Archive for July, 2014

The True “Phobias” in “Transphobia”

Posted: July 24, 2014 by datechguy in culture
Tags: , ,

The 4th  Doctor : “You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”

Doctor Who:  The Face of Evil Episode Four

Stan:  I want you all to call me “Loretta”

Monty Python’s Life of Brian 1979

In the course of my reading yesterday I came across this piece at The Other McCain concerning the ongoing war between Radical feminists and Transgender activists.

I wish Brennan and her radical feminist allies could be strategic enough to realize that there is a huge majority of people who would be willing to support them on this one point — that “woman” is a biological category, not a “gender identity” — if only they realized how important this issue is. The fact that the people being targeted now are my ideological antagonists is not irrelevant to my concern. If hardcore feminists can be targeted this way, what do you think is going to happen when the Tranny Totalitarians target conservatives?

While I find the fight between this em “interesting” groups of people quite amusing there was a rather clarifying moment within this post.    This was a tweet from a “transgender” person by the name of Sophia Banks and a response by a person who goes under “SugarPuss”  that neatly encapsulates the actual reality here:

Actually, umm, no. pic.twitter.com/ovvD0pQ2BJ

— Sugarpuss (@SugarpussFTW) July 18, 2014

Now before we comment on this tweet there is one thing that needs to be clarified. There is, in fact, a tiny amount of people who are  born with the sexual organs of both sexes and or an abnormal production of hormones.  If a person is in such a situation one should respect whatever decision said person makes at the age of decision in terms of choosing to define oneself as either (or no) sex. None of what follows applies to a person with said medical condition.

Now back to that tweets, The bottom line is with the exception I just noted above there is a simple fact that can not be disputed:

Women do not have penises.

Or as Nursie once explained in Black Adder Series 2

Women do not have penises, Women have never had penises and baring an incredible advance in genetic modification and manipulation or transplant surgery women never will have penises any more than men will have wombs.

Now there are a statistically insignificant amount of men and women who have for whatever reason chosen to have their bodies physically altered, via surgery and or hormone treatments to resemble the opposite sex and who have chosen to live as such. The recognized term used for such a person is “Transgender”. In some countries such alteration is recognized by law, however this doesn’t change the actual reality any more than laws claiming a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s under sharia describes an actual mathematical ratio of eyewitness validity.

Now if that tweet said “Transgender woman” rather than simply “woman” I would have no problem with it as it acknowledges the objective reality of a person choosing to physically or chemically altering themselves in a way recognized by law. Nor do I have a problem with a person such as Sophia Banks choosing to live as a woman, function as a woman etc etc etc. Whatever my opinion of the wisdom or sanity of such a decision it’s not my life and therefore not my business. Nor would I have a problem is a person meeting “Sophia” chooses to use female pronouns in discussion, particularly if they had no acquaintance with Sophia before the alternation. Two of the three “transgender” people I know I only met after their “transformation” therefore I find it convenient to use feminine pronouns particularly if they do not wish their previous status disclosed.

However a line is crossed from amused disinterest line to outright defiance if any attempt is made to compel me to acknowledge this delusion as “fact” or if one wishes to force such an acknowledgement by law. At that point this goes from a delusion that only harms the deluded to an attempt to impose a blatant falsehood as truth which is wrong. A great parallel to this would be the group of “catholic” women who ordain themselves & others as catholic “priests”. It’s one thing for them to live this delusion, it’s quite another if they demand the actual Catholic Church to recognize the validity of their make-believe orders.

Or think of the character of Teddy Brewster in the Movie Arsenic & Old Lace.

 As long as Teddy is simply blowing his bugle and just talking to neighbors his delusion is not a problem or at most a minor annoyance, but the moment he demands secret service protection as an Ex President and insists on attending international conferences being acknowledged as Theodore Roosevelt and takes legal action to secure and compel it, then one would be compelled to remind him of objective reality.

And that brings us to this tweet I put out in response to Stacy’s post that caused so much fuss yesterday. 

Not our biz if @sophiaphotos wants to take hormones to play Gidget. That chances if he wants to compel us to play by law @rsmccain #tcot #p2 — Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) July 23, 2014

(note typo in tweet should have said “changes” rather than “chances”)

I’ve tweeted a lot over the years and I’ve never seen more uproar and quicker response from any tweet I’ve ever sent out and believe me I’ve sent out some provocative tweets in my time.

