Iâve never seen a female librarian or a teacher dressed up like that, and lads arguing that itâs not a sexual kink.
Why do grown men indulging in their sexual fantasies by dressing up as women want to read books for kids? Itâs absolutely bizarre behavior and the lads who see no issue with it would want to shake their head. The John Stewart argument is so fucking stupid that only complete dimwit clapping seals could find it compeling. Muhh guns are bad, therefore youâre a hypocrite for not wanting drag queens in a thong reading to your kids. Gotcha!
What a time to be alive.
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Next week will feature the debate of Drag queen storytime vs injecting your kids with rabies. John will walk it.
When we allowed yer man do the telly bingo on RTĂ lads, we were fucked
Oppenheimer is a great film â but it focuses on the wrong man
Harry Trumanâs portrayal in the film is jarring, but he built the world we live in and stand to lose
The fact that J Robert Oppenheimer agonised over his part in the creation of the atomic bomb is not interesting. Was he meant to whistle to work? Harry Truman, to whom it fell to use the âgadgetâ, is the more dramatic figure, precisely because he made what might be the most history-altering executive decision since Pontius Pilate without much in the way of outward qualms.
Christopher Nolanâs biopic of Oppenheimer gives the 33rd US president just one scene, in which he shambles around as a provincial buffoon who canât say Nagasaki right. Apart from its over-reliance on dialogue for exposition, and its naivete about the chances of total Axis surrender, this account of the father of Nato is the most jarring thing in a fine film whose three hours seldom drag.
Since the last decade, when Donald Trump won the presidency, Vladimir Putin took Crimea and Xi Jinping set China on a more assertive path, liberals have tried to put a name to what we are defending from these revisionist leaders. The best effort, the ârules- based international orderâ, is terrible. So call it the Truman Show.
It is Truman who made the foundational decisions of our world: to keep the United States in Europe after 1945, to garrison vulnerable places even farther afield, to reduce industrial tariffs. In ending American isolation, his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had the âadvantageâ of a world war. Truman set himself a harder task: to maintain a forward US posture during peace time. The result, an empire in all but name, has had costs. But the past 18 months have been a sublime education in its uses. Imagine Ukraine right now without a committed US. In another 18 months, depending on how Americans vote, you might not have to.
The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isnât tenable without hard power. And there hasnât been enough of a reckoning with the dereliction of those who governed before. I am not calling for show trials, quite, though it is striking what gets scrutinised and what doesnât. In the UK, there is an inquiry into the Covid pandemic, but not the decline of the defence budget since the 1980s. There were several on the Iraq war but not on the (far from warlike) response to Russiaâs incursions into Georgia and Crimea. Could it have been firmer? How much did it embolden the Kremlin?
The trouble with inquiry-itis, a virus not confined to Britain, is its focus on acts of commission, not omission. In retrospect, Barack Obama took his serene detachment too far, at least in foreign policy. Few administrations anywhere in the West have dated worse than Angela Merkelâs complacent one. Yet, in polite society, each of those names still carries far less stigma than George W Bush or Tony Blair do for the active debacle of the Iraq war. That moral calculation might be correct, but it isnât examined.
Trumanâs reputation languished for decades. His intervention in Korea was a horror, and something of a failure. But what might have happened had the West not shown it would produce counterforce to almost any communist advance anywhere?
If he is neglected (how many westerners can picture him?) it is for two reasons. First, he reminds us what liberalism has done to survive this far. The film treats the nuclear bombing of Japan as a unique moral compromise, and it might be. But âconventionalâ weapons turned much of Tokyo to a cinder over the course of one night. The allies bombed German civilians. As for Americaâs own past, the Union didnât beat the Confederacy with chivalric jousting.
Liberalismâs blend of high conscience and its opposite existed nowhere so much as in the person of Truman. He decolonised the Philippines. He stood up for civilian control of government against the would-be warrior-king General Douglas MacArthur. At the same time, this product of seriously rum municipal politics called the bomb a âblessingâ long after he used it and was complicit in the Red Scare at home. Oppenheimerâs urbane manners and Vedic learning donât make him the more morally complex man.
And so to the other reason Truman is obscured. Snobbery. It is hard for some liberals to accept that we owe our world to a failed haberdasher from Missouri: a mule-traderâs son, a figure of suave derision until, in his 60s, he became perhaps the most powerful human being who will ever live. (Neither his predecessor nor his successor had the nuclear monopoly.) He leaves behind no treatise and few epigrams, much less in translated Sanskrit. But he knew a liberal must learn to walk with, if not the devil, then the brute. â Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023
Itâs one of the best scenes in the movie
Trumanâs line âdo you think the Japanese care about who built the bomb? They care about who dropped it, ME!â Then called him a crybaby or something as he left.
Iâd say Truman is best known for being the first words of the Billy Joel song
Thank god we all survived trumps peace craze
I wonder are Ambrose and the rest of the awkward squad going to start picketing Christmas pantos now? It says a lot that they think a man in a dress is âsexualisedâ.
Itâs easy from the cheap seats but its different when it comes to your door. Would you let a man who dressed up as a woman for a panto live in your house for example?
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I used to work with a chap whose aul fella spent years trying to knock the gay out of him with his fists. Safe to say, it didnât work. I wonder how some of these anti-woke meatheads would react when their child comes out as gay or trans. Most likely, they wouldnât even feel the trust to tell them.
Iâd say you were irresistible back then
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Still am.
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It must be quite obvious to any would be lawyer for Trump that they arenât going to get paid for their services, and are solely using the opportunity to raise their profile. The problem with this is, the quality of legal representative willing to represent him is going to nosedive, if it hasnât already.
Youâre so far gone down the âliberalâ rat hole you donât know basic truth. Have you just consumed vox and the atlantic daily until itâs staring out of your sockets?
How can a child come out as trans? Daddy, I want to cut my genitals off and be called Debra going forward? Go ahead son, I donât want to be an anti woke meathead.
Hope the clownshoes donât interfere with your daily routine.
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Ouchey.
I canât say Iâve ever read either.
There have been people recorded coming out as trans in ancient Rome and Greece. Itâs not a new thing, with reports of individuals seeking gender reassignment surgery going back to the 2nd century. I feel great sympathy with lgbtq children whose narrow minded, intolerant and homo/transphobic parent deprive them of unconditional love, and respect and validate how they feel, regardless of how that is.
There was a young kid who lived across the road from me in Dublin years ago, who was the campest individual Iâve ever met. It turned out by coincidence an on-off girlfriend of mine was best mates with his mum and babysat him a lot as a small child. She told me heâd come out of his mumâs bedroom dwarfed in a neglige, trying to walk in his mumâs going out shoes and smeared in lipstick. The kid was just doing whatever felt right for him at the time. Today. his instagram is filled with gay pride marches in Brazil and closer to home.
Itâs easy for people to discount the internal goings on of someone whose shoes theyâve never walked in, but itâs a lack of empathy and compassion at the heart of it coupled with the fear of anything different from them.
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The worst thing that happened to trans gender people was hitching their wagon to the lgbt movement. I dont know a whole lot about it but afaik it has basically nothing to do with sexual orientation/preference. Ergo imo being part of the lgbt movement cannot progress their cause.
I donât know when or why they decided or someone else decided on a coalition, but I presume it was at a time when biological men who presented as women who largely sexually fraternised with men, were considered gay men who dressed as women, as opposed to just women or transwomen.
