kamala harris would actually throw these kids (and their parents) in jail for truancy.

research your candidates, kids.

you shouldn't vote for this woman. you don't like her politics. they suck.

so, kamala harris has begun her campaign for president by copying the cover art from a recent pop singer and declaring solidarity with hamas.

she likes hot sauce too, right? carries it in her purse?

ugh.

*gag*.

this is beginning to feel like deja vu.

at the end of this, i want the strategists in the democratic party to be forced to wear dunce caps and paraded down pennsylvania avenue.

what do i think of "drag queen story time"?

i think it's very silly and that the correct response is to realize it's very silly. most sane, rational people will consider it comical. nonetheless, is there some valid concern?

there might be. for example, i'm reminded of the time that i went over to sarah's place, and she picked out some clothes for me, and her daughter took the opportunity to jump on my lap when i was sitting down, with the expectation that i would read her a book (which she had picked out for me), and then proceeded to tell me i was stupid for wearing women's clothing. this hurt my feelings, and she never apologized for it. i nonetheless read the book, to sarah's bemusement, and when i stopped to answer a question she asked me, the child bit me, apparently as punishment for stopping. don't bite me, master. i could not possibly hit a child, so i was a sitting duck, too. so, there's a real concern that the drag queens may be the victim of abuse by spoiled kids and some attempt should be made to protect the drag queens from abuse by rotten children.

i'm not actually a drag queen, i'm a transgendered person that had just gone back on hormones and was trying to explain it to my unimpressed ex-girlfriend, and i had no intention of reading the child a story when i went over to sarah's on that day in roughly 2009ish. the kid would have been about five, a little younger. she'd be almost 20 now. one nonetheless needs to ask why the child told me i was stupid, and the answer couldn't be anything other than that her mother had told her as much, which sounds about right. the child was probably literally repeating something she heard her mother say about me. i realized that.

i think that the underlying concern that some conservative parents have about this is that the children are being exposed to a type of mental illness that is being normalized, which is an idea that has no clinical basis. simply wearing clothing is not a mental illness and is not in the dsm. to exaggerate the point, i want to draw attention to the women protesting against drag queens while wearing pants, apparently oblivious to the reality that they are cross-dressing, themselves. well, if women can wear pants, why can't men wear silly princess dresses? there is no rational response to that question, as clothing is merely a social construction, and one that has changed over time. by current standards, jesus himself would have been a drag queen, because he walked around in dresses, as was the norm at the time (and remains the norm in conservative parts of the middle east).

one of the reasons that the persians were seen as barbarians by older middle eastern cultures is that they wore trousers. to the greeks and babylonians, this was unconscionable. all greeks knew that real men wore robes.

viewed rationally, wardrobe choice is a meaningless triviality and all clinical analysis views it that way: cross-dressing itself is not only not a mental illness, but it's exceedingly difficult to even define as the goal posts are constantly shifting, as illustrated by the women in pants protesting exposing their children to drag queens, as they stand beside them, in their pants.

there is perhaps some latent concern underlying this "born in the wrong body" thing, but the idea was never intended to be interpreted as some kind of metempsychosis or something. that might be seen as a symptom of schizophrenia, sure. however, nobody has ever literally thought they were born in the wrong body. it's a figure of speech. it's to be interpreted poetically.

there are still two conditions listed in the dsm that are trans-related and one of them does have some vague relevance, but it is abstract and unlikely to manifest itself in real life. parents should nonetheless be protective of anybody that wants to put their kids on their lap, from strangers at the library to creepy santa clauses to religious freaks. a trusted priest or pastor with repeat access is more likely to abuse your child than a drag queen reading a book in public at the library. there's nothing particular about the trans issue, but i want to be real about this.

the first of these conditions is dysphoria, which is widely misunderstood. there are a lot of people, myself included, that get diagnosed with being left out of society due to their gender identity, which triggers conditions like depression or anxiety. for me, it's frankly more of an excuse for a guaranteed annual income, but i am diagnosed with anxiety stemming from discrimination due to gender identity. this is a real condition in the dsm, but it is a reflection of the society, and not of the identity itself.

the second of these conditions is the one that may be of some legitimate concern to conservative parents, and it is the diagnosis of transvestism as a fetish. clinically speaking, a drag queen is supposed to be defined as a gay man that puts on women's clothing for purposes of sexual arousal, in order to masturbate or have anal sex with other gay men. it is a kink, a fetish, a sexual quirk. on it's own it is harmless, but it has the potential to lead to obsessive behaviour. do you want your son climbing up on that dude's lap? maybe not.

but, i think that this is something that should be easily identified by discerning eyeballs. the drag queen that shows up to storytime in lingerie is not the same thing as the drag queen that shows up to storytime in a silly princess dress. the mistake that conservatives are making is conflating these things, but the use of language is unhelpful. technically speaking, these aren't clinical drag queens, as drag is a sexual activity, and what they are doing is a type of performance art. a better term would be "female impersonator" rather than "drag queen", and some change of language may be helpful to clarify that this is actually harmless and silly rather than creepy and gross.

