Hyperreality

Also: Mattel execs are on record as saying the Barbie movie isn't feminist. Presumably they don't want to annoy right wing and non-western audiences too much.

Don't get me wrong, fun movie. But there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of its feminist credentials.

But hey, what do I know. I'm just Ken.

They'll arrest the trans man for going to a women's bathroom and allied media will claim he was a transwoman who was assigned male at birth.

Similar thing happened with Mack Beggs. Trans man and wrestler. Despite his protests, state rules only allowed him to compete in the league for the sex he was assigned at birth. Ie. trans man wrestling women. Obviously had a strength advantage and dominated. Online and in right wing media, he was and still is often portrayed as a man pretending to be a woman.

Similarly, I have a cis female friend who's been harassed by the vagina police while trying to go for a shit, because someone decided they were insufficiently feminine or some nonsense like that.

Similar stories when muscular female athletes dominate. You'll get people alleging they're actually men with no evidence at all.

Tech layoffs have ballooned. Still seems high.

A lot of that stuff is genuinely heterosexual drag though.

I mean, I know drag queens spend a lot of clothes, but I doubt they spend as much as the average insecure manchild does on his truck and edgy bumper stickers and/or t-shirts. Some of these losers are so insecure they don't eat vegetables or wash their own ass.

Honestly makes me ashamed to be straight sometimes.

They do matter. If they didn't countries like Russia wouldn't spend so much targetting them with propaganda and pushing them not to vote or vote against admittedly flawed left of centre parties.

I've seen older people be cancelled or called fascists over the use of outdated words like 'transgendered', without even an explanation. Obviously, that word is now deprecated and considered a pejorative, but it used to be commonly accepted word and was even used within the community.

I've had people call me sexist, because I was critical of Mattel's motives when making the Barbie movie. Mattel is a company run by a man, with an abysmal record on how they treat their (female) employees, and Barbie negatively damages girls' body image.

I've also had people reply to comments in which I paraphrased or literally quoted feminist thinkers like Dworkin, of mansplaining or not being able to understand sexism because I lacked 'lived experience'. It's not a coincidence that plenty of left-wing feminists, were easy prey for right wing ideology and are now virulent transphobes. Eg. JK Rowling.

Being balanced or even slightly nuanced on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is also likely to result in you getting piled on in some terminally online left wing spaces, where people have gone to the other extreme and now seemingly implicitly or explictly support Hamas/Iran. Same thing for Russia/Ukraine.

You also just accused someone of lacking basic human decency, for criticizing what they perceived as the excesses of online leftists.

That usually backfires though.

spent his entire life as a staunch republican like Reagan style

TBF his perspective hasn't changed that much. It's his party that has abandoned him.

Bit of a tangent, but it's a shame there aren't more content mods and more of a modding community for Cyberpunk 2077.