The responses I got varied from the simple vulgar expletive:

Fuck You @DaTechGuyblog @rsmccain

— Sophia Banks (@sophiaphotos) July 23, 2014

to tweets calling me “transphobic”:

@DaTechGuyblog Uh huh, ask me the same question I asked you, clever. I’m literally just calling you out on your transphobia. — MicJPM (@Mic_jpm) July 23, 2014

to those suggesting I should be removed from the radio:

@sophiaphotos @DaTechGuyblog @rsmccain usually radio guys get booted for talking like that – with enough complaints

— #AnyoneBUTFord2014 (@itsgottobegood) July 23, 2014

I found it all quite amusing and returned tweets for a bit until actual “life” trumped my amusement but as of this writing angry responses continue to enter my timeline. I’m not inclined to block them because I’m a first amendment guy & I generally don’t block an account unless it’s a phony troll one. Contrary to their totalitarian impulses crazy uncles/aunts have the right to their opinion just as I have and I further am confident in the wisdom of my followers.

While flogging this reaction might be good for traffic & DaTipJar there is a more interesting phenom to note in term of both psychology & the net that I’d like to discuss.

Five years ago (have I really been doing this that long?) I wrote a piece called “The Empowerment of Crazy Uncles” where I talked about how the internet empowers the 1% of people who are, shall we say reality challenged.

The problem is with the internet and social networking and the like that crazy 1% or 1/10 of one percent is suddenly empowered. Instead of the crazy uncle at the family gathering that you can ignore, suddenly he has 1000 friends that he can text to rebut and counter rebut all night. He is affirmed and empowered and boy is he motivated, because now there are thousands of people telling him he’s been right all along and is MUCH smarter than everyone thought.

300,000-3,000,000 crazy uncles as individuals isn’t a big deal, but get them all writing e-mails or making phone calls and most importantly AFFIRMING themselves and suddenly you have a potent economic and or political force. Suddenly there is a huge market for a book or 10,000 people willing to pay $20 for a DVD. That’s a fair amount of change and a person can make a good living off of it.

While the net empowers these crazy uncles there is one limiting effect upon them. While they make up a considerable niche market and an excellent activist base in reality they are a rounding error when compared to the actual population. That means if you have constructed your psychological identity based entirely on an illusion and have spent thousands of dollars and years of your time reinforcing said illusion via  surgical & chemical alteration the one thing you dread above all else is the person who,  without fear, is willing to deny your illusion , to pull back the curtain of the Wizard, or point to the procession and say “but the Emperor has nothing on!”

And if such a person is in any way a public person that might encourage others to do the same the carefully built lie that is one’s life becomes as fragile as a block of flats put up by hypnosis:

You want to talk phobia THAT’s phobia.

But it’s not just those deluded and fearful of reality who are endangered, it’s the people who make their living supporting and enabling such delusions. The expensive treatments, the bestselling books, the political machines who can count on shock troops, the ability to exploit these people financially & politically for their own gain is never more in danger than when people are willing to stand up and bluntly say the truth. And the truth is this:

When your identity & belief system in your life can be summed up neatly in a 3 minute gag from a Monty Python movie.

Then it’s likely a wise move to re-examine that system closely.

It’s one thing to lose a cherished delusion, it’s quite another to lose the gravy train that those people illusions finance.  That demands a loud, immediate and even a totalitarian response. That’s the real fear on display for the world to see here, if they did not have this fear they would have ignored me as just some guy on twitter to block.

Two things in closing: None of this nonsense removes the inherent dignity owed a person by virtue of humanity. Furthermore said person remains a child of God and thus the proper subject for prayer as required.  Those are the rules.

If one’s goal is to intimidate and silence that last thing you want to see is this:

The amusing & irrational tweets from those outraged by my homage to reality will be the subject of my lead post tomorow. @rsmccain #tcot #p2 — Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) July 24, 2014

retweeted by Instapundit

heh

As a wise man once said:  ” Heh, indeed.”   *

Enfield Rifles, Israeli Tanks & Palestinian lies

Posted: July 23, 2014 by datechguy in Israel, middle east
Tags: , , ,

Government advocate: One thousand five hundred and sixteen casualties with one thousand six hundred and fifty bullets.
Gen. Dyer: My intention was to inflict a lesson that would have an impact throughout all India.