parents and librarians should nonetheless be careful to erect those filters, as they would in any other context, and which they no doubt probably do.

i haven't seen any pictures of a drag queen story-time with dudes dressed like porn stars, but i would be uncomfortable with that. sure. it's not real. rather, having cinderalla (or perhaps the ugly duckling) told by a female impersonator in exaggerated costume can and should be silly and fun and so long as that is actually true it should be tolerated and enjoyed for what it is.

i was thinking about this while i was in the shower, and i'm waiting for some soap + humidity to soften me up (a side effect of the forced drugging by the losers upstairs has been patches of rough, dry skin, which has been extremely annoying, and has required an all-of-drugstore response) so i'm going to write it down. i am eventually going to be splitting posts like this off of this politics feed, but i've been unable to sit down and do any meaningful work and might not be until i'm able to relocate. it's taken me a long time to recover, and every time i get close, they drug me again. i don't fully understand, but they appear to be muslims trying to enforce some backwards religious code on me, which i don't care about, but i'm not able to escape. they want me to look like a bearded gay man, or something. i don't really understand and don't remotely care; i want to send them to jail for enforcing their laws on me, but i'm having a hard time generating sufficient evidence.

what i was thinking about was the open question of whether the germanic, celtic, slavic and other migrations that ended the roman empire were actually seen not as the rampaging barbarians that the church historians recorded them as but actually as liberators of christian-enforced slavery by the vast majority of the population, who rejected this weird middle-eastern religion that was enforced on them with violence by strange foreigners. i'm not going to prove this claim, so much as i'm going to generate an argument that it is a reasonable supposition by using a series of analogies within more standard, recorded history. a characteristic of this period, c. 450 to c 1000, is that there was little remembered writing outside of the churches, which were governmental and administrative bodies throughout most of europe under a system called 'papal supremacy', where the pope essentially assumed the powers of the emperor. this didn't formally end until it was dismantled by napoleon, in 1806.

first, i want to present an unrelated model that i've used to try to understand the nature of migrations into europe over a long time frame. there's this heated debate in pre-european archaeological circles over whether the indo-european migration was violent or peaceful, with the peaceniks pointing out a lack of clear evidence of violence in the record itself and the war mongers arguing that the central motifs in indo-european culture were all about war, and drawing conclusions. i've tried to resolve this debate by looking at recorded history and pointing out that there has been an essentially unbroken stream of violent horse-backed warriors moving from the steppes for as long as there has been historical records (something that was only really resolved when the russians overwhelmed the horse-backed warriors with superior technology, and eventually with tanks. horses can't fight tanks. at all. hence this giant country called russia, that formed in response to this constant stream of violence.), and almost none of that could be found in the archaeological record if it were searched for, so it's really incumbent on the peaceniks to present their positive case, which they can't. violent migrations from asia into europe were likely a near constant reality going back 6000-8000 years before present, and only ending around the year 1700.

likewise, i think we can look at the question of how northerners were seen by romans by looking at existing history, but we have the ability to look both before and after the period that middle eastern christian colonizers occupied the bulk of europe.

first, consider the byzantine response to advancing turks and arabs in the late dark ages, which was to call on the franks and germans (then seen by the byzantnes as barbarians) to liberate them. we call this the crusades, which from a byzantine roman perspective was a war of liberation (although it suffered from the unfortunate reality that the remnants of roman civilization in the middle east left several centuries previous, in a depopulation event cause by plague, war and economic collapse that peaked in the late 7th century and made it easy for arab bedouin groups to take over in syria and israel). there has also been some serious scholarly research (not some trans girl with a blog) looking into the idea that the viking invasion of christian europe was a response to charlemagne threatening to invade scandinavia, that they targeted the churches for this reason and that they met a minimal response outside of the cities because much of the rural population wasn't christianized at all, and did in truth see them as liberators. we spend a fair amount of time criticizing the inquisition, which lasted into the age of enlightenment (and may have claimed netwon, who was himself a secret alchemist, had he not been very careful about it), without stopping to realize that they were killing witches because they were pagans. this is in truth clear evidence of indigenous religious practices carrying on in europe very late into history. the great peasants revolt likely had a pagan religious slant to it (as did many of the attempts to ward off the plague in the first place). while they have sadly not survived, there are records of indigenous scottish religious practices being practiced in remote locations as last as the 17th century. eastern europe, which had crusades launched against it, did not itself convert until roughly that late, and there are in fact some baltic and finnish tribes in russia that never converted at all and are the last known legitimate vestiges of the old ways in europe. it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps the farmers and peasants in france let the vikings walk in to fight the church, which they despised, precisely because they were still worshiping derivatives of odin, themselves....at least until the vikings became corrupted by christianity, themselves, and became worse oppressors than the remnants of roman rule were.

