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author

Will be offline for a few days. Details when I get back.

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A few years ago when I was radicalised against the horror of conservative perspectives, right-wing trolls often posted 'liberalism is a mental illness'. I have drifted from outrage to broad agreement. It's interesting to notice how much better I feel in myself after personal recovery.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

It gets clearer by the year. Sad, really. I don’t know if Halperin will prove right in his prediction, but he may.

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-rubin-report/trump-2669732851

My take is: When Trump doesn’t do any of the things they fear, it’s likely to only make the left’s mental health burden worse.

They are raging in a void.

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"They are raging in a void"

Of course! After all, wokism is their religion. It's their identity. It will never fill that deep, dark, void. They will always find a grievance and play the victim. They never stopped doing so under the despicable Brandon Regime.

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Your comment reminds me of this exchange in “Tombstone”:

Wyatt Earp:

What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?

Doc Holliday:
A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of himself. And he can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.

Wyatt Earp:
What does he want?

Doc Holliday:
Revenge.

Wyatt Earp:
For what?

Doc Holliday:
Bein' born.

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John, Tombstone is still on my all-time Top Ten favorite movie list. Thanks for sharing the dialogue of that scene. It's so profound and strikes deep.

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Val Kilmer’s performance is my favorite, e.g.:

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson:

Why do you do it?

Doc Holliday:

Wyatt Earp is my friend.

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson:

Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.

Doc Holliday:

I don't.

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If you haven't seen the documentary, "Val", you should watch it. It's sad, but it takes you through Val Kilmer's life in his own words.

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It reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's short story, frequently considered the best short story of the twentieth century, "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

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They want to be heroes; they just don't want to do hero stuff.

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They've got a God sized hole in their hearts that only big government can fill.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

They don't see that he did anything good the last time he was president. Why do you believe they would see it/recognize it now?

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

I’m old enough to notice an odd psychosocial rule in play: the more our identity-politics left gets exactly what it wants in terms of policy and culture, the more frantic and extreme it becomes.

There are different ways to interpret this. But part of it is surely that these people can only feel alive if they can convince themselves they’re oppressed. Since they’re clearly not oppressed, but now in fact dominant, the amount of psychic energy needed to maintain the victim LARP is enormous. And this is what’s making them sick. To give up the LARP is to admit that their whole identity struggle is fake and thus life is meaningless. But to maintain the LARP only grows more exhausting by the year. And they grow more unhinged.

How can one do anything “good” for such a tribe?

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author

If Harris had won, we would have had the spectacle of watching our first professional victim-leader. "Excuse me, I'm speaking." The oppressed leader of the free world.

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Nov 11Liked by Chris Bray

hilarious

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Excellent analysis. I think you hit that nail right on the head. Unfortunately that leaves little room for these people to ever lead an emotionally and mentally healthy life which is really kind of sad

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Makes a lot of sense, except the part where you say they're dominant. Culturally, they never have been. Politically, yes, but hopefully we'll not see that again in my lifetime.

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I get your point, and it's an encouraging one. Culturally, they are not the *majority*, as this election proved.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

To me, it has a Biblical quality: a generation or group is so twisted, so corrupt, God passes it by.

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The trouble is that this crap has been going on for 100 years since Lenin established the Comintern to export Marxism to the world.

Society could really use an instance of divine intervention to mark the need For a course correction. I kind of feel like society’s been on an “interstate with no road signs” re: moral choices. Yeah, yeah, there’s the Bible, but I think people would have benefited from some fireballs into decadent 1920s Weimar Berlin, for instance.

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Yeah, yeah, there's the Bible for sure and I rather think that God is apparently absent because He has given the masses over to their own gods and bullish focus on themselves and their ways and as a result many are in His Abandonment Judgement. (OK...this is what you wanted...you got it. I'm out of here till you come to your senses, if you do that is).

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Spot on, John!