Gandhi 1982

Monday Morning on Special Report with Brett Baier a representative of the Palestinians claimed in US television that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians.

If you are ignorant enough you can look at the 500 dead (as of this writing) in Gaza you might fall for this line, but I’d like to introduce you to a witness who can without question prove the falsehood of this claim: The late General Reginald Dwyer.

95 years ago on April 13th 1919 General Dwyer led a contingent of about 90 men to Jallianwala Bagh where there was a large crowd of Indians some for protest and some for a local fair.

After deploying 50 of his men armed with bolt action Lee Enfield Rifles (First introduced in 1895) he opened fire on the crowd.  After expending aprox 1650 rounds his troops managed to inflict over 1500 casualties on the crowd with between 379 & 1000 dead depending on whose figures you believe.

Dyer never for one moment denied that he was deliberately targeting unarmed civilians, in fact Dyer actually had armored cars armed with machine guns but he was unable to bring them to bear. At the official inquiry he bluntly stated publicly that had he been able to deploy them he would have used them.

The scene was vividly portrayed in the 1982 movie Gandhi

This event is known as the Amritsar or the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.  It was a key moment in the Indian Independence movement.

What does this have to do with Gaza? Consider.

General Dwyer had 50 armed men, using 19th century bolt-action rifles and in only 15 minutes of deliberately targeting a civilian population inflicted 1500 casualties.

Israel has called up 40,000 men, they have deployed, jets, heavy artillery, tanks and all the weapons that a modern experienced 21st century army has at its disposal. For five days (as of this writing on Monday night) they have been fighting directly in Gaza and for several days before this, Israel was launching air and artillery strikes on Gaza.

Furthermore they are operating in an area where 1.8 million people live in an area of 139 square miles. A density of over 13,000 people per square mile.

So consider, if we are to believe the Arabs who are claiming on twitter, Facebook , in the Arab media and in front of every western camera that is put in front of them that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians since day 1 , we have to conclude that the Israeli Army and Air Force, given a full week, are less efficient killers than 50 British soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles, introduced when Grover Cleveland was President of the United States, were in 15 minutes.

General Dyer, the dead of Amritsar and simple logic call such claims a nonsensical lie.

If however you still maintain the Palestinian/Arab line for anything other than political or social reasons I suggest installing a high quality e-mail filter because hundreds of Nigerian e-mail scammers are simply dying to meet you.

Disproving the “Catholics kept the Bible from the People” lie in one exercise

Posted: July 19, 2014 by datechguy in catholic
Tags: ,

One of the most common pieces of idiocy I hear over and over on the net is the idea that there was some kind of grand conspiracy of the Catholic Church to keep the Bible out of the hands of the masses that was only foiled with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg. This idiotic tweet is standard:

@DaTechGuyblog @JasonReinhardt7 @legioviferrata 2 finish WHO would dare keep Bible secret & persecute people who read it 4 millennia Any1?

— CassTete (@CassTete1) July 19, 2014

The amount of historical ignorance it takes to make such a claim is so astounding that one is shocked that a person would be willing to make it in public, but since people know so little of history let me suggest a simple experiment to illustrate the absurdity of it all.

The next time someone tells you this tripe, ask them to do the following.

1. Sit yourself down in front of their  laptop and open up your bible.

2. Starting from Genesis start typing the entire thing out including verse numbers

The new Testament contains 138,020 words in 7956 verses. As you are including the verse numbers that’s an extra word for every say 3 verses so add 2652 words for a total of 140,682.

Now because a person making such a claim is likely a protestant we’ll make the old testament easy by doing what Martin Luther did and lop off the books he didn’t like leaving you 602,585. To make things easier we’ll even excuse you from the verse numbers.

That’s a total of 743,267 words.

A professional typist using a standard keyboard averages between 50-80 words a minute. Taking the low end of 50 words a minute  that means it would take you 14,867.34 minutes to type out the whole thing.

