I had to sign up for a conference in my firm in July in Nashville. The pronoun thing was optional.

But I have a friend who works at Abbott and she couldn’t progress through the registration process for some conference without giving pronouns.

When this dramatic fiction becomes mandatory and we are all required to play along with people’s mental derangements, I’m out.

Go 1099. 

I had thought the trans thing pretty much was “out there” as I live in a red county in a blue state. But yesterday I went to our local REI (outdoor sports) store to look at shoes. Hadn’t been in for a long time. Weirdly, things didn’t seem as neatly displayed and the usual friendly greetings were absent. It felt different. At last, a chubby tattooed guy with bright turquoise-painted fingernails (weird, as usually they hire fit, experienced outdoor types) broke off his conversation with a co-worker and asked languidly if he could help me. As we spoke, I noticed that on his name tag it said “He/Him.” Eventually he told me to just look online for shoes.

This experience was a data point for EVERYTHING WOKE TURNS TO SHIT.

Still, it could be a one-off, thought ever-optimistic I.

But next stop was Super Supplements, where I met cashier “Phil,” obviously a woman, but with butch hair, piercings, tattoos, and “He/They” on her name tag.

It’s real, people.

Knock on wood I’ve seen none of it in my corner of Texas yet.

We're totally effed. Looking at double digit interst rates and double digit inflation which they're trying to hide. And the layoffs are happening starting with the Woke sectors.

Yes. Unemployment is going to skyrocket and still nobody is building stuff, there are upcoming housing shortages and people pouring over the border.

The US had 647 mass shootings last year.  One was by a trans, leaving 646 by straight men.  Your point?

Actually 4 or 5 were by gay or trans men, and most of the rest were black men (probably straight, I’ll grant you that) involved in inner city gang violence.  Not really the classic definition of “mass shooting” but they expanded it to include garden variety drug related crime when 3 or more are shot together.

Yep... but there is no risk of people with libertarian principles being offended by common sense and respect for human life.

A libertarian utopia is as unattainable as a communist utopia. That doesn’t mean their practical applications are equally good or bad.  Attempts at communist utopia always immediately lead to genocide and brutal totalitarianism. The closest we have come to libertarian utopia was the early United States.  Free market economics everywhere, little or no regulation of individual freedoms.  (Except slavery, slaves weren’t considered citizens or even human.)

But the reason for that is we didn’t need government regulation of personal freedoms because social convention regulated behavior.  Sexual promiscuity and perversions were shamed.  If you didn’t work you starved so we might have had one town drunk instead of thousands homeless drug addicts shitting in the street.

Libertarianism only works in a culture that socially, not legally, enforces the behaviors necessary for smooth human functioning in groups, and this leads to maximum freedom, particularly because it fosters upward mobility for everyone due to the freedom to innovate that capitalism brings.

When you start having to enforce personal behaviors legally, at the point of a gun, which is always the case when you criminalize something, then you’ve already lost the culture war. Now you risk the rise of an authoritarian right, and we see this happening as a reaction to the radical LBGTetc. activists.  Laws saying I can’t walk into a men’s room to pee: nonsense that was totally unnecessary twenty years ago. And yes I have done that, did it a couple weeks ago as a matter of fact.

The minority that are violent radicals of the LGBTetc movement are only the tip of the iceberg, only one symptom of a deep and serious problem in our culture: the widespread movement to stop reproducing.

Species suicide.  A drive to remove humanity from the planet, now they are directly sterilizing children.  That’s an outgrowth that began with birth control 70 years ago, feminism, and fake climate hysteria.  You are right Number7, the problem is a loss of respect for human life.

Libertarianism can’t fix that. Authoritarianism can’t fix that, neither the right nor left variety.  I fear that the only thing that can fix it is to allow the destruction to bring us back to the Stone Age when once again, making babies will become a priority.

Once again the libertarian ideal needs to be tempered with pragmatism.  Government should make no law regarding the free choice of individuals to do whatever they want to their bodies, and in the case of children, parents should be the sole determiners, such as deciding whether their child gets the Covid jab.

This was working JUST FINE for decades.  Nobody was cutting off kids’ boobs and dicks.  The extremely rare true trans spent their childhood and adolescence in confusion and then maybe as an adult had surgery.  No laws were necessary.

But the explosion of woke gender ideology has created huge numbers of fake trans along with the rise of a profit making industry to “treat” them, and they are NOT policing themselves and limiting surgeries to adults.  This is resulting in grievous harm to lots of children who aren’t actually trans and even to the true trans who still may not have consented to surgery as an adult once they could grasp the real risk of long term bad outcomes.

To illustrate how serious these bad outcomes are, the trend had been away from surgically meddling with genitalia even in cases of androgynous birth defects or circumcision oopsies.  That should tell you something.  But in a bizarre reversal of this common sense we are now herding thousands of children to have their perfectly normal genitals and breasts mutilated.

Laws restricting that should not be necessary but here we are.

The Trans I work with is male to female and 21 years old and she talks about suicide all the time very flippilantly. Classic bullied kid in school, couldn't cope so went Trans as the solution. Still unhappy, still often depressed, etc.

If they can get past youth they seem to do better.  By that I mean well out of their 20s.  The trans I knew that were middle aged didn’t commit suicide.  I know of one that died in old age, another that is happily married to another trans.  Caitlyn Jenner seems to be a good example.  Now, I do not know if any of them had bottom surgery.  My understanding is that bottom surgeries have very high rates of devastating lifelong complications and I bet suicide rates in older trans will rise with more getting the bottom surgeries.  And especially bottom surgeries in people who aren’t actually trans at all but deluded into thinking they are.

You really have no idea how to look at both sides of an issue, do you?

If Trump wins the nomination, I will vote for him without question.

But when the enemy left sees members of the right being hypocritical, they tend to ignore anything else they say.

Almost everyone here pointed out Biden's age and how he probably wouldn't make it through his first term and they used that as a reason that people shouldn't vote for him  You have to have the same qualms about Trump now.  Trump would be slightly older at his next inauguration than Biden was at his last.

I am concerned about his age.  But to compare him to Biden is apples and oranges. Biden is visibly demented, Trump is doing well cognitively.