Fyi, I was only able to see the top two visual tweet choices to select in the visual tweet voting box, so the results may be skewed. I voted for the cat one considering its relevance to your folk music background.
However the Gus Johnson tweet really hit home as I commented on his attire while watching the broadcast
I don't know why, but it seems the visual tweets take a couple of hours to completely load. I can only see one so far. This happened last week as well.
As usual, Eric, you avoid the thrust of my comment and go off on “gotcha” points instead, but here you go: 1. A woman is an adult human female or, more scientifically, a person born with with xx chromosomes. The ability to change one’s appearance through hormones, surgery, tattoos, and/or working out does not change that fact. Nor does the inability to identify females based solely on appearance or attire, especially in the age of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. (Look up the definition of “cosmetic” while you’re at it; it implies superficiality.). Your first picture is of a female porn star who goes by the name “Buck” something in an industry in which body modification may long have been the norm but that hasn’t changed her biology. I don’t know who your second friend is; perhaps you can enlighten us, preferably without using the kind of derogatory term you chose for Kyle Rittenhouse (“attention slut”). 2. The bogus Russian collusion hoax crippled the Trump presidency by undermining potentially popular support for a duly elected president following a closely contested election. Americans are supposed to come together after presidential elections, but that is now long gone. Whether it affected a single Republican vote is immaterial; it crippled Trump’s presidency - and undermined future presidencies - by legitimizing the notion of a permanent “resistance” to a duly elected government, which manifested itself in a particularly nasty way on a January 6, 2021. In the end, Eric, if you want to keep paying charter subscribers like me for the future, you really need to decide if you’re trying to stimulate serious discussion of important issues here or just trying to be the verbal equivalent of Tik Tok.
I worry that the shrill, aggressive approach of today's trans activist community -- which will say you're worse than Hitler if you question even a little bit, say, trans medical treatment for children, or question whether social contagion is playing a role in the giant uptick in girls identifying as trans -- hardens minds and hearts to the genuine issue. I have a cousin who transitioned from woman to man -- and he is so much better off now. He transitioned many years ago, and he wears his male identity effortlessly. I would never think of him as a her anymore. He looks better, feels better, is more successful, more comfortable in life, in relationships, and in his skin, and the ability to do it -- and social and familial acceptance of it -- was a godsend for him. It made me think, if only he had done it earlier! In the face of such stories, which are not uncommon, insistence that such people are technically the opposite sex strikes me as churlish and unwise.
I addressed your comments head on. You offer a biological definition of "woman," which obtains for most purposes but I have to ask what the purpose of the question is. Is it to suggest that Buck Angel, the trans male porn star, ought to use the women's restroom? Or be addressed with her/she pronouns? Is it to suggest that the trans woman pictured should be using the men's bathrooms and locker rooms even though she has secondary female secondary characteristics, such as breasts? I mean, honestly, what is your point? Why do you care?
You are free to think that the Russian collusion allegation was what made Trump such an ineffective president by most lights, but what's the evidence for that? The failure of his "Better-Than-Obamacare" health care plan? Oh, no, that couldn't be it, because he never introduced one despite years of promising. The failure of his infrastructure plan? Again, nope. He didn't introduce one of those either. He undermined his popularity by his constant, poisonous tweeting and his compulsive mendaciousness. Harping from the extremely online and a few MSNBC commentators didn't "cripple" his presidency, nor did it signal the beginning of some new political movement in which reflexive criticism and opposition to the president threw a wrench into Democracy. Both parties have been guilty of that for generations.
I'm more than happy to print your dissents and to offer a significant platform for dissents. You don't find that many places online. But I'm not going to be bought into coddling them by implied threats to cancel a paid subscription, and I hope that, no matter what you think of me, you don't think I would. Paying conservative customers have already left when they find that I challenge them, and I'll absorb that loss any day. These are serious discussions. I'm asking you serious questions and posing serious challenges to your points. If you think of that as just Tik Tok, then this isn't the forum for you.
I just received my PS renewal notice and I am so glad to be a subscriber. I always look forward to each edition. So thought-provoking, entertaining, and smart!
The reader feedback is always interesting as well.
Responding to Rima: It may surprise you to know that Donald Trump in 2016 carried the combined popular vote of 49 states plus the District of Columbia; only California, which Republicans basically don’t contest because Democrats will carry it anyway. (Remarkably, Hillary Clinton started with 20% of the electoral votes that she needed to win the election and still lost.
