Now they are in part because they're there for the exploration without restraint in the privacy of a person's home.  If biology is incapable of fully explaining how these departures from teh mean develop, culture and acculturation clearly help fill in part of the puzzle.  Medical doctors have widely reported the spreads of diseases in young people, for example, that formerly were fairly rare and associated with certain deviant acts. The fact that they're now more common means that the acts are more common, and the Internet is likely playing a role in that.

Related  Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

But what if we are wrong?

May 25, 1921. The burning of the Customs House.

On this day in 1921 the Irish Republican Army occupied and burned the Customs House in Dublin.  It was a pyrrhic victory in which they lost five men dead and eighty captured.

It remains one of the most famous events of the Anglo Irish War.

May 25, 1921. Road construction.

 Locomotive pulling cars, possibly during road construction.  May 25, 1921.

May 25, 1941. Acts of War.

 As we learn here:

Today in World War II History—May 25, 1941

Germany's Admiral Raeder declared that ships of the U.S. Navy escorting vessels bound to Allied nations, which of course would just be the UK at this time, was an act of war.

The Admiral may have been correct on that.  However, if he was, sinking unarmed merchant ships that were carrying civilian items was definitely an act of war, and the Germans had done that in regard to an American vessel just a few days prior.

May 24, 1941. The sinking of the HMS Hood

On this day in 1941 the HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck in the opening day of the Battle of the Denmark Strait.

Today in World War II History—May 24, 1941

HMS Hood sunk

Only three of its crew of over 1400 survived.

On the same day, a British submarine sank the Italian troops ship SS Conte Rosso off the coast of Sicily which resulted in the loss of 1,300 lives.