so, we can see that the idea that the germans were seen as liberators is recorded in several places in history after roman rule, notably with the crusades (well documented in constantinople) and the viking invasions (well documented, at least from the church perspective). there are also undertones of pagan practices in major events like the great peasants revolt (the centrality of the grove, for instance) and the inquisition that draw into question how christianized europe really was, and how they might view a foreign pagan force to come to fight the church for them.

it is also possible to look at roman attitudes towards germans and celts at the dawn of constantine and the beginning of roman christianity and deduce ideas about how the people viewed their chiristian oppressors and how they may have viewed germanic warriors coming to fight against them.

there were in fact several late roman emperors that saw the goths (a swedish warrior group that migrated into the empire from the region around today's crimea, fleeing the huns) as having noble and ideal qualities, which is something the romans also projected onto the celts, even in the form of late classical art. this is very well documented. our contemporary concept of the noble savage - naked, naive, pure, just, honest but void of civilization and law- was in fact created by roman art, depicting the celtic warrior class. there are surviving statues in rome of celtic warriors that demonstrate how the romans literally placed the naked celtic warriors on a pedestal, as ideal representatives of humanity in a pure and raw state. it is easy to deduce that, in the celts, the romans saw themselves, which is true; italic tribes likely only separated from celtic tribes some time around the halstatt period (c. 1000 bce), and the celtic and italian are the most closely related dialects, which might even be why spain and france so easily converted to latin as the lingua franca. you can contrast this to how the romans saw the carthaginians, which was as creepy foreigners with weird customs. there is a very large amount of evidence from the late classical period that the romans saw the germans and celts as something closer to themselves, and that they contrasted this with their middle eastern slaves (the romans literally brought millions of semitic slaves to europe from syria, and it is these people that eventually became italian and french and spanish christians), who were foreigners that had weird customs that were not like them. there is also actually archaeological evidence of roman pagan cultural practices (like sacrifices) in italy that is contemporary to the germanic invasions, and which seems to suggest either a reversion out of fear (the christian perspective) or a brief return to free cultural activity, which is what i'm hinting at.

this is an important consideration, as the history of europe is decolonized to present indigenous perspectives, and remove introduced christian concepts. we can easily construct the earlier period - we still have the statues of celtic noble savages on display in roman museums - and we know all about the renaissance and what followed, but this historical gap of christian occupation still suffers from the fact that it was written by the occupiers, and the bulk of historians are frankly not cognizant of the depth of the biases. we know the history was written by the church. we say it. we don't understand it and we've yet to put the pieces together to build a history of europe that eliminates and expels christianity, which is overdue and necessary to complete the decolonization of europe and allow it to return to it's indigenous roots in roman, greek, celtic and germanic cultural practices. 

have you ever noticed that the democrats are the blue party, like the tories in the uk, and the republicans are the red party, like the labour party (or the liberal party in canada, or the historical whigs)?

there's a reason for that.

adults have a right to choose to be gay if they want. it's harmless behaviour. no state or social institution should be oppressing anybody for consenting, free choices made by adults.

but, orphaned kids placed with gay parents didn't have the ability to make that choice and it's not fair to make it for them.

my own position is that parents don't have and should not have rights, what they have is responsibilities that are to be defined in the context of the rights of the child. this is a next step from a "best interests of the child" policy to a "the kids have fucking rights" policy. i have a consistency in perspectives that the rights issues in all scenarios belong to the children and never belong to the parents. 

now, older kids (say older than 10) that can make that choice should be allowed to, if they opt to. some kids even know they're gay at that age, or end up without parents because they're gay. that is a special situation, gay people adopting gay kids, that allows for the child to consent and that actually makes sense.

it's placing newborns with gay adults that is making a choice on behalf of these kids that the placement agencies do not have the right to make and should not be making.

and, yes, being gay is a choice. the science is abundantly clear on the point. it's a complex choice, with voluntary and involuntary factors, but it's unambiguously and unquestionably a choice, and that choice should be respected, even if you think it's gross.

i don't usually call myself a liberal, but my position on the gays is right out of on liberty, which is a foundational text in canada, but doesn't tend to get much traction in the united states, where the issue is still defined by religion, which i was not raised in and don't care about. i am, nonetheless, expressing a viewpoint shared by a large plurality, or outright majority, of white northerners in the united states; it's a liberal or libertarian position, it's really not about accepting gay people into conservative society or letting them participate in conservative and religious institutions like marriage. however, because the issue only really exists politically in the south, they have warped and defined a narrative that really doesn't reflect how most people approach the issue.

most people think that the gays should be left alone so long as they aren't harming anybody, and that they're absolutely free to fuck however they choose and want, so long as it's consensual.