Neither party contests states not considered swing states. So even though Trump lost the popular vote in quite a few states including D.C., if we combine all the states and leave out California, he won the popular vote? Well, thanks. We can add the Applegate System to the Electoral College to make my vote in Illinois count even less.
Responding to Eric: What exactly is your point? I’m trying to talk about serious issues as part of restoring meaningful self-government and you want to talk about pronouns? I frankly don’t care what bathroom or pronouns Buck Naked or anybody else over the age of 21 wants to use, but someone smart enough to be nominated for the highest court in the land ought to be smart enough to say something like “A woman, Senator, is an adult human female; someone with XX chromosomes. If you’re asking me how to apply a sex discrimination statute in a particular context to people who identify as something else, then you should know that as a prospective Justice I can’t give an opinion on a case that’s not before me.” And I’m hardly asking you to “coddle” me. So I resent your suggestion that my reminder that I paid to be able to post here - in response to your direct personal email invitation, by the way, when you started this venture - is somehow a “threat” against you. If what you want is an echo chamber and a funny tweet contest, then you’re more than welcome to it, but that holds little interest for me. Happy Holidays, by the way!
Are you suggesting that Ketanji Brown Jackson is not as smart as you or anyone else who believes that chromosomes determine whether someone is a male or a female?
Replying to Joanie Wimmer: Of course not. A refutation of an argument - or even a disagreement - is not an attack on a person; it’s a response to an argument. In response to Eric’s question, I simply suggested what I think would have been a more appropriate answer that distinguishes between the obvious, biological, science-based, and long-established historical meaning of “woman” and how that term might be interpreted for legal purposes in view of the apparently increasingly widespread acceptance of transgenderism as anything other than a social phenomenon or a mental illness. Feel free to identify as whatever you want, but the proposition that chromosomes determine sex is not a “belief” - it’s actual science that’s been true for an estimated 600 million years or so since the first heterosexual species began to evolve on planet earth. You can look it up!
I hasten to point out that Sex and Gender are not the same!! - There is biological sex (chromosomes of some number) and there is gender (not determined by chromosomes). I find the "gender" reveal parties to be ill-informed and pointless. One may know the biological sex of the forthcoming infant. But one will not know the gender until it has been determined by the resulting person.
Good Make-up and hairstyles can make a man appear womanly, and exercise and hormone treatments can make a woman appear manly. Elaborate surgery can make either into a more convincing version of the other. I think if science gets to the point that scientific criteria (bone structure, chromosomes, functional genitalia, etc) can be switched, it would be accurate to say a man has become woman or vice versa. We’re on that path, but not there yet.
I agree with Eric's position on Kyle Rittenhouse. I would only add a couple of thoughts. First, he is a 20-year-old, from modest means. I am quite sure that the activists and lawyers that are using him for their own financial and political interests are very persuasive in selling him on the benefits to him of what is in their interests. It would take a very special person, let alone someone with his background, to resist and insist on common anonymity. Second, the left, and the media, like to promote the notion of youthful vision and wisdom as beacons for action, so it may be additionally galling that KR fails to fit the proper mold.
I forgot all about Kyle! But now that you bring him up, his current 15 minutes of fame is due to the rise of conservatism after Newt Gingrich's refusal to work with Democrats and thus his appeal to the victimhood that is conservatism. I understand that conservatives are part of society but they offer no value and no benefit, they never have and never will. The best liberals can do is marginalize them, as in ignoring them. They are not good people and do poorly in a liberal, inclusive society.
I think it best to end the Kyle Rittenhouse issue. The only last comment to make is how pathetic is the right to use a mope like him as some sort of ideal American.
