tribe
November 6th, 2019
They would think that, wouldn’t they?
Congratulations to Tomas from Sweden who wins this month’s raffle prize – a signed copy of the soon to be published eighth volume of J&M strips, working title “Ha ha”.
If you like Jesus & Mo and want to help keep it going into its fifteenth year, why not pledge a dollar or two per month in support? Just go to Patreon and follow the instructions:
“Tomas from Sweden” :-O? I hope that is me!
Also, ‘first’! (sorry, couldn’t help myself…)
Oh, and good one, this!
“Fake sport”…ha hah ha.
Godless liberals actually engage in tribal epistemology all the time, although since they control 90% of the media, culture, and schools they manage to get away with it a lot more than other factions do.
Of course the whole point of the idea is that this is a fundamental aspect of human nature, and that everybody does it. Nobody gets away from it entirely, but there are ways to partially mitigate the problem.
Of course. Reality has liberal bias.
Reality has liberal bias.
So does that mean, for example, that a man really can transubstantiate himself into a woman simply be believing it to be so? Because that seems to be liberal orthodoxy these days, and people have gotten into serious trouble for questioning it.
JB, there you go again, doing your best to reduce a very complex subject like gender to a simple binary. It isn’t simple. It isn’t just a matter of who has what kind of chromosomes or who has a penis or a vagina.
Do you have a dog in this fight? Are you harmed if you simply accept whatever gender a person tell you they have? If not, why don’t you just take their word for it and mind your own business. It might make you a bigger human being.
Sorry, Darwinharmless, crazy bullshit like that turns my fellow Progressives into Limbaugh fuel.
Except for extremely rare hermaphrodism, people are M or F. Some, like Trump, are MFs.
Tough titties.
You can strongarm DSM and dictionary publishers, but you can’t strongarm physical reality — you know, all that “truth” and “science” stuff you believe when you like reality.
Put more directly, if you want to pretend you’re a girl, you can’t force innocent bystanders who don’t give a sh it to help your yank fantasy. You have to use your own strongarm.
> Are you harmed if you simply accept whatever gender a person tell you they have?
If I say believe it, I’m harmed in the worst way possible: being bullied into agreeing that true=false, 0=1, or that gay men dressed up like women are females.
If I actually DO believe it after being strongarmed, that’s far, far worse.
> why don’t you just take their word for it
You sound like the stupid high school jesus freaks who didn’t like atheists.
Because it isn’t true. Some people care about that.
.
Luxi Turna & jb: *Golf clap* As an individual who cares about truth and reality, thanks for donning your flamesuit and daring to speak about “Gender” vs “Sexual Identity”. Identifying as a person of the opposite gender or having a sexual affinity for one’s own does not somehow magically transform one into a different gender. Although it certainly could be argued that going through the surgeries & other treatments to accomplish the transformation does, it still does not alter the fact that the person was born as a male of female and still retains those chromosomes.
Somehow being progressive has come to mean that one must ignore one’s view of reality and to wholeheartedly endorse every plank in what some Ultimate Progressives have declared to be the Progressive Platform. To have any opinions otherwise somehow invalidates that individual and requires immediate condemnation and expulsion of that heretic from the tribe unless they profess profound regret and “Evolution” of said primitive views.
I can remember when the comment section was full of amusing observations at least tangentially related to the theme of the cartoon.
It seems to have turned into a toilet wall for the few noisy, self-righteous people who take extreme genderists and identity politicians seriously, or in any sense characterising mainstream liberal views.
Take it to 4Chan or Reddit guys, you’ll be more at home there.
Thanks, Hotrats. I was beginning to feel I’d wandered into the wrong pub. Almost felt like a dogpile for a minute.
Cheers, mate.
Have a virtual pint on me, eh.
OK, if a man identifies as a women when using the restroom, “she” must squat to urinate.
Rite now, I’m a man identifying as a woman identifying as a man.
they say it couldn’t be true
that you are what you say is you
you’d be better off dead
if you lived in my head
why should I think you know what is true
Luxi and JB, It isn’t about what’s true or false. It’s about how people want to be treated.
Whatever you think about their gender, there’s no need to be cruel. If there want to be treated as though they had a certain gender, it doesn’t hurt you to treat them that way.
Treating a person with one set of genitals as though they had a different set of genitals… just a bit of play acting, not a level of hell.
Every day, there are some people at work that I treat with respect, despite having completely different feelings about them. It doesn’t hurt me one bit. I act as though they aren’t “brief elaborations of a tube” out if simple politeness.
Blimey. Next somebody is going to show up here claiming that marriage is only between two people capable of reproducing, hence no such thing as a same sex marriage. That would leave me and my wife out, but that failure doesn’t seem to dent the skulls of bigots.
The thing I’m finding amusing right now is that “people have gotten into serious trouble” for questioning “liberal orthodoxy”. The poor victims, eh. What trouble are you thinking of? Being contradicted, possibly scorned, possibly fired. Oh so very harsh.
Or are you talking about the “trouble” of being not hired in the first place, of being denied services, of being beaten or even killed by righteous bigots, or of being driven to suicide by bullies.
