Quote:For decades, conservatives played nice, while the left insulted, ridiculed, and demonized them unilaterally.
Now that the right plays by the same rules, of course the pantywaist left can't take what they dish out.
Ofcourse! Alt right adherents like Shapiro and Syne are just getting back at the mean bullying leftists of the 70's by insulting transgender women some 50 years later. Makes perfect sense now and totally justifies it! How could we have doubted their pure and noble motives? lol
"Ben Shapiro, the conservative writer, prides himself on speaking bold truths to liberal power. His shtick goes something like this: Set up a speech in a progressive bastion, ideally a college campus full of coastal elites who have never left their bubble. Spar with snowflakes who are offended by something he says about race or gender and perhaps even believe he never should have been invited in the first place. Post the exchange on the internet and use it as proof that the cultural consensus is stacked dramatically against conservatives. As Mr. Shapiro has put it: “The left has run out of aggressors to target; instead, they’ve become the aggressors, self-righteous morality police dedicated to wiping out dissenting thought.”---- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/opini...apiro.html
(Sep 4, 2024 12:40 AM)C C Wrote: In addition to Buckley, Vidal also had some famous on-screen tiffs with other egos like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. During the '60s and '70s, The Dick Cavette Show was the go-to place for intellectual guests.
Wow! That was interesting but intense. Kind of creepy watching him picking his nails knowing that he stabbed his wife with a two-and-a-half inch blade that he used to clean his nails.
It bleeped out at the very end. What’s he saying about him speaking about a character in one of his books murdering his wife and a woman as a celebration of American manhood. He said something about the character being complex and that he’s not simply (what?) a woman or the other way, as well. Well, it’s possible to (what?) a woman another way, as well.
C CSep 4, 2024 04:27 AM (This post was last modified: Sep 4, 2024 05:57 AM by C C.)
(Sep 4, 2024 02:43 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Sep 4, 2024 12:40 AM)C C Wrote: In addition to Buckley, Vidal also had some famous on-screen tiffs with other egos like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. During the '60s and '70s, The Dick Cavette Show was the go-to place for intellectual guests.
Wow! That was interesting but intense. Kind of creepy watching him picking his nails knowing that he stabbed his wife with a two-and-a-half inch blade that he used to clean his nails.
It bleeped out at the very end. What’s he saying about him speaking about a character in one of his books murdering his wife and a woman as a celebration of American manhood. He said something about the character being complex and that he’s not simply (what?) a woman or the other way, as well. Well, it’s possible to (what?) a woman another way, as well.
For some reason, all this "violence and murder" revolving around Norman Mailer reminds me of Patricia Highsmith. Probably because I saw Ripley a few months ago, and then in turn was reminded of Hitchcock's film adaptation of her Strangers on a Train.
At any rate... Mailer is apparently referring to Stephen Rojack in his novel "An American Dream", which begins by Rojack strangling his wife.[1]
Arguably, the reason he describes Rojack as a "complex" character is because the latter is narcissistically modeled on Mailer's own view of himself in some ways (i.e., "savvy, tough-guy intellectual trying to mimic or follow in Hemingway's footsteps"). Yet, Mailer also pointed-out how Rojack was different from him.[2] Adding to that inferred similarity was indeed his own stabbing of Adele circa five years earlier.
Presumably in the jumble of words prior to that, after Vidal brings up: "I detest this violence in you. You have actually written that murder is never non-sexual"... Mailer means that Edmund Wilson was describing or interpreting Rojack "as a celebration of American manhood" in whatever it was that Wilson was replying to that was by Vladimir Nabokov (the guy who wrote "Lolita").
But even if we could discover what Wilson and Nabokov were specifically going on about circa that time in 1971, we don't want to delve any further because that's splintering off into a yet another historic literary squabble...
[1] An American Dream: In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner’s Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.
[2] Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction (excerpt): While not denying any of these similarities, Mailer responded by saying, "Rojack is still considerably different from me—he’s more elegant, more witty, more heroic, his physical strength is considerable, and at the same time he’s more corrupt than me. I wanted to create a man who was larger than myself yet somewhat less successful. That way, ideally, his psychic density, if I may use a private phrase, would be equal to mine—and so I could write from within his head with comfort.” The novel was controversial from the time it was announced and generated a huge number of sharply divided reviews in literary journals and the mainstream press. It was an immediate best seller and went through several printings in both hard and soft cover. It has been translated into several languages and except for one brief period has never gone out of print.
C CSep 4, 2024 05:19 PM (This post was last modified: Sep 4, 2024 05:20 PM by C C.)
Medical sexual transitions are a kind of precursor to transhumanism.
In the future, surgical and genetic technology will also be able to accommodate those suffering from species dysphoria. Thereby producing people who resemble and identify with felines, canines, swine, dinosaurs, etc -- even mythical creatures.
The acceptance throughout history of various forms of body modification (cranial deformation, lip and ear lobe plates, face tattoos, neck elongation, etc) indicates that the oncoming radical transformations may largely only garner initial reactions to weirdness, rather than outright and prolonged hostility. Eventually becoming as much a hipster or quasi-norm as pink hair and oodles of body piercing.