You hit the nail on the head. America ended up where we are today as a result of a massive, ingenious Comintern covert influence operation:

Covert Influence Created Political Correctness

The hate-America-first payload, designed by the Comintern's master of covert influence, Willi Muenzenberg, was simple and direct:

You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.

You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.

You believe in open-mindedness.

You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country.

You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman.

You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.

You believe in peace.

You yearn for international understanding.

You hate fascism.

You think the capitalist system is corrupt.

http://willingaccomplices.com/covert_influence_created_political_correctness

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Yeah, I have wished the same. But the Bible tells us that we must walk by faith, not by sight. Still, wonderful things do happen sometimes.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

“the more our identity-politics left gets exactly what it wants in terms of policy and culture, the more frantic and extreme it becomes”

A corollary to your analysis is that liberalism has become a foot race in which worthiness is bestowed SOLELY based how far and quickly you can advance the dogma into new areas or invent new performative standards the followers must pass to remain in good standing. It is a pseudo evangelical religion designed to extract its members’ lifeblood.

Merely adopting liberalism and living by the then extant principles is to become your fellow adherents’ enemy as the cult’s zeitgeist moves on 5 minutes later.

Thus the frantic and extreme characteristics you’ve observed.

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Excellent summation.

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The only good you can do for this tribe is to disincentivize their self-destructive behavior by ignoring their tantrum.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10

But there are those who subsidize it (or create it) for financial gain, e.g., the Stryker family (medical equipment), Big Pharma and the Pritzker family. Ignoring such things allows them to metastasize.

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I’m not saying you ignore the actions. Just the tantrum.

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Some people just can't win gracefully.

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When individual leftists can disconnect from their internet hive mind, they can potentially see it, hence the "red pill". There were many former "never Trumpers" who voted for him in this election from all demographics and walks of life.

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I sorta agree with your initial point, that some can become "red pilled," however, I believe the "never Trumpers" were not "red pilled." I believe their party put someone so intolerable in front of them to vote for, that they just couldn't. These people will never see any good he'll do and go right back to the garbage they've been voting for their entire lives.

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Some, sure, but not all. I was a "never Trumper" who was red pilled in 2022 over the trans kid stuff, and came out a full-fledged Trump supporter, so I know it's possible.

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I really wish it was a true void; things would be quiet.

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Indeed. Its a bit like Bishop Berkeley's question about the tree falling where no one hears, does it make a sound? I think what really bothers the void screamers is that no one is listening. They really become unhinged when the screaming gets one of two responses: Ridicule (memes mostly) or no response at all.

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Updated version- if a narcissist screams into the void, does she make a sound?

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Of course the fact that many (most?) of America's mental health professionals suffer from TDS themselves doesn't help

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they've never been a very healthy lot

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Darwin at work.

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I used to see that being said in the 90s often. I shrugged it off. I've come around to it as well. Except it's not liberalism. Liberalism has long been dead. Like, after WWI dead.

This is something else. They say they're 'liberals' but they're not. I'm not even sure they're progressives after listening to Dore the last couple of years.

They're just plain illiberal. And mentally ill.

And this is an issue across the West. Look at all 'far left' writers and politicians be they in Germany, UK, Australia (yeh yeh I put them in the West sue me), Ireland, Scotland (probably the Kings of them all), Canada etc. All are tedious hysterical illiberal conformists.

That's my generalized comment of the morning. I'll have more this afternoon.

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It's the logical, psychic dead-end of those that took seriously the mantra "the personal is the political" when it replaced critical thinking in Western universities.

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I have maintained for decades that the poor benighted souls we describe as "liberals", "leftists", or "progressives" are afflicted with a particularly loathsome mental illness.

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“Afflicted” is an exceptionally charitable description for something that is avoidable with a little logical thinking.

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True, but consider the probability that the unfortunates so affected are in any way capable of "a little logical thinking". Or for that matter, thinking at all.

It is painfully obvious that many of the leftists, one can't help but notice, in their ranting from their soapboxes, (or whatever bully pulpits some command), are either unable, or unwilling. to think. They seem to share an irritating tendency to scream leftist talking points - the same talking points - over and over and over again. An apparent substitute for actually thinking.