I also believe in the importance of defending the truth. But science, as explained in the clip I linked to, says that gender is not fixed and does not follow your binary rules. That’s a truth I’m more interested in defending than the shallow bullshit binary you lot are pushing.
Reading the comic and the comments, I remember the old adage “If it’s on TV, it must be true.”
One of those lines that really tests whether you are person who understands irony or takes for granted something presented at face value. Or, if what you’re viewing is presented as factual, just how cynical or open-minded you are, and how willing you are to look up the facts yourself and not simply go with the material given.
Multimedia and comment sections have redefined this, morphing it into a thought that can no longer be easily discernible since everyone has their own agenda, and their own minds made up, regardless of the subject in question and how it may be presented.
It’s pointless trying to argue with someone who will turn around and say, “Well, what about…?” and take the discussion into a widely different direction, tangentially linked in such a way that makes their argument concrete to them and bemusing to those who disagree.
In short, practically everyone guilty of such epistemology, whether they intend to or not, because discussions and debates have become so riddled with entitlement, it makes you regret even trying to make a point in the first place.
I will now wait to be ignored or get an explanation on why I’m wrong.
Arghh the whole gender “thing”!!!!
I have hopelessly bounced between many of the viewpoints mentioned here but in the end I am forced to go back to being thoroughly British. It’s nothing to do with me and Paying attention to anyone else’s private life is terribly rude.
This point of view kept people sane for many centuries and works for me still. If anyone else’s private life is accidentally exposed then express polite disinterest and walk away.
^ aye. Let people identify as anything they want! None of my business either….Cup of tea anyone?
The thing about identity is that some aspects of it can be shared social space which do make demands on others.
Consider, for example, someone who claims female identity and ends up, therefore in a womens prison (where they then proceed to rape four women)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/transgender-prisoner-who-sexually-assaulted-inmates-jailed-for-life
Or, who claims female identity and therefore expects access to women’s (especially pre-pubescent girls’) changing rooms and demands the waxing of their still male genitalia, suing those who refuse
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jessica-yaniv-canadian-court-rules-against-transgender-activist-in-waxing-case/
Or, who claims female identity and therefore demands access to women’s sports, using their past of testosterone fuelled muscle and bone build-up to crush opponents
https://www.bjjee.com/articles/transgender-mma-fighter-who-broke-female-opponents-skull-are-we-getting-too-politically-correct-with-reality/
Alas, none of these things can be solved by a simple “respect what people say they are” approach.
It’s appropriate to demand that people be kind and broadminded when approaching such issues of personal identity, but I’m afraid its going to also require thought. Some of which will have to be public thought about some very tricky issues.
“The Sami language includes a rich vocabulary for snow and ice, with over 300 terms. But their vocabulary for reindeer is even more impressive, with as many as one thousand terms devoted to the description of reindeer.” (truenorthgallery.net)
1 Taxonomy ? Ontology
2 Truth is what works. It’s different from fact.
So. Three genders? It depends. Just snow or slush? It depends.
If the Sami have 300 words for snow they haven’t made it into the Sami-English dictionaries. Try it for yourself
https://www.freelang.net/online/sami.php
In general, the idea that language reduces to thought (the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis) has been thoroughly debunked over and over again.
See, for example see Geoffrey Pullam’s exploration of the hoax, excerpts here
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/88-301/introduction/eskimo_snow_words.html
DH. You castegated some posters for objecting to gender self identification. Then you highlight the problems people have when they descriminate…E.g. my wifes beauty parlour refusing to wax a transvestite who quite fancies the idea of having his erect penis waxed by a sexy young woman in a white coat…You sir…are trying to have your cake and to eat it as well…you cant have it both ways….either treat everybody of the sex they identify with equally? Or descriminate based on what seems like just people using the grey areas for nefarious purposes. Where do you draw the line?
jb – “a man really can transubstantiate himself into a woman”
I’m going to guess that you’re referring to folks who are transgender and that you’re trying to compare it to the christian idea that a cracker can be (literally, according to some sects) changed into a bit of Jesus’ body.
My simple response is: Are you really that stupid or are you just being a shit stirrer?
A more reasoned response: No one actually thinks that. For some people, who they are doesn’t match the body they were born into. How hard is that to understand? I, personally, am a guy and, luckily for me, my body matches that self-perception. That’s not always the case. There’s no “believing it so”, it just is.
Wow, it sure seems like some of the folks here define who they are by their genitalia and nothing more. People aren’t simply walking genitals and genetics hardly defines us either — I would like to think that I am not as religiously gullible as my mother and not as big an asshole as my siblings.
But, if you can’t grok the notion of something more than binary, well, stay in your little hole while the rest of us pass you by.
Personally, I don’t care one whit what genitals someone has — I’m married and monogamous, so that is unlikely to come up at all. And I really don’t care what genitals my kids’ friends/partners have, just that they’re polite and kind and caring. Of course, part of that would include caring about others rather than forcing their own limited views on people.