Never mind all the significant social and political issues. Let us focus on Eric's snide attitude toward the English measurement system and his effete affection for metric. Metric is fine for scientific stuff, where it's nice that everything is divisible by ten or easily stated as enormous powers of ten. But for everyday activities, English is clearly more convenient. Liquid measures are easily doubled, quadrupled, halved, quartered, etc. Two cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon, etc. A pound, is readily divided into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Do you know, off-hand, what a sixteenth of a kilogram is? Twelve inches in a foot? Readily divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. You can't even divide a meter by 3 without getting into fractions. Fahrenheit provides degrees that are 1.8 times as precise as Celsius degrees, and decades of temperatures that make sense. Being in "the 20s" in Celsius gets you from the high 60s F. to the mid-80s. God help the European TV weathermen. Yeah, a mile is a strange number of feet at 5280, but readily divided into halves, quarters, and eighths. You might know what an eighth of a kilometer is (125 m), but really the only useful way to divide up a km is into tenths, often not what you're really interested in. And God only knows what's metric for a two-by-four. So OK, the astronomers and physicists can have metric, and by sticking to it, avoid Hubble Telescope embarrassments, but for regular people doing regular stuff, English works best.
In talking about the soccer v. football controversy with some others, I've never felt so much that I'm from Mars, as the book says. Because I'm basically not. But I think I unearthed one reason some women are digging soccer. You're watching a bunch of good looking, super fit young guys do really athletic stuff, pretty much nonstop -- and, unlike with football, with all that gear, you can actually see them. I also encountered a pretty visceral distaste for football because of its violent element, increasingly cited as the cause of debilitating, long-term injury. As for that first reason, well, I might as well pitch beach volleyball as the beautiful game. As for the second, it's harder to dismiss, sadly for those who enjoy the game that, qua game, is actually beautiful.
Fyi, I was only able to see the top two visual tweet choices to select in the visual tweet voting box, so the results may be skewed. I voted for the cat one considering its relevance to your folk music background.
However the Gus Johnson tweet really hit home as I commented on his attire while watching the broadcast
I don't know why, but it seems the visual tweets take a couple of hours to completely load. I can only see one so far. This happened last week as well.
This is a new problem with Substack. I'm going to have to do image grabs of all the visual tweets from now on, it seems.
I've found that if I refresh the page, the images fully load.
I too noticed Gus’s attire and also commented on it. So I had to vote for that one. I had that suit in 1973.
As usual, Eric, you avoid the thrust of my comment and go off on “gotcha” points instead, but here you go: 1. A woman is an adult human female or, more scientifically, a person born with with xx chromosomes. The ability to change one’s appearance through hormones, surgery, tattoos, and/or working out does not change that fact. Nor does the inability to identify females based solely on appearance or attire, especially in the age of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. (Look up the definition of “cosmetic” while you’re at it; it implies superficiality.). Your first picture is of a female porn star who goes by the name “Buck” something in an industry in which body modification may long have been the norm but that hasn’t changed her biology. I don’t know who your second friend is; perhaps you can enlighten us, preferably without using the kind of derogatory term you chose for Kyle Rittenhouse (“attention slut”). 2. The bogus Russian collusion hoax crippled the Trump presidency by undermining potentially popular support for a duly elected president following a closely contested election. Americans are supposed to come together after presidential elections, but that is now long gone. Whether it affected a single Republican vote is immaterial; it crippled Trump’s presidency - and undermined future presidencies - by legitimizing the notion of a permanent “resistance” to a duly elected government, which manifested itself in a particularly nasty way on a January 6, 2021. In the end, Eric, if you want to keep paying charter subscribers like me for the future, you really need to decide if you’re trying to stimulate serious discussion of important issues here or just trying to be the verbal equivalent of Tik Tok.
I worry that the shrill, aggressive approach of today's trans activist community -- which will say you're worse than Hitler if you question even a little bit, say, trans medical treatment for children, or question whether social contagion is playing a role in the giant uptick in girls identifying as trans -- hardens minds and hearts to the genuine issue. I have a cousin who transitioned from woman to man -- and he is so much better off now. He transitioned many years ago, and he wears his male identity effortlessly. I would never think of him as a her anymore. He looks better, feels better, is more successful, more comfortable in life, in relationships, and in his skin, and the ability to do it -- and social and familial acceptance of it -- was a godsend for him. It made me think, if only he had done it earlier! In the face of such stories, which are not uncommon, insistence that such people are technically the opposite sex strikes me as churlish and unwise.
The Trump presidency was crippled by the ignorant, narcissistic grifter Trump. He was never in danger of winning the popular vote.