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All true. I think that “feelings” in political policy making is like crack cocaine – 1 hit and you’re hooked. And after years and years, it’s unrecoverable. I just looked up Nicole Wallace’s bio in Wikipedia to see what was the triggering event for her mind virus, but oddly there’s no mention of her violent shift to the Left. Perhaps she’s unaware of it, much like you’re supposedly unaware of the bending of space-time as you enter a black hole.

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Good insight, but what made them that way?

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Good question. I can only guess it's a careful melange of ignorance, miseducation, and having been heavily propagandized by public institutions. They were taught "progressive" thinking is the only thinking. Funny part about that is it's neither "progressive" and it removed critical thinking from the equation. Nor can we under estimate we appear to have a mental illness crisis. Many people are on some sort of psyche drug and that only serves to make people more anxious and hysterical.

One may say, fine, but how do we know it's effecting just "progressives"? HAVE YOU SEEN THE MEMES?

That's my own generalized and perhaps simplistic take.

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founding

Well Mike nature and reality bat last.

Once reality slaps them upside the head they'll feel like impotent caged animals. The tantrums will get worse as they discover the days of pushing people around without any push-back are over.

Maybe they'll find comfort sniffing each other's queermones now that the soy boys have finally synced their ovulation with all the AWFLS?

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I've wondered if what we are seeing is really the reaction of a spoiled child who has finally heard the word "no", or had his latest indulgence request refused.

Over the past 2 decades, I would venture to say that progs have gotten at least 95% of what they have asked for.

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founding

Yes. And they're running in front of you like a toddler making sure you see them holding their breath.

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Hahahaha 🤣 Ryan you killed it ❤️

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founding

Maybe someone should be TRANSparent with them and let them know they're the losers of social darwinism?

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Cue Camille Paglia:

Weak men result in angry, bitter women.

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always the man's fault

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That isn’t her view — Paglia is a supporter of men being men. I should have posted the link to her video. She’s actually putting the blame on our feminized culture.

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“… nature and reality bat last.”

Great line. Hope you don’t mind if I steal it!👍

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founding

All yours. Any of it

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Wait until the ‘mass’ deportations start - the crazy will become bat sh*t crazy.

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The last decade will become known to historians as "The Great Synchronization"

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Nov 10·edited Nov 12Liked by Chris Bray

I was in high school in 1970 in a suburb of Cleveland when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire for the umpteeth time and burned a wooden bridge. The environmentalists really took off after that. Some of my classmates went mentally/emotionally far beyond just cleaning up the river (which was killing Lake Erie) into all sorts of intrusive ideas (although I didn’t hear pizza ovens mentioned).

A second major event was the liberal opposition to the Viet Nam war NOT because it was corrupt (defending access to rubber plantations) or ineffective, but because peace is self-achieving because it’s “nicer.” This metastasized into the unilateral nuclear disarmament movement.

It was then (1970) that I identified liberalism as a mental disorder. Liberals exist in an altered state of reality. Policies will work simply because Liberals need them to. It is possible to pull the plug from a bath tub and have only the front half drain because that’s the plan. When that doesn’t happen, they blame the water and gravity.

In the 54 yrs since my epiphany, the only change in liberalism has been its metastasis from attacking societal facts (e.g., pollution) to attacking people for their cultural beliefs and eventually, for their immutable characteristics.

The altered-state psychosis deepens.

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You were obviously more astute than I was. I allowed myself to be torn in two for too many years before finally seeing the light.

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No, not more astute. Just alive when obvious events were taking place from which to learn.

My entire family supported the Iraq war. My eldest sister unretired and deployed in 2003 to Baghdad as a civilian working for the Army.

