Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Nobody cares about genocide? No, you simply don’t care about genocide. Enough people cared that it cost Kamala the election. And if Democrats don’t reform their ways, they will never win the White House again. Kamala went against the wishes of her own constituents and put loyalty to Israel over the needs of her own country.
No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.
Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.
The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.
This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.
This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.
I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.
Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.
When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.
This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.
Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.
If this were a movie, it would end with the very soldiers he ordered for his giant vanity project deposing him in response to some crescendo of barbarity on his part. That’s a downright Aesop of an ending - the villain defeated by his own vanity and pride. You order thousands of soldiers to perform a parade to celebrate your birthday, and it’s the last straw that causes them to straight up depose you in a military coup.
The sad truth is that while Kamala would have been better in many other ways, in terms of Israel and Gaza, Trump, Biden, and Kamala are clones of each other. Gaza’s fate was written on October 7th. The Israeli right has long held plans to ethnically cleanse both Gaza and the West Bank. This has been their goal for decades. Part of their long term strategy is to so antagonize the Palestinian population that violent uprisings are inevitable, thus providing justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israel may not have directly known the specifics of the October 7th attack in advance. But Israel has a long standing policy to antagonize Palestinians to generate the cassus belli it needs to launch its ethnic cleansing campaigns.
And frankly, I do not blame any Muslim for staying home in the election, regardless of what other benefits Kamala had over Trump. You cannot tell someone, “yes, I am going to murder your people. But I still need you to vote for me in order to protect democracy.”
At this point, I assume anyone still harping on this is a conservative provocative looking to stir up division.
The truth is it’s possible for more than one group to be at fault. Those who stayed home have a ton of blame, the centrist dipshits at the DNC have a ton of blame, and the Republicans themselves have the most blame of all.
Quit trying to sew division. We need unity now, not to rehash old grievances.
It seems now that the genocide will be entirely on Biden’s head. There’s a cease fire deal that’s been signed. And Trump winning probably did provide a lot of the impetus to get that deal signed.
I despise Trump for other reasons, but when he said, “finish the job,” he clearly meant, “wrap this up.” You can interpret it as a call for total genocide, but that’s your reading of it, not an objective good-faith reading.
The truth is, in practice, Trump would have not been any worse than Biden on Gaza, even if the war had continued. Biden is already giving full US support to Israel. There’s nothing that a president can give Israel that Biden isn’t already giving Israel. I suppose a president could order US troops to directly participate in the fighting, but even Trump’s not that stupid.
The hard truth is that both Trump and Biden are the same on Israel. There is no meaningful difference between their policies. And Harris made clear she was going to have the same stance on Israel that Trump now will - full unconditional support.
But anyway, it’s most likely now that the deaths in Gaza will look something like this:
Under Biden’s watch: 100,000-200,000 killed in a coordinated campaign of extermination
Under Trump’s watch: a few hundred killed in random occasional spurts of violence while under a state of cease-fire.
Historically, this genocide will be entirely on Biden’s head. It’s his genocide. Trump won’t have that stain on his record.
Yeah, everything is a communist plot, eh Senator McCarthy?