I addressed your comments head on. You offer a biological definition of "woman," which obtains for most purposes but I have to ask what the purpose of the question is. Is it to suggest that Buck Angel, the trans male porn star, ought to use the women's restroom? Or be addressed with her/she pronouns? Is it to suggest that the trans woman pictured should be using the men's bathrooms and locker rooms even though she has secondary female secondary characteristics, such as breasts? I mean, honestly, what is your point? Why do you care?
You are free to think that the Russian collusion allegation was what made Trump such an ineffective president by most lights, but what's the evidence for that? The failure of his "Better-Than-Obamacare" health care plan? Oh, no, that couldn't be it, because he never introduced one despite years of promising. The failure of his infrastructure plan? Again, nope. He didn't introduce one of those either. He undermined his popularity by his constant, poisonous tweeting and his compulsive mendaciousness. Harping from the extremely online and a few MSNBC commentators didn't "cripple" his presidency, nor did it signal the beginning of some new political movement in which reflexive criticism and opposition to the president threw a wrench into Democracy. Both parties have been guilty of that for generations.
I'm more than happy to print your dissents and to offer a significant platform for dissents. You don't find that many places online. But I'm not going to be bought into coddling them by implied threats to cancel a paid subscription, and I hope that, no matter what you think of me, you don't think I would. Paying conservative customers have already left when they find that I challenge them, and I'll absorb that loss any day. These are serious discussions. I'm asking you serious questions and posing serious challenges to your points. If you think of that as just Tik Tok, then this isn't the forum for you.
I don't get the Pop Tart joke.
Icing not centered, leading to a life of crime? The idea of Pop Tarts themselves, driving a consumer to madness?
This:
https://www.thewrap.com/jerry-seinfeld-unfrosted-pop-tart-story-melissa-mccarthy/
Icing was shorted - not covering most of the Pop Tart. (IMHO)
If a lot of people are provoked by something, how can it not be considered provoking?
Sorry, that logic is reserved for progressives and liberal activists. Others are simply ignorant, (or bigoted) reactionaries.
No doubt. However, we should distinguish between deliberately provoking and unintentionally provoking and cut people some slack on the latter.
I just received my PS renewal notice and I am so glad to be a subscriber. I always look forward to each edition. So thought-provoking, entertaining, and smart!
The reader feedback is always interesting as well.
Phil Ponce
Agreed! I miss you on TV!
Responding to Rima: It may surprise you to know that Donald Trump in 2016 carried the combined popular vote of 49 states plus the District of Columbia; only California, which Republicans basically don’t contest because Democrats will carry it anyway. (Remarkably, Hillary Clinton started with 20% of the electoral votes that she needed to win the election and still lost.
Neither party contests states not considered swing states. So even though Trump lost the popular vote in quite a few states including D.C., if we combine all the states and leave out California, he won the popular vote? Well, thanks. We can add the Applegate System to the Electoral College to make my vote in Illinois count even less.
Responding to Eric: What exactly is your point? I’m trying to talk about serious issues as part of restoring meaningful self-government and you want to talk about pronouns? I frankly don’t care what bathroom or pronouns Buck Naked or anybody else over the age of 21 wants to use, but someone smart enough to be nominated for the highest court in the land ought to be smart enough to say something like “A woman, Senator, is an adult human female; someone with XX chromosomes. If you’re asking me how to apply a sex discrimination statute in a particular context to people who identify as something else, then you should know that as a prospective Justice I can’t give an opinion on a case that’s not before me.” And I’m hardly asking you to “coddle” me. So I resent your suggestion that my reminder that I paid to be able to post here - in response to your direct personal email invitation, by the way, when you started this venture - is somehow a “threat” against you. If what you want is an echo chamber and a funny tweet contest, then you’re more than welcome to it, but that holds little interest for me. Happy Holidays, by the way!
Are you suggesting that Ketanji Brown Jackson is not as smart as you or anyone else who believes that chromosomes determine whether someone is a male or a female?
No, she’s plenty smart to give the correct political answer, cowardly as it is, or else the Dems would have blocked her.
Replying to Joanie Wimmer: Of course not. A refutation of an argument - or even a disagreement - is not an attack on a person; it’s a response to an argument. In response to Eric’s question, I simply suggested what I think would have been a more appropriate answer that distinguishes between the obvious, biological, science-based, and long-established historical meaning of “woman” and how that term might be interpreted for legal purposes in view of the apparently increasingly widespread acceptance of transgenderism as anything other than a social phenomenon or a mental illness. Feel free to identify as whatever you want, but the proposition that chromosomes determine sex is not a “belief” - it’s actual science that’s been true for an estimated 600 million years or so since the first heterosexual species began to evolve on planet earth. You can look it up!
