Folks, this so out there.

Remember how N had to take a sexual harassment training at his new job?

That was only one of the trainings that every new employee has to take.

The total number of the trainings is…

…. prepare yourselves…

… 35. Yes, thirty-five.

One, for example, explains that you have to avoid bribing healthcare workers. Including in other countries. (Which, in some countries, means receiving no healthcare, but whatever).

None of these trainings are work-related. They are all about interacting with other people, so to say. It’s as if human interactions were so profoundly mysterious that you needed a detailed manual on how to engage with another person on any level.

I’m telling you, academia is way behind business in all this craziness. Way, way behind.

In her book The First Stone, Helen Garner describes how leftist activists expanded the term “violence” to include “actions that displease me.”

She was strongly criticized for her analysis back in the 1990s. Today, however, we see how the concept of violence has been expanded some more to mean “words that displease me.”

We are well on our way to accepting that violence includes “thoughts that displease me.” In the more radical leftist circles, the idea has been floated that violence includes “having to see people whose physical appearance displeases me.”

There seems to be no limit to where an expansion of a concept can lead.

“Escaping Twin Flames” is a Netflix documentary about a cult / marketing group that promised to get its members into committed life-long relationships with their soulmate. Members had to pay for self-improvement seminars that would solve their psychological problems and let soulmates materialize.

To make the scam work long-term, the cult leaders had to provide soulmates. The easiest, most reliable way to do that is to appoint soulmates from within the membership. This way you prevent a potential partner from getting bored and moving on after 3 dates. So the cult leaders decided to pair up all the single members of the organization, tell them they were destined to be together by divine forces, and declare it a massive success.

But here’s the problem. Who are the people most likely to pay tons of money for psychological improvement classes that would lead to marriage?

Women.

Almost all the cult members were women. Who do you pair them with when they joined the group to find men and there are no men?

The cult leaders found a simple solution. They declared half of the women to be men, ordered them to trans up, and paired them with remaining women. And the poor idjits agreed, that’s the funniest part.

Of course, the creators of the Netflix documentary ended up with a conundrum. They wanted to condemn the cult leaders but how do you do that without saying that transing people is wrong? If you can trans children, it definitely can’t be bad to trans adults.

The filmmakers found some poor professor of gender studies who tried to explain that the cult’s transers weren’t real transers because instead of saying “I want to be my true self”, they said “I want to become my true self.” Or the other way round.

For years, we’ve been told that if a woman says “I’m a man”, only a genocidal Nazi fascist evildoer would question this “self ID”. But in the documentary, there are many adult, highly educated, very articulate and successful women who say they are men, and it’s all of a sudden OK to call them delusional and brainwashed.

It’s comedy gold, people. Do watch before the show is pulled off air for enabling genocide, or something.

The documentary is also interesting because the cult leaders have no charisma. They are vulgar, stupid people who offer absolutely nothing yet there’s a herd of stupid needy women eager to hand them large sums of money. Literally anybody can start a cult and find a following. It’s kind of sad.

As things stand now, if it comes down to Biden vs Trump in the election, I’m voting for Biden.

Here’s why.

Both project weakness internationally.

Both inflicted measures that led to inflation.

Both are unwilling to stop mass migration.

So on these issues – immigration, economy, foreign policy – I’m not seeing much of a difference.

But on one issue that matters to me a lot Biden is clearly better.

That issue is wokeness.

There have been no woke riots with Biden of the kind that Trump allowed to run unchecked in the summer of 2020. When the far-left wing in Congress tried to go against Ukraine, Biden shut that down immediately. Whenever they pipe down on anything, he shuts them down. When was the last time we even mentioned AOC or that lady who married her brother? Not in years because they are irrelevant.

People seem to think that the Claudine Gay thing was a major victory against wokeness. OK, and who’s president when it happened? Who was president when zero such victories happened?

We keep saying that the only thing that the Left has against Trump is “mean tweets.” But you know why it’s the only thing they have against him? Because he never did anything else. If he adopted some seriously conservative measures, we’d never stop hearing about them from the Left. The Left called Obama “deporter in chief.” You know why? Because Obama deported more than Trump. For reals, Trump was worse on immigration than Obama. (But massively better than Obama on everything else, which is why if Trump were running against Obama, I’d 100% go with him).

My rational self-interest tells me to go with the no-riot guy. Of course, things can still change. I’m repelled by partisanship, so I’ll change happily if there’s a reason to do that.

Niland is a good person but is he a moron? Are all the people who plaster the news and social media with “did you hear the terrible thing Trump said, how can anybody support him” morons?

I don’t want to offend anybody but we are approaching the tenth anniversary of the “what Trump said pastime”, and I don’t have another explanation for people still engaging in it than their clinical idiocy.