As there are 1440 minutes in the day that means it would take you 10.324 days of 24/7 typing to copy an entire bible assuming you were able to maintain that 50 words per minute the entire time without food, drink or rest

Let’s be kind and assume you need to sleep and be generous and give you say 6 hours a night to sleep. Let’s furthermore allow you a full two hours to eat two to three meals, take a bathroom break and dress So instead of working 24/7 you are working a 16 hour day getting up at 5 to type and hitting the sack at 11 PM with two hours during the day for other things. That would make give you about 960 minutes a day to devote to typing the bible finishing in 15.48 days at that steady 50 Word per minute rate throughout without  error (96% correct simply won’t do)

Ok now lets take away your laptop and replace it with a manual typewriter without an auto correct. How much time would the loading of paper add? The correction of errors. The centering etc? Let’s be EXTREMELY generous and say it would only add 10% to your total time so now we’re up to 17 days to copy a Protestant bible working 16 hours a day seven days a week.

Now lose the typewriter and write it by hand. According to Keller in 1988 An average person can copy text by hand at a rate of 22 words per minutes and now you are dealing with getting pens, starting pages over if you make a mistake etc.  Just how long would it take to hand write a bible?  Well a retired fellow by the name of Phillip Patterson managed to do it in 4 years.

Four years after he began his project to write out every word of the Bible, Phillip Patterson penned the very last lines Saturday at an upstate New York church.“Every single curly-q, every single loop, it was all worth it,” said Patterson, 63, moments after inking the final two verses of the King James Bible. “I’m really going to miss this writing.”

It took Patterson just a few minutes to copy the final lines of the Book of Revelation before a crowd of about 125 people at St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church in Spencertown. He ended the ceremony by saying “Amen.”

But lets assume you are not a retired AIDS patient and much healthier than Mr. Patterson, Moreover we are working uninterrupted for our 16 hours a day every day unlike Keller who devoted a mere 14 hours a day on occasion to work on it.

I’ll wager we can cut that four years down to a single year easy.

Now let’s replace our Pen with a fountain pen.  You have to constantly refill your pen and get your bottled ink, but at least it gives your fingers a rest. Plus you’re going to have to worry about ink stains & accidents. How many days would that add to the project?  Less than 10% say a month or more?

Now replace that fountain pen with a quill, now you have to sharpen that quill and be much more careful since it’s easier to make a mistake as there is no normal ink flow. Plus there is a danger of puncturing the paper with the point. Where do you think we are now? 14 months? 15?

Now cut off your electricity. You can now only write during time of full sunlight or by candlelight.

Suddenly you’re limited to an average of 12 hours a day to work, but that’s OK because now you have 4 hours to use to actually live and rest, but that takes a full 25% off your writing time. We are now up to 18 months to copy that bible. And you’re pretty much doing it the way a medieval monk used to do so, except your glasses are likely much better so you aren’t straining as much as you write.

But if we want to do what the monk did there are two things we can’t ignore..

#1. Being a monk you are observing the sabbath. So you are now losing one day in seven that gets you up to 21 months to finish that book.

#2 What about calligraphy? Most bibles were not written in just plain you are now adding flourishes and fancy lettering.  This is the word of God not some dimestore novel we’re talking about.

Bottom line you are talking nearly 2 years of manual labor working 12 hour days six days a week to produce a single bible.

So are you really going to stand there and tell me that there was a vast Catholic conspiracy to keep Bibles away from the general public when it took two full man years of manual labor to produce a single copy?

Given the amount of man hours it’s a wonder that any Bibles were produced at all and it speaks to the dedication and the faith of both the Catholic Church and the monks at the time that there were bibles even for the clergy let alone for anyone else.

And we haven’t even taken into account the lack of literacy among people living at subsistence level or the cost of such a book. (At $2 an hour 12 hours a day 6 days a week no overtime that $7488 in today’s money not counting materials. Tell me how many $7500 items do you have in YOUR house)?

So the next time some fool tries to tell you of the grand Catholic conspiracy of millennia to keep scripture out of the hands of the people give them this post or tell them to put their fingers where their mouths are.

The Palestinians Losing the Culture War in Israel

Posted: July 16, 2014 by datechguy in Israel, middle east
Tags:

We’ve briefly talked about the revenge killing of Muhammad Abu Khdei who was murdered in response to the kidnapping and slaying of three Israeli teens, but what we haven’t talked about is the cultural significance in this.

I think it’s the sign of a cultural turn and one that our Palestinian friends should see as a huge warning sign.

One of the constant lies of Palestinian/arab propaganda is the idea of Jewish “ethnic cleansing” or Apartheid we’ve demolished this myth several times here but we never really talked about why it’s false.