She was killed by an insurgent missile in 2005, and STILL we supported the Administration and the war. It has only been in the last few years we’ve come to realize the Bushes are an adjunct of the Neocon movement that doesn’t care if we win or lose as long as we keep buying their munitions. After the self-induced failure in Viet Nam, I was REALLY ready for the U.S. to kick some ass, and it took (1) a few thousand dead to realize we can’t nation build and (2) neocon opposition to Trump to realize they’re war profiteers.

“Astute” is not an adjective I’d apply to myself.

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Rush Limbaugh, far from being a “right wing troll” is the first guy that explained that liberalism IS a mental illness. Where have you been for the past 35 years?

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I think credit for "liberalism is a mental disorder" goes to Michael Savage. Rush certainly believed that, too.

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Michael Savage authored a book by that title in the early 2000s. May have coined the phrase as well.

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I suspect the perception of liberalism as a mental illness predates Rush by decades. I recall discussions of leftism, or communism, as a particularly ugly form of insanity at late night skull sessions in my university days. Sixty years ago!

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it really is true. i've posted this link before, but toby rogers nailed it https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/foucaults-crooked-smile

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THESE THEM THEY really live in an alternate reality where they think it’s ok to mutilate children, no vetting immigration with perks (free airplane rides money housing) … wear face diapers while hiking , (actually the beaches, playgrounds were closed) and keep alternate meds from people ( ivermectin) and isolate love ones in the hospital and nursing homes while they died alone . … maybe these them they find Kamala JOY in all this bullshit . They are narcissistic bullies who can’t see past their own noses. Pssstt … And for Pete sake the cost of living is Rediculous .

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They are the epitome of hypocrisy and pure projection. Narcissistic bully’s is an understatement.

Who reads that trash rag? Officially, dead!

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So many trash rags and journalists are dead ☠️

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And so are the healthcare professionals who didn’t do the right thing

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Correction: "journalists."

Them being dead would be a blessing.

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👀 Look at the money 💰 these clowns 🤡 wasted during Kamala joy campaign. https://www.megynkelly.com/2024/11/08/did-the-harris-walz-campaign-end-up-20-million-in-debt-after-raising-over-1-billion/

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Yes. This is wonderful.

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^^^This!!^^^

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Unfortunately, this drivel works. I just lost a friend of 30 years. I had to "justify" my vote for Trump. Race to the bottom is right. We're racing back to grade school playground discussions.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Sad. I've lost some as well. Though in time I have come to understand they were never really there. It was a state of accommodation on my part. Narcissistic supplier.

Friendship, love, is not something conditioned upon one party submitting to the other party's mental orientation. Which is nice way of saying the alternate reality of satanic inversion that has enslaved their minds and spirits.

Going back in time perhaps the pattern of accommodation, kid gloves, tongue holding, self-censoring, and periodic punishments for failing to do so would reveal. Even if not, it was presumed, inevitable that failing in this perpetuity of submission would lead to the dead end.

The friends we lose are casualties of the left's war on reality itself. Just as the war on men (truth), which this post clearly indicates remains in full, was designed to cleave the fragile, the weak, those susceptible to the temptations of progress from the most essential human relationships.

Men from God, children from parents, wives from husbands. Families from clans. Clans from Nations. And then dropping all of it into to the fickle, tenuous, contentious, arbitrary, and fleeting scrum of want that is the death cult's insecure status hierarchy.

Everything is personal, everything is "political" to them. The only middle ground that has exited has been the surplus goodwill we produce, the credit bubble in the social capital of a people that has afforded them the luxury items of their various beliefs and beefs.

But those things are finite. Expensive to maintain. The tapestry of who we are is threadbare. And so we are entering the era in which reality is calling all debts. The reality now is that these people are dangerous. The cute banter of old is gone. We have burned through at least 3 generations of children under their yoke. The fullness of those costs yet to hit the table.

Our collective history of compromise and accommodation needs to come to an end. If we love them, what is left of them - or simply what God commands us to love, we have a duty to prosecute a restoration of the essential truths that their inverted system has destroyed.

This will require more from us. But at least those sacrifices will be to build something and not tossed into the purple-haired furnace of envy so we can just get through another Thanksgiving.