Eventually, transsexual folk will simply be lost in the crowd, in terms of any lingering controversy.
Although it's inevitable that various forms of transhumanism will win out, traditional humanity still has a survival instinct to preserve itself.
For instance, as voluntarily social-justice oriented as the 1960s Star Trek was, even it adhered to the right of baseline humans to prevent genetically engineered superbeings (Khan Noonien Singh and company), cyborgs, and robots from competing with and replacing them (all seemed forbidden by Earth or the Federation).
So there will be resistance to the fruit of transhumanism -- but from both a relativistic and neutral standpoint, how can the original humans be blamed for trying to thwart either their extinction or their massive depopulation? As futile as that resistance will ultimately be, the process of it still has to take place. Any manner of cooperation with the "new beings" (once they threaten to become the majority) will simply hasten and doubly ensure traditional humanity's end or collapse into a small and isolated reservation community.
Messy, in-between stages just have to take place and play out.
(Sep 4, 2024 04:27 AM)C C Wrote: At any rate... Mailer is apparently referring to Stephen Rojack in his novel "An American Dream", which begins by Rojack strangling his wife.
Damn! It’s always the white girls named Debbie.
…Rojack writes: “I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But what I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there…and I thrust against the door…and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts. I was floating. I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream.”
…What Rojack sees on the other side of the “door”—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they-self” within the “self”; he sees his freedom from Deborah who stands at the center of his Being. What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they”; what he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from early forces and constraints— and the authentic possibilities for the “self” that transcends its thrownness in this world. Rojack describes his “transcendence”—his freedom from his lostness in the “they”—in terms of illness leaving him; his “transcendence” feels like “floating”. Since Rojack has wrenched his “self” free from the “they” by killing Deborah, Rojack feels as he did on the balcony: groundless, free, as if he could “fly”. He tells us he was “as far into” himself as he “had ever been” and his “flesh seemed new,” since by freeing himself free from the “they,” he transcends his “thrownness” and frees himself to form his own basis for Being. Further, after he frees himself from Deborah, Rojack is progressively freed from his public roles as her husband, a t.v. personality, a professor, a psychologist, and a socialite.
…For Rojack, this evil on earth not only manifests itself in the form of an oppressive American culture, but is also manifest in the form of Deborah, the temptress, the embodiment of The Dream and its empty promise of happiness.
…Through Mailer’s recovery of the Adamic myth, Mailer presents Deborah as the American Eve who tempts Rojack with the promise of power, money, status, and fame; she tempts him with the promise of The Dream: “the road to President” (AAD 2). In doing so, Mailer associates Rojack’s temptation and his “fall” with his blind absorption in American culture and with the corruption of his “self” and his “soul,” a corruption Rojack associates with Deborah, who tempted him with a lie.80 This lie—of The American Dream—is the lie of the serpent: the apple does not transfer the infinite knowledge of God to Adam or Eve, nor does The Dream provide infinite opportunities and possibilities for the individual “self”; in fact, both corrupt those who believe the lie. Yet Rojack’s “loss of innocence” occurs when he comes to an awareness of the lie of The Dream and of his “failure” in life. Mailer and Rojack envision “innocence” as an existential “innocence,” which has a negative connotation: “innocence” suggests blind absorption in the social world, the covering-up and hiding of one’s “true” self. In existential and religious terms, after his “fall,” Rojack acquires knowledge of the evil within and of free will, and he comes face to face with his existential situation in life: he must choose his own basis for “Being”; he must choose whether his life will be lived for good or for evil. Mailer suggests through Rojack that Adam became aware of his own existential situation in life after eating the apple: Adam became aware of his freedom, his free-will, his ability to make choices for his own life. Mailer suggests the knowledge both Adam and Rojack acquire—of the evil within and of their freedom—is a loss of innocence that is necessary to become self-aware and to come to a heightened awareness of the world and of others.
Yeah, you lose the opportunities to claim insecurity, incel, misogyny, etc.. So you have to fall back to transphobic, even though she makes a very good point about the hypocrisy of bullying real women who don't like men appropriating their gender and them whining when someone appropriates your own. How do you square that circle?
And why is cultural appropriation a bad thing but gender appropriation is fine? Just wall to wall hypocrisy.
(Sep 5, 2024 03:00 AM)Syne Wrote: Yeah, you lose the opportunities to claim insecurity, incel, misogyny, etc.. So you have to fall back to transphobic, even though she makes a very good point about the hypocrisy of bullying real women who don't like men appropriating their gender and them whining when someone appropriates your own. How do you square that circle?
And why is cultural appropriation a bad thing but gender appropriation is fine? Just wall to wall hypocrisy.
I don’t think you’re an incel, but it sounds like the real question is whether you want meow greens or ruff greens.
(Sep 5, 2024 03:18 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I don’t think you’re an incel, but it sounds like the real question is whether you want meow greens or ruff greens.
Oh no, go right ahead. Sympathize more with MR, so you can explain to us why advocating curb stomping actual women is okay.