I hasten to point out that Sex and Gender are not the same!! - There is biological sex (chromosomes of some number) and there is gender (not determined by chromosomes). I find the "gender" reveal parties to be ill-informed and pointless. One may know the biological sex of the forthcoming infant. But one will not know the gender until it has been determined by the resulting person.
You’re wrong about chromosomes determining sex. Science has progressed a little since you were in high school biology.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YdeChkf68eU
Good Make-up and hairstyles can make a man appear womanly, and exercise and hormone treatments can make a woman appear manly. Elaborate surgery can make either into a more convincing version of the other. I think if science gets to the point that scientific criteria (bone structure, chromosomes, functional genitalia, etc) can be switched, it would be accurate to say a man has become woman or vice versa. We’re on that path, but not there yet.
I agree with Eric's position on Kyle Rittenhouse. I would only add a couple of thoughts. First, he is a 20-year-old, from modest means. I am quite sure that the activists and lawyers that are using him for their own financial and political interests are very persuasive in selling him on the benefits to him of what is in their interests. It would take a very special person, let alone someone with his background, to resist and insist on common anonymity. Second, the left, and the media, like to promote the notion of youthful vision and wisdom as beacons for action, so it may be additionally galling that KR fails to fit the proper mold.
I forgot all about Kyle! But now that you bring him up, his current 15 minutes of fame is due to the rise of conservatism after Newt Gingrich's refusal to work with Democrats and thus his appeal to the victimhood that is conservatism. I understand that conservatives are part of society but they offer no value and no benefit, they never have and never will. The best liberals can do is marginalize them, as in ignoring them. They are not good people and do poorly in a liberal, inclusive society.
Whew, thanks for clearing that up! Your omniscience is always appreciated.
You're very, very welcome!
I think it best to end the Kyle Rittenhouse issue. The only last comment to make is how pathetic is the right to use a mope like him as some sort of ideal American.
I think it best to drop further discussion of Kyle Rittenhouse. It is sad that the right needs to use him as some sort of ideal American.
Never mind all the significant social and political issues. Let us focus on Eric's snide attitude toward the English measurement system and his effete affection for metric. Metric is fine for scientific stuff, where it's nice that everything is divisible by ten or easily stated as enormous powers of ten. But for everyday activities, English is clearly more convenient. Liquid measures are easily doubled, quadrupled, halved, quartered, etc. Two cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon, etc. A pound, is readily divided into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Do you know, off-hand, what a sixteenth of a kilogram is? Twelve inches in a foot? Readily divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. You can't even divide a meter by 3 without getting into fractions. Fahrenheit provides degrees that are 1.8 times as precise as Celsius degrees, and decades of temperatures that make sense. Being in "the 20s" in Celsius gets you from the high 60s F. to the mid-80s. God help the European TV weathermen. Yeah, a mile is a strange number of feet at 5280, but readily divided into halves, quarters, and eighths. You might know what an eighth of a kilometer is (125 m), but really the only useful way to divide up a km is into tenths, often not what you're really interested in. And God only knows what's metric for a two-by-four. So OK, the astronomers and physicists can have metric, and by sticking to it, avoid Hubble Telescope embarrassments, but for regular people doing regular stuff, English works best.
And I didn't even mention that a cup is readily divided into halves, quarters, and eighths, via the underappreciated English liquid ounce.
I HAD forgotten about Kyle Rittenhouse Thanks, Eric!
In talking about the soccer v. football controversy with some others, I've never felt so much that I'm from Mars, as the book says. Because I'm basically not. But I think I unearthed one reason some women are digging soccer. You're watching a bunch of good looking, super fit young guys do really athletic stuff, pretty much nonstop -- and, unlike with football, with all that gear, you can actually see them. I also encountered a pretty visceral distaste for football because of its violent element, increasingly cited as the cause of debilitating, long-term injury. As for that first reason, well, I might as well pitch beach volleyball as the beautiful game. As for the second, it's harder to dismiss, sadly for those who enjoy the game that, qua game, is actually beautiful.