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In order to avoid losing relationships, I just don't talk about anything political with certain individuals. Requires constant policing of one's mind and words, resulting in fewer interactions. All very sad.

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With all that self censorship you can’t have meaningful relationships.

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This is so true and so heartbreaking

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Wow, so well said !

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I too lost a close friend of 30 years. That was over the administration’s persecution of J6 prisoners.

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A brainwashed friend of 40 years blocked me on facebook.

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I can argue no one loses a friend over politics. You lost an acquaintance.

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I'd call that a best lost friend.

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Conservative men cannot possibly hate women anything like as much as Jia Tolentino and the New Yorker hate men.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

I honestly think it's as simple as Tolentino never growing out of her teenage envy of girls like Melania. The stuff Tolentino and her ilk write are barely above the level of Mean Girls note-passing in high school.

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I was thinking similarly. It is the level of a bratty 13yr old, in The New Yorker. This is what passes for the adults in the room on the left.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

The noise you hear is Dorothy Parker spinning in her grave.

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maybe she just asked chatgpt to spit out an article in the voice of one of the girls in the movie "heathers"

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Yes. If you look at her photos, she is so obviously a Melania wannabe but for reasons of bone structure, can never be. There is an element of Canadian resentment of Americans there as well.

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As a Canadian, that's on target. The inferiority complex we have towards the US is a disgusting foundation upon which our so-called "national identity" is built. We are told many, *many* lies about the US in order to make us feel better about our mediocrity.

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These are the people that want to replace women with mentally deranged men in woman face, that have driven 25% of women in this country into mental illness so deep it requires medication, and that have murdered some 30 million baby girls since Roe V Wade.

They are the people who want to make pedophilia an acceptable identity, who want the borders open for all manner of violent criminal to stroll through, and who want to castrate and mutilate confused girls by telling them they are actually boys. Conservative men couldn’t possibly hate women as much as these people do.

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"this is...not just using women's biology like in prostitution, This is the pinnacle of objectification, we're going to take your biology, wear it as a costume and transfer this reproductive capacity you have to the tech sector and this is why women are being legally erased in language and law"

jennifer bilek speaks truth to power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k

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True. But they hate us legitimately. Unlike my hatred of them, which is merely hatred. Apparently, and I don’t recall doing this, but my memory is not as good as it once was, I mistreated women something awful 200 years ago.

I had a convo with a feminist nut case about this. But…I knew she believed in reincarnation. She had explained to me previously how she had been a warrior, a male one many times in the past and she brought that male warrior energy into this lifetime to fight male oppression. She was going on about men paying for past male sins was reasonable. So I said ‘but you were a male many times in past lives. You told me this. So what if I had been a female in all my last lives? Who should be paying for what? Maybe you should be paying me.’

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Lol. Some women (I have loved) treated me like I am the amalgamation of every evil thing any man has done anywhere ever.

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It takes a pretty warped mind to be able to write that article.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

I feel incredibly sad for the women who have been deluded by this mirage and will possibly wake up when the biological clock has run out of time. They will never know the possibilities of being a strong woman who partners with a strong man, of the unexpected joy of bearing children (or adopting them), of the enrichment of self-sacrifice. And they will never stare down at the hand that rocked the cradle, realizing the impact they possess on the rest of the world.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

This says it all. I understand because I married one of those strong women who decided that the mommy track was, in the end, much more important than the CEO track. Nothing I ever did in life was ever as important as what she accomplished in raising our children and getting them healthy after the medical-industrial complex did all it could to maim and eventually kill them. She taught me a lot not only about family, but also about how the world really works.

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She's one lucky gal.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

First, MFA Tolentino (or her New Yorker editors) don’t seem to understand the difference between *insure* and *ensure*. In the screenshot quote the test refers to “the blissful servitude of women” needing to be “insured”.

Does she mean Cletus needs to take out a policy, ‘case she runs off? Maybe I should call Cletus.