Israel certainly has the power, the ability and the weaponry to wipe the Palestinians off the face of the earth. If the Jewish state choose, it could say half a mile into Gaza, totally destroy the existing housing there, create a kill zone and simply move the border accordingly. The arabs couldn’t stop them and would be subject to massive slaughter if they tried. They are in the position to take and displace the arabs en masse whenever they want. If they wanted to rebuild the temple, the dome of the rock would be gone and no arab army would react because to do so would invite slaughter.

So why doesn’t Israel do these things?

The answer is pretty simple, the western values that Israel has precludes those things but it’s more than that.

Israel was founded in the late 40′s and fought a full-scale war in the 40′s, 50′s 60′s and 70′s and 80′s to keep it. That generation goal was always the security of the Jewish state, simply to be left alone.

But time passes and that generation is dying.

Now Israel has a population where more than half of their people were born after the six-day war. Jerusalem and the west bank have been a part of Israel all their lives. They have not had to fight a full-scale war but have endorsed rocket & terror attacks regularly.

While the older generation might have accepted this as the price of the return to their ancient lands the younger generation is likely to have none of it. They did not flee from arab lands to Israel as their parents or grandparents did and do not have the memory of a time when they might have had friendly, or at least not hostile arab neighbors.

All they know is they are trying to live their lives and the Arabs are tying to kill them while they do so to make up for a war they lost and their failure to destroy them.

Furthermore they see those same arabs celebrating their deaths and they unlike the west, know what the Arabs are saying in arabic and know exactly what the Palestinians are being taught and what their goals really are. The best symbol of this?

Palestinian rioters in the Arab-Israeli town of Shuafat outside Jerusalem have completely destroyed a new light rail system built by Israel to improve travel in the city and connect it to other towns.

And that message has not been lost on those who saw it.

The total destruction of the modern light rail—which was seen as a symbol of coexistence between Israeli and Arab areas of Jerusalem—is evidence of mounting frustration among Israeli Arabs, who have increasingly clashed with Israeli police as tensions reach a boiling point following the murders.

“These are Arab-Israelis in Jerusalem, and they destroyed a multi-million dollar project that connected them to the rest of the city,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). “This is apartheid, self imposed.”.

That leads to changing attitudes to a new generation of Israeli warriors and not one that bodes well for the Arabs:

Tamir Lion, an anthropologist who studies youth, said he was troubled by the changing attitudes among Israel’s young people. For many years, Mr. Lion interviewed soldiers about why they chose to enter combat units. “The answers,” he said on Israel Radio, “were always about the challenge, to show I could make it, the prestige involved.”

That began to change in 2000, he said. “I started to get answers — not a lot, but some — like: ‘To kill Arabs.’ The first time I heard it, it was at the time of the large terror attacks, and since then it has not stopped.”

A generation has grown up in a period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with suicide bombs and military incursions, rocket fire and airstrikes. Young people on both sides may think about the other more as an enemy than as a neighbor.

Mr. Lion, head of research at the Ethos Institute, said he was troubled. “Today I can say, and everyone who works with youth will say it, Jewish youth in Israel hate Arabs without connection to their parents or their own party affiliation and their own political opinions.”

This represents a serious miscalculation for the arabs and their allies:

Those who blamed Israel for radicalizing Palestinian youth could do so freely because they never thought Israeli youth could be radicalized in sufficient numbers to expose their hypocrisy. They might now be wondering if they were wrong.

The 20 something who joined the Israeli army in 2000 is now the 30 something vet and or junior or middle officer in 10 more years they will be the General in charge of striking back and it 20 more years they will be the prime minister who says “enough”. Moreover that population will be augmented by Jews who have fled Islamic persecution in Europe.

While Seth Mandel doesn’t think Israeli youth may be resentful of the Palestinians who have tried to kill them I’m betting they not only resent it, but are getting damn tired of it and in a very few years those youth will be in government and will not be inclined to show restraint.

For decades the Arabs have wanted to exterminate the Jews but have not had the power, during that same time the Jews had the power to exterminate the Arabs but did not have the will or desire.

I predict that in a generation the Arabs will still not have the power to exterminate the jews but the jews will not only still have that power, but might also have the will to do it.

If I were the arabs I’d make a deal and make it NOW while the 1948 generation is still alive because any deal they will get once they’re gone will come from the barrel of a gun.

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