Living with Kryptonite

2025-05-10

2025-05-08

Answers With Joe about Airships

Idea for managing lift during unloading. I want to contact companies that are working on commercial airships and see what they think of my idea.

CNBC What Happened to Blimps?

Flying Whales

Hybrid Air Vehicles

Airlander

More YouTube

Veritasium

Bloomberg

Choice Feminism

Original post

Baby boys don’t choose genital mutilation, either. Men “choose” to sign up for military service conscription because they prefer it to being sent to prison—and they sugar -coat it with the cover story that it’s“patriotic”. Many choices that men are forced to make are couched in terms of “patriotism” or “duty” and the “wrong” choice typically involves being beaten to death by groups of other men and/or being sent to prison or at the very least alienation, unemployment, homelessness, and starvation.

How is it for women? I have lesbian friends, but I’ve never heard of a gang of dead-eyed housewives beating a lesbian half to death before strapping her to a fence, dousing her in gasoline ⛽️ setting her on fire 🔥 and watching her die screaming for her horrible crimes against nature.

This is of course the kind of thing that happens to gay men with monotonous regularity, receiving at most a shrug, including among my gay friends.

I don’t want to assume that it doesn’t happen to women just as often or as horribly since I hate to make assumptions about “how life is for the other side” and so on.

Oh, and obviously if gay men live in fear, all men live in fear of the same thing. Hence no choice. Even if sexual orientation WERE a choice (I personally don’t believe this) then still no choice.

The point is that there are a lot of things that people have no choice about. For men in the USA 🇺🇸 we have circumcision, work, military service, and homophobia, and they are horrible and oppressive. There are many others.

If for some reason one does not face these issues, or is able to opt out of them (like rich and powerful parents who can get one out of the draft or one doesn’t have to work, etc) then great, but it doesn’t mean everybody else can, too.

This may be the point the speaker is making, and she makes it well.

Privilege has a blinding effect. Unfortunately it also provides an impetus to coöpt movements such as feminism, originally developed by and for poor women and (poor) women of color—who actually needed it—in the service of self-righteousness and virtue-signaling. Alas, this seems to be the fate of many activist movements, but I fear I digress.

============

We can’t all make the same choices or as easily. It’s the birth lottery. Rich or poor. Race. (At the risk of setting off a transphobic firestorm) male or female.

If you get handed one thing, it may make other choices more difficult. Also, choices build up on one another, eg, decision of choice of study, whether to join a gang, whom to marry, which career path.

Yes, you can always say (you always have the CHOICE to say) “you always have a choice”—words are like LEGO, you can click them together however you like—but time, resources, and basic STATISTICS render this a thoroughly vapid pronouncement in many cases and one belying a huge lack of empathy, which I believe is the speaker’s point.

Privileged people who lean on the idea of “choice”, eg, “our movement has given you choice where you had none before” are often dodging the “noblesse oblige” of using their position of power and influence to actually dismantle structural inequality and oppression.

2025-05-06

Best SNL Sketches of the Decade

best SNL scetches of the decade

I’m still looking for the complete collection of “It’s Pat!” There was one where they were playing strip poker and of course they all wanted to get Pat naked so they could finally find out if Pat were a she-Pat or a he-Pat, and Pat didn’t lose a single hand, and some of the other players got pretty naked. That tall blonde actress, Victoria Jackson, I think got totally naked and was holding a pillow up to herself at the end. I would like to find that episode and confirm if my memory is accurate.

Please post if you have links!!

Here's an article on MSN about Julia Sweeney’s Pat character. Maybe I can find the episode I’m looking for! Here's a search on YouTube but I don't think the sketch I'm looking for is there :-(.