Second, I borrowed one of your “mood” photos:

https://claytestament.blogspot.com/2024/11/disappointed.html

Keep up the Inbox battering!

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Or an insurance policy for when she dies of overwork.

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Died in childbirth after her 14th birth.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

I'm just looking at the Great tits outside my window, competing with the Blue tits and the Jays (Swedish name for Jay translates to "nut-screamer") and the Wood-peckers and other little birds.

All of them pecking away at the fatballs I've put out for them. Peck-peck-peckitty-peck all day long.

I think the writers of the New Yorker ought to go outside and look at some Great tits too. They seem unwell, as if they have some malady of the soul.

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It's tough to have a bad day if you've seen some tits.

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🤬

😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣

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Especially great ones. Although to be honest they almost all are at least sort of great.

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Yes, so I’ve heard! There was a great song about showing tits!😂

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I used to be in a band with a few lower middle class working guys. We decided we needed a chick singer. So we got one. We had to agree, all four guys - NOBODY DOES THE CHICK SINGER. AGREED. Wr all agreed. She had spectacular breasts. Truly awesome. Our lead singer, very coarse guy, at his funeral about 50 bikers showed up. His funeral was held in a bar. One practice Kelly our ‘chick singer’ was wearing a wife beater tee shirt, no bra. It was really hot that night in our jam space. She was singing and sweating boobies moving under her tee. At one point Cliff says ‘why don’t you show us your tits? I mean come on we can see them moving around under that tee. Just show us your tits!’ We all jumped in and said ‘sheesh Cliff. Stop it. You’re being rude. Even the other working guys were offended. Kelly said ‘I show them to who I want to. No one can tell me who to show these to. And they are spectacular.’ Cliff goes on for a bit longer. We all step in. Cliff turns around to tune his guitar, really ticked off. Kelly, with Cliff’s back turned, lifts her tee shirt up proudly displaying them to all the rest of the band. Highlight of our week of course. But it was funny too. We all burst out laughing, along with Kelly. She puts her shirt down. Cliff spins around and says ‘this isn’t funny’. Which cracks us up more.

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At first I thought you were in the Grand Tetons. Still, it would be good for the writers of the New Yorker to get out there as well.

Also an example of a place name that needs to be purged.

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Those writers would probably die from histrionics if they knew some of the names of towns and villages in rural Sweden.

"Mensträsk" = Menstruation-swamp

"Pungpinan" = Tormented Scrotum

"Negerbyn" = Negro Village

The last one is especially fun. The name is several centuries old, from the time no-one in that area would ever had seen a real live African Negro. It was an old charcoal-makers' camp originally, and the charcoal-workers would be turned pitch black from the soot and coal dust they lived in 24/7 while working.

And until post-2005, Negro/Neger wasn't a slur in any way in Swedish; it was just a descriptor, like "big nose" or "freckled". Enter the "anti-racists". . . now. it's considered a slur. Effing idjits they are. Ain't no bigger racists than "anti"-racists.

Anyway. Place names - real ones, at that.

"Brittas Hål" = Bridget's Hole

"Ekorrmåla" = Painting Squirrels

"Mörkret" = The Darkness

"Andra Sidan" = The Other Side

"Malmö" = Ground-up Maiden

I could go all day, really, as some names dates back to pre-Christian days.

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author

For the record, I'm not asking how Tormented Scrotum got its name.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Oh well, it dates back to the early 1700s. Outside Stockholm (inside Stockholm today) there was a an Inn, the keeper of which was notorious for not letting people leave without paying, nor racking up a tab in any way.

The joke is, "pung" means both the scrotum and "small leather pouch" in Swedish, typically an old-fashioned money-pouch.

The Innkeeper would - in both ways! - torment the "pung" of any guest who was recalcitrant when it came to paying the bill.

The name stuck, and remains to this day as the name of the area where the Inn once was.

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‼️

From what I understand, Malmö has become strangely apt.