For those who are ignorant (willfully or otherwise)… Gender identity sexual preference, cross-dressing transgender.
Well said, Roger. Very well said indeed.
It’s easy to take several worst case scenarios and say, hey, let’s stick with the binary definition or we run into trouble. I prefer life to be more nuanced than that.
Most of all, I’d like to see a little more empathy in this world. I can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable or distressing than body dysphoria. So I prefer to cut victims of such a condition as much slack as possible. So far, cutting slack has cost me very little.
https://youtu.be/Wg51RnpGn9k
Uncle Roger: Glad to see someone still using that grand old word “grok”.
DH. At no point did I say “stick with the binary definition”.
Confusions here are many, but one thing to consider is that “denying the gender binary” sounds terribly woke, until you realize that it amounts to also denying the lived experience of those who want to transition from one sex to another because they feel that their outward gender expression does not match their inner experience.
If there is nothing to transtion from or to then why do it? These arent small changes. Two years of living as the opposite sex, hormone treatments (which can render you sterile) and often surgery. That’s not on a whim.
That aside, I’m saying that these issues are tricky and arent’ going to be solved by good intentions alone.
There is a reason that law books are great thick tomes, and it isn’t because of “The patriarchy” or “So the system can oppress the poor”. It’s because human interactions carry the potential for bad actors to exploit good intentions. The above links about Jessica Yanis, Karen White and Fallon Fox are simply reminders of this general principle. I notice that you have no proposed solutions to people like that exploiting the identitarian impulse?
Uncle Roger. You may not care what genitals someone has, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if you have daughters then you arent going to be too thrilled about Jessica Yanis sharing a changing room with them? Links above.
I love that everyone is trying to be terribly British and “Oh, I say, do what you like as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses”.
Adorable.
Alas, the issues are not so simple, and if you haven’t actually thought about them, maybe your noble first response intuitions, lovely though they are when it comes to matters of tea etiquette, might not be quite up to the task at hand?
People in Manchester have 99 words for rain but consider the word “sun” to be imaginary. People from Liverpool have a list of 8000 swear words to pre or suffix the word “Manchester”.
I have unilaterally decided that gender identity and all associated language will be replaced by eccentric if the person is under 43 and quirky or flamboyant if over that age. During your 43rd year everyone must identify as “tricksy”.
Oy. Mars moon…I come from the republic of Mancunia and have lived in its suburbs for 54 years. Rain is our friend, coz it reminds us of home. If we wait a hundred or so years, it will be sub tropical and my great great grandkids will have to avoid crocodiles in clifton marina! By then Liverpool will.be a tropical basin devoid of intelligent life. Well one of those facts applies NOW as well…I think that I am on the more masculine spectrum of xy behaviour….But is that behaviour cultural? Aaaaargh my head hurts…
Watcha M27.
As an out and proud satellite of the big red one, I must say I enjoy visiting Mancunia to enjoy the precipitation and diversity i.e. a civilised choice of football teams in red or blue. My brother Phobos visits your moustache day parade every year along with his friend Europa.
If you are suffering from an overdose of testosterone I suggest visiting London to purge it with despair and sorrow, dress up in disguise and go to Arsenal or Tottering as a home supporter. However if your overdose is severe stay on the train south and try the extreme “saints solution”.
Kind Regards
From the orbit of barsoom.
^ in the 70s and 80s I was engaged with all sorts of nutters in the underground. Mainly Chelsea and Millwall nutters. Even the women supporting Millwall frightened me…only Leeds came anywhere near the levels of violence that Millwall were notorious for….but with a bit of guile you could avoid detection and thus safely watch the shirts without serious injury…
SPECIES DYSPHORIA
I am a dog trapped in a human’s body. The proof is that I say so. Bowser’s groomer refuses to do me. The vet would neuter me, but I declined. I’m starting a Go Fund Me page to pay a lawyer to sue the groomer for some kind of discrimination.
^ well…there are loads of men who go to places where they are made to wear a dog collar and forced to eat out of dog bowls….suppose you think they are merely part-time dog fetishists? The spectrum of human strangeness is possibly the most interesting and perplexing subject on planet earth…
@Helenahankart — I do have a daughter and two sons. I took a quick look at the Yaniv story, although admittedly not deep enough to comment on that specific case.
What I will say is
1) in any group of people, be it the religious, the non-believing, the gay, the straight, the transgender, the tall, the short, etc… there will always be the occasional asshole. Can’t be helped.
2) Would I want my daughter sharing a changing room with Yaniv? Dunno; didn’t read enough about it. I will say that anyone who treats any of my kids inappropriately will have to answer to me, regardless of any category they might fall into. That said, my older two have friends/acquaintances who are transgender, as do I. Doesn’t bother any of us.
I have thought about the issues; I’ve been writing about them for many years and fighting for LGBTQ+ rights for even longer. I think I have a pretty good handle on the issue.
Everybody who has chirped up on this post needs to read “Galileo’s Middle Finger” by the brilliant Alice Dreger…a very in-depth expose of the activists revulsion and hatred of the scientists who dare to offend their particular pet ideology…