Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)

I instinctively react to loud male voices, even laughter, like it's a threat.

As someone else observed, there's nothing fair or balanced about competitive sports. It is in many ways a genetic lottery even amongst cis women. Some are stronger, some have better endurance, some are taller, etc.

Not to mention all the social factors: who had time to train, who could afford gear, who was supported, and who was not, which falls heavily in favor of more affluent white women.

It's just important to note that almost all anti-trans sentiment comes from a place of white conservative grievance. "I should have won that race. I should get to control my kids."

The sports thing is a canard, a thought terminating cliche. You have cis women crying they can't possibly compete with trans women while the trans women themselves tend to suck because they're disadvantaged even compared to cis women. They have less testosterone in their system than the cis women do!

The backlash against trans people is entirely artificial because virtually no cis person is affected by trans people and trans healthcare outside of some random parents who wanted an excuse to abuse their child and that girl who would have come in 5th place anyway.

And frankly, you're a fucking freak if you're the kind of person who is obsessed with finding out who is using the bathroom stall next to you.

And whenever a trans woman or a Black woman or someone else does succeed, the entire sport recoils and rewrites the rules to prevent it from happening again.

Nobody cared that Michael Phelps was basically Aquaman.

The deranged parts of MAGA think they can incinerate the US economy, immiserate the country, and make it attractive as an exporter again without realizing that means mostly low-paying jobs in abusive conditions, which the US has imposed on poor countries around the world for decades to sustain its appetite for cheap consumer products. It can't work, and everybody will be worse off even if it does, and the top 10% who own everything don't want to set their wealth on fire anyway.

World-changing economic booms are a once a nation thing, really, and depend entirely on who is in an advantageous position at the time, and particularly, who can be a source of cheap goods for the rest of the world. It was the US once because of a world war. Now it's not and it never will be again. That doesn't mean we don't make things, just that if we stop trading with the outside world out of spite, that trade merely goes elsewhere and enriches someone else. Global economics are inescapable.

MAGA are obsessed with a one time, post-WW2 manufacturing boom that can't be replicated because the rest of the world was literally on fire at the time and the US had no competition. But they're also obsessed with the idea that white Americans didn't need to share these spoils because of Jim Crow and segregation. They want to bring all these things back, artificially, without understanding the circumstances that created them are dead.

It's slowly dawning on the markets and the millionaires and billionaires who promoted Trump that this is the plan, this thing that no one wants, inasmuch as there is a plan and not just a stupid old man surrounded by incompetent yes-men making shit up as they go.

But there's a reason MAGA true believers talk in terms of "short term pain for long term gain." They sincerely believe crashing the economy will eventually bring it about. But they seem to think of it as a 10 year plan instead of the US being impoverished and politically unstable for decades. The truly, truly deranged think that's okay, too, because it will help them build Gilead in the meantime. When in reality, most of them would be shot.

MAGA thinks it can tamp the flow of foreign imports and force a domestic jobs and manufacturing renaissance when a) factories don't need many people anymore because of automation, b) we can't source a lot of things locally, and c) it would take decades for companies to build that capacity -- which they won't as long as it's still cheaper to use international supply chains. You would have to isolate the US completely, at which time the economy would crash and no one would build anything.

The modern US economy is built on financialization, low trade barriers to buy and make goods at the lowest possible price, and relatively easy credit to sustain Americans' consumer lifestyles. It's unsustainable not because America doesn't manufacture things -- it does, a lot, productivity is extremely high -- but because profits and wealth have been consolidated steadily upwards under lax tax systems and deregulation, increasingly depriving ordinary working people of the means to live.

What it comes down to is the US government has been captured by oligarchs, creating a top heavy, speculation driven economy where most money isn't being put to productive use. Not because of "government waste" but because the government is prevented from taxing and investing back into the country. The oligarchs thought Trump was a fellow traveler but in fact, he's a figurehead for a destructive ideological movement. And no one wants to be the first to pull the trigger on him.

Mood.

It's not framed this way because the culture refuses to grapple with what's wrong about the way boys and men are socialized and how they're encouraged to see women as sexual objects subordinate to their desires.

And even still, a majority of cis-het men don't turn into these ghouls!

The "crisis of masculinity" would more accurately be framed as "why do so many boys and men become dead-eyed rape murder monsters out of a perverse sense of male superiority" if we were being honest about it. The downsides affecting these men are all downstream from their refusal to recognize the humanity of women and other people.

House Speaker Mike Johnson just threw a fit and canceled all House business until next week because he lost a procedural vote over letting new and expectant parents in the House vote remotely or by proxy, mainly because of a GOP mini revolt led by Anna Luna.

My secret to writing male characters is to write the part for a woman and then gender swap it at the last second. 😉

"I'm sick of being hated for being conservative!"

Well, then maybe you should stop?

Conservative = "I want to impose segregation and apartheid, destroy public schools, force people to worship my god, force children to work in factories, kill pregnant people who need abortions, and kill queer people just because."

Conservatism is evil.

People don't like evil. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