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It's a moslem-majority city now, has been for some time, so naturally things have turned to total crap, and the rest of Sweden has to prop them up to the tune of ca $800 000 000/year.

"They're not sending their best" is an apt summary, of what 50 years of immigration from the MENA and Africa has done to what was once a leading industrial city.

If you combine the fate of Detroit and SoCal on a smaller scale and replace cartels and gangs with islamic clans (and two gypsy crime families), you basically have it.

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Ooh sounds a lot like.....London (nicknamed londonistan), Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester......

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More species the wokesters will want to rename.

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That's already in the works:

https://americanornithology.org/american-ornithological-society-will-change-the-english-names-of-bird-species-named-after-people/

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” says president.

“The time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs,” says CEO.

"For example, in 2020, the AOS renamed a small prairie songbird found on the Great Plains to “Thick-billed Longspur.” The bird’s original name—honoring John P. McCown, an amateur naturalist who later became a general in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War—was perceived as a painful link to slavery and racism."

And if you want a migraine, scroll down on the linked page to read the comments from bird fanciers.

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The plant people are no different- trying referring to a particular plant by its original name of "Wandering Jew" and you'll be booted and blocked. It's ridiculous! A terrifying read is the fascism of the knitting and crochet world, it's unbelievable how nasty and self important these people are.

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Ridiculous. Possibly, it stems from an urge to "do something" because their basic emotional state is fear, and "doing something" no matter how deranged alleviates that fear?

Here, they've been renaming candy and snacks and such for over two decades now. Kinapuff (puffed rice covered in chocolate) renamed to Rispuff (Ricepuff). Negerboll/Negroball (a mix of oat flakes, fat, cacao, sugar and coffee rolled into pearl-sugar) - the names comes from the latin "negro", not the "race".

Finska pinnar - Finnish sticks, a dry biscuit eaten during a coffee break. Now, they're just sticks I guess.

But making 3' by 6' billboards depicting used tampons, pads and such a plastering the Subway stations with them? Oh that's progressive, that's inclusive, that's Art!

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I read the article and some of the comments. Just SMH…could there be a more useless way to waste time? 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

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Paying someone to go around the office morning and evening to measure how much of their lead pencil each clerk has used up during the day?

Yes, such positions have existed. I've seen the modern version:

A state employee for the National Insurance Office guarding a Xerox-machine, so that people coming to copy and hand in their forms don't copy other unrelated stuff for free.

Tax money at work right there.

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There was a similar story several years ago about a Government department that spent many tens of thousands of dollars to build a "secure" storage facility. For office supplies! And then staffed that store room with a full time attendant. And implemented a requisition system that required several people to operate.

Thereby spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, over several years, to save a few hundred dollars in pens and paper clips. The punch line, the reason I remembered this, was that the genius who dreamed this up was promoted, and given a significant raise.

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On the one hand, being a retired teacher, I can see the logic knowing what magpies we (and other people employed in some public function) can be; a notepad here, a pen there, a ruler or three making into your briefcase - it all adds up.

And when you spend OTM, there's no limit.

And I've often heard the argument that "It will save money in the long run" - ah so, /how/ long, hm? Asking that did not make me Mr Popular at school, I can tell you.

But - it's stupid to spend dollars to save cents, right? Some people just don't get that. They simply don't, no matter how you try and show them.

And, just to really violate some rule about starting sentences, I've actually worked at a school who had precisely what you describe. Granted, we had some 1 500 students in all, but to not entrust us teachers with a key! Instead, employing 1½ person to oversee the supply storage was the solution.

Later, some headmaster started to use those two guys as impromptu janitors/caretakers/cleaners/whatever, necessitating the making of keys for the faculty, and a key-registry, and someone had to take on that as an extra chore.

Charlie Brown said it best: "Good grief!"

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No sign of the greatest of all of the British ties? (Prince Harry 🤣)

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Nah.

No Spotted Dick either, or any Plum puddings.