Trump supporters care about reality (in particular, their daily reality) more than what anybody said. Their rational self-interest matters more than words. They know that with Trump, gas was at under $2, there was no inflation, illegal immigration was 1/3 what it is now, and the global situation was enormously calmer. And that matters to them more than what anybody said.

To be clear: I have no plans to vote for Trump in 2024. I don’t believe he’ll give me what I want on the issues I care about because he didn’t do it in the first term. But I can’t get over the absolutely idiotic approach of the people who keep getting scandalized by what Trump said.

Obama never said stupid things about magnets. But he let Russia invade Ukraine. He disarmed Ukraine and refused to sign the bill passed by Congress to send weapons to Ukraine. Today, I hear how yet another Russian missile killed two kids in the Donetsk region, and what the bloody fuck do I care about magnets? Russia took not an inch of Ukrainian territory when Trump was president. But Trump doesn’t know how magnets work, so to hell with those dead Ukrainians, murdered under Obama and Biden but not Trump, right?

To come to people with these magnets after the full-scale invasion, the inflation, October 7, immigration numbers – it’s an insult. And these people consider themselves smart. “Ha ha, I know how magnets work.”

Do you know how your bank account works, genius? Maybe concentrate on that, and let magnets sort themselves out.

The world in 2019, a year before the election, was extraordinarily better than the world a year before the next election. That’s what matters and not magnets.

Helen Garner on how she was forced to reexamine her feminist beliefs:

Like most people I functioned from day to day on a set of assumptions that I was rarely forced to examine: the adjustments I made under pressure of events were semi-conscious and usually motivated by a desire to avoid taxing mental activity. I was still skating along on ice that had
frozen in the early seventies. But now I felt I was on the verge of finding out things that would cause an upheaval in my whole belief-structure, particularly where men and women were concerned, and the way power shifts between
them.

Helen Garner, The First Stone

This is true regarding how most people’s brains function. They grasp on to a pithy, easy-to-remember statement, and it’s next to impossible to pry them away from this beloved platitude.

Klara finally agreed to go to a friend’s place to play without demanding that I stay there while she plays. “What is it, a “punish Mamma activity?” I asked her. It’s torture to sit there for 3 hours, trying to come up with things to say to the other mom.

So I left and went to read in a café (Helen Garner’s anti-#MeToo book finally arrived!), telling Klara that if she wants to leave, she should ask the friend’s mom to take a picture of her and send to me. Klara is very polite, and would never tell an adult straight out that she doesn’t like it at their place and wants to go. But moms love to take pictures, and this would be a great way to get across a secret message to me.

Sadly, tragically, frustratingly, the pro-Israel side is being led by its opponents like an obedient, trained pony into the most self-defeating position possible.

All of a sudden, the entire narrative about October 7 has become about whether anybody was raped. Rape accusations are notoriously the hardest to get victims to testify and to find proof. In a situation where many people were murdered, where there’s a pile of uncontroverted dead bodies, why is it necessary to argue about rape? Is rape worse than murder? Obviously not. Murder is the worst thing that can happen. And nobody can deny it happened in Israel on October 7.

Anti-Israel propagandists around the world have seized on the rape narrative because it offers them an easy way out. You can drown in discussions of why rape victims don’t want to come forward.

But guess who doesn’t have this problem?

The dead.

The dead are not worried about being harassed on social media by overheated Hamas fanboys. That’s why the Hamas crowd so joyfully pounds on the rapes. The rape debate allows them to avoid the subject of the dead.

In propaganda wars, there are some basic rules. If you don’t follow them, you’ll be controlled and bled by your opponent.

One such rule is: stay on point and don’t debate minutia. If a mass murder of a thousand unarmed people was perpetrated, that’s the message that has to be repeated on every screen and every electric appliance. And by the way, I just realized that I have no idea how many people were murdered on October 7. I’m completely on Israel’s side and it would be helpful to know the number to continue getting out the message about the horror that was perpetrated. Instead, I see on social media endless debates about rape as if the existence or lack thereof of those rapes somehow made the murders less or more terrible.

We have started to find out what the catch was at N’s great new job. Today he had to undergo a 90-minute sexual harassment training, which is mega relevant for a guy whose job is to write code from home.

After the training, I had to answer questions of the following variety:

“What’s intersex?”

“What is the difference between gay and queer?”

“What’s asexual? How can you discriminate against asexual people?”

I strongly suspect “anti-racist training” is next.

I ordered Klara a book she wanted, and she’s been sitting outside in the cold for the past 3 hours waiting for it to be delivered. It’s about to start snowing but she’s undeterred.