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I guess it is possible. Pandering to the male-gaze has been the industry standard for all too long. Time to shake things up in my honest opinion.
The crimes humans commit against each other have numerous justifications and rationalizations, to most of us in North America, we hear more about the atrocities of our enemies, that we do of the ones we commit in our name. John Dower examines the Cold War period in history and concludes that our hands were just as bloody, if not more so, than our hated enemy.
“When the torture manuals refer to “neutralizing” targets, this was commonly recognized as a euphemism for killing. There is no evidence that cover US forces participated directly in the the grotesque torture, death squads, massacres, and “disappearances” characteristic of the dirty wars that ravaged Latin America, only that they promoted and supported them. At the same time, there i”s little or no evidence that, in taking sides in these wars and training and materially aiding “anticommunist” participants in them, the United States gave serious attention to human rights or the rule of law. In most countries south of the border, Washington supported right-wing regimes in their state terror. In Nicaragua, it abetted the Contras in pursing a murderous campaign of “guerrilla” terror against the government. Proxy war, surrogate terror, disdain for human rights and even for plain decency all came together.
As always, it is not possible to quantify the costs of this violence with any exactitude. For South and Central American societies, the political, cultural, and psychological costs were – and to some degree still are – enormous. Writing in Cambridge History of the Cold War, John Coatsworth observed that the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua devastated the economy, forced the government to abandon most of its social programs, and “cost th lives of 30,000 Nicaraguans, mostly civilian supporters of the Sandinista revolution.” He put the death toll in El Salvador between 1979 and 1984 at nearly forty thousand, most who were unarmed combatants murdered by the armed forces.
Coatsworth also noted in passing that President Reagan visited Guatemala City in December 1982 and praised the ruling military junta for its commitment to defend the country against the threat of communism. In 1982- 1983 alone, the government forced eight hundred thousand peasants into “civil patrols” ordered to uncover and kill insurgents or see their communities destroyed. It followed up on its threat by destroying an estimated 686 villages and hamlets and killing between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand people.
All told, Coatsworth estimates that the Cold War in Central America saw nearly three hundred thousand deaths in a population of thirty million, plus a million refugees who fled the area, mostly for the United States. Based on examination of published CIA and State Department materials plus other reports unsympathetic to communist regimes, he reached this conclusion: “Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet Union bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries.”
This does not diminish the multiple horrors of Soviet violence and oppression, but helps place them in perspective.”
-John W. Dower. The Violent American Century. pp. 68 – 69.
Seems obvious, no? Watch a well put together seven minute essay on why we need to change, and the sooner the better.
Nothing like being in the sweet spot for the necessity of complex landing procedures.
Post Modernism keeps coming up at the root of many debates on contentious issues. Gender identity politics one of the area where the influence of post-modernism can be seen. This quote from Tildeb on Violetwisp’s blog is part of his critique of a segment of the left side of the political spectrum what Tildeb calls the Regressive left. The claim is as follows:
“My claim is that there is a strong and growing element in the Left that is regressive, that operates by actions and sentiments that a anti-liberal in principle and demonstrate actions that are anti-Enlightenment in value… not least of which is saying that they do so on behalf of liberal principles and Enlightenment values but then actually committing the opposite. Furthermore, I claim the tactics used are fascist, that bullying and intimidation and violence and disruption and demonization are gaining wider and broader social acceptance… especially by people who should know better. In addition, from these sideline observers who should know better than appease and apologize for these hypocritical illiberals comes a kind of Fifth Column, people who go along, who do not soundly condemn, who rationalize excuses on behalf of others, who partake in the illusion of supporting ‘correctness’ by incorrect means and use a form of apologetics for Really Bad Ideas championed by the more militant advocates who presume they are defending victimized groups by these fascist methods.”
Many women are experiencing this phenomena vis-a-vis liberal feminism allied with trans-activism. Females are routinely branded by the regressive left as TERFs for expressing a need for female only spaces, expressing their sexual preferences and defending the necessary boundaries they set in society in order for them to be safe. The function of the term “terf” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) is to silence, shame, and coerce women into accepting men into their spaces and their feminism. It has been a fairly successful campaign, but women are slowly seeing the downsides of a version of feminism that centres around the needs of males, having their peak trans moments and rejecting liberal feminism because essentially, it isn’t about women and their struggle for emancipation from the patriarchal structures of society.
Tildeb isn’t directly addressing feminist concerns, but this next portion of his comment illustrates exactly the issue with the regressive left’s take on reality and how it affects their argumentation.
“The point I keep raising is about the use of anti-liberal methods done in the name of liberal principles and then excused by those claiming to support liberal principles. Also, I keep raising the point but face significant reticence. from those I accuse of hypocrisy, of using a double standard, of going along with a very Post Modern framework and language not just about groups and power but this idea that everyone owns their own facts, their own truths, that any action illiberal intolerant action undertaken in defense of the victimized groups is somehow justified as well as exempt from legitimate criticism.”
Everyone can’t have their own set of facts and truths and have the naive expectation that others will go along with them. Your deeply subjective personal thoughts and feelings are precisely that – *your* thoughts and feelings; expecting others to fall in line with your subjective whims is not only unreasonable, it is not how the world works. Interfacing with society involves a give and take and mutual understanding of how the world works. We teach children that their own desires and perspectives must be tempered with input from reality – they cannot have all the things, nor do things work precisely the way children think they should. As children mature their outlook on the world becomes more nuanced and the interaction between their personal selves and the world begins to even out and the interplay between individual and society establishes itself into a generally beneficial mutual relationship.
The right to swing ones arms around is limited by the presence of others who may not want to be hit with said arms. In other words feel free to exercise your freedom as long as you’re not infringing on the rights of others. The same can be said of your subjective thoughts and feelings on gender and how your present yourself to the world. By all means, identify however you wish. That is your right, and I fully endorse an individuals right to do so.
But, your self-identification ends with you. There should be no expectation that others have to take your subjective self-declared identity at face value. So, if you happen to be male and identify as a woman fine. But the expectation that others *must* treat you as a woman goes against the conception of rights we have in a liberal society. Others may have different views on gender and identity and they have the exact same rights as the person who happens to be a male identifying as woman.
The problem is that people who do not go along with the self-identification of others are unjustly maligned, harassed, and their views marginalized by the current liberal feminists/transactivist movement. People who believe that the social construction of gender is harmful and should be abolished have their views routinely mislabelled -phobic or bigoted when really they are just stating their opinion (of course, being backed by fact and observable reality is nice too).
So, let’s try and further the bounds of the debate and see where it takes us.
A big thank you Tildeb for clearly putting into words some of key points of the post modern gender identity debate and the surrounding controversy.
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Mystro
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