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I need to disable predictive text.....it ruined my blooming joke 😂 obvs should have read British tits 😂

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Took me a minute, I must confess, but thanks to being raised on 'Monthy Python'-series & movies, I muddled through!

Here's funny thing:

In Middle and Northern Sweden, "pirra" (sounds like you're starting to say "piranha" but stop after the first 'a') means one of those two-wheeled hand-trolleys delivery men uses. In southern Sweden, they call such a thing "säckakärra" = "sack-cart".

Because down there, "pirra" means "to have intercourse", but as a vulgarity. Cue hilarity when people from the North go there to work.

And a bonus one:

"Balle" (sing.) "Ballar" (plur.) in the North means "penis" and "testicles" resp. In the South, it means "buttock(s)".

Imagine the face of a Northerner when he hears a Southerner complain that his "ballar" are hurting. . .

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😆🤣 lolololololololololololol

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I question whether they publish this risible word vomit, just to cause our blood pressure to rise to dangerous levels.

The problem with that line of thinking, is that we know it was written by a liberal woman, so all of the normal rules of logic and sanity do not apply.

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"The big two genders are said to be at war. "

The opening sentence is all you need to read to know that there is no point in reading further,

It's pretty much an illustration of what Noah Smith writes here (

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-educated-professional-class-is?lli=1 ) that

"winning back those voters would require the educated professional types who make up the backbone of the Democratic base and the progressive movement to figure out how to connect rhetorically with the less-educated masses, addressing their concerns, speaking to their values, and just speaking their language in general. And although it’s too early to tell, many of the reactions I’m seeing on social media are, to put it mildly, very unencouraging"

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We need to stop indulging this fantasy that "educated" equates with "intelligent"; it's increasingly the opposite. "Overly-credentialed" versus "innately intelligent" works for me.

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Credentialism is indeed a problem. The "education" they often get these days is not in fact education but more brainwashing and leads to universities graduating people who are probably less suited to the real world than they were when they entered. E.g. this anecdote https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/a-campus-insanity-story

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

I'm an Ivy League educated woman with a Master's degree in Environmental Engineering. I've been pro Trump since day 1. And, no, global warming did not exist until lib politicians created it and gave massive amounts of grant money to universities to "find" evidence of it.

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Aren't these the same people who tell us there are not just two genders???

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Yeah that's exactly the problem.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Make America Sane Again!

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Yes please!!!

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The New Yorker isn't dead, it's free! Freed from any shackles to objective reality or old school journalistic standards. Which is a shame. I enjoyed the New Yorker growing up, I was sad that it died such an ugly death in this shitty, uninspiring cultural meltdown.

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Reached escape velocity?

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I know when the left completely misses the reasons Trump won that it can be infuriating, but keep in mind that if this continues (and it will), the left will lose more and more elections and eventually become irrelevant. That's my hope at least.

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Your hope and my prayer.

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Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Cletus here, no use trying to make peace. We knew what had to be done with old yeller.

Laughing at mental hydrophobia is the same as taking the suffering old dog out behind the barn.

..

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[after keyboard cleanup] You just made my day bright. Way better than tits even. Sigh.

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I don’t care who you are…..that’s funny.

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like!

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10Liked by Chris Bray

Trump entered his first term with no idea how to manage a government bureaucracy and no real committed effective team (just a bunch of old rent seekers) in his cabinet.

Trump is experienced now and with a strong team now (Elon, Tulsti, RFK Jr). I expect the Left to blow up when faced with this competence right after inauguration,

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I hope they hit the ground running and burn through half the cabinet departments and their employees in the first 100 days!!

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founding

Yes!! Clean, baby, clean! And, here's one for the soul...

RFK in charge of health as opposed to Rachel Levine! Life is good.

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I wish that woman who was 24 could be a housewife very easily if she wanted.

I guess it’s OK for us to be astronauts or doctors but God forbid to take care of our own baby instead of throwing it with strangers!!!

It’s “lucky“ to be able to stay home when actually it’s a God-given right for a woman to be with her own baby as is any mother-creature in the world

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